COLTHURST, Sir George Conway (1824-1878), of 36 Wilton Crescent, London, Mdx.; Ardrum, Inniscarra, co. Cork and Castle Blarney, co. Cork

Colthurst’s family were large landed proprietors with estates at Ardrum, Ballyvourney, and Rathcoole, co. Cork and a long track record of service in the Irish parliament.1John Colthurst represented Tallow (1734-56), his son Sir John Conway Colthurst, 1st bt. sat for Doneraile (1751-60), Youghal (1761-8) and Castlemartyr (1768-75), and Sir Nicholas Colthurst, 3rd bt. for St. Johnstown (1783-90) and Clonakilty (1792-5): E. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800, iii (2002), 459-61. Colthurst’s father, Sir Nicholas Colthurst, had represented Cork city at Westminster from 1812-29 as an independent supporter of Lord Liverpool. His initial equivocation over Catholic relief matured into warm support for the Wellington ministry’s concession of emancipation.2HP Commons, 1790-1820, iii. 487; HP Commons, 1820-32, iv. 715-6. In December 1862 Colthurst inherited an estate worth £5,000 per annum at Blarney, including its celebrated castle, from his father-in-law St. John Jefferyes, a man described as ‘the most enterprising and experimental proprietor in the county’.3S.M. Hussey & H. Gordon (ed.), The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent (1904), 49; Belfast News-letter, 17 Dec. 1862. As the owner of 31,260 acres (at an annual valuation of £11,402) he became the fourth largest landowner in County Cork.4J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain (4th edn., 1883), 100; PP 1876 (412) lxxx. 395.

In June 1863 Colthurst was elected for the notoriously corrupt borough of Kinsale, partly on the strength of his donation of £1,000 for the construction of a public waterworks in the town.5PP 1877 (c.1696) xxxix. 1. Amidst charges that the seat had been ‘transferred to him’ by his predecessor, Sir John Arnott, he entered the Commons as a ‘Liberal Conservative’, having on the hustings claimed that he ‘was no violent politician or party man’. Described by opponents as ‘a good old Tory with a Palmerstonian tendency’, Colthurst’s politics remained ‘rather undefined’ and his victory was initially claimed by both parties.6HP Commons, 1832-68: ‘Kinsale’; Freeman’s Journal, 6, 8 June 1863. Any question as to the position he would take in the House was, however, soon answered when, having been canvassed by both sides for his vote on the salmon fisheries bill, he ‘gave a longing, lingering look in the direction’ of the opposition lobby and voted with government.7Belfast News-letter, 19 June 1863. He subsequently offered general support to Palmerston, whom he considered ‘a man of prudence, sagacity, and experience’. On Irish matters, he claimed to favour measures which might ‘improve the position of the tenant without interfering with the rights of property’. Nevertheless, in June 1863 he opposed plans to appoint a royal commission to investigate landlord-tenant relations in Ireland, arguing that ‘Irish landlords ought not to be dealt with in a different manner from English landlords’. Instead he pointed to the unviable nature of Ireland’s many smallholdings as the cause of the country’s agricultural distress.8Freeman’s Journal, 6 June 1863; Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1865), 168; Hansard, 23 June 1863, vol. 171, cc. 1345-6.

In 1864, after serving on a select committee to consider a case of public compensation for a false conviction, Colthurst was drafted on to the important committee on the taxation of Ireland.9PP 1864 (395) v. 547. The case was that of David Berwicke. There he disappointed popular Irish opinion by voting to reject the critical report of the chairman, General Francis Dunne, and to adopt instead the more moderate report of Sir Stafford Northcote.10PP 1864 (513) (513-I) xv. 1, 515; PP 1865 (330) xii. 1; T. Kennedy, A History of the Irish Protest Against Over-Taxation, from 1853 to 1897 (1897), 46, 55. After seeing off another Catholic Liberal challenger at Kinsale in the 1865 general election, he supported the Liberals’ reform bill in 1866 in spite of the threat of disfranchisement it posed to his own seat.11Freeman’s Journal, 30 Apr. 1866. The bill proposed to unite Kinsale with Bandon as a single ‘district of borough’ seat: PP 1866 (142) v. 103. Colthurst was also a director and vice-chairman of the Cork and Macroom Railway. In addition to sitting on committees to consider private railway bills, he campaigned for a reduction in the rates and fares for transit on Irish railways, and helped to organise a public meeting in Dublin on railway reform in January 1867.12PP 1867-68 (0.106) lvi. 33; PP 1867 (3844) (3844-I) (3844-II) (3844-III) xxxviii Pt.I. 1, 127, xxxviii Pt.II. 1, 579; Bradshaw’s Railway Mannual, Shareholder’s Guide, and Official Directory (1867), 64; Freeman’s Journal, 31 Jan. 1867.

Though he regarded himself as ‘a steady supporter of the liberal party’, he pointedly abstained when Gladstone raised the Irish church question in April and May 1868. However, faced by yet another Liberal challenge at the 1868 general election, he claimed to ‘freely accept’ the Liberals’ position on the Irish church and was returned after pledging to support a Gladstone ministry.

Thereafter he voted for the disestablishment of the Irish church in 1869 but proved a stern critic of the 1870 land bill.13Belfast News-letter, 7 Apr. 1868; Freeman’s Journal, 25 May 1868, 4 Mar. 1870; The Times, 8, 16 Sept. 1868; Pall Mall Gazette, 10 Jul. 1868; Daily News, 15 Aug. 1868; Stenton, Who’s Who of British MPs, i. 87; Hansard, 5 Apr. 1870, vol. 200, cc.1311-3. He was openly critical of the government’s union rating bill in February 1873 and, having forfeited any further claim on Conservative electors at Kinsale by his support for disestablishment, announced his forthcoming retirement that October.14Freeman’s Journal, 22 Feb. 1873; Hansard, 20 Feb. 1873, vol. 214, cc.754-5; The Times, 16 Sept. 1868; Birmingham Daily Post, 20 Oct. 1873. At the following year’s dissolution he apparently made no attempt to come in elsewhere.

Colthurst was an active member of the Cork Agricultural Society, but although he was remembered as ‘a kind and indulgent landlord’, having spent more than his rental on relief works during the famine, his Blarney estate had been the scene of violent disturbances in 1849.15R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988), 330; Freeman’s Journal, 3, 13 Oct. 1849, 30 Sept. 1878. He subsequently invested large sums in improvements to his estates, fostering cricket amongst his tenants at Ballyvourney, yet at the same time employing the notoriously tough Samuel Hussey as his land agent.16Freeman’s Journal, 26 Sept. 1878; T. Cadogan & J. Falvey, A Biographical Dictionary of Cork (2006), 57; Hussey & Gordon, Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent, 208. The estates were subject to popular agitations during the 1880s. Colthurst erected a splendid mansion in the Scottish baronial style (completed in 1874) on his Blarney estate, to which he retired on leaving parliament.17While shooting on the estate, he accidentally shot and wounded a Colonel Graves: Freeman’s Journal, 26 Nov. 1873. He died in September 1878 at Buxton, where he was convalescing after a severe attack of gout.18Freeman’s Journal, 26 Sept. 1878, and see Cork Examiner, 26 Sept., 1 Oct. 1878. He was succeeded in the baronetcy by his son Colonel George St. John Colthurst (1850-1925), who contested a by-election for County Cork as a Conservative in February 1879, only to be defeated by his father’s younger brother, Lt.-Col. David La Touche Colthurst (1828-1907), a Catholic convert and favourite of the Land League, who sat as a Home Rule MP from 1879-85.19Freeman’s Journal, 5 Oct. 1878; The Times, 13 Jan. 1879; Cadogan & Falvey, Biographical Dictionary of Cork, 57.