Edward McHugh, the National Land League of Great Britain and the ‘Crofters' War’, 1879–1882

When taking their weekly copy of the Highland News during the spring of 1915 the majority of the Highland population would, no doubt, first have turned anxiously to find news about friends and loved ones fighting in Europe. The edition from Saturday, 17 April, 1915, for example, con tained the names of many from Inverness and the Highlands who would not return home. Perhaps the most prominent war victim of that week was W.G.C. Gladstone, grandson of the 'Grand Old Man', and M.P. for Kilmarnock Burghs, killed in action in France. The paper also detailed German bombing attacks on the English towns of Sittingbourne and Faversham. There was no mention, however, of the death of a sixty-one year old Ulsterman, Edward McHugh, who had passed away quietly at his home in Birkenhead the previous Tuesday.2 McHugh was born in August, 1853, in a small township in Co. Tyrone, close to the Donegal border.3 His was a Roman Catholic, Irish-speaking family, and in 1861 the McHughs migrated to Greenock, where Edward's father, Mathew, found a job as a labourer. After taking an apprenticeship as a compositor, Edward McHugh moved to Glasgow at the start of the 1870s, and it was there that his interest in political and economic issues flourished.