“The Old Pump. ‘Nothing to be Got Out of It, William’” from “Fun” (1887)

The Old Pump. ‘Nothing to be Got Out of It, William’

John Gordon Thomson (1841-1911)

Dalziel Brothers, engravers

Fun (19 October 1887): 165

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

William Gladstone

Courtesy of the Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

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During a speech in Parliament William E. Gladstone proclaimed, “Remember Mitchelstown” after police shot into a crowd, killing three men, at a September 1887 meeting of supporters of a rent strike on the Mitchelstown estate in County Cork, Ireland. “Remember Mitchelstown” then became a rallying cry of Irish Nationalists and those who supported Home Rule. Although when Prime Minister Gladstone managed to pass the Irish Land Act, which protected tenants from the worst abuses by landlords, most of whom were absentee landlords, members of his cabinet, such a Salisbury, insisted on also passing a Coercion Act that allowed authorities in Ireland to imprison people without trial, and this last bit of legislation pretty much destroyed any good feeling the first law produced. Gladstone here as throughout his career was seeking to find just solutions to major problems facing Great Britain.

The Old Pump (See Cartoon.)

      When Lord Salisbury was young,
      He wes pretty glib of tongue,
Though to speechifying now he doesn’t jump
      He was scarcely born a goose,
      And perhaps may be of use—
But it isn’t in the nature of a pump.

      Should you take him hard to task
      For his policy, and ask
What he means to do with Ireland—ask him plump
      If his grand Coercion Act
      Ain’t a failure as a fact,
You will never get an answer from that pump,

      Mr. Gladstone may expose
      His mistakes, in splendid prose;
His lieutenants, too, may go upon the stump,
      And explain throughout their tour
      How great troubles at his door
Must be laid—yet they draw nothing from the pump.

      If, their charges all to crown,
      With “Remember Mitchelstown!”
They conclude, and play that saying as a trump,
      Yet vouchsafed is no reply—
      For particularly dry
Is his lordship when you work him as a pump.

Last modified 9 May 2018