In summer 1814, a traveller passing through West Cork may have glimpsed a man in his mid-thirties pacing the fields with a stick, from which a red, white and blue rag was dangling.

This article was featured in our West Cork Farming 2026 magazine – you can read the full magazine here!

ROBERT HUME

That man would have been William Thompson, recently returned from France, his head spinning with revolutionary ideas – liberty, equality, fraternity.

In Ireland that meant Catholic emancipation, a vote for women, workers owning a share of land.

William was born in 1778 into one of the richest merchant families of Cork. His father, John, was often absent from his estate in Carhoogarriff, near Leap, because of his official duties as lord mayor and high sheriff of Cork. 

When Alderman Thompson died, William was determined not to live as “one of the idle classes”, and moved to Clounkeen House, where he supervised his 1,700 acres from a 100-foot-high watchtower – not as a despot but as a benevolent landowner, who slashed his tenants’ rents and paid for their children’s schooling.

Within three years he became bankrupt and was forced to sell around 300 acres.

Locals were taken aback by the behaviour of this newcomer, who’d given up meat and alcohol so he could think more clearly.

They’d heard he was feeding his pigs sawdust because he believed animal flesh and bones were made of wood fibre.

One claimed that when a mouse got stuck in his honey, Thompson had picked it up by the tail and licked it clean before releasing it.

Many thought he’d gone cuckoo.

However, these shenanigans were nothing compared to his unconventional ideas on land ownership – a generation before Karl Marx – which earned him the nickname ‘Red Republican’.

In his pamphlet Practical Directions for Communities, he maintained that over 90% of people were “utterly destitute”.

They lived in towns and villages, full of prying eyes and envious, competitive neighbours. Only through co-operatives, like Robert Owen’s in New Harmony, Indiana, could labourers achieve “individual independence” and an “increase of happiness” – something he’d recently discussed in London with philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Should minor disagreements arise, they could easily be settled “amicably”, without the interference of lawyers.

What’s more, co-operatives could provide better food, improved hygiene and health, leading to longer life expectancy. Should anyone fall ill, no doctor was needed because their comrades could nurse them.

In 1827 the Co-operative Magazine published a ‘Prospectus of the Cork Co-operative Community’, a proposed 100-acre estate, initially of 200 labourers, to be established “within 15 miles” of Cork City, and funded by shares or weekly subscriptions from sixpence to five shillings.

Front cover of Practical Directions for Communities (1830), written in Cork.

Members would be united into one “harmonious family”, without inequalities or clashes of interest. 

To save journeys to work, and improve security, all the buildings – domestic, agricultural and manufacturing – must be “intermixed, under one roof”. Situated on higher ground in “one great square”, three storeys high, they’d include a mill, stables, threshing machinery, a forge, dance hall, library, lecture room, and a school – where only “interesting agreeable topics” and absolutely no moral instruction were to be taught.

In time, every adult would have a private sitting room and bedroom, with married couples getting adjacent rooms.

The complex should resemble a beautiful “ornamental park”, with no internal fences.

There’d be glorious tree-lined walkways, a waterwheel, beehives, an abundance of flowers, and white mulberry trees, cultivated for silk. In this Utopia, there’d be no streets because streets led to lanes, “focuses of contagion”, “confinement of air”, miasmas and the “concentration of effluvia”.

Land must be levelled and drained, so “not a drop of stagnant water” remained on, or beneath, the surface.

Liquid manure could be pumped through underground iron pipes to fertilize four fields, used for growing potatoes, wheat, cabbages and barley on a rotation basis.

Hunger would become a thing of the past: there’d be a reserve stock of grain “for the use of scarce seasons”, and sugar, “equal to the best imported molasses”, could be made from potatoes. White poppies might even provide “the milky juice for opium”, to be used in medicine – no need to import it from the East Indies or Turkey.

Of the initial 200 members, 52 were earmarked for agriculture and gardening, 66 for building and furnishing, 59 for textiles, and 23 for baking, shoemaking, milling, storekeeping and teaching. Nobody had to be “be pained by the sight” or “burdened by the support” of paupers, since everyone was “usefully employed” for six hours a day, winter included.

Members were told to expect some austerity during the start-up: there’d be no new clothes, just bread and potatoes to eat.

But from day one, a pint of fresh milk would be provided to every individual each morning. By the third summer, trees should yield enough fruit to ensure everyone their pie or pudding, and within a few years, every man and woman would own at least one sheep. They’d be “the possessors of the whole of their establishment”.

Unfortunately, in 1833 William Thompson died, unmarried and childless, his project still on the drawing board, generally considered mere claptrap.

Those who listened to his will being read were flabbergasted: he had requested his corpse be dug up and ribs tipped with silver to give a “fashionable appearance”, his skull sent to a Paris phrenologist, and his body given to the first successful co-operative in Britain or Ireland.

But it was Thompson’s final request that most infuriated his family, who spent the next twenty-five years contesting the will on the grounds that he was insane: William Thompson had bequeathed his entire fortune to the co-operative movement.