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To a distant kinsman of mine falls the dubious honour of stirring controversy in his adopted homeland a century after his demise. Nicholas Flood Davin was known as the “Voice of the West” for his efforts in extending the franchise to Saskatchewan in the 1860s, but his association with a notorious report recommending a regime of industrial schools for native Indians has just seen Canadians in that province vote to remove his name from one institution.
Born in 1840 this Victorian adventurer qualified as a barrister, then worked as a journalist in London and Belfast, before heading across the Atlantic in 1872. Along the way he claimed to have covered the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and would regale audiences with colourful accounts of his exploits.
His actual experience as a newspaper editor in Ireland had been more prosaic; a spell heading up the fledgling Belfast Times ended in a welter of lawsuits and accusations of drunkenness.
Davin hoped to leave all this behind when he left for Canada where he quickly headed west, after persuading John MacDonald's Conservative Party to provide funds for the establishment of the Leader – a newspaper still thriving – in the windswept prairie settlement of Regina, now a bustling city. The new paper arrived just in time to cover the biggest story of the decade, the Saskatchewan Rebellion, which saw settlers and government forces brutally suppress a rising led by Louis Riel, the leader of the dispossessed Métis tribe.
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After a sensational trial that gripped Canada, the deranged Riel was sentenced to death. On the eve of his execution the enterprising Davin is said to have posed as his confessor to interview the condemned man, under circumstances that would not be out of place in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.
The decision to execute Riel would prove to be a seminal moment in Canadian politics, alienating many French Canadians from the Conservative Party.
After the rebellion, Davin was well placed to serve as the first MP for Assiniboia West, a seat he won after a spirited campaign that was fought robustly from Medicine Hat to Moose Jaw, entering the Commons just 13 years after his arrival in Canada.
In many ways Davin’s Canadian reinvention calls to mind his near contemporary, Maupassant’s Bel-ami – the scoundrel journalist who ruthlessly refashioned his past to burrow into the heart of fin-de-siècle Parisian society. In particular Davin was coy about his precise origins, his biographer the late Bev Koester verifiying only a short spell at Queen’s College Cork, and a qualification as a barrister in London.
While he set himself out as a gregarious Celtic boyo, he was cursed with a dark temperament and a weakness for drink. He was never far from controversy, pursued an undistinguished parliamentary career before losing his seat in 1890, and 10 years later, his personal affairs in disarray, he took his own life.
I hope those qualities aren’t inherited, because Davin is a distant forebear of mine, my great-great-great granduncle perhaps, and I am the custodian of a cache of his letters and books.
He would remain a historical curiosity in his adopted country, were it not for the Davin Report, a notorious piece of work that recommended a system of “Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds”.
In time the brutality of those institutions would far outstrip anything we have seen on this island, with campaigners now claiming that up to 6,000 residents may have died behind their walls. Canada, like Ireland, is currently wrestling with the riddle of dealing with the past – the Ottawa government this year transferred over 150 million Canadian dollars in reparations to the Métis nation once led by Louis Riel, and in June Regina citizens voted to rename the Davin School after a spirited controversy in the Saskatchewan capital over his authorship of the eponymous report.
Nicholas Flood Davin has fallen victim to so-called “presentism” where historical figures are judged not by the values of their times, but of our own, although one might have some sympathy with victims of his recommendations.
Even in his darkest days poor Davin could never have contemplated that, 150 years on, he would be synonymous with such a shameful chapter in Canadian history and that – rather than being lionised as the most successful Irish-Canadian of his generation – his memory would attract such obloquy a century later.