17 February 1856 – MP and fraudster John Sadleir takes his own life
Sadleir has been described as the “Victorian Bernie Madoff”.
On 17 February 1856, John Sadleir, a banker and politician who had represented both Carlow and Sligo in the House of Commons, took his own life. His body was found on Hampstead Heath, London, next to the bottle of cyanide he had swallowed. He was 42 years old. The Freeman’s Journal of Dublin wrote that the “deepest sympathy was felt and expressed for the sad termination of a man who played so prominent a part in the monetary as well as the political world.” However, within weeks, it emerged that Sadleir was a swindler, who had falsified balance sheets and forged property deeds to be used as security for loans. Countless people – small farmers, traders, clerks, shopkeepers – were left penniless when the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank, which Sadleir founded, was shown to have debts of over £400,000, and assets of only around £35,000. The Times of London wrote, “There is no instance in history, as far as our recollection extends, which can serve as a parallel to this gigantic fraud.”
John Sadleir was born in Shrone Hill, Co Tipperary in 1814, the son of a tenant farmer, Clement William Sadleir. His maternal grandfather, James Scully, had founded a private bank in Tipperary, which Sadleir revived in 1838 as the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank. Eventually, nine branches were established. Sadleir’s brother James was the managing director and chairman of the bank. The family were Roman Catholics, and Sadleir attended the boarding school Clongowes College in Co Kildare. He trained to become a solicitor, succeeding his uncle in a successful law firm in Dublin.
Sadleir was an active parliamentary agent for Irish railways, and retired from the legal profession in 1846. In 1847, he was elected a Member of Parliament for the Borough of Carlow as a Whig, and was one of 24 MPs who came to be known as the ‘Irish Brigade’, a group opposed to the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill of 1851, which forbade Roman Catholic bishops to assume titles assigned to them by the Pope. The Irish Brigade merged with the Tenant League, founded by Charles Gavan Duffy, in September 1852, to create the Independent Irish Party, and Sadleir pledged not to take a position in government. However, he defected from the party in December of that year, accepting a role as Irish Lord of the Treasury in the cabinet of Lord Aberdeen. This move was condemned in The Nation newspaper (co-founded by Duffy), which wrote, “That Mr John Sadleir should go straight over to any party conducive to his own personal interests does not surprise us very much.”
Sadleir and William Keogh, who had also defected, were obliged to submit themselves for re-election upon changing parties, but Sadleir was not returned for the Borough of Carlow. This was partly because of his split from the Independent Irish Party, but also because of allegations that Sadleir had falsely imprisoned a man – Edward Dowling – who owed money to the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank. Dowling had switched his support to Sadleir’s opponent in the 1852 election, but when he went to cast his vote in Carlow, he was arrested and taken to prison, though the money he owed was not yet due. Sadleir was elected an MP for Sligo in 1853, winning by just eight votes, but when his role in the false imprisonment of Dowling came to light, he resigned as Irish Lord of the Treasury. Sadleir also had to pay damages of £1,100 to Dowling.
The Dowling affair had caused unease among shareholders in the Tipperary Bank, some of whom began unloading their shares. Unbeknownst to them, Sadleir was gambling considerably on the commodities market with the resources of the bank. He lost £120,000 on sugar in a single day in 1855, and at other times lost £35,000 on hemp and £50,000 on iron. While Sadleir owned a substantial amount of property, most of it was tied up in loans, and he would on occasion use the same property as collateral multiple times. He received a large sum from the finances of Carson’s Creek Gold Mining Company, of which he was the founder and chairman, and when he was unable to pay, he used the deeds of an estate in Limerick as security. The deed was lodged in the London and County Bank Sadleir then removed it without anyone’s knowledge, and used it as security on another loan.
James Sadleir was furious in March 1855 when he learned that his brother had gone to the London and County Bank, requesting a £20,000 advance on a Tipperary Bank bill of exchange without consulting him first. James demanded full legal authority to sell Sadleir’s properties to pay for his debts, though he never acted upon this, worried that exposing Sadleir’s outstanding payments would ruin the bank which the two had built up together. By the end of 1855, Sadleir’s overdraft with the Tipperary bank was £247,000. On 1 February 1856, an increasingly desperate Sadleir produced a set of false accounts which showed the Tipperary Bank, at that time insolvent, to be profitable, in the hope of securing fresh dupes to deposit their savings. Many did, and lost everything.
When the London and County Bank refused to loan him any more money, Sadleir took his own life. Within days, the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank closed its doors permanently. Among those left destitute were 800 people whose savings were less than £50. One man, who had saved £100 to support an aged parent, threatened to hang himself when he arrived at the bank and was told there was no money to give him. A woman lost £100 which she had saved to send her stepson to America. One farmer had planned on withdrawing his £300 deposit from the bank, but had been dissuaded from doing so by his wife. When he learned that the money was gone, he beat his wife to death. The fact that most of Sadleir’s victims were people of modest means living in Tipperary and other parts of rural Munster meant their chances of recovery were especially sparse. The Times of London wrote:
“In our own portion of the empire, the aggregate mass of wealth is so great, that if one, two, three thousand persons are suddenly reduced from affluence to poverty, the chances are that in the majority of instances the victims will find an opportunity of gaining the means of subsistence without undergoing the humiliation of public pauperism. In Ireland – in the south of Ireland, it is otherwise. Life is there a hard struggle indeed, and few are the chances of recovery to those who have been foiled in the game.”
Just as The Nation had taken Sadleir to task for defecting in 1852, it denounced him again when the extent of his fraudulent activities was made public:
“The evil he has done lives after him. Every hour since he expired reveals some fresh and more flagrant swindle. Peculation of trust funds; forgery of bills, shares, deeds; the evidence of a wholesale, reckless, and desperate system of fraud, accumulate on every mail.”
Sadleir is thought to have embezzled more than £1,250,000, an extraordinary amount of money for the time. Comparisons have been drawn between him and more contemporary fraudsters. In 2013, the Daily Telegraph referred to Sadleir as the “Victorian Bernie Madoff”. Sadleir also inspired the character of Mr Merdle in Charles Dickens’s book Little Dorrit: “I had the general idea of the Society business before the Sadleir affair, but I shaped Mr Merdle himself out of that precious rascality.”
Sources
‘Death of Mr. Sadleir, M.P.’, The Southern Reporter and Cork Commercial Courier, 20 February 1856, p. 3.
Hickey, D.J., A Dictionary of Irish History Since 1800 (Totowa, New Jersey: Barns & Noble Books, 1980).
Oldfield, Molly: Mitchinson, John, ‘Quite interesting: From the brains behind the BBC quiz show’, The Daily Telegraph, 26 October 2013, p. 22.
Philpotts, Trey, The Companion to Little Dorrit (Mountfield: Helm Information, 2003).
‘Postscript. London’, Evening Mail, 10 March 1856, p. 8.
Stratmann, Linda, The Crooks Who Conned Millions: True Stories of Fraudsters & Charlatans (Stroud: Sutton, 2006).