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Charles Bianconi

1786–1875

 

With remarkable energy, this Italian emigrant to Ireland transformed the communications system of the country, helping to change what might have remained a poor country into a developing one.

      Joachim Carlo Giuseppe Bianconi was born at Tregolo, in the duchy of Milan (now Lombardy), on 24th September 1786.  Leaving school, where he had been an indifferent student, he set out from home to make his fortune.  He arrived in Ireland at the end of 1802 as an apprentice to an Italian print seller, bringing the benefit of 'art pictures' to the Irish.  A pretty boy who appealed to ladies, he became his employer's travelling salesman.  He soon went into business on his own, setting up his own shop in the country town of Carrick-on-Suir, and later in Clonmel.  This business thrived and he made many friends, including DANIEL  O'CONNELL [20].

      The end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 - Waterloo had been fought on 18th June - brought ex-military horses onto the market at cheap prices, as well as the end of the carriage tax.  Having accumulated a little capital, Bianconi bought a horse and a jaunting car, and on 6th July 1815 he began a car service between Clonmel and Cahir in the south of Ireland.

      The idea prospered, and his cars, popularly called the 'Bians', were a common feature of the Irish roads.  By 1823 his services ran over some 1,800 miles of road from twenty-three centres.  By 1845 this network had grown to 3,800 miles and 120 centres.  In 1857 he told the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Dublin, that he still ran some nine hundred horses and sixty-seven cars over 4,244 miles a day.  In 1864, income from passengers and parcels amounted to £40,000.

      He charged passengers one-and-a-half pence per mile.  This made his service cheap enough to be of very real benefit in rural areas, where those of small means could travel about.  In 1843 Bianconi himself explained that 'the farmer who formerly drove and spent three days in making his market, can now do so in one for a few shillings; thereby saving two clear days and the expense of his horses'.

      The improvement of roads followed.  A report of 1838 noted that 'even small portions of those roads were scarcely out of the engineers' hands before they were covered with the carts of farmers, eager to take advantage of the improvement'.  People moved their cottages nearer the new roads, and new villages and towns grew up at their junctions, especially in the west of Ireland.  Charles Bianconi had become one of the agents of the social and economic transformation of Ireland.

      The improvement in service brought with it an increase in tourist traffic, and the beginnings of the tourist industry which is now of such importance to Ireland.  The advent of the tourists brought about an improvement in the hotels and inns, and an overall improvement of life for the local people as well.

      Bianconi, who was elected mayor of Clonmel in 1844, was a sincere Catholic, a fervent supporter of Daniel O'Connell, and a promoter himself of Catholic emancipation (which came in 1829).  He generously donated to many Catholic charities, including the foundation of the Catholic University of Ireland, for which he purchased what is now Newman House.

      In his annual report for 1857, the British postmaster general said that 'no living man has ever done more for the benefit of the sister kingdom'.  In the development of his extensive transport system, Bianconi displayed extraordinary energy as well as ingenuity.  While the promoted the social connections of Ireland, he also increased its economic resources by promoting increased trade.  His cars were the first stage in the development of increased speed in communication and transport, marked by the introduction of the railways and the electric telegraph in the 1830s, and by the use of telephones after 1875.  The nature and quality of life in Ireland was changed by these means.  In 1815 parts of the country might as well have been in the seventeenth century; by the time of Bianconi's death, communication with America was instantaneous.

      The heyday of the cars was soon over.  The railways, promoted initially by WILLIAM DARGAN [75], had arrived.  Bianconi saw where the future lay and bought shares in the new companies, and used his cars to provide local feeder services to their stations.  He retired in 1865, selling off his business to his agents in the county towns across the country.

      He lived out the rest of his life at Longfield, his house near Clonmel, in Tipperary, and died there on 22nd September 1875.  His daughter had married Daniel O'Connell's son Morgan John O'Connell, and in 1885 she published a biography of her father.

      Later still, the cars became a part of fond memories of many nineteenth-century childhoods.  The painter JACK YEATS [26] had especially happy recollections of them, for as a child he had travelled to and from Rosses Point in Sligo on one.  The first play he ever saw was the wild melodrama The Shaughran (1874), by the Irish-American Dion Boucicault.  In his painting In Memory of Boucicault and Bianconi, he has the hero and villain of the play at a local beauty spot striking poses in front of a long car.  What Bianconi had started as a business enterprise had entered the mythology of Irish art.