Special Guest Blogger: Charles Boycott

I served in the British Army which brought me to Ireland so after retiring from the army i worked as a land agent in charge of managing some Irish farmlands and its employees which mainly consisted of paying Irish workers as little as possible while charging them as much as i could to live there.
It was a harsh life, we had it so rough that sometimes we had to make do with eating duck and chicken rather than swan and goose and we ran so short of coal one time that we could only heat three of the seven bedrooms in our mansion and winters in Ireland could be awful.
One winter was particularly harsh which led to poor harvests which in turn led to poor tenants who came to me to help as they were struggling to pay their rent and pleaded with me not to evict them.
Being homeless in this particular time and place in one of the harshest winters for years meant almost certain death and i sympathised with their plight by cutting their salaries and raising their rents but when some complained i held a meeting with them to say that we've all got something we can bring to this discussion but i think from now on the thing you should bring is your suitcase because you are fired and now gather your things and get the hell off my land.
When the local community heard what i was doing, the other employees required to harvest the crops withdrew their labour and began a campaign of isolation against me and my family in the local community. This campaign included shops and services refusing to serve us, workers refused to harvest the crops, postmen refusing to deliver our mail but as i totally dependent on the underpaid Irish workers to keep the farms going, i did what any Englishman would do and complained about it in a letter to the Times Newspaper about how unfair the beastly Irish were being to me and my family and to send help to harvest the crops and provide someone for me to talk to.
Obviously the English ruling class were outraged by my case, specifically the part where a rich English person was being screwed with by some Irish riff-raffs so fifty men volunteered to come over and save my crops, plus 1,000 soldiers to protect those 50 men from the mad Irish locals.
To show my appreciation to the volunteers, i not only personally greeted them from the ship but immediately put them to work and charged them for their potatoes.
The episode was estimated to have cost the British government £10,000 to harvest about £500 worth of crops so the rescue operation proved to be way too expensive to be repeated every time a landowner was shunned by his community, and 'boycotting' became a thing.
Because the Irish could not be relied upon to continue being reasonable after i cut their wages and evicted them, there was nothing else for it but for me to return to England to become a land agent in Suffolk.
I miss the Emerald Isles, i had some happy times there, when the people still spoke to me obviously, but needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle and i left leaving behind boycott's spouting up against the land owners all over Ireland.
What this all means is that if you're brilliant and industrious and don't like having people speak to you or serve you in shops then you too can leave your name in the annals of history and people will still speak your name even after you are long gone.