Iceland review - 2014, Qupperneq 42

40 ICELAND REVIEW
places which saw the most traffic, foreign
visitors usually paid for their food as well
as the use of grazing land for their horses.
In the 19th century when Geysir’s fame
was at its height, Haukadalur, including
the hot springs, was owned by a farmer
named Sigurður Pálsson at Laug. Like
almost every other Icelandic farmer, he was
a man of little means. A constant stream
of visitors during the summertime took its
toll on the household’s budget. To top it
off, foreign visitors—impatiently waiting
for Geysir to stir—kept demanding that
it was fed turf and rock. That meant a dis-
turbance for the area and a lot of time and
effort for Sigurður and his household. The
visitors were wealthy and well-dressed and
considered the physical strain this entailed
beneath them. They expected the locals to
do all the hard work.
selling tHe springs
In the 1890s, when Sigurður had become
an old man, he formally asked the Icelandic
government to relieve him of this bur-
den by purchasing the hot spring area
and assuming its supervision, perhaps even
building tourist accommodation. A few par-
liamentarians liked the idea but the major-
ity was deterred by the cost and the work
needed to undertake the project, although
the asking price was far from high. In the
summer of 1893, Sigurður’s proposal was
rejected.
That same summer, a young Irishman
named James Craig (1871-1940)—the
son of a self-made whiskey millionaire in
Belfast—visited Iceland on a leisure trip.
He visited Geysir with two of his siblings,
lodging at Sigurður’s farm. The two became
fast friends although neither understood
the other’s language; they communicated
via a local guide who was self-taught in
foreign languages. The young Irishman
was sad to hear about the government’s
indifference. Although the proposal had yet
to be rejected, Craig told Sigurður that if
they didn’t purchase Geysir, he would, at
the amount of GBP 100. That amounted to
ISK 3,000, a large sum that certainly would
come in handy for an impoverished farmer.
The young James Craig kept his promise.
The following spring, an entry was made in
the Register of Mortgages stating that on
April 9 1894, Mr. Craig had been handed
the lease to the Haukadalur hot springs and
the surrounding land, for which he paid the
aforementioned amount.
Despite Iceland’s remote location, the
news about the purchase traveled with
remarkable speed to the outside world, with
bourgeois newspapers such as The London
Times and The Belfast News-Letter writing
about it. It must have been considered
unusual as it wasn’t clear what gain the
young man had in spending a fortune on a
few hot springs in a rural part of Iceland—a
place with neither gentlemen, clubs nor
fitting refreshments. His father was quite
taken aback by the whole thing, scolding
his son severely for this lapse in judgment,
which had made a laughing stock of the
entire family. Soon after, in July, 1894, he
relinquished the area to his Londoner rela-
tive, Elliott Rogers, who paid a nominal fee
for it. According to James Craig’s biogra-
phy, Craigavon, Ulsterma (1949), by St. John
Greer Ervine, the incident damaged his
relationship with his father and influenced
his abandonment of the plan to become a
businessman. Instead, he went on to have
a magnificent political career as the leader
of the ulster unionist Party and the first
Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. He
was created a baronet in 1918 and raised to
the Peerage in 1927.
a present FrOM a patriOt
Elliott Rogers was not in the least inter-
ested in Geysir and probably never visited
Iceland. His nephew, Hugh Charles Innes
Rogers, later inherited the property and
immediately decided to sell it. Sigurður
Jónasson, the director of the State Tobacco
Monopoly and an entrepreneur with con-
nections in London, was hired to find a
icelAnd