A History of Britain, Volume 3 (39 page)

Pending this miracle, people were becoming desperate. Russell’s response was to continue Peel’s programme of outdoor relief, but to make public-works projects a test of character. Pay (averaging ninepence a day) was to be pegged to labour, and the labour was deliberately made so back-breaking that it would not attract shirkers, since, as Harry David Jones, the chairman of the board of public works, reported to Trevelyan, ‘I believe everyone considers the government fair game to pluck as much as they can.’ There would have to be a lot of digging and breaking of rocks and backs before the pittance would be handed over. On the High Burren in County Clare a brass ring was used to judge whether the rocks had been broken into pieces small enough to warrant the payment of threepence an hour. Never mind that these roads seemed not to go anywhere. ‘The labourers work for their wages,’ Captain Henry O’Brien wrote from County Clare, ‘but seeing clearly that what they are doing is of no clear value, their heart, they say, is not in it.’

Brutally penal as these work gangs were, for the desperate they were the only alternative to starvation. To the dismay of the government in London, the Irish relief authorities felt they could no longer turn away
the
hordes of women and children pleading for the work. By December 1846, in an exceptionally harsh winter, 441,000 of them were employed; by the following March, 714,000. In the worst-affected western counties, like Clare, more than 20 per cent of the entire population was being kept alive – though barely – by hard labour. Whether its harshness killed some of them seemed to the book-keepers of calamity just a statistical footnote.

By this time, some of the more ghoulish spectacles were being graphically reported in the English press. The dying and the dead of the Skibbereen workhouse, where, between October 1846 and January 1847, 266 of the inmates perished, became known to all Victorian newspaper readers along with their post mortems. Vegetable refuse and grass were being consumed to stave off starvation. In January, the Dublin paper
The Nation
reprinted a post mortem from the
Mayo Constitution
recording that ‘Bridget Joyce and four children died in a small sheep house in a small field at Gleneadagh … it appeared in evidence that the deceased and her family were in the utmost state of destitution and one of the children had nothing to wet the lips of its dying parent but a drop of water and a little snow. The body lay for eight days before a few boards could be procured to make a coffin, in such a state of destitution was the locality. Verdict – death from starvation.’

Small girls were selling their hair to stay alive. Mothers in Donegal walked miles to sell a little wool to be able to buy some meal to feed their family, although women with meal were a prime target for the desperate. Charlock – wild cabbage – became almost a staple, with families flocking to the wet fields where it grew to rip the young leaves out and boil them at home. It wasn’t enough. Communal burial pits were filling up; some families concealed deaths so they could continue to receive relief. So many village priests were dying that newborns were often unable to be baptized before they too perished and so were denied a consecrated burial ground. Mothers were seen carrying dead children on their backs to a remote burial site. In Connemara, on the Atlantic shore, it seems to have been the fathers’ task to take their dead babies to the edge of the ocean, to the ancient limbo-spaces of water, land and sky, and to dig little graves, marked by a rough stone cut from the cliffs. Circles of 30 and 40 of the wind-scoured, lichen-flecked stones, their jagged grey edges pointing this way and that, stand by the roaring surf, the saddest little mausoleum in all Irish history.

Worried by public reaction, though still convinced it was all a blessing in disguise, Trevelyan cranked up the mighty engine of Victorian philanthropy. A British Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and Scotland (for there was also a serious potato blight in the
Highlands)
was established in January 1847, with the queen donating the first £1000; when invited to do better by its founder, the courageous Stephen Spring-Rice, she doubled her contribution. Albert gave £500; the great and the good – Barings and Rothschilds, the Bishop of London, the Earl of Dalhousie, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone and even the Ottoman Sultan – chipped in to increase the fund to £470,000 (about £20 million in today’s money). Trevelyan, Peel, Wood and Russell all gave generously. The fund helped supply the soup kitchens.

While the milk of Victorian charity was flowing the Whig government’s attitude to what could be done to mitigate suffering was, if anything, hardening. The road and harbour works had been so overwhelmed by numbers that the original pretence to provide pay for specific work had all but collapsed, leaving Trevelyan and Sir Charles Wood deeply uneasy about what they were doing. The migration of huge numbers towards the works had also, they thought, depleted country towns of their population. A decision was taken to close the works down. In their place would be the philanthropically funded soup kitchens (where the Quakers had already, and, characteristically, taken the initiative), and the 130 workhouses established by the Irish Poor Law of 1838. There was no reason to suppose, of course, that when the choice was between the penal regime of the workhouses (even with its uniforms, separation of families and prison diet) and starvation, they would not be as overwhelmed by sheer numbers as the relief works. So the Tory MP for Dublin, William Gregory, passed an amendment to the act that restricted workhouse relief to peasants with a quarter of an acre or less. The practical consequences of the Gregory clause ushered in a completely new, and monstrously inhumane, phase of the tragedy. The vast majority of even the poorest peasants had needed more than a quarter of an acre if they were to house their family in just the most primitive stone cabin and supply them with a subsistence diet. Now, with no potatoes and no money, they were faced with the choice of surrendering their acre or two to the landlord to be eligible for workhouse relief, or staying put, starving and probably facing forcible ‘ejectment’ for failure to pay rent. It was no choice at all.

This was precisely the ‘social revolution’ that Trevelyan was looking for: the voluntary migration of the poorest smallholders to the ports or the workhouses; or their eviction. In either case it opened the way for the consolidation of a multitude of economically unviable plots into tenant farms that had, as far as he was concerned, a solid economic future. It would hurt, but it would be the birth-pangs of an Irish yeomanry.

In some peculiar way Charles Trevelyan – and the majority of the government such as Wood and Russell, who thought just like him –
believed
that this huge social upheaval represented some sort of lesson for everyone concerned. The selfish landlords who had thought that the British treasury would bail them out from years of neglect and exploitation were now told that
they
were going to bear the cost of funding workhouse relief from their own local rates. This was supposed to make them ‘self-reliant’, just as a spell in the workhouse, a passage in steerage to New Zealand or a job as a landless labourer working for the new ‘yeomanry’ was supposed to wean the peasants from illicitly brewed poteen and potatoes. What actually happened, of course, was an almost animal struggle to survive, with the weakest going to the wall quickest. The landlords screamed at the government, to no avail. If they were going to have to bear the cost of the workhouses (they had 100,000 occupants by the end of 1847), they would also make sure that those who had left their plots to go there would not come back. Cabins were broken down; roofs smashed in. Their pathetic ruins still stud the low hills in Clare, Mayo and Galway. At Kilrush in County Clare in 1849, 1200 people, many of them suffering from cholera, saw their dwellings demolished in a fortnight. At Erris in County Mayo the Quaker activist James Hack Tuke saw police, reinforced by soldiers, throw sticks of furniture and kitchen pots out from people’s homes:

The tenants make resistance – for these hovels have been built by themselves or their forefathers who have resided in them for generations past – seem inclined to dispute with the bayonets of the police for they know truly that when their hovels are demolished the nearest ditch must be their dwelling and thus exposed, death could not fail to be the lot of some of their wives and little ones. … Six or seven hundred persons were here evicted, young and old, mother and babe were alike cast forth without the means of subsistence! A favoured few were allowed to remain on condition they would voluntarily depart. … At a dinner party that evening, the landlord, as I was told by one of the party, boasted that this was the first time he had seen the estate or visited the tenants.

The most determined survivors built ‘scalpeen’ (from the Gaelic
scailp
, for shelter) huts from the smashed ruins of their cottages and squatted there in the debris.

For those who resigned themselves to losing their land, the workhouse, which most Irish had looked on with repugnance, was no sure salvation. However destitute and famished they might seem, should it be proved that the ‘breadwinner’ was earning even ninepence a day (nowhere
near
enough to feed a family) mother and children might be refused admission. That might have been a mercy since the workhouses, filled to bursting, were breeding grounds for deadly cholera, typhus and tuberculosis. It was also at workhouses that food – usually soup or ‘stirabout’ – was supplied as ‘outdoor relief’. But those who received it had to travel so far, often in poor health, that they more often got American cornmeal – until, that is, the corn ran out.

There was a point when disaster succeeded disaster so relentlessly that the English and Scots began to get sick of hearing about it. By 1848, and certainly 1849, ‘compassion fatigue’ had begun to set in. Although the Irish were themselves bearing the great burden of caring for their own destitute and starving, the English press was full of complaints about having to pay for the hopelessness of the Paddies, who were often depicted as semi-simian, wily, incorrigible wastrels – and dangerously revolutionary, seeking money for arms rather than food. A typical cartoon in
Punch
in December 1846 had an Irishman asking an unamused John Bull ‘to spare a trifle, yer Honourr, for a poor Irish lad to buy a bit of … blunderbuss with’.

One last way out of despair remained: emigration. Between 1845 and 1851 nearly a million and a half took it. In 1846 more than 100,000, especially from the western and southwestern counties, departed; in 1847, 200,000; and in 1851, even after the famine had subsided, a quarter of a million departed Ireland for good. At least 300,000 went to Britain itself, congregating either in port cities like Liverpool or in the industrial centres like Birmingham and Manchester where they were most likely to find work, and it seems, from the 1851 census, that many of them – over a third – found work in England as skilled and professional workers. Some landlords, such as Major Denis Mahon of Strokestown in County Roscommon, saw emigration as the solution to the point of laying out £4000 to enable 1000 of his tenants to sail to Canada. Their journey, in steerage, was no holiday cruise, and the vessels were not called ‘coffin ships’ for nothing: a quarter of Mahon’s emigrants died of disease before landing; Mahon was eventually murdered by one of his own tenants in 1847. Aubrey de Vere, the young Irish poet and nephew of Lord Monteagle, one of the government-appointed heads of the Relief Commission, travelled to Canada in steerage so that he could offer direct witness of the privations endured by the Irish emigrants. Sanitation was almost completely absent, he reported; water and beds foul; food ‘ill-selected and seldom sufficiently cooked … the supply of water hardly enough for cooking does not allow washing. In many ships the filthy beds, teeming with all abominations are never required to be brought on
deck
and aired’. Worse still (at least for the incognito, pious Protestant Irish aristocrat), there were no prayers – nor, since the captain himself made money from selling grog, was there any attempt to restrain drunkenness or ‘ruffianly debasement’. Once at their destination, the long quarantine period at stations like Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence, downriver from Quebec, guaranteed precisely what it was supposed to prevent: another wave of mass deaths among the passengers.

Those who survived all these rigours did not, of course, forget, whether they journeyed near or far. The lawyer and journalist John Mitchel, for example, had not been a voluntary emigrant. In May 1848, he had been sentenced to 14 years’ transportation to Tasmania for publishing seditious views in his paper the
United Irishman
. Five years later he escaped and made his way to the United States, where he became the most militant and wrathful of the memorialists of the Great Hunger. The famine, he insisted, had been not a work of nature but a work of man – of Englishmen. There had been blight all over Europe (here he was exaggerating – thousands, rather than millions, had died in the Netherlands), but there had been famine only in Ireland: ‘The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine. … A million and a half of men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by the English government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance which their own hands created.’ In Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but especially in the United States, the genuine tragedy of the famine became translated by mythic memory into an Irish Exodus, bitter with plagues, sorrows and uprootings. The fact that the reception of the Irish immigrants in Boston, New York or Poughkeepsie was anything but welcoming; that they continued to suffer alienation and exploitation at the hands of ‘native’ Yankee elites; and that they were invariably concentrated in the lowest-paid, most physically dangerous jobs only intensified the tightness of their ghetto world and the fierce tribal determination to take ‘revenge for Skibbereen’.

One figure among the heedless, heartless English was demonized more than any other for causing untold, unnecessary misery: Charles Trevelyan. Mitchel set the tone by depicting him as the murderer, unwitting or not, of the Irish future: ‘I saw Trevelyan’s red claw in the vitals of those children … his red tape would draw them to death.’ The damning judgement on Trevelyan has been repeated over the generations, most fiercely in Cecil Woodham-Smith’s account
The Great Hunger
(1962), which came closest to accusing the English government of perpetrating, almost knowingly, genocide. That was certainly not the case. Neither Charles Trevelyan nor government members who shared his prejudices,
his
moralizing and his bleak conviction that Ireland would never make the transition to modernity without a heavy dose of social pain took any satisfaction from the agony of the famine. But it is also possible to overdo the aversion to strong emotion – to mistake actual tragedy for melodrama, to throw out all those dead babies (who were, after all, no sentimental fiction) along with the bathwater of nationalist demonology. It is possible, in Trevelyan’s and the government’s case, to be over-eager to acquit as well as over-eager to prosecute. For if Trevelyan did not actually want to kill and dispossess large numbers of the Irish, neither was he excessively distraught about their disappearance. If he can be acquitted of villainy, he can be convicted of obtuseness; when it combined absurd confidence in the will of God with an ingrained certainty that, short of trauma, the ‘indolent’ and ‘unself-reliant’ Irish would never help themselves, that obtuseness did, in fact, have lethal consequences.