Dark Days of Georgian Britain

by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)

  There was a view that violence happened because they were, fatally for them, both Irish and a member of the lower orders. The stereotype was the ‘stout Hibernian’:

  Seven stout Hibernians were indicted for assaulting a watchman, and for creating a tremendous row in St Giles, by which that celebrated neighbourhood was thrown into the utmost terror and dismay. Two of the parties were found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment.

  Like many groups in society that were regarded as the ‘other’, the Irish were either condemned or treated like a joke. Often corners of local papers were filled with jokes or apocryphal stories about the Irish which made them villainous or simple minded, or sometimes both:

  A TRUE PROPHET

  A Hibernian who was tried and convicted during the last Western Circuit for burglary, on being asked his age…replied that he was pretty well as old as he’d ever be and declined to give any other answer. He was executed on the Wednesday following.

  A gentlemen going out one morning, bade his Hibernian servant tell Mr T (if he called) that he should be back at dinner; very well, says the servant, but what must I tell him if he doesn’t call?

  One of the first permanent areas of Irish settlement was St Giles, London. The Irish had already been living there for 150 years by 1815. They were poor and therefore occupied the worst houses and lived in the least salubrious parts of town. They were as demoralised and poor as migrant English rural labourers or Scottish handloom weavers. Due to the suspicious attitude of the establishment we have a fair amount of data about the Irish that was collected by people who vacillated between fear and contempt, with the occasional flash of compassion when something was clearly not their fault.

  Thomas Finigan, master of the Irish Free School told a commission on the education of the lower orders in 1816 that there were 6,000 poor Irish adults in St Giles and Bloomsbury who had 3,000 children. The children spent their Sundays either in the public house with their parents, or playing on the streets. Many children were kept away from school by the lack of clothes to wear, and the fact that women had irregular work and used their children for begging. Girls of 13 or 14 were convicted of prostitution, and other children were affected by seeing criminal activity. Finigan claimed to be organising a non-sectarian school for the Irish Catholics but was under great pressure from the local priests, who would occasionally burst into classrooms, shouting protests. He was an Irish protestant himself, but claimed that this was unimportant. The morals of the English protestant poor, he said, were far better, and his implication was clear. His pupils and their parents were from rural Catholic Ireland and that was always going to be a problem.

  In 1814 something happened to the Irish that could not be blamed on their religion or habits. Ironically it was an accident at one of the many British businesses that the Irish supported with their exploited labour. At 5.30 pm on Monday 17 October, a clerk inspected the huge vat of porter – a strong black beer – at Meux’s Brewery, near the Tottenham Court Road. A large iron hoop supporting the outsize barrel had fallen off an hour earlier; however, there was no real concern – this had happened before. The barrel was huge – the size of a two storey building. And, as it turned out, was rotting away.

  The huge fermenting barrel then exploded, and a million pints of beer, mixed with bricks and timber, streamed through the brewery at waist height and spread into nearby New Street and George Street. The lethal stream of beer, bricks and wood filled the basement cellars where people were having their tea, and destroyed three houses in George Street. Bricks from the brew house also rained down on New Street. The explosion weakened the facades of the houses and the inundation destroyed the walls, partitions and roof supports. The newspapers reported that people living on ground or upper storeys had to stand on their furniture until help arrived. However, this was not a possibility if you lived in a cellar with only sticks of furniture, as many of the Irish did.

  One Irish cellar inhabitant was Mary Mulvay, a widow whose first husband had died a few years earlier. She had remarried and had a 3-yearold son, Thomas, from her first marriage, and an unnamed daughter. Her mother, Catherine Butler, was 65 and lodged with them. They all lived in New Street, in the cellar of a house that had once been the residence of a rich family. Mary had a friend who lived locally called Ann Saville, who had a child called John, and a husband, also called John. Most of the Irish in St Giles had unskilled jobs in labouring or the building trade. John was a bricklayer; he would be lucky to earn 12s a week, which would put their standard of living below that of a weaver. Many others laboured at the gigantic brewery of Henry Meux, which adjoined the street where many of them lived. Most Irish women did irregular and seasonal work such as portering at Covent Garden or hawking vegetables.

  Ann’s child John had died the day before. Ann, Mary, Thomas, Catherine and another friend, Elizabeth Smith, were holding a wake when the accident happened. Ann Saville was found drowned in the brew house at 7.30 pm, and Elizabeth Smith on the first floor of her house at midnight. Mary Mulvay, Thomas Mulvay, and Catherine Butler, were also drowned in the cellar while keeping vigil for Ann’s dead child.

  These were poor people, living day-to-day, and would have not put aside the £3 or so needed to avoid a pauper’s funeral. However, their cruel death meant that they would be buried decently. The victims were placed in the Ship Inn in Banbury Street, and they were visited by their male family members. No adult men died because at the time of the explosion, they were at work; this would not have been the case if the explosion had taken place two hours later. John Saville, Ann’s husband, and Thomas Smith, husband of Elizabeth, were present at the coffins of their loved ones. They formed, according to the papers, ‘a doleful group’. The unnamed daughter of Mary Mulvay was taken in by Mrs Finigan, wife of the master of the local school, where she was a pupil.

  Ann and her child were buried at St Giles churchyard on 21 October in the same coffin and the others lay a bit longer at the Ship, until £33 was raised for their burial. This was more than enough money for pauper funerals; however the money was extorted from the crowd rather than being a charitable donation. It was more of an entrance fee; two constables were stationed at the door with plates in hand to collect sixpences and shillings. The money was to be used for the general welfare of the local poor too, who had lost an estimated £3,000 in property – which puts the £33 into some perspective.

  The local working poor who survived were soon forgotten, and the backlash began. In late October, one hostile newspaper reported that the ‘lower class of Irish’ who lived in the area were seen by Wednesday ‘busy employed putting their claim to their share … every vessel from kettle to cask were used … many were seen enjoying their share at the expense of the proprietor’. This is a ludicrous smear; the beer was polluted with the blown up building materials of a factory and a slum; nobody would be drinking it.1

  Many of the reports of drunkenness and beer looting do not appear in the early descriptions of the tragedy. A few weeks later, identically written reports appeared in a few places only. The newspaper could – shock horror! – have invented the story to pander to the prejudices of its readership. Much more likely to be true are the many reports of heroic efforts by the local people to pull people alive out of the rubble, with whole streets going silent in order to detect the cries of the injured.

  Other press created myths were the belief that somebody died of alcoholic poisoning having drunk too much beer flowing from the street, and that the floor collapsed under the weight of sightseers to the coffins of the Irish dead, although it is true that there was a lot of disrespectful gawping and disaster tourism going on for the few days afterwards.

  By November, the emphasis turned away from the victims. The inquest jury at St Giles workhouse had taken only a few moments to declare that the eight were killed ‘accidently, and by misfortune’. The newspapers reported with relief that the Horseshoe Brewery of Henry Meux was insured, and that in November 1814 the company successfully asked the Treasury for th
e rebate of £7,664 of excise duties that had already been paid. Another £800 in aid was raised in the next two months from local people, including a donation from Young’s Brewery at Wandsworth. Meux’s brewery made almost no contribution. The victims were, after all, merely the poor, and the Irish poor at that.

  By 1816, high bread prices, unemployment, and terrible weather had hit poor people hard, and none more so than the poor Irish. However, no subscription society sprung up to help them; instead the master of the school had to write to the newspapers to ask for help directly. It was Thomas Finigan again, who despite some of his views, which were very much reflective of the time, seemed to want to help:

  DISTRESS OF THE POOR IRISH AT ST GILES

  To the editor of the MORNING CHRONICLE

  Sir

  In the name of the one hundred and forty poor Irish children, now in the St Giles Free School in Bloomsbury, most of whom are in an absolutely starving condition, in consequence of the parents being out of employ and this inclement season, I solicit some relief from a benevolent public. I beg to assure you that some of the children fainted in the school room, this day, for want of food!

  The school had long since stopped charging children to attend the school – a nominal amount was usually required – and now the children were starving. Much of the unskilled work done by the lower orders in St Giles was out of doors – labourers, paviors, costermongers, and the work had dried up in the terrible winter of 1816. Later in the year, Finigan reported that £40 had been raised, which was not a lot. As ‘foreigners’, Catholics, and people with a reputation for spending money on drink, compassion was hard to find.

  A petition to the House of Commons was fruitless. The MPs were contemptuous:

  The Irish in St Giles – Mr W. Williams said, as he rose to present a Petition from the Poor Irish Inhabitants of the Parish of St. Giles. He had not long had the Petition in his possession – indeed he had only been able cursorily to glance it over; he however, had not found in it any thing disrespectful to the House. There was some peculiar language to be sure – such as that ‘one good turn deserves another’ – ‘a great bother’ was made about minor matters – and ‘charity begins at home.’ – (A laugh.) But notwithstanding such peculiarities, he considered the Petition to merit the attention of the House.

  The Petition was then brought up and read, and its characteristic phraseology occasioned a good deal of mirth. It set forth the difficulties of these petitioning labouring Irish, as they were without the means of subsistence, and unable to get work…. Their present difficulties were increased from the circumstance of English labourers being preferred, where any labourers were wanted. This they did not complain of, as charity began at home. But relying on the wisdom of Parliament, they could not but implore the House to take their case into consideration, as they felt that work for the labouring poor would be the best barrier against the insinuations of the Radical Reformers, about whom there was so much bother.

  The Irish were often a burden on the Poor Law. The simple explanation was that they were poor, but that was often too simple for hostile commentators. By 1818 the Manchester districts of Ancoats and New Cross had a considerable Irish population. The Morning Chronicle article in 1818, The Mischievous Effects of the English Poor Law, pointed out that in 1817 the Poor Law cost £65,912 in Manchester, mostly in the topping up of wages for poor weavers, but that the local Scottish community were quite unknown as receivers of poor relief:

  A Scotsman is taught from infancy to trust to himself, and when he finds himself unsuccessful in one quarter he betakes himself to another. For the Irish however, a separate list is kept of the Irish poor, who number nearly the same as the English.

  There must have been a reason for a separate Irish list – once again they seem to be keeping an eye on a problem. The criticism of the Irish for showing insufficient labour mobility is unfair; as the poor Irish arrived in Manchester they moved rapidly into the only job that was available – the handloom weaving which made them poor in the first place.

  Also in 1818, perhaps not accidently, the law was changed so that the poor Irish could be sent back to Ireland, sometimes under distressing circumstances. By 1819 many Irish were lying about where they came from. In that year, the Mendacity Society, which prosecuted beggars, brought Irish seaman John Lewis to court for begging in Southwark and claiming to be from Halifax, Canada, rather than his native Dublin. He had been in the British Navy for fourteen years, but was now finding it impossible to live on his 9d a day pension. The paper noted that lots of Irish were claiming to come from English speaking colonies to avoid a seven-day imprisonment and deportation. However, thanks to the work of the Mendacity Society, who were tough on poverty but not the causes of poverty, John received both punishments.

  From 1818, the effect of this law was to remove many Irish families to places where they had no roots. One paper reported a ‘wretched looking woman with three children with no stockings, almost naked’, whose pauper husband had deserted the family after twenty years living in London. Now that he was missing, the family had no settlement in any English parish and were to be deported to Ireland as vagrants.

  Mr Bodkin, an Overseer of the Clerkenwell parish, agreed with the Hatton Garden magistrate that this was an unjust law which made poverty a crime, although in practice it made poverty a crime specifically for the Irish. Mr Bodkin was reluctant to use the powers that the new act gave him, but felt he had to because if the other London parishes knew that Clerkenwell was being humane, all the burden of the iterant poor would fall on them.

  Many Irish made the decision to leave the country completely and emigrate to the USA. In 1817 a group of exiled Irishmen in New York set up a society to resettle and aid Irish emigrants. The Society was lead by Thomas Addis Emmet, and offered charity to the poor migrant, who often landed friendless in a busy port, and who was therefore in great danger of being exploited. The implication was that the migrant could expect only a slightly warmer reception in New York than Liverpool or London. The society offered advice, credit, and protection from those who would prey on them, and the chance to start a new life farming in the American Midwest rather than settling in overcrowded US cities. The reaction of the British establishment was hostile. Many newspapers would aggressively publish accounts of Irish migrants suffering in the USA. The deep-down motivation was political. The implication that the USA could offer more was resented, mostly because there was truth in it. Emmet put forward a plan for the Irish to buy ‘unworked’ land in Illinois for two dollars an acre, payable over twelve years, where they could live a life without the protestant landlord, bailiff, and cleric watching over them and stealing the fruit of their labour.

  Thomas Emmet was a highly controversial figure. He was a lawyer, born in Cork, and was a leading member of the United Irishmen, who fought against British rule and for a liberal, non-sectarian Ireland. It was a name that the newspapers would have recognised as an enemy of the British establishment. His brother Robert Emmet had been executed in 1803 for organising rebellions against British rule.

  The newspapers were keen to play down the importance of Emmet’s ambitions for Irish emigrants. It was page one news when Emmet’s Illinois land plan was rejected by the US House of Representatives. At the same time, the press gleefully reported that migrant ships from Europe to New York were to be restricted in the number of passengers they could carry to prevent overcrowding and deaths. The danger was not a lie; in 1817, twenty per cent of the 5,000 migrants who had left from Antwerp bound for the USA had died en route.

  Thomas Emmet was also a member of the New York Shamrock Society, which produced a book of hints and advice for British-based immigrants, published by the radical bookseller William Hone in London. It was as much a critique of Britain as a comment on the USA. The USA was a democracy, and that was a good thing:

  You will soon perceive that the laws (and ours is a government of laws) are made by the will of the people through agents called Representatives. The will of
a majority passes for, and requires, the consent of all.

  There is much more food than in Europe:

  The European of the same condition who receive meat or fish and coffee at breakfast meat at dinner and meat or fish and tea at supper an abundance of animal food to which he was unaccustomed insensibly falls into a state of too great repletion which exposes him to the worst kind of fever during the heats of summer and autumn.

  While overeating could cause fever in the USA, in Ireland fever was caused by the starvation harvest of 1817, and in Britain by freezing in a garret in Manchester or London. Emmet claimed that labourers earned the dollar equivalent of six shillings a day in the USA, not nine shillings a week like in St Giles. Money went further as taxes were lower:

  Our governments are more frugal they demand few taxes so that the earnings of the poor man are left to enrich himself they are nearly all his own and not expended on kings or their satellites. Idlers are out of their element here and the being who is technically called a man of rank in Europe is despicable in America.

  The new, young Republic was a different world from Regency Britain, and for that reason, the Irish wanted to be there.

  Chapter 23

  A Rash and Melancholy Act?

  The Regency was a rough and violent age. It had a hard, uncaring image and a bloody, vindictive set of punishments for criminals, but attitudes to suicide were gradually changing from condemnation to an attempt at understanding. The belief that it was up to the individual to choose whether life was worth living was not common in an age where eternal damnation was feared, but some changes can be seen in the Regency era – a softening of attitude in places, with perhaps a tendency to extend the search for mitigation, to members of the establishment if not the poor. Not all agreed. John Wesley believed that the English leniency towards suicide was the reason for its great frequency.