Flesh and Blood

by Stephen McGann

  The Sanitary Act gave the local authority in Liverpool new powers to implement measures that prioritised public health, sanitation, disease control and housing policy. It led to the appointment of Britain’s first ever Officer of Health – the campaigning local physician, Dr William Henry Duncan. Duncan had long campaigned for radical action to tackle what he called ‘the most unhealthy town in England’, and ‘the hospital and cemetery of Ireland’. Duncan formed part of a new triumvirate of local health officers, along with the rather fragrantly named Thomas Fresh, who was appointed ‘Inspector of Nuisances’ (a forerunner of the Environmental Health Officer), and civil engineer James Newlands, who became Borough Engineer. Newlands would transform the state of Liverpool’s dreadful sewer system, and such was his success that he was asked in 1854 to provide effective sewerage for the British Army at the Siege of Sevastopol, where more troops were dying of fever than of wounds. Florence Nightingale later wrote to thank Newlands, remarking: ‘Truly I may say that to us sanitary salvation came from Liverpool.’ These men were reforming Victorians in the finest tradition: scientific, methodical, patriotic, and of unimpeachable Protestant respectability. They now gazed down into an urban valley of pestilent humanity as alien to their sensibilities as the far Crimea.

  Although Duncan didn’t yet have our full medical knowledge of the way diseases such as typhus fever were spread, he drew a clear connection between population density, lack of basic sanitation and the prevalence of epidemics that plagued the town. By the time Duncan died in 1863, his campaigning legacy and influence were secure: Liverpool was on the road to cleaning up its act and getting healthier. Yet it was to be a long road – and Duncan had been unequivocal about the moral and social reasons for this:

  … I am persuaded that so long as the native inhabitants are exposed to the inroads of numerous hordes of uneducated Irish, spreading physical and moral contamination around them, it will be in vain to expect that any sanitary code can cause fever to disappear from Liverpool.

  A ‘physical and moral contamination’. It seemed clear to Duncan that pestilence was a two-headed beast: not simply a pathogen, but bound to the morality of the people who suffered it. The first was increasingly understood, and could be cured with medicine, sanitation and slum clearance. The second was incurable, rooted as it was in a grim community whose moral corruption this physical malady must surely index, and to which those who carry it must belong in perpetuity. An alien nation.

  Duncan was revolted by the Irish he encountered, and condemned their perceived ‘innate indifference to filth’, and their ‘recklessness and peculiar habits’. By the time Owen McGann’s family were sitting in that room in Clay Street in 1871, there was a clear connection established in the minds of the respectable citizenry of Liverpool between the diseases that plagued their streets and the moral character of the people believed to carry them. It wasn’t simply hunger, poverty or their insanitary conditions. The immigrant Irish were an infected tribe.

  Yet the McGanns survived with four of their children intact when the census enumerator visited in spring of 1871. Sadly, this state of affairs wasn’t to last. Just a few weeks after that census was recorded, their daughter Sarah would die of a pestilence as old as the pharaohs, and during an epidemic that further stretched the resources and patience of the city they now called home.

  *

  28 April, 1871. 2 in 4 Ct, Clay Street. Sarah McGann, aged eleven. Certified dead. Cause: Variola.

  Variola. Such a quaint word. Almost musical, like the name of an instrument, or the indication of a bright tempo. It swirls in confident cursive on her death certificate.

  The truth is of a much harsher key. Variola is the medical term for smallpox.

  Smallpox had been raging in Liverpool for a few months by the time of Sarah’s death, yet many felt that the authorities had been slow to react with effective vaccination measures. In January 1871, the Liverpool Mercury newspaper aired its frustration:

  Now that the smallpox is carrying off scores of victims every week, the local authorities are beginning to do what they ought to have done long ago – put preventive measures into force … As an illustration of the extent to which vaccination is neglected, Dr Trench, the medical officer, states that he recently requested the lodging house and nuisance inspectors to ascertain whether children coming under their observation had been vaccinated. He was astonished at the result, for in three days the inspectors, while merely performing their routine duties, came in contact with 133 people who had not been vaccinated. The necessity for enforcing vaccination in every possible instance has been over and over again urged by medical men, but it is only in cases of emergency that the authorities seem disposed to listen.

  The best way of discovering if someone was vaccinated was to look for the telltale cicatrix, or small vaccination scar, on a person’s arm. This mark, sadly, did not always denote foolproof protection. The efficacy of smallpox vaccination was observed to fade with time, and, in some cases, to fail altogether – either through imperfect application or through a person’s failure to acquire immunity despite multiple applications. In a later review of the epidemic, the Liverpool Daily Post newspaper examined the death figures of those who’d been admitted to Liverpool workhouses with smallpox, and found that death could occur regardless of whether the patient had been vaccinated or not:

  … Of those imperfectly vaccinated, one half died; of those who showed marks of from one to five cicatrices, one in eight died …

  What of little Sarah? Had Owen been a neglectful parent and left his daughter exposed to the infection without vaccination? I went back to her death certificate. There, beneath ‘Variola’ as the cause of death, was another single, sad word: ‘Vaccinated’. Little Sarah had been inoculated. But she’d died all the same. Jenner’s little miracle had not been able to protect her.

  As the epidemic raged in Liverpool and mass vaccination proved inefficient as the sole solution, priorities shifted to measures for prevention and isolation. Yet those in positions of power and influence remained tardy in their efforts to eradicate infection and prevent its spread. On 16 February, there was frustration in the media with the landlords of slum properties where there had been smallpox outbreaks:

  Yesterday, upwards of 20 owners and agents of property were summoned for neglecting to purify houses in which smallpox and fever had occurred, and in each case penalties had been imposed.

  Safe disposal of bodies was also an issue. When local residents heard of a plan to set up a smallpox mortuary in the nearby Everton district of the city, there was:

  … something akin to a panic in that neighbourhood, the belief being entertained that the bringing of bodies to the place would spread the contagion throughout the district. Dr Trench treats this apprehension as illusory … if a place is well ventilated the contagion is not carried beyond half a yard from the patient …

  Even during the epidemic’s most intense period, there was an all-too-recognisable ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ tendency that challenged the best scientific strategies. And yet even here, the stronger tendency was to blame the spread of the disease on the moral and cultural failings of the Irish immigrants who died. The Officer for Health, Dr Trench, reported that some Irish families were retaining diseased corpses of victims in their houses for days, in order to conduct a traditional funeral wake:

  In Chisenhale-Street, a woman died of Smallpox on the 14th of February. The house was visited at 2 o’clock a.m. on the 17th, and more than a dozen persons were found in it, all intoxicated or under the influence of drink, holding a wake over the corpse. The assembly was broken up by the inspector, and two of the women were so drunk as to require to be carried from the house.

  The wake runs deep in Irish culture. The body of the deceased relative is laid out in the room and family, friends and neighbours are invited to visit and pay their respects. Food and drink are consumed, and the spirit of the gathering is one of celebration rather than mourning. This practice endured in Liverpool until the 1
970s.

  Unfortunately, in the smallpox epidemic of 1871, an Irish wake was a real health hazard. An infected corpse coming into close contact with so many visitors presented an obvious danger of smallpox spreading rapidly throughout the district. Yet why did the Health Officer feel the need to detail the alcoholic inebriation he found at the wake? The drunken condition of women surely had no bearing on the transmission of smallpox? Unless, of course, the moral disposition of those at risk is considered indistinguishable from the infection itself. It was Duncan’s legacy enduring in the minds of the Liverpool authorities. Dr Trench’s words were implicit moral stones thrown to demarcate a tribe that was considered medically treatable but morally contaminated.

  Looking back at my own McGann family at that time, I became curious to see if they displayed any signs of this ‘moral contamination’. Was there any evidence that they lived morally dubious lives? The McGanns were certainly churchgoers, as the records of nearby St Augustine’s church clearly showed. Every significant family event – birth, marriage and death – was recorded there. Was there anything to suggest that they were less than model citizens?

  There was. Owen’s occupation – when not listed as musician – was frequently cited as ‘Emigration Agent’ or ‘Emigration Runner’ on public documents. This rather grand title conjures images of an upstanding Victorian travel agent, dispensing tickets for New York to eager, smiling travellers. The truth was somewhat less glamorous. These runners were little more than disreputable ticket touts. They accosted emigrating families on the Liverpool dockside, falsely claiming to work for one of the many licensed shipping brokers, and then coerced them into parting with too much of their hard-earned savings for onward passage to the New World. In 1850, the Morning Chronicle newspaper called them ‘man-catchers’, and detailed their shady work:

  The business of these people is, in common parlance, to ‘fleece’ the emigrant, and to draw from his pocket, by fair means or foul, as much of his cash as he can be persuaded, inveigled, or bullied into parting with. The first division of the man-catching fraternity are those who trade in commissions on the passage money, and call themselves the ‘runners’, or agents of passenger-brokers … the passenger-brokers of Liverpool, in common with the unwary and unsuspecting emigrants, have suffered greatly from the malpractices of the ‘runners’ who pretend to be their agents. These man-catchers procure whatever sums they can from emigrants as passage money – perhaps £5 or £6 or even more – and pay as little as they can to the passenger-broker whose business they thus assume – often as little as £3.

  Not only were these self-appointed middlemen exploiting the innocence and fear of the arriving emigrant, but most of their victims were also Irish – so an emigration runner like Owen was ingratiating himself as a friendly face to former countrymen and women in order to fleece them. Hardly churchgoing behaviour from my great-great-grandfather. Although there was no doubt of the prejudices stacked against them, Liverpool’s Irish slum dwellers clearly did much to contribute to their own reputation for dishonesty. Perhaps Dr Trench had a point after all …

  But what came first? Was it some innate immoral Irishness that turned Owen into a ruthless tout, or did the circumstances he’d lived through – starvation, exile, disease, death, prejudice – harden him to the reality of his family’s need? Was he born bad, or did he have moral contamination thrust upon him?

  One of the curious aspects of public prejudice against an alien tribe is that it flattens out the many delicate human distinctions existing within that group. In those Liverpool docks there would have been many different types of Irish character: good people and bad, the idle and the industrious, the pious and the godless, saints and touts, the quiet bright child and the aggressive dullard. All humanity – but compressed by the prejudice of others into a single pestilence. I often wonder what Owen’s surviving children – James, Eugene and Mary – were like as individuals. Did they take their sister Sarah’s death in their stride, or did they mourn her loss for many years? Were they thoughtful or boisterous children? Good or bad? We’ll never know, and the social commentary at the time simply labels these children as Irish, pauper and pestilent. A single objectified target for stones.

  Yet the Liverpool Irish endured, expanded in number, and slowly began to assert themselves. By the time of Sarah’s death from smallpox, the Irish population of Liverpool had grown to over 76,000 – about 15 per cent of the city. Just as the outside had objectified them, so they began to self-identify, forming an insular community built around race, religion, and the work they now dominated in the nearby docks. Liverpool differed from other cities in the industrial north regarding the nature of the labour that dominated the workforce. It wasn’t the fixed landscape of factories and mills, but an ever-shifting and opportunistic maritime economy of moving goods and people – casual work and transient incomes. Work was tough and clannish, whether you were a dockside tout like Owen or a stevedore unloading cargo. This was employment perfectly suited to the unskilled Irish labourers who lived nearby. George Smyth, a local businessman, commented on their dominance of the docks:

  The Irishmen in Liverpool perform nearly all the labour requiring great physical powers and endurance. Nine-tenths of the ships that arrive in this great port are discharged and loaded by them; and all the cargoes skilfully stowed.

  Well, that was the cargo that didn’t mysteriously disappear. Docks are famously porous places, where stolen goods can easily find their way into local hands. In the mid-nineteenth century there was a roaring trade in the theft of cotton and other goods from the Liverpool docklands by Irish criminal networks.

  However, by the 1870s, the Irish workforce had also risen to occupy more legitimate positions, such as stevedore gang leader, master porter or warehouseman. These jobs were then passed down from father to son, so that by the end of the century the lifeblood of Liverpool’s fortune – its port – was firmly in the rough hands of the Irish north-end labouring man.

  And what of the women? Liverpool had none of those female-heavy textile mills of Lancashire, so the only work Susan or her surviving daughter Mary could do (apart from the immoral variety) was street trading, such as selling watercress, or chopped wood kindling in bundles of ‘chips’. Gangs of Irish ‘chip girls’ were a common feature of the Victorian Liverpool streets.

  The Irish were soon to extend their influence beyond the casual workplace and into the halls of power. The north-end had developed its own shopkeepers, small merchants and publicans to serve their insular community. These now represented a new Irish middle class: a constituency that could vote and represent others. A political movement developed in the north-end streets called the Irish National Party. It was an organisation founded culturally around the escalating issue of home rule for Ireland, but with a more practical local focus on the rights, interests and conditions of the Catholic immigrants. Soon INP councillors from the district were sitting in Liverpool town hall, lobbying for improvements to the health and welfare of their residents.

  A huge breakthrough came with the parliamentary boundary changes of the mid-1880s, when north Liverpool was allowed for the first time to elect its own MP to Westminster. The election was won by the famous Irish nationalist politician T. P. O’Connor, who went on to serve the north end of Liverpool as an MP for nearly fifty years. North Liverpool remains the only constituency outside of the island of Ireland ever to return an Irish nationalist MP: a remarkable indication of the area’s cultural history.

  Sadly, Owen and Susan would not live to see these developments. Susan died in Clay Street in 1876 of paralysis, attended by Owen. Owen followed her four years later. His twenty-one-year-old son Eugene, my great-grandfather, signed Owen’s death certificate with an ‘x’. It is 1880; the first McGanns to arrive in England are now dead, and the future belongs to their children – anonymous members of a poor, diseased enclave of Irish exiles that still can’t write their own surnames. In just a hundred years from this moment, their family’s surname will be wri
tten on film posters and in numerous newspaper articles by the same nation that now glares at them suspiciously from over the ghetto wall. How did we ever get to here from there?

  For Eugene, it started with a wedding. A few months after Owen’s death, my great-granddad married a young woman called Mary Kelly in St Augustine’s church. Mary was the daughter of an Irish dock labourer from the next street – the very definition of marrying your own kind. As for his older brother James, his trail goes quiet after 1871. I later find him as an able seaman, plying the oceans of the world. Sister Mary vanishes too, perhaps hiding behind a new husband’s surname in the New World, or else languishing in some unrecorded grave in the old one. Eugene and Mary were now the last remaining McGanns in the north end. Would their lives be blighted by the same maladies that killed three of Eugene’s siblings?

  It doesn’t start well. In January 1881, Mary gives birth to their first child, John Dennis, in a court dwelling in Carlton Street – one of the most infamous streets mentioned in ‘Squalid Liverpool’: ‘That human beings should be permitted to live in such a place and under such conditions is a scandal and a disgrace.’

  The commissioners weren’t wrong. John Dennis McGann died of bronchitis at just seven months old. Something would have to change in those streets if the health of my family was ever going to improve.

  *

  Compulsory purchase legislation had been available to the Liverpool authorities since 1864 for the purpose of slum clearance, but very little had been done about the courts and cellars near the north docks. Cases became mired in vested interests, commercial compensation and local sectarian politics. Things finally began to move in 1883 with the formation of Liverpool’s Insanitary Property Committee. This committee oversaw the destruction of insanitary housing, with new dock warehousing and railway development expanding into the spaces previously occupied by the courts. However, there were soon suspicions. Although the private enterprises involved had agreed to build replacement housing for the locals, the price of this new housing was way beyond the means of the poor Irish whose dwellings they’d demolished. The displaced labouring poor were therefore forced to leave the district and seek alternative slum housing in nearby boroughs like Everton – thereby simply transferring the problem of overcrowding and disease elsewhere. Meanwhile, the lucrative dockside district was cleansed of troublesome nationalist paupers.