A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  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.

  And, after all, not everyone in England shared his hands-off attitude to intervention. Sir Robert Peel had been just as much a free trader but had been willing to set the dogma aside in the midst of crisis. His shipments of American corn unquestionably and measurably saved lives in 1846. By the time Trevelyan and Russell realized they needed additional imports, it was too late. Against Trevelyan’s smug optimism that in the long run the experience would actually draw Ireland closer to England through reaping the ‘natural’ benefits of its social transformation, many others drew the opposite conclusion: that a wound had been opened that would ultimately bleed the union to death. A journalist wrote in The Times that, whatever happened, generations of Irish would remember that ‘In their terrible distress, from that temporary calamity with which they were visited, they were to have no relief unless they gave up their holdings. That law, too, laid down a form for evicting the people, and thus gave the sanction and encouragement of legislation to exterminate them. Calmly and quietly, but very ignorantly – though we cheerfully exonerate the parties from any malevolence; they [the government] … committed a great mistake, a terrible blunder, which in legislation is worse than a crime.’

  Trevelyan, of course, was either oblivious to the odium or shrugged it off as inevitable resentment towards his unsentimental economic realism, much like a Victorian headmaster resigned to being remembered with mixed feelings by boys who had been birched in their own best interests. He was knighted for his sterling work in fami
ne relief, and his reputation in England had never been higher. In the 1850s, while his brother-in-law Macaulay was beginning the epic history of England’s parliamentary liberty, Charles Trevelyan, even though still only assistant permanent secretary to the treasury, became the personification of its destiny as an imperial government, the most powerful and authoritative of that empire’s invisible hands. It was Trevelyan who, with Sir Stafford Northcote, headed a commission of inquiry into the Civil Service. Their report of 1854 opened the service for the first time to competitive examination, transforming British government (though not, of course, overnight) from a grazing ground of aristocratic patronage to a true meritocracy. The test of talent, not family connection or the influence of land and fortune, would produce the proconsuls that the best of empires needed.

  And it was Charles Trevelyan who in the 1850s decided that this new, purified government needed to be housed in centralized but spacious new quarters. What he had in mind was not just bigger office space but a virtual city of government. To stave off the objections of pinch-penny chancellors of the exchequer, Trevelyan defended his visionary project on grounds of cost-efficiency: connecting adjacent departments would save on the hackney-cab fares needed to get from one to another. But his real motives were transparently imperial. In 1856 Trevelyan argued that:

  We have a very important national duty to perform … this city is something more than the mother of arts and eloquence; she is a mother of nations; we are peopling two continents … and we are organising, christianising and civilising large portions of two ancient continents, Africa and Asia; and it is not right when the inhabitants of those countries come to the metropolis they should see nothing worthy of its ancient renown. Now I conceive that a plan of the kind I have sketched … would give the honour due to the focus of our liberties, of that regulated freedom which we hope will overspread the world.

  Under the rubric of the commission, the foreign secretary alone would have to have five reception rooms en suite, capable of taking 1500 visitors at a time; a state dining chamber for 50; plus tea rooms and a commodious library: nothing short, in fact, of a palace of imperial government.

  The Crystal Palace had embodied the technological and commercial power of the empire, whilst Barry’s and Pugin’s Houses of Parliament (nearing completion), in their neo-Gothic grandiloquence, represented the continuity of the ‘ancient constitution’. Now an imposing range of offices in Whitehall, deliberately sited close to the Palace of Westminster and with a new foreign office at their heart, would complete the trinity of industry, liberty and wise administration. In a brilliant public-relations move, designed to pre-empt accusations of profligacy, in May 1857 there was staged an exhibition of 218 competing architectural submissions; the 2000 drawings were displayed in, of all places, Westminster Hall, more usually the scene of royal audiences and lyings-in-state.

  That same week, on 5 May, a member of the Civil Service in Delhi wrote to his correspondent in London: ‘As usual, no news to give you. All quiet and dull. Certainly we are enjoying weather which at this season is wonderful. Morning and evening are deliciously cool. … In fact punkah wallahs are hardly come into use.’ Six days later the mutilated bodies of the officers of the 54th Native Infantry were thrown into a bullock cart at the Kashmir Gate. Teachers at the local school had been killed in their schoolroom. The editor of the Delhi Gazette, along with his wife, mother and children, had died by his proofs, and the manager of the Delhi Bank, Mr Beresford, had been killed at the tills along with his family. The first Asian rebellion against the empire of the Europeans had begun.

  CHAPTER

  6

  THE EMPIRE OF

  GOOD INTENTIONS:

  THE DIVIDEND

  ON 9 MAY 1857, 85 Indian sepoys of the 3rd Light Cavalry, army of Bengal, were marched on to the parade ground at Meerut, northeast of Delhi, for military degradation. Their offence had been to refuse to drill with Lee-Enfield rifle cartridges that they believed to be greased with beef tallow, pig fat (taboo to Hindus and Muslims respectively) or both. Under a dark sky their uniforms were stripped from them, their boots removed and their ankles shackled. Clanking, they were led off under escort to the military prison to start a 10-year sentence for insubordination. A young cornet, John McNabb, thought the sentence excessively severe: ‘It is much worse than death. They will never see their wives and families and one poor old man who has been forty years in the regiment and would have got his pension is now thrown back the whole of his service.’

  The next day troopers from the 3rd as well as soldiers from the 11th and 20th Native Infantry broke open the gaol to free the prisoners. They set fire to their mud barrack huts, killed 50 of their British officers and civilians, including women, and cut the telegraph wires. By riding hard overnight the mutineers were in Delhi the following morning, 11 May, to declare the restoration of the Mughal Empire. This put the octogenarian ‘King of Delhi’ Bahadur Shah, the last of the imperial line, in a painful predicament. In all probability he would have much preferred to be left alone to write his elegant Persian court poetry, especially since he never harboured many illusions about the eventual outcome of the restoration. But cornered by the inflammatory force of the rising, and pressed by the devotion, half embarrassing, half touching, of its leaders, Bahadur Shah had no option but to lend his name to its authority. Proclamations were issued calling for the extirpation of the rule of the feringhi, the foreigner: ‘It has become the bounden duty of all the people, whether women or men, slave girls or slaves to come forward and put the English to death … by firing guns, carbines and pistols … shooting arrows and pelting them with stones, bricks … and all other things which may come into their hands. … The sepoys, the nobles, the shopkeepers and all other people of the city, being of one accord, should make a simultaneous attack on them … some should wrestle and through stratagem break the enemy in pieces, some should strike them with cudgels, some slap them, some throw dust in their eyes …’

  Even before the rebel sepoys arrived in Delhi, Captain Robert Tytler of the 38th Bengal Native Infantry knew something bad was happening. At dawn on the 11th the order for the hanging of the first leader of the mutiny at Barrackpore was read out to the native troops as a way of making an exemplary point. The demonstration did not go down well. While the order was being read out in clipped military shouts, Robert heard the response coming from the ranks: a writhing snake of a mutter travelling down the rows of men. Fluent in Hindustani (Urdu), he knew exactly what it meant. Later he saw groups of men standing about in the sun and told them to move into the shade. It was, after all, 138°F. ‘We like the sun,’ they replied, not moving. ‘Harriet,’ he told his wife a little later, ‘my men behaved infamously today. They hissed and they shuffled with their feet while I was reading out the order, showing by their actions their sympathy with the executed sepoy.’ Not long afterwards, with her husband running round trying to secure magazines against the worst, popping in and out of the bungalow to make sure his wife was safe, Harriet, eight months pregnant with her third child, ‘could see there was something very wrong. Servants running about in a wild way, guns [light field cannon] tearing down the main street as fast as the oxen could be made to go, and Mrs Hutchinson the Judge’s wife, without a hat on her head and her hair flowing down loosely on her shoulders, with a child in her arms and the bearer carrying another, walking hastily in an opposite direction to the guns. What could it all mean?’ Harriet’s French maid, Marie, who must have been in Paris in 1848, knew exactly what it all meant: ‘Madame, this is a revolution.’ Women and children were told to gather at the flagstaff tower. And although Robert had ordered her not to move from their house she obeyed the new orders, saving her family from certain massacre. Inside the tower, sitting and standing on the stairwell were a quiet, frightened group of overdressed Victorian women, children and maidservants, sweating into their crinolines (for it was 100 degrees in the shade). Bad news started to pour in: a colonel of the 54th bayoneted by his own men at the Kashmir
Gate, just a few hundred yards away. ‘Mama, will these naughty sepoys kill my Papa’, asked her four-year-old boy Frank, ‘and will they kill me too?’ ‘He was a very blue-eyed, fair child,’ Harriet later wrote. ‘I gazed at his little white throat and said to myself, “My poor child, that little throat will be cut ere long, without any power on my part to save you.” It was a dreadful moment, but I pulled myself together and said, “No, darling, don’t be frightened. No one will harm you. Stay close to your mother.”’ She heard more bad news: the slaughter of many more officers; 40 women and children dragged from a hiding place and butchered; a huge explosion and white cloud drifting over Delhi when the powder magazine went up. Shouts of ‘Prithiviraj ki jai’ – ‘Victory to the sovereign of the world’ – could be heard all over the city.

  Robert’s familiarity with the language of his sepoys probably meant that there was enough sympathy between them for him to persuade some at least to cover his family’s escape from Delhi towards the big military station at Umballa, almost 120 miles to the northwest. When he asked them to be honest with him, some of the men came and touched him on the forehead: a good sign. In dangerously bright moonlight they made their way, first by buggy together with another couple, the Gardners (the wife being also eight months pregnant), then, when the wheels came off, by foot. Harriet carried her two children as well as her own very heavy body along the roads and tracks. Looking back at the burning bungalows of the cantonment, Harriet recalled, ‘was a sickening sight, knowing all that we valued was lost to us forever, things that no money could ever purchase – a beloved dead child’s hair, manuscripts and paintings for a book my husband was going to publish some day; all my own paintings, books, clothes’. When they finally reached Umballa they lived in a bullock cart, watching out for the 9-inch black centipedes that would lodge a leg or two in one’s own leg and, even when cut away, would cause blood poisoning. Blood was on everyone’s mind. To distract her two-year-old daughter Edith, Harriet pricked holes in her own feet to make them bleed so that the child could ‘play nursey’ and stanch the bleeding with her handkerchief. When the wounds healed Harriet would open them again for the little girl’s amusement. It was on the straw of the bullock cart that her baby boy was born. To commemorate their ordeal the Tytlers saddled him with the name of Stanley Delhi-Force and assumed, since he was a dysenteric infant, that he would not survive to be embarrassed about (or proud of) his middle name. Indeed, Harriet was pessimistic about their own chances of survival, and kept two large bottles of laudanum with her at all times to kill her children and herself if the worst came to the worst. But Stanley Delhi-Force did live. Better yet, he seemed to some of the loyal soldiers an omen. If a baby is born, they told her, it meant there would be reinforcements because he was the first of the troop. The next day reinforcements arrived at Umballa.