Three Famines

by Keneally, Thomas

  Come 15 May, the date assigned for the first sale of meal, many women queued up outside the warehouses to buy their pound of Indian meal, their pennies – acquired by labour or by selling clothes or furniture or the family pig – in hand. The maize was sold to the Irish at cost price at first, and later for a little more than that. Some relief committees bought up supplies for unofficial distribution to those who could not afford it, even at its moderate price.

  The Irish had various names for the corn – min dèirce, beggar’s meal, Indian buck, or, as previously described, ‘Peel’s brimstone’. The first to have recourse to it were the people of the extreme west and south-west of the country. They needed something to eat, but the reality was that, though the maize might relieve hunger, it was of little nutritional value. One commentator declared that the distribution of raw meal to starving, weak and homeless beggars was as useful as giving them river sand.

  Yet, despite all the suspicion of ‘yellow male’, and the difficulty in preparing it, the maize, minimal as it was in quantity, probably saved a number of lives in that grim time and thereafter.

  In London, Trevelyan, execrated in history for being a man of ideology, was pragmatic to the extent that in December 1845 he permitted a scheme of public works to be put in place, run and supervised by the Irish Board of Works. The public works were scheduled to begin in March 1846. Local relief committees were to apply for funds to run works in their areas, which would give employment to the hungry. The British Treasury would grant 50 per cent of the cost of road improvements and other public works, the rest having to come from local grand juries – that is, the local gentry and better-off tenants who were eligible to sit on such juries. In Ireland the grand juries did more than sit at trials – they were also involved in road repair, fever hospitals and other civil institutions, and during the famine their members would make up the relief committees and the Boards of Guardians.

  Trevelyan regretted the generosity of his public works scheme almost as soon as it was put in place. Many of the projects were designed to improve facilities around a particular landlord’s property. Others were merely make-work projects. Local relief committees were accused of issuing tickets of employment in ‘an irregular manner’. As well as that, a system of measuring how much work a person did in the day had not been put in place. And then there were not enough surveyors and other qualified people to supervise the work. Famine roads, which begin nowhere and lead nowhere, are often seen as a symbol of the futility and indignity of the relief works, but they were also a windfall to corrupt supervisors, who could create fictitious workers and pocket their wages.

  The fact that in the summer of 1846 there had been far fewer Irishmen turning up in England to work on the English harvest was taken as a sign by Trevelyan that the Irish were finding it too easy to earn money on the scheme. He was also concerned that it was taking men away from working on the Irish harvest. He did not take account of the fact that the smaller number of Irishmen coming to Britain might have been based on physical weakness brought on by the last winter of want, and by the necessity of getting money immediately.

  After the works had lasted through the summer, the further failure of the potatoes made it necessary to continue them. Over the winter of 1846 –7, Trevelyan urged that the pay on the works be dropped. That winter would be one of northern Europe’s worst, and in it the bare-footed went to labour. Two million people were dependent on this relief by now, either directly or indirectly. Some dropped dead while crushing stone, many of them with rocks or shovels in hand. The public works became a venue of death, often from relapsing fever. The Irish generally spent all their winters indoors and were not used to exposing themselves for hour upon hour, day upon day, to the ferocious Atlantic-brewed weather of the Irish outdoors.

  The scheme was also imperfect in that it rewarded those who laboured hardest, and so discriminated against the weak. Many families nonetheless knew that this work was their only chance in that bitter winter, which accounted for the fact that the labourers referred to what they built as ‘male [meal] roads’ or ‘stirabout [porridge] drains’. Men, women and children presented themselves in bleak landscapes for a daily wage of ninepence or tenpence, deliberately set low to stop the Irish exploiting it. Due to a lack of small coin and of pay clerks, the handing out of the weekly wages would often not end until midnight on Saturday, a further test of the endurance of labourers.

  Captain Henry O’Brien, a retired artilleryman who was an official of the Board of Works in East Clare, wrote to Trevelyan on the day after Christmas 1847, worried about all the reported corruption and inefficiency on the works, but aware that, for all their faults, they were necessary for the survival of many people. He declared, ‘The labourers worked for their wages, but seeing clearly that what they are doing on the public roads is of no clear value, their heart, they say, is not in it. Naturally quick in feeling and acute in intellect, they have no lively interest in the completion of a task which, though it keeps them from starvation, is manifestly unproductive.’ He told Trevelyan that he took pains to ensure that only the destitute were employed on the roads, and possibly needed to assure Trevelyan that this was so as a means of proving that he was not a soft-hearted exaggerator.

  An engineer employed on the works described ‘the poor enfeebled labourer’ lying on the side of the bog he has been employed to drain, or by the road debris, ‘giving his dying blessing to the bestowers of tardy relief’. Some parliamentarians’ idea for legislation to employ Irish labour on railway construction was voted down in part because it would benefit certain landowners over others. It became politically impossible, too, for the prime minister to implement a scheme to distribute £50,000 worth of seed to tenants.

  In February 1847, it was announced in the House of Commons that 15,000 people were dying each day in Ireland. Nonetheless, subsequently, because of corruption and its administrative flaws, the public works scheme was abandoned, at Trevelyan’s suggestion, and there was a gradual dismissal of the people labouring on it. In March 1847, 734,000 people were employed on the scheme – approximately one in every three adult males. The Treasury imposed a 20 per cent reduction on 20 March 1847, to be followed by further, gradual reductions. By June, all works projects had ceased. Families who had depended on them waited for the next manifestation of public mercy.

  Now a new system had to be established to prevent people who had previously been working on the roads from stampeding the workhouses of Ireland. The Poor Law system that had been operating in England had provided the impoverished with access to a workhouse, built to be forbidding in appearance, where they were fed in return for labour deliberately designed to be unattractive. Workhouse labour included bone-crushing to make fertiliser, sack-making, picking oakum to provide rope, corn-milling.

  In 1838, a Poor Law was passed for Ireland, enabling the setting-up of workhouses under the care of Boards of Guardians. Each district where there was a workhouse was called a Poor Law Union. The Poor Law Unions of Ireland were based on the administrative units known as baronies. Eighty-two workhouses were built. The system was to be paid for by a tax known as the poor rate, levied on landowners and tenants. Because not all tenants could afford it, the poor rate was restricted to those who owned or leased land worth £4 or more per year.

  A special problem faced the authorities when it came to the Irish workhouses. In England they were designed to be so intimidating, so associated with tedious and hard labour, that only those genuinely desperate would go anywhere near them. A Poor Law commissioner, a member of the overall management commission for the entire system, observed that in Ireland, ‘The standard of their mode of living is unhappily so low that the establishment of one still lower is difficult.’

  Yet the Irish abhorred and detested these institutions. And even as the famine progressed, anyone who could avoided the workhouse. Many had decided that whatever misfortune befell them, they would never go within its shadow, never pass through its neo-gothic standardised gatehouse. �
�O King of Glory’, went an Irish prayer:

  Hear and answer us,

  From bondage save us, and come to our aid,

  And send us bread, as we cry in misery,

  And may the workhouse be in ashes laid.

  It was just as well these sentiments existed, since each workhouse serviced a region of tens of thousands and, in the most extreme cases, of up to 200,000 people.

  The chief method to stop the tens of thousands displaced from the cold comfort of road works from, nonetheless, being forced to descend on the workhouses was the February 1847 Temporary Relief Act, commonly called the Soup Kitchen Act. It provided for an end to the sale of maize, the gradual scaling-down of public works and their replacement by soup kitchens, which were meant – at the time the act was passed – to operate for a limited period.

  They were a departure – for the first time, food was to be served from premises outside the workhouse. The soup was to be free, however, and not dependent on any means test; the lists of those who needed to be fed were to be submitted to the relief committees by local figures such as priests. There was a hope that the new arrangement would make the Irish healthy enough to work through the summer and take in the harvest. The system was called ‘outdoor relief’ – although the relief was distributed sometimes indoors or under canvas. The overall body who was to administer the new arrangements was a Board of Temporary Relief, answerable to Trevelyan.

  At the local level, the soup kitchens were to be run by newly appointed relief commissioners, who included the Poor Law guardians of the workhouse, leading churchmen, the three highest ratepayers and a local relief inspector. The kitchens were to be set out and put into operation at the expense of the poor rates, but until the autumn of 1847, government was willing to make advances against the security of the rates that would be collected. After that, the local relief commissioners would be dependent on their own resources. By then, in Trevelyan’s view, the famine should be over. Trevelyan hoped so. The administrative stress was damaging his health, as were criticisms of his work from those who thought him too liberal, and those who thought him inhuman. He was becoming brusque with his colleagues.

  Often farmers would send their wives and children to the workhouse and stay on their smallholdings themselves. But in June 1847, the passing of a further Poor Law Amendment Act contained the infamous Gregory clause. The clause was framed by William Gregory, a landlord of Galway and MP for Dublin, and, though contained in a Relief Act, was the antithesis of relief. It required that anyone who tenanted more than a quarter acre of land had to give it up if he wanted to enter the workhouse or the fever hospital. The Gregory clause suited landlords, of course, but also the government’s ideology, since only in the most desperate need would a farmer seek workhouse charity and thus be considered as having passed the ultimate test of genuine need while at the same time yielding up his land. It was intended both to thin out the numbers in the workhouse and to encourage emigration.

  Many landlords used the Gregory clause, and the accompanying poverty of their cottiers, to clear their estates so that they could be employed for new, more profitable forms of agriculture, such as grazing and extensive grain-growing. It was taken for granted by a lot of landlords and their agents now that if any members of a family, even children, sought relief in the workhouse, their parents’ cabin would be unroofed and burned down. Mercifully, the Poor Law commissioners in Dublin advised local Boards of Guardians around the country that dependants of men, but not the men themselves who held a rood – that is, a quarter-acre – of land, could receive relief without breaking the law. The reasoning was that women and children should not be allowed to die or to suffer acutely merely because the father of the family was so determined that he would not give up his miserable patch of earth. But the result was an inevitable splitting-up of families.

  Gregory, asked by another member of the House of Commons whether the clause would destroy a class of small farmers of whom there were millions in Ireland, replied that he did not see of what use such small farmers could possibly be. Interestingly, Lady Gregory, forty-five years after her husband’s death, living in depopulated Galway, became a host and patron to William Butler Yeats and adopted elevated views of the people of the west of Ireland, at least those who were still there.

  Local relief committees wanted a definition of soup and a decision on whether it should include meat. The relief commissioners in Dublin told them there need not be meat, that soup was ‘any food cooked in a boiler, and distributed in a liquid state, thick or thin and whether composed of meat, fish, vegetables, grain or meal’. The relief commissioners were at one with the government at Westminster in that they declared relief should be ‘miserable and scanty’. One bowl of soup and one pound of biscuit, flour, grain or meal was to be the daily issue. If the soup had already been thick, only one quarter of the biscuit etc. was to be given. The Board of Health, however, recommended that the soup be solid rather than fluid, and the ingredients varied. They also recommended plenty of vegetables, since scurvy was still prevalent.

  It was considered at an official level that the new program would take four to six weeks to become operative. Though food was to become ready for distribution as early as March 1847, this was a very hopeful timetable and the scheme was in place in very few areas by then. Between the winding down of the public works and the provision of soup lay a gap responsible for the deaths of many. But, reacting to the urgency, some local commissioners got their kitchens running very quickly. Indeed, some kitchens had already been set up by landlords. On the estate of Sir Lucius O’Brien (brother of the famous rebel Smith O’Brien), on the road which led from Newmarket-on-Fergus to Dromoland Castle (now, by irony, a five-star hotel and golf course), there were two ash trees where relief was handed out by the daughters of the O’Brien household. These ash trees were ever after to be known as the ‘famine trees’. A similar plan was put in place by the aging novelist Maria Edgeworth in County Longford. The Society of Friends in Cincinatti, Ohio, had read of Maria Edgeworth’s ministrations to 3000 starving people in her area, and consigned to her $180 worth of corn meal to be used in stirabout. The Friends had also entered the soup business in Ireland before outdoor relief became official. They set up a three-boiler soup-making plant in Cork City, and made and distributed 2500 quarts of a nourishing mix, which included meat, vegetables and barley.

  In areas in the west, there was a problem in finding cauldrons for the cooking of soup, and there were other problems as well. In some places June arrived and still no kitchen was operating, even though the starving were desperate for it to open. Hence there were food riots throughout Ireland, and troops were sent for from their barracks to suppress them. Some soldiers were lenient and compassionate, both the Irish and men from the other areas of the United Kingdom. But they were under the orders of their officers, who in turn were under strict instructions themselves.

  At the beginning of June, the guardians of the Galway Union, who had responsibility for the workhouses in the area around the city, attributed the high level of mortality to the delay in opening the soup kitchens. In the Roscommon Union no soup kitchen had opened by the end of May and the local government inspector of the kitchens provided relief out of his own pocket. When, finally, a soup kitchen opened on 15 June in the Skibbereen Union, a region of the most widespread death, priests were criticised by the authorities for trying to force onto the required lists the name of every person they could who was entitled to outdoor relief. Yet the soup was meant to be available free for the starving, and even though the government’s idea of true need always differed from that of people on the ground, its issue was not dependent on any means test – an indication that the Westminster government believed now that death was widespread in Ireland, and that perhaps even the majority of the Irish needed outdoor relief.

  The organisation of the soup kitchens was often a triumph of administrative skills on the part of local Boards of Guardians, and the kitchens ended up feeding three million peopl
e – well over a third of the population. The problem remained the soup’s poor nutritional content, which, despite the Board of Health’s recommendations, was sometimes so low in vegetables that it allowed the onset of scurvy.

  A famed London chef named Alexis Soyer, who worked at the Reform Club, frequented by Whig politicians, had helped to run a London soup kitchen in 1845 at the time the first potato failure had brought hardship to the English, even though the potato did not dominate the diet of the poor in England to the same extent as it did in Ireland. He found it a technical and culinary challenge to devise means to produce food for great numbers of people and then successfully distribute it. He designed a new boiler for the purpose and published a number of recipes for cheap soup, with no meat component, but nutritious and costing three-quarters of a penny per quart. Some doubted the value of Soyer’s soup, one critic suggesting that he feed it and nothing else for two weeks to members of the Reform Club and see what condition they ended up in.

  On behalf of the Whig government, Soyer went to Ireland to establish a ‘model’ soup kitchen, which opened on 5 April 1847 in a large tent located outside the Royal Barracks in Dublin. It was a highly publicised affair, which both the English and Irish press attended, and notable guests were each given a helping of the soup. After the respectable had left, a hundred paupers from the Dublin Mendicity Institution were ushered into the tent and served. Part of the model of the soup kitchen was that people would enter the tent or other premises by way of a zig-zag entrance in which they waited in single line. A bell signalled when a certain number of paupers in the queue could enter, and those who did not fit in waited outside for the next bell. The bowls and spoons on the table were attached by chains, and a prayer was said before there was any eating. Each person received a quart of soup, and a quarter pound of bread for consumption outside the soup kitchen. The sittings were each supposed to take no longer than six minutes. Soyer’s soup kitchen also made sufficient soup to supply other relief centres within Dublin, so that between 6 April and 11 August 1847 an average of 8750 persons were fed daily on his soup.