236. The Great Famine: The Blight Strikes Ireland (Ep 1)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrenpool. Thank you so much for all of your very kind comments about the Irish series that we are embarking on. It's been really lovely to hear what many of you have thought. And also, it is not an easy listen. And I won't lie, today's episode is going to be a particularly difficult listen, isn't it, William? It's going to be very rough. I have been deeply depressed all week just reading the material for this pod. And I think since we did the Armenian Genocide last year, I had such a depressing and sad week of reading. It is a relentless tale of suffering and unnecessary trauma.

1:09But the bright side of this is we have one of our favourite people coming to speak to us today, which is Comtey Binh, who is getting up out of bed in LA. Hello. Thank you. So look, the reason that you're here and what we are going to talk about, it's an episode that really does form the bedrock, I think, of Irish cultural identity. It is we're going to be talking about the famine, the great hunger. And there is, I don't know whether it's because I'm not Irish, but I always sense it in song, in music, in poetry, a great fatalism about the Irish mindset. And I wonder whether there is something about that, a cultural memory that is founded on something so horrific, the thing that we're going to talk about today, does stamp the Irish identity somewhat.

1:53I suppose I'd take the opposite view to that, that it's very easy to claim victimhood and And great numbers of people died and great numbers survived. And it's interesting. How did people survive? Who survived? And it isn't merely that the Anglo-Irish survived or that the great landowner survived. Great numbers of people living in towns survived and who data wasn't their stable food or that they were, in fact, able to make a profit on prices going up, which they did do. And of course, there were huge land clearances at the end because of great numbers of people who lived on holdings that were less than five acres were actually cleared away so that the land itself changed.

2:32I think a great change came over the country by the 1870s. And by the time, you know, Charles Stuart Parnell and the idea of home rule came, it was almost forgotten, except it survived in ballads, in popular history, in folktales, and in this idea somehow that England had done this to, quote, us. So I can still meet people who will claim that they personally, living now in Ireland, are affected in some very deep way by the famine itself. And it's very, very hard to accept that. It's very, very hard not to feel that this is really a sort of desecration of something that really was the most serious thing that happened in the country in the 19th century.

3:16And it involved immense amounts of obviously huge suffering and death. But to claim now in this country that's always in a state of semi-boom or has been since the last 20, 30 years and people worry a lot about should they change their cars to hybrid or electric or should they take their holidays in Madagascar, that they're somehow while in Madagascar after a few pina coladas or something, singing a song about the famine and looking off melancholy into the distance, thinking that they actually were in the famine, whereas they were actually in the feast. Colm, you make this point very beautifully in a very, very long essay that you wrote in the London Review of Books some time ago, which is why we've come to you to talk about this.

4:00I think most people listening to this will associate you with your novels, most recently Brooklyn. But this is a substantial work of history. Why is it that you took so much time and wrote such a sort of epic essay on this? Has it been a subject that always fascinated you, or is it that irritation that you just expressed? First of all, I studied history and I studied history at University College of Dublin. And I don't think the famine was mentioned at any point during that period. In other words, it was not on the curriculum because the Irish professors of history tended to have done their PhD at Cambridge.

4:33And they came back to Dublin, you know, got their nice job, but they had no interest in studying ships records or workhouse records. They were really interested in parliamentary history, in the history of power. And also it was very worrying. this was 1972, it was very worrying if you began to train a generation of Irish people who were likely to become teachers or civil servants, as we were, in this idea of Irish victimhood in the 19th century, that instead they were talking about parliamentary politics in the 19th century. The same is true of many great traumas, though, isn't it? I mean, no one ever wrote anything about the Armenian genocide for several generations, ditto the Holocaust, which suddenly became a sort of massively subject thing in the 1970s rather than the 40s and 50s.

5:16So I think that this then began to change. And so what I became interested in at the time of, say, the 150th anniversary, which coincided with the reign of Mary Robinson, Mary Robinson as president, who began to mention the famine in all her speeches. What I agreed to do for the London Review of Books at the time was to read every single book that came out in those two or three years for the 150th anniversary. And I realized, of course, that there are such differences between the historians, even on small matters of essential fact, how many evictions took place during these three or four years, say from 1845 to 1850.

5:49and the historians, including people working in the same history department, had such varying views on this that I wondered if it wasn't possible for them to have a conference where they would decide on the methodology. But no one would do this. All of them seemed to be working alone as little independent republics. Some of them were really interested in the minutiae, in how much nourishment you would get in the workhouse in a particular place, in a particular a month. And the point that I started to make was, how do you then write prose describing catastrophe? And what tone should you take? Yes.

6:22And if it's possible that a dry tone is the last thing you need or the thing you need most, that an emotional tone to keep talking about catastrophe or the cruelty, or that if you start using words that are emotional, then it won't lead you anywhere where you haven't been before. Because the big book that all of us read that was considered the Bible was Cecil Woodham Smith's book called The Great Hunger. I was weirdly brought up on that too. I had an Irish nanny from Ackle Isle, and she took me down to the public library in North Berwick, I remember when I was seven or eight. And we went through, I think my memory is just looking at the woodcuts in the book, but we went through that book and I think it left a permanent effect on me.

7:04I mean, I remember the stories of starving children and the mothers and the babies wrenched their mother's arms and all this sort of stuff. And it traumatized her, that book. Yes, it's very well told at the end of the first chapter, it will end, and news came that a new thing had begun to be seen in the potato crop. It was the first sign of the blight. And that's the end of the first chapter. So she really knew what she was doing. And she also did a huge amount of original research. The Irish historians thought the tone was wrong. I grew up in the 80s. I went to school in the 80s. And for us, I think, you know, I was in school in Essex.

7:39And we had this little song that we were taught as a class. we had to learn how to sing it. It was a little folk song. I am a navigational. I come from County Cork. I had to leave my native home to find a job or work. The crops are bad in Ireland and the tax too much to pay. And so here I am in England digging up your waterway. We had no understanding that that was one of the saddest stories ever about people starving to death and having to come on their hands and knees and dig up the land of England because they needed to earn money for food. And that was our introduction. So in a way they talked about it without talking about it.

8:10My introduction to the ironies or to the problems around this begin with the cathedral in Enniscorthy, which is where I'm from in Ireland. And my father was involved in writing for a book called The Century Passes, which was produced in 1946 for the centenary of the cathedral. And you look at the cathedral designed by Pugin, you know, the great English church architect. He came over to Ireland during the famine and built this massive space filled with colour, filled with neo-Gothic shapes, this massive space. I think, oh, that must have been done by people who were starving and they needed work.

8:47No, it wasn't. And then my father has a list of all the people who donated. And Zez says, soon after, these people would have known hunger. But I looked at the names and realized, no, no, these were the people whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren still own shops in the town. The people who donated to the cathedral were the Catholic middle class. And they did not suffer in the famine. they managed to build this massive cathedral, which was a Catholic space, about Catholic power in this town, the town that had been held by the Portsmouths. Edmund Spencer had been in, and suddenly this building was going to replace the castle, which had been built by the Portsmouths by Henry Wallop in, what, 1595.

9:27And therefore, the money it must have taken to cart all that stone to build, just to create that steeple. This isn't a simple story of a nation starving. This is a story of a certain group of people within that nation actually becoming victimized and being almost written out of history then, that the silence that followed them was the silence of a new prosperity, which really was in place by the 1870s. That is a complexity you bring up beautifully in our article, which we're going to try and recover in this podcast. But I think, first of all, we need to go back slightly. We're getting ahead of ourselves.

10:03Because on the last pod, Jane Allmire left us at the Battle of the Boyle. And I think we need just to very quickly canter through the history separating us from that period. Anita, do you want to kick off with the 1798 rebellion? Sure. I mean, inspired by the French Revolution, a group called the United Irishmen, an alliance of Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics seeking independence from British interference, initiated a rebellion. But they sought French assistance. And of course, if you involve the French, whose back goes right up the English. And so, you know, you have this collision that's set right there and then, a rebellion marked by events such as dragooning of Ulster.

10:45And this is a rebellion that ultimately fails. It fails, it's put down with a degree of savagery that we talked about in the last episode. And in 1801, the Act of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, abolishing the Irish Parliament. Well, I think the hope was that it might bring English investment and free trade and all sorts of things which proved entirely illusory. Instead, English goods flooded into Ireland, Irish industry collapsed, unemployment was widespread. And this is all in the immediate run up to the Great Famine. A picture I think is very important to make clear before we go into the famine is the enormous poverty of Ireland at this time, which is something that many foreign visitors comment on when they come here.

11:38There's a French visitor who talks about how there's only magnificent chateau and miserable cabins to be seen in Ireland. and England is the richest country of the world just over the sea and Ireland is a long way behind at this period. Tell us again about the population of Ireland and how it exploded and the kind of pressures that created, Colm. In 1600, the population of Ireland was 1 million. By 1841, it had risen to something like 8 million. And by that time, half a million Irish farms were smaller than 15 acres and almost 200 ,000 holdings were smaller than five acres. So that in other words, people didn't even own the five acres.

12:21They leased the five acres. If they had a pig or if they had any crops, they were used to pay the rent. And what they lived on and lived on entirely were potatoes, which had been brought to Ireland by Walter Raleigh in the 16th century. And there was enough nutrition in the single potato. So they just took the crop for granted. They knew how to do it. And also, which is very important for later on, this was a very easy crop to grow. If you had five acre holding, you didn't have to do much, which meant you sat around a lot in the winter because there wasn't hard labor. There wasn't any work for you.

12:54So you simply grew your potatoes. You picked them when the time came. You looked after your pigs and you got on with your life. Now, whether this was an oral culture of the highest sort or whether it was just peasants sitting around in a smoky cabin, as many visitors said. But the point is these people were very vulnerable to the almost unimaginable thing, which would be a potato blight. I've seen a really interesting study on this, which is sort of a comparison of the poor of Europe at this time. And actually, when the potatoes were going well, this was not bad. You know, there was nutrition and vitamins in a potato that you didn't find in wheat.

13:29So, you know, elsewhere, if you had a wheat harvest that failed in France or in Russia, for example, people would fall back on rye and they would get by. but it wouldn't be great and it wouldn't be great all of the time. But in Ireland, you had sort of all of the starches, the carbohydrates, the sugar, the vitamins, and you also had turf. So you had fires, you had fuel, all of this. But because it's such a monoculture, the moment that goes, you're done for. I mean, if that's all you've got, you haven't got the rye to fall back on. You haven't got another crop to fall back on. You haven't got room to grow or time to grow anything else.

14:00Three million people eat nothing else but potatoes, apparently. It was a staple diet for at least half the population. And the blight was first noticed in the autumn of 1845. The blight also occurred elsewhere, for example, the Netherlands actually lost two thirds of its potatoes. But of course, it didn't matter as much in the Netherlands because people were not living in this very strange way. I should say that part of the problem we have in interpreting this is that anyone who looked at this situation in Ireland, of the sheer number of people living in these tiny holdings, living entirely on the potato, realized that this is not sustainable.

14:36So that if viewed the business of public policy from London, no matter what way you look at this, it has to change. And no one was coming up with a solution that famine would be the best way of changing it. See, the problem was that people also had become, in the opinion of those in power, lazy and indolent. So it wasn't as though these hardworking Irish were doing their best with these small holdings, was they seemed to be sitting around and they seemed to be laughing, you know, sitting and sitting in the doors of their cabins laughing at you as you went by. We've said the word blight a few times.

15:08I think we should explain what it is. So, just explain to us this blight, what did it do to the crop and how quickly did it sort of destroy the crop? And of course, nobody knew whether it was going to come the following year or the year after. So, there was that uncertainty. But you can just imagine that feeling of looking down at it and realising, if this goes on, we're doomed. And apparently a terrible smell, the rotting potatoes in the ground led this sort of miasma, which people could smell before they even dug up their potatoes. Yeah, the smell of death came before death, as it were. The smell came from the ground itself.

15:41It is a powerful sort of symbol, you know, this great fog of stink that is sweeping the nation that is, you know, sort of the precursor to a horrible hunger. Let's take a break. So we've just come to 1846 now and the entire potato crop is lost because of these fungal spores that remain in the ground, even though you've lost one harvest. It doesn't mean that it dies with the potatoes. It's there in the ground. It will keep coming back. Join us after the break when we find out what happens next.

16:16Welcome back. So we were just talking about the potato blight, this fungus that eats up the potato in the ground so that even before you dig it up, you can smell this rotting smell that has the same smell as bilge from a ship. And the initial British response is actually not too bad, Combe, isn't that right? Robert Peel actually does react rather quickly to this. Yes, and there's an effort to introduce a system of public works. In other words, that since people are starving, then there's a need for them to earn their living. And so this becomes a real problem. The end of September 1846, 26 ,000 men are employed on relief work.

17:00And so by March, the following year, by March 1847, you're talking about 700 ,000 people are on public works. Now, the public works are designed almost like prison work. In other words, to be as repulsive as possible is one of the terms used. And to get people up early in the morning to have them working all day for a pittance. But nonetheless, there would be money at the end. Of course, it was winter work. Of course, people were not used to doing that sort of work. And of course, people were also starving at the same time as working. So as you can imagine, the number who died on the works and the winter, of course, every piece of bad luck comes with another piece of bad luck.

17:38The winter of 1846 into 1847 was exceptionally cold in Ireland. I have this habit, and I guess it's because I'm a journalist, but I look at the newspapers at the time. These are some of the newspapers from 1847, exactly the period that you're talking about. The Cork Examiner writes, thousands are perishing on the roads in ditches and in fields, fever-stricken, worn out, and famished. This is talking about those who were having to work for their crust. Another one here from the Freeman's Journal in 1847, crowds of gaunt yellow-skinned skeletons crawl into the workhouses where they die like rotten sheep.

18:12So, I mean, people are aware of the terrible, terrible plight of these people. And I don't think we've really talked about this properly. I think we should probably bring in the name Charles Trevelyan pretty soon, shouldn't we? Because the whole attitude to these poor, starving people is very much shaped by this one man, the official in charge of famine relief. Bizarrely, Charles Trevelyan is someone that I've come across a great deal from a completely different end of his life when he was in Delhi in his youth. And he's a kind of one-size-fits-all empire pod villain because everything he does throughout his career is sort of cursed.

18:49First First of all, in India, he's famous for being appalled by Hinduism and Islam. And although he's only 21, he blows the whistle on all the Indophile Brits of the East India Company who are becoming very close to the Mughal court. Then, at a later point in his life, he goes to Calcutta, where he acts against all the British Orientalists who are celebrating Indian culture and interested in Sanskrit and Persian literature. and he says that this should all end. And with his brother-in-law, Macaulay, he tries to get everybody to learn English and creates a movement for having Sanskrit studies and Persian studies and other Indian languages ended in British schools and universities and to have only English taught.

19:37And this famous quote by Macaulay, it's a single shelf of a good English library is worth all the native literature of Indian Arabia. that very famous quote from Macaulay's Minute on Education, is very much cooked up with his brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan. And when Macaulay comes back to London, Trevelyan comes with him and he joins the Treasury. And this is where we meet him now because he's in place just at this moment that the Peel government falls because it's repealed the corn laws. Why? Because he wanted the corn to be cheaper. And so the government of Peel, which has done quite well providing relief at the very beginning of this famine falls over this very issue.

20:20And Trevelyan welcomes the fall and gets very much into bed with the new regime that is far more into laissez-faire economics, that you shouldn't intervene, that you shouldn't be creating workhouses or work schemes. Trevelyan also is taught by Malthus himself at Halebury in his youth. So he's brought in all these ideas of Malthusian checks to population. And he works to stop aid being given. It's a credo. The successor to Robert Peel is Lord John Russell. And they are very much of the same mind about this, that you spoil people by helping them at times like this. I mean, just some of the quotes from Trevelyan.

20:57Turn your stomach. So what he says is, you know, the great evil which we have to contend with is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. Dependence on government is an evil which must be checked." So, you know, you've got these people who are being written about, who are known about, who are being, you know, they're engravings made of them in their bones. And he's saying, actually, it's their fault. Either it's their fault, or they deserve it, or as a punishment from God, but to help them would be evil. So, we must not do that.

21:31I mean, Charles Trevelyan, when I say the name Charles Trevelyan, Colm, I mean, what does that do to you? Yes, you hear about him in the songs. He was made into the villain of this. The problem is that he was pushing an open door in the sense that while the Act of Union had both the two countries together in some ways constitutionally, it may even have drawn attention to the difference of Ireland, to how different Ireland was. And you can go through the entire period of, say, from the 1840s onwards and find that every single public person has something rotten to say about Ireland at some point and often, very often in their lives, stretching to people like Henry James, Ford, Maddox Ford at the end of the century.

22:09But including like Frederick Engels, who should have known better because his girlfriend was Irish. And he says things like, fills the drunkenness were always mentioned to have brought with them the Irish man loves his pig as the Arab loves his horse. This is Frederick Engels with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. And, you know, this Lord John Russell will, of course, talk about the Irish, a people born and bred from time immemorial in inveterate indolence, improvidence, disorder and consequent destitution. So that Trevely came back from India. It wasn't as though he was preaching to the unconverted, but it was also the otherness of Ireland, the fact that Ireland almost needed to be punished, which makes it strange that he did any intervention at all.

22:55But nonetheless, it would have taken an extraordinary imagination to have intervened early in 1847, enough to have prevented what was about to occur. He did have an opposition that was pushing him to do something, but even the opposition was really vile about the Irish. I mean, Benjamin Disraeli, I was just looking through some panzart as well at the time. And Disraeli sort of says things like a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien church, the weakest executive in the world. This is the Irish question. So, you know, even those who are urging him to do something have nothing good to say.

23:26And you know what you said about pushing on an open door, as well as looking at what the Irish press was saying, I was looking at what the English press was saying. These are That's just some of the articles from 1847, which is the date you've taken us to. The Times. This is from the Times. The Irish are a lazy people. The wretched, indolent, half-savage creatures in the west of Ireland must be taught industry by the spur of necessity. That's the Times. The Illustrated London News, which is a little bit later, there is no doubt that the Irish peasant is improvident and reckless, looking more to immediate gratification than permanent well-being.

24:01Now, I've jumped forward two years in the headline, but that's because, and we should remind people, I think, take this opportunity. This was not a catastrophe that lasted a year, was it, Colm? I mean, how long did this famine drag on for? It really dragged on into the early 1850s. So you're talking about four, five, six years where the potato blight occurred and where people were suffering its implications, meaning, of course, you could pay your rent the first year. You could manage somehow to get food the second year, but it was a third year that got you because the blight continued. I mean, there had been other famines and there were other famines in the future, but this one became the one.

24:40It didn't merely stay in the imagination. It had a factual base for staying there. And the accusation is that, in a sense, it wasn't just that there was the potato blight. It was the British response to it which exacerbated it and turned it in what was definitely going to be a very tricky time with many deaths into one of the great horrors of Irish history. We should also just point out what an odd character Charles Trevelyan was. This is Macaulay, his own brother-in-law, writing about him. He says, His manners are odd, blunt almost to roughness, at other times awkward even to sheepishness. He's rash, lacks tact, and has no small talk.