237. The Great Famine: The Irish Exodus to America (Ep 2)

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.

0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrenpil. And we are joined, once again, I'm delighted to say, by Colm Tobin, Irish novelist, playwright, journalist, writer, most recently the acclaimed Brooklyn. And so happy that you came back to talk to us. The last episode, I mean, I did warn people at the front, was going to be very difficult listening. This is going to be much of the same. Of course, we're going to look at some of the suffering that went on. We took you up to 1847, but we're going to pick up from there. where this famine, which started in the mid-1840s, drags on to the 50s, the 1850s.

1:08So it is not just a one-year thing. And the repercussions felt for decades afterwards. We talked, Colm, a little bit about, well, a lot a bit about the suffering, which is quite right. But what we're going to sort of focus on is what the British government did and did not do to alleviate that suffering. Now, you talked about gruel and the thin, watery soup that was provided at first to those who could no longer hold on to their land and had to go to the workhouse. They'd been sort of thrown off their land because they owned five acres and therefore they didn't qualify for relief. And then suddenly the decision is made by, again, Charles Trevely and Bouhis, the man we talked about in the last episode, who is thought of by many as the villain of the piece, not the only one, but the chief villain of the piece as he was head of famine relief.

1:56He decides to stop the soup kitchens. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, by August 1847, say three million people are being fed every day by the state. Now, this has replaced public works, which didn't work and it was a very bad winter. And in a way, there's a hiatus between the public works period and the soup kitchen period where really nothing happens. Now, if you have three million people who are starving, arriving every day to get this soup, of course you're going to get the spread of disease. So that's the overwhelming majority of famine deaths. I mean, the ones that people just didn't die of hunger, but died of typhus and relapsing fever and dysentery.

2:35People gathered together in great groups. But then if you get the next stage where you remove even this. Now, on one hand, you have a set of statements made by British politicians generally, or British public figures about Ireland and the Irish, the indolence, the drunkenness, etc. But on the other side now, what you start to get are extraordinary descriptions of the starving, of the roads, of the cabins, of people being found dead, of the walking dead, ghosts. They're extraordinary vivid descriptions now appearing, as you said in the last episode, in the actual contemporary newspapers, but also by writers, by anyone who goes there.

3:10So you could fill a book with these extraordinary descriptions, which really do curdle the blood, of actually what it looked like in County Mayo by the end of 1847. I've got some here taken from Cecil Woodham Smith's book that you talked about in the last episode. And it's a particularly vivid set of descriptions by somebody called William Forster, who is a Quaker minister from Norwich. As we have Trevelyan as our villain, who seems to run through every bit of villainy in the British Empire in the course of his career. So the Quakers, wherever we go in empire, the Quakers always seem to come to the rescue.

3:48They're here, very much center stage, running their own soup kitchens and running their own relief works throughout Ireland. And he writes to Trevelyan, saying and begging him to realize the seriousness of the situation. And his letters survive, and they're extraordinary. I'll read some passages. The people were like walking skeletons. The men stamped with the livid mark of hunger. the children crying with pain, and women in some of the cabins too weak to stand, all the sheep gone, all the cows, all the poultry killed, only one pig left, and the very dogs had disappeared. At a place called Clifton, Foster was quickly surrounded by a mob of men and women, more like famished dogs than fellow creatures, whose fingers, looks, and cries all showed they were suffering from the ravening agony of hunger.

4:40Another letter that Trevelyan gets is from a cork magistrate who's been told to first organize public works and then run the soup kitchens, and then the soup kitchens are closed down. And he says, the scenes that I saw on my journey were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner in some filthy straw, their soul covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about naked above the knees. I approached with horror and found by a low moaning that they were alive.

5:23They were in fever, four children and a woman, what had once been a man. It was impossible to go into the detail. Suffice to say, in a few minutes, I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms. Then my neckcloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn around. And I found myself grasped by a woman with an infant just born in her arms and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins, the sole covering herself and the baby. And so it goes on. These terrible descriptions begin pouring in to London, but they don't alter the policy. They don't shift things. I mean, there's one, I mean, it's just one line.

6:00I can't find where it's from. But like you, William, I've been incredibly depressed all week reading accounts of this. But there's one of a journalist, I think, seeing, he describes them, sort of men, women and children whose mouths are green, stained from the grass that they've been eating, because that's all that they can eat. And Colm, I mean, you must know so many of these stories. So I don't know whether you become immune to it. We've just kind of been subject to it over the week that we've been thinking about. Part of the problem, and I noticed this about Ireland only when I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina, that the contested spaces in Europe like that are places where there are river valleys.

6:39And above the river valleys are boggy bad land with very good land below that can produce corn, that can have dairy herds, and just above, land that is hardly, barely arable and that can be used for very little. So you get good land very close to really, really bad land, which means that in the middle of all of this, corn is being exported. In the middle of all of this, people in the towns, some of them are living quite comfortably. People who own shops, people who, for example, who are moving like Daniel O 'Connell into the professions so that you have a way of almost pretending as soon as this was over that it almost hadn't happened.

7:17Trevelyan was the spin doctor here where he's really said there was a famine of 1847. and he kept saying it was over. And when it went into 48 and 49, it was as though it really, the worst part had happened, which wasn't actually true. And so you get on one hand these extraordinary descriptions out of a book of apocalypse. But what you don't get are then, what were these people's names? Where was the house they lived in? Because the houses they lived in were mud cabins that were very quickly destroyed. So you're talking about the landscaping erased of these people, the marks where they're buried, even, the famine graveyards with unmarked graves, massive emigration, the huge clearances.

7:57So that these descriptions, which there's so many of them, they're so vivid, become strangely ghostly themselves in that there's a sort of way of writing about this from anyone who's seen it from outside. There's a way of describing it from London as public policy. What's missing in the middle, of course, is the photograph. that were just before a moment when there could have been photographs of this. We don't have them. We have a few paintings, but nothing. This is pre-modern in a very funny way. The language describing the starving and the dying is almost pre-modern, but the actual way in which it's not, just before photography, makes also a difference to how we view it now.

8:42But we do get figures, like the character who comes in our podcast a lot, William Howard Russell, this early war correspondent who later goes on to cover the Crimea and the Indian mutiny. He's there and he says it's the worst thing he's seen of any of these. He says, I've supped breakfast, lunch, and dinner of horrors for all my career, but nothing equals this. And so you are getting these sort of moments of modernity when war correspondents are turning up and covering this for newspapers. And later on, economists, I mean, Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, will say that there's no other famine in the world where the number of dead as a proportion of the population, that this in the late 1840s in Ireland was like nowhere else.

9:27I mean, obviously, it's the place, if you're a journalist, to go in 1847, 1848. But what I'm talking about is ways in which it seems to have moved out of reality into some apocalyptic space. It's in ballads, it's in descriptions, it's in songs, but somehow or other it got erased from the landscape. But whatever it was as a catastrophe, it seemed to mark a year and after that things were different. Can we sort of try and put some names? I think you're right, you know, sort of numbers are not names. Photographs are absent. So if we just remember just a name. I know you had a book earlier, you showed us names of the dead.

10:05There has been scholarship more recently, and there was at the time people were named. So Jeremiah Hegarty, let's just remember him, of Galway, who died in a ditch of starvation because he was so worried that his family would be evicted, he stopped eating the barley earmarked to pay the rent. Many others stole sheep. They left behind the head and the bell and the skinning, the carcass on a flat tombstone before taking the flesh part to be cooked in a hiding place. and the farmers retaliated by building pits full of spikes, we're told. The thief fell in, was held there by his pierced feet and then clubbed to death.

10:40So people were reduced to eating rats, dogs, the carcasses of diseased cattle and the joints of starved horses. Okay, I mean, we started with a name and then we lost him again. Jeremiah, I would like to know more about what happened to Jeremiah Hegarty's family. The family tried to feed by starving himself to death and not eating the barley. I mean, it's work being done even now to try and put families and names and histories to these people who died. I think historians are still divided. The economic historians tend to have been trained to be very, very careful with emotion, that it's not your job to do the feelings.

11:15For example, jobs on what exactly the workhouses were, what the nourishment was in a workhouse, how the famine ends up. You must study it regionally because it didn't happen with the same intensity, say, in the east of Ireland as it did in County Mayo and County Gaul and County Kerry. So that County Donegal, historians tend to be very, very careful because, of course, during the years of the troubles, if you got going on this, if you got going on the emotions surrounded it, you could unleash emotions that led into people supporting the IRA. And there was a desperate fear among academics, especially, that if the work you were doing could lead people to have this view of Irish history, that it was dark and it was light and we were light and they were dark.

12:00This had enormous political implications. So historians tended, especially Irish historians, tended to be very, very careful in what they wrote, in not just putting in a name and writing about the emotions surrounding even the looking of a name. you put in Mary Kelly. What does that name mean to you? Do you know a Mary Kelly? Yes, I do. But imagine if that Mary Kelly were to be found moving along the streets, suffering from typhus. The historians didn't tend to do that. And there was a general support for that. It was really only when Mary Robinson became president where she began to talk about it as something, a trauma that the society had suffered, that it sort of moved into a realm where it could be openly discussed and where people would read about it and think about it.

12:46You know, you've used the term workhouse and it just suddenly occurred to me that we have listeners all over the world. And although we here in Britain are familiar with what the workhouse is, if you've ever read any of your Dickens, you will know. But just for those who don't know, just describe what a workhouse was and who ended up there and how you ended up there and how you got out of there. A workhouse was the last resort. I mean, it was simply that you could arrive there with your family, you could be taken in, You could be fed to some extent, you could be housed to some extent, but they were hotbeds of obviously of disease and of despair.

13:20So it was not as though you went there and you were rehabilitated and given enough food and sent back. And of course, they were still there for the rest of the 19th century into the 20th century as a sort of public relief. But a public relief that really had its origins in, I think, a Victorian punishment for the poor. that if you're coming in here, you're coming into a dark, punishing place. You weren't just given food, you would have to do work for the food. So it's that kind of, again, linking together the feckless poor who end up in this way have to be taught how to work. And often people didn't leave the workhouse.

13:53There are some horrifying figures, the mortality rate within the workhouses. I was just looking at Skibbereen in Skibbereen, the workhouse there. And these, by the way, these were like huge, they did look like prisons. They were like huge buildings where you couldn't just come and go as you please. High walls, you know, and gates and guards and things. But in Skibbereen, more than half of the children admitted after October 1846, which is the start, died. More than half because of diarrhea acting on their exhausted constitution, it is noted. So as you say, you know, just a hideous thing. There's another statistic I've got here, which again, even worse.

14:31In 1850, the workhouses were caring for 119 ,000 children who knew neither their surname nor whether their parents were alive. What I'm suggesting is that what happened in this period was the erasure, the wiping out of a complete class of person in Ireland. And these were the people who had a lease on five acres or less. So as you're looking at this, say, between 1845 and 1855, this cottier class had more or less disappeared. the number of holdings under one acre dropped from 134 ,000. There were 134 ,000 holdings under one acre to 36 ,000. The number of persons per square mile had fallen from 255 to 231.

15:15And the average productivity had risen greatly. So in other words, what you're getting is that as soon as you went into the workhouse, or as soon as you left your holding, your house was destroyed on that day, it was often a mud cabin, the five acres was joined to another five acres. And so what happened then was within a year, within two years, by the early 1850s, that class of five acre to, you know, one acre holding people had simply disappeared from the earth. So that what grew instead, of course, were people who had larger farms or worked on larger farms, were people who, because the prices went up during these years so much.

15:54People who had profited from that, who were not the English government, but the middleman. You have to remember, if you have a five-acre holding, this is owned eventually by a landlord who's living in England. The middleman becomes the essential figure. And the middleman, of course, is Irish, and the middleman is Catholic. And the middleman is the one who collects the rents. The middleman is the one who does the evictions. So all that's being done in Ireland by Irish people. So you have this strange new class emerging. For example, some people were able to join the empire. They learned how to read and write.

16:23They did the exams. They did the civil service exams. Even in something like Joyce's portrait of the artist as a young man, you see them getting the results. And someone got India. You know, someone got the other colonies. And this is the ambition for certain young men. For other young men, it was to become a middleman. And for other young men, it was to own a shop. For other young men, it was to own a bigger farm. And so what you saw then in the aftermath was not merely the idea that the ghostly dead had wandered with their diseases through these roads and in these workhouses, but their children had died.

16:55So they didn't have grandchildren, that the whole idea that all of them had gone, their houses had gone, their holdings had gone. And what they had left was this idea of the ghostly, of something that economic historians could work with, that ballad writers could work with. But somehow in the middle, the catastrophe was almost unimaginable. But there's also a terrible sense, I think, Com, that the English are after this end, that Trevelyan sees the erasure of this Cotillia class as, in a sense, the bright providential end. In a sense, God is wanting these people to be wiped out for a better future.

17:35His view of this is that God has sent the calamity to punish the Irish, and that the calamity must not be too much mitigated, that the selfish Nindalip must learn the error of their ways and a better world emerge at the end of this. And this is the divine plan. This, oddly enough, had solved the problem. And the problem was identified in the early 1840s that this system of landholding in very poor areas was not sustainable. And suddenly, you know, this catastrophe came. And yes, I mean, there are appallingly cold remarks by Trevelyan about God and providence, but also about, you know, just the need for serious root and branch land reform in Ireland.

18:14Here are two Trevelyan quotes where he says this. The Great Irish Famine of 1847 he's talking about, and he's using those words already by 1848. Unless we are much deceived, posterity will trace up to that famine the commencement of a sanitary revolution in the habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate, and will acknowledge that on this, as on many other occasions, supreme wisdom has seduced permanent good out of transient evil. It's a terrible, terrible way of looking at it. The death of all these people is somehow part of a divine plan that's going to create something better in its wake.

18:51It's completely appalling. What happens also, though, Colm touched on this earlier, is that you do have a sort of pushback from people like Young Ireland, led by John Mitchell William Smith O 'Brien, who will be building up in anger until they've attempted an armed uprising in 1848. But in the meantime, they are writing. They are writing too. They can write too. You see, the newspapers have written all these unspeakable things. Hansard has groaned under the weight of those Trevelyan speeches and others like them. But then you have in 1847, you have these things written, the Almighty indeed sent the potato blight.

19:27This is almost an answer to the Trevelyan thing. The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but it is the English who created this famine. A million and a half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by this English government. So, you know, there is the start of a politicization and a radicalization. I mean, I don't know whether you would go as far as to say if the famine wouldn't have happened, you wouldn't have had such a surge of nationalism in the country column. Could the one have happened without the other? Well, you see, 1848, oddly enough, happened, you know, in the same way that happened in other European countries, the consolidation of ideas of identity and national identity and an ancient nation.

20:09So, you know, in other words, the opening of A Nation, once again, is when boyhood's fire was in my blood, I read of ancient heroes. So you're talking about, you know, the beginning of that idea that Ireland was an ancient country with an ancient language and an ancient culture, but what also Ireland now had was a grievance. In a single moment, the British government had conspired to wipe out more or less half the population. So that if you're a nationalist and you're writing books and you're writing ballads and you're making speeches from 1848 onwards, this idea of grievance is rooted in the famine.

20:42I mean, the famine becomes the grievance, not the wiping out of the, say, Irish language or even the trade issues, you know, of closing various Irish industries, but the famine becomes the word you can use to say, this is what they did to us. This is how they feel about us. And not merely that, but this catastrophe was almost caused by them. This began with the potato blight. You have to be very careful because you have to read this in a sort of reasonably nuanced way. This policy of laissez-faire was not invented to punish Ireland. That this Trevelyan did not specialize in hating Ireland. You know, he went to India and did the same thing, as you pointed out.

21:18You're still dealing, no matter what you do, with the small question of language, with the extraordinary statements made in the British House of Commons, with the extraordinary statements made by Trevelyan, with the vivid descriptions, and with something like, I mean, Herman Melville was in Liverpool, and he saw the Irish coming off the ship. And he said, it seems hard to believe such an array of misery could be furnished by any town in the world. Old women, rather mummies, drying up with slow starving and age, young girls incurably sick who ought to have been in the hospital, sturdy men with the gallows in their eyes and a whining lie in their mouth, young boys hollow-eyed and decrepit.

21:55So you have constant descriptions of this. And the problem then is how this then gets moved into the rhetoric of nationalism going in certainly to the 20th century. This is the, I suppose, the sort of culmination in the relations between Ireland and England, which would really mean that Ireland would have to become an independent state. And not only that, but a sort of nation. We're going to take a break. After the break, these descriptions that Colm just described and people seeing for themselves coming off on the boats in Liverpool, they know what's happening now. Come back and we'll talk about Queen Victoria and her rather controversial part in famine relief.

22:40Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about these ghost ships, if you like, ending up in Liverpool with these hollow-eyed men, women and children fleeing the hunger, the great hunger of the famine. Queen Victoria is moved by, when we talked about this, we did an episode on Queen Victoria, the descriptions of the suffering, particularly Lily of the Children. And, you know, she keeps a diary where she writes about it. She says that she's deeply moved by it. And she starts contributing to a fund that sort of rises up out of the ground where the government and the laissez-faire attitude of the government is, we've done what we can, we can do no more.

23:17It is charity that steps in. So William talked about the Quakers, love the Quakers. But then you've also got these sort of businesses, associations that step forward. The British Association for the Relief of the Extreme Distress in the Remote parishes of Ireland and Scotland. It was snappy titles like that that got people to give and put their hands in their pockets. But you had people like the Rothschilds, Barings, you know, these are all the names that we are familiar with, the Canards, who start raising money or giving money or sort of creating trust to feed, clothe and provide fuel for the starving of Ireland.

23:50And then you've got Queen Victoria herself, who gives£2 ,000 to famine relief. What did you make of that? Is this a woman who is deeply... Okay, I can see you're laughing. All right, okay. No, I'm laughing because I was brought up, I honestly was brought up believing that she gave a fiver. That was the story, wasn't it? I don't know who started this, but it was very, very effective that in the middle of the whole thing, Queen Victoria, she gave a fiver and there was a Native American tribe who managed to give more. And they heard about the famine and thought it was awful and they sent more money than the Queen.

24:19This 2000 thing, I'm sure it's true, but it has never made any difference. It's always presumed that this parsimonious Ireland-hating queen decided to give as little as possible as a further way of insulting us. Honestly, honestly, this was and is generally believed that she gave a fiver. Not just believed now. I mean, in 1900, Maud Gonne, who was like a muse to W.E. Yeats, Beauty Like a Titan Bow. That was her, wasn't it? Yes, yes. Maud Gonne, Beauty Like a Titan Bow. Being high and solitary and most stern. Oh, I get chills with Yates. And with you reading Yates, it's even worse. So stop it. But look, Maud Gonne used to describe Queen Victoria as the famine queen.

24:58Yeah, Maud Gonne was pretty good at that. She called her the famine queen. And then that stuck. You know, I mean, there was no point in talking about£2 ,000 being a lot of money at that time. No matter what she did, she was the famine queen and she gave her fiver. Okay. America, though, also donated. I mean, just talk to us about the relationship that is now building between, because there's a very strong relationship between the Irish and America. They will head to America in great numbers. Just let's say that 80 % of those who emigrated to America and survived were of rural origin. They were from those five acre holdings.