by Charles Egan
‘It was worth it just to see Lucan’s face. Near went apoplectic he did.’
‘Did he believe it though?’
‘Oh, I reckon he believes it alright. Not that he’ll ever admit it, nor the truth about the Levally evictions. Maybe we should ask Father Ward to write a note to the Freeman’s Journal about that too.’
*
Pat had other things on his mind. That night, he wrote to Voisey in Knockanure, requesting that he ask the local parish priest for freedom to marry on behalf of his intended bride, Sarah Cronin, who had lived for most of her life in Knockanure. He received a letter from Voisey by return, stating that the banns would be read the following three Sundays. For Westport, he wrote to the clerk, asking that the request be passed on to the chaplain to the workhouse. Over the following weeks, he received letters from both Knockanure and Westport saying no objections had been raised to the marriage of Patrick Ryan and Sarah Cronin on the grounds either of existing marriage, or of close relationship as cousins, and enclosing letters of freedom as requested. He wrote to Carrigard to inform them, and said he would request leave in a few weeks.
He stayed on with Gaffney working on accounts. He noticed many things. Castlebar Workhouse was selling its own furniture to pay for corn. There were very few wooden beds in the dormitories now. Instead, the floors were covered with straw, where inmates were crowded together every night.
Even so, the workhouse’s income was very little. The big landlords, including Lord Sligo in Westport, and even Lord Lucan in Castlebar were only paying their county rates from time to time, a point which still surprised Pat, since they could be prosecuted. On thinking about the matter though, he realised that the Grand Juries would be dominated by the big landlords – especially Lord Sligo and Lord Lucan – and they would hardly prosecute themselves, nor convict themselves if prosecuted.
Many of the other landlords were not paying at all, and some had not for two years. In some parts, he had travelled there was no record of landlords. In much of Erris there had been very little paid, and there were very few paupers in the temporary workhouse that had been erected there. The same was true of Partry. Many of Partry’s poor would have made their way to Ballinrobe Workhouse, where large numbers would have died. Even the ones who broke out of the workhouse would only have lasted a short time.
*
One morning, he entered Gaffney’s office to discuss correspondence. Frederick Cavendish was there.
‘Delighted to see you again, Pat.’
‘And you, Lord Cavendish.’
‘I think we can forget the ‘Lord’ bit. There’s more important matters than titles now. Have a look at this.’
He passed a newspaper to Pat.
‘Father Ward has been writing letters again,’ Gaffney said. ‘Dublin Evening Post this time. It’s from the minutes of some relief committee he’d written to in Dublin.’
He pointed to a single paragraph.
‘This little passage here. We’d like your opinion.’
Pat read –
‘The heart will never conceive the appalling scenes of woe and grinding agonies of hunger. I have seen, though I did not publish the fact, the flesh of the dead daughter mangled in the mouth of her poor dead mother, four of them dead together on the same wad of straw.’
He whipped his hand to his mouth.
‘Oh, Christ!’
‘Pretty awful, isn’t it?’ Gaffney said.
‘But…where?’
‘We don’t know for sure. There’s talk of Drimcaggy, but no-one knows.’
‘You travelled with him,’ Cavendish said. ‘Did you see any sign of anyone eating the dead?’
‘I didn’t,’ Pat said. ‘But there was one house he wouldn’t even let me into. Mary Kennedy’s, it was. He said there were things no man should ever see.’
‘Yes, I remember you told me that,’ Gaffney remarked.
‘So I did,’ Pat said. ‘Well, that house was in Drimcaggy. Whatever he saw in that house upset him terribly, and he was a man well used to terrible things. He knew I was too. And that was what puzzled me. What could be worse than what I had already seen?’
‘Could it be true, so?’ Cavendish asked him. ‘Could a mother eat her own children?
Pat found it hard to speak. The very question was sickening.
‘I…I can’t imagine it.’
‘Me neither,’ Gaffney said. ‘Mind you, here’s been rumours of this kind of thing from all around the County. I had reckoned they were only stories. But Father Ward has always been reliable in the past.’
‘He has,’ Pat said. ‘But now…I don’t know.’
Cavendish stared at him, as if mesmerised. Then he shook his head in frustration.
‘Has he lost his mind or what?’
Pat hesitated. The question was a sharp one.
‘He did say he’d been in fever. People picture strange things when they’re in fever.’
‘Had he recovered when you met him?’ Gaffney asked.
‘He was well enough. But he was weighed down with worries. And all the things we saw on the road; it was enough to rattle any man’s wits.’
Gaffney drummed his fingers on the desk.
‘Maybe he’s had fever again.’
‘Perhaps,’ Pat said. ‘God knows we were in enough cabins with fever.’
‘So we might never know,’ Cavendish said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pat replied. ‘I should have insisted on seeing inside the Kennedy house for myself.’
‘Oh, it’s not your fault, Pat,’ Gaffney said. ‘And anyhow, there might have been nothing in that house. He might be writing about some other village entirely. And even if it had been that house, it would have been asking far too much of you to witness that. No, don’t you worry about it. You’ve done well. Very well indeed.’
Afterwards, Pat walked back to his office. His senses were on edge. The old grey floorboards screeched like never before. The whitewashed walls crowded in on him. The corridors stretched forever, their dripping candles forming all kinds of grotesque figures, intermingled with flickering images of a dead blackthorn tree. He was trembling, but he steadied himself on the wall. Then he walked to his office and began to work on accounts.
Chapter 27
Bradford Observer. June 1849:
The Sanitary Commissioners in their recent report, presented by them to Parliament, submit a mass of evidence all proving that cholera and other diseases are not contagious. The conditions of transmission and infection are an impure atmosphere and depraved physical health. The best antidotes are cleanliness, temperance, cheerfulness. As surely as magnet attracts steel, so certainly will filth and dirt develop cholera. Hard drinkers will fall the easiest prey. Incessant dread may predispose the body to take it. Let all offensive dunghills, dirt heaps, stagnant muddy pools, and decomposing matter of every description be forthwith removed.
Over the weeks and months, Murty got to know the Yeadon brothers better. He had at last discovered that the mysterious third brother, Nathan, was ill with miners’ lung. Nathan had been the first of the brothers to work in the mines, starting at the early age of ten, pulling carts along the shafts. Later, he had become a miner, hacking at the coalface, until the coal dust had destroyed his lungs, and he could take it no more. Now he lay in the bedroom in the next house, waiting for death. Sometimes the brothers spoke of the workhouse as the only way out for him.
‘Does it not worry ye that ye’d get it yourselves?’ he asked them, one Sunday.
‘Miners’ lung!’ Samuel exclaimed. ‘That’ll never catch us. Firedamp will kill us first.’
‘Firedamp?’ Murty exclaimed.
‘One spark is enough to set it off, and bring the roof down. The men who die from the collapse, they’re the lucky ones. The ones who are trapped, die in their own good time. Explosions are the killers in the mines.’
Murty could sense the defeat in what Samuel had said, and the way he had said it. It surprised him, because of what he knew of the brothers
’ interest in Unions.
‘And what of the Union? Would they not make a protest?’
‘If we had a Union, they might,’ Arthur said. ‘But such a Union, we do not have. The dragoons broke any chance of that in Bradford.’
‘For now,’ Samuel said. ‘But we’ll be back.’
Kitty, with her easy ways, got on well with everyone. She assisted Bríd around the house, most especially on Saturday nights, when it was cleaned of coal dust and smoke grime. She responded too to the bantering ways of the Yeadon brothers, teasing them about their appearance when they came back from the mines and, more important, insisting they be clean before they came into the Kerrigan house. The brothers accepted this with good grace and humour.
*
Cholera returned to Bradford. The outbreak earlier in the year had caused panic, but now it was said that it had been of a milder sort.
‘This is the worst one now,’ Sinéad said, ‘the one we’ve all feared. You mark my words, we’re for it now.’
This time the approach was faster. Within days, neighbours in Adelaide Street had it. Sinéad was convinced that it spread in the mills, but she and the other women worked on, Tomás too. The same sense of defeat as before, Murty thought, waiting for their fate.
‘They’re saying it’s the Irish bringing it,’ Máire said one evening.
‘Arra, that’s nonsense,’ Tomás said. ‘Sure it’s hitting every city, near and far, whether there’s Irish there or not. Weren’t they saying the same about the fever?’
For once, Murty felt it was better working on the railways. If what the girls were saying about the mills was true, then the open air was healthier. He worried though about Aileen. Would she get cholera? Would she die of it?
As it turned out, Kitty was to be the first to get it.
When she came back from the mill one evening, she was irritable, which in itself was strange. Then she started complaining of muscle cramps.
Quickly, Bríd had her isolated upstairs. Sinéad, Máire and Peg brought their horsehair mattresses down to the front room, where they were stored under the dining table, to be pulled out at night and made up as beds on the floor for themselves.
Murty was concerned when Aileen took over as Kitty’s nurse. For two days, she did not go to work, bringing jugs of water up to Kitty to feed her powerful thirst.
‘You should have put salt in with it,’ Sinéad told her, ‘that’s what the girls in the mill are saying.’
Murty was even more surprised when Aileen insisted on staying upstairs. She explained to him that if she got the disease, she would only spread it to everyone else if she came downstairs. On her request, Bríd prepared her meals and left them on the landing at the top of the stairs.
Dinner times were silent now. What if Kitty died? Aileen had lost two adult children already. Kitty was not family, but she was very, very close. If it came to the worst, he did not know how he could possibly cope with her silence again.
Then came the news that Síle Reilly too had contracted cholera, and a few days later, they heard she was dead. Murty and Tomás, went into the house next door, Bríd stayed at home, concerned that Aileen should stay too, and knowing that she needed the company, even if only from the distance of the stairs.
Murty and Tomás carried the coffin out with Arthur and Samuel. They placed it on to the waiting cart, and followed it to the graveyard. As they walked, two more coffins were added to the cart. They were buried separately. The four of them knelt at the graveside, as the coffin was lowered into it, and the last rites were spoken.
When they returned, Murty asked Bríd about Kitty.
‘She’ll live, I think.’
‘She will?’
‘I won’t say it for certain. She’s been long enough ill with it, but Aileen says she’s getting better.’
*
Work continued on the Lancashire & Yorkshire. At times, Murty wondered how it might compare to other work. From all of what Tomás had told him though, the mills were closed to Mayo men now.
Even here on the railways, he could see how much the Irish were despised. There was always the chance of rioting between the English and the Irish navvies, but Murty, Higgins and Doyle made sure to keep well away, when any chance of it developed. While they all enjoyed the odd beer, he knew how fast trouble could erupt in the bars and shebeens around the railway works. He was surprised to discover that there was a ‘company shebeen’ on the works on the Colne Extension. Danny had been violently against shebeens on the works. He suspected too that Danny’s involvement with the Molly Maguire gang was what led to his death. The gang had cleared the shebeens for Danny, but what else had they done? Murder?
It was tough on the McCormack cutting, but even so, Murty knew he was better off working on the Lancashire & Yorkshire. Murtybeg’s works on the Colne extension had a brutal reputation. Murty reckoned that Murtybeg was working many of his navvies to death, and all for a shilling a day. Yes, he was feeding them, and some of them became strong enough to leave and work for other contractors. What of the others though, who died in the shacks, packed to the limit with men who had no other way of making a living, and no other way of gaining shelter? And Murtybeg was charging rent for these killing holes, where disease killed them faster than hunger could in Mayo. Fever before, cholera now.
No, he could not work with Murtybeg again. But was it any better where he was working now? Yes, the men were better paid. Still nothing like what they had been paid on the Leeds & Thirsk, but Murty himself was earning two shillings a day now, and while McCormack might have been doing very well out of it, he was not misusing his men to the same extent as Murtybeg was.
But what they were doing was worse. As they continued driving the Lancashire & Yorkshire through Broomfields, houses and shacks were being demolished. The tenements were disgusting. Dens of disease too, dozens of people crushed into houses designed for a quarter the number. The shacks were no better than sceilps back in Mayo. They were roughly constructed out of timber off-cuts by those who dwelt in them. They too only spread fever and cholera faster, and they could not keep out the driving rain and cold in the winter.
What made it worse was that this part of Broomfields was Irish. Day after day, the police cleared the tenements and shacks, batons whipping at the people if they moved too slowly. Murty knew that some of the evicted men were working on Murtybeg’s site up on the Colne Extension. These were the men that were fodder for him. Soon they would be in Murtybeg’s shacks, paying a rent and dying of disease. Not that that was very much different to what was happening in Broomfields.
But what of the others being evicted? Nowhere to live at all. What would happen to them? How long they would live, was an open question.
After the people were cleared, the McCormack men would move in to demolish the shacks. That was the easy work. Bringing down the tenements was more dangerous, but most of them were demolished using blasting powder. Afterwards, Murty, Higgins and Doyle would move in with their sledgehammers, smashing the remaining fragments of wall into bricks, then loading the bricks onto wheelbarrows to be brought down to the advancing railway and thrown onto the wagons for disposal.
Was this any different to how evictions were carried out in County Mayo? Was he an evictor?
Painful thinking, but what could be done? Organise an association, a union? Unionise the navvies in Bradford? Proscribe the demolitions? What chance would that have? Very little.
‘You’re still not thinking of unionising?’ he asked the Yeadons one night.
‘What good would that do?’ Arthur asked.
‘We could strike for higher wages,’ Samuel said, at once.
‘Aye, and we’ve tried that afore, and look where it got us,’ Arthur said.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Samuel said, ‘Next time, we’ll do it proper. Just like the woolcombers did back in ’25. Fetch on a general strike. Isn’t that it Tommy?’
‘Yes,’ Tomás said. ‘That’s the way to do it.’
‘But y
ou didn’t win then,’ Murty said.
‘We didn’t,’ said Samuel, ‘but you can’t blame that on us. It wasn’t us that gave in first. But mark my words, Murty, the Miners’ Association will be back; the Woolcombers & Weavers too. Not just one Association, and not just separate. There’ll be many Associations, but all united in one great national union that will force the bosses to their knees. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again, you wait and see.’
Murty lay awake in bed that night, thinking of all he had heard. An attempt at a general strike twenty years ago, ending in failure. Another in 1842, with the same result. A third in 1844, broken. The Charter defeated. Was there no way forward?
And what of the navvy?
At the cutting the next morning, a whistle was blown as the fuse in the blasting powder was being lit. They moved back behind another house.
‘I’d been talking to some fellows last night about Unions,’ he said to Higgins and Doyle. ‘I doubt there’s much chance of it in Bradford anymore.’
‘Not from all we hear,’ Doyle said. ‘They talk it round and round in circles in the shack, but the Unions in Bradford are finished.’
‘Right across the country, too,’ Higgins said.
There was a loud roar, as another house crashed to the ground. They waited as the dust cleared.
‘Yes,’ said Murty, ‘you’re right, but still we can dream. Can you imagine the look on young Murtybeg’s face if we called a strike on the Colne Extension?’
‘I doubt it would worry him much,’ Higgins said. ‘Sure there’s thousands and thousands of navvies on the tramp, the half of them starving, and most of them within a hundred miles from here. If there was ever talk of a strike on the railway works, they’d all be making their way here.’
‘Scab labour,’ Doyle said.
‘Scab or not,’ Higgins said, ‘a man doesn’t give a damn if his belly is empty. No, all they’d suffer is a day’s delay on the Colne before they’d be up to full speed again. Whatever about the mill workers or the miners, you’ll never unionise the navvy.’
‘I’d agree with you,’ Murty said.
