And yet they survived. Not only that, but Ireland’s population was actually booming. In a mere fifty years, it had more than doubled. What was holding this rotten system together? How was the peasant population able to survive and thrive year after year under such impossible economic conditions?
The answer lay, surprisingly, with the humble potato.
The potato was introduced to Ireland in 1590, and quickly became a vital staple for the rural Irish. It was extremely easy to grow, requiring only a spade and some primitive digging. It could grow in extremely poor soil, and came packed with essential vitamins. Also, it provided an incredibly high yield; just an acre and a half of potatoes could feed a family of six for half a year, whereas grain for the same family would require six times as much land and need greater agricultural skill. A third of the potato crop could even be spared to feed a pig, which provided much-needed extra income. This was a true superfood.
Yet the reliance on this single vegetable for a nation’s survival was precarious to say the least. The potato crop was prone to regular failure, which threatened starvation for those most reliant on it. There had been famines in 1816, 1822, 1826 and 1831, causing localised deaths and fever. Even in the good years, the months before an annual harvest were known as the ‘summer hunger’ – when last year’s stock ran out, and a family were forced to beg for food until the new crop came in. This was a population only ever one step from starvation. Susan, who would later watch little Teresa die from hunger in Liverpool, had been weaned on malnutrition like mother’s milk.
As the sub-divisions of peasant land became increasingly mean and unsustainable, a less nutritious but much hardier variety of animal-feed potato became the new staple. It was called the ‘horse potato’ or ‘lumper’. This could grow in the very poorest soil – making it ideal for the rough terrain families were now forced to inhabit – and it was resistant to common diseases. Yet it had one fatal flaw. It was highly vulnerable to an as-yet little-known fungal disease from the Americas called Phytophthora infestans. Potato blight.
Potato blight is a fungal organism that spreads in spores carried on the wind, and it thrives during periods of damp, humid weather. It starts as small black spots on the leaves of the potato and then spreads into large brown lesions, some with a downy growth. These produce thousands of new airborne spores that spread the infection widely. As the plant shrivels and dies, the spores penetrate the ground and infect the tubers. The diseased potatoes then become a cankerous brown and collapse into indigestible rot. Worse still, the fungus hides over the winter in the seed potatoes that remain, waiting to strike again when the weather warms and new planting begins. Blight had spread to Europe in 1845, devastating potato crops and causing many deaths in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Yet these nations didn’t depend entirely on the potato for their dietary survival …
In September of that year, blight finally arrived in Ireland from mainland Europe. What happened next was to be one of history’s great humanitarian disasters: a famine so profound that it would drive a nation’s people across every ocean in the world for the meagre chance of finding something more digestible than the hell they’d known. My family were amongst them.
*
The Great Famine in Ireland lasted from 1845 to 1852. It involved the catastrophic collapse of the nation’s potato crop for consecutive seasons due to potato blight. It caused starvation, destitution and death on an enormous scale. It destroyed the economy, obliterated the population, and set the nation on an inevitable course towards rebellion and ultimate independence from Great Britain. It changed everything.
The McGann family survived, as that baptism in 1859 shows. But how many of them? The records don’t reveal. Roscommon lost a third of its population – the highest proportion of any Irish county. In the first outbreak of famine in 1846, the north Roscommon area where the McGanns lived quickly began to suffer hardship. A Quaker from Liverpool called Joseph Crosfield passed through the area in December, and commented on the state of the people he saw:
Many of them declare that they have not tasted food of any kind for forty-eight hours; and numbers of them have eaten nothing but cabbage or turnips for days and weeks.
Such scraps of food would soon be considered a luxury. As the famine worsened, the desperate would turn to nettles, berries, dandelions and plant roots. Dogs, cats and horses quickly disappeared, then wild animals such as foxes and badgers. Cattle would be bled for the nourishment that could be gained from a few pints of their blood. By 1847, the second year of famine, there would be nowhere left to turn.
Before the famine, 60,000 acres of potatoes were planted in Roscommon County. Yet as blight killed off the seed potatoes, there were fewer left to plant. By 1847 the acreage had reduced to 6,900. The Nation, a Dublin newspaper, reported: ‘In Roscommon deaths by famine are so prevalent that whole families who retire at night are corpses in the morning.’
The owner of the land on which Tibohine church stood wrote to Westminster to report that the conditions were calamitous and food must be sent urgently. What would the British government do to ease their suffering?
Not enough. Though relief funds were substantial, a stumbling block in Westminster’s approach to Irish famine relief resided in the mid-Victorian devotion to laissez faire economics. The free market was considered sacrosanct, and nothing should interrupt its invisible hand – not even mass starvation. This meant that the supply of any emergency aid mustn’t be allowed to distort the local market price for produce. Under this doctrine, the Irish couldn’t just be given help – they had to show that they were deserving of it. And, where possible, they had to earn it. This attitude was fed by a British suspicion regarding the Irish character. The Irish peasant was thought by many as feckless, deceitful, rebellious and ungrateful. The very model of the undeserving poor. So the authorities set up relief works: small-scale, publicly funded infrastructure projects that could employ the local destitute and provide them with the means to purchase emergency food aid. The starving peasants were put to work building roads and bridges in desolate corners of the country and in all weathers – work with little practical purpose but to provide employment. Some were so weak with hunger that they could barely lift a shovel.
Deadly fever would soon follow. Famine-ravaged Ireland was utterly unprepared for infectious disease. The area where the McGanns lived had a population of 30,000 spread over 135 square miles of rough country, and only one hospital. It’s a fact of famine that the sufferer will be more likely to die from disease than starvation. The body’s immune system is so compromised as to invite any infection. It was reckoned that ten times more people were dying of typhus and dysentery than from malnutrition. The hospitals and workhouse infirmaries of Roscommon were soon full to bursting, and new patients had to be turned away to die.
Under the terms of the Poor Law Act, the tax burden for these hordes of sick and destitute fell onto the local ratepayers. Yet few able ratepayers remained. In parts of Roscommon, just 4 per cent of the population were supporting all the rest. These ratepayers were the traditional landowners, many of whom had large estates containing hundreds of starving sub-tenants on tiny plots of over-divided land. A landowner was responsible for paying the rates of any tenant who paid less than four pounds in rent. Many of these cash-strapped landowners now decided on a draconian solution: they would evict those in debt, and then consolidate their tiny plots into larger, more valuable land. So, at the famine’s darkest hour, the landowners called in their desperate tenants’ hanging loans.
These ‘clearances’ became an infamous chapter in the story of the Great Famine. Between 1848 and 1854, nearly 50,000 families were evicted from their dwellings with nowhere to go. Gangs of bailiffs, army or police would tear down cottages and burn them to the ground to ensure that no shelter remained to encourage the occupiers to linger. Once they were evicted, families could find little shelter. Evicted wraiths would haunt their local communities, living like wild creatures in bog holes, until disease
and hunger finally took them and their unburied bodies were discovered.
This was the hunger that Susan McGann and my kin had experienced. A pitiless horror that branded the mind of the sufferer with the urgent attainment of safety in a world of stark choices. A merciless motivational antagonist. Hunger can change the way you think – the choices you make. Not just hunger – hunger for something. Survival. The tyranny of hope. Escape.
Emigration was nothing new to the Irish. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, there had been a steady increase in the tide of emigrants that left to seek a better life in North America and Australasia. A million and a half had already gone – usually through the port of Liverpool. What characterised these pre-famine travellers was their relative degree of youth and aspiration; 70 per cent were between sixteen and thirty-four. Many had friends and family already living overseas, who sent back passage money and tales of better prospects. Yet once the famine was under way, the tide of emigrants became a vast flood. More than a million left in just six years – but these were no longer young and fit aspirants. They were the old, the penniless, the fatally diseased and the starving. An exodus of the desperate.
The famine had tripped a switch in the collective psyche of a nation, and it wasn’t something that could now be switched off by a change in agricultural fortunes. After the famine finally subsided in the early 1850s, the tide of emigration continued unabated – accounting for a massive four million souls over the next half-century. The people had seen enough. They wanted out, regardless of whether their potatoes grew or not. My family was amongst them.
*
The McGanns left Ireland for good sometime between 1859 – when Owen and Susan christened Eugene in Tibohine – and 1864, when they first turn up in the public records of the slums of Liverpool. Intriguingly, the McGanns seem to have gone to the United States first, but had then returned to Ireland. A census form records that eldest son James was born in ‘Philadelphia, America’ in 1857. By 1859 they were back in Tibohine for Eugene’s birth. Five years after that, they had settled in Liverpool. This was a period of remarkable restlessness for a family that had never previously travelled beyond their immediate neighbourhood. It was as if their hunger possessed three motivating forces: an active retreat from the horror they knew, a love of home that drove them back into its arms, and a feverish hope that propelled them into the unknown despite all dangers and obstacles.
This was an age when the slow wooden sailing ships gave way to fast metal-hulled coal steamers – vessels that could carry greater numbers of passengers across the seas at much cheaper cost. These competing ships could also ferry passengers from Dublin to Liverpool much faster, and at a price even a pauper might afford. The McGanns therefore gathered what they had and walked the entire 170 kilometres from Tibohine to Dublin, where they caught a steam ship for Liverpool costing several shillings. This was a pretty wretched trip: embarkation was chaotic and crowded, the crossing was frequently hazardous, and the poorest passengers were crammed onto the open deck, exposed to the elements. In evidence to a Select Committee in 1854, a travelling eyewitness described conditions for these deck passengers:
… they were generally crowded around the funnel of the steamer or huddled together in a most disgraceful manner; and as they have not been used to sea voyages, they get sick, and perfectly helpless, and covered with the dirt and filth of each other.
Despite the cheap cost, such a trip would still leave many Irish families penniless when they arrived. The fortunate ones might have some extra put by for their onward passage across the Atlantic, but those less fortunate, like the McGanns, would be forced to remain in Liverpool, and hope that they could earn enough to emigrate later.
What would Owen, Susan and the children have been confronted by as they disembarked?
Liverpool docklands was a teeming, stinking, chaotic and disorientating place. Hungry passengers, bleary-eyed and freezing, spilled out onto an urban dockside where hustlers and thieves exploited the unwary, and noise and confusion reigned. The Liverpool Mercury newspaper reported on the scene:
In the cold and gloom of a severe winter, thousands of hungry and half naked wretches are wandering about, not knowing how to obtain a sufficiency of the commonest food nor shelter from the piercing cold. The numbers of starving Irish men, women and children—daily landed on our quays is appalling; and the Parish of Liverpool has at present, the painful and most costly task to encounter, of keeping them alive, if possible …
Indeed, basic survival would be the most immediate priority for my family. This meant procuring food and any kind of a roof over their head. For people like Owen and Susan, the options were few. Local Poor Law relief, the parish-based welfare system that existed at the time, excluded immigrants with less than five years’ residency. There were some charitable foundations that provided short-term meals, but nothing more. There was begging, which was rife at that time, and essential for many. If a family could put its children out to beg, they might scrape the pennies together for basic shelter and sustenance.
Shelter would generally be sought in the Vauxhall district of the city – the ghastly close-packed slum streets huddled up next to the docks, running north from the city centre between Great Howard Street and the River Mersey. These streets were dangerously overcrowded with Irish refugees, and lacked the most basic sanitation. Deadly epidemic diseases were a persistent threat. Most immigrants were forced to find accommodation in one of the infamous lodging houses or cellars for a penny per person per night. Local physician William Duncan described these places:
At night the floor of these cellars are covered with straw and there the lodgers – all who can afford to pay a penny for the accommodation – arrange themselves as best they may, until scarcely a single available inch of space is left unoccupied. In this way as many as thirty human beings or more are sometimes packed together underground, each inhaling the poison which his neighbour generates, and presenting a picture in miniature of the Black Hole of Calcutta.
The energy expended to get to Liverpool with bodies racked by hunger was to prove too much for some. Cases of starvation began to appear with shameful regularity in coroners’ reports: Mary Mageney of Vauxhall Road, discovered dead in bed from starvation – she’d not eaten for four days. Young Patrick Curren, starved to death in a cellar in Ashby Street. These were the streets where the McGanns lived when they arrived, and where they were to remain for more than three decades. It was the place where little Teresa ended her short life.
And yet, those of my family who lived, lived on. Day after day. Year after year.
In the 1871 Census I found them crammed into a single room in nearby Clay Street. Owen, Susan and their surviving children – James, fourteen, Eugene, twelve, Sarah ten, Mary, eight. Still on the edge. Still desperate. But very much alive. I remembered the Minnesota study – how starvation left its victims with a consuming passivity and ‘no more sexual feeling than a sick oyster’. But the frequency of baptism records in Owen and Susan’s family suggested that the sexual feelings of these particular oysters were far from sickly. In that crowded, stinking room, full of their own sleeping children, Owen and Susan clearly found time for plenty of physical contact.
How? Why hadn’t that constant hunger and misery simply consumed them with a passive despair? Why didn’t they just lie down with their empty distended bellies and surrender?
I was missing something. There was clearly a motivating force beyond their medical condition that I couldn’t see. I knew what hunger could do to my family in that room, but what could it make them capable of? Perhaps their desperate hunger became a focus for their minds – an embraced privation that sharpened their resolve, making them more determined to succeed. More determined to live. Stripping away the trivial and leaving only the naked love they felt for each other. A motivating force beyond passivity. Hunger as focus.
And yet – focus on what? Is it just love distilled by want that had my starving ancestors copulating amongst the rags an
d the rattled breathing of their nearby children? No. They weren’t just hungry, they were hungry for something. It was a directed desire. Raw and soil-stained. A passion.
Focused hunger as a raw passion. What could such a hunger make someone in my family capable of?
TESTIMONY
William Routledge. Born June 1918 in Liverpool. Died May 1984.
My uncle Billy.
I can see Billy’s face clearly in my mind’s eye. It’s 1943. I see those grim laughter lines around his eyes, blackened and bruised. The nicotine fingers and the gaunt, sunburned, deathly-sallow cheeks. The unforgiving sun. A cloud of flies and the vivid green of a palm against the sky. He’s almost naked, but for a grimy loincloth. A handful of scrawny potatoes lie scattered at his feet in the yellow dirt. A Japanese voice can be heard, screaming in fury. Billy stares directly at me and opens his lips wide in a smile. His mouth is scarlet with fresh blood. His front teeth have been reduced to a broken row of shattered shards by some violent force. He grins at me like a lurid skeleton from a child’s nightmare.
Sarawak, Borneo.
William Routledge, or ‘Billy Ruck’ as he was known to all of us, was the husband of my mother’s sister Mary. The Routledges were a part of that same Irish flotsam that had blown across the Irish Sea to Liverpool in the years following the Great Famine. Billy’s grandfather Francis had been born in Dublin just a year before Eugene was christened in Tibohine. Billy grew up in the Edge Hill area of Liverpool – an urban warren just a stone’s throw from my own inner-city streets. He was raw and hard and irreverent and funny – a lover of boxing, beer and football – but also reticent and thoughtful in company. A man of fewer words than you might suppose, and certainly fewer than you felt he knew.
Flesh and Blood Page 3
