by Simon Schama
The difference, Mill thought (with the benefit of his own relative ignorance about the subcontinent), was that those who decreed benevolent reform for India did not have to worry about politics, nor were they inheriting iniquities from the conquests and land settlements of centuries before. A benign, educated administrator, he thought, could decree ‘Improvement’ for the cultivators of Bihar or Gujarat and it would happen. Indeed, under Dalhousie, Mill thought it was indeed happening, in the shape of the Ganges canal.
It was certainly true that those charged with managing the nightmare of the Irish potato famine – from the two prime ministers, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell, to their presidents of the board of trade and chancellors of the exchequer, and treasury officials like Trevelyan – all had to think hard about the political implications of any move they made. But it was also true that most of the politicians and civil servants were in the grip of a set of moral convictions that allowed them to think that whatever they did would always somehow be over-ridden by the inscrutable will of the great Political Economist in the sky. God willed it, apparently, that, as The Times put it, the ‘Celts’ stop being ‘potatophagi’. God willed it that the feckless absentee landlords take responsibility for the evil system they had perpetuated. God willed it that there should be a great exodus and that vast tracts of western Ireland should become depopulated. Or was it heresy to think that these things had been made, or made worse, by the hand of man? One of those heretics was the Tory prime minister Sir Robert Peel, who had to deal with the first phase of the calamity. In February 1846, in a speech to the Commons, trying to persuade them to abandon the Corn Laws that prevented the free import of, among other grains, American corn, Peel concluded by advising the members:
When you are again exhorting a suffering people to fortitude under their privations, when you are telling them, ‘these are the chastenings of an all-wise and merciful Providence, sent for some inscrutable but just and beneficient purpose …’, when you are thus addressing your suffering fellow-subjects … may God grant that by your decision of this night, you have laid in store for yourselves the consolation of reflecting that such calamities are, in truth [my emphasis], the dispensations of Providence – that they have not been caused, they have not been aggravated by laws of man, restricting in the hour of scarcity the supply of food!
What, then, if anything, could have been done to make the misery less brutal? Could, for example, the scale of the disaster have been predicted? During the second half of the 19th century a whole school of writers published what they took to be famine predictors for another part of the empire that suffered famines – India: a combination of meteorological cycles (still imperfectly understood); price indices as early warnings of shortages; and assessments of depleted grain reserves. And with a great deal of experience behind them, they still got it wrong. So even though there had been failed potato crops in the 1820s and 1830s, nothing in those earlier crises could possibly have prepared governments, central or local, for what was about to happen in 1845. The fungus Phytophthoera infestans had attacked American crops, which gave it its grim nickname of ‘the American potato cholera’. The disease that appeared first on the underside of the leaves and ended by turning the potatoes to blackish-purplish slimy mush had indeed never been seen in Europe before. Even when it arrived (in Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as Ireland) it was thought – not least by many of the botanical experts called on to pronounce on the blight – to be the symptom, rather than the cause, of the rotted crop; the result of a spell of unusually cold, heavy rain. With only a quarter of the 1845 crop lost, officials in Dublin, anxious not to be alarmist, were calling the shortfall ‘a deficiency’. The optimistic assumption was that, with better weather (and there was a long, warm, dry period in the summer of 1846), there would be a return to relatively normal harvests. Misunderstanding of how the blight was transmitted was then compounded by poor advice. In the face of anxiety that there should be enough seed potatoes for the following year, peasant farmers were told (or at least not discouraged from doing so) merely to cut away rotten sections of the tubers and store what was left for planting the following spring. The microscopic spores over-wintered, and when the infected tubers were planted a second season of ruin was guaranteed.
The problem, of course, was that even in good years a very high proportion of the Irish population was living on a razor’s edge between survival and starvation. That population had trebled between the middle of the 18th century and 1845, rising from 2.6 million to 8.5 million. Two-thirds lived off the land, the vast majority on holdings too small to count as even modest ‘farms’. Ireland had traditionally been a grazing economy and the better-off regions in the north and east still produced and exported dairy goods to Britain. But rising demand from industrializing Britain had turned Ireland into an exporter of grain, especially oats and barley. Farmers who had the capital and the unencumbered land rose to the opportunity. But in the centre and west of the country, where the population rise had been steepest, landlords (often absentee) exploited the imbalance between population and available land to raise rents and lower wages. By the 1840s, the process of shrinking income and plot size had created a huge semi-pauperized population. There were 135,000 plots of less than an acre; 770,000 of less than 10 acres. The only sure thing was that the crop that promised the best yield from the wet, heavy ground, was potatoes: 10–12 pounds of them were being eaten every day by each Irish man and woman. But that was the beginning and the end of their diet, which if they were lucky was augmented by a little milk for protein, or by fish or kelp if they lived close to the shore.
The Great Famine in Ireland, 1845–9.
There were some in Peel’s government who, even at the end of 1845, thought they were seeing something like a plague of Egypt at hand. Sir James Graham, the first lord of the admiralty, wrote to the prime minister in October, ‘It is awful to observe how the Almighty humbles the pride of nations … the canker worm and the locust are his armies; he gives the word: a single crop is blighted; and we see a nation prostrate, stretching out its hands for bread.’ By December the price of potatoes and other foodstuffs had doubled and Peel, who had been returned to office in 1841 committed to retain the Corn Laws (but who had had a change of heart), now felt that he could not wait to use the Irish crisis to persuade parliament – and especially his own party – to repeal them. Secretly he bought £100,000 worth of American corn and had it ground and distributed at cost to special depots, run by local committees throughout Ireland. His hope was to use the reserve at best to stabilize prices, at worst for immediate relief. As a social by-product, perhaps the experience of cornmeal mush (initially greeted with horrified suspicion by much of the population as ‘Peel’s brimstone’) would also wean the Irish from their addiction to potatoes.
By August 1846, with a second blighted crop, it was glaringly obvious that Ireland was already in the grip of a famine. The Reverend Theobald Mathew, who wrote to Trevelyan imploring more direct free aid, saw the misery with his own eyes: ‘On the 27th of last month I passed from Cork to Dublin and this doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the 3rd instant I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens wringing their hands and wailing bitterly [at] the destruction which had left them foodless.’
Against the wishes of his party, but with strong Whig support, Peel had succeeded in pushing through the repeal of the Corn Laws in June 1846, resigning a few days later. Yet the new Whig government, led by Lord John Russell, looked at the multiplying misery dry-eyed. For some years Russell had, in fact, been one of the most severe critics of the ruthlessly exploitative habits of Irish landlords. But that was precisely why he was loath to use state aid from London to bail them out of responsibility for the consequences of their selfishness and greed. If the Almighty was laying a scourge across their back (for the assumption was that Irish property owners would n
ot let their own people starve), who was he to stay His hand? This was the way in which not only Russell but also Sir Charles Wood, his chancellor of the exchequer, thought and spoke. And it was music to the ears of Charles Trevelyan, who all along had suspected Peel of being soft; and had objected, whenever and however he could, to any interference with the ‘natural’ and commercial operation of the grain market. It was not for the government, Trevelyan believed, to step in and buy up corn. If the price were right – and surely it was – private business would naturally send it to the markets where it was most needed. Manipulating those markets out of a misplaced sense of benevolence was a presumptuous meddling with God’s natural economic order. Stopping the export of oats, for example, was unthinkable. When the head of the relief commission, Randolph Routh, wrote to Trevelyan, ‘I know there is a great and serious objection to any interference with these exports, yet it is a most serious evil’, Trevelyan replied, ‘We beg of you not to countenance in any way the idea of prohibiting the exportation. The discouragement and feeling of insecurity to the trade from such a proceeding would prevent its doing even any immediate good. … indirect permanent advantages will accrue to Ireland from the scarcity … the greatest improvement of all which could take place in Ireland would be to teach the people to depend on themselves for developing the resources of their country.’
Pending this miracle, people were becoming desperate. Russell’s response was to continue Peel’s programme of outdoor relief, but to make public-works projects a test of character. Pay (averaging ninepence a day) was to be pegged to labour, and the labour was deliberately made so back-breaking that it would not attract shirkers, since, as Harry David Jones, the chairman of the board of public works, reported to Trevelyan, ‘I believe everyone considers the government fair game to pluck as much as they can.’ There would have to be a lot of digging and breaking of rocks and backs before the pittance would be handed over. On the High Burren in County Clare a brass ring was used to judge whether the rocks had been broken into pieces small enough to warrant the payment of threepence an hour. Never mind that these roads seemed not to go anywhere. ‘The labourers work for their wages,’ Captain Henry O’Brien wrote from County Clare, ‘but seeing clearly that what they are doing is of no clear value, their heart, they say, is not in it.’
Brutally penal as these work gangs were, for the desperate they were the only alternative to starvation. To the dismay of the government in London, the Irish relief authorities felt they could no longer turn away the hordes of women and children pleading for the work. By December 1846, in an exceptionally harsh winter, 441,000 of them were employed; by the following March, 714,000. In the worst-affected western counties, like Clare, more than 20 per cent of the entire population was being kept alive – though barely – by hard labour. Whether its harshness killed some of them seemed to the book-keepers of calamity just a statistical footnote.
By this time, some of the more ghoulish spectacles were being graphically reported in the English press. The dying and the dead of the Skibbereen workhouse, where, between October 1846 and January 1847, 266 of the inmates perished, became known to all Victorian newspaper readers along with their post mortems. Vegetable refuse and grass were being consumed to stave off starvation. In January, the Dublin paper The Nation reprinted a post mortem from the Mayo Constitution recording that ‘Bridget Joyce and four children died in a small sheep house in a small field at Gleneadagh … it appeared in evidence that the deceased and her family were in the utmost state of destitution and one of the children had nothing to wet the lips of its dying parent but a drop of water and a little snow. The body lay for eight days before a few boards could be procured to make a coffin, in such a state of destitution was the locality. Verdict – death from starvation.’
Small girls were selling their hair to stay alive. Mothers in Donegal walked miles to sell a little wool to be able to buy some meal to feed their family, although women with meal were a prime target for the desperate. Charlock – wild cabbage – became almost a staple, with families flocking to the wet fields where it grew to rip the young leaves out and boil them at home. It wasn’t enough. Communal burial pits were filling up; some families concealed deaths so they could continue to receive relief. So many village priests were dying that newborns were often unable to be baptized before they too perished and so were denied a consecrated burial ground. Mothers were seen carrying dead children on their backs to a remote burial site. In Connemara, on the Atlantic shore, it seems to have been the fathers’ task to take their dead babies to the edge of the ocean, to the ancient limbo-spaces of water, land and sky, and to dig little graves, marked by a rough stone cut from the cliffs. Circles of 30 and 40 of the wind-scoured, lichen-flecked stones, their jagged grey edges pointing this way and that, stand by the roaring surf, the saddest little mausoleum in all Irish history.
Worried by public reaction, though still convinced it was all a blessing in disguise, Trevelyan cranked up the mighty engine of Victorian philanthropy. A British Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and Scotland (for there was also a serious potato blight in the Highlands) was established in January 1847, with the queen donating the first £1000; when invited to do better by its founder, the courageous Stephen Spring-Rice, she doubled her contribution. Albert gave £500; the great and the good – Barings and Rothschilds, the Bishop of London, the Earl of Dalhousie, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone and even the Ottoman Sultan – chipped in to increase the fund to £470,000 (about £20 million in today’s money). Trevelyan, Peel, Wood and Russell all gave generously. The fund helped supply the soup kitchens.
While the milk of Victorian charity was flowing the Whig government’s attitude to what could be done to mitigate suffering was, if anything, hardening. The road and harbour works had been so overwhelmed by numbers that the original pretence to provide pay for specific work had all but collapsed, leaving Trevelyan and Sir Charles Wood deeply uneasy about what they were doing. The migration of huge numbers towards the works had also, they thought, depleted country towns of their population. A decision was taken to close the works down. In their place would be the philanthropically funded soup kitchens (where the Quakers had already, and, characteristically, taken the initiative), and the 130 workhouses established by the Irish Poor Law of 1838. There was no reason to suppose, of course, that when the choice was between the penal regime of the workhouses (even with its uniforms, separation of families and prison diet) and starvation, they would not be as overwhelmed by sheer numbers as the relief works. So the Tory MP for Dublin, William Gregory, passed an amendment to the act that restricted workhouse relief to peasants with a quarter of an acre or less. The practical consequences of the Gregory clause ushered in a completely new, and monstrously inhumane, phase of the tragedy. The vast majority of even the poorest peasants had needed more than a quarter of an acre if they were to house their family in just the most primitive stone cabin and supply them with a subsistence diet. Now, with no potatoes and no money, they were faced with the choice of surrendering their acre or two to the landlord to be eligible for workhouse relief, or staying put, starving and probably facing forcible ‘ejectment’ for failure to pay rent. It was no choice at all.
This was precisely the ‘social revolution’ that Trevelyan was looking for: the voluntary migration of the poorest smallholders to the ports or the workhouses; or their eviction. In either case it opened the way for the consolidation of a multitude of economically unviable plots into tenant farms that had, as far as he was concerned, a solid economic future. It would hurt, but it would be the birth-pangs of an Irish yeomanry.
In some peculiar way Charles Trevelyan – and the majority of the government such as Wood and Russell, who thought just like him – believed that this huge social upheaval represented some sort of lesson for everyone concerned. The selfish landlords who had thought that the British treasury would bail them out from years of neglect and exploitation were now told that they were going to bear the cost of fun
ding workhouse relief from their own local rates. This was supposed to make them ‘self-reliant’, just as a spell in the workhouse, a passage in steerage to New Zealand or a job as a landless labourer working for the new ‘yeomanry’ was supposed to wean the peasants from illicitly brewed poteen and potatoes. What actually happened, of course, was an almost animal struggle to survive, with the weakest going to the wall quickest. The landlords screamed at the government, to no avail. If they were going to have to bear the cost of the workhouses (they had 100,000 occupants by the end of 1847), they would also make sure that those who had left their plots to go there would not come back. Cabins were broken down; roofs smashed in. Their pathetic ruins still stud the low hills in Clare, Mayo and Galway. At Kilrush in County Clare in 1849, 1200 people, many of them suffering from cholera, saw their dwellings demolished in a fortnight. At Erris in County Mayo the Quaker activist James Hack Tuke saw police, reinforced by soldiers, throw sticks of furniture and kitchen pots out from people’s homes:
The tenants make resistance – for these hovels have been built by themselves or their forefathers who have resided in them for generations past – seem inclined to dispute with the bayonets of the police for they know truly that when their hovels are demolished the nearest ditch must be their dwelling and thus exposed, death could not fail to be the lot of some of their wives and little ones. … Six or seven hundred persons were here evicted, young and old, mother and babe were alike cast forth without the means of subsistence! A favoured few were allowed to remain on condition they would voluntarily depart. … At a dinner party that evening, the landlord, as I was told by one of the party, boasted that this was the first time he had seen the estate or visited the tenants.
