From the BBC -

A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of “new fundamentals”, according to a leading food expert.

Tim Lang warned that the current system, designed in the 1940s, was showing “structural failures”, such as “astronomic” environmental costs.

The new approach needed to address key fundamentals like biodiversity, energy, water and urbanisation, he added.

Professor Lang is a member of the UK government’s newly formed Food Council.

“Essentially, what we are dealing with at the moment is a food system that was laid down in the 1940s,” he told BBC News.

“It followed on from the dust bowl in the US, the collapse of food production in Europe and starvation in Asia.

“At the time, there was clear evidence showing that there was a mismatch between producers and the need of consumers.”

Professor Lang, from City University, London, added that during the post-war period, food scientists and policymakers also thought increasing production would reduce the cost of food, while improving people’s diets and public health.

“But by the 1970s, evidence was beginning to emerge that the public health outcomes were not quite as expected,” he explained.

“Secondly, there were a whole new set of problems associated with the environment.”

Thirty years on and the world was now facing an even more complex situation, he added.

“The level of growth in food production per capita is dropping off, even dropping, and we have got huge problems ahead with an explosion in human population.”

Fussy eaters

Professor Lang lists a series of “new fundamentals”, which he outlined during a speech he made as the president-elect of charity Garden Organic, which will shape future food production, including:

• Oil and energy: “We have an entirely oil-based food economy, and yet oil is running out. The impact of that on agriculture is one of the drivers of the volatility in the world food commodity markets.”
• Water scarcity: “One of the key things that I have been pushing is to get the UK government to start auditing food by water,” Professor Lang said, adding that 50% of the UK’s vegetables are imported, many from water-stressed nations.
• Biodiversity: “Biodiversity must not just be protected, it must be replaced and enhanced; but that is going to require a very different way growing food and using the land.”
• Urbanisation: “Probably the most important thing within the social sphere. More people now live in towns than in the countryside. In which case, where do they get their food?”

Professor Lang said that in order to feed a projected nine billion people by 2050, policymakers and scientists face a fundamental challenge: how can food systems work with the planet and biodiversity, rather than raiding and pillaging it?

The UK’s Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, recently set up a Council of Food Policy Advisers in order to address the growing concern of food security and rising prices.

Mr Benn, speaking at the council’s launch, warned: “Global food production will need to double just to meet demand.

“We have the knowledge and the technology to do this, as things stand, but the perfect storm of climate change, environmental degradation and water and oil scarcity, threatens our ability to succeed.”

Professor Lang, who is a member of the council, offered a suggestion: “We are going to have to get biodiversity into gardens and fields, and then eat it.

“We have to do this rather than saying that biodiversity is what is on the edge of the field or just outside my garden.”

Michelin-starred chef and long-time food campaigner Raymond Blanc agrees with Professor Lang, adding that there is a need for people, especially in the UK, to reconnect with their food.

He is heading a campaign called Dig for Your Dinner, which he hopes will help people reconnect with their food and how, where and when it is grown.

“Food culture is a whole series of steps,” he told BBC News.

“Whatever amount of space you have in your backyard, it is possible to create a fantastic little garden that will allow you to reconnect with the real value of gardening, which is knowing how to grow food.

“And once you know how to grow food, it would be very nice to be able to cook it. If you are growing food, then it only makes sense that you know how to cook it as well.

“And cooking food will introduce you to the basic knowledge of nutrition. So you can see how this can slowly reintroduce food back into our culture.”

Waste not…

Mr Blanc warned that food prices were likely to continue to rise in the future, which was likely to prompt more people to start growing their own food.

He was also hopeful that the food sector would become less wasteful.

“We all know that waste is everywhere; it is immoral what is happening in the world of food.

“In Europe, 30% of the food grown did not appear on the shelves of the retailers because it was a funny shape or odd colour.

“At least the amendment to European rules means that we can now have some odd-shaped carrots on our shelves. This is fantastic news, but why was it not done before?”

He suggested that the problem was down to people choosing food based on sight alone, not smell and touch.

“The way that seeds are selected is about immunity to any known disease; they have also got to grow big and fast, and have a fantastic shelf life.

“Never mind taste, texture or nutrition, it is all about how it looks.

“The British consumer today has got to understand that when they make a choice, let’s say an apple – either Chinese, French or English one – they are making a political choice, a socio-economic choice, as well as an environmental one.

“They are making a statement about what sort of society and farming they are supporting.”

Growing appetite

The latest estimates from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that another 40 million people have been pushed into hunger in 2008 as a result of higher food prices.

This brings the overall number of undernourished people in the world to 963 million, compared to 923 million in 2007.

The FAO warned that the ongoing financial and economic crisis could tip even more people into hunger and poverty.

“World food prices have dropped since early 2008, but lower prices have not ended the food crisis in many poor countries,” said FAO assistant director-general Hafez Ghanem at the launch of the agency’s State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008 report.

“The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality,” he added.

Professor Lang outlined the challenges facing the global food supply system: “The 21st Century is going to have to produce a new diet for people, more sustainably, and in a way that feeds more people more equitably using less land.”

Here is an excerpt of Tim Lang’s speech:

During this talk I’m going to cover very quickly ‘structural factors’ that I think are shaping the world of food, then I’m going to explore ‘what the policy context is’ [...].

So the first:

I could probably rant at this point! Essentially the twentieth century and all the progress, which there undoubtedly has been, has been built upon certain assumptions and certain infrastructural givens.

I do want to stress, when we’re saying how terrible things are, that actually there have been huge advances in the 20th centaury; increased output of food, more people being fed, wider range and availability, people being fed better and life expectancy rocketing in many countries for all sorts of complicated reasons, but within that, diet has been a critical factor.

Lets not forget that.

BUT. The environmental cost has been astronomic. The impact on public health, which is what my colleagues and I work on a lot, is immense. Diet is now THE single, biggest factor in causing premature death worldwide.

Even in Sub-Saharan Africa five percent of the population are obese. Even in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The impact of inappropriate eating, inappropriate diet, and inappropriate food ingredients on the globe is now really well documented. The problem is, and just recently on the 28th August the World Health Organisation’s commission on Social Determinants of Health came out documenting this, where does that leave the world of food?

New Fundamentals

Within the Royal Institute of International Affairs’ food supply working party, which I’ve been in for three years and which is coming out with a big report this time next month, I have been arguing that the new 21th Century world of food in going to be based on what I call the ‘New Fundamentals’. These fundamental factors might be obvious to you (Garden Organic members) but not necessarily to everyone.

Oil

Firstly oil. Oil and energy. Cheap non-renewable resources of energy have underpinned everything; the agrochemicals, the fertilisers, the tractors replacing the land used to grow oats to feed the horses that drove the ploughs. You name it, you think it, its all based on oil. Even down to the oil that drives the Volvo that takes you six miles on average now to the hypermarket to get the cheaper food. We have an entirely oil based food economy. And yet oil is running out. The impact of that on agriculture is one of the drivers of the volatility in the world food commodity markets. Everyone knows that.

Water

Secondly, most of my colleagues in food policy around the world agree, that actually important though oil is, the thing that is going to bring 21st century approach to food to its knees, is actually not oil, but water!

I speak as someone who was a farmer in the Forest of Bowland, which is the centre of God’s plughole! I have a friend whose farm has 120 inches of rain a year. It seems inconceivable that anyone speaking in the English language, let alone anyone with a British passport, could say that water is a problem. It is.

50% of all vegetables coming into this country come from foreign countries. Think of the growth, the explosion of growth, just in Kenyan green beans. Well every stem of a green been from Kenya, each stem, has used four litres, yes four litres of potable water, and this in a water stressed country. We have a very complicated situation emerging around water.

I am a commissioner on the Government’s sustainable development commission and I led a review of how the Government deals and doesn’t deal with supermarkets as the gatekeepers of the modern food economy. One of the key things that we tried to push, and I certainly pushed very hard and have been pushing behind the scenes, is to get Defra to start auditing, begin to develop the methodology for auditing food by water. It is going to be the decider in the next 30 years. Water economy, water exchange, and virtual water are going to be critical factors.

Climate change

Thirdly, climate change. Climate change is altering everything; where food can grow, how it can grow, etc. You know it; it is going to alter what we can do.

Biodiversity

Fourthly, biodiversity. The collapse of biodiversity is something that even worries the agro-chemical companies whose market is about selling. Some very strange things are happening now. The old black/white, them/us divisions that the organic movement, and the gardening world, have dealt with are going to begin to break down. You will start to get very radical thoughts coming out of the long-term thinkers and planners in companies that we’ve spent a lot of our time arguing against and with. Biodiversity is another of the key factors.

Demographics

Demographics. You don’t have to be a eugenicist to see that going from 6.7 billion people on the planet to 9 billion on the planet by 2050 means a lot more food has got to be produced. A factor is what diet people eat, so if you eat like the average American, well, frankly, we’re dead, the planet can’t do it. If you eat like us in Britain, the planet can’t do it. If you eat like the Chinese of a hundred years ago you can feed 12 billion. What you eat is a critical factor but none the less the demographics are an important feature now.

Urbanisation

Urbanisation is probably the most important thing within the social sphere. The shift we have now, it is arguable, is that we are just past the point where, for the first time in human history, more people live in the towns than in the country. In which case where do they get their food?

That’s why I told you about my failures with my own garden. I can’t grow my own food. My wife and I try to have something from our garden, even if it’s just a herb each meal but we eat out a great deal. Any pretence of feeding myself is a nonsense.

Now write that over 5 billion people. Who’s going to grow the food? Where are they going to grow it? Who’s going to be the labour force?

Labour

There has been a collapse of the labour force. Look in Britain at the racism over the migrant labour. I was born in Lincoln; my home county has been a disgrace! The Fens are a major producer of vegetables. It has brought in migrant labour at very low rates and then treated them disgustingly. Now this is delicate stuff I know, but if British people are not prepared to go and work in the fields, how are we going to grow veg?

We need to consume less meat, less dairy, more fruit and more veg – but from where?

Nutrition transition

The ‘nutrition transition’ is a phrase that in my world is critical. It is a transformation that happens when people get richer and they alter their diet. They eat more fat and more meat, unless from vegetarian culture. People shift from drinking water or tea to soft drinks i.e sugar. They get increased calories. It makes them fatter, leads to heart disease and degenerative diseases. The nutrition transition is not just an issue of nutrition, though it is, with direct impact on health, it is also a major cultural phenomenon. The culture, the psychology of it is very important.

Health care costs

The thing that gets me out of bed each day is health care costs. The reason the food system cannot go on as it is going on is because of the cost of health care.

The cost of diet related diseases to the NHS in this, the 5th richest country, is unsustainable. Think what it does to India. The town I was brought up in, now one of the biggest cities in the world, Mumbai, has the highest rate of diabetes type 2 in the world. And it has no NHS. It is a disease of the rich. Here it is a disease of the poor. Poor people here are fat; in India rich people are fat. It is a return for us to the 18th Century. The health care costs are bringing the country to its knees.

Think about how much it applies in the US where 40 million people don’t even have health care insurance. Now apply it to the developing world, which is going through a nutrient transition and then think of your Cargill or Monsanto or Nestle, one of the big companies. Nestle sells 1% of all food consumed on the planet and plans to increase this to 2% by 2020. That may sound very small, but it is awesome power and that’s my final point.

Price volatility and Battles of power

Volatility of price is coinciding with battles of power, of power and control.

So these are what I call the ‘New Fundamentals’. But what’s the response of Government? What is the policy context?

Firstly they have not taken any notice of it. We have been lonely voices. But actually there is incredibly good evidence that has been building up since 1975. The Government’s own report from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy in 1974 said the health care cost of cardiovascular disease and diet related ill health is unsustainable. That is 34 years ago. Nothing new about this but the evidence has built up to a point at which the system is not going to be able to carry on in the same way in which it has been doing.

Now let’s go back to the 1930s. The evidence creators, researchers and scientists said “We don’t need to have this crisis of collapsing farming, of malnutrition in the big Western cities, of absolute malnutrition in Asia.” and they came up with what my world would call Productionism i.e. that with suitable use of science, capital investment, and research, you can produce more.

Has anyone here heard about Sir George Stapleton? Well, what Stapleton was about was that if you put drainage into the uplands you can grow different grasses and what looks like unproductive moor land, will deliver. It may deliver more meat, they weren’t thinking about heart disease then, but it will deliver.

But basically that Productionist model is now what is under threat. That whole model, although it has gone through various changes and evolutions etc, is now in trouble.

The economic mainstream thinking is essentially neo liberalism; let markets survive.

But in fact what Productionism fed into in the 1940′s, in the post war reconstruction, symbolised by Lord John Boyd Orr who was the first Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation was the need to harness nature by investment and by rebuilding skills.

And that is what is now coming unstuck, that whole diverse set of experiments gone off on different paths that people like Stapleton and Boyd Orr, like the organic movement in their different ways have done, is now hitting its soft brick wall.

Mean-time one of the irons of doing things differently, the Common Agricultural Policy, (CAP) which actually was set up to stop malnutrition and hunger in Europe, people forget that, just became a subsidy milking scheme from you and me as tax payers to rich land owners. Particularly here in Britain. 80% off all the money from the CAP went to 20% of farmers. It was a siphon from the mass to the few.

Now what is the British Government’s position of dealing with the New Fundamentals? The first is that it is actually ignoring it. In 2005/06 the Treasury and Defra put out major policy statements that said don’t have policies, let the markets decide! Sweep away the CAP, decouple! And that’s actually happened! So now just when we need a policy, a set of levers to address the New Fundamentals, we haven’t got one. We actually haven’t got any engagement. That is when I start getting worried and that is why I’m here because I think this is the policy vacuum that people like your good selves have got to get involved with.

Photograph from Bentley Organic

From Graham Harvey’s blog -

Those of us who produce and market local food – or, like me, simply enjoy consuming it – don’t need reminding that it’s often a healthier way to eat. Now at last it seems the government is finally catching up with the benefits.

Health minister Ben Bradshaw has told the Commons that patients in west country hospitals showed faster recovery rates when offered locally-produced meat, dairy products, fish and vegetables than those given the usual anonymous hospital food. The comments are based on findings in Cornwall where health trusts have made big efforts to cut food miles and support local farmers and growers.

According to Ben Bradshaw no less than 80 per cent of the food served in Cornwall’s hospitals now comes from local farmers, butchers, milk producers and fishermen. Not only was local food proving popular with patients, he told the Commons, but it had actually hastened recovery rates.

Let’s hope other government departments take note of the findings. If fresh, local produce can improve the health of people in hospital, it can bring benefits to the wider community too. Institutions like hospitals, schools and prisons are only the starting point. What this obese and sickly nation needs is a totally new food system based on well-grown, nutrient-rich produce.

Sad to see that National Farmers’ Union president Peter Kendall is still pushing for an expansion of large-scale, commodity food. At the union’s AGM he spoke of Britain’s “moral duty” to make “our optimum contribution to global supplies of food and bio-energy”. What this means is that big arable farmers should be free to profit from ever higher production of low-grade industrial crops for global markets. The main beneficiaries of such a policy would be chemical companies and commodity traders. The victims would include the people of Britain, small farmers, the world’s poor and the global environment.

I agree with the NFU president that Britain has a moral duty to use its farmland wisely. But as I see it the wisest thing Britain’s farmers could do for the world is concentrate on growing healthy foods for the 60 million or so people of these islands. And they need to do it using methods that safeguard soil fertility and the global environment for future generations. This way farmers will once again become national heroes. And, like the hospital patients of Cornwall, we’ll all be a lot fitter.

And another of his posts -

The truth is that, however smart our technologies, it’s the living community below ground that enables plants to grow. They supply plants with the nutrients they need, provide them with water and protect them against toxins and disease. Without the activity of soil life – from microscopic bacteria to earthworms – life above ground would quickly grind to a halt.

Sadly chemical farming subjects these living communities to a non-stop toxic barrage, wiping out whole species and disrupting the intricate subterranean network that keeps plants healthy. With their natural support systems weakened, crop plants become more dependent on pesticides to keep them growing – which is great for the chemical industry but bad news for the rest of us.

Britain Rocks, Britain’s foundations

Ice’s shaping of the landscape

Taming the Wild

Redressing the balance in modern times

Irish Famine
Unit I. I.Laws that Isolated and Impoverished the IrishUNIT I: Laws that Isolated and Impoverished the Irish PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES1. The student will understand that the mass starvation in Ireland resulted from historical and political forces as well as the potato blight itself.

TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIESA.Students will Examine the laws designed to separate, subjugate and impoverish the native Irish.Activity 1. Students will read excerpted material from A Pocket History of Ireland The Great Hunger, (p.27-28) “Penal Laws” from The Story of the Irish Race. Students will answer questions following readings and discuss issues.Activity 2. Students will read excerpted material from A Pocket History of Ireland (p.40-41), the Encyclopedia Americana -International Edition on the economic theory of Laissez Faire and the writings of Thomas Robert Malthus. Students will answer questions following readings and discuss issues.Activity 3. Students will read “The Destruction of Irish Trade”, summarized and excerpted material from The Story of the Irish Race. Students will answer questions following the reading and discuss the issues raised.

INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL/RESOURCES

MacManus, Seamus, The Story of the Irish Race, The Irish Publishing Co., New York, 1922O hEithir, Breandan, A Pocket History. of Ireland, The O’Brien Press, Dublin, Ireland, 1989

Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991.

Encyclopedia, Americana, Grolier Incorporated, 1992.

Irish Famine
Unit I
Activity 1

The Statutes of Kilkenny

“So successful was this cultural assimilation that two hundred years after the first invaders arrived the English crown was forced to take severe measures at a parliament which assembled in Kilkenny, the heartland of Norman Ireland, in 1366. Its purpose was to preserve the racial purity and cultural separateness of the colonizers, thereby enabling the English crown to retain control over them.

It is a measure of the adaptability of both the Irish and the Normans that the crown was faced with such a problem. Not only were the Normans militarily superior, but their political, social and religious systems were different from those practiced by the natives. They favored central government, walled land cultivated intensively, inheritance through the first-born male, and large abbeys rather than small monastic settlements; and Norman French was their language. They secured their land by building castles, which functioned first as strong-points in the invasion and later as centers of control and power. The native Irish seemed to accept the new way of life as something they could, and had to, live with. Gradually, Gaelic culture prevailed and although the Normans controlled about two-thirds of the country in 1366, military might and political sophistication had not been sufficiently powerful to obliterate the native way of life.

The Duke of Clarence, son of Edward III, presided over the parliament which passed the Statutes of Kilkenny. Their purpose was to prevent further assimilation, by legal and religious penalties. The settlers were forbidden to use the Irish language. They were also forbidden to use Irish names, marry into Irish families, use the Irish mode of dress, adopt any Irish laws and play the Irish game of hurling. The measures were a failure. Gaelicisation had gone too far and by now the native population, having failed to beat the invaders on the field of battle, was in league militarily with the conquerors. By the end of the fifteenth century the English crown ruled only a small area around Dublin, known from its fortifications of earth and wood as ‘The Pale’ (meaning a fence or boundary). The term has lived on in contemporary politics to describe those who show little understanding of the problems of rural Ireland and whose outlook is conditioned by their metropolitan surroundings.”

O hEithir, Breandan, A Pocket History of Ireland, The O’Brien Press, Dublin, Ireland, 1989

Questions for discussion:

• What was the purpose of the Statutes of Kilkenny?
• What would be lost to the English rulers if the Irish and English (Normans) continued to intermarry?
• What do you think the term “Beyond the Pale” meant to an Englishman living in 14th century Dublin?

Irish Famine
Unit I
Activity 1

The Penal Laws“The Penal Laws, dating from 1695, and not repealed in their entirety until Catholic emancipation in 1829, aimed at the destruction of Catholicism in Ireland by a series of ferocious enactments, provoked by Irish support of the Stuarts after the Protestant William of Orange was invited to ascend the English throne in 1688, and England faced the greatest Catholic power in Europe – France. At this critical moment the Catholic Irish took up arms in support of the Stuarts. James II’s standard was raised in Ireland, and he, with an Irish Catholic army, was defeated on Irish soil, at the battle of the Boyne, near Drogheda, on July 1, 1690.The threat to England had been alarming, and vengeance followed. Irish intervention on behalf of the Stuarts was to be made impossible forever by reducing the Catholic Irish to helpless impotence. They were, in the words of a contemporary, to become ‘insignificant slaves, fit for nothing but to hew wood and draw water’, and to achieve this object the Penal Laws were devised.In broad outline, they barred Catholics from the army and navy, the law, commerce, and from every civic activity. No Catholic could vote, hold any office under the Crown, or purchase land, and Catholic estates were dismembered by an enactment directing that at the death of a Catholic owner his land was to be divided among all his sons, unless the eldest became a Protestant, when he would inherit the whole. Education was made almost impossible, since Catholics might not attend schools, nor keep schools, nor send their children to be educated abroad. The practice of the Catholic faith was proscribed; informing was encouraged as ‘an honorable service’ and priest-hunting treated as a sport.Such were the main provisions of the Penal Code, described by Edmund Burke as ‘a machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man’.The material damage suffered through the Penal Laws was great; ruin was widespread, old families disappeared and old estates were broken up; but the most disastrous effects were moral. The Penal Laws brought lawlessness, dissimulation and revenge in their train, and the Irish character, above all the character of the peasantry, did become, in Burke’s words, degraded and debased. The upper classes were able to leave the country and many middle-class merchants contrived, with guile, to survive, but the poor Catholic peasant bore the full hardship. His religion, made him an outlaw; in the Irish House of Commons he was described as ‘the common enemy’, and whatever was inflicted on him he must bear, for where could he look for redress? To his landlord, who was almost invariably an alien conqueror? To the law? Not when every person connected with the law, from the jailer to the judge, was a Protestant who regarded him as ‘the common enemy’.

In these conditions suspicion of the law, of the ministers of the law and of all established authority worked into the very nerves and blood of the Irish peasant, and, since the law did not give him justice, he set up his own law. The secret societies, which have been the curse of Ireland, became widespread during the Penal period, and a succession of underground associations, Oak Boys, White Boys and Ribbon Men, gathering in bogs and lonely glens, flouted the law and dispensed a people’s justice in the terrible form of revenge. The informer, the supplanter of an evicted tenant, the landlord’s man, were punished with dreadful savagery, and since animals were wealth, their unfortunate animals suffered, too. Cattle were ‘clifted’, driven over the edge of a cliff, horses hamstrung, dogs clubbed to death, stables fired and the animals within, burned alive. Nor were lawlessness, cruelty and revenge the only consequences. During the long Penal period, dissimulation became a moral necessity and evasion of the law the duty of every god-fearing Catholic. To worship according to his faith, the Catholic must attend illegal meetings; to protect his priest, he must be secret, cunning, and a concealer of the truth.

These were dangerous lessons for any government to compel its subjects to learn, and a dangerous habit of mind for any nation to acquire.”

Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunqer; Ireland 1845-1849 p.27-28 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991. First printing: 1962.

Irish Famine
Unit I
Activity 1

PENAL LAWS

“Professor Lecky, a Protestant of British blood and ardent British sympathy, says in his History of Ireland in the 18th Century that the object of the Penal Laws was threefold:

1. To deprive the Catholics of all civil life2. To reduce them to a condition of most extreme and brutal ignorance

3. To dissociate them from the soil.

4. He might, with absolute justice, substituted Irish for Catholics-and added, (4) to expirate (cause to expire) the Race.

• The Irish Catholic was forbidden the exercise of his religion.
• He was forbidden to receive education,
• He was forbidden to enter a profession.
• He was forbidden to hold public office.
• He was forbidden to engage in trade or commerce.
• He was forbidden to live in a corporate town or within five miles thereof.
• He was forbidden to own a horse of greater value than five pounds.
• He was forbidden to purchase land.
• He was forbidden to lease land.
• He was forbidden to accept a mortgage on land in security for a loan.
• He was forbidden to vote.
• He was forbidden to keep any arms for his protection.
• He was forbidden to hold a life annuity.
• He was forbidden to buy land from a Protestant.
• He was forbidden to receive a gift of land from a Protestant.
• He was forbidden to inherit land from a Protestant.
• He was forbidden to inherit anything from a Protestant.
• He was forbidden to rent any land that was worth more than thirty shillings a year.
• He was forbidden to reap from his land any profit exceeding a third of the rent.
• He could not be guardian to a child.
• He could not, when dying, leave his infant children under Catholic guardianship.
• He could not attend Catholic worship.
• He was compelled by law to attend Protestant worship.
• He could not himself educate his child.
• He could not send his child to a Catholic teacher.
• He could not employ a Catholic teacher to come to his child.
• He could not send his child abroad to receive education.

MacManus, Seamus, Story of the Irish Race, Devin-Adair Co., Grenwich, Connecticut, 1979 p.458-459

Irish Famine

Unit I
Activity 1

Questions for discussion:

• What was the purpose of the Penal Laws?
• How was religion used to divide the Irish from the English?
• Why was the education of Catholics forbidden?
• In what sense did an Irish Catholic exist under the Penal Laws?

Irish Famine
Unit I
Activity 2

The Famine

“A terrible national calamity which decimated the population and all but killed the Irish language (the everyday speech in areas ravaged by famine) was now occupying everyone’s attention. The great potato famines of 1845-51 reduced the population from 8 million to 6.6 million through starvation, disease and emigration to Britain and America. The Napoleonic war in Europe led to the growth in tillage farming to supply the armies. When it ended in 1815 it had a marked effect on the Irish economy. The potato had become the staple food for most of the rural population, but with the war’s end came a change from tillage to pasture. This caused much unemployment and the unemployed depended entirely on small patches of sub-divided land to grow enough potatoes to sustain them. The population had increased to 8 million, two-thirds of them depending on agriculture, much of which was at minimal level. When the potato crop was destroyed by blight the result was devastating: the people’s only source of food was gone.

Although the government in London was aware of the threatening problem, Ireland was not a major preoccupation and the famine had assumed the proportion of a crisis before schemes were implemented on a large scale. Even when they were it seemed that the crisis was of secondary importance when it came to preserving the economic policies of the day. These policies were based on the principle of non-interference with market forces in economic matters. Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. But that was a ‘money crop’ and not a ‘food crop’ and could not be interfered with. The relief schemes were frequently hastily thought up, and parts of Ireland still contain roads that lead to nowhere in particular – built during be famine. These are known as boithre na mine (meal roads) in Irish because a day’s work was paid for with imported Indian meal. Other relief schemes were organized by proselytizing Protestants who handed out food accompanied by religious tracts. Some Catholics did convert to the Protestant faith and were promptly christened ‘soupers’ (from the soup kitchen run by the proselytizers) as a mark of contempt by their stauncher fellow Catholic neighbors.

This disaster, one of the greatest to happen in a European country in peacetime, was a tragic condemnation of the Union. For the dilatory manner in which the crisis was dealt with in London was a result of sheer ignorance. The Times of London wrote the obituary of the Irish nation by writing that soon an Irishman in his native land would be as rare as an American Indian in his.”

O hEithir, Breandan, A Pocket History of Ireland, The O’Brien Press, Dublin, Ireland, 1989

Irish Famine
Unit I
Activity 2

“MALTHUS, mal’thes, Thomas Robert (1766-1834), British economist, whose theories of population and food supply had a deep influence on later economists, historians, and demographers. He was born near Guilford Surrey, England, on Feb. 14, 1766, the son of a well-to-do country gentleman. He entered Cambridge in 1784, where he became interested in mathematics. In 1797 he took holy orders and briefly occupied a country parish. After some travel, he was appointed (1805) professor of history and political economy at Haileybury, the college established by the East India Company for its cadets. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died near Bath, England, on Dec. 29, 1834.

Malthus’ father was of liberal views, a friend of Jean Jacques Rousseau and an admirer of William Godwin and the marquis de Condorcet, all of whom represented the high hopes for social progress associated with the 18th century Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. But the younger Malthus, partly because of his training and partly because the intellectual climate in England had become ultraconservative following the French Revolution, came to opposite and more pessimistic conclusions about future of mankind. His argument rested on two “postulata”-that food is necessary for existence, and that “the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain.” He asserted that “the human species would increase in the ratio of 1, 2, 4, 8… and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4…. ” Thus population growth would be checked by inadequate food supplies, reducing the majority to a bare subsistence.

These views, implying that Nature was destructive of any hope for lessening poverty, and poor relief was self-defeating, were expressed in a short pamphlet, Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), which projected him into public attention with a vengeance. Very few works of equal brevity have aroused so much wrath or have been so influential. This attention was the more remarkable since Malthus’ ideas were not original (as he admitted) and were based on assertion, not observation. Nevertheless, his argument helped shape public policy for generations, and is even invoked today.

Malthusian population doctrine has generally been used to ‘blame the victim”-that is, to support the belief that the ultimate source of poverty is the lack of foresight of the poor. In the first edition of the Essay, where the argument was presented with simplistic certainty, the only “checks” on overpopulation were said to be vice and, especially, misery. In later editions he admitted that late marriage would be another check to population. Still later, in his Principles of Political Economy (1820), he altered the argument further by relating population growth not directly to food supplies but to increasing employment opportunities. Thus general economic progress would “have a favorable effect upon the poor” if they were industrious and frugal. But it was his first and harshest statement that caught the public eye.

Malthus also popularized or contributed other principles to the new science of political economy. In 1815 he developed a theory of land-rent based on the principle of “diminishing returns.” This holds that successive units of productive inputs, such as labor or capital, when applied to a given amount of land, would result in progressively smaller units of output (food).

Diminishing returns reinforces the dismal prospects of his population principle, since it means that as population grows, more and more labor will be needed to produce each unit of food.

But the argument ignored the effect of scientific agriculture, the opening of new, more fertile lands, and technological progress generally. All of these have increased agricultural output per unit of input and made possible a rising standard of living for a larger population. Besides the “population principle” and “diminishing returns,” Malthus conceived the notion that accumulation of capital, the foundation of industrial production, could go forward too rapidly. In that case, he said, too much would be produced, and the market would suffer from a “glut” of unsold goods. Looking at this problem from a conservative view, as he generally did, Malthus found the solution in the exaggerated consumption habits and large numbers of servants employed by the well-to-do landowning class. He asserted that “a body of unproductive consumers was needed to preserve a “balance between produce and consumption.”

But, as his great adversary (and friend) David Ricardo saw, England’s industrial prosperity in the 1820′s required more productive capital-that is, wage-goods as well as factories and machines-and not more unproductive consumers. Ricardo’s views, which reflected industrialists’ and workers’ interests as opposed to landowners’, carried the day-all too well in fact, hardening into a dogma that survived for over a century.

Then in 1936, during the Great Depression, Malthus’ theory of overproduction and “glut’ was rescued from obscurity by John Maynard Keynes, who praised him for having anticipated by over a century the source of depressions. Keynes’ theoretical model, like Malthus’, was designed to preserve the status quo. Thus, paradoxically, the ideas for which Malthus was best known in his own time have been largely discarded or disproven, while the doctrine least accepted in his day has been raised from the dead, as it were, in modern Keynesianism.”

H. John Thorkelson
University of Connecticut

Encyclopedia Americana, Grolier Incorporated, 1992. First printing: 1829

Irish Famine
Unit I
Activity 2

“LAISSEZ FAIRE, le-sa-far’, a phrase that epitomized l9th century economic and political philosophy in the English-speaking world. The term usually is translated to mean “leave it (the economic system) alone.” It calls for and supports a “hands-off” policy on the part of government. The phrase itself is originally French. The thought behind it, however, is English as well. In the 18th century, great emphasis was placed on natural law throughout Western Europe. It was held that the natural order of things was best designed to produce the most beneficent results for mankind, if man would only leave it alone. This spurred investigations in the natural sciences to discover the immutable laws of nature. Philosophically, mankind was urged to accept and follow these laws. In political and economic organization, laissez hire became the accepted policy.

The most vocal arguments in the 18th century came from France. A group known today as the Physiocrats, who called themselves “les economistes,’ carried the philosophical arguments of natural law into the social field. A French merchant named Legendre is credited with saying in 1680 that if you want to advance commerce and industry “leave them alone” (laissez faire). The injunction was directed at the French government of that day, which was stifling industry and trade with excessive regulation. The argument was carried into the political field by the marquis d’Argueseau, who in 1753 declared that “to govern better, it is necessary to govern less.” This point of view found its way into American political philosophy in the form of the Jeffersonian “The least governed are the best governed.”

It remained for Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, to provide a definitive philosophical justification for a policy of laissez faire in economic affairs. That was the doctrine of the “invisible hand” propounded in his Wealth of Nations. (1776) The argument ran that people, if left to their own devices and unimpeded by governmental regulation, would conduct their economic activities as if guided by an unseen, invisible hand so as to maximize both their own and their society’s economic well-being. This represented an ultimate faith in natural law and in each individual’s relation to the natural order.

Practically, a policy of laissez hire meant extreme individualism in economic and political affairs, and a “hands-off” attitude on the part of government. “Free trade,” “free enterprise,” “rugged individualism,” and “free competition”, are all phrases that represent laissez hire in action, particularly in the English-speaking world of the 19th century. The freedom so frequently referred to is freedom from all but the minimum amount of governmental intervention.

Laissez faire and the philosophy of natural law from which it emanates are no longer dominant economic forces. In the 20th century, greater emphasis has been placed on mankind stability to master its fate through collective action. Trade unions and manufacturers’ associations represent this trend. Governmental intervention or regulation “for the good of all” has in many areas superseded free and untrammeled individualism. Laissez faire – now often referred to as the market economy – is now only one of many policies vying for preeminence in the economic affairs of the Western World.”

WILLIAM N. KINNARD, Jr.
University of Connecticut

Encyclopedia Americana, Grolier Incorporated, 1992.

Questions for discussion:

• Should a laissez faire policy have been applied to Ireland during a time when the main food crop of the poor was devastated? In other words, should the market forces of supply and demand be altered during a mass starvation?
• Should the colonial power allow exports of food from a country because greater profits are to be obtained elsewhere?
• If British government officials believed Malthus’ theory that population growth is to be halted by inadequate food supplies, and that poor relief was self-defeating, how should they respond to the Irish Famine?
• What if the food supplies in Ireland were adequate, but the poor could not afford them? What should be the policy then?

Irish Famine
Unit I
Activity 3

The Destruction of Irish TradeThe early Irish were famous for their excellence in arts and crafts, especially for their wonderful work in metals, bronze, silver and gold. By the beginning of the 14th century trading ships were constantly sailing between Ireland and the leading ports of the Continent.

COMPETITION WITH ENGLAND

This commerce was a threat to English merchants who tried to discourage such trade. They brought pressure on their government, which passed a law in 1494 that prohibited the Irish from exporting any industrial product, unless it was shipped through an English port, with an English permit after paying English fees. However, England was not able to enforce the law. By 1548 British merchants were using armed vessels to attack and plunder trading ships travelling between Ireland and the Continent. (unofficial piracy)

ENGLISH MEN, ENGLISH SHIPS, ENGLISH CREWS, ENGLISH PORTS AND IRISH GOODS

In 1571 Queen Elizabeth ordered that no cloth or stuff made in Ireland could be exported, even to England, except by English men in Ireland. The act was amended in 1663 to prohibit the use of all foreign-going ships, except those that were built in England, mastered and three-fourths manned by English, and cleared from English ports. The return cargoes had to be unloaded in England. Ireland’s shipbuilding industry was thus destroyed and her trade with the Continent wiped out.

TRADE WITH THE COLONIES

Ireland then began a lucrative trade with the Colonies. That was “cured” in 1670 by a new law which forbade Ireland to export to the colonies “anything except horses, servants, and victuals.” England followed with a decree that no Colonial products could be landed in Ireland until they had first landed in England and paid all English rates and duties.

Ireland was forbidden to engage in trade with the colonies and plantations of the New World if it involved sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, rice, and numerous other items. The only item left for Ireland to import was rum. The English wanted to help English rum makers in the West Indies at the expense of Irish farmers and distillers.

IRISH WOOL TRADE CURTAILED, THEN DESTROYED

When the Irish were forbidden to export their sheep, they began a thriving trade in wool. In 1634 The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Stafford, wrote to King Charles I: “All wisdom advises us to keep this (Irish) kingdom as much subordinate and dependent on England as possible; and, holding them from manufacture of wool (which unless otherwise directed, I shall by all means discourage), and then enforcing them to fetch their cloth from England, how can they depart from us without nakedness and beggary?”

In 1660 even the export of wool from Ireland to England was forbidden. Other English laws prohibited all exports of Irish wool in any form. In 1673, Sir William Temple advised that the Irish would act wisely by giving up the manufacture of wool even for home use, because “it tended to interfere prejudicially with the English woolen trade.”

George II sent three warships and eight other armed vessels to cruise off the coast of Ireland to seize all vessels carrying woolens from Ireland. “So ended the fairest promise that Ireland had ever known of becoming a prosperous and a happy country.”

LINEN TRADE REPRESSED

Irish linen manufacturing met with the same fate when the Irish were forbidden to export their product to all other countries except England. A thirty percent duty was levied in England, effectively prohibiting the trade. English manufacturers, on the other hand, were granted a bounty for all linen exports.

BEEF, PORK, BUTTER AND CHEESE

In 1665 Irish cattle were no longer welcome in England, so the Irish began killing them and exporting the meat. King Charles II declared that the importation of cattle, sheep, swine and beef from Ireland was henceforth a common nuisance, and forbidden. Pork and bacon were soon prohibited, followed by butter and cheese.

SILK AND TOBACCO

In the middle of the 18th century, Ireland began developing a silk weaving industry. Britain imposed a heavy duty on Irish silk, but British manufactured silk was admitted to Ireland duty-free. Ireland attempted to develop her tobacco industry, but that too was prohibited.

FISH

In 1819 England withdrew the subsidy for Irish fisheries and increased the subsidies to British fishermen – with the result that Ireland’s possession of one of the longest coastlines in Europe, still left it with one of the most miserable fisheries.

GLASS

Late in the 18th century the Irish became known for their manufacture of glass. George II forbade the Irish to export glass to any country whatsoever under penalty of forfeiting ship, cargo and ten shillings per pound weight.

THE RESULT

By 1839, a French visitor to Ireland, Gustave de Beaumont, was able to write:

“In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland. To explain the social condition of such a country, it would be only necessary to recount its miseries and its sufferings; the history of the poor is the history of Ireland.”

CONCLUSION

From the 15th through the 19th centuries, successive English monarchies and governments enacted laws designed to suppress and destroy Irish manufacturing and trade. These repressive Acts, coupled with the Penal Laws, reduced the Irish people to “nakedness and beggary” in a very direct and purposeful way. The destitute Irish then stood at the very brink of the bottomless pit. When the potato blight struck in 1845, it was but time for the final push.

Summarized from pages 483-492 of:

MacManus, Seamus, The Story of the Irish Race, New York, The Irish Publishing Company, 1922

Irish Famine
Unit 1
Activity 3

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

• Why did the English wish to have complete control over Irish trade and manufacturing?
• What do you think would be the long-term effects of halting every attempt by a people to export their goods?
• How does this story help us understand how the Irish became impoverished enough to live off potatoes?
• Is this kind of governmental interference in trade the opposite of laissez faire?

Irish Famine
Unit IIII.Racism UNIT II – RacismADDITIONAL UNIT GOALS:

PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES

1.The student will be able to define and give examples of anti-Irish racism, and relate them to the Irish Famine experience.

TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES

A.Students will learn that anti-Irish racism and anti-Catholic discrimination have been an inherent part of British colonial rule in Ireland. Students will also examine this racism in the context of racism against other peoples.

Activity 1. Students will view anti-Irish cartoons, finding, listing and discussing racist stereotypes.Activity 2. Students will read “Out of Africa, Out of Ireland” and “British Racism: Before, During and After the Famine”. They will then answer questions following the readings and discuss the issues raised.

INSTRUCTIONAL, MATERIAL/RESOURCES“Out of Africa, Out of Ireland” and “British Racism: Before, During, and After the Famine”. (see footnotes for sources) “Bog Trotters” is a long-standing English term for Irish people,especially Irish peasants. They are shown here as near imbeciles,frolicking over the countryside. “The Irish Ogre” about to devour the peasants is none other than Daniel O’Connell, “the Liberator”. He earned that name by leading a peaceful struggle for Catholic emancipation. Why he is depicted with copious bags of rent money is unclear. “The workingman’s burden” shows a gleeful Irish peasant carrying his Famine relief money while riding on the back of an exhausted English laborer. The cartoon could just as easily have depicted Irish peasants carrying absentee English landlords on their backs. “The Pig and the Peer”. This cartoon shows a life-size pig with an Irish accent pleading with the English Prime Minister. During the Famine thousands of Irish peasants were evicted to make way for animals that could “pay rent”. “Two Forces” shows “classical” Britain using the sword of law to protect Ireland (Hibernia) from Irish “anarchists” and their demand for land reform. “The Irish Frankenstein” capitalized on Mary Shelley’s popular novel to depict the Irish as savage, inhuman monsters. This untitled cartoon shows the Irish as obese, wasteful, violent, drug abusing monkeys. John Bull (Britain) shows Uncle Sam that he will take care of the troublemaker. “Equal Burdens”. Here the stereotype of the belligerent Irishman meets the stereotype of the happy slave. Irish were called “white Negroes”. “Uncle Sam’s Lodging House” shows the Irish as the only new emigrant raising hell and disrupting good order. “American Gold” contrasts the industrious Irish in America with the slothful Irish in Ireland. “No Irish Need Apply” signs were common. “The Day We Celebrate” by American cartoonist Thomas Nast shows the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day as violent, drunken apes. “Scientific Racism” from an American magazine, Harper’s Weekly, shows that the Irish are similar to Negroes, and should be extinct! This British cartoon shows backward Chinese blocking “Progress” only ten years after the “Opium War” when the British government used troops and gunboats to force the Chinese to accept illegal opium trafficking.Irish Famine
Unit II
Activity 2

OUT OF AFRICA, OUT OF IRELAND

W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP, and the preeminent historian on slavery in the Americas, wrote: “Any attempt to consider the attitude of the English colonies toward the African slave-trade must be prefaced by a word as to the attitude of England herself and the development of the trade in her hands.”

Du Bois gives us a logical starting place for discussing racism and the legacy of slavery in America: it begins with the “Mother Country’s” dominant role in the Atlantic slave trade. Before all white Europeans are lumped together with the British as colonists and slave keepers, let us consider Britain’s treatment of the Irish and the Africans, and the many parallels of subjugation and enslavement to be drawn.

Britain first entered the slave trade with the capture of 300 Negroes in 1562, and pursued it with religious zeal for three centuries. She introduced the first African slaves to Virginia on board a Dutch ship in 1619. In 1651 she fought two wars to wrest the slave trade from the Dutch.

In her book, Black Chronology from 4,000 B.C. to Abolition of the Slave Trade, Ellen Irene Diggs wrote: “The final terms of peace surrendered New Netherlands (Delaware, New Jersey and New York)to England and opened the way for England to become the world’s greatest slave trader.”

In 1662 the “Company of Royal Adventurers” was chartered by Charles II of England. The Royal Family, including the Queen Dowager and the Duke of York, contracted to supply the West Indies with 3,000 slaves annually. This company was later sold for 34,000 Pounds and replaced by the “Royal African Company” also chartered by King Charles II.

Diggs says that in 1655, “Oliver Cromwell, in his zeal for God and the slave trade”, sent an expedition to seize Jamaica from Spain. It soon became Britain’s West Indian base for the slave trade.

Six years earlier Oliver Cromwell and his 20,000 man army invaded Ireland. They killed the entire garrison of Drogheda and slaughtered all the townspeople. Afterwards, Cromwell said “I do not think thirty of the whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody for the Barbados.”

Under Cromwell’s policy known as “To Hell or Connaught” Irish landowners were driven off millions of acres of fertile land. Those found east of the river Shannon after May l,1654, faced the death penalty or slavery in the West Indies. Cromwell rewarded his soldiers and loyal Scottish Presbyterians by “planting” them on large estates. The British set up similar “plantations” in Barbados, St. Kitts and Trinidad. The demand for labor on these distant plantations prompted mass kidnappings in Ireland. A pamphlet published in 1660 accused the British of sending soldiers to grab any Irish people they could in order to sell them to Barbados for profit:

“It was the usual practice with Colonel Strubber, Governor of Galway, and other commanders in the said country, to take people out of their beds at night and sell them for slaves to the Indies, and by computations sold out of the said country about a thousand souls.”

In Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois concurs: “Even young Irish peasants were hunted down as men hunt down game, and were forcibly put aboard ship, and sold to plantations in Barbados”.

According to Peter Berresford Ellis in To Hell or Connaught, soldiers commanded by Henry Cromwell, Oliver’s son, seized a thousand “Irish wenches” to sell to Barbados. Henry justified the action by saying, “Although we must use force in taking them up, it is so much for their own good and likely to be of so great an advantage to the public.” He also suggested that 2,000 lrish boys of 12 to 14 years of age could be seized for the same purpose: “Who knows but it might be a means to make them Englishmen.”

In 1667 Parliament passed the “Act to regulate Negroes on British Plantations.” Punishments included a severe whipping for striking a Christian. For the second offense: branding on the face with a hot iron. There was no punishment for “inadvertently” whipping a slave to death.

Between 1680 and 1688 the English African Company sent 249 ships to Africa and shipped approximately 60,000 Black slaves. They “lost” 14,000 during the middle passage, and only delivered 46,000 to the New World.

Diggs points out that “Planters sometimes married white women servants to Blacks in order to transform these servants and their children into slaves.” This was the case with “Irish Nell”, a servant woman brought to Maryland and sold to a planter when her former owner returned to England. Whether her children by a Black slave husband were to be slave or free, occupied the courts of Maryland for a number of years. Petition was finally granted, and the children freed.

The “custom” of marrying white servants to Black slaves in order to produce slave offspring was legislated against in 1681. How many half Irish children became slaves through this custom? How many Black Americans have Irish ancestors because of it? If a servant is forced to mate with a slave in order to produce slave children for her slave master, is she not a slave?

In 1698 British Parliament acted under pressure and allowed private English merchants to participate in the slave trade. The statute declared the slave trade “highly Beneficial and Advantageous to this Kingdom, and to the Plantations and Colonies thereunto belonging,” according to Du Bois.

English merchants immediately sought to exclude all other nations by securing a monopoly on the lucrative Spanish colonial slave trade. This was accomplished by the Assiento treaty of 1713. Spain granted England a monopoly on the Spanish slave trade for thirty years. England engaged to supply the Spanish colonies with “at least 144,000 slaves at the rate of 4,800 a year,” and they greatly exceeded their quota, according to Du Bois. The kings of Spain and England were to receive one-fourth of the profits, and the Royal African Company was authorized to import as many slaves as they wished.

In Slavery: A World History, Milton Meltzer says, “Slave trading was no vulgar or wicked occupation that shut a man out from offce or honors. Engaged in the British slave trade were dukes, earls, lords, countesses, knights – and kings. The slaves of the Royal African Company were branded with initials D.Y. for the Duke of York”

The Church of England supported the slave trade as a means of converting “heathens,” and the Bishop of Exeter held 655 slaves until he was compensated for them in 1833. Trader John Newton had prayers said twice a day on board his slave ship, saying he never knew “sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion.” Francis Drake’s slave ship was the “Grace of God.”

In the late l8th century English historian Arthur Young travelled widely in Ireland. He wrote, “A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier dares to refuse. He may punish with his cane or horsewhip with most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense.”

When the Irish rebelled in 1798, Britain shipped thousands of chained “traitors” to her penal colonies in Australia. Many Irish prisoners were convinced that the masters of these convict ships were under orders to starve and murder them by neglect on the outward voyage. In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes says, “They had reason to think so,” and points to the 1802 arrival of the Hercules, with a 37 percent death rate among the political exiles. That same year, the Atlas II sailed from Cork, with 65 out of 181 “convicts” found dead on arrival. Irish sailors who mutinied to help their countrymen were flogged unmercifully, and “ironed” together with handcuffs, thumbscrews and slave leg bolts.

In Slavery and the Slave Trade, James Walvin writes: “In 1781 the British slave ship the Zong, unexpectedly delayed at sea and in danger of running short of supplies, simply dumped 132 slaves overboard in order to save the healthier slaves and on the understanding that such an action would be covered by the ship’s insurance (not the case had the wretched slaves merely died).”

Africans who arrived in the West Indies were sometimes sold in advance to plantation owners, or an agent could be paid 15-20 percent for handling the sale. But most often the ship’s captain was responsible for selling the slaves, and his method was the “scramble.”

According to Meltzer, the slaves were marched through the town behind bagpipes and drawn up for inspection in the public square. “By agreement with the buyers, a fixed price was set for the four categories of slaves: man, woman, boy, girl. A day for the sale was advertised. When the hour came, a gun was fired, the door to the slave yard flung open, and a horde of purchasers rushed in, with all the ferocity of brutes….each buyer, bent on getting his pick of the pack, tried to encircle the largest number of slaves by means of a rope. The slaves, helpless, bewildered, terrified, were yanked about savagely, torn by one buyer from another.” Already branded once by the trader, the slaves were branded a second time with their new owner’s initials.

The last report of slave populations in the British West Indies was in 1834. K.W. Stetson in his “Quantitative Approach to Britain’s American Slave Trade” documents them as follows: Barbados: 82,000, Jamaica: 324,000, Grenada: 23,600, St. Vincent: 22,300, Dominica: 14,200, Trinidad: 20,700, Tobago: 11,600, St. Lucia: 13,300, Virgin Islands: 5,100, Bahamas: 10,100, Bermuda: 4,000, British Honduras: 1,900.

One victim of the trade was a Ghana man, Ottobah Cugoano, who was kidnapped at 13 and taken to the British West Indies as a slave. Later he was brought to England and freed. He commented bitterly on the British:

“Is it not strange to think that they who ought to be considered as the most learned and civilized people in the world, that they should carry on a traffic of the most barbarous cruelty and injustice, and that many are become so dissolute as to think slavery, robbery and murder no crime?”

Britain also colonized many African countries, including: Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Cameroons, Egypt, Zanzibar, N. Rhodesia, S. Rhodesia, Swaziland, Somalia, Tanganyika, Basutoland, Seychelles, Mauritius, Togoland, and South Africa (Transvaal, Orange River, Natal, Cape Colony).

There were slave uprisings in Jamaica in 1669, `72, `73, twice in 1678, `82, `85, `90, 1733, `34,’62, `65, `66, 1807, 1815 and 1824. The last rebellion was led by Samuel Sharpe. The British executed him along with all the other leaders of the revolt, but his action did lead to Britain abolishing slavery. In the 1830′s the British government paid the West Indian slave owners 22 million Pounds as compensation for the loss of their slave property. The slaves were not compensated.

Walvin says, “The picture described here has been too charitable toward the slavers and does not fully underline the inhumanities endemic in the slave trade…the slave trade was an exercise in cruelty and inhumanity to a degree scarcely imaginable to modern readers.”

In The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson says, The value of British income derived from the (slave) trade with the West lndies was said to be four times greater than the value of British incomes derived from trade with the rest of the world.” Diggs says that the great profits from the trade “helped make possible the British Industrial Revolution”. The tables from the Royal African Company indicate that between l690 to 1807,they took 2,579,400 slaves out of Africa.

In 1845-52 over a million Irish people died of starvation and related diseases while enjoying the benefits of direct rule from London. The mortality rate was increased by the forced eviction of 500,000 souls.

A million and a half more left Ireland, many suffering and dying onboard “coffin ships”.

There are many parallels between the treatment received by the Irish and the Africans at the hands of the British, and undeniably, racism played a major role in both tragedies.

BRITISH RACISM: BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE FAMINE

Racism is an ancient scourge, and the two groups in conflict need not be of different colors or religions.

When one powerful group begins to see another people as apes, pigs, beasts, or as an inferior race of subhumans, a disaster is in the making. Any study of racist stereotyping should consider what the dominant group stands to gain. Racism usually begins with economics.

Massacres, the slave trade, and the theft of vast tracts of other people’s land, have all been justified by claims of religious, cultural and racial superiority. Such myths often hide the harsh reality of exploitation and colonization.

Anti-Irish prejudice is a very old theme in English culture. The written record begins with Gerald of Wales, whose family was deeply involved in the Norman invasion of Ireland.

In his 12th-century History and Topography of Ireland Gerald wrote contemptuously of the people, portraying them as inferior to the Normans in every respect:

“They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the habits of pastoral living.” He condemned their customs, dress, and “flowing hair and beards” as examples of their “barbarity”. He also vilified the religious practices and marriage customs of the people:

“This is a filthy people, wallowing in vice. Of all peoples it is the least instructed in the rudiments of the faith. They do not yet pay tithes or first fruits or contract marriages. They do not avoid incest.” (1.)

A SACRIFICE TO GOD”

Religion was often used to justify attacks on the Irish. In 1574, a colonial expedition to Ulster led by the Earl of Essex slaughtered the entire population of Rathlin Island, some 600 people. Edward Barkley, a member of the expedition, gave a graphic description of how Essex’s men had driven the Irish from the plains into the woods, where they would freeze or die of hunger at the onset of winter. He concluded:

“How godly a deed it is to overthrow so wicked a race the world may judge: for my part I think there cannot be a greater sacrifice to God” (2.)

When the Irish resisted colonization, they were met with total war on soldiers and noncombatants alike. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the military governor and half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, stated:

“I slew all those from time to time that did belong to, feed, accompany or maintain any outlaws or traitors; and after my first summoning of a castle or fort, if they would not presently yield it, I would not take it afterwards of their gift, but won it perforce – how many lives soever it cost; putting man, woman and child to the sword.” (3.)

Thomas Churchyard, a pamphleteer who accompanied Gilbert to Munster, justified the killing of non-combatants on the grounds that they provided food for the rebels: “so that killing of them by the sword was the way to kill the men of war by famine.” Churchyard described Sir Gilbert’s methods:

EARLY TERRORISM

“That the heads of all those (of what sort soever they were) which were killed in the day, should be cut off from their bodies and brought to the place where he encamped at night, and should there be laid on the ground by each side of the way leading into his own tent so that none could come into his tent for any cause but commonly must pass through a lane of heads which were used ad terrorem, the dead feeling nothing the more pains thereby; and yet did it bring great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk and friends, lie on the ground before their faces, as they came to speak with the said colonel” (4.)

“BEASTLY BEHAVIOR”

The various justifications for colonization were brought together and elaborated by Edmund Spenser, the poet and author of The Faerie Queene. In his book, A View of the State of Ireland,published in 1596, Spenser wrote:

“Marry those be the most barbaric and loathy conditions of any people (I think) under heaven…They do use all the beastly behaviour that may be, they oppress all men, they spoil as well the subject, as the enemy; they steal, they are cruel and bloody, full of revenge, and delighting in deadly execution, licentious, swearers and blasphemers, common ravishers of women, and murderers of children.” (5.)

In 1610, A New Description of Ireland was published. Its author, Barnaby Rich wrote:

“The time hath been, when they lived like Barbarians, in woods, in bogs, and in desolate places, without politic law, or civil government, neither embracing religion, law or mutual love. That which is hateful to all the world besides is only beloved and embraced by the Irish, I mean civil wars and domestic dissensions …. the Cannibals, devourers of men’s flesh, do learn to be fierce amongst themselves, but the Irish, without all respect, are even more cruel to their neighbors.” (6.)

“GLORY TO GOD ALONE”

On his arrival in Dublin in 1649, Cromwell said: “By God’s divine providence” he and his troops would “carry on the great work against the barbarous and bloodthirsty Irish…” After his army laid siege to the town of Drogheda, and killed the entire garrison, he wrote:

“It hath pleased God to bless our endeavors in Drogheda…The enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town…I do not think 30 of the whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody for the Barbados…I wish that all honest hearts may give the glory of this to God alone, to whom indeed the praise of this mercy belongs.” Cromwell proceeded to Wexford where he slaughtered 2,000 more. (7.)

The English poet John Milton wrote at this time: “God is decreeing some new and great period. What does He then but reveal himself…as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?” (8.)

NO PEOPLE MORE PREJUDICED

British contempt for the Irish was part of an increasing disdain for foreigners in general. The Swiss traveller de Saussure observed them in 1727:

“I do not think there is a people more prejudiced in its own favor than the British people, and they allow this to appear in their talk and manners. They look on foreigners in general with contempt, and think nothing is as well done elsewhere as in their own country.” (9.)

A TRUE-BORN ENGLISHMAN

English writer Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, lampooned the notion of English superiority in a poem, “A True-born Englishman”. The preface began: “The intent of the satire is pointed at the vanity of those who talk of their antiquity, and value themselves upon their pedigree, their ancient families, and being True-Born; whereas it is impossible we should be True-Born: and if we could, should have lost in the bargain.”

Defoe then listed the diverse peoples who had settled in England: Romans, Gauls, Greeks, Lombards, Scots, Picts, Danes and “slaves of every nation”, and concluded: “From this amphibious ill-born mob began that vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman.” (10.)

RACISM AGAINST AFRICANS, INDIANS AND EGYPTIANS

The British denigrated the Africans in terms similar to those they used about the Irish, but even more defamatory. While the Irish were despised for their “inferior” brand of Christianity, the Africans were dismissed for not even being Christians, but “heathens.” And African customs were represented as even more “barbaric” than the Irish.

In India, British rule was justified because the Indians were “heathans” and unfit to rule themselves. In 1813 Lord Hastings wrote: “The Hindoo appears a being nearly limited to mere animal functions and even in them indifferent. Their proficiency and skill in the several lines of occupation to which they are restricted, are little more than the dexterity which any animal with similar conformation but with no higher intellect than a dog, an elephant or a monkey, might be supposed to be capable of attaining.” (11.)

Lord Cromer, the British Governor of Egypt, wrote that, “Free institutions in the full sense of the term must for generations to come be wholly unsuitable to countries such as India and Egypt…it will probably never be possible to make a Western silk purse out of an Eastern sow’s ear.” (12.)

The 18th century British philosopher David Hume, who wrote contemptuously of the Irish, also maligned the Africans. In his essay, “Of National Characters” he wrote: “I am apt to suspect that Negroes, and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white…” (13.)

In the British view of the world, the Irish occupied a position way below themselves, but just above the Africans. The two were often compared, as in these verses from the British magazine Punch in 1848:

“Six-foot Paddy, are you no bigger –
You whom cozening friars dish –
Mentally, than the poorest nigger
Grovelling before fetish?
You to Sambo I compare
Under superstition’s rule
Prostrate like an abject fool.” (14.)

In 1849, British historian Thomas Carlyle published “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.” Mr. Eric Williams, former Prime Minister of Trinidad, and a historian, called it “The most offensive document in the entire world literature on slavery and the West Indies.” Carlyle argued that the recently emancipated slaves should be forced to work for the whites: “Decidedly you will have to be servants to those who are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you; servants to the Whites, if they are (as what mortal can doubt they are?) born wiser than you.” (15.)

Carlyle visited Ireland soon after the famine and filled his journal with tirades against what he called “this brawling unreasonable people”. Ireland, he wrote, was a “human swinery”, “an abomination of desolation” and “a black howling Babel of superstitious savages”. (16.)

IRISH CHIMPANZEES

In the 1860s, the debate among scientists about the relationship of humans to animals prompted British racists to make frequent comparisons between Irish people, Black people and apes. The Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley wrote to his wife from Ireland in 1860: “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country…to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.” (17.)

“THE MISSING LINK”

In 1860 the first live adult gorilla arrived at the London Zoo just after Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species had been published. Victorians flocked to see it and debate the relationship of humans to animals. In 1862 the British magazine Punch published “The Missing Link” a satire attacking Irish immigrants: “A gulf certainly, does appear to yawn between the Gorilla and the Negro. The woods and wilds of Africa do not exhibit an example of any intermediate animal. But in this, as in many other cases, philosophers go vainly searching abroad for that which they could readily find if they sought for it at home. A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder ladden with a hod of bricks.” (18.)

The British historian Edward Freeman visited the United States in 1881. His obituary states that “he gloried in the Germanic origin of the English nation.” On his return from America, he wrote: “This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a Negro, and be hanged for it. I find this sentiment generally approved – sometimes with the qualification that they want Irish and Negroes for servants, not being able to get any other.” (19.)

“SCIENTIFIC” RACISM

Although their empire was acquired by military force and a divide and conquer strategy, the British attributed their success to Anglo-Saxon superiority. This old idea was brought up to date through pseudo-scientific theories of race.

Nineteenth century theorists divided humanity into “races” on the basis of external physical features. These “races” were said to have inherited differences not only of physique, but also of character. These “differnces” allowed the races to be placed in a heirarchy. Needless to say, the Teutons, who included the Anglo-Saxons, were placed at the top. Black people, especially “Hottentots” were at the bottom, with Celts (Irish) and Jews somewhere in between.

Anthropologists went around measuring people’s skulls, and assigning them to different “races” on the basis of such factors as how far their jaws protruded. Celts and others were said to have more “primitive” features than Anglo-Saxons.

The physician John Beddoe invented the “index of nigrescence” a formula to identify the racial components of a given people. The Anglo-Saxon’s “refined” features also came with a “superior” character. They were said to be industrious, thoughtful, clean, law-abiding and emotionally restrained, while the characters of the various colonized peoples were said to be the very opposite.

In 1850 the anatomist Robert Knox described the Celtic character as “Furious fanaticism; a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient industry; no accumulative habits; restless; treacherous and uncertain: look to Ireland…” He drew the following conclusion:

“As a Saxon, I abhor all dynasties, monarchies and bayonet governments, but this latter seems to be the only one suitable for the Celtic man.” (20.)

SUBJECTION AS A CONDITION FOR ADVANCEMENT

In 1862, the British historian Lord Acton wrote:

“The Celts are not among the progressive, initiative races, but among those which supply the materials rather than the impulse of history…The Persians, the Greeks, the Romans and the Teutons are the only makers of history, the only authors of advancement.” He concluded: “Subjection to a people of a higher capacity for government is of itself no misfortune; and it is to most countries the condition of their political advancement.” (21.)

In 1886 Lord Salisbury opposed Home Rule for Ireland with these words: “You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots, for instance.” Self government was only for people of the “Teutonic race.” (22.)

“THE WILD IRISH”

Another proponent of the theory of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy was James Anthony Froude, a professor of history at Oxford. He described the Irish country folk as “more like squalid apes than human beings.” He depicted the Irish as “unstable as water”, while the English stood for order and self-control. Only “efficient military despotism” could succeed in Ireland, he wrote, because the “wild Irish” understood only force.

“THOSE WHO ARE WISER”

Froude considered Negroes, like the Irish, to be an inferior race. He wrote: “Nature has made us unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind…Slavery is gone…but it will be an ill day for mankind if no one is compelled any more to obey those who are wiser than himself…” (23.)

Toward the end of her 1984 book, Nothing But the Same Old Story’: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism, Liz Curtis wrote:

“A gigantic exercise in self-delusion has helped to preserve English pride and self-regard down the centuries. Actions taken for reasons of political and economic expediency have been presented as if altruism were the sole motive. Atrocities of all kinds – from Cromwell’s massacre at Drogheda, to the slave trade, to the appropriation of vast tracts of other people’s countries – have been justified by claims of religious, cultural and racial superiority. These myths have served the British ruling class well over the centuries, clouding the harsh reality of exploitation and colonization.”

That reality is best described by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels:

“A crew of pirates are driven by a storm they know not whither, at length a boy discovers land from the topmast, they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see an harmless people, are entertained with kindness, they give the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial, they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple of more by force for a sample, return home and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity, the natives driven out or destroyed, their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people.”

QUESTIONS

• How were racism and religion used by the British to justify the economic exploitation of Ireland?
• Why is it necessary to examine racism against the Irish in the context of British racism against a variety of peoples?
• Given that radio and television did not exist during the Irish Famine, a few British Ministers and powerful newspapers could have used racism, religion and propaganda to control British public opinion about Ireland. How could such a tragedy happen today, in the age of mass communication?
• How is Britain’s role in the slave trade relevant to a study of anti-Irish racism?

FOOTNOTES

1. Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, Penguin Classics 1982
2. Canny, Nicholas P., “The ideology of English colonisation from Ireland to America”, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 30, 1973, p.581.
3. Ranelagh, John, Ireland, London: Collins 1981, p.86
4. Canny, op.cit., p.582.
5. Lebow, Ned, “British Historians and Irish history”, Eire-Ireland, vol.VIII, no.4, Winter 1973, p.12
6. Lebow, op.cit., p. 15
7. Downing, Taylor, The Troubles, London: Thames/MacDonald Futura 1980.
8. Hill, Christopher, God’s Englishmen: 0liver Cromwell and the English Revolution London: Weidenfield and Nicholson 1970, p.l18
9. Plumb, J.H., England in the Eighteenth Century, Penguin, 1950, p.33.
10. Defoe, Daniel, “A True-Born Englishman”, in Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
11. Plumb, op.cit., p. 178
12. Curtis, op.cit., p.58
13. Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, London: Pluto Press, 1984, p.152
14. Lebow, op.cit., p.ll. 15. Williams, Eric, British Historians and the West Indies, London: Andre, 1966, p. 81.
16. Campbell, Flan, The Oranqe Card: Racism, Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland, London: Connolly Publications, 1979, p.12
17. Curtis, L.P. Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A study of anti-Irish prejudice in Victorian England, University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1968, p. p.84
18. Curtis, Lewis P., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971, p.100.
19. Curtis, Anglo Saxons…, op.cit., p.81
20. Ibid., p.93
21. Williams, op.cit., p.53-4
22. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons op.cit., p.102-3
23. Williams, op.cit., p.177

Irish Famine
Unit IIIIII.Mass Eviction During Famine

Unit III – Mass Eviction During FamineADDITIONAL, UNIT GOALSPERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES

1. The student will determine what role mass eviction played in exacerbating the condition of the poor during the Great Famine.

TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES

A. Students will learn the extent of the mass evictions, their causes and detrimental effects.

Activity 1. Students will read “Mass Eviction During Famine”, a compilation of excerpts from Famine histories, and a Document from The Irish Famine by Peter Gray. Students will answer questions following the readings and discuss issues raised.

INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL/RESOURCESGray, Peter, The Irish Famine, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1995. “Mass Evictions During Famine” (see footnotes for sources) Irish Famine
Unit III
Activity 1

MASS EVICTIONS DURING FAMINE

Mass evictions or “clearances” will forever be associated with the Irish Famine. “It has been estimated that, excluding peaceable surrenders, over a quarter of a million people were evicted between 1849 and 1854. The total number of people who had to leave their holdings in the period is likely to be around half a million and 200,000 small holdings were obliterated” (1)

Under a law imposed in 1847, called the “Gregory Clause”, no tenant holding more than a quarter acre of land was eligible for public assistance. To become eligible, the tenant had to surrender his holding to his landlord. Some tenants sent their children to the workhouse as orphans so they could keep their land and still have their children fed.

Other tenants surrendered their land, but tried to remain living in the house; however, landlords would not tolerate it. “In many thousands of cases estate-clearing landlords and agents used physical force or heavy-handed pressure to bring about the destruction of cabins which they sought.” (2)

Many others who sought entrance to the workhouses were required to return to their homes and uproot or level them. Others had their houses burned while they were away in the workhouse.

“When tenants were formally evicted, it was usually the practice of the landlord’s bailiffs – his specially hired ‘crowbar brigade’ – to level or burn the affected dwellings there and then, as soon as the tenants effects had been removed, in the presence of a large party of soldiers or police who were likely to quell any thought of serious resistance.” (3)

THE EVICTED

“These helpless creatures are not only unhoused, but often driven off the land, no one remaining on the lands being allowed to lodge or harbor them. Or they, perhaps, linger about the spot, and frame some temporary shelter out of materials of their old homes against a broken wall, or behind a ditch or fence, or in a bog-hole, places unfit for human habitations …. disease, together with the privations of other kinds which they endure, before long carry them off.

As soon as one horde of houseless and all but naked paupers are dead, or provided for in the workhouse, another wholesale eviction doubles the number, who in their turn pass through the same ordeal of wandering from house to house, or burrowing in bogs or behind ditches, till broken down by privation and exposure to the elements, they seek the workhouse, or die by the roadside.” (4)

“There were hoards of poor on the roads every day. The Catholics who could gave some little they had to these, a saucer of oatmeal, a handful of potatoes, a drink of milk or a little bottle of sweet-milk to carry away with them. It was not unusual to see a woman with two, three or four children half-naked, come in begging for alms, and often several of these groups in one day, men too. If the men got work they worked for little or nothing and when they were no longer needed they took to the road again. These wandering groups had no homes and no shelter for the night. They slept in the barns of those that had barns on an armful of straw with a sack or sack or some such thing to cover them.” (5)

BRITISH GOVERNMENT & EVICTIONS

When there was widespread criticism in the newspaper over the evictions, Lord Broughman made a speech on March 23rd, 1846 in the House of Lords. He said:

“Undoubtedly it is the landlord’s right to do as he pleases, and if he abstained he conferred a favor and was doing an act of kindness. If, on the other hand, he choose to stand on his right, the tenants must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they had no power to oppose or resist…property would be valueless and capital would no longer be invested in cultivation of the land if it were not acknowledged that it was the landlord’s undoubted and most sacred right to deal with his property as he wished.” (6)

Even when tenants were evicted in the dead of winter and died of exposure, the British Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, “rejected the notion that house-destroying landlords were open to any criminal proceedings on the part of the government.” (7)

British Parliament passed a law reducing the notice given to people before they were evicted to 48 hours. The law also made it a misdemeanor to demolish a dwelling while the tenants were inside. As a grand gesture of goodwill, the law prohibited evictions on Christmas day and Good Friday.

LANDLORDS

Irish Poor Law made landlords responsible for relief of the poor on the smallest properties – those valued at 4 Pounds or less. This gave landlords a strong incentive to rid themselves of tenants who were in that category and unable to pay rent. They did this by evicting the tenants or by paying for the tenants to emigrate on the “coffin ships”

On January 23rd, 1846, Mr. Todhunter, a member of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends wrote: “It is evident that some landlords, forgetful of the claims of humanity and regardless of the Public Welfare, are availing themselves of the present calamity to effect a wholesale clearance of their estates.” (8)

One landlord, the Earl of Lucan, evicted 187 families (913 people) in 18 months. A follow-up report by a Galway newspaper found that of the 913 evicted, 478 were receiving public relief, 170 had emigrated, and 265 were dead or left to shift from place to place. It is not known how many of the 170 who emigrated died at disembarcation centers or aboard “coffin ships”.

The Limerick and Clare Examiner protested that even “the good landlords are going to the bad, and the bad are going to the worst extremities of cruelty and tyranny, while both are suffered by a truckling (submissive) and heartless government to make a wilderness of the country and a waste of human life.” (9)

“I must say the landlords were not all alike. My grandfather, God rest his soul, went to pay part of his rent to his landlord, a Bantry man. ‘Feed your family first, then give me what you can afford when times get better,’ he told him.” (10)

“The fact that our people escaped so well was owed to the landlord of the time, Mr. Cronin Coltsman. He earned the everlasting gratitude of the people. When he saw the awful plight of his tenants, he caused a mill to be built half a mile below our village …. When the mill was ready the landlord bought Indian meal in Cork City and got his tenants to go with their horses and bring the meal free of charge to the mill where, when it was ground, everyone who needed it got a measure or scoop of meal for each one of their family. (11)

“The landlords were not always to be blamed when evictions took place. Middle-men and well-to-do farmers were very often responsible. ‘Grabbing’ was quite common in the district. Farmers who had more money to spare were only too ready to approach the landlord or his agent and offer to pay back rent on a neighboring farm on the condition that they would be given possession. Sometimes landlords were asked to dispossess tenants from holdings, the rents of which were fully paid up.” (12)

“A MODEST PROPOSAL”

In 1729, Jonathan Swift, the Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, wrote a macabre satire, “A Modest Proposal” in which he tried to draw attention to the horrific conditions of the Irish poor. The pamphlet put forward a scheme for solving Ireland’s economic problems by fattening up the children of the poor and selling them as meat:

“A young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food; whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in fricassee or ragout… I grant that this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords; who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have best title to the children.”

CONCLUSIONS

University of Wisconsin History Professor James S. Donnelly, the author of Landlord and Tenant in 19th-Century Ireland, wrote: “I would draw the following broad conclusion: at a fairly early stage of the Great Famine the government’s abject failure to stop or even slow down the clearances (evictions) contributed in a major way to enshrining the idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind.

Or perhaps one should say in the Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and women, and not only to the revolutionary minority…” (13)

Dennis Clark, author of Erin’s Heirs and The Irish in Philadelphia, wrote that the British government’s insistence on “the absolute rights of landlords” to evict farmers and their families so they could raise cattle and sheep, was “a process as close to ‘ethnic cleansing’ as any Balkan war ever enacted.” (14)

FOOTNOTES

1. Poirteir, Cathal, Famine Echoes, Gill and MacMillan Ltd., Dublin, Ireland. 1995 p.229
2. Donnelly, James S., Jr., “Mass Eviction and the Irish Famine: The Clearnaces Revisited”, from The Great Irish Famine, edited by Cathal Poirteir. Mercier Press, Dublin, Ireland. 1995. p. 162
3. Ibid,
4. Litton, Helen, The Irish Famine; An Illustrated History Wolfhound Press Ltd., Dublin, Ireland, 1994. p.98
5. Poirteir, p. 235
6. Campbell, Patrick, Death in Templecrone, P.H. Campbell, Jersey City, NJ, 1995. Princeton Academic Press. p.55
7. Donnelly, p.162
8. Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991. First printing: 1962. p. 183
9. Donnelly, p.165
10. Poirteir, p. 207
11. Ibid
12. Ibid, p.219
13. Donnelly, p. 170-71
14. Clark, Dennis, “The Great Irish Famine: Worse than Genocide?” published by the Irish Edition (Philadelphia) July, August and September, 1993. p.9

Irish Famine
Unit III
Activity 1

Document from The Irish Famine by Peter Gray DOCUMENTS 141

James Hack Tuke, a Quaker from York, condemned the mass evictions in Connacht.

“The landlords of Mayo, as well as of many other portions of Connaught, as a class, (there are many noble exceptions who feel and see the impolicy and evil of such proceedings,) are pursuing a course which cannot fail to add to the universal wretchedness and poverty which exist.

The corn crops, bountiful as they may be, are not sufficient to meet the landlords’ claim for rent and arrears contracted during the last two years of famine, and it is at least not unnatural for the tenant to be unwilling to give up that, without which he must certainly perish. In every direction, the agents of the landlords, armed with the full powers of the law, are at work everywhere. One sees the driver or bailiff “canting” the small patches of oats or potatoes or keepers, whose extortionate charges must be paid by the unfortunate tenant, placed over the crop. Even the produce of seed, distributed through the agency of benevolent associations, has been totally swept away.

To add to the universal distress caused by this system of seizure, eviction is in many cases practiced, and not a few of the roofless dwellings which meet the eye, have been destroyed at the instance of the landlords, after turning adrift the miserable inmates; and this even at a time like the present, when the charity of the whole world has been turned towards the relief of this starving peasantry.

Whilst upon the island of Achill, I saw a memorable instance of this mode of proceeding, at the wretched fishing village of Kiel. Here, a few days previous to my visit, a driver of Sir R. O’Donnells, whose property it is, had ejected some twenty families, making, as I was informed, with a previous recent eviction, about forty. A crowd of these miserable ejected creatures collected around us, bewailing, with bitter lamentations, their hard fate.

One old grey-headed man came tottering up to us, bearing in his arms his bedridden wife, and putting her down at our feet, pointed, in silent agony to her, and then to his roofless dwelling, the charred timbers of which were scattered in all directions around. This man said he owed little more than one year’s rent, and had lived in the village, which had been the home of his forefathers, all his life.

Another man, with five motherless children, had been expelled, and their “boiling-pot” sold for 3shilling. Another family, consisting of a widow and four young children, had their only earthly possession “a little sheep,” seized, and sold for 5 shillings!

But it is needless to multiply cases; instances sufficient have been given to show the hardships and misery inflicted. From this village alone, at least one hundred and fifty persons had been evicted, owing from half a year’s to a year and a half’s rent. The whole of their effects, even the miserable furniture of these wretched cabins seized and sold to satisfy the claims of the nominal owner of Achill (Island).

What prospects are there for these miserable outcasts? Death indeed must be the portion of some, for their neighbors, hardly richer than themselves, were principally subsisting upon turnip tops; whilst the poorhouse of the union of Westport is nearly forty miles distant. Turnips taken, can we say stolen, from the fields, as they wearily walked thither, would be their only chance of support.”

QUESTIONS

• How did the estimated half a million evictions contribute to the death rate during the Great Famine?
• What were the living conditions like for those evicted?
• Were there any tenant rights under British law?
• In what way did the Poor Law contribute to the death rate among the poor?

Irish Famine
Unit IV. IV.Mortality Rates and“The Horror”

Irish Famine

Unit IV

UNIT IV – Mortality Rates and “The Horror”

ADDITIONAL UNIT GOALS:

PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES

1.The student will examine the levels of mortality experienced in Ireland during the Great Famine, and humanize numbers and statistics. TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIESA.Students will learn that the range of mortality estimates is from 500,000 to 1,500,000 or more, with a consensus mortality estimate of 1,000,000 deaths.

Activity 1. Students will read excerpts from This Great Calamity (p. 167-169), and The Great Hunger (p. 411-412), answer questions following the readings and discuss the issues raised.Activity 2. Have students go to the library and use the Statistical Abstract of the United States to determine the population of the United States, and the number of deaths per year from automobile accidents.

• What percentage of the population are killed in such accidents each year?
• How does that percentage compare with the percent killed in Ireland during the Great Famine?

Activity 3. Students will read the personal accounts contained in “Famine Scenes (The Horror)” and compare their reactions to ones they experienced reading the statistical accounts in Activity 1. Students will answer questions following the reading.

INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL/RESOURCES

Kinnealy, Christine, This Great Calamity; The Irish Famine 1845-52, Roberts Rinehart Publishers, Boulder Colorado, 1995

Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991. First printing: 1962.

Irish Famine
Unit IV
Activity 1

This Great Calamity THE IRISH FAMINE1845-52 By Christine Kinealy Mortality“The exact number of people who died during the Famine years (1845-51) is not known. In the first year of distress, no one was believed to have died from want; however, by the end of 1846, this had changed dramatically. In April 1847, an editorial in an Irish newspaper asked:`What has become of all the vast quantity of food which has been thrown into lreland? Where are the effects which it might have been expected to produce? How are the millions of pounds of money voted and subscribed been used that the march of famine, instead of being saved, has apparently been quickened.’By this stage, it was obvious that the various relief measures employed since the appearance of the second blight had failed. The most telling manifestation was the great increase in mortality in the winter of 1846-7.In 1851, the Census Commissioners attempted to produce a table of mortality for each year since 1841, the date of the previous census. Their calculations were based on a combination of deaths recorded in institutions and recollections of individuals (civil registration of deaths was not introduced into Ireland until 1864). The statistics provided were flawed and probably under-estimated the level of mortality, particularly for the earlier years of the Famine: personal recollections are notoriously unreliable and such methods did not take into account whole families who disappeared either as a consequence of emigration or death. In the most distressed areas, therefore, the data is the most incomplete and the information was sometimes based on indirect evidence.

The table below, which was compiled by the Census Commissioners, does offer some insights into the fluctuations in mortality in these years. Because the rates of mortality were computed at the county level, with the exception of the larger towns, the disparities within each county cannot be measured and thus it is difficult to identify pockets of particularly severe distress. Local reports and increased numbers of local studies revealed a complex picture of local diversity, exposing pools of distress and excess mortality in parts of the midlands, whereas areas in the west of Ireland were little affected. Furthermore, excess mortality was evident even in some of the wealthiest parts of the country.

Table 14: Irish Mortality, 1842-50 ¹³⁹

The number of deaths during the Famine has variously been calculated as lying between half a million and one and a half million fatalities. The correct number probably lies in between. It is more generally accepted that in the region of one million people died during these years. Excess mortality as a result of the Famine, however, did not end in 1851. In addition to deaths, the Famine also contributed to a decrease in the birthrate, by contributing to a decline in the rate of marriage and in the level of fertility and fecundity. The number of deaths in Ireland in 1847 was double the number in the previous year. This increase in mortality affected all parts of Ireland. The high rates of mortality were not prolonged and some areas in Ulster and the east coast showed signs of recovery in 1848, which was maintained despite the reappearance of blight in the same year. By this time, the local economies were recovering from tile temporary industrial dislocation apparent in 1847. In parts of the west, however, mortality remained high and reached a second peak in 1849, a cholera epidemic providing the final, Fatal blow to an already vulnerable people.

Mortality was particularly severe in the first three months of 1847, peaking in March and then starting a slow decline after April. This peak coincided with public works being used as the main vehicle for relief and is a clear testament to the Failure of this system. The continuing high mortality of April and May 1847 coincides with the period during which public works were being wound down, even though their replacement was not always available. After May, the level of mortality began to decrease significantly, although it remained higher than its pre-Famine levels. This reduction is generally associated with the opening of soup kitchens in the summer of 1847 and the relatively generous provision of relief. The impact of mortality was most severe among the lowest economic and social groups within Ireland-those who, lacking their own capital resources, depended on external assistance for relief. The most vulnerable individuals within this group were children under five, old people and pregnant and lactating women. Overall, however, women tended to he more resilient than men to the effects of the Famine.

At the end of March 1847, Lord George Bentinck, leader of the Troy opposition, questioned the government regarding the number of deaths in Ireland and accused the Whigs of attempting to conceal the truth. No official figures had been released to parliament, although he suspected that there were:

`… tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of deaths – they could not learn from the government how many, for there was one point about which the government were totally ignorant or which they concealed, which was the mortality which had occurred during their administration of Irish affairs.’

Bentinck continued by attacking an underlying economic philosophy of the government:

`They know the people have been dying by their thousands and I dare them to inquire what has been the number of those who have died through their mismanagement, by their principles of free trade. Yes, free trade in the lives of the Irish people.’”

Irish Famine
Unit IV
Activity 1

THE GREAT HUNGERIRELAND 1845-1849 CECIL WOODHAM-SMITHPENGUIN BOOKS How many people died in the famine will never precisely be known. It is almost certain that, owing to geographical difficulties and the unwillingness of the people to be registered, the census of 1841 gave a total smaller than the population in fact was. Officers engaged in relief work put the population as much as 25 per cent. higher; landlords distributing relief were horrified when providing, as they imagined, for 60 persons, to find more than 400 ‘start from the ground’.In 184I the population of Ireland was given as 8,175,124; in 1851, after the famine, it had dropped to 6,552,385, and the Census Commissioners calculated that, at the normal rate of increase, the total should have been 9,018,799, so that a loss of at least 2.5 million persons had taken place. The figures available, however, must be regarded as giving only a rough indication; vital statistics are unobtainable, no record was kept of deaths, and very many persons must have died and been buried unknown, as the fever victims died and were buried in west Cork, as bodies, found lying dead on the road, were buried in ditches, and as the timid people of Erris perished unrecorded.In the four provinces of Ireland the smallest loss of population was in Leinster, 15.5 per cent, then Ulster, 16 per cent, Connaught’s loss was greatest, 28.6 per cent, and Munster lost 23.5 per cent. In some respect, death and clearance improved Ireland; between 1841 and 1851, nearly 360,000 mud huts disappeared, the greatest decrease being 81 per cent in Ulster, which then included the distressed county of Donegal, followed by Connaught, with a decrease of 74 per cent, Munster 69 per cent, and Leinster 62 per cent. Small holdings under five acres were nearly halved, and holdings over fifteen acres doubled.No advantage, however, was taken of the reduction of small tenants, agriculture was not improved, and in 1866 Isaac Butt wrote, ‘Ireland has retrograded . . .’ Between 1848 and 1864, however, thirteen million pounds was sent home by emigrants in America to bring relatives out, and it is part of the famine tragedy that, because no adequate measures of reconstruction were undertaken, a steady drain of the best and most enterprising left Ireland, to enrich other countries.The famine left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword. Other famines followed, as other famines had gone before, but it is the terrible years of the Great Hunger which are remembered, and only just beginning to be forgiven.

Time brought retribution. By the outbreak of the second world war, Ireland was independent, and she would not fight on England’s side. Liberty and England did not appear to the Irish to be synonymous, and Eire remained neutral. Many thousands of Irishmen from Eire volunteered, but the famous regiments of southern Ireland had ceased to exist, and the ‘inexhaustible nursery of the finest soldiers’ was no longer at England’s service.

There was also a more direct payment. Along the west coast of Ireland, in Mayo especially, on remote Clare Island, and in the dunes above the Six Mile Strand are a number of graves of petty officers and able seamen of the British Navy and Merchant Service, representatives of many hundreds who were drowned off the coast of Ireland, because the Irish harbours were not open to British ships. From these innocents, in all probability ignorant of the past, who had never heard of failures of the potato, evictions, fever and starvation, was exacted part of the price for the famine.

Irish Famine
Unit IV
Activity 1

Questions:

• Out of a pre-famine population of just over 8 million people, how many Irish died?
• Given a normal rate of increase, what would have been the total population in Ireland in 1851?
• Which groups were the most vulnerable to starvation? Why?
• What is the “retribution” or “direct payment” for the Famine mentioned by Woodham-Smith?
• Does she make the case that Ireland’s neutrality in World War II was designed to punish England for the Great Famine?

Irish Famine
Unit IV
Activity 3

FAMINE SCENES (THE HORROR)“A cabin was seen closed one day a little out of town, when a man had the curiosity to open it, and in a dark corner he found a family of the father, mother, and two children, lying in close compact. The father was considerably decomposed; the mother, it appeared, had died last, and probably fastened the door, which was always the custom when all hope was extinguished, to get into the darkest corner and die, where passers-by could not see them. Such family scenes were quite common, and the cabin was generally pulled down upon them for a grave.” (1.)“Six men, beside Mr. Griffith, crossed with me in an open boat, and we landed, not buoyantly, upon a once pretty island. The first that called my attention was the death-like stillness – nothing of life was seen or heard, except occasionally a dog. These looked so unlike all others I had seen among the poor – I unwittingly said, “How can the dogs look so fat and shining here, where there is no food for the people?” The pilot turned to Mr. Griffith, not supposing that I heard him, and said, “Shall I tell her?”That was enough: if anything were wanting to make the horrors of the famine complete, this supplied the deficiency.” (2.)“Going out one cold day in a bleak waste on the coast, I met a pitiful old man in hunger and tatters, with a child on his back, almost entirely naked, and to appearance in the last stages of starvation; whether his naked legs had been scratched, or whether the cold had affected them I knew not, but the blood was in small streams in different places, and the sight was a horrid one. The old man said he lived seven miles off, and was afraid the child would die in the cabin, with the two little children he had left starving, and he had come to get the bit of meal, as it was the day he heard food relief was being given out. The officer told him he had not time to enter his name in the book, and he was sent away in that condition. A penny or two was given him, for which he expressed the greatest gratitude.The next Saturday we saw the old man creeping slowly in a bending posture upon the road. The old man looked up and recognized me. On inquiring where the child was, he said the three were left in the cabin, and had not taken a ‘sup or a bit’ since yesterday morning, and he was afraid some of them would be dead upon the hearth when he returned. He was so weak that he could not carry the child and had crept seven miles to get the meal. He was sent away again with a promise to wait till next Tuesday, and come and have his name on the books. This poor man had not a penny nor a mouthful of food, and he said tremulously, ‘I must go home and die on the hearth with the hungry ones.”‘ (3.)

“The deaths in my native place were many and horrible. The poor famine-stricken people were found by the wayside, emaciated corpses, partly green from eating docks (weeds) and nettles and partly blue from the cholera and dysentery.” (4.)

“There was a girl who had her hands worn from scraping the stones of the strand for food, such as shaddy and all sorts of shellfish, and when she had the strand bare she was found lying dead.” (5.)

“The children’s appearance, though common to thousands of the same age in this region of the shadow of death, was indescribable. Their paleness was not that of common sickness…They did not look as if newly raised from the grave and to life before the blood had begun to fill their veins anew; but as if they had been thawed out of the ice, in which they had been imbedded until their blood had turned to water.” (6.)

“We met flocks of wretched children going to school for the ‘bit of bread’, some crying with hunger, and some begging to get in without the penny which was required for their tuition. The poor emaciated creatures went weeping away, one said he had been looking for a penny all day yesterday, and could not get it.” (7.)

DEATH FROM EATING FOOD

“So many had been starving for so long that when they were given food…the danger of death actually increased. The body could neither absorb nor assimilate so sudden an intake of nutrients it had been craving for so long…The heart especially could not withstand the added workload of a sudden increase in the body’s metabolic rate.” ‘Carthy swallowed a little warm milk and died’ was the simple statement of one man’s death from starvation in Skibbereen. One man connected with the Quaker Society of Friends said, “If they get a full meal it kills them immediately.” (8.)

“When the Indian meal came out, some of them were so desperate from starvation that they didn’t wait for it to be cooked properly, they ate it almost raw and that brought on intestinal troubles that killed a lot of them that otherwise might have survived.” (9.)

“The house was near the road and a pot of stirabout was kept for any starving person who passed the way. My mother Mary was a young girl at the time and alone in the house one day when a big giant of a fellow staggered in. He wolfed his share of stirabout and made for the door, but there was a tub of chopped raw cabbage and porridge for the pigs. He fell on his knees by the tub and devoured the stuff till she was in a fright, then he reeled out to the road and was found dead there a short time after.” (10.)

“I heard my grandmother say that she knew fine people to be seen lying dead along the roads and in the fields. It seems they fell dead out of their standing and the dogs eating at them. They mustered up, she said, in bunches like, them that felt getting weak, and then went away to some place away out, and one done what they could for the other till they died.” (11.)

There were so many deaths that they opened big trenches through the graveyards and when they were full of dead they filled them in. Most of those who died were children or old people. “It is estimated that three out of every five who died were under 10 years of age or over 60.” (12.)

DEALING WITH THE DEAD

The problem of finding materials for coffins or transporting the corpses and digging graves for over a million dead, was made worse by the dire poverty and physical exhaustion caused by hunger and disease.

“A woman from the Teelin district of County Donegal, on the death of her little son, not having the wherewithal to get a coffin, put the child in the cradle, strapped the cradle on her back and carried it five miles to the nearest graveyard and buried it.” (13.)

“The people had neither the material nor the strength to make coffins nor dig graves. When a person died they got a plank and tied the feet of the corpse to one end of it and the head to the other end, and the hands together, then two men took hold of it at each end and carried it to a bog nearby where the water was deep and threw it in.” (14.)

“My father told me that he saw a man carrying his brother’s corpse in a coffin on his back to Moybologue graveyard. He had no one to help him and he had to dig the grave and bury the corpse himself. He died in the hospital and people didn’t like to attend the funeral because he died of fever, and they afraid they might take it. My father said it was the saddest sight he’d ever seen.” (15.)

“They saw the man coming along the road – Scannlon was his name – and a load on his back. My grandmother asked him what he had there, and he said ‘twas his wife that was dead and he was taking her to Leitrum graveyard to bury her. He had her sitting on a board fastened over his shoulders and she was dressed in her cloak and hood just as she’d be when she was alive. His little son was with him. My grandmother went into the house and brought them food and milk. Scannlon wouldn’t take anything; he said it would overcome him and he wanted to have his wife buried before dark. The little boy drank the milk.” (16.)

Questions:

• Do these personal stories help to make individuals out of statistics?
• Why did people die from eating food?
• Why did the dead present such unusual problems for the living?

FOOTNOTES

1. Litton, Helen, The Irish. Famine;. An Illustrated History Wolfhound Press Ltd., Dublin, Ireland, 1994, P.40.
2. Ibid., p.38
3. Ibid., p.79
4. Poirteir, Cathal, Famine Echoes, Gill and Macmillan Ltd., Dublin, Ireland, 1995, p.90.
5. Ibid., p.88
6. Gray, Peter, The Irish Famine,.Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1995. p.139
7. Ibid., p. 143
8. Gallagher, Michael & Thomas, Paddy’s Lament. Harcourt Brace Company, New York / London, 1982, p.104
9. Poirteir, p. 89
10. Ibid.,p.92
11. Ibid., p.ll
12. Ibid.,p.182
13. Ibid., p.183
14. Ibid., p.185
15. Ibid.,
16. Gallagher, p.ll

Irish Famine
Unit V.

V.

Emigration: Departure,
Crossing and Arrival

ADDITIONAL UNIT GOALS:

PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES

1. The student will be able to describe the conditions in Liverpool, where Famine emigrants disembarked, and explain the deaths on board the “coffin ships”.

TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES

Students will examine the problems faced by Famine victims before and during their transport to America.

Activity 1. Students will read excerpts from The Great Hunger, and The End of Hidden Ireland, and answer questions immediately following. Students will discuss the viewpoint of landlords, ship captains, and the public, as well as the hazards faced by the emigrants.

INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL/RESOURCES

Scally, Robert James, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995, pp.212-215

Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991. First printing: 1962. pp.226-228

Objective 2.

The student will be able to describe the conditions at the quarantine station at Grosse Ile (Isle) Quebec, where the Famine emigrants landed.

TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES

A.Examine two of the historical descriptions of Grosse Ile.

Activity 1. Students will read excerpts from The Great Hunger and Robert Whyte’s 1847 Famine Ship Diary, answer questions following the readings and discuss the issues raised.

INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL/RESOURCES

Mangan, James (Ed.), Robert Whyte’s 1847 Famine Ship Diary Metclef Press, Dublin Ireland,

1994. pp.lll-121

Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunqer: Ireland 1845-1849 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991. First printing: 1962. pp. 218-221

Irish Famine
Unit V
Activity 1

LEAVING FROM LIVERPOOL

The passage through the Liverpool funnel was also the most common experience of the famine emigrants. One might even say it was their first truly “national” experience. The sight of the exodus was concentrated and magnified in the few square miles of the waterfront where, in a sense, all of Ireland’s townlands met for the first time and witnessed the commonality of their fate. Whatever the circumstances of their leaving home or their ultimate destination, the vast majority of emigrants were unmistakably linked by characteristics that identified them as one in the eyes of Liverpool if not yet in their own. Rags, disease, and the ravages of hunger were among the signs attached to them, as we have seen.

For Rushton’s police, baggage was the telling sign. The health officers looked for symptoms of “Irish fever.” Adult males of the most ordinary appearance in Ballykilcline were the ape-like “Milesian’ brutes of Victorian caricature. Above all, the symbols of Irishness in Liverpool were the signs of a poverty so extreme that, when found in the heart of the empire, it was seen as a fall from civilization and likened to savagery.

In Liverpool, the poverty of the emigrants was visible in their bodies, in their rags, and malnutrition. Toothlessness, matted hair, body smells, and other missing vanities also set them apart. But, according to some observers Irish poverty could be distinguished from that of other paupers as something more than just a lack of cash, something as evident in their gait and demeanor as in their obvious need. “Passive,” “resigned,” “stunned,” and “mute” were descriptions most commonly given to distinguish Irish emigrants along the docks. The authorities, especially the unenviable health and parish relieving officers, were repeatedly frustrated by the tendency of sick or starving emigrants to hide themselves from view in the cellars and tenements, as though fearing to approach even those who meant to help them.

There was some reason to remain unseen, since Irish-born paupers could be brought before the magistrates and immediately returned to Ire-land under the Poor Removal Acts. Short of that dreaded prospect, the sick could be removed from the family for quarantine or “treatment” in the fever sheds. Inadvertently, the law also gave the lodging-house keepers and their intermediaries a new means of threatening their guests with exposure and repatriation. The laws and regulations aimed at emigrants, as well as the discretionary powers of health and parish officers, tended to reinforce the ingrained habits of isolation and secrecy with which the emigrants had long used to cloak themselves from scrutiny. In the townland, all deputies of the law or authorities were to be shunned indeed, many succeeded in evading them and some lived entirely out of their sight for years. But anonymity was no longer possible, since in Liverpool the law or the threat of it was everywhere in the person not only of every official but of almost any native citizen.

It is unlikely that most of the newly arriving emigrants understood the variety of proceedings of the law that could derail their hopes and plans: discovery by the relieving officers might be followed in a few hours by a summary hearing before the magistrates and forced removal along the same route they had just survived, as deck passengers back across the Irish Sea. Medical or ship’s officers could reject one or all in a family without appeal moments before they boarded. Health officers could order immediate quarantine in the fever sheds or the hulks moored in the river to isolate the infected. Doctors or beadles could remove “lunatics” from the poorhouses to the crowded asylum at Rainhill, where the wards were filled with hundreds who were diagnosed as suffering from “mental paralysis”.

A large minority were also handicapped by language or illiteracy. The Irish accents of both native- and Irish-born could be heard throughout the city, distinguishing their bearers’ place of origin or even their religious identity to each other. But speaking Irish above a whisper outside the Irish wards instantly marked the emigrant to both the authorities and the swarms of predators. More than half of the native population of the city was also illiterate, but new arrivals from Ireland were at greater risk of exploitation from this cause in the unfamiliar workings of the emigration system, in which reliable information and directions about ship movements, delays, and regulations were essential. At least in these circumstances, the literate children were more likely to be a help than a burden to many emigrant families; indeed, the value and status of the young adults had almost certainly risen as the distance from the townland lengthened and the powers of the elders diminished.

Another large but unknown number arrived in Liverpool with their tickets or their fares only and were completely unprepared for even slight setbacks. The routine delays in sailing dates were especially dangerous for these and accounted for the thousands caught in the gauntlet of official and criminal coercion from which few emerged unscathed and many totally penniless. Many were also vulnerable to the devious practices of the freelance banditti who infested the lower levels of the emigrant trade, being as unused to complicated transactions as they were to schedules or lodging houses. These easily fell afoul of money changers, offering to “dollar” their English coin into American currency of less or no value, or of lodging-house keepers who might keep a family “on the cuff” for food and shelter and strip them bare when payment came due, by force if threats failed.

Many of the petty frauds practiced on them were common bullying: baggage would be stolen by the runners and “commissions” demanded for its return; half-fare childern’s tickets were sold to illiterate adults who would then be turned away at the gangplank. Worthless out-of-date tickets were casually altered and bought by the gullible or desperate. Others were refused passage because they lacked the additional one dollar “head money” required at American ports. In their rush to fill the steerages, brokers were known to book emigrants for New York on vessels bound for Baltimore or Boston, or even New Orleans, assuring them that these places were only hours apart.

The fleecing of “greenhorns” was widely practiced in all big cities in Europe and America, often as in Liverpool by those who had survived a similar experience themselves not long before. It soon became a kind of initiation rite for migrant peasants in the new moral niceties of city life. But Liverpool’s well-earned fame for this skullduggery could probably not have been achieved but for the overabundance of fresh and easy victims, a role the townland emigrant of 1848 was suited for as if by order.

The exposure of their weakness had begun at the moment they were assembled in the Strokestown square and proceeded daily on the road to Liverpool as they were marched and herded under the eyes of strangers, all now reduced to homeless paupers whatever their former standing had been. Patriarchs and independent widows who had ruled adult families on the land became burdensome dependents when severed from their holdings, and together with infants and children under five suffered the highest rates of attrition en route.

James Connor’s father, a patriarch of one of the largest and oldest townland families, was rejected as “too old and debilitated” by a reputable captain who merely wished to reduce the risk of mortality aboard his ship during the crossing. Such descriptions tell us little about the old man’s actual condition, since the same description was sometimes used of men or women of less than forty years of age as reason for rejection. Hundreds of similarly described emigrants were “repatriated’ weekly from Liverpool alone, some of them no doubt creating bits of the scenes of “want and woe” described by Melville. Of the nearly 300,000 who arrived in 1847, some 15,000 were removed to Ireland under the new Poor Law Removal Act

Scally, Robert James, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995, pp.212-215

QUESTIONS:

• How were the Irish waiting to emigrate from Liverpool set apart and isolated?
• How were the Irish famine refugees in Liverpool victimized and exploited?

Irish Famine
Unit V
Activity 1

COFFIN SHIPS

“In April Stephen de Vere, of the well-known family of de Vere, Curragh Chase, County Limerick, took a steerage passage on an emigrant vessel to Quebec, in order ‘that he might speak as a witness respecting the sufferings of emigrants’. ‘Before the emigrant has been a week at sea,’ wrote Stephen de Vere, ‘he is an altered man… How can it be otherwise ? Hundreds of poor people, men, women and children, of all ages from the drivelling idiot of 90 to the babe just born, huddled together, without light, without air, wallowing in filth, and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart… the fevered patients lying between the sound in sleeping places so narrow, as almost to deny them… a change of position… by their agonized ravings disturbing those around them… living without food or medicine except as administered by the hand of casual charity, dying without spiritual consolation and buried in the deep without the rites of the church.’

The food, de Vere continued, was seldom sufficiently cooked because there were not enough cooking places. The supply of water was hardly enough for drinking and cooking-washing was impossible; and in many ships the filthy beds were never brought up on deck and aired, nor was the narrow space between the sleeping-berths washed or scraped until arrival at quarantine. Provisions, doled out by ounces, consisted of meal of the worst quality and salt meat; water was so short that the passengers threw their salt provisions overboard – they could not eat them and satisfy their raging thirst afterwards. People lay for days on end in their dark dose berths, because by that method they suffered less from hunger. The captain used a false measure for water, and the so-called gallon measure held only three pints; for this de Vere had the captain prosecuted and fined on arrival at Quebec. Spirits were sold once or twice a week, and frightful scenes of drunkenness followed. Lights below were prohibited because the ship, in spite of the open cooking-fires on her decks, was carrying a cargo of gunpowder to the garrison at Quebec, but pipes were secretly smoked in the berths, and lucifer matches used. The voyage took three months, and apart from fever, which does not seem to have been serious, many of the passengers, wrote de Vere, became ‘utterly debased and corrupted’. Yet he was told that the ship was ‘more comfortable than many’.

The worst ships were those which brought emigrants sent out by their landlords, and of all the sufferings endured during the famine none aroused such savage resentment, or left behind such hatred, as the landlord emigrations.

Before the famine, responsible landlords, for instance, Lord Bessborough and Lord Monteagle, advanced money and paid the cost of passages for tenants to emigrate. Lord Monteagle, in particular, believed that in emigration lay the solution of Ireland’s population problem, and the Monteagle Papers contain a number of letters from grateful emigrants; he was also responsible for setting up the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Colonization, that is, emigration, in 1847.

Another landlord, Mr. Spaight, of Limerick, a well-known ship broker, bought Deify Castle, in Tipperary, for £40,000 in 1844, and found `a dead weight of paupers’. As he was engaged in the passenger trade, he offered free passage and provisions to those willing to emigrate, and the value of two pounds on landing, provided the tenants ‘tumbled’, that is, pulled down, their cabins. He made the offer only to entire families, and said he had ‘got rid of crime and distress for £3 10s. a head’. The first failure of the potato was followed by a number of landlord emigrations, and a total of more than a thousand tenants from various estates reached Quebec in 1846, those arriving early in the season being reasonably healthy and, on the whole, adequately provided for.

The fatal year 1847 brought a change. In January the Government announced that the whole destitute population was to be transferred to the Poor Law, to be maintained out of local rates at the expense of owners of property, and the only hope of solvency for landlords was to reduce the number of destitute on their estates. Emigration began to be used as an alternative to eviction, and Sir Robert Gore Booth, a resident landlord, was accused by Mr. Perley, the Government emigration agent at St. John, New Brunswick, of ‘exporting and shovelling out the helpless and infirm to the detriment of the colony’. Sir Robert in reply put forward the landlord’s point of view, declaring that emigration was the only humane method of putting properties in Ireland on a satisfactory footing. The country was overpopulated, and it was not right to evict and turn people out on the world. To emigrate them was the only solution.

Emigration also saved money; the cost of emigrating a pauper was generally about half the cost of maintaining him in the work-house for one year, and once the ship had sailed the destitute were effectually got rid of, for they could return only with immense difficulty. In 1847, therefore, the temptation was strong to ship off as cheaply as possible those unfortunates who, through age, infirmity or the potato failure, had become useless and an apparently endless source of expense.

No attempt was made to regulate landlord emigration, but the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners did warn landlords that each tenant should have at least one pound landing-money, and provided the necessary organization for remitting money to British North America. No money, however, was sent.

On December 11, 1847, Mr. Adam Ferric, a member of the Legislative Council of Canada, wrote a furious open letter on Irish landlord emigration to the British Colonial Secretary, Earl Grey. He denounced landlords by name, the best-known being Lord Palmerston and Major Mahon, of Strokestown, County Roscommon, who later was tragically murdered. Hordes of half-naked, starving paupers, declared Mr. Ferric, including aged, infirm, beggars and vagrants, had been shipped off to ‘this young and thinly populated county without regard to humanity or even to common decency’. They were given promises of clothes, food and money and told that an agent would pay from two to five pounds to each family, according to size, on arrival at Quebec; when they arrived no agent could be found, and they were thrown on the Government and private charity. Twice as many passengers as the ship should hold were ‘huddled together between decks’; there was too little food and water and conditions were ‘as bad as the slave trade’.

Nine vessels had left Sligo carrying tenants emigrated by Lord Palmerston from his estates, and additional passages were hooked from Liverpool, about 2,000 persons leaving in all. The first vessel to arrive, the Elira Liddell, at St. John, New Brunswick, in July, 1847, raised a storm of protest; it was alleged that she brought only widows with young children, and aged, destitute, decrepit persons, useless to the colony. Another vessel, the Lord Ashburton, arrived at Quebec on October 30, dangerously late in the season, carrying 477 passengers, 174 of whom, Lord Palmerston’s tenants, were almost naked: 87 of them had to be clothed by charity before they could, with decency, leave the ship. On the Lord Asburton 107 persons had died on the voyage of fever and dysentery; 60 were ill, and so deplorable was the condition of the crew that five passengers had to work the ship up to Grosse Isle. The Quebec Gazette described the condition of the Lord Ashburton as ‘a disgrace to the home authorities’. Even later in the year, on November 8, 1847, the brig Richard Watson arrived, carrying tenants of Lord Palmerston’s, one of whom, a woman, was completely naked, and had to have a sheet wrapped round her before she could go ashore.

Most notorious of all was the Aeolus–bringing tenants of Lord Palmerston’s from Sligo–which arrived at St. John, New Brunswick, on November 2. The St. Lawrence was then closed by ice, the Canadian winter had begun, and caleches, or horse-drawn sleighs, had replaced carriages in the snow-filled streets of Quebec. The captain of the Aeolus paid £250 in bonds to be allowed to land 240 emigrants at St. John. They were ‘almost in a state of nudity’, and the surgeon at Partridge Island, the quarantine station, asserted that ninety-nine per cent must become a public charge immediately: they were widows with helpless young families, decrepit old women, and men ‘riddled with disease’.

The citizens of St. John declared that they could not feed or shelter the unfortunate emigrants; notices were posted in the streets offering to all who would go back to Ireland a free passage and food; and message was sent to Lord Palmerston that the ‘Common Council of the City of St. John deeply regret that one of Her Majesty’s ministers, the Rt. Hon. Lord Palmerston, either by himself or his authorized agent should have exposed such a numerous and distressed portion of his tenantry to the severity and privations of a New Brunswick winter… unprovided with the common means of support, with broken-down constitutions and almost in a state of nudity’.”

Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunqer; Ireland 1845-1849 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991. First printing: 1962. pp.226-228

QUESTIONS:

• What were the conditions for the Irish Famine victims on board the “coffin ships”?
• Why did the landlords in Ireland wish to pay for their tenants to leave?
• Why were the worst conditions found on the ships paid for by the landlords?

Irish Famine
Unit V
Objective 2

Activity 1

Regulations at Quebec required that all ships with passengers coming up the St. Lawrence should stop at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle, thirty miles down the river, for medical inspection; those vessels which had sickness on board were then detained and the sick taken to the quarantine hospital. Grosse Isle, a beautiful island, lying in the middle of the majestic St. Lawrence, had been selected as the site for a quarantine station in 1832, at the time of a cholera epidemic.

On February 19, 1847, Dr. Douglas, the medical officer in charge of the quarantine station at Grosse Isle, asked for £3,000 to make preparations for the coming immigration, pointing out that during the previous year the number admitted to the quarantine hospital had been twice as large as usual, and that reports from Ireland indicated that the state of the immigrants this year would be worse.

Far from getting £3,000, Dr. Douglas was assigned just under £300. He was allowed one small steamer, the St. George, to ply between Grosse Isle and Quebec and given permission to hire a sailing-vessel, provided one could be found for not more than £50 for the season.

The citizens of Quebec, however, were so uneasy, that at the beginning of March, 1847, they sent a petition to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Earl Grey, in which they pointed out that the number of Irish immigrants was annually rising, that the present distress in Ireland must mean a further large increase, that they viewed with alarm the probable fate of poor Irish immigrants in the rigorous winter climate of Canada, and that there was also the possibility of such immigrants bringing disease. They begged the Canadian Government to take action.

The Montreal Gazette, prophesying that Canada was going to be ‘inundated with an enormous crowd of poor and destitute emigrants’, called for ‘legislative measures’ to meet the coming crisis. Everyone knew, declared the Gazette, that Quebec was merely the port where emigrants disembarked for a few hoists, to embark again for Montreal, and it was on Montreal that the inundation would descend. However, a meeting of Montreal citizens, called by the Emigration Committee of Montreal on May to, 1847, to consider what steps should be taken, was so poorly attended that the meeting was adjourned.

There was one man who might have been able to convince the Canadian Government that a catastrophe was approaching, Alexander Carlisle Buchanan. He was the Chief Emigration Officer, he was esteemed in official circles, his reports were studied, his opinion carried weight. Nevertheless, Buchanan, though he anticipated a very considerable increase in sickness, ‘did not make any official representation to Government’ because, as he wrote, ‘it was a subject that did not come within the control of my department’.

The Government, therefore, received no official warning that the emigration from Ireland was likely to present any problem, beyond being unusually large; and in April, 1847, the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners made their seventh report without any inkling that disaster threatened. In the Canadian Legislature soothing assurances were given; the coming immigration would certainly he large, but the present system was adequate to deal with it; in 1846, 125,000 persons had arrived (this was an exaggeration), but the system had been found to work, ‘and in general there were no complaints’.

The opening of the St. Lawrence was late in 1847; ‘the merry month of May started with ice an inch thick’, reported the Quebec Gazette, and the first vessel, the Syria, did not arrive until May 17. Less than a week later the catastrophe had taken place, and was beyond control. The Syria had 84 cases of fever on board, out of a total of 241 passengers–nine persons had died on the voyage, and one was to die on landing at Grosse Isle. All her passengers were Irish, had crossed to Liverpool to embark, and had spent one night at least in the cheap lodging-houses of Liverpool. In Dr. Douglas’s opinion, 20 to 24 more were certain to sicken, bringing the total for the Syria to more than 100, and the quarantine hospital, built for 150 cases, could not possibly accommodate more than 200.

Dr. Douglas now told the Canadian Government that he had ‘reliable information’ that. 10,600 emigrants at least had left Britain for Quebec since April 10: ‘Judging from the specimens just arrived’, large numbers would have to go to hospital, and he asked permission to build a new shed, to cost about £150, to be used as a hospital. On May 20, he received authority to erect the shed provided the cost was kept down to £135.”

Four days after the Syria, on May 21, eight ships arrived with a total of 430 fever cases. Two hundred and five were taken into the hospital, which became dangerously overcrowded, and the remaining 216 had to be left on board ship. ‘I have not a bed to lay them on or a place to put them,’ wrote Dr. Douglas. ‘I never contemplated the possibility of every vessel arriving with fever as they do now.’

Three days later seventeen more vessels arrived, all with fever; a shed normally used to accommodate passengers detained for quarantine was turned into a hospital and instantly filled. There were now 695 persons in hospital and 164 on board ship waiting to be taken off; and Dr. Douglas wrote that he had just received a message that twelve more vessels had anchored, ‘all sickly’.

On May 26 thirty vessels, with 10,000 emigrants on board, were waiting at Grosse Isle; by the 29th there were thirty-six vessels, with 13,000 emigrants. And ‘in all these vessels cases of fever and dysentery had occurred’, wrote Dr. Douglas-the dysentery seems to have been infections, and was probably bacillary dysentery.

On May 31 forty vessels were waiting, extending in a line two miles down the St. Lawrence; about 1,100 cases of fever were on Grosse Isle in sheds, tents, and laid in rows in the little church; an equal number were on board the ships, waiting to be taken off; and a further 45,000 emigrants at least were expected.

On June 1 the Catholic Archbishop of Quebec addressed a circular letter to all Catholic Bishops and Archbishops in Ireland, asking them to ‘use every endeavor to prevent your diocesans emigrating in such numbers to Canada’. Nevertheless, the numbers continued to mount; ultimately, in 1847, 109,000 are stated to have left for British North America, ‘almost all’, stated the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, ‘Irish’.

By July, more than 2,500 sick were on Grosse Isle, and conditions were appalling. ‘Medical men,’ wrote Dr. Douglas, were ‘disgusted with the disagreeable nature of their duties in treating such filthy cases.’ Many doctors died; Dr. Benson, of Dublin, who had experience in fever hospitals in Ireland, arrived on May 2d and volunteered his services, but caught typhus and died six days later. Each of the medical officers was ill at some time, and three other doctors died of typhus, in addition to Dr. Benson. At one period twelve out of a medical staff of fourteen were ill; of the two others, one left because he was afraid of catching typhus and one was summoned to a dying parent, leaving Dr. Douglas virtually single-handed.

Patients on the ships were often left for four or five days without any medical attention: under the Passenger Act of 1842 ships were not compelled to carry a doctor, and only one doctor besides Dr. Benson happened to have been a passenger.

Nurses, too, were unobtainable, and the sick suffered tortures from lack of attention. A Catholic priest, Father Moylan, gave water to sick persons in a tent who had had nothing to drink for eighteen hours; another, Father McQuirk, was given carte blanche by Dr. Douglas to hire nurses, as many as possible, from among the healthy passengers. He offered high wages and told the women that, speaking as their priest, it was their duty to volunteer; not one came forward. The fear of fever among the Irish, said Dr. Douglas, was so great that ‘the nearest relatives abandon each other whenever they can’. The only persons who could be induced to take charge of the sick were abandoned and callous creatures, of both sexes, who robbed the dead.

Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991. p.218-221

Irish Famine
Unit V
Objective 2

Activity 1 APPENDIX III

ON THE ISLAND: THE HORRORS OF GROSSE ISLE’

The Canadian authorities were hardly less remiss than the British in preparations to meet the terrible emergency before them; although they had equally received ample warning of it. In 1846, Dr Douglas, the medical superintendent at Grosse Isle, had repeatedly urged them to get ready for what was coming. The British, Irish, American and Canadian newspapers had almost daily reported and commented on the alarming progress which the famine and pestilence were making in Ireland, so that they could not plead ignorance of the ominous outlook or of the fact that the emigration from the Green Isle to Canada in 1847 would be on a very large scale.

Early in that year Mr. Robert Christie, the historian, then a leading member of the Provincial Parliament, wrote to the Provincial Secretary, Hon. Dominick Daly, complaining of the Government’s inexcusable failure to take proper and necessary precautions and pointing out the great danger to which the country would be exposed, together with the measures to be adopted to avert it. Reverend Fr Moylan, the Catholic missionary at Grosse Isle in those days, also gave timely forewarning to the Government with respect to the gravity of the situation and it was upon his urgent recommendation that, later when the crisis was on, the available police force to keep order on the island was increased by 50 men of the 93rd Regiment, under Lt. Studdard, sent down from Quebec.

But all the signs and the warnings of the coming storm were virtually unheeded until it was practically too late. The only additions made to the Quarantine establishment were through the purchase of 50 bedsteads, double the quantity of straw used in former years and the erection of a new shed or building to serve as a hospital and to contain 60 more beds. In this way, provision, including the old hospitals and sheds dating from 1832, was made for only 200 sick, the average of former years never having attained half that number requiring admission at one time. How utterly inadequate this was, the alarming sequel soon showed.

But, while there was little or no excuse for the failure of the British authorities to have risen equal to the great emergency, there was certainly a good deal for that of their Canadian colleagues. At that time the British North American provinces were comparatively new and poor, carrying on a struggling existence and possessing little means or few re-sources that were then available. Their political and social organization was yet in a more or less primitive and chaotic state, and as already seen, they were also divided among themselves by conflicting opinions as to the gravity of the danger and the steps to be taken to avert or meet it.

However, they were very soon brought face to face with it in all its hideousness and scarcely a month had elapsed after the opening of navigation in 1847, when a session of the Provincial Parliament was hurriedly called and held in Montreal, a select committee was appointed to inquire into the situation, and a commission was also appointed consisting of Drs. Painchaud, of Quebec and McDonnell and Campbell, of Montreal, to investigate the character and amount of sick-ness prevailing among the emigrants at Grosse Isle and the best mode to be adopted to arrest the disease and prevent its dissemination, with full powers to make all such changes on the island as they thought proper.

The commissioners reported. Of the sick in the hospitals, sheds and tents, they said: “We found thence unfortunate people in the most deplorable condition for want of necessary nurses and hospital attendants; their friends who had partially recovered being in too many instances unable and in most, unwilling, to render them any, assistance, common sympathies being apparently annihilated by the mental and bodily depression produced by famine and disease. At our inspection of many of the vessels, we witnessed some appalling instances of what we have now stated – corpses lying in the same beds with the sick and the dying, the healthy not taking the trouble to remove them.”

Immediate steps were taken by the commissioners for affording temporary shelter on the island, by means of spars and sails borrowed from the ships and the putting up of shanties for the accommodation of the healthy.

What pen can fittingly describe the horrors of that shocking summer at Grosse Isle? All the eye-witnesses, all the writers on the subject, agree in saying that they have never been surpassed in pathos, as well as in hideousness and ghastliness. In a few months one of the most beautiful spots on the St Lawrence was converted into a great lazar and charnel-house to be forever sanctified by the saddest memories of an unhappy race.

In speaking of the fever sheds, Mr. De Vere says: “They were very miserable, so slightly built as to exclude neither the heat nor the cold. No sufficient care was taken to remove the sick from the sound or to disinfect and clean the beddings. The very straw upon which they had lain was often allowed to become a bed for their successors and I have known many poor families prefer to burrow under heaps of loose stones, near the shore, rather than accept the shelter of the infected sheds.”

Captain, afterwards Admiral Boxer, of Crimean fame, stated that there was nothing more terrible than the sheds. Most of the patients were attacked with dysentery and the smell was dreadful, as there was no ventilation.

Frs. Moylan and O’Reilly saw the emigrants in the sheds lying on the bare hoards and ground for whole nights and days without either bed or bedding. Two, and sometimes three, were in a berth. No distinction was made as to sex, age or nature of illness. Food was insufficient and the bread not baked. Patients were supplied three times a day with tea, gruel or broth. How any of them ever recovered is a wonder. Fr O’Reilly visited two ships, the Avon and the Triton. The former lost 136 passengers on the voyage and the latter 93. All these were thrown overboard and buried in the Atlantic. He administered the last rites to over 200 sick on hoard these ships. Fr Moylan’s description of the condition of the holds of these vessels is simply most revolting and horrible.

As for the dead, who were not buried at sea, it has been already seen how they were taken from the pest ships and corded like firewood on the beach to await burial. In many instances the corpses were carried out of the foul smelling holds or they were dragged with boat-hooks out of them by sailors and others who had to be paid a sovereign for each.

A word more as to the removal of the corpses from the vessels. They were brought from the hold, where the darkness was, as it were, rendered more visible by the miserable untrimmed oil lamp that showed light in some places sufficient to distinguish a form, but not a face. It was more by touch than by sight that the passengers knew each other. First came the touch and then the question, who is it? Even in the bunks many a loved one asked the same question to one by his or her side, for in the darkness that reigned their eyesight was failing them.

The priest, leaving daylight and sunlight behind, as each step from deck led him down the narrow ladder into the hold of the vessels of those days, as wanting in ventilation as the Black Hole of Calcutta, had to make himself known and your poor Irish emigrant with the love and reverence he had for his clergy, who stuck to him through thick and thin, endeavored to raise himself and warmly greet him with the little strength that remained.

Another death announced, orders were given by the captain for the removal of the body. Kind hands in many cases attended to this. In other cases, as we have seen, it was left to strangers. Up the, little narrow ladder to the deck, were the corpses borne in the same condition in which they died, victims among other things of filth, uncleanliness and bed sores and with hardly any clothing on them. There was no pretence of decency or the slightest humanity shown.

On deck a rope was placed around the emaciated form of the Irish peasant, father, mother, wife and husband, sister and brother. The rope was hoisted and with their heads and naked limbs dangling for a moment in mid-air, with the wealth of hair of the Irish maiden, or young Irish matron, or the silvered locks of the poor old Irish grandmother floating in the breeze, they were finally lowered over the ship’s side into the boats, rowed to the island and left on the rocks until such time as they were coffined. Well might His Grace the Archbishop of Quebec, in his letter to the Bishops of Ireland, say that the details he received of the scenes of horror and desolation at the island almost staggered belief and baffled description.

There was no delay in burying the dead. The spot selected for their last resting place was a lonely one at the western end of the island at about 10 acres from the landing. At first the graves were not dug a sufficient depth. The rough coffins were piled one over the other and the earth covering the upper row, in some instances, was not more than a foot deep and generally speaking about a foot and a half. The cemetery was about 6 acres in extent. Later huge trenches were dug in it about 5 or 6 feet deep and in these the bodies were laid often uncoffined. Six men were kept constantly employed at this work.

Be’chard, in his history of the island, adds a new horror to the ghoulish scene. He states that an army of rats, which had come ashore from the fever ships, invaded the field of death, took possession of it and pierced it with innumerable holes to get at and gnaw the bodies buried in the shallow graves until hundreds of loads of earth had to be carted and placed upon them.

At first, says the late J. M. O’Leary, the sick were placed in the hospitals, while the seemingly healthy were sent to the sheds, but emigrants were continually arriving who were left for days and nights without a bed under them, or a cover over them, wasting and melting away under the united influence of fever and dysentery, without anyone to give them a drink during their long hours of raging thirst and terrible sufferings.

For want of beds and bedding, for want of attendants, hundreds of poor creatures – after a long voyage consumed by confinement and hunger, thirst and disease – were compelled to spend the long, long nights and sultry days, lying on the hard boards without a pillow under their burning heads, without a hand to moisten their parched lips or fevered brows and what was the result? They who, by a little providential precaution and ordinary care, might have been restored to their large, helpless families and distracted relations, were hurried away in a few hours to their premature and unhonored graves while those who should at once have provided for their salvation at any cost and sacrifice were haggling about the means.

What encouragement was it for a young professional man to expose himself to almost certain death for the paltry remuneration of 17 shillings and 6 pence a day held out to those who tendered their services? What could be hoped for or expected from nurses who were willing to spend their nights and days in a fever hospital for 3 shillings a day?

In the sheds were double tiers of bunks, the upper one about 3 feet above the lower. As the planks of the former were not placed close together, the filth from the sick fell upon those in the lower tier who were too weak to move. Filth was thus allowed to accumulate and with so vast a crowd of fever cases in one place and with no ventilation, generated a miasma so virulent and concentrated that few who came within its poisonous atmosphere escaped.

Clergy, doctors, hospital attendants, servants and police, fell ill one after the other and not a few of them succumbed. A number of the captains, officers and crews of the pest ships also died at Grosse Isle and some of the vessels were so decimated of these during the voyage across and so short-handed, that it is a wonder how they ever reached the island.

Often times there were two and sometimes three in a bed without any distinction of age, sex or nature of illness. Corpses remained all night in the places where death occurred, even when there was a companion in the same bed, while the bodies that had been brought from the ships were piled like cordwood on the beach without any covering over them until such time as they were coffined.

In the midst of this fierce Canadian summer, thousands of sick kept pouring into Grosse Isle. Not a drop of fresh water was to be found on the island, no lime juice, no clean straw even to protect the patients from the wet ground in the tents while in the beginning of July, with the thermometer at 98° in the shade, hundreds were landed from the ships and thrown rudely by the unfeeling crews, on the burning rocks and there they remained whole nights and days without shelter of any kind.

Mangan, James (Ed.), Robert Whyte’s 1847 Famine Ship Diary, Mercier Press, Dublin, Ireland, 1994. P.111-121

Irish Famine
Unit V
Objective 2
Activity 1

Questions for discussion:

• How many famine and fever victims were the medical authorities at Grosse Isle prepared to handle? How many arrived in 1847? Why were they so unprepared?
• What was the general state of the Irish emigrants as they arrived at Grosse Isle?
• Were the famine victims given food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care and decent burials?
• In what sense were the Irish better off than they were in Ireland?

Irish Famine
Unit VI

VI.

Genocide

Performance Objectives:The student will weigh the opinions of historians and attempt to come to a conclusion about genocide in Ireland during the Great Famine.Teaching/learning Strategies and Activities:Students will study the opinions of historians and compare them with definitions of genocide provided.

Activity 1. Students will read “Genocide”, answer questions following the readings and discuss the issues raised.

Instructional Materials/Resources:

“Genocide” (see footnotes for sources)

Irish Famine
Unit VI
Activity 1

GENOCIDE

The American Heritage Dictionary defines genocide as: “The systematic, planned annihilation of a racial, political or cultural group.”

The United Nations Convention on Genocide, adopted by the U.N. in 1948 lists this as one of the acts which qualify: “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or part.”

Richard L. Rubenstein in his book The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World offers yet another definition. He states, “…a government is as responsible for a genocidal policy when its officials accept mass death as a necessary cost of implementing their policies as when they pursue genocide as an end in itself.” (1.)

BRITISH, IRISH AND AMERICAN VOICES:

IMMORAL SELF-INTEREST

Oxford history professor James Anthony Froude, who once wrote that Irish folk were “more like squalid apes than human beings” wrote the following in his book, English in Ireland: “England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe.” (2.)

Dr. GRAY

In his essay, “Ideoloqy and the Famine”, Belfast-born and Cambridge-educated historian Peter Gray wrote that:

“It is difficult to refute the indictment made by one humanitarian English observer in the later stages of the Famine, that amidst ‘an abundance of cheap food…very many have been done to death by pure tyranny’. The charge of culpable neglect of the consequences of policies leading to mass starvation is indisputable. That a conscious choice to pursue moral or economic objectives at the expense of human life was made by several ministers is also demonstrable.”

Professor Gray concludes, however, that British government policy “was not a policy of deliberate genocide”, but a dogmatic refusal to admit the policy was wrong and “amounted to a sentence of death to many thousands.” (3.)

PROFESSOR CLARK

Dennis Clark, an Irish-American historian, wrote in The Irish in Philadelphia that the famine was “the culmination of generations of neglect, misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless cabin dwellers it meant emigration or extinction… (4.)

The dimensions of the calamity can hardly be delineated by simple statistics. England had presided over an epochal disaster too monstrous and too impersonal to be a mere product of individual ill-will or the fiendish outcome of a well-planned conspiracy. It was something worse: the cumulative antagonism and corruption of the English ruling class was visited with crushing intensity upon a long-enfeebled foe. It was as close to genocide as colonialism would come in the nineteenth century.”

About the 500,000 evictions that took place during the Famine, Clark wrote: “The British government’s insistence on ‘the absolute rights of landlords’” to evict farmers and their families so they could raise cattle and sheep, was a process “as close to ‘ethnic cleansing’ as any Balkan war ever enacted.” (5.)

PROFESSOR DONNELLY

Professor James S. Donnelly Jr., a historian at the University of Wisconsin, wrote the following in Landlord and Tenant in Nineteenth-Century Ireland:

“I would draw the following broad conclusion: at a fairly early stage of the Great Famine the government’s abject failure to stop or even slow down the clearnaces (evictions) contributed in a major way to enshrining the idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind. Or perhaps one should say in the Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and women, and not only to the revolutionary minority…”

But Donnelly concludes otherwise: “And it is also my contention that while genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish…” (6.)

COMMISSIONER TWISLETON

When the Irish Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twisleton resigned in protest over lack of relief aid from Britain, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Clarendon, wrote the following to British Prime Minister Lord John Russell:

“He (Twisleton) thinks that the destitution here [in Ireland] is so horrible, and the indifference of the House of Commons is so manifest, that he is an unfit agent for a policy that must be one of extermination.” (7.)

In 1849 Twisleton testified that “comparatively trifling sums were required for Britain to spare itself the deep disgrace of permitting its miserable fellow subjects to die of starvation.” According to Gray, the British spent 7 million Pounds for relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, “representing less than half of one percent of the British gross national product over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the 20 million Pounds compensation given to West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s.” (8.)

LORD CLARENDON

The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Earl of Clarendon wrote a letter to Prime Minister Russell on April 26th, 1849, expressing his feelings about lack of aid from the British House of Commons:

“I do not think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination.” (9.)

PROFESSOR SENIOR

Nassau Senior, a respected economics professor at Oxford University said that the Famine in Ireland “would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good.” (10.)

EDWARDS AND WlLLIAMS

In The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52 Editors R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams wrote:

“The political commentator, the ballad singer and the unknown maker of folk-tales have all spoken about the Great famine, but is there more to be said? If man, the prisoner of time, acts in conformity with the conventions of society into which he is born, it is difficult to judge him with irrevocable harshness. So it is with the men of the famine era. Human limitations and timidity dominate the story of the Great Famine, but of great and deliberately imposed evil in high positions of responsibility there is little evidence.” (11.)

JOHN MITCHEL

John Mitchel, leader of the Young Ireland Movement, wrote the following in 1860:

“I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island, that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a “dispensation of Providence;” and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe; yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud – second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.” (12.)

OTHER IRISH NATIONALISTS

In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Lord John Russell was a student of the poet Spenser, who had inhumanely calculated “how far English colonization and English policy might be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation.” (13.)

That same year a Cork City Councilor named Brady told his audience that the British Prime Minister had “violated every pledge previously made on arriving at place and power… a million and a half Irish people perished, were smitten and offered up as a holocaust, whose blood ascended to the throne of God for redress…, but the pity was that the minister was permitted to act so with impunity.”

On April 1, 1848, an editorial writer in The Nation said, “It is evident to all men that our foreign government is but a club for grave-diggers…we are decimated not by the will of God but the will of the Whigs.” (14.)

WOODHAM – SMITH

At the end of The Great Hunger, Cecil Woodham-Smith concludes:

“These misfortunes were not part of a plan to destroy the Irish nation; they fell on the people because the government of Lord John Russell was afflicted with an extraordinary inability to foresee consequences. It has been frequently declared that the parsimony of the British Government during the famine was the main cause of the sufferings of the people, and parsimony was certainly carried to remarkable lengths; but obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance probably contributed more.”(15.)“Much of this obtuseness sprang from the fanatical faith of mid-nineteenth century British politicians in the economic doctrine of laissez-faire, no interference by government, no meddling with the operation of natural causes. Adherence to laissez-faire was carried to such a length that in the midst of one of the major famines of history, the government was perpetually nervous of being too good to Ireland and of corrupting the Irish people by kindness, and so stifling the virtues of self reliance and industry.”

“In addition hearts were hardened by the antagonism then felt by the English towards the Irish, an antagonism rooted far back in religious and political history, and at the period of the famine, irritation had been added as well…It is impossible to read the letters of British statesmen of the period, Charles Wood and Trevelyan for instance, without astonishment at the influence exerted by antagonism and irritation on government policy in Ireland during the famine.”

“It is not characteristic of the English to behave as they have behaved in Ireland; as a nation, the English have proved themselves to be capable of generosity, tolerance and magnanimity, but not where Ireland is concerned. As Sydney Smith, the celebrated writer and wit, wrote: ‘The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.”‘ (16.)

CHRISTINE KINEALY

At the end of The Great Calamity, Christine Kinealy writes:

“While it was evident that the government had to do something to help alleviate the suffering, the particular nature of the actual response, especially following 1846, suggests a more covert agenda and motivation. As the Famine progressed, it became apparent that the government was using its information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland. These included population control and the consolidation of property through various means, including emigration…Despite the overwhelming evidence of prolonged distress caused by successive years of potato blight, the underlying philosophy of the relief efforts was that they should be kept to a minimalist level; in fact they actually decreased as the Famine progressed.” (17.)

BRITISH COLONIAL POLICIES

Cecil Woodham-Smith, an Englishwoman, wrote that “It is not characteristic of the English to behave as they have behaved in Ireland.” The following historical record offer contrary evidence. Briefly consider five issues: British treatment of American prisoners during the Revolution, British domination of the slave trade, British government-backed “Opium War”, British concentration camps used during the Boer War, and the 1943 mass starvation in British-ruled Bengal, India.

1. BRITISH STARVED AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR PRISONERS

During the American Revolution the British put captured rebel soldiers, sailors, and civilians onboard floating dungeons called “horrible hulks.” According to Albert Martin in The War for Independence, “They were worse than any prison ashore.”

On the worst boat, H.M.S. Jersey, nicknamed `Hell Afloat’, “Prisoners were allowed half the Royal navy’s ration, and that was food rejected as too spoiled even for Her Majesty’s seamen. Rats and vermin swarmed through Jersey, spreading disease.”

“Although the Jersey held 1,100 prisoners with more arriving daily, overcrowding was no problem, since the dying made way for the newcomers. Each morning a Redcoat sergeant bellowed through the bars, ‘Rebels, turn out your dead.’ No fewer than five bodies were hoisted up each day.”

The only way to get off the hulks was to change sides and enlist in the service of King George III. “British officers constantly spoke of His Majesty’s generosity toward rebels who mended their ways. Yet very few accepted the offer to turn traitor. Their willingness to suffer is proof of their devotion to the cause of American independence.” Over eleven thousand men died in these hulks, more than lost their lives in a11 of George Washinqton’s battles.. (18.)

2. DURING THE 17TH AND EARLY 18TH CENTURY, ENGLAND WAS THE LEADING SLAVE TRADING NATION

According to a 1980 book, The African Slave Trade, England began trading slaves in 1562 when London merchants financed “three good ships” with hundreds of men in their crews, to sail under the command of William Hawkins. In Guinea, they “got into their possession, partly by the sword and partly by other means to the number of 300 Negroes at least.” (20.)

Between 1795-1804 when English slave trade was at its height, the following were the clearances for ships from the three main English ports:

“The value of British income derived from (slave) trade with the West Indies was said to be four times greater than the value of British incomes derived from trade with the rest of the world. And this West India trade was in many respects the ideal colonial system. The trade consisted in simple exchange of cheap manufactured goods for African slaves, of African slaves for West India foodstuffs and tobacco; and of these products, once brought to Europe, for a high return in cash.” (21.)

3. THE BRITISH USED WARSHIPS AND TROOPS TO FORCE CHINA TO ACCEPT IMPORTED OPIUM

According to World History From 1500 the British wanted Chinese tea, but had nothing but cash to trade for it. Their colony in India was producing a good crop of opium, but it was prohibited in China except for medical purposes. The Chinese resisted illegal British opium trafficking, and that led to the “Opium War”. Britain used superior firepower, ships and troops to force the Chinese to accept opium sales. “The opium trade amounted to millions of silver dollars and hundreds of tons of opium annually.” (22.)

4. THE BRITISH STARVED THOUSANDS IN BOER WAR CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Fifty years after a million Irish people starved to death under British rule, the English fought their last great imperialist war. Major-General Horatio H. Kitchener commanded the British troops fighting the Dutch Boers in South Africa.

According to English author Thomas Pakenham, in his 1979 book The Boer War, Kitchener hoped to defeat the guerilla forces by destroying their means of support. He ordered the Boer farms burned and all the cattle, sheep and other livestock killed. His soldiers then rounded up all the men, women and children who were not guerilla fighters, and put them into concentration camps near railroad lines.

One hundred and fifty thousand people, white and black, were interned in camps with no running water, no meat, no milk for the children, and little fresh fruit or vegetables. Humanitarians reported that fever-stricken children-were dying in the dirt. Twenty to twenty-eight thousand people died of malnutrition and related diseases, according to Pakenham. British “methods of barbarism” in South Africa shocked the world.

5. WHILE UNDER BRITISH COLONIAL RULE, MILLIONS STARVED IN BENGAL, INDIA

According to Dr. Gideon Polya, a professor in Victoria, Australian, the 1943-44 famine that killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people in Bengal was “man-made”. Dr. Polya says that “the British brought an unsympathetic and ruthless economic agenda to India” and that “the creation of famine” was brought about by British “sequestration and export of food for enhanced commercial gain.”

He says that “British disinclination to respond with urgency and vigor to food deficits resulted in a succession of about 2 dozen appalling famines during the British occupation of India.” These swept away tens of millions of people. One of the worst famines was that of 1770 that killed an estimated 10 million people in Bengal (one third of the population) and which was “exacerbated by the rapacity of the (British) East India Company”.

Dr. Polya writes that “An extraordinary feature of the appalling record of British imperialism with respect to genocide and mass, world-wide killing of huge numbers of people (by war disease and famine) is its absence from public perception. Thus, for example, inspection of a selection of British history texts reveals that mention of the appalling Irish Famine of 1845-47 is confined in each case to several lines (although there is of course detailed discussion of the attendant, related political debate about the Corn Laws). It is hardly surprising that there should be no mention of famine in India or Bengal.”

The 1998 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Indian-born Amartya Sen, was a childhood victim of the Bengal famine. He said, “Any famine is easy to prevent if a government has the incentive to prevent it. If the government generates the income, then the market can deal with the supply problem very well by moving food.” Famines never strike democracies, Professor Sen contends. “Democracy gives a political incentive for the government to intervene… elected governments feel an obligation to intercede on behalf of constituents. Autocrats feel no such compunction.”

If the above historical record is true, then it is characteristic of British officials to behave as they behaved in Ireland. However, one cannot conclude that the ruthless actions of the ruling elite had the complete support of the British people.

THE CASE FOR GENOCIDE IN IRELAND: A SUMMARY

1. British Laws enacted over centuries, deprived the Irish of their land, language, trade, education, vote and religion.

2. British racism against the Irish people has been manifest for centuries, and has been used to dehumanize, debase, criminalize and enslave the Irish. British racism also extended to Africans, Indians, Egyptians and other conquered peoples.

3. The British government upheld the absolute right of landlords to evict Irish families during a terrible famine even in the dead of winter. Further, the Poor Law was encouraged landlords to engage in eviction in order not to be bankrupted by poor rates for their tenants.

4. The British allowed massive amounts of food to be exported from Ireland during the Famine and justified it under the doctrine of laissez-faire, or non-interference. However, British interference in Irish trade has been prolonged and continuous, before, during, and after the Famine.

5. The British authorities were well aware that the Poor Law made landlords more likely to make a one-time payment for “coffin ship” passage for their tenants rather that continue to pay taxes for their upkeep in workhouses. Canadian officials repeatedly sent reports informing British officials of the massive mortality rates on these ships.

QUESTIONS:

• Which historian or author provides the weakest arguments about genocide? Which the strongest? Why?
• Which, if any, of the three definitions of genocide applies to British rule in Ireland?
• Why is it important to consider the other acts of starvation imposed by the British in the historical period before and after the Famine?
• Do the actions of the British government related to the Revolutionary War prison ships, the slave trade, the Opium War, the Boer War, and the Bengal famine influence your opinion about whether or not the British were capable of genocide in Ireland?

FOOTNOTES

1. Clark, Dennis, “The Great Irish Famine: Worse than Genocide?” published by the Irish Edition (Philadelphia) July, August and September, 1993. p.7 2. 2. MacManus, Seumas, The Story of the Irish Race, The Irish Publishing Co., New
3. Gray, Peter, “Ideology and the Famine” in The Great Irish Famine Poirteir, Cathal, Editor, Mercier Press, Dublin, Ireland. 1995 p.102
4. Clark, Dennis, The Irish in Philadelphia, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1973. p.25
5. Clark, “The Great Irish Famine” p. 9
6. Donnelly, James S., Jr., “Mass Eviction and the Irish Famine: The Clearnaces Revisited”, from The Great Irish Famine, edited by Cathal Poirteir. Mercier Press, Dublin, Ireland. 1995. p. 170-71
7. Woodham-Smith, Cecil, The Great Hunaer; Ireland 1845-1849 Penguin Books, London, England, 1991. p.380
8. Gray, Peter, The Irish Famine, Discoveries: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, London, 1995, p.95
9. Woodham-Smith, p.381
10. Gallagher, Michael & Thomas, Paddy’s Lament. Harcourt Brace & Company, New York / London, 1982. p.84
11. Ibid., p.180
12. Ibid., p.178
13. Donnelly, p.172
14. Donnelly, p.173
15. Woodham-Smith, p.410
16. Ibid., p.411
17. Kinealy, Christine, This Great CalamitY; The Irish Famine 1845-52, Roberts Rinehart, Boulder, 1995. p.352-3
18. Martin, Albert, The War For Independence, Antheneum, New York, 1988. p. 180-83
19. Davidson, Basil, The African Slave Trade, Little Brown, Boston, 1980, p.67
20. Ibid., p.82
21. Ibid., p.78
22. Allen, J. Michael and James B., World History from 1500, Hatper and Row, New York, 1990

Irish Famine
Unit VII

FAMINE POETRY

PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES1. The student will determine the attitude of the poet toward the Famine experience by focusing on his/her use of imagery, allusion, metaphor and refrain.TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIESA.Students will compare the points of view contained in the poems, and discuss the poet’s ability to evoke empathy. Students will compare the attitude of stoicism versus passionate defiance.

Activity 1. Students will read a variety of poems, answer questions following the readings, and discuss the issues raised.“GIVE ME THREE GRAINS OF CORN, MOTHER.“

“FIELDS OF ATHENRY“

“THE PRATIES GROW SO SMALL“

“THE ITINERANT SINGING GIRL“

“THE BOREEN SIDE“

“FAMINE AND EXPORTATION“

“DARK ROSALEEN“

“SONG OF THE FAMINE“

“THE FAMINE YEAR (THE STRICKEN LAND)”

Poetry used by permission of the Irish Academic Press, Dublin. Excerpted from The Hungry Voice, Edited by Chris Morash, 1989

“GIVE ME THREE GRAINS OF CORN, MOTHER.“
By Amelia Blanford Edwards

Give me three grains of corn, Mother,

Only three grains of corn;

It will keep the little life I have

Till the coming of the morn.

I am dying of hunger and cold, Mother,

Dying of hunger and cold;

And half the agony of such a death

My lips have never told.

It has gnawed like a wolf at my heart, Mother,

A wolf that is fierce for blood;

All the livelong day, and the night beside,

Gnawing for lack of food.

I dreamed of bread in my sleep, Mother,

And the sight was heaven to see;

I awoke with an eager, famishing lip,

But you had no bread for me.

How could I look to you, Mother,

How could I look to you

For bread to give to your starving boy,

When you were starving too?

For I read the famine in your cheek,

And in your eyes so wild,

And I felt it in your bony hand,

As you laid it on your child.

The Queen has lands and gold, Mother,

The Queen has lands and gold,

While you are forced to your empty breast

A skeleton babe to hold-

A babe that is dying of want, Mother,

As I am dying now,

With a ghastly look in its sunken eye,

And famine upon its brow.

There is many a brave heart here, Mother,

Dying of want and cold,

While only across the Channel, Mother,

Are many that roll in gold;

There are rich and proud men there, Mother,

With wondrous wealth to view,

And the bread they fling to their dogs tonight

Would give life to me and you.

What has poor Ireland done, Mother,

What has poor Ireland done,

That the world looks on, and sees us starve,

Perishing one by one?

Do the men of England care not, Mother,

The great men and the high,

For the suffering sons of Erin’s Isle,

Whether they live or die?

Come nearer to my side, Mother,

Come nearer to my side,

And hold me fondly, as you held

My father when he died;

Quick, for I cannot see you, Mother,

My breath is almost gone;

Mother! Dear Mother! Ere I die,

Give me three grains of corn.

FIELDS OF ATHENRY (SONG)
By Pete St. John

By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling
“Michael, they have taken you away,
For you stole Trevelyan’s corn,
So the young might see the morn.
Now a prison snip lies waiting in the bay.”Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing
We had dreams and songs to sing
It’s so lonely round the fields of Athenry.

By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young man calling
“Nothing matters, Mary, when you’re free
Against the famine and the crown,
I rebelled they cut me down.
Now you must raise our child with dignity.”

By a lonely harbor wall, we watched the last star fall
As the prison ship sailed out against the sky
For she lived to hope and pray for her love in Botany Bay
It’s so lonely round the fields of Athenry.

THE PRATIES GROW SO SMALL
Anonymous

O, the praties they grow small
over here, over here.
O, the praties they grow small,
and they grow from spring to fall,
and we eat them skins and all,
over here, over here.O, I wish that we were geese,
night and morn, night and morn,
O, I wish that we were geese,
For they fly and take their ease,
And they live and die in peace,
over here, over here.

O, we’re trampled in the dust,
over here, over here,
O, we’re trampled in the dust,
But the Lord in whom we trust,
will give us crumb for crust,
over here, over here.

THE ITINERANT SINGING GIRL
By Jane Francesca Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s Mother)

Fatherless and motherless, no brothers have I,
And all my little sisters in the cold grave lie;
Wasted with hunger I saw them falling dead –

Lonely and bitter are the tears I shed.

Friendless and loverless, I wander to and fro,
Singing while my faint heart is breaking fast with woe,
Smiling in my sorrow, and singing for my bread –

Lonely and bitter are the tears I shed.

Harp clang and merry song by stranger’s door and board,
None ask wherefore tremble my pale lips at each word;
None care why the color from my wan cheek has fled –

Lonely and bitter are the tears I shed.

Smiling and singing still, tho’ hunger, want, and woe,
Freeze the young life-current in my veins as I go;
Begging for my living, yet wishing I were dead –

Lonely and bitter are the tears I shed.

THE BOREEN SIDE
By James Tighe

A stripling, the last of his race,
lies dead In a nook by the Boreen side;
The rivulet runs by his board and his bed,
Where he ate the green cresses and died.The Lord of the plains where that stream wanders on, -
Oh! he loved not the Celtic race –
By a law of the land cast out fellow man,
And he feeds the fat ox in his place.

The hamlet he leveled, and issued commands,
Preventing all human relief,
And out by the ditches, the serfs of his lands,
Soon perished of hunger and grief.

He knew they should die — as he ate and he drank
of the nourishing food and wine;
He heard of the death cries of the famish’d and lank
And fed were his dogs and his swine.

That Lord is a Christian! and prays the prayer,
‘Our Father’ — the Father of all –
And he reads in the Book of wonderful care,
That marks when a sparrow may fall.

And there lies that youth on his damp cold bed,
And the cattle have stall and straw;
No kindred assemble to wail the lone dead –
They perished by landlord law.

He lies by the path where his forefathers trod –
The race of the generous deeds,
That sheltered the Poor for the honor of God,
And fed them with bread — not weeds.

Unshrouded he lies by the trackless path,
And he died as his kindred died –
And vengeance Divine points the red bolt of wrath,
For that death by the Boreen side.

FAMINE AND EXPORTATION
By John O’Hagan

Take it from us, every grain,
We were made for you to drain;
Black starvation let us feel,
England must not want a meal!When our rotting roots shall fail,
When the hunger pangs assail,
Ye’ll have of Irish corn your fill –
We’ll have grass and nettles still!

We are poor, and ye are rich;
Mind it not, were every ditch
Strewn in spring with famished corpses,
Take our oats to feed your horses!

Heaven, that tempers ill with good,
When it smote our wonted food,
Sent us bounteous growth of grain –
Sent to pauper slaves, in vain!

We but asked in deadly need:
‘Ye that rule us! Let us feed
On the food that’s ours’ ~ behold!
Adder deaf and icy cold.

Were we Russians, thralls from birth,
In a time of winter dearth
Would a Russian despot see
From his land its produce flee?

Were we black Virginian slaves,
Bound and bruised with thongs and staves,
Avarice and selfish dread
Would not let us die unfed.

Were we, Saints of Heaven! were we
How we burn to think it — FREE!
Not a grain should leave our shore,
Not for England’s golden store.

They who hunger where it grew –
They whom Heaven had sent it to –
They who reared with sweat of brow –
They or none should have it now.

Lord that made us! What it is
To endure a lot like this!
Powerless in our worst distress,
Cramped by alien selfishness!

Not amongst our rulers all,
One true heart whereon to call;
Vainly still we turn to them
Who despoil us and contemn.

Forced to see them, day by day,
Snatch our sole resource away;
If returned a pittance be –
Alms, ’tis named, and beggars, we.

Lord! thy guiding wisdom grant,
Fearful counselor is WANT;
Burning thoughts will rise within,
Keep us pure from stain of sin!

But, at least, like trumpet blast,
Let it rouse us all at last;
Ye who cling to England’s side!
Here and now, you see her tried.

DARK ROSALEEN
By Sister Anne Therese Dillen

I thirst beside the heather-laden bogs –
no samaritan for me;
no one here to see
that I shall die amidst the
plenty, in the field –
and that its yield
will sail to shores beyond the sea.How can it be
that flocks of sheep can find their fill
while I lie empty and in pain?
or is it vain
to beg attention to my plight?

How can I fight
when I am listless, drained alone,
shrunken to the bone
while others eat what I have
grown in toil?

Woman of the soil –
I fade against a wall of human greed
and – sower of the seed –
I languish as it grows…

THE SONG OF THE FAMINE
By Anomymous

Want! want! want! Under the harvest moon;
Want! want! want! Thro’ dark December’s gloom;
To face the fasting day upon the frozen flags!
And fasting turn away to cower beneath a rag.Food! food! food! Beware before you spurn,
Ere the cravings of the famishing to loathing madness turn;For hunger is a fearful spell, And fearful work is done,
Where the key to many a reeking crime is the curse of living on !

For horrid instincts cleave unto the starving life,
And the crumbs they grudge from plenty’s feast but lengthen out the strife –
But lengthen out the pest upon the fetid air,
Alike within the country hut and the city’s crowded lair.

Home! home! home! A dreary, fireless hole –
A miry floor and a dripping roof, and a little straw — its whole.
Only the ashes that smoulder not, their blaze was long ago,And the empty space for kettle and pot where once they stood in a row!

Only the naked coffin of deal, and the little body within,
I cannot shut it out from my sight, so hunger-bitten and thin; -
I hear the small weak moan – the stare of the hungry eye,
Though my heart was full of a strange, strange joy the moment I saw it die.

I had food for it e’er yesterday, but the hard crust came too late –
It lay dry between the dying lips, and I loathed it — yet I ate.
Three children lie by a cold stark corpse In a room that’ s over head –
They have not strength to earn a meal,
Or sense to bury the dead!

And oh! but hunger’s a cruel heart, I shudder at my own,
As I wake my child at a tearless wake, All lightless and alone!
I think of the grave that waits, and waits but the dawn of day,
And a wish is rife in my weary heart –I strive and strive, but it won’t depart-
I cannot put it away.

Food! food! food! For the hopeless day’s begun;
Thank God there’s one the less to feed! I thank God it is my son!
And oh! the dirty winding sheet, and oh! the shallow grave!
Yet your mother envies you the same of all the alms they gave!

Death! death! death! In lane, and alley, and street,
Each hand is skinny that holds the bier, and totters each bearer’s feet;
The livid faces mock their woe, and the eyes refuse a tear;
For Famine’s gnawing every heart, and tramples on love and fear!

Cold! cold! cold! In the snow, and frost, and sleet,
Cowering over a fireless hearth, or perishing in the street,
Under the country’s hedge, On the cabin’s miry floor,
In hunger, sickness, and nakedness, it’s oh! God help the poor.

It’s oh! if the wealthy knew a tithe of the bitter dole
That coils and coils round the bursting heart like a fiend, to tempt the soul!
Hunger, and thirst, and nakedness, sorrow, and sickness, and cold,
It’s hard to bear when the blood is young, and hard when the blood is old.

Sick! sick! sick! With an aching, swimming brain,
And the fierceness of the fever-thirst, and the maddening famine pain.
On many a happy face to gaze as it passes by –
To turn from hard and pitiless hearts, and look up for leave to die.

Food! food! food! Through splendid street and square,
Food! food! food! Where is enough and to spare;
And ever so meager the dole that falls, What trembling fingers start,
The strongest snatch it from the weak, For hunger through walls of stone would break

It’s a devil in the heart!

Like an evil spirit, it haunts my dreams, through silent, fearful night,
Till I start awake from the hideous scenes, I cannot shut from my sight;
They glare on my burning lids, and thought, like a sleepless goul,
Rides wild upon my famine-fevered brain — Food! ere at last it come in vain

For the body and the soul!

THE FAMINE YEAR (THE STRICKEN LAND)
By Jane Francesca Wilde

Weary men, what reap ye? — Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye? — Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
There’s a proud array of soldiers — what do they round your door?
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping — Would to God that we were dead;
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride, But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure — bask ye in the world’s caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

Questions:

“GIVE ME THREE GRAINS OF CORN, MOTHER.”"

• Because the child/poet knows his mother has no corn to give him, is his pleading senseless? Does that make the poem more effective?
• Do you identify more with the mother or the child?
• Does the last half of the poem oversimplify the Famine story, or is it the logical way a child would view the issue: plenty vs. scarcity?

“FIELDS OF ATHENRY“

• How does the image of birds differ in this poem differ from the geese in “The Praties Grow so Small”?
• Why does the poet call it “Trevelyan’s corn”?
• What can you gather about the destination of the prison ship: Botany
• Bay? Locate it in a world atlas, and try to learn more about the Irish who were sent there on prison ships.

“THE ITINERANT SINGING GIRL”

• Why does the girl’s way of earning a living worsen her sorrow?

“THE BOREEN SIDE”

• The poet compares the starvation deaths of the evicted to the well being of the animals who replace them. How does he use it to support the implication that the landlord is not a Christian?

“FAMINE AND EXPORTATION”

• Which stanza best summarizes the poet’s chief argument?

“DARK ROSALEEN”

• How does the tone of the poem differ from “The Boreen Side” and “Famine and Exportation”.
• Is the poem’s tone similar to “The Praties Grow so Small”?

“SONG OF THE FAMINE”

• Which trial seem more terrifying: the physical or the emotional?
• What seems to happen to compassion when survival is at stake?

“THE FAMINE YEAR (THE STRICKEN LAND)”

• How does the poem use questions and answers to lead us from the subject of exports to the plight of starving children?
• Are those two themes carried out more effectively in “Famine and Exportation” and “Give me three grains of corn, Mother”?
• Do you think the poet finds real solace in the hope of an ultimate judgment day?

From the BBC’s History site -

A million people are said to have died of hunger in Ireland in the late 1840s, on the doorstep of the world’s richest nation. Ideology helped the ruling class avoid grappling with the problem of mass starvation. Jim Donnelly describes how.

Source of blight: the fungus Phytophthora infestans ©

The Irish catastrophe

The Great Famine in Ireland began as a natural catastrophe of extraordinary magnitude, but its effects were severely worsened by the actions and inactions of the Whig government, headed by Lord John Russell in the crucial years from 1846 to 1852.

Altogether, about a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade (1845-55). Comparison with other modern and contemporary famines establishes beyond any doubt that the Irish famine of the late 1840s, which killed nearly one-eighth of the entire population, was proportionally much more destructive of human life than the vast majority of famines in modern times.

In most famines in the contemporary world, only a small fraction of the population of a given country or region is exposed to the dangers of death from starvation or infectious diseases, and then typically for only one or two seasons. But in the Irish famine of the late 1840s, successive blasts of potato blight – or to give it its proper name, the fungus Phytophthora infestans – robbed more than one-third of the population of their usual means of subsistence for four or five years in a row.

An artificial famine?

Bridget O’Donnell – evicted from her cottage with her children ©

This was not an artificial famine as the traditional Irish nationalist interpretation has long maintained – not at any rate at the start. The original gross deficiency of food was real. In 1846 and successive years blight destroyed the crop that had previously provided approximately 60 per cent of the nation’s food needs. The food gap created by the loss of the potato in the late 1840s was so enormous that it could not have been filled, even if all the Irish grain exported in those years had been retained in the country. In fact, far more grain entered Ireland from abroad in the late 1840s than was exported-probably almost three times as much grain and meal came in as went out.

Thus there was an artificial famine in Ireland for a good portion of the late 1840s as grain imports steeply increased. There existed – after 1847, at least – an absolute sufficiency of food that could have prevented mass starvation, if it had been properly distributed so as to reach the smallholders and labourers of the west and the south of Ireland.

Why, then, was an artificial famine permitted to occur after 1847, and why didn’t the British government do much more to mitigate the effects of the enormous initial food gap of 1846-47? In many contemporary famines a variety of adverse conditions make it difficult or impossible to deliver adequate supplies of food to those in greatest need. Such conditions include warfare and brigandage, remoteness from centres of wealth and relief, poor communications, and weak or corrupt administrative structures. Ireland, however, was not generally afflicted with such adversities.

Ideological resistance

Soup kitchen vat, Connemara, Galway

Though it had a rich history of agrarian violence, the country was at peace. In addition, its system of communications (roads and canals) had vastly improved in the previous half-century, the Victorian state had a substantial and growing bureaucracy (it generated an army of 12,000 officials in Ireland for a short time in 1847), and Ireland lay at the doorstep of what was then the world’s wealthiest nation. Why, then, was it not better able to deal with the problems caused by the failure of its potato crop?In answering this question, it is instructive to contrast the role of ideology in the general response to famines today with the part played by ideology in response to the Great Famine in Ireland. Today, wealthier countries and international organisations provide disaster assistance (though, alas, often not nearly enough) as a matter of humanitarian conviction and perceived self-interest. But in Britain in the late 1840s, prevailing ideologies among the political élite and the middle classes strongly militated against heavy and sustained relief.

Political inertia

A child digs for potatoes with her bare hands ©

Before examining this issue of ideology in the 1840s and 1850s, however, we should review what the British government might have done to mitigate the natural catastrophe arising from repeated ravages of potato blight..

First, the government might have prohibited the export of grain from Ireland, especially during the winter of 1846-47 and early in the following spring, when there was little food in the country and before large supplies of foreign grain began to arrive. Once there was sufficient food in the country (imported Indian corn or maize), from perhaps the beginning of 1848, the government could have taken steps to ensure that this imported food was distributed to those in greatest need. Second, the government could have continued its so-called soup-kitchen scheme for a much longer time. It was in effect for only about six months, from March to September 1847. As many as three million people were fed daily at the peak of this scheme in July 1847. The scheme was remarkably inexpensive and effective. It should not have been dismantled after only six months and in spite of the enormous harvest deficiency of 1847.

Third, the wages that the government paid on its vast but short-lived public works in the winter of 1846-47 needed to be much higher if those toiling on the public works were going to be able to afford the greatly inflated price of food. Fourth, the poor-law system of providing relief, either within workhouses or outside them, a system that served as virtually the only form of public assistance from the autumn of 1847 onwards, needed to be much less restrictive. All sorts of obstacles were placed in the way, or allowed to stand in the way, of generous relief to those in need of food. This was done in a horribly misguided effort to keep expenses down and to promote greater self-reliance and self-exertion among the Irish poor.

Fifth, the government might have done something to restrain the ruthless mass eviction of families from their homes, as landlords sought to rid their estates of pauperized farmers and labourers. Altogether, perhaps as many as 500,000 people were evicted in the years from 1846 to 1854. The government might also have provided free passages and other assistance in support of emigration to North America – for those whose personal means made this kind of escape impossible.

Last, and above all, the British government should have been willing to treat the famine crisis in Ireland as an imperial responsibility and to bear the costs of relief after the summer of 1847. Instead, in an atmosphere of rising ‘famine fatigue’ in Britain, Ireland at that point and for the remainder of the famine was thrown back essentially on its own woefully inadequate resources.

Doctrines of inaction

Ruined cottage on the site of a famine eviction, Connemara, Galway

What, then, were the ideologies that held the British political élite and the middle classes in their grip, and largely determined the decisions not to adopt the possible relief measures outlined above? There were three in particular-the economic doctrines of laissez-faire, the Protestant evangelical belief in divine Providence, and the deep-dyed ethnic prejudice against the Catholic Irish to which historians have recently given the name of ‘moralism’.

Laissez-faire, the reigning economic orthodoxy of the day, held that there should be as little government interference with the economy as possible. Under this doctrine, stopping the export of Irish grain was an unacceptable policy alternative, and it was therefore firmly rejected in London, though there were some British relief officials in Ireland who gave contrary advice.

The influence of the doctrine of laissez-faire may also be seen in two other decisions. The first was the decision to terminate the soup-kitchen scheme in September 1847 after only six months of operation. The idea of feeding directly a large proportion of the Irish population violated all of the Whigs’ cherished notions of how government and society should function. The other decision was the refusal of the government to undertake any large scheme of assisted emigration. The Irish viceroy actually proposed in this fashion to sweep the western province of Connacht clean of as many as 400,000 pauper smallholders too poor to emigrate on their own. But the majority of Whig cabinet ministers saw little need to spend public money accelerating a process that was already going on ‘privately’ at a great rate.

An act of Providence?

The Irish were portrayed as freeloaders in the British press of the time ©

Recent historians of the famine, while not neglecting the baleful role of the doctrine of laissez-faire, have been inclined to stress the potent parts played by two other ideologies of the time: those of ‘providentialism’ and ‘moralism’. There was a very widespread belief among members of the British upper and middle classes that the famine was a divine judgment-an act of Providence-against the kind of Irish agrarian regime that was believed to have given rise to the famine. The Irish system of agriculture was perceived in Britain to be riddled with inefficiency and abuse. According to British policy-makers at the time, the workings of divine Providence were disclosed in the unfettered operations of the market economy, and therefore it was positively evil to interfere with its proper functioning.

A leading exponent of this providentialist perspective was Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant chiefly responsible for administering Irish relief policy throughout the famine years. In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan described the famine as ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’, one which laid bare ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil’. The famine, he declared, was ‘the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected… God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part…’ This mentality of Trevelyan’s was influential in persuading the government to do nothing to restrain mass evictions – and this had the obvious effect of radically restructuring Irish rural society along the lines of the capitalistic model ardently preferred by British policy-makers.

Finally, we come to ‘moralism’-the notion that the fundamental defects from which the Irish suffered were moral rather than financial. Educated Britons of this era saw serious defects in the Irish ‘national character’-disorder or violence, filth, laziness, and worst of all, a lack of self-reliance. This amounted to a kind of racial or cultural stereotyping. The Irish had to be taught to stand on their own feet and to unlearn their dependence on government.

‘Moralism’ was strikingly evident in the various tests of destitution that were associated with the administration of the poor law. Thus labourers on the public works were widely required to perform task labour, with their wages measured by the amount of their work, rather than being paid a fixed daily wage. Similarly, there was the requirement that in order to be eligible for public assistance, those in distress must be willing to enter a workhouse and to submit to its harsh disciplines-such as endless eight-hour days of breaking stones or performing some other equally disagreeable labour. Such work was motivated by the notion that the perceived Irish national characteristic of sloth could be eradicated or at least reduced.

Famine fatigue

A ruined cottage – the site of a famine eviction

This set of ethnic prejudices, which have now been abundantly documented, had the general effect of prompting British ministers, civil servants, and politicians to view and to treat the Catholic Irish as something less than fully human. Such prejudices encouraged the spread of ‘famine fatigue’ in Britain at an early stage, and they dulled or even extinguished the active sympathies that might have sustained political will – the will to combat the gross oppression of mass evictions, to alleviate the immense suffering associated with reliance on the poor-law system, and to grapple with the moral indefensibility of mass death in the midst of an absolute sufficiency of food.

The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has rightly insisted that famine is almost always a preventable occurrence if only the government in question has the political will to prevent it. This dictum applies as much to Ireland in the late 1840s as Sen meant it to apply to India a century later. Just as in the case of the Bengali victims of famine in the early 1940s, so too with those of the Great Famine in Ireland, the mass death of enormous multitudes of people stemmed partly from their perceived status as the cultural and social inferiors of those who governed them. This status, imposed by British rulers on their colonial subjects, made their plight seem much less urgent in Britain and caused it to be misperceived.

It seems doubtful that the British governing classes learned much from their Irish experience in the late 1840s. In British India, during the years 1876-79, famine claimed the lives of between six and ten million people. And between 1896 and 1902, an almost certainly even higher toll from starvation and disease (the estimates range from six to nineteen million) was recorded there, just as the reign of Victoria, the Empress-Queen, came to its inglorious close.

Find out more

Books

The Great Irish Potato Famine by James Donnelly (Sutton Publishing, 2002)

Places to visit

Pay a visit to the Irish Labour History Museum – articles, journals and resources relating to past and current history of Ireland’s workers. Beggars Bush Barracks, Haddington Rd, Dublin 4 Tel: 00 353 1 668 1071

Published: 2001-01-01

From the BBC History website, copied here in full –

Agricultural Revolution in England 1500 – 1850
By Professor Mark Overton

From the 16th century onwards, an essentially organic agriculture was gradually replaced by a farming system that depended on energy-intensive inputs. Mark Overton assesses the impact of this agrarian revolution.

An enduring myth

For many years the agricultural revolution in England was thought to have occurred because of three major changes: the selective breeding of livestock; the removal of common property rights to land; and new systems of cropping, involving turnips and clover. All this was thought to have been due to a group of heroic individuals, who, according to one account, are ‘a band of men whose names are, or ought to be, household words with English farmers: Jethro Tull, Lord Townshend, Arthur Young, Bakewell, Coke of Holkham and the Collings.’

These men are seen as having triumphed over a conservative mass of country bumpkins. They are thought to have single-handedly, in a few years, transformed English agriculture from a peasant subsistence economy to a thriving capitalist agricultural system, capable of feeding the teeming millions in the new industrial cities.

All these details are in some dispute, but there is general agreement that the role of the ‘Great Men’ as pioneers and innovators has been exaggerated. ‘Turnip’ Townshend, for example, was a boy when turnips were first grown on his estate, and he could not, as the textbooks tell us, have introduced them from Hanover. Jethro Tull was something of a crank and not, as we have been told, the first person to invent a seed drill, which in any case was not used by farmers on any scale until a century after his treatise Horse hoeing husbandry was first published in 1731.

Jethro Tull ©

To continue, Coke of Holkham was a great publicist (especially of his own achievements), but some of the farming practices he encouraged (such as the employment of the Norfolk four-course rotation in unsuitable conditions) may have been positively harmful. And Arthur Young, the agricultural writer, has been described as a ‘a mountebank, a charlatan and a scribbler’ by one author, although others see him as a proto-social scientist. Finally, Bakewell’s New Leicester sheep was a success, but his Longhorn cattle were not. It seems that only the Collings brothers, who developed the shorthorn cattle breed, can escape criticism. Despite this evidence, the myths associated with these individuals have proved extremely difficult to dislodge from literature not directed at a specialist historical audience.

More food for more people

A Shorthorn Bull

Despite these criticisms, it is still argued that an English agricultural revolution happened in the century or so after 1750. One obvious reason behind the argument is the fact that an expanding population from this time on was largely fed by home production. In 1750 English population stood at about 5.7 million. It had probably reached this level before, in the Roman period, then around 1300, and again in 1650. But at each of these periods the population ceased to grow, essentially because agriculture could not respond to the pressure of feeding extra people. Contrary to expectation, however, population grew to unprecedented levels after 1750, reaching 16.6 million in 1850, and agricultural output expanded with it.

One reason output grew was through new farming systems involving the rotation of turnips and clover, although these were part of the general intensification of agricultural production, with more food being produced from the same area of land. Intensity was also increased by land reclamation, especially the draining of the fenlands of eastern England, from the 17th century onwards, when a low-intensity agricultural system based on fishing and fowling was replaced by a high-intensity system based on arable crops.

Other examples include the clearing of woodland and the reclamation of upland pastures. This extent of this activity is impossible to quantify, but may have affected some 30 per cent of the agricultural area of England, from the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries.

Crop yields

A sheaf-delivery reaper at work

The mix of crops also changed, replacing low-yielding types, such as rye, with higher-yielding types such as wheat or barley. The balance between arable and permanent pasture also changed, so that more productive arable land was replacing permanent pasture. This does not mean that fodder supplies were falling, quite the reverse, for the loss of permanent pasture was made good by new fodder crops, especially turnips and clover, in arable rotations. Not only did these crops result in an increase in fodder yields, but they were also instrumental in the reclamation of many lowland heaths from rough pasture to productive arable farms.

The Worlidge Drill ©

The most important new crop in this context is the turnip, because it meant that the area of fallow land could be reduced. This was because one of the purposes of the fallow was to clear the land of weeds by ploughing, but a crop of turnips sown in rows could be hoed to remove weeds while it was growing. Thus fallow land was about 20 per cent of the arable area in England in 1700, and steadily declined to reach only 4 per cent in 1871. One of the earliest pieces of evidence we have, concerning the cultivation of turnips for animal fodder, is the inventory taken for probate purposes, in 1638, of the possessions of a Mr Pope, of Burgh Castle in Suffolk. But turnips were not common until the mid-18th century, and not widespread as part of the new Norfolk four-course rotation until the 19th century.

Cereal yields also increased. Wheat yields increased by about a quarter between 1700 and 1800, and then by about a half between 1800 and 1850, and the most recent research emphasises the early 19th century as the period of crucial change. The key to increasing cereal yields was nitrogen, which we now know was the ‘limiting factor’ in determining cereal yields before about 1830.

Farming systems

Southdown sheep with turnips

Before this time, farmers did not know formally of the existence of nitrogen, but we can interpret many of their actions in terms of the conservation of existing stocks of nitrogen, and the addition of new nitrogen to the soil. Existing stocks were exploited, for example, by ploughing up permanent pasture to grow cereals. Available nitrogen was conserved by feeding bullocks in stalls, collecting their manure (which is rich in nitrogen), and placing it where it was needed. Also, most importantly, new nitrogen was added to the soil using legumes – a class of plants that have bacteria attached to their roots, which convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates in the soil that can be used by whatever plants are grown there in the following few years.

Legumes had been sown since the Middle Ages in the form of peas, beans and vetches, but from the mid-17th century farmers began to grow clover, both white and red, for the same purpose, and by the 19th century had dramatically increased the quantity of nitrogen in the soil available for cereal crops. In Norfolk, for example, between 1700 and 1850, the doubling of the area of legumes and a switch to clover tripled the rate of symbiotic nitrogen fixation.

This new system of farming was remarkable because it was sustainable; the output of food was increased dramatically, without endangering the long-term viability of English agriculture. But just as a sustainable agriculture had been achieved, the development of chemical fertilisers and other external inputs undermined this sustainability. An essentially organic agriculture was gradually replaced by a farming system that depended on energy-intensive inputs dependent on the exploitation of fossil fuels.

More food per worker

Feeding sheep on turnips

A second reason why we can claim an agricultural revolution in the century after 1750 is that as each agricultural worker produced more food, so the proportion of the workforce in agriculture fell. This falling proportion of workers in agriculture enabled the proportion working in industry and services to rise: in other words improved agricultural production made the industrial revolution possible, and many would regard the industrial revolution as the beginning of the modern world. By 1850 only 22 per cent of the British workforce was in agriculture; the smallest proportion for any country in the world.

Exactly how those working on the land were able to produce more food remains something of a mystery. More animal power was available to English farmers than to their counterparts elsewhere, and from the 1820s and 30s a wide variety of machinery was developed, which was particularly important for improving the efficiency of the cutting and threshing of grain. The improvement in labour productivity, however, had begun long before this.

The key probably lies in the way the English workforce was organised and employed. The development of agrarian capitalism in England, with those involved in agriculture divided into landowners, capitalist tenant farmers and labourers, saw the development of better farm management and more efficiency in using the workforce.

Debate about the agricultural revolution in England is still full of controversy. Some historians, particularly those using the techniques of economics to derive indices of output and productivity from prices, completely dismiss the idea of an agricultural revolution after 1750 and argue that the major changes happened earlier. Since no national agricultural statistics were produced until 1866 it is understandable that historians search for techniques that purport to give them the information they want: but it is difficult to avoid the overwhelming mass of evidence from a wide variety of sources that points to the period after 1750 as witnessing an agricultural revolution.

Read on

Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500-1850 by Mark Overton (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

The Transformation of Rural England: Farming and the Landscape, 1700-1870 by Tom Williamson (Exeter University Press, 2002)

Farm Production in England 1700-1914 by ME Turner, JV Beckett and B Afton (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Two Hundred Years of British Farm Livestock by Stephen JG Hall and Juliet Clutton-Brock (British Museum [Natural History], 1989)

The Agrarian History of England and Wales edited by J Thirsk (Cambridge University Press: vol. IV, 1967; vol. V, 1985; vol. VI, 1989)

About the author

Mark Overton is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Exeter. He has published extensively on the agrarian history of England, including Agricultural Revolution in England-1500-1850, and is now completing a project on production and consumption in English households 1600-1750, to be published by Routledge.

From the National Portrait Gallery website: “Promoted as ‘the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, Clare spent much of his life as a poor agricultural labourer before mental illness condemned him to an asylum in 1837. His intensely detailed poetry reflects his love of his native countryside. It also movingly describes the hardship suffered by the rural poor living in a landscape being destroyed by enclosure. Clare enjoyed a brief London vogue with his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel (1821). In 1827, he published The Shepherd’s Calendar a more political verse in which man shapes the landscape and is defined by it.”

From This Land Is Ours, by Dave Featherstone, reprinted here in full -

John Clare and ‘The Tragedy of the Enclosures’

The Mores

Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall ever be
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave
And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now
The sheep and cows were free to range as then
Where change might prompt nor felt the bonds of men
Cows went and came, with evening morn and night,
To the wild pasture as their common right
And sheep, unfolded with the rising sun
Heard the swains shout and felt their freedom won
Tracked the red fallow field and heath and plain
Then met the brook and drank and roamed again
The brook that dribbled on as clear as glass
Beneath the roots they hid among the grass
While the glad shepherd traced their tracks along
Free as the lark and happy as her song
But now all’s fled and flats of many a dye
That seemed to lengthen with the following eye
Moors, loosing from the sight, far, smooth, and blea
Where swopt the plover in its pleasure free
Are vanished now with commons wild and gay
As poet’s visions of life’s early day
Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done
And hedgrow-briars – flower-lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower-pots – these are all destroyed
And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft
Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease
Each little path that led its pleasant way
As sweet as morning leading night astray
Where little flowers bloomed round a varied host
That travel felt delighted to be lost
Nor grudged the steps that he had ta-en as vain
When right roads traced his journeys and again -
Nay, on a broken tree he’d sit awhile
To see the mores and fields and meadows smile
Sometimes with cowslaps smothered – then all white
With daiseys – then the summer’s splendid sight
Of cornfields crimson o’er the headache bloomd
Like splendid armys for the battle plumed
He gazed upon them with wild fancy’s eye
As fallen landscapes from an evening sky
These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho’ the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes
Have found too truly that they were but dreams.

Remembrances

Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions every one
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on
I tried to call them back but unbidden they are gone
Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away
Dear heart and can it be that such raptures meet decay
I thought them all eternal when by Langley Bush I lay
I thought them joys eternal when I used to shout and play
On its bank at ‘clink and bandy’ ‘chock’ and ‘taw’ and
ducking stone
Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own
Like a ruin of the past all alone
When I used to lie and sing by old eastwells boiling spring
When I used to tie the willow boughs together for a ‘swing’
And fish with crooked pins and thread and never catch a
thing
With heart just like a feather- now as heavy as a stone
When beneath old lea close oak I the bottom branches broke
To make our harvest cart like so many working folk
And then to cut a straw at the brook to have a soak
O I never dreamed of parting or that trouble had a sting
Or that pleasures like a flock of birds would ever take to
wing
Leaving nothing but a little naked spring
When jumping time away on old cross berry way
And eating awes like sugar plumbs ere they had lost the may
And skipping like a leveret before the peep of day
On the rolly polly up and downs of pleasant swordy well
When in round oaks narrow lane as the south got black again
We sought the hollow ash that was shelter from the rai n
With our pockets full of peas we had stolen from the grain
How delicious was the dinner time on such a showry day
O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away
The ancient pulpit trees and the play
When for school oer ‘little field’ with its brook and wooden
brig
Where I swaggered like a man though I was not half so big
While I held my little plough though twas but a willow twig
And drove my team along made of nothing but a name
‘Gee hep’ and ‘hoit’ and ‘woi’- O I never call to mind
These pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind
While I see the little mouldywharps hang sweeing to the wind
On the only aged willow that in all the field remains
And nature hides her face where theyre sweeing in their
chains
And in a silent murmuring complains
Here was commons for the hills where they seek for
freedom still
Though every commons gone and though traps are set to kill
The little homeless miners- O it turns my bosom chill
When I think of old ‘sneap green’ puddocks nook and hilly
snow
Where bramble bushes grew and the daisy gemmed in dew
And the hills of silken grass like to cushions to the view
Whe n we threw the pissmire crumbs when we’s nothing
else to do
All leveled like a desert by the never weary plough
All vanished like the sun where that cloud is passing now
All settled here for ever on its brow
I never thought that joys would run away from boys
Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such
summer joys
But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys
To petrify first feelings like the fable into stone
Till I found the pleasure past and a winter come at last
Then the fields were sudden bare and the sky got overcast
And boyhoods pleasing haunts like a blossom in the blast
Was shrivelled to a withered weed and trampled down and
done
Till vanished was the morning spring and set that summer
sun
And winter fought her battle strife and won
By Langley bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On cowper green I stray tis a desert strange and chill
And spreading lea close oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey
And cross berry way and old round oaks narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again
Inclosure like a Buonapar te let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is
running still
It runs a naked brook cold and chill
O had I known as then joy had left the paths of men
I had watched her night and day besure and never slept agen
And when she turned to go O I’d caught her mantle then
And wooed her like a lover by my lonely side to stay
Aye knelt and worshipped on as love in beautys bower
And clung upon her smiles as a bee upon her flower
And gave her heart my poesys all cropt in a sunny hour
As keepsakes and pledges to fade away
But love never heeded to treasure up the may
So it went the comon road with decay
Composed c. 1832 First published 1908

mouldywharps – moles

To a Fallen Elm

Old Elm that murmured in our chimney top
The sweetest anthem autumn ever made
And into mellow whispering calms would drop
When showers fell on thy many coloured shade
And when dark tempests mimic thunder made
While darkness came as it would strangle light
With the black tempest of a winter night
That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root
How did I love to hear the winds upbraid
Thy strength without while all within was mute
It seasoned comfort to our hearts desire
We felt thy kind protection like a friend
And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire
Enjoying comforts that was was never penned

Old favourite tree thoust seen times changes lower
But change till now did never come to thee
For time beheld thee as his sacred dower
And nature claimed thee her domestic tree
Storms came and shook thee with aliving power
Yet stedfast to thy home thy roots hath been
Summers of thirst parched round thy homely bower
Till earth grew iron – still thy leaves was green
The children sought thee in thy summer shade
And made their play house rings of sticks and stone
The mavis sang and felt himself alone
While in they leaves his early nest was made
And I did feel his happiness mine own
Nought heeding that our friendship was betrayed

Friend not inanimate- tho stocks and stones
There are and many cloathed in flesh and bones
Thou ownd a lnaguage by which hearts are stirred
Deeper than by the attribute of words
Thine spoke a feeling known in every tongue
Language of pity and the force of wrong
What cant assumes what hypocrites may dare
Speaks home to truth and shows it what they are

I see a picture that thy fate displays
And learn a lesson from thy destiny
Self interest saw thee stand in freedoms ways
So thy old shadow must a tyrant be
Thoust heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free
Thoust sheltered hypocrites in many an hour
That when in power would never shelter thee
Thoust heard the knave supply his canting powers
With wrongs illusions when he wanted friends
That bawled for shelter when he lived in showers
And when clouds vanished made thy shade ammends
With axe at root he felled thee to the ground
And barked of freedom – O I hate that sound

It grows the cant terms of enslaving tools
To wrong another by the name of right
It grows a liscence with oer bearing fools
To cheat plain honesty by force of might
Thus came enclosure- ruin was her guide
But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight
Tho comforts cottage soon was thrust aside
And workhouse prisons raised upon the scite
Een natures dwelling far away from men
The common heath became the spoilers prey
The rabbit had not where to make his den
And labours only cow was drove away
No matter- wrong was right and right was wrong
And freedoms brawl was sanction to the song

Such was thy ruin music making Elm
The rights of freedom was to injure thine
As thou wert served so would they overwhelm
In freedoms name the little so would they over whelm
And these are knaves that brawl for better laws
And cant of tyranny in stronger powers
Who glut their vile unsatiated maws
And freedoms birthright from the weak devours

Composed c. 1821 First published 1920

Background to John Clare and Enclosures

John Clare perhaps one of the most overlooked, misrepresented and misunderstood poets in the English language, is an extraordinary fine ‘nature’ poet. He was the most striking of a number of poets who were seized upon by the early nineteenth century literary establishment as illustrating the authentic voice of th e English peasant’ just as that vocation and the landscape that went with it were being banished and razed forever- this representation has startling parallels in the green movements sentimentalised invocation of shifting cultivating tribes in places like Papua New Guinea in a similar epoch of destruction and reinvention of (the idea of) nature. His poems, despite the ways that they have been represented distinctively go beyond the narrow limits of the pastoral, of the idea of the existence of a harmonious uncontested countryside, and show they are much more than the mad incoherent ramblings of a ‘rhyming peasant’ (he ended his life in an asylum).

The poems that made him ‘amusing to Dukes’ in London’s literary scene were generally inferior to his later work – much of which remained unpublished until long after his death. He grew up in the small fenland community of Helpstone in Northamptonshire, and ‘the green language’ running through his poetry forms beautifully sensitive description of that area’s creatures and people. ‘Remembrances’ and ‘To a Fallen Elm’, are two of the finest examples of the elegies he wrote to the fields and woods which he grew up in as they were destroyed and razed by the brutal progress of enclosure. Although the enclosure of ‘common land’ was not a ‘new’ process in early nineteenth century England- it had been going on before Gerrard Winstanley’s time- but the virulency of it was new – and through it the vicious inequality of English rural society acquired a ‘terrible visibility’.

Clare’s poetry gives voice to a ‘tormented customary consciousness’: in his poetry we see the disintegration of a moral economy- an economy which was still held together by a delicate social fabric based and secured by custom, rather than by the vagaries of money and profit: though this ‘moral’ economy could be as brutal and unequal as anything that came after it. What Clare laments is the replacement of this order by ‘new instrumental and exploitative stance, not only towards labour……… but also towards the natural world’. This is important because it shows that the experience of people and nature are not riven and fractured apart, but intertwined. The persistence of fracturing apart people, especially ‘working’ people, from their complex and uneven interrelations with nature is one of the major reasons for the poverty in our understandings of the relationships between people, inequality and ecology. This intertwining of the experience of people and nature is starkly represented in an image like that of the hanging moles in ‘Remembrances’. Here there is a blurring of the distinctive experience of people and nature, since they can stand for each other- the image probably alludes to the labourers hung during the Captain Swing riots and rick burnings that exploded across Southern England during 1830: A period ringing with the echoes of the ‘bloody old Times’ baying for the labourers blood.

The most disabling element that one sees enclosure bringing to the lives of landless labourers in Clare is the way that they were not only dispossesed of ownership, but also of their control of their landscape: they became alienated from it. This new landscape of ‘repression and greed’ that enclosure had stamped upon the land is similarly stamped across the structure of ‘Remembrances’. One feels the fences and exclusions of the new landscape tightening like a torque around the poems beautifully flowing rhythm; particularly in the last line of each stanza which cuts bitterly across the verse’s sprung motion. In ‘To a Fallen Elm’ the fact that Clare no longer has the right to decide the fate of the Elm overshadowing his house becomes an emblem of the erosion of the right to nature- of the right to shape one’s environment. this right is ridden over by a new knavish and empty conception of freedom. Though he sentimentalised the Helpstone of his youth Clare’s writing suggests resources for the emergence of ‘a different kind of freedom’, from this knavish and empty conception- in the r elationships between people and between people and their environments: ‘a different kind of freedom’ which has many resonances for the struggle to prevent the New Right ensuring that we only conceptualise each other and our environments through the grid of financial value and transactions.

Dave Featherstone

Sources

E.P. Thompson ‘Custom Law and Common Right’ in his Customs in Common 1991 Penguin esp p. 175- 184.

John Tripp’s fine poem ‘Greetings, John Clare’ in his Selected Poems published by Seren.

Raymond and Merryn Williams’s edition of John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose which has fine introduction and critical commentary and is published by Methuen.

Raymond Williams ‘The Country and The City’ published by Chatto and Windus/ the Hogarth Press.

The important phrase ‘Tragedy of Enclosures’ is used by the Spanish writer on ecology and inequality- J. Martinez-Alier in an essay on Latin American ecological history:

‘Ecology and the poor: A neglected dimension of Latin American history’. Journal of Latin American Studies 23.

From wikipedia, about the English statesman, Charles Townshend (1674-1738), Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk and descendant of the legal advisor to the Paston family -

Born at Raynham Hall, Norfolk, Townshend succeeded to the peerages in December 1687, and was educated at Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. He had Tory sympathies when he took his seat in the House of Lords, but his views changed, and he began to take an active part in politics as a Whig. For a few years after the accession of Queen Anne he remained without office, but in November 1708 he was appointed Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard, having in the previous year been summoned to the Privy Council. He was ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the States-General from 1709 to 1711, taking part during these years in the negotiations which preceded the conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht.

After his recall to England he was busily occupied in attacking the proceedings of the new Tory ministry. Townshend quickly won the favour of George I, and in September 1714, the new king selected him as Secretary of State for the Northern Department. The policy of Townshend and his colleagues, after they had crushed the Jacobite rising of 1715, both at home and abroad, was one of peace. The secretary disliked the interference of England in the war between Sweden and Denmark, and he promoted the conclusion of defensive alliances between England and the emperor and England and France.

In spite of these successes the influence of the Whigs was gradually undermined by the intrigues of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, and by the discontent of the Hanoverian favourites. In October 1716, Townshend’s colleague, James Stanhope afterwards 1st Earl Stanhope, accompanied the king on his visit to Hanover, and while there he was seduced from his allegiance to his fellow ministers by Sunderland, George being led to believe that Townshend and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Walpole, were caballing with the Prince of Wales, their intention being that the prince should supplant his father on the throne. Consequently in December 1716 the secretary was dismissed and was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, but he only retained this post until the following April.

Early in 1720 a partial reconciliation took place between the parties of Stanhope and Townshend, and in June of this year the latter became Lord President of the Council, a post which he held until February 1721, when, after the death of Stanhope and the forced retirement of Sunderland, a result of the South Sea Bubble, he was again appointed secretary of state for the northern department, with Walpole as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The two remained in power during the remainder of the reign of George I the chief domestic events of the time being the impeachment of Bishop Atterbury, the pardon and partial restoration of Lord Bolingbroke, and the troubles in Ireland caused by the patent permitting Wood to coin halfpence.

Townshend secured the dismissal of his rival, Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville, but soon differences arose between himself and Walpole, and he had some difficulty in steering a course through the troubled sea of European politics. Although disliking him, George II retained him in office, but the predominance in the ministry passed gradually but surely from him to Walpole. Townshend could not brook this. So long, to use Walpole’s witty remark, as the firm was Townshend and Walpole all went well with it, but when the positions were reversed jealousies arose between the partners. Serious differences of opinion concerning the policy to be adopted towards Prussia and in foreign politics generally led to a final rupture in 1730. Failing, owing to Walpole’s interference, in his efforts to procure the dismissal of a colleague and his replacement by a personal friend, Townshend retired on 15 May 1730. His remaining years were passed at Raynham, where he interested himself in agriculture and was responsible for introducing into England the cultivation of turnips on a large scale and for other improvements of the kind. He died at Raynham on 21 June 1738.

Townshend introduced to England the four-field crop rotation pioneered by farmers in the Waasland region in the early 16th century. The system (wheat, barley, turnips and clover), opened up a fodder crop and grazing crop allowing livestock to be bred year-round, and increased productivity by avoiding leaving the soil uncultivated every third year. Previously, a three-year rotation was practiced by farmers in Europe with a rotation of rye or winter wheat, followed by spring oats or barley, then letting the soil rest (leaving it fallow) during the third stage. Crop rotation is necessary in order to avoid the build-up of crop-specific soil pests and diseases, and because different families of plant have varying nutritional requirements. The four-field crop rotation was a key development in the British Agricultural Revolution.

As a result of this, and other agricultural experiments at Raynham, he became known as Turnip Townshend. Although a figure of some fun, his agricultural reforms were extremely important. However, Alexander Pope mentions him in Imitations of Horace, Epistle II, as a turnip obsessed person and says, in a note, that “that kind of rural improvement which arises from turnips” was Townshend’s favorite conversational topic.

See previous post for innovations in four-field crop rotation.

Between 1770 and 1830, enclosures changed the English rural landscape forever. Landowners annexed vast acreages, producing even greater wealth from the now familiar pattern of small hedged fields. Peasants no longer had plots to grow vegetables nor open commons for grazing their single cow or sheep and pigs. Diet was basic – tea, bread and potatoes.

As a result, the people were badly nourished and small.

Wages of Despair Average family expenditure (1840s)
Item	Price
Rent	1s 2d
Bread	9s
Tea	2d
Potatoes	1s
Sugar	3.5d
Soap	3d
Thread	2.5d
Candles	3d
Salt	0.5d
Coal and Wood	9d
Cheese	3d
Total	13s 9

Wages of 9 or 10 shillings a week reduced families to starvation level unless they could be supplemented by working wives and children.

Low wages, appalling conditions and unemployment, bad winters and poor harvests in 1829 and 1830 fuelled a great explosion of anger, resulting in riots led by the mythical ‘Captain Swing’ in November 1830. Throughout England 600 rioters were imprisoned; 500 sentenced to transportation; and 19 executed.

The six Tolpuddle Martyrs were all farm labourers, paid 9 shillings a week and lived in dreadful poverty. Their leader, George Loveless, decided to set up a Union in Tolpuddle to give labourers bargaining strength. The landowners, led by James Frampton and supported by the government, were determined to squash unions and to control increasing outbreaks of dissent.

Born in 1769 at Moreton House near Tolpuddle, into a long established family of country gentlemen, he passionately believed in Church, Consitution, King and Country – and maintenance of the status quo. James Frampton framed the Martyrs on a trumped up charge of administering an unlawful oath, using a law applicable to the Navy not workers’ rights. He feared trades unionism threatened the power base and wealth of the landed upper classes. Having witnessed the French Revolution, he was determined to suppress any sign of rebellion or opposition whatever the cause.

Squire Frampton had been busily gathering evidence against the Tolpuddle men. There was Legg’s evidence from a preliminary magistrates inquiry. Now he wished Lord Melbourne to know that societies were being organised among the agricultural labourers, inducing them to enter into combinations of a dangerous and alarming kind to which they are bound by oaths administered clandestinely. Melbourne advised caution. But once Frampton had proof of unlawful combination his lordship advised him to study section 25 of 57 Geo. III, c. 19, the Act of Parliament whose purpose was to more effectually prevent Seditious Meetings and Assemblies.

The Grand Jury’s foreman was William Ponsonby, MP brother-in-law to the Home Secretary Lord Melbourne. Members of the Jury included James Frampton, his son Henry, his step-brother Charles Wollaston and several of the magistrates who had signed the arrest warrant. The trial was presided over by Judge Baron Williams whose closed mind was evident even before it properly began. “The object of all legal punishment is not altogether with the view of operating on the offenders themselves, it is also for the sake of offering an example and a warning”.

The landowner magistrates found a way of trapping and punishing the Martyrs, using two laws in combination. The men were betrayed by one of their fellow labourers, Edward Legg, tried at Dorchester Assizes in March 1834, found guilty of administering an unlawful oath, and sentenced to 7 years’ transportation to Australia. The harshness and injustice of their treatment caused massive public outcry.

The Establishment was wrong to believe that unions would lose impetus after repeal of anti-union laws. The Tolpuddle affair rekindled the flames, and the strongest possible sign of their revival burst onto the scene on April 21, 1834 – one month after the Trial. A mass procession of 35 unions, organised in London’s Copenhagen Fields by the Metropolitan Trades Unions, marched to Whitehall to present a massive 200,000 signature petition to Lord Melbourne.

Five Martyrs were shipped in appalling conditions to New South Wales, where they were assigned as convict labour to landowners. George Loveless, delayed by illness after the Trial, later went in chains to Tasmania. Public pressure resulted in the men being pardoned by the King. Months passed before instructions to free the men reached the Australian authorities. They did not return to England until three years after their infamous Trial. On April 5, 1834 George Loveless was declared fit for travel. First held on the York hulk, six weeks later, on May 17, he sailed aboard the William Metcalfe for Van Diemen’s Land.

From their smoke-filled, stinking cell below the Crown Court in Dorchester, five of the convicted men were taken in chains to the prison hulks, York and Leviathan, lying off Portsmouth. The sixth, George Loveless, was ill in gaol and was not to follow for several weeks. Hulks were condemned ships. There were usually three decks, each containing between 500 and 600 prisoners, issued with coarse convict clothing and fettered with heavy irons riveted to their legs. Disease was rampant. Epidemics of cholera, dysentery and smallpox swept through the packed masses, resulting in wholesale death.

By June 1835, 10 months after the Martyrs’ arrival in penal colonies, conditional pardons had been granted by Lord John Russell, the Home Secretary. Russell had jumped the gun: legally, a convict could not be conditionally pardoned under four years. The flurry of correspondence between Whitehall and the Sydney and Hobart Government Houses caused confusion and delay. Thomas Wakley’s campaign continued. He presented 16 petitions to Parliament. There was nationwide agitation. Conditional pardons were not good enough.

George Loveless was the first to arrive home, on June 13, 1837. He was greeted by members of the London Dorchester Committee. There was no fanfare: the King was dying. George slipped back into obscurity in Tolpuddle. Here he wrote “The Victims of Whiggery”. A powerful polemic, it was much quoted at meetings of Chartists who were beginning to gather strength against bad employment practices. The pamphlet’s price was four pence; profits were devoted to the Martyrs’ families, supplementing support from the London Dorchester Committee during the years of separation.

Alone among the Martyrs, James Hammett did not write of his experiences. He was the only one with a criminal record before the arrest. He alone fell foul of the law in New South Wales. He stayed behind in Tolpuddle, forsaking farm work to become a builder’s labourer. Details of his life only emerged in 1875 when he was honoured as one of the earliest agricultural trade unionists, at a time when Joseph Arch, leader of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union, wished to consolidate resurgence of union activity.

The London Dorchester Committee raised funds with public support to buy leases on farms in Essex for the returning Martyrs. Five still campaigned for working men’s rights, supporting the Chartist movement. One – James Hammett – returned to Tolpuddle. Continuing pressure from landowners forced the other five to seek new lives in Canada, where they found contentment as farmers in London, Ontario.

They organised a Chartist association in Greensted, following the six points of “The People’s Charter”: Manhood Suffrage, Voting by secret ballot, Payment of MPs, Annual Parliaments, Abolition of property qualifications for MP’s Equal electoral districts. The Essex squirearchy reacted much as Squire Frampton had. The Vicar of Greensted preached against their activities: the foundations of decent society were being undermined; paternal, beneficial order where everyone knew his proper place must be restored. He alerted the Home Office.

Self-educated and self-reliant, George Loveless was 37 when arrested. He married Elizabeth (Betsy) and by 1834 they had three children, all supported on a ploughman’s wage of 9 shillings a week. Loveless was a Methodist lay preacher. He was articulate and wrote eloquently about the Martyrs’ experiences in “The Victims of Whiggery” and “The Church Shown Up” . Loveless and four of his fellow Martyrs emigrated to Canada, where he helped to build a Methodist Church at Siloam. He died in 1874 at the age of 77.

Arrested before his 21st birthday, James [Brine] was born in 1813. Reputed to have a bright personality, he produced a dramatic accounts of his experiences as a Martyr. In Australia he was robbed of all the bedding and clothes allocated by the authorities on his way to his assigned master. He married Elizabeth Standfield, daughter of Thomas and sister of John, further strengthening the family bonds, at Greensted Church, Essex. They had 11 children, four born in England, the others in Canada. Brine lived to 90, dying in 1902. He built the log house which is still a local landmark – the only building associated with the Martyrs left in their adopted country.

Born at the end of 1811, [James Hammett was] married with a baby son when arrested. He was an outsider: unlike the others, he never wrote about his experiences, had a criminal record and was not a Methodist. He alone stayed in Tolpuddle, as a builder’s labourer. He was not at the fateful initiation, and may have accepted arrest on behalf of his newly-married brother, John, who was present and whose wife was about to give birth.Hammett had been imprisoned in 1829 for allegedly stealing some pieces of iron. In Australia, he was charged with.

Five years younger than George, James [Loveless] was born in 1808. Married with two children, he too was a Methodist preacher. A founder member of the Tolpuddle Union, he was singled out by Squire Frampton as a fire brand as early as 1830 during local riots at Piddletown. Of all the emigrants to Canada he alone did not buy land, opting instead to become sexton of the North Street Methodist Church in London Township, Ontario. He remained so until his death at 65 in February 1873.

For several years John [Standfield] and his father George and James Loveless worked on the same farm in Tolpuddle. After their return from deportation in Australia, John moved with the others to Essex and then to Canada. There he became mayor of East London, where he kept a hotel, ran a shop and founded a choir.

The oldest, Thomas Standfield was 44 in 1834 and married to the Loveless brothers’ sister, Dinniah. By February, 1834 they had five children (with one on the way) of whom John, a fellow Martyr, was the oldest. Thomas was also a Methodist and co-founder of the Tolpuddle Union. Many of their meetings were held in the upstairs room in his cottage. On moving to Essex, Thomas and his son John went to Fenner’s farm, five miles from the Lovelesses, which had been leased for them by the London Dorchester Committee. They emigrated to Canada 2 years after the Lovelesses. He died aged 74 in February, 1864. Diana soon followed him. Their graves are next to George and Betsy Loveless in Siloam cemetery.

blossoming orchards, originally uploaded to Flickr by Tobymutz.

From The Independent –

Pip pip hooray: A celebration of the British apple – They inspired Newton, shaped our countryside, and strike at the very core of Britishness. Now, after years of decline, native apples are back in fashion. On the eve of Apple Day, Michael McCarthy salutes the fruit.

Published: 19 October 2007

No tourists head for Colnbrook; it’s a location that has lost its sense of place. Officially it’s a village, but a village a mile from the end of the main runway of Heathrow Airport is not the sort of village that gets into a guidebook. These days it’s just part of the vast semi-suburban hinterland where Greater London starts to dissolve into the countryside; a straggle of roads whose older buildings are interspersed with modern houses in small estates; even its geographical location is blurred. Originally it was in Buckinghamshire; then it was in Middlesex; now it seems to be in Berkshire, part of Slough.

I am looking for a block of flats called The Lawns, and though I drive up and down the high street several times, I can’t find it. I ask in the Post Office and am directed further back towards the airport perimeter, and eventually I spot it, next to the Arora Park Hotel with its its Kathmandu Kitchen restaurant (“Spice Up Your Sunday!”): three storeys of Seventies-anonymous red brick, with an arched entrance into the rear car park. I drive through and get out.

So it was here. Here, where this grey asphalt is portioned off in white lines, here where the notice warns “Wheelclamping In Operation 24 Hours” , here where Heathrow’s roaring jumbos and Airbuses rise up overhead so abruptly they seem like sea monsters surging from the depths. This is where a minor miracle occurred, and the Cox’s orange pippin was born.

It is hard to believe. Then, of course, it was a garden, this dead rectangle dotted with Toyotas. I try to imagine it, the garden of Richard Cox, a wealthy brewer from Bermondsey who in the 1820s retired to the country to pursue his hobby of horticulture. Were there rose beds here? Herbaceous borders? There must have been lawns, wide green lawns. (The Lawns was the name of Cox’s substantial Georgian house.) But what certainly graced this ground were apple trees.

Colnbrook was indeed in the countryside then, a proper village bestriding the Bath Road, surrounded by market gardens and, especially, orchards – and there was Richard Cox’s particular interest. He knew about apples, and the amazing genetic tricks they play. One day, around 1825, Cox took a noble English apple variety, the Ribston pippin, and pollinated it with another such, the Blenheim orange, planted the pips from the resultant fruit in this garden, today so brutally sealed under asphalt, and sat back to wait.

He waited for about a decade. At length, the trees that grew up here bore fruit themselves, and with one of them, Richard Cox found he had brought about something quite astonishing: apples so delectable they put even their noble progenitors to shame. “When perfectly ripe, [it is] deliciously sweet and enticing, with rich, intense, aromatic flavour,” notes Joan Morgan, the great authority on the English apple, describing the Cox in The New Book of Apples. “Spicy, honeyed, nutty, pear-like… subtle blend of great complexity…”

It was the acme of apple. The zenith of apple. The pinnacle of apple. The Bermondsey brewer had produced what was to become, with its flawless balance of sweetness and acidity, one of the most esteemed fruits in the world – certainly, Britain’s most popular native fruit, representing half of all the apples grown in the UK.

He did not know he might bring this about. He didn’t aim at it, directly. He couldn’t. All he could do was plant his pips, cross his fingers, and see.

For apples, or to be more precise, domestic apple varieties, do not ” breed true”. They do not reproduce themselves. If you munch a Cox down to the core and plant one of the pips, you will not get a tree that produces Coxes. You may get something quite similar; but you’re just as likely to get something very different. This is because apple varieties are propagated by grafting, and so, genetically, are clones of each other; and as such they cannot fertilise themselves, but need to be cross-pollinated with pollen from a different apple tree type.

What they then produce, as the two separate genomes mingle, is infinite variety in their offspring, just as male and female human beings produce infinite variety in their children. The “children” of apple trees are not the apples, mind; the apples just are the cradles, and they stay the same. The children are the pips, and genetically, there are as many different apple pips as there are children in the world.

And just as most children, most of us, grow up to be fairly ordinary, but occasionally one will turn out to be Mozart, so it is with apples. Most pips, if planted, turn into trees that are nothing special, but occasionally one grows into a tree bearing fruit that is entirely new, with a wonderful, distinctive, fresh character that gardeners then rush to preserve. With a shout of surprise and joy, no doubt.

This has happened about 7,000 times (and it’s still happening) since the wild apple, which originated in the Tien Shan mountains on the borders of what are now Kazakhstan and China, was first domesticated by man, and brought along the Silk Road to Europe. There are thought to be that many named apple varieties in the world, with well over 2,000 in England alone: beauty of Bath, Bramley seedling, Devonshire quarrenden, sweet lark, Lord Lambourne, d’Arcy spice, Sturmer pippin, Peasgood’s nonsuch, Egremont russett, Worcester pearmain, Norfolk royal, Cornish gillyflower… how many d’you want? You can eat a different English apple every day for more than six years. Each one tastes different, each one offers a different take on seasonality, on ripening, on colour and shape, on texture, on the acidity/sweetness balance, and on the combinations of all of these.

This scarcely believable variety is the very essence of apples, the reason why for many people they are the pre-eminent fruit. It’s the great joy of them. But there’s more: because every apple surely originates in an exclamation, as it were, in a yell of delighted amazement at the abrupt discovery of one of those blessed genetic accidents, as happened in Richard Cox’s garden, each one has a story. Each apple variety has its own colour and texture and taste, but it also has its own person, its own place; usually both.

Take the Blenheim orange, the enormous, Christmastime eating apple, superb with cheese, prized by some enthusiasts above all others: it was discovered in 1740 growing against the wall of the park of Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the seat of the Duke of Marlborough, by a local man, a Mr Kempster. He grew a cutting in his own garden and people stopped by to marvel at the tree with its load of striking orange-red fruit – they halted their coaches to gawp at it – but alas for his posthumous fame, when the apple came to be sold commercially, the name of the Big House was thought to be a rather classier label for what until then had been known as Kempster’s pippin. “Pound o’Kempster’s, please”… not a bad ring to it, really.

The Ribston pippin, the other progenitor of the Cox, also came from a country estate: it was raised at Ribston Hall near Knaresborough in Yorkshire, some time after 1707, by Sir Henry Goodricke, allegedly from a pip he had brought from Rouen in France (and it went on to be the Victorians’ favourite table apple, like the muscat of Alexandria was their favourite table grape). The Egremont russet, nutty and delicious despite its rough skin, is thought to have been raised on the estate of Lord Egremont at Petworth in Sussex. But by no means all apple histories begin with toffs. Discovery, with its perfumed, spicy edge (some people detect a hint of strawberries), was raised about 1950 by George Dummer, a fruit-farm worker from Langham, Essex, who planted a seedling from a Worcester pearmain pip in his front garden.

As Mr Dummer had only one arm, his wife tried to help him with the planting, but in doing so she slipped and broke her ankle, and the seedling lay unplanted in the garden for several weeks; yet it survived the frosts and went on to become what is now England’s most widely-grown early-season apple. It seems a great shame it’s not known as Mrs Dummer, or even Mrs Dummer’s ankle (that’s certainly what I’d have called it), but perhaps, like Blenheim orange, discovery has a classier ring, in marketing terms. ” Pound o’Dummer’s ankles”? Maybe not.

Mrs Dummer is not alone in missing out on apple-y commemoration; another famous fruit not named after its originator is the Bramley seedling, the scruffy green cannonball that is our best-known cooking apple. The first tree grew from pips planted by a young girl, Mary Ann Brailsford, in her garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, around 1809. Many years later a local butcher, Matthew Bramley, bought the cottage and the garden, and when a local nurseryman took graftings from the tree and began to sell the fruit, he named if after the new owner. “Pound o’ Brailsfords”? That’s all right.

The stories are endless. The differences are endless. Yet, about 40 years ago, this miraculous variety, the apple’s great glory, found in no other fruit, came under siege. Supermarkets arrived, and brought with them a buying power that began to impose a narrow uniformity on the fruit shelves. To take advantage of economies of scale, they needed huge crops of a mere handful of types, many of which came from abroad. As the supermarkets became our greengrocers in the 1970s and 1980s, the Blenheim orange, the Ribston pippin, the beauty of Bath and even the Worcester pearmain, let alone a myriad rarer varieties, vanished completely. In their place came a trio of red, green and yellow things: Mackintosh red from Canada (dry and characterless, I thought it, as a young apple-fancier), Granny Smith from Australia (too sour), and above all, golden delicious from France (bland, insipid. I remember once thinking, the effect of it was to displease in its very attempt to please, like an ingratiating subordinate, not that I had any subordinates.)

These invaders swept through the shelves. By 1981, French golden delicious or Le Crunch, as the marketing men called it (such wit!) reigned supreme: insipid or not, its sales were worth £100m annually in a British apple market worth £235m. English varieties? Well, for a few weeks from late September there were Coxes on sale, and there still were Bramleys, because there weren’t any foreign cooking apples worth importing; but that was about it.

It wasn’t just a catastrophic loss of taste and tradition; this change brought about immense damage to the countryside and the landscape. For as the traditional varieties of English apples lost their market, farmers began to grub out the orchards that produced them, some of them hundreds of years old. They could get a grant from Europe to do it. The scale of the destruction was vast, especially in the traditional fruit-growing counties: Worcestershire has lost 63 per cent of its traditional orchards since the 1970s, Somerset 60 per cent since the 1960s. Kent lost 92 per cent of its traditional orchards between 1946 and 2003. England as a whole has lost 57 per cent of its orchards since 1950 – about 170,000 acres’ worth.

They were – they are – magnificent reservoirs of wildlife, these old tree communities, abounding in insects, wild flowers, mosses and lichens, and birds such as nuthatches, treecreepers and woodpeckers; yet at the same time they produced a crop. They were the perfect blend of the wild and the cultivated, living symbols of how people could exist in harmony with the natural world. They were wonderful places to be. But no one realised it at the time. To hard-pressed farmers, orchards were merely unwanted assets; to nature conservationists, who should have known better, they were commercial fruit trees; they weren’t part of nature. They fell through a gap in the conservationists’ consciousness; their value was invisible.

It took two women to see it: a wildlife campaigner, Angela King, and a university lecturer in planning and ecology, Sue Clifford. Both environmental activists involved in Friends of the Earth, in the early 1980s they had joined together in an interest nobody else seemed bothered about: the local, and the ordinary; the commonplace, and the everyday.

“The environmental movement at the time was all about the special and the rare,” Clifford said. “It was all about firefighting, looking after the rare and the endangered, putting designations around things to protect them – and then the rest could go hang. That seemed completely wrong to us. We wanted to invent a philosophy of wanting to care for everything around you, and create an organisation that would inform and encourage and inspire people to look after their own patches.”

They did. With the writer and film-maker Roger Deakin (the man who wrote Waterlog about swimming his way across Britain; he died last year) they started Common Ground, a pressure group with an aim like no other’s: the preservation of local distinctiveness. They were the first, really, to see what the Starbucks culture would do, long before Starbucks was known to us: how the spiky distinctiveness and difference of every high street, often centuries-old and cherished by local people even if they could not say why, would be steamrollered flat by globalised business and its universal brands. As would the countryside, regional foods, local dialects, parish customs and a thousand individual ways of doing things.

They were well-established, with a couple of books published about defending your own corner of the world, when orchards crept into their consciousness.

“We produced a manifesto for trees,” Clifford said, “and in amongst it all, we found these trees that none of our conservation colleagues could see. You mentioned fruit trees, and orchards, and nobody was interested. They regarded them as commercial crops. But we discovered perry pear trees that were 300 years old, and all these gorgeous orchards that were full of wildlife as well as fruit. We found orchards needed a champion, and we were going to be it.” And it was while championing orchards – they commissioned the Devon countryside photographer James Ravilious to photograph the orchards of the South-west as one of their first acts of putting them on the map – that they made their biggest discovery of all.

“We suddenly realised,” King said. “that there were all these apple varieties.”

That moment, probably some time in 1989, marked the turning point for the native English apple, the moment when a lifebelt was thrown into the water. For Common Ground had found its ultimate emblem: nothing has local distinctiveness in the way apples do. “It was the amazing variety of the fruit, but also the extraordinary richness of symbolism and story attached to it all,” said Clifford. “Other fruits have sublime local distinctiveness too – damsons, walnuts – but the apple just kept coming through to the top.

“Like with Friends of the Earth, at the beginning, the whale was going to stand for the world… well, the apple emerged as the thing that was going to stand for the world for us. What we were trying to do was make the link between nature and culture, and we couldn’t have thought of anything better.”

The result: Apple Day. In a stroke of quite brilliant imagination, King and Clifford took their love of apples, their concern for apples, their wonder at apples’ miraculous variety, and brought it to the attention of the whole country. You or I might hire a PR company to do that. They merely inserted it into the calendar.

They chose 21 October 1990, a date when the English apple season is in full swing. That was Apple Day, they said. Who was to gainsay them? Anyway, they proved it. They put up a marquee near the Common Ground office on the piazza of Covent Garden– where London’s great fruit market had flourished until 16 years before, a connection they were well aware of – and assembled 100 British apple varieties – 100 – for people to try – people, that is, who had spent two decades chewing their way through the red thing, and the green thing, and the blasted yellow thing.

People were delighted. You could bring your own apples to be identified. You could buy a tree. You could admire Ravilious’s orchard photographs. You could try some cider, courtesy of the Campaign for Real Ale. But most of all, you could see what you had been missing since the supermarkets came, and you could smell it too, in a marquee which was filled with the most remarkable aroma, the aroma of 100 different apples, which sounds like the title of a Persian poem. Since then, Apple Day, this completely new ” calendar custom”, has gone from strength to strength, and is now celebrated annually in thousands of places; it is so widespread that some people believe it to be medieval in origin. Clifford and King merely watch it from a distance, letting local people get on with their own celebrations, although this year they are publishing a quite remarkable book to coincide with it: The Apple Source Book, a sort of all-in-one apple enthusiasts’ kit, containing everything from a raft of celebrity apple recipes and hints on cider-making, to a gazetteer of where you can find your Ribston pippin and your Blenheim orange.

Common Ground’s highlighting of the value of the apple has done much for the rebirth of English cider-making – “boutique” cider makers are flourishing in the West Country, given a boost by cider’s new fashionability thanks to the Magners advertising campaign – and for the preservation of old orchards: in a heartening victory for their long campaign, in August this year, traditional orchards finally became a priority habitat under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan.

But for English apples themselves, and their miraculous variety, what has Apple Day done? Well, it drew a line at once under their decline; they could no longer all vanish with no one noticing. More than that, it has demonstrated to supermarkets that there is a lively consumer interest in more than the same few standard types, and the supermarkets have responded: there is far more choice than there once was.

The threat, now, is no longer from restriction to two or three foreign and fairly dull varieties; it seems to be from the skill of breeders in other countries who are producing marvellous apples of their own. Braeburn is the great example. Bred in New Zealand in 1952, it is crisp, juicy, sweet, refreshing, and now the king of the apple market in Britain; we eat 100,000 tons of it yearly. Following close behind it is gala, another New Zealand variety, which children enjoy because it is simple and very sweet. Next in the popularity stakes comes Granny Smith, yes, the green thing, followed by golden delicious, yes, the yellow thing, and it is not until we reach the fifth most eaten apple in Britain that we reach a British variety: the Cox’s orange pippin.

It must be remembered that this is largely because the other varieties can be imported from all over the world, all the year round – we import more than 70 per cent of our apples – while the Cox has a relatively short growing season, in Britain alone. It does not travel well, the Cox. It isn’t really grown abroad. It seems that the genes of the Blenheim orange and the Ribston pippin had long become used to the moist but steady temperate climate of southern England and it is only here that their prodigious child can flourish, But how it flourishes! I’ve loved it all my life, and although I fully see the attraction of the Braeburn, its fresh appeal is essentially one-dimensional; it doesn’t remotely compare with the honeyed, perfumed subtlety of Richard Cox’s foundling.

I think of this, standing in the car park of The Lawns. I’m delighted to have found the site, tarmac or no tarmac, but I am cast down that there are no traces of Richard Cox himself. I had read that the remains of his summer house, all that was left of his garden, should be visible, but there seems to be nothing whatsoever. A family emerges from the flats; when I ask them about a summerhouse they look at me as if I am crazy. So I get ready to go, as the jets leaving Heathrow thunder overhead.

And then my eye catches something. One side of the car park, covered in ivy, is not wood-and-concrete fencing like the other two sides; it is brick wall. I approach it, and see that the brick is old. I follow it to its corner, and there, smothered by ivy totally, is a bulge; and I can just glimpse from the base that the bulge is made of stone.

I begin to pull the ivy off, and suddenly, to my amazement, I find wood planking; it is an old wooden door. And then, with even greater surprise, as I scrabble more ivy off, I see that the door has an old brass knob.

My heart starts to beat faster as I turn the knob and gently push. And it pounds faster still when the door begins to open. For an irrational but intense split second I am certain that, like the children in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, I am about to step from the car park under the Heathrow flightpath into a different world. I don’t, of course; but I do step into a pitch-dark warm space full of dead ivy stems, and with a sense of wonder, I think, here.

Here it was, maybe, that that he tasted it, when he first took it from the tree; here in this summerhouse he took a bite, on a warm autumn evening; and here it was that he uttered his exclamation, the exclamation of surprise and delight that has surely accompanied every apple discovery, all seven thousand of them, down the centuries: “Upon my soul, this is most uncommon toothsome!” – or words to that effect.

Never mind that the wheelie bin pen maintained by Slough Borough Council is a few feet away. I am back in 1835, filled with the mystery and miracle of apples, filled with their romance.

Let’s celebrate them this weekend.

The Apple Source Book, by Sue Clifford and Angela King (£16.99), is published by Hodder. To order a copy for the special price of £15.50 (free P &P) call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

To visit Common Ground’s excellent website, click here. And, accompanying the above article,

The A to Z of apples

Apple Day

First held at London’s Covent Garden on 21 October 1990, Apple Day has grown to take in events all over the world, including an international ” longest peel” competition. Last year’s winner, Justin Pachebat, produced an unbroken peel that was 662cm (22ft) long at an event in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

Bramley

The tart ingredient of all good apple crumbles should in fact bear the name Brailsford, for it was Mary Ann Brailsford who, in 1910, planted the first pip in a Nottinghamshire garden. Local nurseryman Henry Merryweather spotted the resulting fruit and asked the landowner, Mr Bramley, for permission to take cuttings. Today, more than 500 UK growers sell 100,000 tons of Bramleys, worth over £40m, every year.

Cox

Richard Cox, a retired Bermondsey brewer, created what would become Britain’s favourite dessert apple while cross-pollinating trees in his Buckinghamshire garden around 1825. Today, the Cox’s orange pippin accounts for more than half of UK-grown desert apples and is also thought to be the only fruit with pips that rattle.

Duck’s bill

British growers have produced more than 2,300 cultivars of apple, blessing many of them with splendidly curious names. The duck’s bill was produced by Sussex gardener Fred Streeter in 1937, while the marriage maker first appeared in Leicester in 1883. The etymology of the cider apples slack-me-girdle (now extinct) and hen’s turd remains a mystery.

English apple

In 1929, nurseryman Edward Bunyard said: “No fruit is more to our English taste than the apple. Let the Frenchman have his pear, the Italian his fig, the Jamaican may retain his farinaceous banana, and the Malay his durian, but for us the apple.”

Forbidden Fruit

The symbolic forbidden fruit that Eve coaxes Adam to share with her is not identified in Genesis, but is popularly believed to be an apple. The fruit’s illicit status is thought to derive from its Latin name, malus, which resembles malum (evil).

Granny Smith

Sussex-born farmer’s daughter Maria Ann Sherwood married Thomas Smith, a farm labourer, in 1818. Twenty years later, the Smith family sailed for Australia to begin new lives as orchardists. Maria Smith, who would soon become a granny, cultivated the tart green apple that would bear her name from the remains of Tasmanian crab apples.

Halloween

The tradition of apple-bobbing, in which contestants race to retrieve apples floating in a barrel using only their mouths, is thought to originate at the Celtic festival of Samhain, which gave rise to Halloween. Apples were traditionally associated with fertility gods and were also thrown at weddings, a tradition echoed in the modern (and safer) throwing of the bouquet.

Iwasaki, Chisato

The Japanese orchardist holds the current world record for the largest apple ever grown. In October 2005, Iwasaki produced an apple at his Hirosaki City farm that weighed in at 1.849kg and was almost the size of a football.

Johnny Appleseed

The legendary American nurseryman, born in 1774, single-handedly introduced the apple to swathes of the American Midwest. Appleseed’s grave in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is a national historic landmark and a park there plays host to the annual Johnny Appleseed Festival.

Kazakhstan

A team of DNA analysts from Oxford University recently traced the origins of the domestic apple, Malus domestica, to the wild Malus sieversii, which still thrives on the slopes of the Tien Shan mountains that straddle north-west China and Kazakhstan. The name of the Kazakh capital, Almaty, means “rich with apple”.

Le Crunch

In the 1980s, the Le Crunch campaign, heavily subsidised by the French government, successfully promoted the golden delicious in the UK, forcing many British growers to shut up shop. A new Le Crunch campaign will launch in UK supermarkets this month.

Mythology

Irish folklore claims that a continuous ribbon thrown behind a woman’s shoulder will land in the shape of her future husband’s initials. In England, early apple-growers would practise the apple wassail during winter. The first recorded event was at Fordwich, Kent, in 1585, where bread was tied to branches and cider poured over the roots in an effort to bring on a bountiful crop.

Newton, Isaac

The rare Flower of Kentapple tree has stood for more than 300 years outside Woolsthorpe Manor, the 17th-century Lincolnshire manor house in which Isaac Newton was born. The tree and its falling apples are known to have influenced Newton’s 1665 law of universal gravitation, but the image of a fruit landing on the physicist’s head is thought to be a myth.

Orchards

Being a combination of woodland, hedgerow and grassland, orchards support a huge variety of wildlife, from bats to butterflies and beetles to badgers. But an estimated 57 per cent of British apple orchards have disappeared since the First World War as cheap imports have priced out domestic growers.

Production

In 2005, at least 55 million tons of apples were produced worldwide, which, if the average fruit weighs 100 grams, equates to half a trillion apples. China accounts for almost half of that output, while UK growers produce a relatively paltry 200,000 tons a year (63 per cent of all UK fruit growing).

Quaglino’s

From 17 September to 14 October, diners at the St James’s, London, restaurant will have the chance to sample some of Britain’s lesser-known apple varieties. Head chef Craig James will present “The A-Z of apples” , a daily changing menu that will include dishes like spiced parsnip and bloody butcher soup and Woolbrook pippin tart tatin.

Redstreak

During the 1640s, Lord Scudamore’s fashionable “apple champagne”, based on the famed redstreak cider apple, proved such a hit that John Evelyn remarked: “All Herefordshire has become, in a manner, but one entire orchard.” Premium cider has seen a return to favour of late, led by Irish firm Magners.

Supermarkets

Supermarkets sell 70 per cent of all apples in the UK, yet, according to a report in 2005 by Friends of the Earth, just 35 per cent of their stock is British-grown. And despite there being more than 2,000 varieties of British apple, supermarkets stocked just 25, compared to 51 in the UK greengrocers surveyed. Some apples sold in supermarkets are shipped from as far afield as New Zealand.

Trademark

The pink lady was the first variety of apple to be trademarked and may now be cultivated only with the permission of Apple and Pear Australia Ltd.

Urinary stones

Hippocrates, the “father of medicine”, swore by the proposed medicinal benefits of eating an apple a day. Advocates claim the fruit can cure ills as varied as indigestion and rheumatism and many cider drinkers believe the beverage can prevent the formation of painful urinary stones (calculi).

Vitamin C

Yorkshire apple the Ripston pippin, thought to be an ancestor of the famous Cox’s orange pippin, has one of the highest levels of vitamin C among English apples. The French camille blanc variety contains up to 40 milligrams per 100 grams, equal to the recommended daily intake and more than many oranges.

Wax

Apples produce their own protective coating of wax, but this is removed when commercial growers wash the fruit to remove dust and residue from pesticides. To restore the shine, many producers apply shellac, derived from the secretions of lac insects. As many as 300,000 insects are required to produce a kilogram of lac resin.

Xylophagous

The xylophagous insect is one of the French apple’s greatest nemeses. In Britain, growers use pesticides to combat the biggest threats to UK apples, which include the codling moth and the summer fruit tortrix. In a 2003 survey by Friends of the Earth, 78 per cent of apples tested contained potentially harmful pesticide residues.

York, New

The “Big Apple” nickname was popularised in a 1970s campaign by New York’s tourism board, but the moniker’s origins remain unclear. According to one of many theories, the term first appeared in the 1909 book, The Wayfarer in New York, by Edward S Martin. In it he wrote that disgruntled Americans not living in New York are “inclined to think the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap”.

Zestar

A trademark of the nursery at the University of Minnesota, the red zestar apple, released in 1999, is described by its producers as “a crunchy, juicy apple with a sweet yet tart taste and hint of brown sugar flavour” .

Simon Usborne

This from Treehugger -

Somerset apples are for cider, not eating. At Burrow Hill Cider Farm forty different varieties of apples have been grown for the past 150 years. The traditional cider is a blend of these different kinds, with names such as Harry Masters Jersey and Brown Snout, growing on trees up to 60 years old. These apples are pressed to make juice, fermented to make cider and then distilled in Calvados-style stills. Made on site, the cider is matured in huge old barrels for at least a year. Whilst we were there local people were bringing their own gallon containers for refill, directly from the barrels. The dry was very very dry, as in pucker the lips, but when mixed with some medium sweet made a delicious non-alcoholic treat. They also make Eau de Vie and brandy. The brandy is aged in giant barrels, and gets its colour from the oak.