Three Famines (20 page)

Many landlords used the Gregory clause, and the accompanying poverty of their cottiers, to clear their estates so that they could be employed for new, more profitable forms of agriculture, such as grazing and extensive grain-growing. It was taken for granted by a lot of landlords and their agents now that if any members of a family, even children, sought relief in the workhouse, their parents’ cabin would be unroofed and burned down. Mercifully, the Poor Law commissioners in Dublin advised local Boards of Guardians around the country that dependants of men, but not the men themselves who held a rood – that is, a quarter-acre – of land, could receive relief without breaking the law. The reasoning was that women and children should not be allowed to die or to suffer acutely merely because the father of the family was so determined that he would not give up his miserable patch of earth. But the result was an inevitable splitting-up of families.

Gregory, asked by another member of the House of Commons whether the clause would destroy a class of small
farmers of whom there were millions in Ireland, replied that he did not see of what use such small farmers could possibly be. Interestingly, Lady Gregory, forty-five years after her husband’s death, living in depopulated Galway, became a host and patron to William Butler Yeats and adopted elevated views of the people of the west of Ireland, at least those who were still there.

Local relief committees wanted a definition of soup and a decision on whether it should include meat. The relief commissioners in Dublin told them there need not be meat, that soup was ‘any food cooked in a boiler, and distributed in a liquid state, thick or thin and whether composed of meat, fish, vegetables, grain or meal’. The relief commissioners were at one with the government at Westminster in that they declared relief should be ‘miserable and scanty’. One bowl of soup and one pound of biscuit, flour, grain or meal was to be the daily issue. If the soup had already been thick, only one quarter of the biscuit etc. was to be given. The Board of Health, however, recommended that the soup be solid rather than fluid, and the ingredients varied. They also recommended plenty of vegetables, since scurvy was still prevalent.

It was considered at an official level that the new program would take four to six weeks to become operative. Though food was to become ready for distribution as early as March 1847, this was a very hopeful timetable and the scheme was in place in very few areas by then. Between the winding down of the public works and the provision of soup lay a
gap responsible for the deaths of many. But, reacting to the urgency, some local commissioners got their kitchens running very quickly. Indeed, some kitchens had already been set up by landlords. On the estate of Sir Lucius O’Brien (brother of the famous rebel Smith O’Brien), on the road which led from Newmarket-on-Fergus to Dromoland Castle (now, by irony, a five-star hotel and golf course), there were two ash trees where relief was handed out by the daughters of the O’Brien household. These ash trees were ever after to be known as the ‘famine trees’. A similar plan was put in place by the aging novelist Maria Edgeworth in County Longford. The Society of Friends in Cincinatti, Ohio, had read of Maria Edgeworth’s ministrations to 3000 starving people in her area, and consigned to her $180 worth of corn meal to be used in stirabout. The Friends had also entered the soup business in Ireland before outdoor relief became official. They set up a three-boiler soup-making plant in Cork City, and made and distributed 2500 quarts of a nourishing mix, which included meat, vegetables and barley.

In areas in the west, there was a problem in finding cauldrons for the cooking of soup, and there were other problems as well. In some places June arrived and still no kitchen was operating, even though the starving were desperate for it to open. Hence there were food riots throughout Ireland, and troops were sent for from their barracks to suppress them. Some soldiers were lenient and compassionate, both the Irish and men from the other areas of the United Kingdom. But they were under the orders of their officers, who in turn were under strict instructions themselves.

At the beginning of June, the guardians of the Galway
Union, who had responsibility for the workhouses in the area around the city, attributed the high level of mortality to the delay in opening the soup kitchens. In the Roscommon Union no soup kitchen had opened by the end of May and the local government inspector of the kitchens provided relief out of his own pocket. When, finally, a soup kitchen opened on 15 June in the Skibbereen Union, a region of the most widespread death, priests were criticised by the authorities for trying to force onto the required lists the name of every person they could who was entitled to outdoor relief. Yet the soup was meant to be available free for the starving, and even though the government’s idea of true need always differed from that of people on the ground, its issue was not dependent on any means test – an indication that the Westminster government believed now that death was widespread in Ireland, and that perhaps even the majority of the Irish needed outdoor relief.

The organisation of the soup kitchens was often a triumph of administrative skills on the part of local Boards of Guardians, and the kitchens ended up feeding three million people – well over a third of the population. The problem remained the soup’s poor nutritional content, which, despite the Board of Health’s recommendations, was sometimes so low in vegetables that it allowed the onset of scurvy.

A famed London chef named Alexis Soyer, who worked at the Reform Club, frequented by Whig politicians, had helped to run a London soup kitchen in 1845 at the time the
first potato failure had brought hardship to the English, even though the potato did not dominate the diet of the poor in England to the same extent as it did in Ireland. He found it a technical and culinary challenge to devise means to produce food for great numbers of people and then successfully distribute it. He designed a new boiler for the purpose and published a number of recipes for cheap soup, with no meat component, but nutritious and costing three-quarters of a penny per quart. Some doubted the value of Soyer’s soup, one critic suggesting that he feed it and nothing else for two weeks to members of the Reform Club and see what condition they ended up in.

On behalf of the Whig government, Soyer went to Ireland to establish a ‘model’ soup kitchen, which opened on 5 April 1847 in a large tent located outside the Royal Barracks in Dublin. It was a highly publicised affair, which both the English and Irish press attended, and notable guests were each given a helping of the soup. After the respectable had left, a hundred paupers from the Dublin Mendicity Institution were ushered into the tent and served. Part of the model of the soup kitchen was that people would enter the tent or other premises by way of a zig-zag entrance in which they waited in single line. A bell signalled when a certain number of paupers in the queue could enter, and those who did not fit in waited outside for the next bell. The bowls and spoons on the table were attached by chains, and a prayer was said before there was any eating. Each person received a quart of soup, and a quarter pound of bread for consumption outside the soup kitchen. The sittings were each supposed to take no longer than six minutes. Soyer’s soup kitchen also made
sufficient soup to supply other relief centres within Dublin, so that between 6 April and 11 August 1847 an average of 8750 persons were fed daily on his soup.

In the middle of April 1847, Soyer made ready to return to London, and left Ireland in a fury of publicity. In an irony of the parlous times, public dinners were held in his honour and the citizens of Dublin gave him a snuffbox in appreciation of his making cheap soup ‘palatable’. The provision of free soup at such a cheap price – barely more than a farthing and a half, a farthing being a quarter of a penny – suited very well the economies of the time.

The transfer from relief in wages to relief in cooked food was not universally popular, especially as the soup varied so much in quality. In Clonmel, Tipperary, a member of the grand jury described the local soup as ‘totally unfit for human food’. For the same reason, in a number of areas the soup kitchens were attacked by the hungry and a few were destroyed. In Kells in County Meath, in an event known as the ‘Stirabout Rebellion’, an angry crowd gathered around the soup kitchen and refused to allow anyone to receive their ration, on the grounds that they did not like the indignity of receiving a useless fluid. In County Limerick a number of soup kitchens were destroyed because people thought they were being fobbed off with a food that would not sustain them or in any way sate their hunger. In the city of Limerick itself, the soup boilers in one kitchen were ‘smashed to atoms’ and a meeting of the relief commissioners was broken into and all the
documents destroyed. When the ringleader was arrested, a crowd attacked the local barracks with stones, and the frightened police fired shots into the mass of people. In Corafin in County Clare, on the edge of the desolate area known as the Burren, the soup kitchen was destroyed by a number of people who demanded uncooked food in place of the soup.

From now on, therefore, as far as Treasury was concerned, famine relief was to be a matter for Irish poor ratepayers and charity from within Britain and without, in part from the forerunners of today’s non-government organisations or relief agencies – the British Relief Association and the Society of Friends, for example, who would carry much of the weight. Through the soup kitchens, the government and Trevelyan had tried to deal with hunger head-on, though at someone else’s expense. But the idea of dispensing food for free as outdoor relief, that is, relief given outside the walls of the workhouses, the latter being considered the only proper venues for the issue of free food, offended Trevelyan’s principles.

In fact, even before the Soup Kitchen Act was passed, the Poor Law guardians and local relief bodies in many places were already feeding people soup, partly financed by discreet amounts of money given to them by the lord lieutenant in Dublin. Before the Soup Act, Westminster ordered that this be stopped, because it was outdoor relief. But in many areas the committees and guardians persisted – for example, in Castletown, Queen’s County, where landholders ‘above immediate want’ were said to have been able to subscribe something to the poor rate. There were also unofficially run soup kitchens in many parts of Dublin, where things operated in a ‘regular and orderly manner’, and up in rural Roscommon. As early
as 1846, the guardians of the Fermoy Union were handing out a breakfast of stirabout to 4–500 people. The guardians throughout Kilkenny were able to feed 2000 people in much the same way. The Skibbereen guardians described the distress in their union as heartbreaking and helped the Church of Ireland’s Reverend Caulfield. In 1846, Caulfield had come from his parish of Clane in Kildare to assist by opening a soup kitchen, in which over 1000 people were fed a pint of soup each day. Some soup kitchens were operated by landlords ‘having their house surrounded from morning to night by hundreds of homeless, half-naked, famishing creatures’. The kitchens of the Quakers were already operating and putting bowls of soup in people’s hands without asking any payment of them. It is impossible to estimate the lives saved by these personal acts of energetic compassion, or how high the death rate would have been without them.

After their early reconnaissance of Ireland and the effects of the famine, a Dublin-based Quaker Relief Committee was founded. It received £4800 from Irish Quakers, £35,500 from English Quakers and £4000 from non-Quakers in both countries. The donations received from the United States much exceeded these amounts. It happened that by the end of 1846, the Quakers in England and Ireland had made contact with the American Quakers, who now raised a massive relief amount. One of the first organisers of aid from the United States was Irish-born Quaker Jacob Harvey. He estimated that during 1847, Irish immigrants in America,
overwhelmingly working-class people or servants, remitted $1 million, the equivalent of £250,000, to aid for Ireland. Protestant churches and New York synagogues also contributed donations.

A number of Quakers from England and Ireland now travelled to the west of Ireland to oversee the distribution of food relief. Meanwhile, in Dublin another central committee was formed by citizens. It included both the Protestant and Catholic archbishops of the city. Donations, however, tended to fall as 1846 progressed, because of the hope of a more plentiful harvest at the end of the summer.

The reappearance of blight in the late summer and autumn of 1846 brought the relief efforts back into being with, among other organisations, the British Association for the Relief of Distress in Ireland and Scotland appearing. The British Relief Association was founded by Jewish banker and philanthropist Lionel de Rothschild at the beginning of 1847. Its board members began their first meeting by each contributing £1000 of relief. A sixth of the money raised by the organisation would be used for the famine in the Scottish highlands, and the rest was for Ireland. The association appointed the Polish putative nobleman and former explorer of Australia Count Paul Strzelecki to act as their agent in Ireland.

The central relief committee of the Society of Friends continued its aid, and a new general central relief committee was formed in Dublin in December 1846, once it was apparent that no end to the suffering was in sight. At that stage, before his ultimate transportation to Australia, William Smith O’Brien sat on the latter committee. Donations from all over the world again began to arrive. Toronto sent
£3472, Buenos Aires £441, South Africa £470 and Delhi a further £296 from private Irish soldiers serving in the army. Most of the money raised – £20,835 – went to allay want in Connacht in the west, and must have helped sustain lives. But many committees began to wind up their activities at the end of 1847, as did relief committees elsewhere in the world, when the harvest came forth unblighted. Even the Society of Friends scaled down its efforts, though it continued to give indirect relief in the form of seeds and capital equipment such as spades and fishing tackle. Apart from that, their resources were exhausted, they said.