The Reverend Henry Brennan, the parish priest of Kilglass in County Roscommon, wrote to the Freeman’s Journal in Dublin on 14 July 1847: ‘Sir – there is not in Ireland any parish where fever and destitution prevail to so fearful an extent as here … by this time fever has made its way into almost every home … In some parts the fields are bleached with the bones of the dead which were previously picked by dogs.’
What is at first sight remarkable about Father Brennan’s account is that, as with Lieutenant Colonel Fitch, its chief emphasis is not on starvation as such, but on disease.
Fever struck very soon after the onset of the Irish famine and people called it ‘famine fever’. Thomas Burke of Roscommon wrote, perhaps clumsily but with great force, to his emigrant sister in Australia, ‘They are dying like the choler [cholera-smitten] pigs as fast as they can bury them. And the dogs eating them some buried in mats others in their clothes.’ As early as 17 December 1846, a Mr N. M. Cummins, a justice of the peace, wrote to the Duke of Wellington that, in his locality, famine and thus famine fever were already raging. Again, there was an emphasis on disease rather than starvation. Cummins entered a hovel and saw six ‘ghastly skeletons’ huddled in a corner on straw beneath a horse cloth, their naked legs protruding. ‘They were in fever – four children, a woman, and what once had been a man.’ Within a minute of emerging he was surrounded, he said, by two hundred such spectres. ‘A mother, herself in fever, was seen the same day to drag up the corpse of her child, a girl about 12, perfectly naked; and leave it half-covered with stones.’
By fever, the Reverend Henry Brennan and Justice of the Peace Cummins meant either famine fever (typhus) or relapsing fever. The Irish, whose clothes were often in tatters, huddled together in mutual filth, and the fetching and boiling of water to wash clothing and destroy lice became as far beyond them as they would later be for the famine-weakened Bengalis and Ethiopians. As a result, clothing became infested by lice.
Typhus is caused by a micro-organism, which would be named rickettsia, appropriately to honour Howard Taylor Ricketts, who first identified the bacterium. Such were his energetic researches that he contracted the disease himself and died of it in 1915 – in itself a proof of how infectious the organism was. This disease was generally released in the clothing of the starving through the faeces of the louse, which impregnated unwashed rags and which, on touch, produced a sort of dust that even priests who gave the last rites to sufferers, or anyone who handled their corpses, were vulnerable to. It could be similarly caught from a louse bite that was scratched, or even by the crushing of a louse. In fact, in Ireland, doctors, priests, parsons, members of relief committees who supervised outdoor relief, Poor Law officials, kindly middle-class visitors to the workhouses and relief workers in general all proved highly susceptible to the infection. A Doctor Carroll of Waterford actually claimed that typhus fever mortality increased in ratio of the rank and respectability of the individuals attacked.
Wherever it appeared, typhus caused fever, the appearance of drunkenness and a rash. The small blood vessels were particularly affected by rickettsia and the skin turned dark, so that in Donegal they called it firbrhas dubh, ‘black fever’. A characteristic of famine fever was the way it replaced the odour that people gave off in healthier times with something more repellent. The smell of fever patients was described by a doctor in West Cork as ‘a cadaverous suffocating odour’ with a ‘peculiar mousy smell which was always the harbinger of death’. Wherever people huddled together, as they did in the Ethiopian highlands and in Bengal, typhus must have been present too.
Fever brought a shadow over families. The families of sufferers were often wary enough to vacate the house. Some saw this isolation of the stricken as a form of sensible quarantine. In Ireland, once or twice a day people would feed the individual inside by tying a can of water and some hot gruel in a container to the end of a long pole. When there were no more tugs on the pole, the peasants would pull down the house on top of the corpse and burn it – a mimicry of the evictions and subsequent unroofing of houses by landlords, and a totally unaccustomed method of disposing of the body of a beloved.
In Ireland Firbrhas buidhe, ‘yellow fever’, cut down a lesser but significant swathe than famine fever or typhus. It was a puzzling disease, which doctors called relapsing fever, and it was also carried by lice, but involved an organism much longer than the bacterium of typhus. Relapsing fever came from the louse’s body, and was let loose if the insect was crushed or damaged. Interestingly, it is a fever not generally mentioned in the famines of Bengal and Ethiopia. A violent fever struck the victim for perhaps five days, when the patient recovered and was able to walk about. Perhaps a week later, the illness struck again, in very sudden and increased intensity, often jaundicing the victim (hence ‘yellow fever’) before felling him, as witnesses to the disease declared, virtually in mid-stride.
Famine fever and relapsing fever were spread in the close quarters of the workhouses of Ireland. The Irish had despised the workhouses before the famine, looking at them as hostile in architecture and intent, and fatal to individual dignity in their punitive atmosphere and the lean relief they gave. But now the poor came crowding in through their gates, and thus the workhouse became a huge petri dish of bacteria. The practice of fitting out new arrivals with the clothing of those who had just died spread infection exponentially. Fever wards – the populace called them ‘fever sheds’ – were erected, into which those suffering from typhus and relapsing fever were placed. But they were never adequate – famine and relapsing fevers always outran their capacity.
Another focus of fever during the famine days were the gaols, which were overcrowded with those who had committed thefts and what the authorities called ‘rural outrages’ – attacks on the property, agents and person of landlords.
In Dublin early in the nineteenth century, a number of philanthropic souls, including the Quaker Samuel Bewley, whose teahouse still operates in Dublin, and the brewer Arthur Guinness, acquired an orchard on the south-western outskirts of Dublin to build a fever hospital. Its 220-bed capacity was now overwhelmed. Similarly, the Cork Street Fever Hospital was swamped by people who had moved, in the universal famine manner, from the countryside to the city looking for relief.
Unlike the physicians of Bengal and Ethiopia, many Irish doctors blamed the outbreak of fever on bad air and miasmas. But Dominic John Corrigan, a Dublin physician who was an early expert on heart disease, perceived that famine was the common element in all fever outbreaks, and argued the direct connection between the two. He was much contradicted by others, who pointed out that fever often existed in times of plenty. In Bengal and Ethiopia, people had the advantage that medical practitioners saw an unarguably clear causative connection between famine and disease. But in those cases the problem was how to get medical attention.
In an Ethiopian resettlement or collective farm site at Guraferda in Kafa province, in the far south-west of the country, resettled newcomers were attacked by Central African diseases they had never encountered before, and died for lack of medical attention. Among all else, they contracted a killing disease derived from the effects of the tsetse fly, the carrier of so-called ‘sleeping sickness’, to which the northerners had never been exposed, along with malaria, which was far less common in the highlands than it was in Guraferda. The bite of the tsetse fly causes a red swelling at the site of the bite, which is quickly followed by anxiety, mood swings, fever, sleeping by day and insomnia by night, but ultimately – through the deterioration of the central nervous system – coma and death. When Mengistu heard about this regional disaster and received a report of the high death rate, he declared that the minister of agriculture had misinformed him. He then abandoned the Guraferda resettlement project.
Not as much attention has been given to the psychiatric results of famine. As he wrote in his medical history of the Bengal famine, Lieutenant Colonel Fitch was mystified by some of the reactions of the starving. They often refused to eat anything but ri
ce and some spices and fish. They rejected food grains such as wheat or millet or maize. Westerners in Calcutta would leave their residences or flats and give the starving on the pavements ‘eatables such as plum cake’. British soldiers in outposts in the mofussil would try to share their rations with the villagers, but to very little effect. It was as if they were blind to any food but that familiar to them, and sometimes even to that.
A final question must be asked: what are the effects on those who were carried in the wombs of starving mothers during famine?
A team of epidemiologists from the United States made a seven-year study of those born in the western Netherlands during the so-called Hunger Winter of 1944–5. They found that mortality in those born during famine was higher in both the first and second years of life. And famine foetuses might have also in some cases suffered a loss of brain cells. Even so, the researchers found no sign of lower mental ability once the children who were conceived and born in the famine reached mature age. And those carried in the womb of famished mothers, but born after the famine ended, suffered no effect in body size, whether in height or weight.
This Dutch study also showed that during famines the rate of conception is reduced. Amenorrhoea, a lack of menstruation, is widespread in all famines. The first research into amenorrhoea was carried out by Polish epidemiologist Johann von Jakowski in the hunger of the German winter and spring of 1916–17, caused by the blockade of the German coast by the Royal Navy, and called by Germans ‘the winter of ruta bagas’. Amenorrhoea also occurred in Nazi-occupied Western and Eastern Europe in World War II, and in particular in the concentration camps. A Hungarian expert estimated that 99 per cent of women prisoners suffered it, and there were reports of the same phenomenon in East Bengal and Ethiopia during their respective famines. The body returned to normal once however marginal meals were able to be eaten.
If bacteria were sentient, they would look upon famine fields as arenas of near-miraculous chance, an opportunity for a vicious dance across grand reaches of humans, whose resistance to invasion has fatally withered.
11
Evictions, Movements and Emigration in Bengal and Ireland
REGARDING MASS EVICTIONS and migrations, especially by comparison with Ethiopia, where so many journalists and aid agencies worked, Bengal was, once again, the hidden famine. The Bengali famine did not create an exodus of people out of the accursed country, as did Mengistu’s Ethiopian famine. From the summer of 1943 until November that year, when the round-up of starving street people by the military and police began, the greatest movement was towards Calcutta and other Bengali cities. A swell of people travelled without tickets on the railways, sitting atop the roofs of rolling stock, clinging to doors and windows in prodigious and apparently impossible numbers, or riding the rattlers beneath the carriages or freight trucks. Massive crowds of skeletal people waited at every station trains pulled into. Destitute women were raped at night while lying on the roads without strength to resist.
The writer Bhabani Bhattacharya witnessed the flight of people from the mofussil and describes the refugees who tried to hang from any railing or window frame of trains going west. As cane-wielding Red Turbans attempted to force them to the ground, they cried, ‘Give us a ride to the great city. Food enough in the great city [for us], and even the dogs and cats …’
Once the hopeful destitutes reached the city in their fragments of clothing and settled in its streets, many respectable people, almost in self-protection, began to believe that if Calcutta could be cleared of the destitutes, the famine would have been dealt with. For in famine, irrationality strikes not only the starving but the witnesses as well. So even the spaces taken on the pavements by the destitute and starving from the mofussil were not secure to them. When the victims died on the streets, the delay in collection of bodies and the onset of putrefaction increased the feeling among the citizenry that something must be done. As to how many arrived in Calcutta alone, the Famine Inquiry Commission puts the number at 100,000, but many accuse them in some significant matters of underestimating. In any case, the picture is muddied by the fact that some destitutes spent their nights in outer suburbs and villages and travelled on the outside of trains, hanging from any purchase or perched on the roofs, back into Calcutta by day.
We do not know how many of the destitutes were bargadars, the sharecroppers who gave half their produce to the person they worked the land for. This man might not be the zamindar, the overall landlord, but – in a pattern that existed in Ireland as well – one of a sequence of middlemen, ryots, the more prosperous farmers who themselves held land under the landlord and paid tribute to him. Without wasting excessive sympathy on him, sometimes the zamindar himself was under economic pressure, since the tax he paid the government was not reduced in the event of drought or famine, even though his sharecroppers could not produce now, and thus even the middlemen, from whom the sharecroppers leased land, became less able to pay their rent. In Bengal, therefore, there was not the same obvious and overriding impulse in landlords to evict and force tenants off their land. Some bargadars were driven out and became landless. But at least Bengali zamindars wanted to keep the pattern of land-use as it was, whereas the Irish landlords wanted to turn it upside down.
In September 1943, the Bengal government decided to move the destitutes off the streets of Calcutta and truck them to poorhouses and destitute camps around the city, as a first step in their journey back home. The clean-out began in November. The city was now full of scenes in which employees and police struggled to lift the weak off the road and into trucks, and found the destitutes resisting with their last resources of strength. The arrival of police trucks in the streets of Calcutta caused the hungry to flee. Among the victims, there was great fear of government camps, a belief that sinister things would be done there. Rumours about the malign intentions of government had spread among the hungry, who had been taught by their experience to believe the worst. Fazlul Huq, a Bengali politician, would say that the ultimate removals of the destitute were done with ‘rough handling and callousness’. The ultimate report of the Famine Inquiry Commission said that the round-up was achieved with ‘some force’ and ‘unpleasant scenes of coercion’.
In these compulsory round-ups, families were separated. When the authorities replaced police trucks with civilian vehicles and the police with volunteers, the transportation went more smoothly. But even when placed in the camps, which were often based around old army barracks, the famished would wander away, again seeking food, and among the most restless of those detained in camps were the children collected from the streets. ‘The wandering habit among children,’ a witness said, ‘was difficult to stop.’ Their brains had been deranged by starvation. ‘Children – skin and bone – had got used to eating like dogs. You tried to give them a decent meal, but they would break away and start wandering and eat filth.’ Special famine rooms for children had to be set up to deal with this impulse to move in any direction. It took two weeks of detention and adequate food, now extended to the destitutes by the Bengal government as a means of keeping them in the camps, to break the wandering impulse.
When the army took over relief at Wavell’s command that November, after a less than distinguished start by the civil authorities, some destitutes were repatriated to the countryside by army transport without having to confront the detention centres. Instincts told them this was to be preferred over custody. About the procedures in the detention centres little is known, but gradually the desperate were cleared from Calcutta.
Evictions and subsequent emigration were not only part of the mythology of the Irish famine, but also of its bitter reality. The government in Westminster always intended that Irish landlords should be made to support by taxes the overwhelming bulk of relief handed to the Irish, and given that less and less rent was being paid by the peasantry, and by small and even larger farmers, a program of rigorous action would be undertaken by many Irish landowners. It was fuelled in part by a belief common to many landlords t
hat their tenants were grudging payers of rent, and by the economic reality that some – certainly not all – of the evictors laboured under the necessity of paying off mortgages raised on their estates, and on the grand houses and castles built by their forebears in more profitable times.
Evictions were already well started by the spring of 1846. In East Galway, in the village of Ballinglass on the Galway– Roscommon border, a Mrs Gerrard had evicted for unpaid rent more than sixty tenants – 300 people, based on the average Irish family size. The eviction was carried out by a detachment of the 49th Regiment and numerous constables. That night the ejected families slept in hastily put-together shelters – their neighbours had been warned on pain of eviction against taking them in. Subsequently, they lived either in scalps, burrows roofed over with boughs and turf, or in scalpeens, holes dug in the ruins of a ‘tumbled’ (the remains of a) house. But Mrs Gerrard’s men or the police drove the evictees out of these too and onto the roads. There, many chose to die in the open, given that they had every excuse for giving up their souls.
A notorious evictor early in the famine was elegant military man and member of Parliament the Earl of Lucan, George Bingham, who owned over 60,000 acres in the Castlebar and Ballinrobe areas in County Mayo in the west. He was largely an absentee landlord, wild Mayo being admittedly a barbarous place for a man of the world to live. He declared as part of his motivation for the evictions that he ‘would not breed paupers to pay priests’. He evicted 2000 tenants from one parish in Ballinrobe alone, and tumbled – that is, smashed in – their houses.