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.
In 1848, the blight appeared again. The British Treasury secretly offered the Quakers £100 if they would resume their relief operations. They refused to accept it, on the basis that far more radical measures were needed.
Because of the British Relief Association’s close contacts with Charles Trevelyan, it was often seen as an arm of government relief. But there were a number of ideological conflicts between Strzelecki and Trevelyan, especially over the issue of feeding some 200,000 children through the schools in the west, a plan of Strzelecki’s which Trevelyan saw as too profligate. The association, subject to Trevelyan’s influence at the board level, closed its operations in the summer of 1848. In September that year, a disheartened Strzelecki left dismal Ireland, refusing to accept payment for the work he had done, though still pursuing a campaign to be recognised and compensated as the first discoverer of gold in Australia.
However, Joseph Bewley, the Dublin Quaker merchant, established a further relief committee in Dublin and the Friends in London went into action again. From English Quakers they received an extraordinary £35,000. But the donations received from the United States far exceeded these amounts, as Jacob Harvey again organised a massive relief operation.
Joseph Bewley himself, like Harvey in New York, would be among the victims of the famine, in that they died premature deaths and, according to the opinions of contemporaries, in both cases from overwork. Many of the Friends were punished for their efforts: Jonathan Pim, a Dublin merchant, suffered acutely from exhau
stion, even though he would recover to serve in the House of Commons as a Liberal. As well as Bewley and Harvey, another merchant, William Todhunter, also died – again, according to his physician, of exhaustion – while about a dozen other Quaker workers were struck down by famine epidemics.
Pope Pius IX had sent a donation of Roman $1000. Later, under pressure from British emissaries and from his own conservative conscience, he would condemn and prohibit any Catholic uprising. But in March 1847, he issued an encyclical to the Catholic community worldwide, requesting Catholics to set aside three days of prayer for Ireland and to make donations. This had an impact among the Catholics of Britain as much as it did in remote Australia, Venezuela and South Africa, and donations flowed in, though not entirely from those Irish-born or of Irish descent. In Australia, where Irish convicts, former convicts and free immigrants made up nearly a third of the population, funds were raised with some urgency. In the more distant parts of the colonies, in what would become Queensland, there was an Irish Famine Relief Organisation. The Choctaw nation of America sent its mite as well. Privately raised aid came from Britain, from Newcastle, Gateshead, Hull, Birmingham, Leeds, Huddersfield, Wolverhampton and York.
To the chagrin of Lord John Russell, prime minister of Great Britain, the United States intervened more and more with relief. The American government’s motives were not entirely pure. The British government believed that US relief exports and their free issue to the hungry of Ireland would help drive up prices for American produce in general in Britain, and indeed even for those Irish whom the proffered American grain did not reach. The general Irish Relief Committee in New York declared that the miseries of Ireland were the direct cause of America’s increasing wealth. ‘What is death to Ireland has but augmented fortune to America.’ American merchants were fattening on the starvation of other people, it said.
In February 1847, Congress was approached to permit the Boston Relief Committee to be provided with a sloop of war, the Jamestown, and the frigate Macedonian, to transport supplies to Ireland. Congress agreed, a gesture all the more remarkable because American forces were committed to war against the Mexicans. Manned by volunteers, who slept in hammocks on deck to maximise room for supplies, the Jamestown left Massachusetts on 28 March. After fifteen days and three hours, it arrived in Cork. Captain Forbes of the Jamestown argued that if the supplies could cross the Atlantic in fifteen days, there should be no greater delay in getting them into the hands of the poor. The ship, said a newspaper in Cork, took a shorter time to bring its supplies than it would take to get ‘an intelligible answer’ from the Board of Works or to understand one of the acts of Parliament aimed at relief. A Liverpool philanthropist, William Rathbone, had agreed to help to oversee the impartial distribution of this relief.
It seems that in Ireland, relief, with its concentration on emergency food, might have been better targeted than in some modern famines. Nonetheless, there were complaints about relief assessors travelling the country by fine coach and staying at the best inns, phenomena seen now in the gleaming vehicles and accommodation at the best hotels, which has been associated with aid workers of the International Committee of the Red Cross and other bodies.
Sometimes the aid offered to the hungry was, in the minds of the givers, ordained by God. But its intention lay in affecting drastic change in those subjected to the charity. The phenomenon of ‘souperism’ – conversion to Protestantism for the sake of food and advantage – grew in large part from the founding in 1830 of the Protestant Colonisation Society, whose objective was to create Protestant colonies in the Catholic recesses of Ireland. This society, too, would offer soup and other favours, but at a particular cost.
By the early 1830s, it had already succeeded in founding its colonies of Protestants in County Donegal and Kildare. The evangelical Reverend Edward Nagle established a colony even in remote Achill Island in County Mayo, and another on the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry – in both cases country beyond which lay the Atlantic, a fact that might have emphasised the Protestant Colonisation Society’s sense that they had created mighty fortresses there against the general barbarism of the west of Ireland. The missions were founded with the support of local landowners, who were devout members of the Church of Ireland (the Anglican church, that is). Landowners’ wives were particularly enthusiastic contributors to the projects. Those from the Catholic masses who were converted by the society were ostracised and subjected to ‘exclusive dealing’, an early form of the boycott, which involved refusing to sell goods or to give any succour to any convert to Protestantism.
When the famine began, a further conversion movement came into being, the Society for the Irish Church Mission, which worked in Connemara in western Galway. This group were also willing to offer generous support, and in trying as well to bring about conversions, they believed they were liberating the Irish not only to a pure appreciation of the deity but also to a Protestant culture associated with habits of industry, social progress and inventiveness.
At the height of the famine, a priest in Ballinakill near Clifden on the Galway coast described proselytisers going from cabin to cabin ‘proffering food and money and clothing to the naked and starving on condition of their becoming members of their conventicles’. Priests in the west inveighed against the evangelicals from the pulpit, but their words could not bear away the reality of starvation. Many of the conversions were temporary, provoked by want. Yet ‘souperism’ would come to hold a much greater place in the Irish imagination than the ultimate figures justified. Part of the reason was the fervent, vitriolic and memorable oratory directed against the opportunistic proselytisers by the Catholic clergy. The bulk of Church of Ireland ministers themselves also mocked the work of the ‘colonisers’, and their trading of food for faith.
As for Catholic clergymen, Sir Randolph Routh, the chairman of the relief commissioners, found that during the famine the vast majority of priests were behaving ‘most liberally, and most meritoriously’, and cooperating well with their Church of Ireland colleagues. Some bishops were criticised, however, for not being demanding enough in seeking help for their people, and there were even some priests who went ahead with grand renovations or new building of churches during the most bitter years.
15
Relief: Bengal
THE QUESTION MUST be asked: why did Bengal suffer from a lack of administration and hence of mechanisms to distribute food? The centre of government in the regions was the British district officer, who was also the district magistrate and collector of revenue. His job was to keep order according to the government’s strictures. When Burma fell in 1942, the demands made on him were entirely to do with the coming Japanese invasion. His first task was to create a civil defence to prepare for the heavy air raids that were likely in the front line area. He was required to requisition supplies, land and buildings for the retreating British and Indian armies, and for military airfields. He had also to look after Indian refugees from Burma who turned up, trembling, alarmed and hungry. They had reached the town of Chittagong, far inland on the Karnaphuli River, by way of Assam and told tales of Japanese atrocities. At the level of the British and the Indian ruling class, even as far away as the capital, Calcutta, people were panicking. The Japanese advance through Burma had been so swift that there was a sense of inevitable capture. A witness who appeared before the Famine Commission described the all-absorbing tension in Calcutta, the emptiness of streets (the starving had not yet arrived), the abandoned houses and shops. The families of government servants were ordered out of the coastal regions, and few people did not believe that by the next cold season, the Japanese would hold Calcutta.
Exposed far out on his limb, the district officer was meant to calm some of the misgivings the refugee stories evoked in the general population, while simultaneously going about the business of denying them their boats and vehicles. He also had instructions to address the local inflation of currency, and all the turmoil of a beaten army streaming through the region to take up defensi
ve positions to the west. By June 1942, Chittagong was in front of the first line of defence, and the district officer was ready to abandon it as soon as the port and its installations were destroyed. The permanent harbour works were prepared for demolition.
In a sixty-mile line south of the town, district officers and their administration kept working in front of the positions taken up by the British armies, and were thus in no-man’s land. One wrote that he never knew whether he was going to wake up the next morning to find a Japanese soldier bringing in his morning tea.
So the efforts of the district officer were devoted to military issues and were not as exercised by the coming food crisis. Meanwhile, the only official in the Bengal village was the chowkidar (watchman), who did duty as a policeman and to whom all deaths were to be reported. He was poorly paid and often illiterate, and he lacked the authority of the village officials of the ryotwari areas, the areas in which village taxes were raised, and in which the officials were respected, or at least eminent, members of the community.