The Irish famine of the 1840s

Not great subject matter for the Christmas season, but this is a book that will be of interest to many.  I've previously written posts about the Dutch "hunger winter" of 1944 and about Stalin's Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s.  The Irish famine in the 1840s is similarly grim (and similarly not typically taught in American undergraduate schools).  I noticed this book from the 1960s in our library's "new acquisitions" list a few months ago, and put my name on the waiting list because I recognized Cecil Woodham-Smith as being the author of "The Reason Why," about the Crimean War and the charge of the light brigade, which I had read, enjoyed, and blogged five years ago.  Herewith some notes and brief excerpts from the book:

"Furniture was a luxury; the inhabitants of Tullahobagly, county Donegal, numbering about 9,000, had in 1837 only 10 beds, 93 chairs and 243 stools between them.  Pigs slept with their owners, manure heaps choked doors, sometimes even stood inside; the evicted and unemployed put roofs over ditches, burrowed into banks, existed in bog holes." (p.20) 

"Ten years before the famine, the Poor Enquiry of 1835 stated that three-quarters of the labourers in Ireland existed without regular employment of any kind... for thirty weeks of the year, that is, for the whole of the year ecept when potatoes were being cultivated, 2,385,000 persons were without employment because there was absolutely no work to offer them.  Unless an Irish labourer could get hold of a patch of land and grow potatoes on which to feed himself and his children, the family starved." (32) 

"The conditions of life in Ireland and the existence of the Irish people depended on the potato entirely and exclusively.  The potato, provided it did not fail, enabled great quantities of food to be produced at a trifling cost from a small plot of ground... an acre and a half would provide a family of five or six with food for twelve months..." (35) 

"... in the backward areas where famine struck hardest, cooking any food other than the potato had become a lost art.  'There is,' wrote Trevelyan, 'scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceed the boiling of a potato.  Bread is scarcely ever seen, and an oven is unknown..'  (76) 

"No preparations, however... could, in fact, have saved the Irish people from the fate which lay before them... almost in a night, every potato in Ireland was lost..." (91) 

"The winter in Ireland of 1846-47 was 'the most severe in living memory', and the longest.  Snow fell early in November; frost was continuous; icy gales blew 'perfect hurricanes of snow, hail and sleet"... roads were impassable and transport was brought to a standstill..." (143) 

"The British Government has started Irish relief with a millstone round its neck - the 2,385,000 persons who, as the Poor Inquiry Commission reported, starved, more or less, every year in Ireland, whether the potato failed or not..." [starved, but not necessarily 'to death'] (165) 

The "famine fever" was a combination of multiple illnesses - louse-borne typhus caused by Rickettsia and relapsing fever from spirochetes (descriptions p. 189) 

Massive emigration was facilitated by the timber trade, which brought cargoes of timber from North America and previously returned using ballast weights.  The emigrants became new ballast.  Living conditions on those transports was grim. (208-9) 

Once arriving in North America (Canada and the U.S.), "The Irish had no technical skill to offer; they were not carpenters butchers, greengreocers, glaziers, masons or tailors; it was not customary for every man to have a trade in Ireland, and the Irishman's agricultural knowledge was apt to be limited to the spade-culture of a patch of potatoes.  Once his physical capacity for hard manual work had been lost, as it already had been in the famine - 'they are half dead before they start' - the poor Irish emigrant presented a problem which would have been almost insoluble even if strenuous efforts had been made on his behalf.  No efforts were made, however..." (248) 

"in 1847 New York... retained some of the features of a frontier town.  'Vagrant pigs acted as scavengers, and wandered through the streets at will.  They were kept in 'hog pens' on vacant lots, usually by irish owners, and turned loose to forage... on August 20 there were not fewer than ten thousand pigs roaming New York, 'dangerous as hyaenas.' (253) 

"Cabins in Erris were cut out of the living bog, the walls of the bog forming two or three sides; entrances were so low that it was necessary to crawl in on all fours, and the height inside - four to eight feet - made it almost impossible to stand upright.  Floor space was usually from seven to ten feet square... Large families, sometimes of more than eight persons, lived in these 'human burrows'; they were 'quiet harmless persons, terrified of strangers.'" (311) 

"The inhabitants of three villages were evicted by Mr Walshe, with the help of a company of the 49th Regiment: their houses were thrown down and they were turned out, in the depth of the winter, to exist as best they might..." (319) 

"Officially, it was declared that no deaths from starvation must be allowed to occur in Ireland, but in private the attitude was different.  'I have always felt a certain horror of political economists,' said Benjamin Jowett... 'since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good." (375)

I'll stop here.  I couldn't find a place to copypaste this text from, and typing it has been tedious (there are some excerpts in a 1963 Atlantic article); those with an interest in the subject matter (especially if you have Irish ancestry) can find the book at their library.  I would point out that this is a scholarly work of history, laden with copious statistics and extended discussions of Parliamentary activities which will be of marginal interest to most readers.  There are likely some more concise books on the same subject matter which will suffice for most readers, including the Wikipedia entry.