Trevelyans corn- should there have been more of it?

Nhead wrote: »

From what Trevelyan stated in the quote he meant that the famine was God's judgement on the moral evil of the Irish (as Trevelyan saw it). He was basically following the laissez faire orthodoxy of the time seen in The Economist which believed that if the government provided food it would violate natural law.

Fratton Fred wrote: »

Your assumption is that he is blaming the famine on the moral evil of the Irish people, that is not what he says.

He states that the famine is a devine judgement on the Irish (ok, pretty right wing thinking there) but then goes on to say (and the quote has been edited so he doesn't say it straight afterwards) that the real evil they have to contend with is the people.

Now, is he saying the starving people are evil, or is he saying that the merchants and Landlords (whose job Trevelyan saw at as to feed their tennants) are being evil in exacerbating the famine.

If you look at the work he did in India, why would his attitude to the Irish be so very different?

He got it wrong, I wouldn't argue that in the slightest, but I think he may be a convenient scape goat for a lot of people, particularly the Cork merchants who made fortunes out of other people's suffering.

CDfm wrote: »

Fred and I had an aside on the religious persecution thread

http://m.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=72647704&postcount=19

This is relevant on distribution.

And on laissez faire - the landlords did not see it as their job to feed the tenants and they were tenants and not serfs.

Did you have incidents of potato blight in Britain and how were the poor treated.

CDfm wrote: »

Edit



http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/past/famine/summer_1847.html

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

So was Trevelyans role significant or was he just a minor civil servant? Could he have done more or was he just fulfilling his role, doing what he was told to do? And what the hell was he rewarded for in 1847- in the middle of the famine?

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

This was part of the attempt to make Ireland pay for its own famine induced deficits. The famine had become an old news story in England and paying for relief schemes had become unpopular amongst government supporters. Was this a common feeling in England though- who had voting rights there in 1847?

Comments of the Duke of Wellington (1830)

Politicians were well aware of the underlying causes though they did nothing to tackle them. For example, on 7 July 1830 the Duke of Wellington wrote:

I confess that the annually recurring starvation in Ireland, for a period differing, according to the goodness or badness of the season, from one week to three months, gives me more uneasiness than any other evil existing in the United Kingdom.
It is starvation, because it is the fact that, although there is an abundance of provisions in the country of a superior kind, and at a cheaper rate than the same can be bought in any other part of Her Majesty’s dominions, those who want in the midst of plenty cannot get, because they do not possess even the small sum of money necessary to buy a supply of food.
It occurs every year, for that period of time that elapses between the final consumption of one year’s crop of potatoes, and the coming of the crop of the following year, and it is long or short, according as the previous season has been bad or good.
Now when this misfortune occurs, there is no relief or mitigation, excepting a recourse to public money. The proprietors of the country, those who ought to think for the people, to foresee this misfortune, and to provide beforehand a remedy for it, are amusing themselves in the Clubs in London, in Cheltenham, or Bath, or on the Continent, and the Government are made responsible for the evil, and they must find the remedy for it where they can—anywhere excepting in the pockets of Irish Gentlemen.
Then, if they give public money to provide a remedy for this distress, it is applied to all purposes excepting the one for which it is given; and more particularly to that one, viz. the payment of arrears of an exorbitant rent.
However, we must expect that this evil will continue, and will increase as the population will increase, and the chances of a serious evil, such as the loss of a large number of persons by famine, will be greater in proportion to the numbers existing in Ireland in the state in which we know that the great body of the people are living at this moment. [Wellington to Northumberland, 7 July 1830, in Despatches, vii 111–2; repr. in P. S. O’Hegarty, A history of Ireland under the Union (London 1952) 291–2]


http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Famine

The famine in Skibbereen

The 'Great Hunger' was one of many famines in Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century, but the size of the disaster dwarfed those that preceded it. A contemporary comment was that "God sent the blight, but the English made the famine": and to some extent this was true because the governments of both Peel and Lord John Russell did little to help the Irish population.
On 15 December 1846, one of the Cork magistrates, Mr Nicholas Cummins, visited Skibbereen and sent a letter describing what he saw to the Duke of Wellington and a copy to The Times. The letter was published in the newspaper on 24 December 1846.
The Whig government headed by Lord John Russell did not send food to Skibbereen. There were plentiful supplies of meat, bread and fish in the area, according to the Board of Work’s Relief Inspector’s report and no one seemed to realise that the starving Irish had no money with which to buy it. However, on 8 January 1847, Charles Edward Trevelyan, the permanent head of the Treasury, wrote a minute on behalf of the Lords of the Treasury. This was the sole response of the British government.

Being aware that I should have to witness scenes of frightful hunger, I provided myself with as much bread as five men could carry, and on reaching the spot I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive - they were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe, either from famine or from fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain. My heart sickens at the recital, but I must go on.
In another case, decency would forbid what follows, but it must be told. My clothes were nearly torn off in my endeavour to escape from the throng of pestilence around, when my neckcloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn, I found myself grasped by a woman with an infant just born in her arms and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins - the sole covering of herself and baby. The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining lands, which was observed shut for many days, and two frozen corpses were found, lying upon the mud floor, half devoured by rats.
The Times, 24 December 1846
***
It is their Lordships desire that effectual relief should be given to the inhabitants of the district in the neighbourhood of Skibbereen the local Relief Committees should be stimulated to the utmost possible exertion; soup kitchens should be established under the management of these Committees at such distances as will render them accessible to all the destitute inhabitants and ... liberal donations should be made by Government in aid of funds raised by local subscriptions.
Correspondence ... relating ... to the Relief of the Distress in Ireland (Commissariat Series), H.C. (1847)


http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/ireland/skibber.htm

William Stuart Trench first became associated with the Lansdowne estate in Kerry in 1849, when he compiled a detailed report on its distressed condition in the wake of the famine for the proprietor, the third marquess of Lansdowne. As agent he devised a scheme of assisted emigration which between 1850 and 1855 shipped 4,000 of the population from Kenmare to America. Through use of contemporary estate records, and by drawing on the work of modern American scholars, the present study not only analyses Trench's emigration scheme in detail, but also provides a fascinating reconstruction of the lives of the Lansdowne emigrants in the slums and ghettos of New York.

http://www.geographypublications.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=34

I did not see a child playing in the streets or on the roads; no children are to be seen outside the doors but a few sick and dying children. In the districts which are now being depopulated by starvation, coffins are only used for the more wealthy. The majority were taken to the grave without any coffin, and buried in their rags: in some instances even the rags are taken from the corpse to cover some still living body.

On arriving at Cappagh, in the first house I saw a dead child lying in a corner of the house, and two children, pale as death, with their heads hanging down upon their breasts sitting by a small fire. The father had died on the road coming home from work. One of the children, a lad seventeen years of age, had been found, in the absence of his mother, who was looking for food, lying dead, with his legs held out of the fire by the little child which I then saw lying dead. Two other children had also died. The mother and the two children still alive had lived on one dish of barley for the last four days. On entering another house the doctor said, "Look there, Sir, you can't tell whether they are boys or girls." Taking up a skeleton child, he said, "Here is the way it is with them all; their legs swing and rock like the legs of a doll, they have the smell of mice."



Source: W. Stewart Trench, Realities of Irish Life (London: Longmans, Green, 1847).

http://college.cengage.com/history/west/resources/students/primary/potato.htm#source

William Steuart Trench

Life
1808-1872; b. near Portarlington; 4th son of Thomas Trench, dean of Kildare; ed. Royal School, Armagh, and TCD; land agent to estates of Marquis of Lansdowne in Kerry, 1849, and properties of Marquis of Bath in Monaghan, 1851, and Lord Digby in Offaly, 1859; also agent to the Shirley estates in Monaghan; object of several unsuccessful assassination attempts by Ribbonmen; issued Realities of Irish Life (5 edns. in 1868), in which he spoke of it as his ‘lot to live surrounded by a kind of poetic turbulence and almost romantic violence, which I believe could scarcely belong to real life in any other country of the world; deemed by some to give the best account of pre-Famine Irish district; held that emigration ‘gives us room to be civilised; also Ierne, a novel from the same material; d. Carrickmacross; bur. Donaghmoyne Churchyard, Co. Monaghan. ODNB DIB DIW FDA OCIL IF

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Works
Realities of Irish Life (Longmans 1868; 3rd. edn. 1869); Do., with Preface by Patrick Kavanagh (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966) URL="http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/t/Trench_WS/life.htm#Realities"]infra[/URL; Ierne, A Tale, 2 vols. (Longmans, Green 1871).
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland holds Report on the Shirley Estate (1843) as D3531/S/55.

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Criticism
See references in Colm Toibin & Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish Famine: A Documentary (London: Profile Books 1999).

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Commentary
Hubert Butler, Grandmother and Wolfe Tone (1990), “In Monaghan” [chap.], writes of Donaghmoyne Church, relics of W. S. Trench, author of Realities of Irish Life, under white marble Celtic cross; agent to Mr Shirley and Marquess of Bath, with a sway over 44,000 acres; Canon OHanlon, writing of Donaghmoyne, refers to him as the notorious calumniator and exterminator of the people of Farney, and DC Rush, historian of Monaghan, has him a liar and a briber of agents provocateur; Lord Bath, a humane and progressive landlord, thought highly of him. Hubert remarks, ‘his first book (1868), suggests that his considerable literary gifts tempted him sometimes to colourful exaggeration but [that] on the whole he brought peace to the barony and served an unpopular regime with a loyalty that was tempered by humanity. His son illustrated the book with a superabundance of filial piety. In picture after picture Trench, a figure of scriptural beauty, faces alone and unarmed a mob of drink-sodden paddies brandishing shillelaghs and hurling bottles and turnips. Though his shirt is torn from his back and his limbs are bleeding, he is undaunted. [...; 116] The ensuing pages contain a reference to a Thornton [O Draignean], called in Trench ‘an idle, good-for-nothing fellow, weak, small and cunning, who plotted to kill Trench, and next turned informer, so that two companions were hanged in Monaghan gaol [118]. Even Rush and OHanlon would not deny that ‘even at his worst he gave his tenants the care that a good stock-breeder gives to his stock. They prospered and multiplied &c. (p.118.)

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Sr. Una Agnew, The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh (Dublin: Columba Press 1998), gives an account of the disgrace of Kavanagh's grandfather Peter Kevany, Principal of Kednaminsha Nat. School, Inniskeen, ending: ‘The full tragedy of the story [of Peter Kevany and Nancy Callan] becomes evident from official records at the National Archives in Dublin. It was Stuart [sic] Trench, then manager of the Bath Estate schools, who compounded the injury further by reporting his teacher to the Commissioners of Education. [...; 144] On 4 April 1855, the Commissioners received a letter from Stuart Trench stating that he had suspended a teacher for “immorality” as “he has been for some time living with a widow who is with child by him and not married to him.” Trench enclosed a letter from Kevany requesting forgiveness and promising amendment. Three weeks later came the dreaded ultimatum that Kevany would be “immediately removed from the school [and that] they would not again recognise him as a National School teacher. This action ensured Kevany's public disgrace. His salary was suspended forthwith, and a notice served that the school would be closed until further notice. / Kevany was forced to leave the area though he continued to plead his case with the Commissioners [...]’. (pp.144-45.)




http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/t/Trench_WS/life.htm