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Skibbereen and the Great Hunger
– In this treatise on Skibbereen and the Famine, Philip O’Regan addresses the issue of just how the area came to be so synonymous with the Great Hunger and why it features so prominently in the literature of the Famine
THE first annual memorial day for the Great Famine will be held on Sunday, May 17, and the occasion will be marked with ceremonies in Skibbereen and at Grosse Île in Canada.
This is to be an annual commemoration, with each province to host the event in turn, but Skibbereen was, significantly, chosen to host the inaugural memorial day.
Speaking at the launch of the national event last January, Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív explained why Skibbereen had been chosen as this year’s location: “The Skibbereen area was one of the worst affected by the Great Famine. The mass graves of between 8,000 and 10,000 famine victims at Abbeystrewry near Skibbereen are testament to the tragic consequences of the catastrophic failure of the potato crop in the area during the 1840s.”
Skibbereen was at the epicentre of this appalling tragedy and one of the areas that suffered most between 1845-50 – of that there’s no doubt. In the decade 1841-1851, the population of Ireland decreased by about twenty per cent, while the Skibbereen Union area lost over 36 per cent of its population, a greater loss than any other Union in the country.
About one million people died and between one and one-and-a-half million emigrated. About another one million people were to leave Ireland’s shores in the following three decades, 1850-1880.
While these figures give some idea of the size of the convulsion which Ireland experienced in that period, they do not distinguish between the different intensities of impact in regional terms. Such distinctions are important. No area of the country escaped entirely the misery of those years, but counties along the east and north-east coast were least affected, while areas of the west and south-west were totally devastated.
Skibbereen quickly became a byword for famine and even today, over 160 years later, is still synonymous world-wide with the Great Hunger and is very much part of the lexicon of the Famine.
The Great Irish Famine, by Canon John O’Rourke, published in 1874, was one of the first books to deal with the Famine in its historical context. The book was re-issued by Veritas in 1989, and in a new foreword Aengus Finucane CSSp compared scenes from Ireland in the 1840s with Africa’s famines of the 1980s. One of the places Fr Finucane had visited was Nampula, a town in the north of Mozambique. He spoke of meeting people there who were “helpless and hopeless. For Nampula 1989 read Skibbereen 1846.”
PROMINENTLY
Why did Fr. Finucane use Skibbereen in his analogy? And why is it that in the historiography and literature of the Famine, Skibbereen seems to feature so prominently? There is incontrovertible evidence that the Skibbereen area received a substantial, and maybe inordinate, amount of attention from contemporary writers and journalists. This had the knock-on effect of attracting travel writers and other witnesses to the area to see for themselves the unfolding horrors. A natural corollary of this media attention was that these primary sources were then extensively quoted when writing the history of the Famine.
In this necessarily brief essay we hope to give an idea of some of the factors which contributed to Skibbereen’s prominence in Famine literature. An interesting issue which arises of course is whether this media attention and publicity contributed to relief measures in Skibbereen because of its notoriety, and, in contradistinction, whether other areas not so much in the public eye were left to rely on their own very limited resources.
The first thing to point out is that the Famine was a major event in journalism in Ireland and England. Journalists and artists were sent to various areas as to a war zone, to report back on conditions. It was very big news.
While communications were obviously nowhere near as sophisticated as they are today, Ireland and England did have a rich culture of newspapers and the popular newspapers of the day did enjoy an extensive readership. Newspapers were the chief source of news, and the most effective way of disseminating information.
Significantly, the Famine coincided with a period of great expansion and innovation in the British press, and in the 1840s there was over 200 provincial weekly papers in circulation.
The Times of London was the dominant paper, but there were many others with a large readership. The Economist (founded in 1843) and Punch (1841) were new kinds of journals, and other important papers included the Illustrated London News, the Manchester Guardian, the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Herald, the News of the World (began life on October 1, 1843), the Observer, the Standard, and the Scotsman.
LITERACY
In Ireland, by 1850 there were 65 registered provincial newspapers, well distributed around the country. Ireland also had a high level of literacy for the time, maybe higher than in England because of the operation since 1831 of the national school system here, of which there was no equivalent until 1870 in England. According to the census returns for 1851, the population of the whole of Ireland was 6,552,385 and 53 per cent of the population said they could read.
Travellers to Ireland also played a big role in putting the story of Skibbereen into the wider public domain and their writings, many published in pamphlet form, played a crucial role in overturning a degree of scepticism and reluctance by many in England who didn’t want to believe the extent of the Famine and the devastation it was causing. Travellers to remote areas like Skibbereen and Schull undoubtedly saved lives by drawing much-needed subscriptions to the area (as alluded to above) through highlighting the appalling conditions of the people.
The whole response to the Famine and the formulation of the British government’s policy towards Ireland in the 1840s were reliant on a number of factors, one major element being British public opinion. And the task of informing and very often directing and guiding British public opinion fell to the newspapers. The Times was of course by far the most influential newspaper of the day and what it came to represent to the political classes can be gauged by Robert Peel’s contention that it was the “barometer of public opinion”.
By 1850 The Times had a circulation of 40,000 daily, but because papers were read in exchanges, libraries and reading-rooms it had a readership of up to half a million. The Times had a leading article and an ‘Ireland’ column almost every day during the Famine, clearly treating it as a major story. In fact The Times commissioner, Thomas Campbell Foster, was touring Ireland when news of the first failure of the potato crop broke in September 1845.
The interest and coverage were so extensive partly because it believed such a disaster was very much out of keeping with an age of advanced industry and civilisation in Britain. After all, since the Act of Union in 1801 Ireland was part of Great Britain and the responsibility for its governance and wellbeing lay with Westminster. How could such a thing be happening in a part of the most powerful country on earth?
Throughout 1845-46 Foster produced in The Times a long and influential series of articles on “the condition of the people of Ireland”.
As the Famine went on, the tone and substance of The Times coverage changed dramatically. Indeed, one would have to question whether the exalted reputation that The Times had for helping to form public opinion was now the case at all as istead it seemed to be reacting to public opinion in England. On February 19, 1846, The Times carried a leading article objecting to the government voting away money on an “act of God”, to a country that was used to famines. It was now following the line of many in influential positions, including Charles Trevelyan, who believed that the Famine was an act of God and were reluctant to intervene.
In fact, in the space of one year, between November 1845 and November 1846, the change in The Times’ position can be seen to be complete. In a series of leading articles in November 1845 it was highly critical of the government for adding to Ireland’s evils with its indecision for doing nothing in the two months since the blight had been discovered. Indeed, its tone compared favourably with that of the Nation’s criticism of government inaction.
But by April 1846 The Times was more worried about the Famine being a frustrating restraint on English progress and prosperity, and by November 6, 1846, the volte-face was complete when, referring to the huge sums of money which had been deposited in Irish savings-banks, The Times derisively commented: “A few more famines and Ireland will become one of the wealthiest countries in the world.”
British public opinion aside, however, The Times’ coverage of the Famine played an important role from another perspective. It was the practice of the day for newspapers to publish extensive extracts from other papers, and from 1846 onwards The Times’ ‘Ireland’ column mostly contained extracts from provincial newspapers in Ireland, the Cork Examiner and the Southern Reporter, both based in Cork, being very prominent. It was a two-way process of course as the provincial press in Ireland and England often carried large extracts from The Times, the Nation, the Freeman’s Journal, etc.
Skibbereen, a newspaper town since 1857, when the Skibbereen and West Carbery Eagle was first published, did not have a newspaper of its own during the Famine, but Cork was well served with three newspapers, the Cork Constitution, the Cork Examiner and the Southern Reporter, and the latter two in particular carried extensive coverage of the Famine in the Skibbereen area.
Though in its ‘Ireland’ column from 1846 on The Times carried almost daily reports of death and starvation, very often carrying accounts from the Cork-based newspapers of the appalling conditions in the Skibbereen area, its editorial policy seemed strangely out of sync with this as it condemned Ireland for its ingratitude and violence and consistently elevated English suffering over Irish.
In Dublin, the Nation and the Freeman’s Journal also carried regular accounts taken from the Cork newspapers (often running the same extracts as The Times) and these accounts were then often repeated in other papers, so the news from the Skibbereen area was widely distributed.
While they were both nationalist organs, the Nation was far more trenchant in its editorial policy and was convinced the Famine was the work of a genocidal agenda by the government designed to wipe out the Irish by starvation and emigration – a view held by many nationalists.
The weekly Nation was the chief organ of nationalist opinion. Its first editor and one of its founders, Thomas Davis, died on September 9, 1845, on the eve of the Famine, and John Mitchel took over as editor. Mitchel wrote extensively on the Famine and was very forthright in his views on British rule in Ireland. His oft-quoted dictum appeared in the Nation on January 30, 1847: “The potato blight is the dispensation of Providence – the famine is the work of a foreign Government.”
While acknowledging The Times’ role in putting the name of Skibbereen to the British public, another London-based newspaper was to play a far greater role in highlighting the plight of this area. The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, while not having the same influence as The Times, was very popular and was selling 67,000 (with its overall readership being a multiple of this) copies by 1850. This journal broke new ground with its pictorial reporting.
Two things in particular stand out about the Illustrated London News coverage of the Famine from Skibbereen. One was the publication of extracts from his ‘Diary of a Dispensary Doctor’ by Dr. Daniel Donovan, Physician to the Skibbereen Dispensary and Union Workhouse, which appeared in the Southern Reporter throughout 1847 and 1848. It was the writings of Dr. Donovan that more than anything else helped to focus world attention on the plight of Skibbereen. His contributions to various medical journals, the Lancet, the Dublin Journal of Medical Science, and the Dublin Medical Press earned for him a reputation as an expert and accurate observer of disease. He was also regarded as one of the leading authorities regarding the distinction between death from famine and from disease.
His ‘Diary’ gives us vivid and often very disturbing accounts of the state of affairs in this area. His were authentic and first-hand accounts, the credibility of which could not be questioned.
Dr. Donovan died on September 30, 1877. An obituary in the Dublin Medical Press said of him: “... At this period, the letters which emanated from his facile and graceful pen, written to the Cork Daily Reporter and London papers, exposed in their true colours before the world, and in powerful and explicit language all the harrowing details, the melancholy, suffering and privations the poor people in the south of Ireland, especially about Skibbereen, were undergoing at the time ...”
GREAT CONCERN
The first reports of the potato blight in Ireland were in September 1845, and just the following month, in October, Dr. Donovan was showing great concern. In a report from the Carbery Agricultural Society in Skibbereen at a dinner held on the night of their annual show in Skibbereen, the Cork Constitution of November 1, reported that “Dr. Donovan, dispensary physician at Skibbereen, found that the wail all around him was that the potatoes were rotting everywhere.”
The second reason why the Illustrated London News was so important to Skibbereen was for its publication in early 1847 of a series of articles and illustrations from James Mahony. While newspaper columns were now filled with details of mass starvation and death, the Illustrated London News brought this home in a most dramatic way.
On January 30, 1847, the paper, on its front page under a heading ‘The Famine in Ireland – Funeral in Skibbereen’ carried a sketch of two uncoffined corpses being transported to the cemetery on a wagon bed drawn by an emaciated horse. The sketch, by Mr. H. Smith of Cork, helped to bring some sense of the horror of the situation and was perhaps for most British readers the first time that the word ‘famine’ took on a raw, more tangible meaning. The sketch was accompanied by a strong front page editorial calling for greater government action.
On February 13 and 20 the paper followed up with two series of reports and drawings from the same area of West Cork by James Mahony. Cork-born Mahony was commissioned by the Illustrated London News to visit the Skibbereen district so that it could place before its readers the “graphic results” of his journey with “unexaggerated fidelity”.
Mahony met with, among others, Dr. Donovan, and the artist insisted that the doctor’s reports were not “highly coloured” simply because “neither pen nor pencil could ever portray the misery and horror at this moment, to be witnessed at Skibbereen”.
Mahony’s images are among the very few pictorial records of the Famine and while they are now very familiar to us, they are still deeply disconcerting.
Throughout the winter of 1846-47 horror stories from Skibbereen in local, national and English press had begun to intensify. These daily reports of plague, pestilence and death, almost on a biblical scale, had to have a lasting impression on the national psyche and are deeply embedded in the collective memory of the nation.
In early December 1846 two Protestant gentlemen from the Skibbereen area, the Rev. Caulfield and the Rev. Richard Townshend (whose reports concerning conditions in the district had been published in newspapers in both Britain and Ireland) travelled to London to meet with Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and effective controller of relief measures. They told him that the Government relief schemes were failing and appealed to Trevelyan to send emergency food supplies, but none were sent.
On December 15 the commissioners of the Board of Works wrote an official letter to the British government, telling of the extreme destitution in Skibbereen. Appeals from Skibbereen received an official response from Trevelyan on behalf of the lords of the treasury on January 8, 1847, but again Skibbereen received no emergency supplies of food. In fact, on November 7, 1846, a local committee, The Committee of Gratuitous Relief, had opened a soup kitchen at the Steam Mill in Ilen Street, one of the first to be opened in the country, and acted ahead of the ‘Soup Kitchen Act’ which came into law in January 1847.
One of the most often quoted documents of the Famine was published in The Times on Christmas Eve, 1846. The writer of this letter was Mr. Nicholas Cummins, a Justice of the Peace of Unionist persuasion who lived at Ann Mount, Cork. Mr. Cummins visited the Skibbereen area on December 15, 1846 and was shocked at what he saw. He wrote to the Duke of Wellington “without apology or preface” describing conditions in Ireland and imploring for help.
“Having for many years been connected with the western portion of the County of Cork, and possessing some small property there, I thought it right personally to investigate the truth of the several lamentable accounts which had reached me of the appalling state of misery to which that part of the country was reduced. I accordingly went on the 15th inst. to Skibbereen, and to give the instance of one townland which I visited, as an example of the state of the entire coast district, I shall state simply what I there saw.”
The account goes on to give harrowing descriptions of starvation and suffering and must have had a profound effect on those reading it on Christmas Eve.
In January 1847 the Cork Examiner reported that the death rate in Skibbereen Workhouse had reached 140 a month, with as many as eight dying in a single day. Remember, they were the officially recorded deaths in the Workhouse; deaths outside the Workhouse would have greatly exceeded this. At a public meeting Dr. Donovan asserted that people were “dropping in dozens”.
The Freeman’s Journal of January 9, 1847 carried a report from Rev. John Fitzpatrick, Skibbereen, that mortality was so great in Skibbereen at that stage that death was regarded with “perfect indifference”. “The respect which the Irish were so fond of paying to their deceased friends, of accompanying their remains to their last resting place, is here altogether omitted ...”
The report went on to say that the people were oblivious to everything other than obtaining “a morsel to save themselves from starvation”.
The Cork Examiner a few weeks earlier, on December 16, 1846, had reported that “the most extraordinary feature” of the prevailing distress in Skibbereen was “the total apathy and singular indifference” with which death was regarded in the area. An accompanying editorial emphasised the reporter’s palpable sense of shock.
In February, J.W. Clerke, secretary of the local relief committee, reported that the dead were being “thrown coffinless into graves”.
As well as James Mahony, many others came to see for themselves the scale of the disaster in Skibbereen in those early months of 1847. Three in particular, two students from Oxford, Lord Dufferin and the Honourable G.F. Boyle, and an American philanthropist Elihu Burritt, published very detailed and vividly dismaying accounts.
LETTER FROM OXFORD
In February Dufferin and Boyle came to Ireland to witness for themselves the conditions here. They brought £50 with them which had been raised by the students at Oxford. The two students stayed overnight at the Becher Arms Hotel, North Street.
On their return to England, they published a pamphlet entitled Narrative of a Journey from Oxford to Skibbereen during the Year of the Irish Famine, by Lord Dufferin and the Honourable G.F. Boyle, the proceeds of the work to be sent to Skibbereen.
The Letter from Oxford, dated March 1, 1847, is a widely quoted document of the Famine and begins: “In an account of what was seen and heard by two Gentlemen during a stay of twenty-four hours in a small town in the south of Ireland, at a fearfully interesting period...
“We have just returned from a visit to Ireland, whither we had gone in order to ascertain with our own eyes the truth of the reports daily publishing of the misery existing there. We have found everything but too true; the accounts are not exaggerated – they cannot be exaggerated – nothing more frightful can be conceived. The scenes we have witnessed during our short stay at Skibbereen equal anything that has been recorded by history, or could be conceived by the imagination. Famine, typhus fever, dysentery and a disease hitherto unknown, are sweeping away the whole population. The poor are not the only sufferers; fever is spreading to every class, and even the rich are becoming involved in the same destruction.
“... Our time being limited, we had originally determined to go no farther than to some of the counties near the capital; but upon mentioning our intention to an Irish friend, we were advised to proceed at once to Skibbereen, in the county of Cork, which was reported to be the very nucleus of famine and disease.”
MASS GRAVE
One of the places Dufferin and Boyle visited was the Abbey cemetery, site of a mass grave.
“... It was a very large graveyard, and most of the graves had evidently long since been made; but in one corner there was about an acre of uneven and freshly turned earth. This was the portion allotted to the late victims of famine and disease; by these graves, no service had been performed, no friends had stood, no priest had spoken words of hope, and of future consolation in a glorious eternity! The bodies had been daily thrown in, many without a coffin, one over another, the uppermost only hidden from the light of day by a bare three inches of earth, the survivors not even knowing the spot where those most dear to them lay sleeping...”
“With reference to the mortality in the parish, Mr. Townsend assures us that the Local Committee estimate the number of deaths every day at from 35 to 40, exclusive of those in the Workhouse. The manager of the public coffin alone received payments for the interment of 65 bodies in three weeks.”
Some time later, an anonymous donation of £1,000 was made for the relief of distress in Skibbereen and some years after the Famine ended, it was discovered that it had been Lord Dufferin who had made the donation.
Also during February Burritt visited Skibbereen for three days and on his return to England published in Birmingham on March 3 an account of his visit, Three Days at Skibbereen and its Vicinity.
Again the pamphlet is full of the most disturbing accounts of famine and decay. He describes one scene of people queueing outside the soup kitchen: “The soup house was surrounded by a cloud of these famine spectres, half naked, and standing or sitting in the mud, beneath a cold, drizzling rain. The narrow defile to the dispensary bar was choked with young and old of both sexes, struggling forward with their rusty tin and iron vessels for soup, some of them upon all fours, like famished beasts.”
Elihu Burritt himself was an extraordinary man. In 1844 he founded an international pacifist newspaper The Christian Citizen in Worchester, Massachusetts, and this continued publication until 1851. Having crossed the Atlantic in June 1846, he founded the League of Universal Brotherhood and he organised the first of a succession of annual Peace Congresses in Brussels in 1848. He travelled widely in Europe gaining interest and support for his movement from such figures as Victor Hugo. He returned to England in 1863 when he was appointed by Abraham Lincoln as consular agent in Birmingham.
Although ‘Black 47’ is remembered as being the worst year of the Famine, reports emanating from the Skibbereen district were of death and disease right up to 1851. It is quite evident that not only was Skibbereen adversely affected very early, but severe conditions continued long after they had eased in other places.
In 1850 Mr. A.G. Stark in his Journal of a Tour in Leinster and Munster, recorded: “When the root failed, therefore, the whole fabric built upon it tumbled to pieces, and the civilised world rang with the woes of Skibbereen and the neighbouring village of Schull. And the civilised world was not deaf to the cry of agony. Contributions from every point of the compass, in money and food, from Turk and Christian, from Jew and Gentile, Gael and Saxon, poured in to mitigate the horrors of famine. At one time it was feared that humanity would give up in despair the task of saving Skibbereen...”
But what is most interesting about Stark’s pamphlet is the account of the Auxiliary Workhouses. “In the main workhouse, and about twenty auxiliaries – which were formerly employed as corn-stores, warehouses, private dwellings, &c. – there are upwards of 4,000 paupers fed, lodged and clothed in idleness at the public expense...
“I did not visit any of the poorhouses; indeed, the shrill sound of female voices that reached my ear, as I passed one of them – Swanstone’s Stores (Swanton’s) – as if nothing reigned within except discord and pain – rendered the invitation to enter anything but desirable...”
And remember, this was in 1850.
Throughout 1848 Dr. Donovan’s ‘Diary’ appeared in the Southern Reporter, and the Cork Examiner had a special correspondent in Skibbereen, Jeremiah O’Callaghan, whose very regular dispatches from the area were often picked up and carried by other newspapers in Ireland and England.
So continued the tale of devastation and despondency from Skibbereen until 1851 when finally the Famine had wreaked its full havoc and had run its course.
THE LEGACY
Skibbereen has many pleasanter memories than those recorded here and has had much to celebrate over the years, but it is not so inappropriate in these days to remember the legacy of the past. How this little town, in a corner of this little country became synonymous with famine is a story that should be remembered.
In fact, because of its association with famine, the name of Skibbereen was once nearly lost and could have ceased to exist at all, and may well have been written out of history. It came about when Timothy McCarthy-Downing MP, one of the town’s most prominent citizens in the 1860s and ’70s and a very influential Member of Parliament representing Cork, tried to have its name changed.
Around 1875-76, McCarthy-Downing believed himself to be in line for a peerage. He may well have had good grounds for his belief, as he was at that time a very influential MP and was at the height of his political prowess.
One thing disturbed him, however, with regard to this sought-after peerage. He claimed that the name ‘Skibbereen’ had very negative connotations and was associated with “obnoxious reminiscences of famine.” At a meeting of the Skibbereen Town Commissioners in January 1876, McCarthy-Downing, then chairman of that body, proposed that they change the name of Skibbereen.
There was almost unanimous agreement with McCarthy-Downing but there was one dissenting voice, that of John Francis Levis, who had a tannery on Main Street. Of the seven members present at that meeting, six were strongly in favour of doing away with the name Skibbereen and replacing it with Ilenmore or Ilentown. Ilenmore, it appears, was the preferred option.
Being all-powerful locally, when McCarthy-Downing sought to make the change he anticipated no opposition as few would care to cross his purpose. Yet the old name found a sturdy defender in John Francis Levis. He challenged the attempt to wipe ‘Skibbereen’ off the map, prepared a petition, hung it in his shop for signatures, and eventually succeeded in foiling the plans of the local colossus. Because of the determination of Levis, this misguided folly by McCarthy-Downing was eventually dropped.
As it transpired, McCarthy-Downing never received a title, so we never had a Lord Skibbereen, or a Lord Ilenmore or Lord Ilentown for that matter!