Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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      29 August: sixty-five from Listowel board for Canada on the ship Clio.

      26 September: thirteen from Listowel sail on the John Francis …12

      Passengers were often selected by their landlords, being of no further economic use on the land, or by the guardians of the workhouses, and sent away to North America with just the price of their fare.

      At Quebec the immigrants disembarked at Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence archipelago. Five thousand were buried there, the majority killed by typhus. A priest who went on board the arriving ships left an account of desolation:

      Two to three hundred sick might be found in one ship, attacked by typhoid fever and dysentery, most lying on the refuse that had accumulated under them during the voyage; beside the sick and the dying were spread out the corpses that had not yet been buried at sea. On the decks a layer of muck had formed so thick that footprints were noticeable in it. To all this add the bad quality of the water, the scarcity of food and you will conceive but feebly of the sufferings that people endured during the long and hard trip. Sickness and death made terrible inroads on them. On some ships almost a third of the passengers died. The crew members themselves were often in such bad shape that they could hardly man the ship.13

      A report from the government in Quebec noted that those ‘sent out by their landlords were chiefly large helpless families, and in many instances widows and their children’ and that they ‘were generally very scantily supplied … The condition of many of the emigrants, I need not inform you, was deplorable.’14 A priest gave the last rites to the dying. ‘I have not taken off my surplice today,’ wrote Father Bernard McGauran, ‘they are dying on the rocks and on the beach, where they have been cast by the sailors who simply could not carry them to the hospitals. We buried 28 yesterday, 28 today, and now (two hours past midnight) there are 30 dead whom we will bury tomorrow. I have not gone to bed for five nights.’15

      The Listowel passengers on the ship Clio were told to expect a sum of money from the Listowel Union on arrival. Nothing was sent and they were left ‘entirely without means’. The colonial government moved them on to where they might find work.

      In the same period Scots Highlanders were also being shipped out by their landlords. A Colonel Gordon sent his entire tenantry – 1,400 people from the islands of Barra and Uist – to Canada. But to those Irish who were forced into migration, and to those left behind, what mattered was their particular circumstance. Even if they had been aware of the sufferings inflicted on the Scottish and English poor it would not have ameliorated their sense of loss, or the accumulation of grievance that the Famine caused. Nor would it have disposed them to think more highly of the government and the landlords. The wider context is everything until it is nothing at all.

      My grandmother Hannah and her brother Mick and their friends were brought up with stories of the Famine as passed on by their grandparents. Moss Keane from Ballygrennan outside Listowel recalled his grandfather’s memories: ‘The families used to get sick and die. The fever was so bad in the end they used to bury the people by throwing their mud houses down on them; then they were buried. The English could relieve them if they wished … Many a person was found dead on the roadside with grass on their mouths.’16 As always the spirit world was invoked in memory of the dead. People told of meeting them along the road.

      They were in the ground but walking still.

One story relates how a prosperous landowner came to gloat at a starving old woman. She was so ashamed of her plight that she boiled stones in the pot and pretended they were potatoes. ‘But when the time came, she found flowery bursting spuds in the pot.’17 Another tells of a great fiddler from the locality who was buried in a mass grave and whose music could still be heard on certain nights. I found out that there had indeed been such a man, a famous dancing master who died of exposure in Listowel Workhouse.*

      I met a woman walking past Ballydonoghue church one evening who turned out to be a family friend of the Purtills. Nora Mulvihill was born and reared here and came from a line that went back to the nineteenth century. Nora was middle-aged with grown-up children, and most evenings she walked the local roads to keep fit. Drive the roads of rural Ireland any evening and weather and you will see women like her, heads down and arms swinging. She knew the land and its stories.

      We drove to Gale cemetery where the dead of the Famine from Ballydonoghue were buried. ‘Do you know about the doctors that were here?’ she asked. I assumed she meant the medics who visited the workhouse during the disease epidemics. But no, Nora had another story. I would leave without knowing how to interpret what I was told. Maybe it was just a story, like so many of the others told over the generations by the old people, a story with some truth maybe or none, or maybe entirely true. But it was a story that lasted. ‘There was a house above in Coolard where there were doctors,’ Nora told me. ‘I don’t know who they were or what they were doing there, whether it was the one family or whatever. But at any rate they lived there through the hunger. At the time there was a lot of dead bodies lying around the place. People were falling on the roads. So the doctors sent their servants out to bring in bodies to them and they had a room upstairs in the house where they did experiments. When they were finished with them a man would come with a cart and take the corpses to the graveyard here.’ The man was known locally as ‘Jack the Dead’.

      A local historian, John D. Pierse, found an account of a ‘Dr Raymond [who] used to buy bodies for a couple of shillings from the local people … he’d come at the diseased part of the body and examine it … they used to do that wholesale.’18 The county archives showed that Dr Samuel Raymond was living in this area in 1843, on the eve of the Famine, and was still serving as a magistrate in 1862. It may have been that he was carrying out sample autopsies on behalf of the government. But in the memory of the place he is a ghoulish exploiter to whom the bodies of the dead were mere biological material.

      The stories offered the poor a promise that their suffering would be remembered, if not by individual names, then at least the manner of their death, a series of accusing fingers pointing out of the past at the English, the landlords, the big Catholic farmers who had food on their tables every night … at the whole army of their ‘betters’.

      The Listowel Workhouse was the repository of the doomed. Those who ended up in this cramped, disease-ridden barracks had lost all hope of survival on the outside. A doctor treating smallpox sufferers found that ‘three or four fever patients are placed in beds that are unusually small’. He witnessed two children die soon after arriving ‘probably being caused by the cold to which such children were exposed to on account of being brought in so long a distance’.19 The doctor found the body of a newborn baby in the latrines. A record for the 22 March 1851 documented the deaths of sixty-six people in the workhouse, of whom forty-nine were under the age of fifteen.

      Out of this misery grew an ambitious scheme. A report at the height of the Famine quoted the Listowel Workhouse master as saying ‘the education of the female children appears to be very much neglected … very few could even read very imperfectly. Only one or two make any attempt at writing.’20 The remedy to illiteracy and the prospect of death from starvation or disease was to pack thirty-seven girls off to Australia. They were among 4,000 Irish girls selected to find new lives in the colonies. Most ended up marrying miners or farmers in the outback. In the great СКАЧАТЬ