English politics has caused me often to review with fresh eyes the state
of the country as it existed in my childhood and youth, when, of course,
both the good and evil of it appeared to me to be part of the order of
nature itself.
I will first speak of the condition of the working classes, then of the
gentry and clergy.
I had considerable opportunities for many years of hearing and seeing
all that was going on in our neighbourhood, which was in the district
known as “Fingal” (the White Strangers’ land), having been once the
territory of the Danes. Fingal extends along the sea-coast between
Dublin and Drogheda, and our part lay exactly between Malahide and Rush.
My father, and at a later time my eldest brother, were indefatigable as
magistrates, Poor law Guardians and landlords, in their efforts to
relieve the wants and improve the condition of the people; and it fell
on me naturally, as the only active woman of the family, to play the
part of Lady Bountiful on a rather large scale. There was my father’s
own small village of Donabate in the first place, claiming my attention;
and beyond it a larger straggling collection of mud cabins named
“Balisk”; the landlord of which, Lord Trimleston, was an absentee, and
the village a centre of fever and misery. In Donabate there was never
any real distress. In every house there were wage-earners or pensioners
enough to keep the wolf from the door. Only when sickness came was there
need for extra food, wine, and so on. The wages of a field-labourer
were, at that time, about 8s. a week; of course without keep. His diet
consisted of oatmeal porridge, wheaten griddle-bread, potatoes and
abundance of buttermilk. The potatoes, before the Famine, were delicious
tubers. Many of the best kinds disappeared at that time (notably I
recall the “Black Bangers”), and the Irish housewife cooked them in a
manner which no English or French _Cordon Bleu_ can approach. I remember
constantly seeing little girls bringing the mid-day dinners to their
fathers, who sat in summer under the trees, and in winter in a
comfortable room in our stable-yard, with fire and tables and chairs.
The cloth which carried the dinner being removed there appeared a plate
of “smiling” potatoes (_i.e._, with cracked and peeling skins) and in
the midst a _well_ of about a sixth of a pound of butter. Along with the
plate of potatoes was a big jug of milk, and a hunch of griddle-bread.
On this food the men worked in summer from six (or earlier, if mowing
was to be done) till breakfast, and from thence till one o’clock. After
an hour’s dinner the great bell tolled again, and work went on till 6.
In winter there was no cessation of work from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m., when
it ended. Of course these long hours of labour in the fields, without
the modern interruptions, were immensely valuable on the farm. I do not
think I err in saying that my father had thirty per cent. more
profitable labour from his men for 8s. a week, than is now to be had
from labourers at 16s.; at all events where I live here, in Wales. It is
fair to note that beside their wages my father’s men, and also the old
women whose daughters (eight in number) worked in the shrubberies and
other light work all the year round, were allowed each the grazing of a
cow on his pastures, and were able to get coal from the ships he
chartered every winter from Whitehaven for 11s. a ton, drawn to the
village by his horses. At Christmas an ox was divided among them, and
generally also a good quantity of frieze for the coats of the men, and
for the capes of the eight “Amazons.”
I cannot say what amount of genuine loyalty really existed among our
people at that time. Outwardly, it appeared they were happy and
contented, though, in talking to the old people, one never failed to
hear lamentations for the “good old times” of the past generations. In
those times, as we knew very well, nothing like the care we gave to the
wants of the working classes was so much as dreamed of by our
forefathers. But they kept open house, where all comers were welcome to
eat and drink in the servants’ hall when they came up on any pretext;
and this kind of hospitality has ever been a supreme merit in Celtic
eyes. Some readers will remember that the famous chieftainess, Grana
Uaile, invading Howth in one of her piratical expeditions in the
“spacious times of great Elizabeth,” found the gates of the ancient
castle of the St. Lawrences, closed, _though it was dinner-time_!
Indignant at this breach of decency, Grana Uaile kidnapped the heir of
the lordly house and carried him to her robbers’ fortress in Connaught,
whence she only released him in subsequent years on the solemn
engagement of the Lords of Howth always to dine with the doors of Howth
Castle wide open. I believe it is not more than 50 years, if so much,
since this practice was abolished.
I think the only act of “tyranny” with which I was charged when I kept
my father’s house, and which provoked violent recalcitration, was when I
gave orders that men coming from our mountains to Newbridge on business
with “the Master” should be served with largest platefuls of meat and
jugs of beer, but should not be left in the servants’ hall _en
tête-à-tête_ with whole rounds and sirloins of beef, of which no account
could afterwards be obtained!
Of course, the poor labourer in Ireland at that time after the failure
of the potatoes, who had no allowances, and had many young children
unable to earn anything for themselves, was cruelly tightly placed. I
shall copy here a calculation which I took down in a note-book, still in
my possession, after sifting enquiries concerning prices at our village
shops, in, or about, the year 1845:—
Wheatmeal costs 2s. 3d. per stone of 14 lbs.
Oatmeal costs 2s. 4d. per stone of 14 lbs.
India meal costs 1s. 8d. per stone of 14 lbs.
14 lbs. of wheatmeal makes 18 lbs. of griddle-bread.
1 lb. of oatmeal makes 3 lbs. of stirabout.
A man will require 4 lbs. food per day 28 lbs. per week.
A woman will require 3 lbs. food per day 21 lbs. per week.
Each child at least 2 lbs. food per day 14 lbs. per week.
A family of 3 will therefore require 63 lbs. of food per week—_e.g._,
_s._ _d._
1 stone wheat— 18 lbs. bread 2 3
1 stone oatmeal— 42 lbs. stirabout 2 4
-- - -
60 lbs. food; cost 4 7
A family of 5 will require—
Man 28 lbs.
Wife 21 lbs.
3 children 42 lbs.
——
91 lbs. food.
_s._ _d._
Say 30 lbs. bread—23 lbs. wheatmeal 3 10
61 lbs. stirabout—20 lbs. oatmeal 3 4
—— — ——
91 lbs. 7 2
Thus, when a man had five children to support, and no potatoes, his
weekly wages scarcely covered bare food.
Before the Famine and the great fever, the population of our part of
Ireland was exceedingly dense; more than 200 to the square mile. There
were an enormous number of mud cabins consisting of one room only, run
up at every corner of the roadside and generally allowed to sink into
miserable squat, _sottish_-looking hovels with no drainage at all; mud
floor; broken thatch, two or three rough boards for a door; and the four
panes of the sole window stuffed with rags or an old hat. Just 500,000
of these one-roomed cabins, the Registrar-General, Mr. William Donelly,
told me, disappeared between the census before, and the census after the
Famine! Nothing was easier than to run them up. Thatch was cheap, and
mud abundant, everywhere; and as to the beams (they called them
“_bames_”), I remember a man addressing my father coaxingly, “Ah yer
Honour will ye plaze spake to the steward to give me a ‘_handful of
sprigs_?’” “A handful of _sprigs_? What for?” asked my father; “Why for
the roof of me new little house, yer Honour, that I’m building fornenst
the ould wan!”
I never saw in an Irish cottage any of the fine old oak settles,
dressers and armchairs and coffers to be found usually in Welsh ones. A
good unpainted deal dresser and table, a wooden bedstead, a couple of
wooden chairs, and two or three straw “bosses” (stools) made like
beehives, completed the furniture of a well-to-do cabin, with a range of
white or willow-pattern plates on the dresser, and two or three
frightfully coloured woodcuts pasted on the walls for adornment. Flowers
in the gardens or against the walls were never to be seen. Enormous
chimney corners, with wooden stools or straw “bosses” under the
projecting walls, were the most noticeable feature. Nothing seems to be
more absurd and unhistorical than the common idea that the Celt is a
beauty-loving creature, æsthetically far above the Saxon. If he be so,
it is surprising that his home, his furniture, his dress, his garden
never show the smallest token of his taste! When the young girls from
the villages, even from very respectable families, were introduced into
our houses, it was a severe tax on the housekeepers’ supervision to
prevent them from resorting to the most outrageous shifts and misuse of
utensils of all sorts. I can recall, for example, one beautiful young
creature with the lovely Irish grey eyes and long lashes, and with
features so fine that we privately called her “Madonna.” For about two
years she acted as housemaid to my second brother, who, as I have
mentioned, had taken a place in Donegal, and whose excellent London
cook, carefully trained “Madonna” into what were (outwardly) ways of
pleasantness for her master. At last, and when apparently perfectly
“domesticated”—as English advertisers describe themselves,—Madonna
married the cowman; and my brother took pleasure in setting up the young
couple in a particularly neat and rather lonely cottage with new deal
furniture. After six months they emigrated; and when my brother visited
their deserted house he found it in a state of which it will suffice to
record one item. The pig had slept all the time under the bedstead; and
no attempt had been made to remove the resulting heap of manure!
My father had as strong a sense as any modern sanitary reformer of the
importance of good and healthy cottages; and having found his estate
covered with mud and thatched cabins, he (and my brother after him)
laboured incessantly, year by year, to replace them by mortared stone
and slated cottages, among which were five schoolhouses supported by
himself. As it was my frequent duty to draw for him the plans and
elevations of these cottages, farmhouses and village shops, with
calculations of the cost of each, it may be guessed how truly absurd it
seems to me to read exclusively, as I do so often now, of “tenants’
improvements” in Ireland. It is true that my father occasionally let, on
long leases and without fines, large farms (of the finest wheat-land in
Ireland, within ten miles of Dublin market), at the price of £2 per
Irish acre, with the express stipulation that the tenant should
undertake the re-building of the house or farm-buildings as the case
might be. But these were, of course, perfectly just bargains, made with
well-to-do farmers, who made excellent profits. I have already narrated
in an earlier chapter, how he sold the best pictures among his
heirlooms—one by Hobbema now in Dorchester House and one by Gaspar
Poussin,—to rebuild some eighty cottages on his mountains. These
cottages had each a small farm attached to it, which was generally held
at will, but often continued to the tenants’ family for generations. The
rent was, in some cases I think, as low as thirty or forty shillings a
year; and the tenants contrived to make a fair living with sheep and
potatoes; cutting their own turf on the bog, and very often earning a
good deal by storing ice in the winter from the river Dodder, and
selling it in Dublin in summer. I remember one of them who had been
allowed to fall into arrears of rent to the extent of £3, which he
loudly protested he could not pay, coming to my father to ask his help
as a magistrate to recover _forty pounds_, which an ill-conditioned
member of his family had stolen from him out of the usual Irish private
hiding-place “under the thatch.”
But outside my father’s property, when we passed into the next villages
on either side, Swords or Rush or Balisk, the state of things was bad
enough. I will give a detailed description of the latter village, some
of which was written when the memory of the scene and people was less
remote, than now. It is the most complete picture of Irish poverty,
fifty years ago, which I can offer.
Balisk was certainly _not_ the “loveliest village of the plain.”
Situated partly on the edge of an old common, partly on the skirts of
the domain of a nobleman who had not visited his estate for thirty
years, it enjoyed all the advantages of freedom from restraint upon the
architectual genius of its builders. The result was a long crooked,
straggling street, with mud cabins turned to it, and from it, in every
possible angle of incidence: some face to face, some back to back, some
sideways, some a little retired so as to admit of a larger than ordinary
heap of manure between the door and the road. Such is the ground-plan of
Balisk. The cabins were all of mud, with mud floors and thatched roofs;
some containing one room only, others two, and, perhaps, half-a-dozen,
three rooms: all, very literally, on the ground; that is on the bare
earth. Furniture, of course, was of the usual Irish description: a bed
(sometimes having a bedstead, oftener consisting of a heap of straw on
the floor), a table, a griddle, a kettle, a stool or two and a boss of
straw, with occasionally a grand adjunct of a settle; a window whose
normal condition was being stuffed with an old hat; a door, over and
under and around which all the winds and rains of heaven found their
way; a population consisting of six small children, a bedridden
grandmother, a husband and wife, a cock and three hens, a pig, a dog,
and a cat. Lastly, a decoration of coloured prints, including the Virgin
with seven swords in her heart, St. Joseph, the story of Dives and
Lazarus, and a caricature of a man tossed by a bull, and a fat woman
getting over a stile.
Of course as Balisk lies in the lowest ground in the neighbourhood and
the drains were originally planned to run at “their own sweet will,” the
town (as its inhabitants call it) is subject to the inconvenience of
being about two feet under water whenever there are any considerable
floods of rain. I have known a case of such a flood entering the door
and rising into the bed of a poor woman in childbirth, as in Mr.
Macdonald’s charming story of Alec Forbes. The woman, whom I knew,
however, did not die, but gave to the world that night a very fine
little child, whom I subsequently saw scampering along the roads with
true Irish hilarity. At other times, when there were no floods, only the
usual rains, Balisk presented the spectacle of a filthy green stream
slowly oozing down the central street, now and then draining off under
the door of any particularly lowly-placed cabin to form a pool in the
floor, and finally terminating in a lake of stagnant abomination under
the viaduct of a railway. Yes, reader! a railway ran through Balisk,
even while the description I have given of it held true in every
respect. The only result it seemed to have effected in the village was
the formation of the Stygian pool above-mentioned, where, heretofore,
the stream had escaped into a ditch.
Let us now consider the people who dwelt amid all this squalor. They
were mostly field-labourers, working for the usual wages of seven or
eight shillings a week. Many of them held their cabins as freeholds,
having built or inherited them from those who had “squatted” unmolested
on the common. A few paid rent to the noble landlord before-mentioned.
Work was seldom wanting, coals were cheap, excellent schools were open
for the children at a penny a week a head. Families which had not more
than three or four mouths to fill besides the breadwinners’, were not in
absolute want, save when disease, or a heavy snow, or a flood, or some
similar calamity arrived. Then, down on the ground, poor souls,
literally and metaphorically, they could fall no lower, and a week was
enough to bring them to the verge of starvation.
Let me try to recall some of the characters of the inhabitants of Balisk
in the Forties.
Here in the first cabin is a comfortable family where there are three
sons at work, and mother and three daughters at home. Enter at any hour
there is a hearty welcome and bright jest ready. Here is the
schoolmaster’s house, a little behind the others, and back to back with
them. It has an attempt at a curtain for the window, a knocker for the
door. The man is a curious deformed creature, of whom more will be said
hereafter. The wife is what is called in Ireland a “Voteen;” a person
given to religion, who spends most of her time in the chapel or
repeating prayers, and who wears as much semblance of black as her poor
means may allow. Balisk, be it said, is altogether Catholic and devout.
It is honoured by the possession of what is called “The Holy Griddle.”
Perhaps my readers have heard of the Holy Grail, the original
sacramental chalice so long sought by the chivalry of the middle ages,
and may ask if the Holy Griddle be akin thereto? I cannot trace any
likeness. A “griddle,” as all the Irish and Scotch world knows, is a
circular iron plate, on which the common unleavened cakes of wheatmeal
and oatmeal are baked. The Holy Griddle of Balisk was one of these
utensils, which was bequeathed to the village under the following
circumstances. Years ago, probably in the last century, a poor, “lone
widow” lay on her death-bed. She had none to pray for her after she was
gone, for she was childless and altogether desolate; neither had she any
money to give to the priest to pray for her soul. Yet the terrors of
purgatory were near. How should she escape them? She possessed but one
object of any value—a griddle, whereon she was wont to bake the meal of
the wheat she gleaned every harvest to help her through the winter. So
the widow left her griddle as a legacy to the village for ever, on one
condition. It was to pass from hand to hand as each might want it, but
every one who used her griddle was to say a prayer for her soul. Years
had passed away, but the griddle was still in my time in constant use,
as “the best griddle in the town.” The cakes baked on the Holy Griddle
were twice as good as any others. May the poor widow who so simply
bequeathed it have found long ago “rest for her soul” better than any
prayers have asked for her, even the favourite Irish prayer, “May you
sit in heaven on a golden chair!”
Here is another house, where an old man lives with his sister. The old
woman is the Mrs. Gamp of Balisk. Patrick Russell has a curious story
attached to him. Having laboured long and well on my father’s estate,
the latter finding him grow rheumatic and helpless, pensioned him with
his wages for life, and Paddy retired to the enjoyment of such privacy
as Balisk might afford. Growing more and more helpless, he at last for
some years hobbled about feebly on crutches, a confirmed cripple. One
day, with amazement, I saw him walking without his crutches, and
tolerably firmly, up to Newbridge House. My father went to speak to him,
and soon returned, saying: “Here is a strange thing. Paddy Russell says
he has been to Father Mathew, and Father Mathew has blessed him, and he
is cured! He came to tell me he wished to give up his pension, since he
returns to work at Smith’s farm next week.” Very naturally, and as might
be expected, poor Paddy, three weeks later, was again helpless, and a
suppliant for the restoration of his pension, which was of course
immediately renewed. But one who had witnessed only the scene of the
long-known cripple walking up stoutly to decline his pension (the very
best possible proof of his sincere belief in his own recovery) might
well be excused for narrating the story as a miracle wrought by a true
moral reformer, the Irish “Apostle of Temperance.”
Next door to Paddy Russell’s cabin stood “The Shop,” a cabin a trifle
better than the rest, where butter, flour, and dip candles, Ingy-male
(Indian meal), and possibly a small quantity of soap, were the chief
objects of commerce. Further on came a miserable hovel with the roof
broken in, and a pool of filth, _en permanence_, in the middle of the
floor. Here dwelt a miserable good-for-nothing old man and equally
good-for-nothing daughter; hopeless recipients of anybody’s bounty.
Opposite them, in a tidy little cabin, always as clean as whitewash and
sweeping could make its poor mud walls and earthen floor, lived an old
woman and her daughter. The daughter was deformed, the mother a
beautiful old woman, bedridden, but always perfectly clean, and provided
by her daughter’s hard labour in the fields and cockle-gathering on the
sea-shore, with all she could need. After years of devotion, when Mary
was no longer young, the mother died, and the daughter, left quite alone
in the world, was absolutely broken-hearted. Night after night she
strayed about the chapel-yard where her mother lay buried, hoping, as
she told me, to see her ghost.
“And do you think,” she asked, fixing her eyes on me, “do you think I
shall ever see her again? I asked Father M—— would I see her in heaven?
and all he said was, ‘I should see her in the glory of God.’ What does
that mean? I don’t understand what it means. Will I see her _herself_—my
poor old mother?”
After long years, I found this faithful heart still yearning to be
re-united to the “poor old mother,” and patiently labouring on in
solitude, waiting till God should call her home out of that little white
cabin to one of the “many mansions,” where her mother is waiting for
her.
Here is a house where there are many sons and daughters and some sort of
prosperity. Here, again, is a house with three rooms and several
inmates, and in one room lives a strange, tall old man, with something
of dignity in his aspect. He asked me once to come into his room, and
showed me the book over which all his spare hours seemed spent; “Thomas
à Kempis.”
“Ah, yes, that is a great book; a book full of beautiful things.”
“Do you know it? do Protestants read it?”
“Yes, to be sure; we read all sorts of books.”
“I’m glad of it. It’s a comfort to me to think you read this book.”
Here again is an old woman with hair as white as snow, who deliberately
informs me she is ninety-eight years of age, and next time I see her,
corrects herself, and “believes it is eighty-nine, but it is all the
same, she disremembers numbers.” This poor old soul in some way hurt her
foot, and after much suffering was obliged to have half of it amputated.
Strange to say, she recovered, but when I congratulated her on the happy
event, I shall never forget the outbreak of true feminine sentiment
which followed. Stretching out the poor mutilated and blackened limb,
and looking at it with woeful compassion, she exclaimed, “Ah, ma’am, but
it will never be a _purty_ foot again!” Age, squalor, poverty, and even
mutilation, had not sufficed to quench that little spark of vanity which
“springs eternal in the (female) breast.”