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The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845 - 1849
The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, perhaps the most appalling event of the Victorian era, killed over a million people and drove as many more to emigrate to America. It may not have been the result of deliberate government policy, yet British ‘obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance’ – and stubborn commitment to laissez-faire ‘solutions’ – largely caused the disaster and prevented any serious efforts to relieve suffering. The continuing impact on Anglo-Irish relations was incalculable, the immediate human cost almost inconceivable. In this vivid and disturbing book Cecil Woodham-Smith provides the definitive account.
‘A moving and terrible book. It combines great literary power with great learning. It explains much in modern Ireland – and in modern America’ - D.W. Brogan.
‘A moving and terrible book. It combines great literary power with great learning. It explains much in modern Ireland – and in modern America’ - D.W. Brogan.
528 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
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About the author
Cecil Woodham-Smith
43 books19 followersCecil Blanche Woodham-Smith (née Fitzgerald) was a British historian and biographer. She wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of the Victorian era.
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August 24, 2021
"It has been frequently declared the the parsimony of the British Government during the famine was the main cause of the sufferings of the people, and the parsimony was certainly carried to remarkable lengths; but obtuseness, short-sightedness, and ignorance probably contributed more."
As Sydney Smith, the celebrated writer and wit, wrote: “The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots".
I read a history of Ireland's Potato Famine a few years ago which gave me an insight into this enormous tragedy but in retrospect I believe the author of that work was more than slightly biased in his reporting of the events of that history. This book is far and away a much more objective and thorough review and is written in what I would term a journalistic manner which at times can be rather dry and dull but it is, nevertheless, compelling. In 1841 the population of Ireland was reported to be 8,175,124 though that number may be inaccurate and lower than reality. In 1851 the population had dropped to 6,552,385 with nearly a million people having emigrated to other countries, primarily Canada and the U.S. That's a population loss of just under 20% with nearly a third of that loss attributable to death from starvation and disease related to the starvation and that is what the Irish refer to this period as, The Starvation. The impact of the Starvation on Ireland was probably greater than the Holocaust was to European Jewry in the 20th century and it is no wonder why the Irish came to hate the British with such intensity.
Prior to the beginning of the Starvation in 1846 Ireland had been under the dominion of England for centuries and were regarded as a conquered people. Under this status the Irish were forbidden education and were not even permitted to send their children abroad to be educated. They were also denied occupation in many trades and businesses, the vote, and the ability to hold public office as well as numerous other common rights and privileges. It is no exaggeration to state that the Irish were probably regarded more harshly by their British occupiers than the slaves of the American South were during the same period. American slaves had value and were housed, fed, cared for, and frequently trained in a variety of trades. The Irish had no value to the English and that was made abundantly clear when the Famine began.
When the blight began in 1846 the English were totally committed to the principles of laissez-faire economy and that the government should do as little as possible to interfere with markets or the economy. This notion prevented them from offering any sort of meaningful assistance by way of purchasing and distributing food or stopping the exporting of food produced in Ireland and directing it to local relief. Even the assistance they did offer was not offered free but for sale at market prices only. The idea of giving people free food was thought to deny or rob the recipient of self-esteem and self-reliance. The following year, 1847, the entire crop failed and crisis was in full operation. The British government did, very reluctantly, assist Ireland with a commitment of 8 million pounds in funds primarily to avoid appearing heartless. The following year there was a successful crop but because of the evictions, deaths, disease, etc not as much acreage was planted as usual. While the crop was successful the yield was below normal and not enough to end the problem of hunger. Nevertheless, the British government declared the crisis over and immediately set about legislating a solution to any further such problems. Their solution was to dump all responsibility for the problem and its future requirements on Ireland and the Irish taxpayers. The author reveals in detail how disastrous this solution was due to the effects of the Famine on the Irish economy and population. The British solution was a total failure and the Famine continued in a repeating cycle for decades following the 1840's. The author alludes to the British refusal to effectively address Ireland's distress as the foundation for the Irish Independence movement of the early 2oth century.
This book is another chapter in the England's colonial history that illustrates how inept, arrogant, bigoted, and ignorant they were to people that were not English. That the English blamed the Irish for their situation without the slightest acknowledgment that the condition of the Irish was a result of English policies is unbelievable and totally English, English of that time at least. This is an incredibly sad history that is well worth becoming familiar with though it is hard to read.
As Sydney Smith, the celebrated writer and wit, wrote: “The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots".
I read a history of Ireland's Potato Famine a few years ago which gave me an insight into this enormous tragedy but in retrospect I believe the author of that work was more than slightly biased in his reporting of the events of that history. This book is far and away a much more objective and thorough review and is written in what I would term a journalistic manner which at times can be rather dry and dull but it is, nevertheless, compelling. In 1841 the population of Ireland was reported to be 8,175,124 though that number may be inaccurate and lower than reality. In 1851 the population had dropped to 6,552,385 with nearly a million people having emigrated to other countries, primarily Canada and the U.S. That's a population loss of just under 20% with nearly a third of that loss attributable to death from starvation and disease related to the starvation and that is what the Irish refer to this period as, The Starvation. The impact of the Starvation on Ireland was probably greater than the Holocaust was to European Jewry in the 20th century and it is no wonder why the Irish came to hate the British with such intensity.
Prior to the beginning of the Starvation in 1846 Ireland had been under the dominion of England for centuries and were regarded as a conquered people. Under this status the Irish were forbidden education and were not even permitted to send their children abroad to be educated. They were also denied occupation in many trades and businesses, the vote, and the ability to hold public office as well as numerous other common rights and privileges. It is no exaggeration to state that the Irish were probably regarded more harshly by their British occupiers than the slaves of the American South were during the same period. American slaves had value and were housed, fed, cared for, and frequently trained in a variety of trades. The Irish had no value to the English and that was made abundantly clear when the Famine began.
When the blight began in 1846 the English were totally committed to the principles of laissez-faire economy and that the government should do as little as possible to interfere with markets or the economy. This notion prevented them from offering any sort of meaningful assistance by way of purchasing and distributing food or stopping the exporting of food produced in Ireland and directing it to local relief. Even the assistance they did offer was not offered free but for sale at market prices only. The idea of giving people free food was thought to deny or rob the recipient of self-esteem and self-reliance. The following year, 1847, the entire crop failed and crisis was in full operation. The British government did, very reluctantly, assist Ireland with a commitment of 8 million pounds in funds primarily to avoid appearing heartless. The following year there was a successful crop but because of the evictions, deaths, disease, etc not as much acreage was planted as usual. While the crop was successful the yield was below normal and not enough to end the problem of hunger. Nevertheless, the British government declared the crisis over and immediately set about legislating a solution to any further such problems. Their solution was to dump all responsibility for the problem and its future requirements on Ireland and the Irish taxpayers. The author reveals in detail how disastrous this solution was due to the effects of the Famine on the Irish economy and population. The British solution was a total failure and the Famine continued in a repeating cycle for decades following the 1840's. The author alludes to the British refusal to effectively address Ireland's distress as the foundation for the Irish Independence movement of the early 2oth century.
This book is another chapter in the England's colonial history that illustrates how inept, arrogant, bigoted, and ignorant they were to people that were not English. That the English blamed the Irish for their situation without the slightest acknowledgment that the condition of the Irish was a result of English policies is unbelievable and totally English, English of that time at least. This is an incredibly sad history that is well worth becoming familiar with though it is hard to read.
January 4, 2011
This is an older history of the famine (first published 1962), a good example of well-written general history. Its subject is, of course, thoroughly horrifying. What struck me as I read was how much history repeats itself and how little some learn from it. The Irish died not really because of the potato blight but because of insanely stupid laws governing land ownership and tenancy that were set up to benefit a tiny few and to exploit and degrade the many and were subsequently defended, even at the height of the famine, on the basis of the sanctity of private property and the untouchable profit of landowners (which their own shortsighted greed ultimately diminished or destroyed anyway); a grossly unequal distribution of wealth; contempt for Ireland, the Irish, and Catholicism, for a culture and a religion that were widely regarded as inherently backward and dangerous; and, above all, a blind faith on the part of government and the wealthy in the power of a free market and an insistence, in the face of all evidence and all common sense, that government intervention and assistance were always wrong ("government isn't the solution to the problem; government IS the problem" sums up their ideology pretty well) because it distorted the market, reduced the incentive for private enterprise, and encouraged dependence instead of manly self-reliance (sound familiar?). The free market gospel was mean-spirited, self-serving idiocy then, and it's mean-spirited, self-serving idiocy now. Perhaps this book should be required reading for complacent neo-cons now who spout the same slogans.
May 27, 2021
My maiden name was Donovan¹ and in younger days my auburn hair, occasionally earned me the name, ‘Red’. Visiting Ireland in 1983 from England where I was serving on active-duty Air Force, it felt like stepping back in time, even more so than living in England already did. I was forcibly struck by the friendliness of the Irish people, who upon learning I was American had to tell me they had a relative living in Chicago or Boston or someplace, USA. I smiled and nodded. What was I to say? Everywhere I went during that brief week, I was met with kindness, aching beauty, quaint rusticity and poverty. It was my first encounter with beggars; some were children. I left a bit of my heart in Ireland.
My Dad spent a number of years researching our family genealogy, but he met a brick wall when it came to Ireland. The oldest available record² for our family was a marriage record from St. Louis, Missouri in 1845, which meant our ancestors managed to leave Ireland sometime prior to the tragic year of the first potato famine in 1846. Based on the terrible events described in this book, I can only thank God and marvel that I am here to write this review when so many others, as well as their descendants, are not. His ways are indeed not our ways.
I was certainly drawn to The Great Hunger because of my Irish heritage, but I hope I may review this book fairly and not with undue harshness toward those who might have done more to ameliorate the various problems which occurred during this time.
Seldom have a read a book in my fairly long life when I have been so overwhelmed by the unalleviated suffering of my fellows. Here and there were those who did things which helped, but for the vast majority of the poor starving Irish it was too little and too late. Is this a condemnation on the British?
No, for several reasons. First, for the time period what they did was about par. They did not respond to the actual personal suffering so much as they responded as a political entity to a political crisis. Second, because other crisis³ situations all over the empire also clamored for attention and due to distance, available communications and scarce assets, what was provided was deemed adequate, even while it was desperately shown it was anything but. Third, because there was a long-standing poor relationship between the English and the Irish which went way back in history and was only further exacerbated during this Great Hunger. Fourth, because we cannot apply today’s value standards back to the middle of the 1800s however much we would like to. I know it is popular now to do this with slavery in America, but I absolutely refuse to do so. It was a different time and the people lived with much different constraints. Lifespans were shorter, cultural values and mores were completely different and there is no one-for-one exchange. We cannot judge them by our standards. In fact, we would do well, not to judge them at all.
Does this completely excuse their actions which resulted in the deaths of over a million and a half Irish (estimated, as there was no way anything like records could be kept), plus another million emigrants during these years? While it might be convenient it is also difficult and dangerous to apply responsibility to a governing body such as a country. There were many individuals whose heroic actions saved many lives, there were also those who turned a blind eye when they could just as easily have done more. On the other hand, the sheer volume and magnitude of the physical problems which beset Ireland were on such a scale that it would have taken many dedicated heroes, phenomenal organization and dedicated financial backing to have turned the tide of misery during these years.
The Great Hunger begins by describing the situation in Ireland prior to the failure of the potato crop of 1846. One of the most important things to understand is the Irish farmer’s total dependence on the potato for their diet and the devastation the crop failure caused. Other crops were grown in Ireland, but these were all for export and immediately handed over to the Irish landlords in payment for rent. The tenant-landlord relationship in Ireland was tenuous at best and even in years of good crops, Irish people died of starvation because there were more people than arable land. The only way people hung on to the land was to pay their rent first by turning in the crops grown. The potatoes they kept for themselves to live on. In 1846, Ireland was not the only place which suffered from the potato blight, which is one of the reasons England gave for not doing more for the Irish. Another reason is that in that time, it was believed that any interference such as large-scale charitable assistance would upset the economy, hurt farmers and drive the poor onto permanent dole. This was the philosophy of the time and it was rigidly held to.
As a result, the British government initially responded to the crisis with public works. However, due to terrible mismanagement, overwhelming need, useless projects, lack of qualified engineers to direct the projects, corruption and government refusal to lower prices, this effort went through all the money dedicated to it without helping but a few. There was a lengthy discussion of this terrible fiasco, but it was depressing beyond belief, a case study of what to do if you do not want to help people.
On the positive side, the Friends, or Quakers, were truly friends to the Irish throughout this long ordeal. They provided reliable witness to the terrible suffering and squalor of the Irish and relayed this back to the British government which often resulted in policy changes. They set up and manned their own soup kitchens which were always better than anything done by the government and they helped individual families, children and stranded persons with food, medical and burial assistance for years and they did this on both sides of the Atlantic. May God bless them for this as they were often the Irish people’s only human ‘friends’!
When the British government realized the failure of the works projects, they switched to ‘soup kitchens’ which again sounded good, but only on paper. The administrators often tried to make the food as cheaply as possible resulting in unappetizing and innutritious ‘soup’, forerunners of what the Nazis would later feed prisoners in their camps 100 years later. Grown men couldn’t live off this, even when there were sufficient ‘kitchens’ to be found. The government was also trying to make these ventures ‘pay’ through collecting ‘rates’ (taxes) which was totally ludicrous as rates were impossible to be collected under the best of circumstances.
The winter of 1846-47 was another brutal setback. Normally Ireland experiences mild weather year-round, but this winter was brutal with snow and freezing rain from November through March. Instead of the mild trade winds which usually flow from North America, the country experienced the bitter cold coming from Russia.
Then if all that wasn’t enough, there was ‘the fever’. There were actually two types of fever, typhus and relapsing fever, but this was not known then, all fever was just called, fever. They were both transmitted by lice and with people tramping all over the country in search of food, fever quickly spread and was pretty much everywhere in the country. One witness described children who looked like little old men, with wizened faces, their long wispy hair fallen out in patches yet strangely growing on their faces. It is estimated that 2 out of the 3 people who died during these years died from ‘the fever’. Dysentery was also lumped into this group.
During the terrible time of the fever (January-June ’47) assistant secretary of Her Majesty’s treasury, Charles Trevelyan was finally convinced of the horror of the catastrophe happening in Ireland, but either did not know what else he could do, or still clung to his belief that if he interfered with ‘free trade’ he would destroy something much greater. In any event, he seems to have never doubted his own choices in the matter.
Irish began leaving their homeland in search of better shores long before the first potato crop failure, but certainly the famine of 1846, began an exodus like never before. Sadly, these years also saw the origin of what came to be known as, “Coffin Ships”, some of which were chartered by good landlords trying to help their tenants find better lives, and others by scurrilous shysters trying to make money off a bad situation. Either way, the Irish died, some drowned, some died of fever, starvation due to insufficient rations of food or water, terrible living conditions, or because when they arrived at their destination they were refused and ordered back to Ireland. Many loved the Irish when they were in Ireland; almost no one loved them when they showed up on their shores. Irish immigrants suffered every bit as much as those who remained at home. Cecil Woodham-Smith devotes quite a bit of text to the suffering of and prejudice against the Irish in Canada, Boston, New York, and Liverpool but suffice it to say they were not welcome, and it was generations before they escaped their slums of misery. Germans and other immigrants quickly moved into the American heartland, for example. The Irish, for the most part, remained imprisoned. Smith speculates this is because they were so accustomed to being treated poorly by their landlords back in Ireland, they did not question similar treatment when they arrived in new surroundings.
Back in Ireland, Irish landlords came under attack from the British government and the citizenry, with some of it due. But by 1847, even the best landlords were so strapped there was little they could do. There were so many rates owed, many couldn’t even sell their properties. During that year, seven landlords were killed outright, some good, others not. The potato crop of 1847 was good, but little had been planted so there was little to be gained. In 1848, a massive crop was planted, the weather turned wet again and the whole crop was lost. I’m not quite sure where the expression, ‘the luck of the Irish’ comes from, but it is NOT from these years!
The book does end with a beautiful story of Queen Victoria’s visit to Ireland in August of 1848, and it brought a great deal of joy to the people. She was young then and the four days she spent there were full of royal gaiety, not seen by the Irish in years. It seems to have done much for the people’s spirits, but it did nothing to fill their empty bellies. She was not much more than a figurehead.
The Irish people were at their lowest point and they received a royal visit. They needed something more substantial. They needed food! I can just imagine what today’s media would make of that.
Instead, the British government withdrew all special assistance. No more soup kitchens, works projects or anything else. Ireland was pretty much on her own. The help it received in the future came primarily from Irish living in other parts of the world—fares for its citizens to migrate elsewhere, a continual drain of her best citizens.
Éirinn go Brách!
¹The Donovan’s come from County Cork, originally it was O’Donovan, the ‘O’ was dropped when they came to America.
²For most of this tragic time period exact written records of numbers and names do not exist. My Dad and sister traveled to Ireland to see what they could find about our ancestors prior to the famine but they were not able to learn anything.
³It was noted that the neglectful way the government treated the Irish was no better or worse than how it treated its own soldiers during the Crimean War just a few years later. The major difference being the scale in this case was much larger and so many more people died.
My Dad spent a number of years researching our family genealogy, but he met a brick wall when it came to Ireland. The oldest available record² for our family was a marriage record from St. Louis, Missouri in 1845, which meant our ancestors managed to leave Ireland sometime prior to the tragic year of the first potato famine in 1846. Based on the terrible events described in this book, I can only thank God and marvel that I am here to write this review when so many others, as well as their descendants, are not. His ways are indeed not our ways.
I was certainly drawn to The Great Hunger because of my Irish heritage, but I hope I may review this book fairly and not with undue harshness toward those who might have done more to ameliorate the various problems which occurred during this time.
Seldom have a read a book in my fairly long life when I have been so overwhelmed by the unalleviated suffering of my fellows. Here and there were those who did things which helped, but for the vast majority of the poor starving Irish it was too little and too late. Is this a condemnation on the British?
No, for several reasons. First, for the time period what they did was about par. They did not respond to the actual personal suffering so much as they responded as a political entity to a political crisis. Second, because other crisis³ situations all over the empire also clamored for attention and due to distance, available communications and scarce assets, what was provided was deemed adequate, even while it was desperately shown it was anything but. Third, because there was a long-standing poor relationship between the English and the Irish which went way back in history and was only further exacerbated during this Great Hunger. Fourth, because we cannot apply today’s value standards back to the middle of the 1800s however much we would like to. I know it is popular now to do this with slavery in America, but I absolutely refuse to do so. It was a different time and the people lived with much different constraints. Lifespans were shorter, cultural values and mores were completely different and there is no one-for-one exchange. We cannot judge them by our standards. In fact, we would do well, not to judge them at all.
Does this completely excuse their actions which resulted in the deaths of over a million and a half Irish (estimated, as there was no way anything like records could be kept), plus another million emigrants during these years? While it might be convenient it is also difficult and dangerous to apply responsibility to a governing body such as a country. There were many individuals whose heroic actions saved many lives, there were also those who turned a blind eye when they could just as easily have done more. On the other hand, the sheer volume and magnitude of the physical problems which beset Ireland were on such a scale that it would have taken many dedicated heroes, phenomenal organization and dedicated financial backing to have turned the tide of misery during these years.
The Great Hunger begins by describing the situation in Ireland prior to the failure of the potato crop of 1846. One of the most important things to understand is the Irish farmer’s total dependence on the potato for their diet and the devastation the crop failure caused. Other crops were grown in Ireland, but these were all for export and immediately handed over to the Irish landlords in payment for rent. The tenant-landlord relationship in Ireland was tenuous at best and even in years of good crops, Irish people died of starvation because there were more people than arable land. The only way people hung on to the land was to pay their rent first by turning in the crops grown. The potatoes they kept for themselves to live on. In 1846, Ireland was not the only place which suffered from the potato blight, which is one of the reasons England gave for not doing more for the Irish. Another reason is that in that time, it was believed that any interference such as large-scale charitable assistance would upset the economy, hurt farmers and drive the poor onto permanent dole. This was the philosophy of the time and it was rigidly held to.
As a result, the British government initially responded to the crisis with public works. However, due to terrible mismanagement, overwhelming need, useless projects, lack of qualified engineers to direct the projects, corruption and government refusal to lower prices, this effort went through all the money dedicated to it without helping but a few. There was a lengthy discussion of this terrible fiasco, but it was depressing beyond belief, a case study of what to do if you do not want to help people.
On the positive side, the Friends, or Quakers, were truly friends to the Irish throughout this long ordeal. They provided reliable witness to the terrible suffering and squalor of the Irish and relayed this back to the British government which often resulted in policy changes. They set up and manned their own soup kitchens which were always better than anything done by the government and they helped individual families, children and stranded persons with food, medical and burial assistance for years and they did this on both sides of the Atlantic. May God bless them for this as they were often the Irish people’s only human ‘friends’!
When the British government realized the failure of the works projects, they switched to ‘soup kitchens’ which again sounded good, but only on paper. The administrators often tried to make the food as cheaply as possible resulting in unappetizing and innutritious ‘soup’, forerunners of what the Nazis would later feed prisoners in their camps 100 years later. Grown men couldn’t live off this, even when there were sufficient ‘kitchens’ to be found. The government was also trying to make these ventures ‘pay’ through collecting ‘rates’ (taxes) which was totally ludicrous as rates were impossible to be collected under the best of circumstances.
The winter of 1846-47 was another brutal setback. Normally Ireland experiences mild weather year-round, but this winter was brutal with snow and freezing rain from November through March. Instead of the mild trade winds which usually flow from North America, the country experienced the bitter cold coming from Russia.
Then if all that wasn’t enough, there was ‘the fever’. There were actually two types of fever, typhus and relapsing fever, but this was not known then, all fever was just called, fever. They were both transmitted by lice and with people tramping all over the country in search of food, fever quickly spread and was pretty much everywhere in the country. One witness described children who looked like little old men, with wizened faces, their long wispy hair fallen out in patches yet strangely growing on their faces. It is estimated that 2 out of the 3 people who died during these years died from ‘the fever’. Dysentery was also lumped into this group.
During the terrible time of the fever (January-June ’47) assistant secretary of Her Majesty’s treasury, Charles Trevelyan was finally convinced of the horror of the catastrophe happening in Ireland, but either did not know what else he could do, or still clung to his belief that if he interfered with ‘free trade’ he would destroy something much greater. In any event, he seems to have never doubted his own choices in the matter.
Irish began leaving their homeland in search of better shores long before the first potato crop failure, but certainly the famine of 1846, began an exodus like never before. Sadly, these years also saw the origin of what came to be known as, “Coffin Ships”, some of which were chartered by good landlords trying to help their tenants find better lives, and others by scurrilous shysters trying to make money off a bad situation. Either way, the Irish died, some drowned, some died of fever, starvation due to insufficient rations of food or water, terrible living conditions, or because when they arrived at their destination they were refused and ordered back to Ireland. Many loved the Irish when they were in Ireland; almost no one loved them when they showed up on their shores. Irish immigrants suffered every bit as much as those who remained at home. Cecil Woodham-Smith devotes quite a bit of text to the suffering of and prejudice against the Irish in Canada, Boston, New York, and Liverpool but suffice it to say they were not welcome, and it was generations before they escaped their slums of misery. Germans and other immigrants quickly moved into the American heartland, for example. The Irish, for the most part, remained imprisoned. Smith speculates this is because they were so accustomed to being treated poorly by their landlords back in Ireland, they did not question similar treatment when they arrived in new surroundings.
Back in Ireland, Irish landlords came under attack from the British government and the citizenry, with some of it due. But by 1847, even the best landlords were so strapped there was little they could do. There were so many rates owed, many couldn’t even sell their properties. During that year, seven landlords were killed outright, some good, others not. The potato crop of 1847 was good, but little had been planted so there was little to be gained. In 1848, a massive crop was planted, the weather turned wet again and the whole crop was lost. I’m not quite sure where the expression, ‘the luck of the Irish’ comes from, but it is NOT from these years!
The book does end with a beautiful story of Queen Victoria’s visit to Ireland in August of 1848, and it brought a great deal of joy to the people. She was young then and the four days she spent there were full of royal gaiety, not seen by the Irish in years. It seems to have done much for the people’s spirits, but it did nothing to fill their empty bellies. She was not much more than a figurehead.
The Irish people were at their lowest point and they received a royal visit. They needed something more substantial. They needed food! I can just imagine what today’s media would make of that.
Instead, the British government withdrew all special assistance. No more soup kitchens, works projects or anything else. Ireland was pretty much on her own. The help it received in the future came primarily from Irish living in other parts of the world—fares for its citizens to migrate elsewhere, a continual drain of her best citizens.
Éirinn go Brách!
¹The Donovan’s come from County Cork, originally it was O’Donovan, the ‘O’ was dropped when they came to America.
²For most of this tragic time period exact written records of numbers and names do not exist. My Dad and sister traveled to Ireland to see what they could find about our ancestors prior to the famine but they were not able to learn anything.
³It was noted that the neglectful way the government treated the Irish was no better or worse than how it treated its own soldiers during the Crimean War just a few years later. The major difference being the scale in this case was much larger and so many more people died.
March 21, 2013
A fine introduction to one of the great disasters of the modern world--- the Irish Famine of the mid and late 1840s. Woodham-Smith tells the tale with both compassion for a land where perhaps a quarter of the population was destitute even in good years and with a subtle, icy coldness for the administrators in London who refused to take any of the steps that seem so obvious today. (Yes, I'm New Orleans-born, and my thought while reading "The Great Hunger" was that the relief efforts undertaken in Ireland after 1845 managed to make the way the American administration handled the Katrina disaster seem like a model of planning and efficiency)
Woodham-Smith was writing at the end of the 1950s--- before demography and statistics were assimilated by historians, and she relies on prose rather than statistics to tell her tale. The more recent, more social-science look at the famine is Kinealy's "The Great Calamity, which should be read in tandem with Woodham-Smith. But Woodham-Smith's account is telling--- powerful and poignant both ---and she lays out a clear account of a period when one disaster (the potato blight, extreme weather, typhus, cholera) followed close on another, and where horror spread not only across Ireland, but to Montreal and New York as well, where refugees from the famine carried plague to new shores.
Woodham-Smith lays out the sheer backwardness of Ireland in the 1840s, of a land so impoverished that when the British government did import American wheat for famine relief, there were no mills to grind it--- since the bulk of the rural population could afford nothing but potatoes and almost never had bread. She points out the paradox of continuing grain exports at the height of the famine, since many small and middling landlords had no domestic market for grain, and were themselves dependent on exports to pay their own rents to the largely absentee big landlord class. She also skewers the bland, blind belief of the Treasury mandarins in London, with their unquestioning belief in free trade and laissez-faire that kept them from distributing free or cheap seed or provisions lest it "undermine the market". She catches the blindness, too, of the Young Ireland revolutionaries of 1848, who tried to lead a peasant uprising with no planning or weapons, and with no conception that the rural population were too starved and broken to have any energy for rebellion.
A fine book, and a fine introduction to a ghastly topic. Very much worth reading.
Woodham-Smith was writing at the end of the 1950s--- before demography and statistics were assimilated by historians, and she relies on prose rather than statistics to tell her tale. The more recent, more social-science look at the famine is Kinealy's "The Great Calamity, which should be read in tandem with Woodham-Smith. But Woodham-Smith's account is telling--- powerful and poignant both ---and she lays out a clear account of a period when one disaster (the potato blight, extreme weather, typhus, cholera) followed close on another, and where horror spread not only across Ireland, but to Montreal and New York as well, where refugees from the famine carried plague to new shores.
Woodham-Smith lays out the sheer backwardness of Ireland in the 1840s, of a land so impoverished that when the British government did import American wheat for famine relief, there were no mills to grind it--- since the bulk of the rural population could afford nothing but potatoes and almost never had bread. She points out the paradox of continuing grain exports at the height of the famine, since many small and middling landlords had no domestic market for grain, and were themselves dependent on exports to pay their own rents to the largely absentee big landlord class. She also skewers the bland, blind belief of the Treasury mandarins in London, with their unquestioning belief in free trade and laissez-faire that kept them from distributing free or cheap seed or provisions lest it "undermine the market". She catches the blindness, too, of the Young Ireland revolutionaries of 1848, who tried to lead a peasant uprising with no planning or weapons, and with no conception that the rural population were too starved and broken to have any energy for rebellion.
A fine book, and a fine introduction to a ghastly topic. Very much worth reading.
November 30, 2020
Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith's "The Great Hunger" is a veritable tour de force in which the author demonstrates that the governing class of Great Britain failed utterly in its leadership role during the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1849. Woodham-Smith shows that the politicians never took the initiative. They consistently ignored reports of problems from the field and always acted too late. They were essentially indifferent to the sufferings of the Irish peasantry embracing the ideology of "laissez-faire" economics which seemed to justify a policy of not giving food to the starving. They did however facilitate the massing loading of peasants infected by typhus onto boats and shipping them to North America thus exporting an epidemic.
As an undergraduate, it was explained to me that this unconscionable was justified by ignorance. The necessary scientific discoveries needed to counter the problem were decades away. The Bordeaux Mixture which protected potatoes against blight did not exist before the late 1870s. There was no vaccine against typhus until the 1930s. Woodham-Smith, however, argues that there things that could have been done to reduced the magnitude of the suffering which were not done .
The politicians at Westminster repealed the Corn Laws prohibiting the import of foreign grain to the British Isles so that the peasants could buy food. This measure ignored the fact that the Irish peasantry lived in a pre-monetary economy. They had no cash with which to buy imported grain. Their rents were paid for with their potato harvest and they ate the surplus for their sustenance. For the next step, the politicians purchased American corn which the Irish lacked the equipment to mill.
To respond to the first wave of the famine in 1845, the British parliamentarians eventually bought food and sent it to Ireland to feed some of the hungry. Then in January 1847 they the shifted the responsibility for famine relief to the Poor Law which meant that local councils in Irish Districts had to bear the cost. Unable to do so, the landlords evicted their crop-less tenants and expelled them from their districts to reduce the expense of relief.
Woodham-Smith notes that the nationalist politicians of Ireland were totally cut off from the reality of the situation. Thus the Young Ireland Rebellion against British rule was launched in 1848. Failing within weeks, it accomplished nothing except to reduce financial aid from the British government and the English public.
Woodham-Smith correctly observes that Britain would pay the price for years for its mismanagement of the Potato Famine. It was one of the underlying causes for the Irish War of Independence and Irish neutrality during WWII. In addition, the mythology of the Great Hunger made it extremely difficult for both Wilson and Roosevelt to persuade the American public to go to war to assist England. She might also have added that the memory of the Potato Famine was a fundamental factor in the American decision to force Great Britain to divest itself of its Empire following WWII.
"The Great Hunger" is an outstanding book and extremely well-researched. As a Canadian reviewer, I must note that here treatment of the arrival of the "coffin ships" in Canada and her description of the operations of the quarantine station at Grosse Île is outstanding. Woodham-Smith's book stands up very well today almost 60 years after its initial publication and may never be truly superseded.
As an undergraduate, it was explained to me that this unconscionable was justified by ignorance. The necessary scientific discoveries needed to counter the problem were decades away. The Bordeaux Mixture which protected potatoes against blight did not exist before the late 1870s. There was no vaccine against typhus until the 1930s. Woodham-Smith, however, argues that there things that could have been done to reduced the magnitude of the suffering which were not done .
The politicians at Westminster repealed the Corn Laws prohibiting the import of foreign grain to the British Isles so that the peasants could buy food. This measure ignored the fact that the Irish peasantry lived in a pre-monetary economy. They had no cash with which to buy imported grain. Their rents were paid for with their potato harvest and they ate the surplus for their sustenance. For the next step, the politicians purchased American corn which the Irish lacked the equipment to mill.
To respond to the first wave of the famine in 1845, the British parliamentarians eventually bought food and sent it to Ireland to feed some of the hungry. Then in January 1847 they the shifted the responsibility for famine relief to the Poor Law which meant that local councils in Irish Districts had to bear the cost. Unable to do so, the landlords evicted their crop-less tenants and expelled them from their districts to reduce the expense of relief.
Woodham-Smith notes that the nationalist politicians of Ireland were totally cut off from the reality of the situation. Thus the Young Ireland Rebellion against British rule was launched in 1848. Failing within weeks, it accomplished nothing except to reduce financial aid from the British government and the English public.
Woodham-Smith correctly observes that Britain would pay the price for years for its mismanagement of the Potato Famine. It was one of the underlying causes for the Irish War of Independence and Irish neutrality during WWII. In addition, the mythology of the Great Hunger made it extremely difficult for both Wilson and Roosevelt to persuade the American public to go to war to assist England. She might also have added that the memory of the Potato Famine was a fundamental factor in the American decision to force Great Britain to divest itself of its Empire following WWII.
"The Great Hunger" is an outstanding book and extremely well-researched. As a Canadian reviewer, I must note that here treatment of the arrival of the "coffin ships" in Canada and her description of the operations of the quarantine station at Grosse Île is outstanding. Woodham-Smith's book stands up very well today almost 60 years after its initial publication and may never be truly superseded.
September 11, 2017
I actually bought this book about (probably) ten years ago and put it off for so long possibly because I did not expect it to be a pleasant read. And I was right, it’s not, but it is an important book. And I certainly think that it’s a period which anyone who wants to understand modern Ireland should understand more fully.
The book is exhaustive, exhausting, horrifying and educational. I’m not especially interested in the politics of the tragedy, but with the cold light of 20-20 hindsight it’s evident that there were some catastrophic decisions made by the British parliament that effectively ignored the reality of millions of starving people. In effect, by challenging the absentee landlords to fund the starving tenants they were telling those same landlords to throw starving people out on the roads to die of hunger, disease or exposure. And that’s one of the worst pieces of information – apart from the fact that during the famine, food was being shipped OUT of Ireland, people were also being thrown forcibly out of their hovel-homes.
Even when the ‘lucky ones’ among those people managed to get to Canada or America they faced challenges in being allowed enter and, as they had zero skills beyond potato-growing, they simply created slums everywhere they went, with the terrible diseases they carried another factor to consider.
Partly I decided I could no longer put off reading the book as I had managed to clarify that my great-great-great grandparents were married in 1845 (as the Famine began) and my great-great grandfather, James Fingleton, was born in 1849. I doubt I will ever know how this period affected them, though it most certainly did. But this book is really a great piece of work and I could only recommend it hugely to any prospective reader.
The book is exhaustive, exhausting, horrifying and educational. I’m not especially interested in the politics of the tragedy, but with the cold light of 20-20 hindsight it’s evident that there were some catastrophic decisions made by the British parliament that effectively ignored the reality of millions of starving people. In effect, by challenging the absentee landlords to fund the starving tenants they were telling those same landlords to throw starving people out on the roads to die of hunger, disease or exposure. And that’s one of the worst pieces of information – apart from the fact that during the famine, food was being shipped OUT of Ireland, people were also being thrown forcibly out of their hovel-homes.
Even when the ‘lucky ones’ among those people managed to get to Canada or America they faced challenges in being allowed enter and, as they had zero skills beyond potato-growing, they simply created slums everywhere they went, with the terrible diseases they carried another factor to consider.
Partly I decided I could no longer put off reading the book as I had managed to clarify that my great-great-great grandparents were married in 1845 (as the Famine began) and my great-great grandfather, James Fingleton, was born in 1849. I doubt I will ever know how this period affected them, though it most certainly did. But this book is really a great piece of work and I could only recommend it hugely to any prospective reader.
November 10, 2011
I picked this book up at a time when I am researching my family history and at the moment in particular my 3 x great grandparents Hugh and Catherine who came from Roscommon, Ireland, to England in 1852. They would have been teenagers at the time of the great famine.. Having read the book, I'm surprised they or anyone else lived to emigrate. I know my ancestors were humble people who couldn't read or write, and I really wonder how they survived, and how many of their families perished.
It's easy having read this horrific story to blame the British government for the deaths of so many Irishmen but I think the blame must be more widely spread. It struck me that although individual members of the Church made heroic attempts to help the people, often dying themselves, the Church as a whole did precious little for Ireland; surely it must bear a great responsibility for the overpopulation and ignorance of the people. The whole landowning system was disastrous and very few people of influence in England had any idea of Ireland's particular problems.
The book is written in a dry and unemotional style, which adds to the horrific nature of its subject. Widespread famine, death by starvation and subsequent typhoid and other diseases don't make for comfortable reading but this book is recommended for anyone with an interest in Ireland.
It's easy having read this horrific story to blame the British government for the deaths of so many Irishmen but I think the blame must be more widely spread. It struck me that although individual members of the Church made heroic attempts to help the people, often dying themselves, the Church as a whole did precious little for Ireland; surely it must bear a great responsibility for the overpopulation and ignorance of the people. The whole landowning system was disastrous and very few people of influence in England had any idea of Ireland's particular problems.
The book is written in a dry and unemotional style, which adds to the horrific nature of its subject. Widespread famine, death by starvation and subsequent typhoid and other diseases don't make for comfortable reading but this book is recommended for anyone with an interest in Ireland.
March 11, 2012
This is the best book I have ever read in my life. It is extraordinarily informative, gripping and horrifying. The catastrophe developed after centuries of colonialism, where the bountiful agricultural resources were extracted from Ireland while the Irish people were reduced to barely subsistence level lives: diet of one staple (in spite of the variety of exports they raised), starvation every year before the potato crop was ready, work to pay rent with hardly any currency exchanged, education and language outlawed, no professions allowed. The way the government handled the crisis is an early example of the deliberate subjugation of human suffering to the dynamics of market forces and profiteering. After a complete failure of the potato crop, the government expected the people to recover themselves with no seed and no currency to buy it. The people had sold even their clothes to get food.
The flight to America usually offered no relief as the people were sent off with little or no food for the voyage and insufficient water. Most arrived as skin and bones, many naked or nearly so, with typhus or cholera spreading through the ships. There was no welcome for these immigrants. They were detested for their extreme neediness and the disease they brought to American cities (Canada and US). There was no infrastructure to receive such an influx of destitute, unskilled, starving people. They died, along with their doctors, nurses, and priests in filthy off-shore fever hospitals or they were exploited in miserable death-trap slums.
The author uses primary sources, such as letters, newspapers, and government edicts to tell the story. Names are mentioned, both the good guys and the bad guys. (However, the author did miss the story of the Ottoman Sultan's exchange of letters with Queen Victoria and the assistance he sent to Drogheda secretly so as not to upstage her contribution.) Everyone who has Irish blood in their veins needs to know this story, which is much more complex and significant than the words "Irish potato famine" convey. This book should be life-changing for whoever reads and understands what happened and why.
The flight to America usually offered no relief as the people were sent off with little or no food for the voyage and insufficient water. Most arrived as skin and bones, many naked or nearly so, with typhus or cholera spreading through the ships. There was no welcome for these immigrants. They were detested for their extreme neediness and the disease they brought to American cities (Canada and US). There was no infrastructure to receive such an influx of destitute, unskilled, starving people. They died, along with their doctors, nurses, and priests in filthy off-shore fever hospitals or they were exploited in miserable death-trap slums.
The author uses primary sources, such as letters, newspapers, and government edicts to tell the story. Names are mentioned, both the good guys and the bad guys. (However, the author did miss the story of the Ottoman Sultan's exchange of letters with Queen Victoria and the assistance he sent to Drogheda secretly so as not to upstage her contribution.) Everyone who has Irish blood in their veins needs to know this story, which is much more complex and significant than the words "Irish potato famine" convey. This book should be life-changing for whoever reads and understands what happened and why.
May 23, 2021
If you wish to read a comprehensive history of the Irish famine beginning in 1845 (of which there were many before and after, this one being the most devastating) this book is the one that you will want to begin with. You might find the detail tiresome at times, but when you compare the comprehensiveness of the historical data (if that is what you are looking for), you will appreciate the minute detail. It gives a comprehensive history of the political machinations that went on in England, and the resulting tension and conflicts that occurred with the Englishmen who were assigned to posts in Ireland, and how the residents thereof responded.
During this period of time, and probably for a century or longer before, and for many decades later, the potato was the only source of food that was planted by the poor Irish. It is amazing that this limited food source could sustain a human body, with occasional supplemental food such as milk, butter or turnips. As long as the crops were healthy, the Irish survived well on this diet. It is commented upon frequently with amazement of how many children they were able to produce despite this limited diet, and thus putting greater stress on the need for a productive harvest. In 1845, a potato blight began in Europe, in particular Holland and parts of northern France. By the harvest time in Ireland, many farms had lost almost their complete harvest, and precipitated the early beginnings of the devastation that would last another four years.
It is a brutal phase of history that is difficult to dive into; my reason for doing so is that I am genetically Irish through all four of my grandparents, 3 families having emigrated to the US after the famine, the fourth, before. I am particularly interested in the psychological impact on the generations that followed, and, in particular, how it affected my attitudes toward myself and others, especially other Irish Americans. In my lifetime, I have felt the greatest disapproval and criticism from Irish Americans, and found it very difficult to accept my inheritance. Reading the historical account of the holocaust that three of my founding ancestors experienced is helping me to accept and forgive what I have suffered--the comparison humbles me. I don't know if I would have had the will to live in the circumstances that they suffered.
The book itself is very readable, and in spite the small size of the print, one becomes engaged quite readily. I won't call it a page-turner, but for a historical text it is rather easy to read. If you do not like history, this is not the book for you. If you do not like the brutality of certain aspects of history (in this case, poor wretches of families, shoeless, almost clothes-less dying of frank starvation, where not sufficient resources were made available to impact this devastation.) I believe that the estimates of the death toll in Ireland was sorely underestimated because there was no governmental structure to actually count the number of dead and dying. At times the Irish corpses lay on the road within and without the villages unattended, some eaten by starving dogs. I find it amazing that anyone from the lower caste of the Irish could have survived this devastation and still have the will to live.
Because of the complexity of their farm system, where Irish and English landowners could not sell their farms unless all taxes and debts were paid, many of the landowners ran up huge debt at this time, especially when Enlgand held the landowners responsible for the taxes needed to provide any assistance to the poor and starving. Thus, the poor lost their only means for paying their rent and providing food for their family (because the potato was usually their only crop), and were often evicted from their homes and their small plot of land. Occasionally the landowner would have pity on these poor, and would pay a pittance to the ship captains for their passage to North America. They were usually sent through Liverpool, England (since this was the cheapest fare compared to fares to the United States where the boats had better accomodations), to board what became known as the "coffin ships", poorly supplied with food and water, and usually no accommodation for places of comfortable sleep and normal hygiene. Up to thirty per cent of most of the passengers of these ships died of "ship fever" and never made it to their new land, thus their name: the ships became their coffins.
Of those who made it, once on land, the new Irish immigrants were despised because they brought poverty, illness and lack of any skills that would allow them to provide for themselves and their families. Some became the impoverished homeless of that time.
What this book lacks (but in length would have been a huge text) is the history of the Irish immigrants once they landed in either Canada or the US. That is the history that I am searching for now. How did this proud nationality come to grips with their new life, and become the successful workers of their new world that they became? I'll let you know when I find those texts.
During this period of time, and probably for a century or longer before, and for many decades later, the potato was the only source of food that was planted by the poor Irish. It is amazing that this limited food source could sustain a human body, with occasional supplemental food such as milk, butter or turnips. As long as the crops were healthy, the Irish survived well on this diet. It is commented upon frequently with amazement of how many children they were able to produce despite this limited diet, and thus putting greater stress on the need for a productive harvest. In 1845, a potato blight began in Europe, in particular Holland and parts of northern France. By the harvest time in Ireland, many farms had lost almost their complete harvest, and precipitated the early beginnings of the devastation that would last another four years.
It is a brutal phase of history that is difficult to dive into; my reason for doing so is that I am genetically Irish through all four of my grandparents, 3 families having emigrated to the US after the famine, the fourth, before. I am particularly interested in the psychological impact on the generations that followed, and, in particular, how it affected my attitudes toward myself and others, especially other Irish Americans. In my lifetime, I have felt the greatest disapproval and criticism from Irish Americans, and found it very difficult to accept my inheritance. Reading the historical account of the holocaust that three of my founding ancestors experienced is helping me to accept and forgive what I have suffered--the comparison humbles me. I don't know if I would have had the will to live in the circumstances that they suffered.
The book itself is very readable, and in spite the small size of the print, one becomes engaged quite readily. I won't call it a page-turner, but for a historical text it is rather easy to read. If you do not like history, this is not the book for you. If you do not like the brutality of certain aspects of history (in this case, poor wretches of families, shoeless, almost clothes-less dying of frank starvation, where not sufficient resources were made available to impact this devastation.) I believe that the estimates of the death toll in Ireland was sorely underestimated because there was no governmental structure to actually count the number of dead and dying. At times the Irish corpses lay on the road within and without the villages unattended, some eaten by starving dogs. I find it amazing that anyone from the lower caste of the Irish could have survived this devastation and still have the will to live.
Because of the complexity of their farm system, where Irish and English landowners could not sell their farms unless all taxes and debts were paid, many of the landowners ran up huge debt at this time, especially when Enlgand held the landowners responsible for the taxes needed to provide any assistance to the poor and starving. Thus, the poor lost their only means for paying their rent and providing food for their family (because the potato was usually their only crop), and were often evicted from their homes and their small plot of land. Occasionally the landowner would have pity on these poor, and would pay a pittance to the ship captains for their passage to North America. They were usually sent through Liverpool, England (since this was the cheapest fare compared to fares to the United States where the boats had better accomodations), to board what became known as the "coffin ships", poorly supplied with food and water, and usually no accommodation for places of comfortable sleep and normal hygiene. Up to thirty per cent of most of the passengers of these ships died of "ship fever" and never made it to their new land, thus their name: the ships became their coffins.
Of those who made it, once on land, the new Irish immigrants were despised because they brought poverty, illness and lack of any skills that would allow them to provide for themselves and their families. Some became the impoverished homeless of that time.
What this book lacks (but in length would have been a huge text) is the history of the Irish immigrants once they landed in either Canada or the US. That is the history that I am searching for now. How did this proud nationality come to grips with their new life, and become the successful workers of their new world that they became? I'll let you know when I find those texts.
January 2, 2013
How equipped are our governments to deal with emergencies? Supposing a worldwide epidemic, which many scientists forecast, or even a tornado, were to strike, would there be an effective support system with adequate funds to spring immediately into action? Do we want this to happen? Have we learnt anything from the past?
Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote a book in 1962 called The Great Hunger which implicitly asks these question. She had shown how slow the British Government was to learn from the mistakes made in the Irish famine in her book The Reason Why (1953), which details how administrative failure and ignorant leadership were able to destroy the British Army in the Crimea in the 1850s without the Russians having much to do with it. In The Great Hunger Woodham-Smith shows how doctrinaire adherence to laissez faire economic theory, ignorance of conditions in Ireland, hatred of the Irish and unchecked colonialism applied to what was officially part of Britain led to the deaths of more than four million men, women and children in Ireland, and the emigration of two or three million more, many of whom died on their journey, in the period 1845-49. (A note about figures: everything is ambiguous, none more so than statistics. A census of Ireland in the nineteenth century was impossible. Many districts could not be reached because of inadequate roads. The poor were often not counted. During the famine records could not be kept because of administrative breakdown. It is not known accurately what the population of Ireland was at the time of the famine, nor is it known how many died. Stick to official estimates if you want to downplay the tragedy, double those figures if you want to exaggerate it).
It started with bad weather, unseasonably damp and humid, the perfect conditions for the newly arrived potato blight to spread. A simple crop to grow, in Ireland the potato had become the staple food of the nation and was at the mercy of the weather: there had been regular ‘shortages’ for many years, during which the people went without. Now in 1846 the fungus phytophthora infestans, hitherto unknown in Europe, completely destroyed the Irish potato crop. The bulk of Ireland’s conservatively estimated 8 million people (possibly as high as 12-14 million as the western counties were never adumbrated effectively) had no food of any kind. This was just the beginning.
The whole of Europe was affected by an economic recess; food supplies were short across the continent and none available to help Ireland in her hour of need. Following starvation came fever, typhus and others. There was no effective way of dealing with widespread sickness in Ireland, and thousands and then millions died untreated and in some cases unburied. The humid summer was followed by one of the coldest winters on record, and people who had had to sell their clothes to feed their children died of exposure. Complete poverty meant that the Irish had no funds to buy seed for the following spring, widespread lack of education meant they had no knowledge of other crops or efficient cropping methods. In 1847 the weather was good and the crop of potatoes healthy, but only a tiny fraction of what it needed to be to feed the people. Then in 1848 the blight returned, destroying the entire crop for that year.
Ironically, Ireland is a fertile country. During the famine, farm produce which might have fed most of the starving was leaving Ireland for England in a steady stream. As Woodham-Smith explains, this anomaly had its roots in the system of land tenure, which goes back to Elizabethan times. Elizabeth I, Cromwell and many other British leaders followed a policy of dispossessing Irish nobility and awarding their lands to their own followers. Ireland was a plundered country, with no thought taken to integrate it with the rest of the nation or build its economy. Over the centuries the estates were broken down to smaller lots, but the revenues from them were spent in England by absentee landlords. Many of these became impoverished but remained improvident. Soon the only way to attract investment for produce was to sell competitively in foreign markets, hoping to squeeze income for establishments in Britain from the proceeds. Nobody worried about the Irish. They grew the food and sold it to pay their rents. They ate potatoes and lived in hovels. Nobody asked about crop failure.
The key figure in the way the Irish famine was dealt with in Britain was Charles Trevelyan, permanent head of Treasury. Others were Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord John Russell, Prime Minister. These men could be said to be responsible for what has been described emotively as genocide in Ireland. Of course they did not create the problem, which had existed for centuries and was a condition of England’s conquest of Ireland: it was a powder keg awaiting someone to throw a match.
Trevelyan’s contribution was to ignore the problem. Though there was a food shortage throughout Europe in the mid 40s, no planning or forecasts were made for the fragile economy of Ireland. Though the system of poor relief had been shown over many years to be underresourced and impossible to operate, reliance was made on it in the crisis. Throughout the famine Trevelyan was reluctant to send aid to Ireland because that would prohibit market forces from operating and be destructive for the economy (a doctrine of laissez faire Trevelyan rigidly adhered to, as did the government of which he was a part). The fact there was no market, and no economy after 1846, was ignored, along with the stream of reports which detailed the breakdowns in every system of administration in the country. If there was a problem in Ireland, Trevelyan thought, it was the fault of the Irish people, and it was up to them to fix it. The fact that Britain governed Ireland was effectively ignored in the process. Trevelyan was a true bureaucrat, and dealt with many problems merely by calling for further reports on them.
Through convoluted reasoning Trevelyan thought the people responsible for the mass of starving Irish were the landlords, who refused to fund relief funds. He caused rates to be levied, which the bankrupt landlords couldn’t pay, and their response was to clear the land, evicting tenants by police and military aid and demolishing their dwellings. The starving were thus forced on the parish and the poorhouses, which were also bankrupt and unable to cope with millions of new applicants for assistance. The British government did provide some slight assistance for poor relief, but as they thought that too was the responsibility of the landlords, they eventually withdrew it. The problem passed from hand to hand, and people died.
Perhaps this is one way tragedies happen. People who don’t know what to do do nothing, and ask, What problem? There’s no problem!
One of the saddest stories in Woodham-Smith’s book is that of the nationalists, the Repeal Association, the Young Ireland party and the revolutionary group lead by Fintan Lalor. With the passing of the great Daniel O’Connell the nationalist movement in Ireland was in the hands of leaders who knew less about the condition of the Irish than the British did. Breathing fiery rhetoric about driving the despoiling English from the land, they strove to organise forces of rebellion from starving men who only gathered in dozens, and mainly for food. But the British, which meant effectively Trevelyan, used this so-called rebellion as a further reason for withholding aid.
Woodham-Smith’s book has been criticised as simplifying the problem, and as anti-British. The same complaints have been made against her masterpiece The Reason Why. The Great Hunger tries to be objective. Woodham-Smith uses statistics a lot, refrains from judgmental remarks, quotes from a wide range of existing sources. But she does have a prejudice, against the entropy in large organisations and the tragedies they inflict. She says emigration to Australia was negligible (over one million came to Australia from Ireland), that this was because of the expense of the passage (there were several systems of assisted passage) and that there was no network of Irish to welcome them if they did arrive (there were many earlier Irish migrants, not to mention the convicts) so her information on Australia is deficient. Otherwise her uses of source material is impressive.
Inappropriate administrative procedures, rigid adherence to beliefs inapplicable to the situation encountered, racial prejudice, refusal to see problems arising or deal with them when they arrive – these methods kill as effectively as the gas chamber. Malthusian economists even forecast the deaths of millions of Irish people and saw it as a reasonable solution to the problem of overpopulation.
Today the world’s population is approaching seven billion. Crises involving millions of people are more likely to happen now than they were in 1845 in Ireland. Have the responses we are likely to make learnt from the past?
Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote a book in 1962 called The Great Hunger which implicitly asks these question. She had shown how slow the British Government was to learn from the mistakes made in the Irish famine in her book The Reason Why (1953), which details how administrative failure and ignorant leadership were able to destroy the British Army in the Crimea in the 1850s without the Russians having much to do with it. In The Great Hunger Woodham-Smith shows how doctrinaire adherence to laissez faire economic theory, ignorance of conditions in Ireland, hatred of the Irish and unchecked colonialism applied to what was officially part of Britain led to the deaths of more than four million men, women and children in Ireland, and the emigration of two or three million more, many of whom died on their journey, in the period 1845-49. (A note about figures: everything is ambiguous, none more so than statistics. A census of Ireland in the nineteenth century was impossible. Many districts could not be reached because of inadequate roads. The poor were often not counted. During the famine records could not be kept because of administrative breakdown. It is not known accurately what the population of Ireland was at the time of the famine, nor is it known how many died. Stick to official estimates if you want to downplay the tragedy, double those figures if you want to exaggerate it).
It started with bad weather, unseasonably damp and humid, the perfect conditions for the newly arrived potato blight to spread. A simple crop to grow, in Ireland the potato had become the staple food of the nation and was at the mercy of the weather: there had been regular ‘shortages’ for many years, during which the people went without. Now in 1846 the fungus phytophthora infestans, hitherto unknown in Europe, completely destroyed the Irish potato crop. The bulk of Ireland’s conservatively estimated 8 million people (possibly as high as 12-14 million as the western counties were never adumbrated effectively) had no food of any kind. This was just the beginning.
The whole of Europe was affected by an economic recess; food supplies were short across the continent and none available to help Ireland in her hour of need. Following starvation came fever, typhus and others. There was no effective way of dealing with widespread sickness in Ireland, and thousands and then millions died untreated and in some cases unburied. The humid summer was followed by one of the coldest winters on record, and people who had had to sell their clothes to feed their children died of exposure. Complete poverty meant that the Irish had no funds to buy seed for the following spring, widespread lack of education meant they had no knowledge of other crops or efficient cropping methods. In 1847 the weather was good and the crop of potatoes healthy, but only a tiny fraction of what it needed to be to feed the people. Then in 1848 the blight returned, destroying the entire crop for that year.
Ironically, Ireland is a fertile country. During the famine, farm produce which might have fed most of the starving was leaving Ireland for England in a steady stream. As Woodham-Smith explains, this anomaly had its roots in the system of land tenure, which goes back to Elizabethan times. Elizabeth I, Cromwell and many other British leaders followed a policy of dispossessing Irish nobility and awarding their lands to their own followers. Ireland was a plundered country, with no thought taken to integrate it with the rest of the nation or build its economy. Over the centuries the estates were broken down to smaller lots, but the revenues from them were spent in England by absentee landlords. Many of these became impoverished but remained improvident. Soon the only way to attract investment for produce was to sell competitively in foreign markets, hoping to squeeze income for establishments in Britain from the proceeds. Nobody worried about the Irish. They grew the food and sold it to pay their rents. They ate potatoes and lived in hovels. Nobody asked about crop failure.
The key figure in the way the Irish famine was dealt with in Britain was Charles Trevelyan, permanent head of Treasury. Others were Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord John Russell, Prime Minister. These men could be said to be responsible for what has been described emotively as genocide in Ireland. Of course they did not create the problem, which had existed for centuries and was a condition of England’s conquest of Ireland: it was a powder keg awaiting someone to throw a match.
Trevelyan’s contribution was to ignore the problem. Though there was a food shortage throughout Europe in the mid 40s, no planning or forecasts were made for the fragile economy of Ireland. Though the system of poor relief had been shown over many years to be underresourced and impossible to operate, reliance was made on it in the crisis. Throughout the famine Trevelyan was reluctant to send aid to Ireland because that would prohibit market forces from operating and be destructive for the economy (a doctrine of laissez faire Trevelyan rigidly adhered to, as did the government of which he was a part). The fact there was no market, and no economy after 1846, was ignored, along with the stream of reports which detailed the breakdowns in every system of administration in the country. If there was a problem in Ireland, Trevelyan thought, it was the fault of the Irish people, and it was up to them to fix it. The fact that Britain governed Ireland was effectively ignored in the process. Trevelyan was a true bureaucrat, and dealt with many problems merely by calling for further reports on them.
Through convoluted reasoning Trevelyan thought the people responsible for the mass of starving Irish were the landlords, who refused to fund relief funds. He caused rates to be levied, which the bankrupt landlords couldn’t pay, and their response was to clear the land, evicting tenants by police and military aid and demolishing their dwellings. The starving were thus forced on the parish and the poorhouses, which were also bankrupt and unable to cope with millions of new applicants for assistance. The British government did provide some slight assistance for poor relief, but as they thought that too was the responsibility of the landlords, they eventually withdrew it. The problem passed from hand to hand, and people died.
Perhaps this is one way tragedies happen. People who don’t know what to do do nothing, and ask, What problem? There’s no problem!
One of the saddest stories in Woodham-Smith’s book is that of the nationalists, the Repeal Association, the Young Ireland party and the revolutionary group lead by Fintan Lalor. With the passing of the great Daniel O’Connell the nationalist movement in Ireland was in the hands of leaders who knew less about the condition of the Irish than the British did. Breathing fiery rhetoric about driving the despoiling English from the land, they strove to organise forces of rebellion from starving men who only gathered in dozens, and mainly for food. But the British, which meant effectively Trevelyan, used this so-called rebellion as a further reason for withholding aid.
Woodham-Smith’s book has been criticised as simplifying the problem, and as anti-British. The same complaints have been made against her masterpiece The Reason Why. The Great Hunger tries to be objective. Woodham-Smith uses statistics a lot, refrains from judgmental remarks, quotes from a wide range of existing sources. But she does have a prejudice, against the entropy in large organisations and the tragedies they inflict. She says emigration to Australia was negligible (over one million came to Australia from Ireland), that this was because of the expense of the passage (there were several systems of assisted passage) and that there was no network of Irish to welcome them if they did arrive (there were many earlier Irish migrants, not to mention the convicts) so her information on Australia is deficient. Otherwise her uses of source material is impressive.
Inappropriate administrative procedures, rigid adherence to beliefs inapplicable to the situation encountered, racial prejudice, refusal to see problems arising or deal with them when they arrive – these methods kill as effectively as the gas chamber. Malthusian economists even forecast the deaths of millions of Irish people and saw it as a reasonable solution to the problem of overpopulation.
Today the world’s population is approaching seven billion. Crises involving millions of people are more likely to happen now than they were in 1845 in Ireland. Have the responses we are likely to make learnt from the past?
January 8, 2022
This was a crazy episode in human history. The Irish, along with many other parts of Europe had adopted the monoculture potato from South America. It quickly became part of the staple diet, grew fast and provided a good amount of sustenance for the hoards of disadvantaged people who made up the majority of the population in those days. In its native Peru, there are over 200 types of potato, but literally one single specimen was brought (smuggled) to Europe and subsequently planted all over the continent. Without any diversity it was a ticking time bomb until a blight or fungus would tear through all of them. This fungus existed in Peru and periodically broke out among one or another species, but it wasn’t a big deal with 200 species of potato to choose from. It would be contained, and people had plenty of other potatoes to fall back on. This fungal blight could not survive the passage across the Atlantic and hence the European potatoes were relatively safe, that is until the onset of steam powered ships which brought down the travel time across the Atlantic to a short enough period that the fungus could now survive the crossing. Ireland being at the leading edge of Europe and therefore first in line for a crop plague was hit first and hardest. The results were devastating to put it very mildly. Perhaps the single craziest statistic I took from this book is that in 1845 the population of Ireland was roughly 8 million people, and by 1965 (120 yrs later) and it had only JUST recovered to half of that ~4 million. Thus was the destruction of the Irish potato famine between outright starvation and exodus. Much of the animosity between Ireland and England was borne of this time as the English showed everything short of complete contempt and apathy towards the Irish. Human suffering set new boundaries. The waves of Irish landing in the new world and elsewhere were a sight to behold as doctors would intercept these ships arriving in port with cargo holds filled with dead and dying people. The starving Irish could not fight off common diseases and hence carried deadly strains of well known bugs, in the city of Montreal some 4 out of every 6 doctors died from exposure to deadly pathogens just by doing their job of screening newly arriving Irish refugees. The book is just full of mind boggling anecdotes and descriptions. It is also very thorough, right up to the point you want it to be, covering all the main points of interest, up to politics and public reaction abroad and the reality on the ground for all the people living through it. Highly recommended.
January 11, 2019
You don’t have to stretch your imagination too much to be able to make comparisons between the British treatment of the Irish in the mid 1800s and Russian oppression of Eastern Europe during and after WWII, Turkish treatment of Armenians in early 1900s, the treatment of Jews and Christians by radical Islam in the Middle East in the last hundred years, or even the Nazi genocide of the Jews during WWII minus the death camps and gas chambers. I was shocked to read about the Irish Potato famines of 1846 and 1848 when a rough estimate of 1.5 million died of starvation. At the heart of the disaster was the failure of the Potato crops those years. But it seems to have been made worse by how the British responded to it. The author explains the importance of potatoes to the Irish diet and that other crops were grown for export so that tenant farmers could pay their rent and they considered that more important than having food to eat as they could be evicted from their dugout shacks. The British had low opinions generally of the Irish people and demanded payments for most of the aid they provided. Many of the Irish tenants chose to leave Ireland for Canada or America but large numbers were sick and diseased and died on the trip or shortly after arriving. As a group they were mostly unskilled laborers except for growing potatoes and a few other crops. There are too many aspects of this tragedy to put into a summary but until I read this book I really didn’t appreciate how bad it was! Plenty of Irish history leading up to and through the famine. It was well written and very descriptive and informative about one of the darkest times in Irish history!
October 21, 2009
After reading this book I'm amazed my Irish ancestors survived long enough to be able to emigrate to England and for that I am truly thankful or I wouldn't be here to write this review. Truly harrowing in it's detail of the sufferings of the Irish people and what we now see as their callous treatment by the British government. I also hadn't realised that famine was a regular occurence in Ireland because of their reliance on the potato, although in this case it went way beyond anything that had ever happened before. The conditions people lived in were appalling and the ones who thought they were emigrating to a better life fared just as badly, thousands of them dying of typhoid fever either on the crossing or as soon as they reached Canada/America/England. Well written and thought provoking, a must read for anyone researching their Irish roots.
August 27, 2012
It was only after visiting the Famine museum in Strokestown House that I felt compelled to investigate the full story of the famine. This book is an outstanding piece of research into Ireland's darkest hour and should be considered as essential reading for every student of Irish history
December 1, 2023
Some good stuff here but ultimately very soft on the Brits and landlord classes. Doesn't pay enough attention to the treatment of the Irish post-1798 and ultimately concludes that Brits were "generous" in their response to the famine in the years 1845-1847.
January 19, 2025
Strange way to nearly end the book by recounting in thorough detail the queen’s visit to Ireland, which had pretty much no importance to the famine. Otherwise pretty good but very segmented in its telling and probably a bit too British centric.
October 7, 2012
Well , that wasn’t pretty. Well-researched, informative, and educational, but definitely not pretty.
I’d always wondered how the Irish potato famine happened, how a country could depend so heavily on one crop, one food source so completely, that its failure could have the kind of devastating effect this one did. The Great Hunger explains the perfect storm of conditions and forces that resulted in starvation for millions of people, emigration for hundreds of thousands more. At the time, all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the 1801 Act of Union, with a combined Parliament in Westminster that had assimilated the Irish economy and legislature with that of England. The famine was a result of, cumulatively: land use policy, landlord- tenant relations, cycles of repression and rebellion, political and religious strife, bureaucracy, the ease with which potatoes could be cultivated and therefore the extent to which the Irish poor with very little land became dependent on that crop, administrative ineptitude in averting anticipated disasters, export policy, food distribution snafus and public works mismanagement, and conservative laissez faire economic policy by the English Treasury. The head of the English Treasury did not want to interfere with commerce with too much welfare --when there was no commerce to interfere with and absolutely no money at all for people to engage in commerce. The situation was complicated by simultaneous crop failures all over Europe the same year the Irish potato fell to serious blight (1846), and a serious financial crisis in England in 1847. Soup kitchens and the distribution of imported corn meal, which was nutritionally inadequate anyway, didn’t make a dent in the vast need. It became impossible to collect taxes to fund relief efforts among the landed Irish gentry who were becoming insolvent. After two years of this, a second round of the potato blight occurred in 1848. A pathetic attempt at an uprising by the Young Irelanders led by William Smith O’Brien failed, as it’s pretty hard to get people who are literally starving very organized, but resulted in further animosity between the Irish and English as the insurrection was put down. It was a mess. Even children were so eager to get out of Ireland they would commit crimes serious enough to result in sentences of exile or “transportation” that would get them sent to North America or Australia.
Some parts of the book get a little dry, with talk of legislative acts, politics and taxation rates, but there are also heart-breaking stories about the people: terrible descriptions of starving people, especially the children, and of the horrendously bad living conditions of the destitute, sick and dying, landlords turning people off of their little plots for non-payment of rent and tearing down their homes. Whole families were living in tiny windowless cellars or literally in ditches and bogs, many “half-naked” because they’d sold all their clothes along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down or even remotely edible-- and the definition of “edible” became increasingly flexible as the crisis deepened. People were actually dying by the side of the road of starvation. Epidemics of dysentery, typhus and “ship fever” decimated not only the emigrants travelling to North America in horribly ill-equipped ships, but also the towns where they landed, because there were not enough quarantine sites or hospitals to control the spread of disease. This did not endear them to their new neighbors.
The complete devastation occurring over the four years covered was so extreme it’s hard to realize it was only 165 years ago, in a Western country. Sir John Russell, the Prime Minister at the time, said the famine was “such as has not been known in modern times, indeed . . . like a famine of the 13th century acting upon a population of the 19th.” The book points out that the English tried to help for the first couple of years, but seriously faltered in their later attempts. The author credits not maliciousness on the part of the English government, but rather “obtuseness, short-sightedness, and ignorance.” But she generously allows that “it is doubtful if any Government in Europe, at the time, could have done more.” Still, the English don’t really come off looking that good.
I’d always wondered how the Irish potato famine happened, how a country could depend so heavily on one crop, one food source so completely, that its failure could have the kind of devastating effect this one did. The Great Hunger explains the perfect storm of conditions and forces that resulted in starvation for millions of people, emigration for hundreds of thousands more. At the time, all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the 1801 Act of Union, with a combined Parliament in Westminster that had assimilated the Irish economy and legislature with that of England. The famine was a result of, cumulatively: land use policy, landlord- tenant relations, cycles of repression and rebellion, political and religious strife, bureaucracy, the ease with which potatoes could be cultivated and therefore the extent to which the Irish poor with very little land became dependent on that crop, administrative ineptitude in averting anticipated disasters, export policy, food distribution snafus and public works mismanagement, and conservative laissez faire economic policy by the English Treasury. The head of the English Treasury did not want to interfere with commerce with too much welfare --when there was no commerce to interfere with and absolutely no money at all for people to engage in commerce. The situation was complicated by simultaneous crop failures all over Europe the same year the Irish potato fell to serious blight (1846), and a serious financial crisis in England in 1847. Soup kitchens and the distribution of imported corn meal, which was nutritionally inadequate anyway, didn’t make a dent in the vast need. It became impossible to collect taxes to fund relief efforts among the landed Irish gentry who were becoming insolvent. After two years of this, a second round of the potato blight occurred in 1848. A pathetic attempt at an uprising by the Young Irelanders led by William Smith O’Brien failed, as it’s pretty hard to get people who are literally starving very organized, but resulted in further animosity between the Irish and English as the insurrection was put down. It was a mess. Even children were so eager to get out of Ireland they would commit crimes serious enough to result in sentences of exile or “transportation” that would get them sent to North America or Australia.
Some parts of the book get a little dry, with talk of legislative acts, politics and taxation rates, but there are also heart-breaking stories about the people: terrible descriptions of starving people, especially the children, and of the horrendously bad living conditions of the destitute, sick and dying, landlords turning people off of their little plots for non-payment of rent and tearing down their homes. Whole families were living in tiny windowless cellars or literally in ditches and bogs, many “half-naked” because they’d sold all their clothes along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down or even remotely edible-- and the definition of “edible” became increasingly flexible as the crisis deepened. People were actually dying by the side of the road of starvation. Epidemics of dysentery, typhus and “ship fever” decimated not only the emigrants travelling to North America in horribly ill-equipped ships, but also the towns where they landed, because there were not enough quarantine sites or hospitals to control the spread of disease. This did not endear them to their new neighbors.
The complete devastation occurring over the four years covered was so extreme it’s hard to realize it was only 165 years ago, in a Western country. Sir John Russell, the Prime Minister at the time, said the famine was “such as has not been known in modern times, indeed . . . like a famine of the 13th century acting upon a population of the 19th.” The book points out that the English tried to help for the first couple of years, but seriously faltered in their later attempts. The author credits not maliciousness on the part of the English government, but rather “obtuseness, short-sightedness, and ignorance.” But she generously allows that “it is doubtful if any Government in Europe, at the time, could have done more.” Still, the English don’t really come off looking that good.
Read
July 25, 2022I read this 1962 work of historical non-fiction while working on my Master’s Thesis at university in the mid 1970s. An amateur historian, Woodham-Smith was nonetheless meticulous and thorough in her research, as well as writing in a fluid, eminently readable manner. Finally, her work always seemed to have a somewhat personal bent to it. Previously, she’d written a biography of Florence Nightingale which did much to enhance the weakened impression of that historical personage. Then, a work on the Charge of the Light Brigade revealed the utter idiocy of that famous event as well as propounding the unpopular opinion that Britain had actually lost the Crimean War.
As a descendant of Irish stock, her largely negative interpretation of the British government’s response to the famine of the 1840s is understandable.
She particularly pillories a figure from the British Board of Trade, Charles Trevelyan, for his largely unfeeling and bureaucratic response to the problem. Indeed, the famine was an immense catastrophe. Ireland’s population dropped from around eight million in 1841 to around six million in 1851 as roughly a million people died and a million emigrated: many of those whom also died in what were called ‘fever ships’.
The fact that the government in London changed from Tory to Liberal at the time did little to help continuity in its response to the problem of the blight of the potato crop. This change was brought on by the repeal of the Corn Laws and the effective end of protectionism for the landed interest in England. Sir Robert Peel, the Tory leader, had adopted the prevailing laissez-faire free-market philosophy, feeling that Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market would allow goods and services to move more efficiently in an economy unencumbered by government restrictions. Free trade would lead to improved prosperity for all. But would it feed a population which was starving and had no money to purchase food?
That Trevelyan eventually used the Army’s commissariat supply services to set up soup kitchens which eventually fed up to three million people on a daily basis was, I argued in my thesis, a testament to the concept of eventual government involvement in the marketplace: particularly as it came at almost exactly the same time as this triumph of the diametrically opposite free market liberal political economic thinking. In not paying sufficient heed to this glaring dichotomy of thought and action, I feel Woodham-Smith missed a major point.
Still, her work is as factually meticulous as it is eminently readable. Indeed, it reads almost like a novel which could have been written by three of my other favourite writers of historical ‘fiction’: Philippa Gregory, Colleen McCullough and Tracy Chevalier.
Highly recommended.
As a descendant of Irish stock, her largely negative interpretation of the British government’s response to the famine of the 1840s is understandable.
She particularly pillories a figure from the British Board of Trade, Charles Trevelyan, for his largely unfeeling and bureaucratic response to the problem. Indeed, the famine was an immense catastrophe. Ireland’s population dropped from around eight million in 1841 to around six million in 1851 as roughly a million people died and a million emigrated: many of those whom also died in what were called ‘fever ships’.
The fact that the government in London changed from Tory to Liberal at the time did little to help continuity in its response to the problem of the blight of the potato crop. This change was brought on by the repeal of the Corn Laws and the effective end of protectionism for the landed interest in England. Sir Robert Peel, the Tory leader, had adopted the prevailing laissez-faire free-market philosophy, feeling that Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the market would allow goods and services to move more efficiently in an economy unencumbered by government restrictions. Free trade would lead to improved prosperity for all. But would it feed a population which was starving and had no money to purchase food?
That Trevelyan eventually used the Army’s commissariat supply services to set up soup kitchens which eventually fed up to three million people on a daily basis was, I argued in my thesis, a testament to the concept of eventual government involvement in the marketplace: particularly as it came at almost exactly the same time as this triumph of the diametrically opposite free market liberal political economic thinking. In not paying sufficient heed to this glaring dichotomy of thought and action, I feel Woodham-Smith missed a major point.
Still, her work is as factually meticulous as it is eminently readable. Indeed, it reads almost like a novel which could have been written by three of my other favourite writers of historical ‘fiction’: Philippa Gregory, Colleen McCullough and Tracy Chevalier.
Highly recommended.
January 25, 2020
2.75 stars
In the mid-1800s, the main food in Ireland was potatoes. A disease (blight) hit potatoes and was devastating for the people of Ireland. There was nothing else to substitute, as it’s what the most vulnerable populations ate.
This was an audio, and as soon as I heard the narrator, I had a bad feeling. I’m sure I’ve listened to this narrator before; also male and a British accent – sadly both of those are warnings that I am more likely to lose interest and miss a lot of what’s going on. And that’s what happened.
Although, I did follow more than I expected. There was also a lot of politics – coming out of England, how would they help the people (or not)? I followed at least some of the issues with the potatoes, the starving population, and some of the immigration to North America; I missed something about a trial (no idea what that was about), and the queen visited Ireland after it was over, but I missed most of that, as well (beyond that everyone loved her during her first trip). Given how much of it I missed, I couldn’t quite rate it “ok”, but I didn’t want to rate it too low, either, as what I did pay attention to was interesting.
In the mid-1800s, the main food in Ireland was potatoes. A disease (blight) hit potatoes and was devastating for the people of Ireland. There was nothing else to substitute, as it’s what the most vulnerable populations ate.
This was an audio, and as soon as I heard the narrator, I had a bad feeling. I’m sure I’ve listened to this narrator before; also male and a British accent – sadly both of those are warnings that I am more likely to lose interest and miss a lot of what’s going on. And that’s what happened.
Although, I did follow more than I expected. There was also a lot of politics – coming out of England, how would they help the people (or not)? I followed at least some of the issues with the potatoes, the starving population, and some of the immigration to North America; I missed something about a trial (no idea what that was about), and the queen visited Ireland after it was over, but I missed most of that, as well (beyond that everyone loved her during her first trip). Given how much of it I missed, I couldn’t quite rate it “ok”, but I didn’t want to rate it too low, either, as what I did pay attention to was interesting.
July 9, 2021
Heavily Diluted Truth
November 23, 2025
"A masterpiece of the historian's art," is how one reviewer described this work, and I could not agree more. Woodham-Smith was indeed an historian of note. Published in 1962, she was ahead of the curve in her weaving of social, economic and political history into a wide tapestry. Combined with her beautiful writing, the result is a gripping narrative teeming with insight.
I certainly learned a lot about the famine and Irish and British history while adding to some of the gaps in my knowledge about the history of my native Canada and that of the US.
One of the many things that stuck me was just how addicted the Irish were to the potato and how impoverished Ireland was. I have long had a vague understanding that the potato was the Irish staple and that by Western European standards Ireland was poor and underdeveloped - the latter state of affairs obtained until fairly recently.
But I had not realised how much the plight of the Irish peasant mirrored that of many Africans engaged in subsistence agriculture. Most Irish peasants lived in mud huts and every year experienced the biting hunger of a "lean season" when the potato supplies from the previous season ran short ahead of the harvest - a situation many rural Africans still find themselves in today. And the lack of land tenure goes a long way to explaining both cases. Irish peasants cultivated potatoes on land owned by British overlords, and additional crops they grew were for sale - potatoes as the staple were for subsistence. And many faced the hardships of expulsion if they could not pay their rents.
Another dot I had not connected before is that Ireland's lack of mineral resources also contributed to its underdevelopment - it had and has I believe little in the way of coal and iron ore. The great South African historian Charles van Onselen has, in his book on Irish banditry in South Africa, speculated that this might explain the myth of the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow - a myth spawned by a society that had virtually no gold.
A lot of historical water has flown under the bridge since this book appeared 60 years ago, and many of its conclusions have no doubt been subjected to critical scrutiny. I am no expert on the historiography of the famine but this is informed speculation. Still, this is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in this painful chapter in history.
I certainly learned a lot about the famine and Irish and British history while adding to some of the gaps in my knowledge about the history of my native Canada and that of the US.
One of the many things that stuck me was just how addicted the Irish were to the potato and how impoverished Ireland was. I have long had a vague understanding that the potato was the Irish staple and that by Western European standards Ireland was poor and underdeveloped - the latter state of affairs obtained until fairly recently.
But I had not realised how much the plight of the Irish peasant mirrored that of many Africans engaged in subsistence agriculture. Most Irish peasants lived in mud huts and every year experienced the biting hunger of a "lean season" when the potato supplies from the previous season ran short ahead of the harvest - a situation many rural Africans still find themselves in today. And the lack of land tenure goes a long way to explaining both cases. Irish peasants cultivated potatoes on land owned by British overlords, and additional crops they grew were for sale - potatoes as the staple were for subsistence. And many faced the hardships of expulsion if they could not pay their rents.
Another dot I had not connected before is that Ireland's lack of mineral resources also contributed to its underdevelopment - it had and has I believe little in the way of coal and iron ore. The great South African historian Charles van Onselen has, in his book on Irish banditry in South Africa, speculated that this might explain the myth of the pot of gold at the end of the Rainbow - a myth spawned by a society that had virtually no gold.
A lot of historical water has flown under the bridge since this book appeared 60 years ago, and many of its conclusions have no doubt been subjected to critical scrutiny. I am no expert on the historiography of the famine but this is informed speculation. Still, this is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in this painful chapter in history.
February 19, 2025
The great hunger Ireland 1845- 1849 is a powerful and heartbreaking account of one of Ireland's darkest chapters—the Great Famine. Woodham-Smith takes an unflinching look at the tragedy that unfolded between 1845 and 1849, when potato blight decimated the primary food source of millions, leaving the Irish population to suffer starvation, disease, and mass emigration.
What I found remarkable about this book is how deeply it explores not only the famine itself but also the political and social forces that worsened the catastrophe. The author meticulously examines how British policies, prejudice, and bureaucratic inefficiency exacerbated the suffering of the Irish people. The descriptions of the starving families, overcrowded workhouses, and those forced to emigrate on “coffin ships” are harrowing and unforgettable.
What I took from this book is a greater understanding of how history is shaped by systemic failures and human indifference. It taught me the importance of empathy and awareness in addressing societal crises. Despite the grim subject matter, the book serves as a sobering reminder of resilience and the lasting scars such events leave on a nation.
If you’re interested in history, particularly in understanding the roots of Irish struggles and their complex relationship with Britain, The Great Hunger is essential reading. It’s not light material, but it’s an eye-opening and deeply moving narrative that stays with you long after you finish.
What I found remarkable about this book is how deeply it explores not only the famine itself but also the political and social forces that worsened the catastrophe. The author meticulously examines how British policies, prejudice, and bureaucratic inefficiency exacerbated the suffering of the Irish people. The descriptions of the starving families, overcrowded workhouses, and those forced to emigrate on “coffin ships” are harrowing and unforgettable.
What I took from this book is a greater understanding of how history is shaped by systemic failures and human indifference. It taught me the importance of empathy and awareness in addressing societal crises. Despite the grim subject matter, the book serves as a sobering reminder of resilience and the lasting scars such events leave on a nation.
If you’re interested in history, particularly in understanding the roots of Irish struggles and their complex relationship with Britain, The Great Hunger is essential reading. It’s not light material, but it’s an eye-opening and deeply moving narrative that stays with you long after you finish.
February 27, 2024
There are many things about the Irish potato famine that are remarkable. For one thing, the fact that calling it a famine wholly misses the reality of the thing. At any rate, I find it quite interesting that this; whether a famine, a hunger, or mass negligent manslaughter or genocide, is wildly taught. So much history of small nations apparently deemed inconsequential is lost and also lost is the reality that many large nations often had a hand in, or directly created all the horrors in said small nations. Also not taught in most history curriculums, is how all of these dynamics are continuations of colonialism. Specifically missing in cases like the Irish potato famine, is how lasseiz-faire economic policies allow mass death like this to happen. All the while, landlords often still demand the same amount of rent and the England still demands that they get the same amount of money from exports. Because money is more important than human lives, and landlords living as comfortably and luxuriously as possible is the only thing society should be concerned about, not the roughly 2.5 million people starving to death. Well, to make a joke that Jason Petty, better known as the rapper and poet Propaganda, made in the behind the bastards podcast’s episodes about the genocide of Irish people by Britain, good thing there are no corrupt landlords right now who prioritize living in luxury over their tenants having proper housing. There definitely aren’t corrupt landlords now. Not at all. For sure not. Don’t look into it.
September 28, 2025
A fine overview of the potato famine which frames it (rightly so) as a direct consequence of British mismanagement and ignorance. I appreciated the emphasis of blame placed on the zeal for lassaiz-faire capitalism which was so common among the British upper class. Few excuses were made for the shameless behavior and apathy toward needless suffering that was, to paraphrase Aime Cesair, learned in the periphery (India, China, East Indies, etc.)
February 13, 2021
An odyssey of my poor english. Half a year brothers and sisters, half a year!
March 11, 2019
Heartbreaking, thought provoking; a must-read for anyone interested in Irish history. Amazing how we survived as a race of people that were subjected to centuries of colonialism and the genocide of the famine years.
November 21, 2024
Well researched. Condescending and priggish, seems to be told from the British perspective
January 2, 2012
I had always wanted to know more about this sad topic. One of the things I learned was how complicated it all was. Lots of people unilaterally blame the british, but it was more complicated than that. It as caused by centuries of british repression that caused huge land ownership problems and dependence on one crop because the people were so poor and treated so badly by the landlords who were mostly british or scottish protestants. Trevelyan was the biggest bastard of all the british bureaucrats who wanted to make sure the free market system was not altered in the least, even if it would've meant saving a million people from starvation and disease and causing another million to emigrate. Most of the irish were too poor to go to America so they were to England instead. The last chapter on how the irish were neutral in WW2 was interesting as it caused many deaths of british sailors because their ships were barred from docking for any reason. The attempted revolution in 1848 never really took off in ireland because of how weak, starving and dead they all were.
January 5, 2017
Having learned about the great famine during school in Ireland I was always aware of Britain's maltreatment but the potato crop failure seemed to be highlighted as the main culprit. The evil truth was always going to be too much for innocent young minds to fathom.
From the many sources used in this important book it is amazing that to this day the systematic policies of privation that kept Gaelic Ireland restrained in a constant precarious state of cyclical starvation have never been acknowledged by any British government since.
It's a well written book but the subject matter makes difficult reading, especially if you're Irish or of Irish descent from that era. Now when I see corn kernels all I can see is Peels Brimstone and the lyric from the song Fields of Athenry "for they stole Trevelyens corn so their young might see the morn".
This wasn't a disaster or a calamity, it was simply murder on a mass scale. To this day Irelands population is still below its 1845 level. God sent the blight but the british created the famine.
From the many sources used in this important book it is amazing that to this day the systematic policies of privation that kept Gaelic Ireland restrained in a constant precarious state of cyclical starvation have never been acknowledged by any British government since.
It's a well written book but the subject matter makes difficult reading, especially if you're Irish or of Irish descent from that era. Now when I see corn kernels all I can see is Peels Brimstone and the lyric from the song Fields of Athenry "for they stole Trevelyens corn so their young might see the morn".
This wasn't a disaster or a calamity, it was simply murder on a mass scale. To this day Irelands population is still below its 1845 level. God sent the blight but the british created the famine.
October 11, 2018
A detailed, at times dry, but good account of an event that led to Ireland's losing an estimated 30% of its population through death and immigration. Woodham-Smith can be a bit too ready with generalizations about peasant culture, and in discussing immigration, New Orleans is never mentioned (although it was second only to New York as a destination) and Philadelphia only briefly. Yet the thesis of government incompetence, at least after 1845, and the ravages of laissez faire capitalism and free trade is well argued. The English come off less as murderers and more as detached skinflints, who became especially neglectful after a stillborn uprising in 1848, likely the weakest rebellion of the year of revolution. All in all, it made sure that Ireland would never accept a true union with Britain, and left a certain mark on Irish culture that I have observed in my family and Irish-Americans in general: distrust of authority, gallow's humor, a relic Catholicism, depression, and a desire for community even when it is facile or pointless. It is a desire for something lost in the crossing.
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