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‘Irish fever’ in Britain during the Great Famine: immigration, disease and the legacy of ‘Black ’47’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Lewis Darwen ,
Donald M. MacRaild ,
Brian Gurrin  and
Liam Kennedy
Lewis Darwen
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London Metropolitan University, Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University Belfast
Donald M. MacRaild*
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London Metropolitan University, Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University Belfast
Brian Gurrin
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London Metropolitan University, Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University Belfast
Liam Kennedy
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London Metropolitan University, Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University Belfast
*
*Department of Humanities, Roehampton University, [email protected]; London Metropolitan University, [email protected]; Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, [email protected]; School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen's University Belfast, [email protected]
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Abstract

During the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, ‘Black ’47’, tens of thousands of people fled across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Britain, desperately escaping the starvation and disease plaguing their country. These refugees, crowding unavoidably into the most insalubrious accommodation British towns and cities had to offer, were soon blamed for deadly outbreaks of epidemic typhus which emerged across the country during the first half of 1847. Indeed, they were accused of transporting the pestilence, then raging in Ireland, over with them. Typhus mortality rates in Ireland and Britain soared, and so closely connected with the disease were the Irish in Britain that it was widely referred to as ‘Irish fever’. Much of what we know about this epidemic is based on a handful of studies focusing almost exclusively on major cities along the British west-coast. Moreover, there has been little attempt to understand the legacy of the episode on the Irish in Britain. Taking a national perspective, this article argues that the ‘Irish fever’ epidemic of 1847 spread far beyond the western port of entry, and that the epidemic, by entrenching the association of the Irish with deadly disease, contributed significantly to the difficulties Britain's Irish population faced in the 1850s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 166 , November 2020 , pp. 270 - 294
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Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2020

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References

1 Census of Ireland, 1851; Mokyr, Joel, Why Ireland starved: a quantitative and analytical history of the Irish economy, 1800–1850 (London, 1983), pp 30–80Google Scholar; Gráda, Cormac Ó, Black ’47 and beyond: the Great Irish Famine in history, economy and memory (Princeton, NJ, 1999)Google Scholar.

2 Although the term ‘hungry forties’ was in fact invented in the early 1900s to frame national debates about tariff reform, the politics of the term need not concern us when discussing the mass migration of Irish into Britain. See: Jane Cobden Unwin, The hungry forties: life under the bread tax; being testimonies of witnesses now living in Sussex (London, 1904). The term was popularised in free trade-protection debates in Edwardian Britain. Now it is a commonplace for that decade. For critical perspectives, see: Chaloner, W. H., The hungry forties: a re-examination (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Howe, A. C., ‘Towards the “hungry forties”: free trade in Britain, c.1880–1906’ in Biagini, Eugenio (ed.), Citizenship and community: Liberals, Radicals and collective identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996), pp 193–218Google Scholar; Vernon, James, Hunger: a history (Cambridge, MA, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Lewis Darwen, ‘Implementing and administering the new poor law in the industrial north: a case study of Preston union in regional context, 1837–61’ (Ph.D. thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 2016), pp 85–91; R. C. O. Matthews, A study in trade cycle history: economic fluctuations in Great Britain, 1833–1842 (Cambridge, 1954).

4 The Irish, among other factors, are discussed in Mary Poovey's Making a social body: British cultural formations, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995), pp 64–7, and in Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Irish immigration and the “condition of England” question: the roots of an historiographical tradition’ in Immigrants and Minorities, xiv, no. 1 (Mar. 1995), pp 67–85, which discussed the influential writers of the 1830s and 1840s, who shaped subsequently the image of the outcast Irish.

5 Several earlier outbreaks of diseases, such as cholera, were identified with the poor Irish, but not exclusively so. Examples can be see in: Morning Chronicle, 10 Sept. 1832; Ipswich Journal, 11 July 1835. Wider context of the Irish and disease in Britain can be found in Michael Worboys and Michael Sigsworth, ‘The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain’ in Urban History, xxi, no. 2 (Oct. 1994), pp 237–50, which makes this Irish connection in wider British attitudes. See also Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered lives: public health in Victorian Britain (Boston, MA, 1983).

6 E. Margaret Crawford, ‘Migrant maladies: unseen lethal baggage’ in eadem (ed.), The hungry stream: essays on emigration and famine (Belfast, 1997), pp 137–51; Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the poor: Atlantic seaboard states & the 19th-century origins of American immigration policy (New York, 2017); Frank Neal, Black ’47: Britain and the Famine Irish (Basingstoke, 1998), pp 123–56; Marianna O'Gallagher, ‘The orphans of Grosse Île: Canada and the adoption of Famine Irish orphans, 1847–48’ in Patrick O'Sullivan (ed.) The meaning of the Famine (Leicester, 2000), pp 81–111; Christopher Hamlin, More than hot: a short history of fever (Baltimore, 2014), p. 90; Arno Karlen, Plague's progress: a social history of man and disease (London, 1995), p. 120.

7 Not least in terms of punitive and exclusionary poor law activity: Hirota, Expelling the poor, passim.

8 Audrey P. Coney, ‘Mid nineteenth-century Ormskirk: disease, overcrowding and the Irish in a Lancashire market town’ in Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, cxxxix (1990), pp 83–111; Frances Finnegan, Poverty and prejudice: a study of Irish poverty in York, 1840–1875 (Cork, 1982), pp 16, 21, 24, 26, 28–49, 56, 189; Frank Neal, ‘Lancashire, the Famine, and the poor laws’ in Irish Social and Economic History, xxii (1995), pp 26–48; idem, ‘The Famine Irish in England and Wales’ in O'Sullivan (ed), The meaning of the Famine, p. 56; idem, Black ’47, pp 123–76.

9 Matthew Gallman's closely-argued comparative study, Receiving Erin's children: Liverpool and the Irish Famine migration, 1845–1855 (London, 2000), pp 106, 118, frames fever in Liverpool and Philadelphia through the agency of Irish migration. The authorities in both places generated vivid accounts of the effects. Understandably, however, given the scope of the work, he makes no detailed statistical analysis of the progress of disease. Also see Crawford, ‘Migrant maladies’, passim, for a focused and specific discussion.

10 Finnegan, Poverty and prejudice, pp 16–17.

11 Neal, ‘Lancashire, the Famine and the poor laws’, p. 33.

12 John Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse: the history of the Liverpool-Irish, 1800–1939 (Liverpool, 2007), pp 60–1; Graham Davis, ‘Little Irelands’ in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989), p. 115.

13 Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish migrants in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1979), esp. chapter 3.

14 Ruth Ann M. Harris, The nearest place that wasn't Ireland: early nineteenth-century Irish labor migration (Ames, IA, 1994), a study which explores as far as the early 1840s.

15 Donald M. MacRaild, ‘“No Irish need apply”: the origins and persistence of a prejudice’ in Labour History Review, lxxviii, no. 3 (2013), pp 269–99.

16 Neal, Black ‘47 looks more generally at the crisis of mass immigration with respect to local state responses, but says little about typhus beyond Liverpool in a systematic way. See also his Sectarian violence: the Liverpool experience, 1819–1914 (Liverpool, 1988), which explores Irish poverty in the context of nativist animus, and his ‘The Irish steamship companies and the Famine Irish’ in Immigrants and Minorities, v, no. 1 (1986), pp 28–61.

17 For a petition from Liverpool, see: Neal, Black ‘47, pp 91–2. For Glasgow, see The Times, 7 Apr. 1847. For a general petition signed by several Lancashire and Yorkshire unions, see Manchester Times, 1 Jan. 1847; Bolton Chronicle, 27 Feb. 1847; Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, 26 Mar. 1847; Worcester Chronicle, 10 Feb. 1847.

18 Davis, The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914, p. 51; Donald M. MacRaild, The Irish diaspora in Britain, 1750–1939 (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 6; Neal, Black ‘47, chapter 13.

19 Tom Crook, Governing systems: modernity and the making of public health in England, 1830–1901 (Oakland, CA, 2016), especially pp 63–104; Wohl, Endangered lives, pp 117–40. Some of the most vivid writings on Irish immigrant communities in England and Wales in the 1840s were published as a series of long essays in the Morning Chronicle. These are brought together in Jules Ginswick (ed.), Labour and the poor in England and Wales, 1849–51: the letters to the Morning Chronicle from the correspondents in the manufacturing and mining districts, the towns of Liverpool and Birmingham and the rural districts (8 vols, London, 1983), especially those on northern England and Wales, in vols 1 and 3.

20 For example, Manchester Times, 1 Jan. 1847.

21 Report from the select committee on poor removal, p. 358, H.C. 1854 (396), xvii, 368; Glasgow Parochial Board minute books, 30 Nov. 1847 (Glasgow City Archives (G.C.A.), D-HEW 1/1/1).

22 Joel Mokyr and Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘What do people die of during famines? The Great Irish Famine in comparative perspective’ in European Review of Economic History, vi, no. 3 (Dec. 2002), pp 339–63.

23 Ibid., pp 341–3.

24 Census of Ireland for the year 1851, part iv: report on ages and education, p. 247, H.C. 1856 (2053), xxix, 511. See also, J. N. Hays, Epidemics and pandemics: their impacts on human history (Oxford, 2005), pp 239–48; Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Irish Famine (London, 1995).

25 Mokyr & Ó Gráda, ‘What do people die of during famines’, p. 342.

26 Report from the select committee on medical relief, p. 247, H.C. 1854 (348), xii, 689.

27 Manchester Courier, 3 July 1847.

28 W. H. Duncan, ‘On the sanitary state of Liverpool [31 August, 1847]’ in Local reports on the sanitary condition of the labouring population of England (London, 1842); Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse, p. 57.

29 Tenth annual report of the registrar-general of births, deaths, and marriages in England (London, 1852), p. viii.

30 Anne Hardy, ‘Urban famine or urban crisis? Typhus in the Victorian city’ in Medical History, xxxii, no. 4 (Oct. 1988), pp 400–15.

31 E. Margaret Crawford, ‘Typhus in nineteenth-century Ireland’ in Elizabeth Malcolm and Greta Jones (eds), Medicine, disease and the state in Ireland, 1650–1940 (Cork, 1999), p. 122.

32 Charles Creighton, A history of epidemics in Britain: from the extinction of plague to the present time (2 vols, Cambridge, 1894), ii, 194.

33 The Monthly Journal of Medical Science, new series, ii (1848), p. 72.

34 Bell's Weekly Messenger, 30 Jan. 1847; Derby Mercury, 6 Jan. 1847; Evening Mail, 1 Feb. 1847; Glasgow Herald, 19 Feb. 1847; Hampshire Advertiser, 6 Feb. 1847; Hereford Journal, 3 Mar. 1847; John O'Groat Journal, 8 Jan. 1847; Liverpool Mercury, 5 Feb. 1847; Leeds Times, 27 Feb. 1847; Newcastle Courant, 1 Jan. 1847; The Scotsman, 10 Feb. 1847.

35 Bell's Weekly Messenger, 15 May 1847; Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian, 23 May 1847; Coventry Herald, 14 May 1847; Gloucester Journal, 15 May 1847; Illustrated London News, 1 May 1847; London Daily News, 8 May 1847; Monmouthshire Merlin, 15 May 1847; Morning Advertiser, 29 Apr. 1847; Newcastle Journal, 8 May 1847; Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury, 12 June 1847; Sheffield Independent, 8 May 1847; The Era, 16 May 1847; Worcester Chronicle, 19 May 1847; Windsor and Eton Express, 1 May 1847.

36 Norfolk Chronicle, 8 May 1847.

37 Brighton Gazette, 10 June 1847.

38 Sheffield Independent, 15 May 1847.

39 Tenth annual report of the registrar-general, pp 288–9.

40 The number of deaths attributed to typhus always fluctuated to some degree. The fluctuations between 1849 and 1851 are within normal bounds.

41 The period 1847–8 was one of economic distress in the manufacturing districts of Britain, and it might be thought that this contributed to the epidemic. However, there is little evidence to support this contention. Deaths from typhus fever during the economic depression of 1841–2, for example, were no higher than in other years. See: Medical-Chirurgical Review, xlvii (July – Oct. 1845), p. 135.

42 Alfred Austin, correspondence and papers related to the West Midlands District (including unions in Manchester, Rugby and Sheffield), 1843–55 (T.N.A., MH 32/7).

43 Tenth annual report of the registrar-general, pp xxii–xxxiii.

44 Prescot union (T.N.A., MH 12/6095).

45 Ibid.

46 Creighton, History of epidemics in Britain, p. 208. The number of patients rose from 777 in 1846 to 2,333 in 1847.

47 Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science, v (1849), pp 439–40.

48 London Medical Gazette, xxix (1847), p. 972.

49 Graham Davis has argued that in Newcastle in 1847 a report by the medical officer did not associate the Irish with the outbreak of fever, and he suggests that this indicates ‘a more tolerant attitude to Irish immigrants’ in the town. However, several Catholic clergymen did attest to the influx of Irish as being the cause of typhus, as did members of the town's Institute for the Prevention of Contagious Fever in Newcastle in their annual report: Davis, ‘Little Irelands’, pp 104–33; Newcastle Guardian and Tyne Mercury, 12 June 1847.

50 Birmingham union (T.N.A., MH 12/13291).

51 Reports and communications on vagrancy, p. 3 [987] H.C. 1847–8, liii, 241. The counties were Berkshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Sussex and Wiltshire.

52 Ibid., p. 36.

53 The petition was created by the Howden poor law union in Yorkshire, and was adopted by many unions in the region.

54 Liverpool Mercury, 7, 18 May, 25 June, 2 July 1847; Neal, Black ‘47, pp 123–57.

55 Neal, Black ‘47, p. 217.

56 Christine Kinealy, This great calamity: the Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Dublin, 1994), p. 336.

57 John V. Pickstone, ‘Dearth, dirt and fever epidemics: rewriting the history of British “public health”, 1780–1850’ in Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (eds), Epidemics and ideas: essays on the historical perception of pestilence (Cambridge, 1995), pp 125–48.

58 Felix Driver, Power and pauperism: the workhouse system, 1834–1884 (Cambridge, 1993), pp 73–94.

59 Pickstone, ‘Dearth, dirt and fever’, pp 131–3.

60 While poor law policy and practice at local level invariably differed between unions, such was the nature of poor law administration which allowed boards of guardians considerable autonomy, it is the similarities rather than the differences in regional responses to the 1847 epidemic that stand out. Boards of guardians no doubt looked to neighbouring unions for guidance. For more on local/regional differentiation of poor law administration generally, see Driver, Power and pauperism, pp 32–57; Elizabeth Hurren, Protesting about pauperism: poverty, politics and poor relief in late-Victorian England, 1870–1900 (Stroud, 2007); Steven King, Poverty and welfare in England, 1700–1850: a regional perspective (Manchester, 2000).

61 Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Yardsticks for workhouses during the Great Famine’ (U.C.D. Centre for Economic Research, working paper series 2007, WP07/08), p. 4.

62 This information has mainly been derived from T.N.A., MH 12 and local newspapers. With few exceptions, the question of how to respond to epidemic fever was discussed at boards of guardians’ meetings in unions across areas of heavy Irish immigration in 1847, and opening temporary fever hospitals invariably formed part of the conversation. The following references include the MH 12 files we surveyed in which correspondence regarding typhus fever or ‘Irish fever’ features during the year 1847. It is necessary to note that many unions have no surviving MH 12 files for 1847, so the absence of a union from this list does not necessarily indicate that it was typhus-free. Nor were we able, due to their sheer number, to survey all of the MH 12 files, although we made sure to cover each region. For south Wales, see: Cardiff, MH 12/16248 and Newport, MH 12/8089. For the north-east, see: Gateshead, MH 12/3069 and MH 12/3070; for the Midlands, see: Birmingham, MH 12/13291; Stafford, MH 12/11431; Wolverhampton, MH 12/11678; for Lancashire, Yorkshire and Cheshire, see: Ashton-under-Lyne, MH 12/5415; Blackburn, MH 12/5531; Bradford, MH 12/14726; Burnley, MH 12/5675; Halifax, MH 12/14977; Huddersfield, MH 12/15069; Keighley, MH 12/15160; Leeds, MH 12/15228; Manchester, MH 12/6043; Prescot, MH 12/6095; Preston, MH 12/6113; Stockport, MH 12/1141; York, MH 12/14400; for London, see: Whitechapel, MH 12/7916.

63 Evening Mail, 28 June 1847.

64 In July 1847 a medical officer of the Whitechapel union attributed a rise in fever cases in his district to ‘the great influx of Irish in a state of destitution and disease’: letter of 12 July 1847 (T.N.A., MH 12/7916). See also: MH 32/64 for correspondence between London unions and Assistant Poor Law Commissioner Richard Hall on Irish immigration and disease, particularly: parish of St George to Richard Hall, 20 Apr. 1847; St Anne's union to Richard Hall, 26 Apr. 1847; Richard Hall to poor law commissioner, 1 May 1847; Whitechapel union to Richard Hall, 1 May 1847; Richard Hall to poor law commission, 21 May 1847.

65 Gore's Liverpool General Advertiser, 11 Mar. 1847.

66 Manchester Times, 2 July 1847; Yorkshire Gazette, 12 June 1847.

67 Manchester Times, 2 July 1847.

68 Rochdale union (T.N.A., MH 12/6176); Huddersfield union (T.N.A., MH 12/15069).

69 Birmingham union (T.N.A., MH 12/13291); Durham Chronicle, 25 June 1847.

70 Ashton-under-Lyne union (T.N.A., MH 12/5415).

71 This figure includes all fever cases, rather than just those treated in a fever hospital. There is evidence to suggest that mortality rates in fever hospitals was slightly higher than the average, although this is probably because many people in the last stages of life were taken to fever hospitals and died shortly after entering.

72 E. W. Goodall, A short history of infectious diseases (London, 1934), p. 88; Hardy, ‘Urban famine or urban crisis?’, pp 401–25; Bill Lukin, ‘Evaluating the sanitary revolution: typhus and typhoid in London, 1851–1900’ in Robert Woods and John Woodward (eds), Urban disease and mortality in nineteenth-century England (London, 1988), p. 102.

73 Huddersfield union (T.N.A., MH 12/15069).

74 See, for example, Birmingham union (T.N.A., MH 12/13291); Liverpool Mercury, 7 June 1847; Manchester union (T.N.A., MH 12/6043).

75 Kinealy, This great calamity, pp 335–41.

76 Neal, Black ’47, pp 220–22. The select vestry was in charge of poor law administration in Liverpool.

77 Neal, Black ’47, p. 277.

78 Report from the select committee on poor removal, p. 445.

79 Manchester Courier, 28 July 1847.

80 Bolton Chronicle, 21 Aug. 1847; Manchester Times, 31 July 1847; minutes of the Ormskirk union board of guardians, 22 July 1847 (Lancashire Archives (L.A.), PUS/1/3); minutes of the Prescot union board of guardians, 1 July 1847 (L.A., PUP/1/3); Liverpool Mercury, 4 Sept. 1847; Fylde union minute books, 18 May 1847 (L.A., PUF/1/3). For Glasgow, see: Report from the select committee on poor removal, pp 570–77. Large numbers of Irish were also removed from Ayrshire and Renfrewshire in 1847.

81 Neal, Black ’47, p. 225.

82 His letter was featured in the poor law minute books of the Fylde union (L.A., PUF 1/3).

83 Stockport union (T.N.A., MH 12/1141).

84 Staffordshire Advertiser, 15 May 1847.

85 See MacRaild, Irish diaspora in Britain, pp 117–24, and the sources cited there. Wolffe, John, The Protestant crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860 (Oxford, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Paz, D. G., Popular anti-Catholicism in mid-Victorian England (Stanford, CA, 1992)Google Scholar, are key studies of the religious dimensions.

86 The fear of workplace competition was very widespread by the mid 1840s, and affected agricultural labouring trades, dock work, and the railways. See: MacRaild, Irish diaspora in Britain, p. 142.

87 Kirk, Neville, ‘Ethnicity, class and popular Toryism, 1850–1870’ in Lunn, Kenneth (ed.), Hosts, immigrants and minorities: historical responses to newcomers in British society, 1870–1914 (Folkestone, 1980), pp 64–105Google Scholar.

88 Kinealy, Christine, A death-dealing Famine: the Great Hunger in Ireland (London, 1997), p. 119Google Scholar.

89 Morning Advertiser, 11 May 1847.

90 Evening Mail, 21 Apr. 1847.

91 See, for example, Ashton-under-Lyne union (MH 12/5415); Gateshead union (MH 12/3069-70); Halifax union (MH 12/14977); Liverpool Mail, 8 May 1847 (a report on opposition to a fever hospital in Birkenhead); Hull Advertiser, 10 Dec. 1847. Neal refers to a campaign to stop the opening of a fever hospital by residents in Liverpool (Neal, Black ’47, p. 133).

92 Manchester Times, 31 July 1847.

93 Ibid., 15 May 1847.

94 Darwen, Lewis and Gurrin, Brian, ‘“Bad as it is, we were better off in England”: Locating the Famine Irish experience in Britain through deposition testimony’ in Gray, Peter and Corporaal, Marguérite (eds), The Great Irish Famine and social class: conflicts, responsibilities, representations (Berlin, 2019), pp 217–34Google Scholar.

95 Darwen, Lewis, MacRaild, Donald M., Kennedy, Liam and Gurrin, Brian, ‘“Unhappy and wretched creatures”: charity, poor relief and pauper removal in Britain and Ireland during the Great Famine’ in E.H.R., cxxxiv, no. 568 (June 2019), pp 589–619CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 See, for example: Maguire, J. M., Removal of Irish poor from England and Scotland (London, 1854), p. 89Google Scholar. See also: Hansard 3, cxlvi, 616–21 (30 June 1857).

97 Belchem, Irish, Catholic and Scouse, p. 70. Many provincial reports to the General Board of Health during the late 1840s and early 1850s include discussions of ‘Irish fever’, and more generally the Irish feature heavily in these reports.

98 Ginswick (ed.), Labour and the poor, i, 101.

99 A luminously savage epithet in a speech in Bath (Bath Chronicle, 27 Jan. 1848), uncovered by Davis in ‘Little Irelands’, p. 131, note 42.

100 , Lowe, The Irish in mid-Victorian Lancashire: the shaping of a working-class community (Washington D.C., 1989)Google Scholar; Lees, Exiles of Erin; Finnegan, Poverty and prejudice. Indeed, most classic studies of the Famine period written in the 1960s and 1970s reflect this interpretation.

101 MacRaild, ‘“No Irish need apply”’, tables, 1, 2 and fig. 1, pp 277–9.

102 Ibid., table 2, p. 278. The authors wish to acknowledge, and are grateful for, the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust (grant number: RPG-2015-404), which enabled this research to be undertaken, and the incisive comments of the journal's readers.