This weekend was spent at a conference in the Irish Workhouse Centre which is located in the old Portumna workhouse in Co Galway. The voluntary committee who have restored and conserved many of the buildings in the complex held the first ‘Irish Workhouse Conference – Past and Present’ bringing together historians (such as Larry Geary, Gerard Moran, myself, and Sean Lucey), emigrants (Bill Marwick, whose ancestor departed from a Galway workhouse to Australia in the 19^th century) and an osteoarchaeologist – Dr Linda G. Lynch who has worked on the bones recovered in various workhouse burial grounds around the country, including Manorhamilton in Co Leitrim.

Drs Geary and Moran spoke about aspects of the workhouse that are sometimes underplayed in the popular perception of the institutions; Gerry Moran gave a fascinating account of ‘Riots and insubordination in the workhouses during the Great Famine’, and Larry Geary spoke about his work on the provision of health care under the Irish Poor Law.

Myself (Georgina Laragy) and Sean Lucey spoke about the research we have been involved in since 2007 at Oxford Brookes and here at Queen’s University, Belfast. I provided an overview of regional patterns of indoor and outdoor relief, using maps available here, and explored the regional distinctions that led to experiences of poverty in nineteenth century Ireland. Sean Lucey spoke about the reform of the poor law system under the Irish Free State after 1920, and the continuation of the system in the six counties of the newly-created Northern Ireland until after the Second World War.

Click on picture to the left for Georgina Laragy’s powerpoint

Peter Higginbotham, author of the fantastic resource on workhouses across the British Isles (www.workhouses.org) also provided information on the workhouses of Ireland and Scotland. He had visited Portumna more than a decade ago, taking the image below which showed how dilapidated and derelict the building, dating from the early 1850s, had become.

© Peter Higginbotham, www.workhouses.org

Most spectacular however, was the contribution by the voluntary committee of the Portumna workhouse to the conservation and preservation of the buildings themselves. This was outlined by Mairín Doddy (Conservation Office for Galway County Council) and Ursula Marmion (IRD manager and co-ordinator of the Irish Workhouse Centre) who guided the large audience through the wonderful work that has been completed over the past ten years to conserve the building using the highest international standards of conservation. This involved getting cattle out, removing ivy (which you can see in the photo above) and re-roofing to prevent water getting in and destroying what remained. Their presentations were supplemented by very informative tour guides who brought groups of us through the dormitories, laundry, reception area, yards etc., each at different stages of conservation.

In addition to the sterling work of the Irish Workhouse Centre we were treated to information about the state of a number of surviving workhouses from all around the island and the conservation work and community initiatives that are based around these once-dreaded buildings.

Some workhouses, such as Callan in Co. Kilkenny, Birr in Co Offaly and Kilmacthomas in Co Waterford are in private hands and their owners spoke about the work on-going to conserve and use these beautiful buildings as community resources. The workhouse in Limavady in Co Derry is a fully operational health and social services centre that caters for a population similar to those who would have been institutionalised there in the 19^th century, but under a new dispensation that provides dignity and a degree of independent living to those who live on the grounds. It also hosts offices, a museum and arts/cultural events. Carrickmacross and Bawnboy workhouses in the border counties of Monaghan and Cavan have also benefitted from community initiatives that have seen them restored to a very high standard with more work planned for the future. The Donaghmore workhouse, like the Irish Workhouse Centre in Portumna, hosts a museum that details the history of the workhouse itself, the Great Famine and rural life in the area, including an exhibition of agricultural implements and tools.

All in all, the conference was a wonderful success on the part of Ursula Marmion and the committee down at Portumna. But it also allowed this time-traveller to walk around the buildings, see the wooden platforms where paupers slept, the ventilation holes to circulate air and keep them healthy, the cells for refractory inmates and the laundry room where their uniforms, ticking etc., were washed and dried. It provided a tangible element to the research that we are doing here at Queen’s, a ‘site of memory’ for travelling back in time as we imagine what life would have been like for those who worked and lived there.

(All images bar one by Peter Higginbotham were taken by © Georgina Laragy 2014)

In the workhouse yard

On the stone stairway in the female side of the building

Female dormitory, Portumna workhouse

Ventilation holes over the doorway into the female wards © Georgina Laragy 2014

Dilapidated cells for refractory inmates

The School of History and Anthropology, in conjunction with the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities, is hosting a conference in Clifton House, Belfast, 11-12 April 2014 entitled ‘Poverty and Famine in Ireland: The Great Famine, its contexts and legacy’. The programme can be found below. It is open to any and all who would like to attend though for reasons of space and catering it is limited to approx. 50-60 attendees. If you would like to attend please contact Georgina Laragy by email g.laragy@qub.ac.uk as soon as you decide. Admission is free and all are welcome. The conference will hear from some of the leading researchers in the field and it should be a excellent event.

Poverty and Famine in Ireland: The Great Famine, its contexts and legacy

11-12 April 2014, Clifton House, North Queen Street, Belfast

Friday 11 April

12.30-1.45 Private lunch for research partners

2                Welcome

2.15-3       Session 1: Niall Ó Ciosain (NUIG), ‘Irish poverty in the Poor Inquiry and Nicholls Reports’

3-4            Session 2: Robyn Atcheson and Peter Gray (QUB), Epidemics and Fever Hospitals in pre-Famine Belfast and during the Great Famine

4-4.30       Coffee

4.30-5.30  Session 3 Olwen Purdue and Georgina Laragy (QUB), Poverty and welfare in post-Famine Belfast

5.30-6.30  Private Advisory Board meeting

7              Private Dinner

Saturday 12 April

9.30-10.30      Session 4: Eoin McLaughlin (Edinburgh) and Chris Colvin (QUB), Evidence for Famine Nutrition from the Irish Prison Registers

10.30-11         Coffee

11-12              Session 5: Ciaran Reilly (NUIM), ‘Culpability and the Great Famine: What the Strokestown archive reveals’

12-1                Session 6: Andy Newby (Helsinki), ‘”Regarded in a Different Light”? Imperial Relations and Famine Relief in Finland, 1867-8’.

1-2 Lunch

2-3                    Session 7: Marguerite Corporaal, Chris Cusack and Lindsay Jannsen (Nijmegen), ‘”At the verge of ruin”: Poverty and Feudalism in Famine Fiction’

3-4                    Session 8: Emily Mark-Fitzgerald (UCD), ‘Representations of poverty in Irish Famine memorials’

4 Close

By Robyn Atcheson

As a fan of all things related to the classic Victorian detective, a seemingly mundane note in the minute books of the Belfast Board of Guardians caught my attention a few weeks ago.

On 29 August 1843, the Guardians noted that 7s. 6d. was to be paid to a Patrick Sherlock ‘for the apprehension of William Smith who absconded with Union clothing’.[1]

Belfast’s own Patrick Sherlock therefore interacted with the poor as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective several decades later.  While the canon of Sherlock Holmes stories displays a rather genteel, and certainly gentlemanly, image of Victorian London, there are several references to the other side of urban life in the nineteenth century.  Holmes and Watson enjoy the benefits of wealth and status from their rooms in Baker Street but certain stories illuminate the darker, poorer side of life in London.  The Baker Street Irregulars, street urchins employed by Holmes to carry messages or uncover clues, are present in the very first Sherlock Holmes story ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and even have a chapter named after them in another novel ‘The Sign of the Four’.  The BBC’s modern adaptation, starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the infamous deerstalker, has recreated this scheme with the use of Sherlock’s ‘homeless network’ who aid him in many of his cases.

One Holmes story in particular highlights poverty in nineteenth-century London and provides an interesting contemporary fictional perspective on the matter.

‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ is a short story contained in the volume The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, first published in The Strand magazine in 1891.  A visit from a friend on behalf of her opium-addicted husband persuades Dr Watson to venture to an opium den of disrepute near the docks in search of the addict Isa Whitney. After locating Whitney relatively quickly, Watson is about to leave when an old, wrinkled man stops him, revealing himself to be none other than Holmes in disguise.  (This opening sequence was recently referenced in the BBC’s ‘His Last Vow’ episode.) In the original story Holmes informs Watson that he is working on the case of Neville St Clair, a wealthy gentleman from Kent who had mysteriously disappeared.  St Clair, thirty-seven years of age with a wife and two children ‘had no occupation, but was interested in several companies and went into town as a rule in the morning, returning by the 5.14 from Cannon Street every night.’  Mrs St Clair took an unexpected trip to London and was shocked to see her husband’s face, crying in anguish, in the second-floor window above the opium den.  On investigation, police discovered that the room was used by a cripple, a professional beggar.  St Clair’s clothes were found in the room, as well as ‘traces of blood … seen upon the windowsill’; his coat washed ashore the next day with 421 pennies and 270 halfpennies in the pockets.  Holmes believes St Clair to have been murdered and the beggar, Hugh Boone, was arrested.

Holmes describes the suspect to his companion: ‘His appearance, you see, is so remarkable that no one can pass him without observing him.  A shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar, which, by its contraction, has turned up the outer edge of his upper lip, a bulldog chin and a pair of very penetrating dark eyes, which present a singular contrast to the colour of his hair, all mark him out from amid the common crowd of mendicants and so, too, does his wit, for he is ever ready with a reply to any piece of chaff which may be thrown at him by the passers-by.’

The seemingly simple case is complicated further when Holmes and Watson call on Mrs St Clair in Kent to discover that she has received a letter, undeniably from her husband.  While Watson sleeps, Holmes ponders the problem with his pipe, eventually wakening Watson early the next morning to reveal the solution.  Returning to London, Holmes visits the beggar Boone in his cell in Bow Street and while Boone sleeps, washes his face until his image turned from that of a beggar to that of Mr Neville St Clair.

St Clair admits to Holmes that his ‘job’ in the city was begging.  As a young man reporting for an evening paper, St Clair had once acted as a beggar for an article, using the secrets of make-up he had learned from an interest in acting.  Shocked at how much money he was able to make, St Clair returned to the scheme when he needed to pay off a debt and then decided to quit his job as a reporter, describing the decision as ‘a long fight between my pride and the money’.

‘I do not mean that any beggar in the streets of London could earn £700 a year – which is less than my average takings – but I had exceptional advantages in my power of making up, and also in a facility of repartee, which improved by practice and made me quite a recognised character in the City.  All day a stream of pennies, varied by silver, poured in upon me, and it was a very bad day in which I failed to take two pounds.’

The remarkable tale of the man with the twisted lip is an interesting glimpse into perceptions of poverty in Victorian London.  While marvelling at the explanation, neither Watson as narrator nor any other character present, questions its validity.  Are we, the twenty-first century reader, then meant to infer that it was possible for a beggar to make this amount of money in 1890s London?

Regardless of the amount made by such endeavours, the general attitude towards begging is clear.  After hearing St Clair’s explanation, Holmes asks how he had avoided prosecution for begging to which St Clair replies that he was prosecuted ‘many times; but what was a fine to me?’  Not only was begging illegal under the Vagrancy Act of 1824 but it was considered a disgraceful act, publicly parading poverty on the street.  Even St Clair himself is embarrassed by his occupation, clearly desperate to hide the truth from his family; ‘I would have endured imprisonment, ay, even execution, rather than have left my miserable secret as a family blot to my children.’  ‘God help me, I would not have them ashamed of their father.  My God! What an exposure! What can I do?’   This shame, so feared by St Clair, was, however, nothing compared to the shame and fear of poverty itself.  The author, Conan Doyle, could relate to the fear of poverty.  His father, Charles Doyle, was an alcoholic and ended up in an asylum, throwing his family into periods of poverty while Arthur was a child.

A final interesting point to take away from Holmes’s encounter with poverty in this tale is that Neville St Clair lived this double life for years without being discovered.  The dichotomy between rich and poor was, and arguably remains, a huge societal gap.  How St Clair flitted between one and the other is definitely an interesting statement on the superficial aspects of poverty; his clothes, hair, make up and mannerisms that enabled others to classify him as either ‘rich’ or ‘poor’.  For as Benjamin Disraeli stated in ‘Sybil’ in 1845:

‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws … THE RICH AND THE POOR.’

If anyone is in London this week you might be interested in hearing Dr Sean Lucey speaking about his research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on Thursday 23 January. The title of the paper is ‘‘It’s a truism that public health is a purchasable commodity: municipal healthcare in inter-war Belfast’.

Municipal medicine and public health has been seen as a failure in Belfast and Northern Ireland/ North of Ireland prior to the introduction of the National Health Service. The recent British historiography on the performance of public health providers, particularly in the municipal sectors, has challenged similar negative understandings. This paper argues that a more positive picture is applicable to Belfast. It demonstrates that although Belfast was one of the unhealthiest cities in the United Kingdom, attempts were initiated to expand municipal personal health services. Concentrating on maternity and child welfare provision; controversial due to the city’s high infant and maternal mortality rates; the paper highlights how Belfast’s voluntary hospital sector and the continued existence of the poor law undermined municipal expansion. These two sectors expanded demonstrating that while municipal medicine remained modest, other fields were more dynamic indicating the existence of a strong mixed economy of healthcare.

Thursday, 23rd January 2014, 12.45 pm – 2.00 pm
Venue: LG7, Keppel Street Building

Further details on the venue and Centre for History in Public Health in London click here.

Our Research Fellow Dr Sean Lucey spoke to journalist David Lynch about the parallels between health care provision for mothers and children in 1950s Ireland and today. He also makes reference to the situation in Belfast at that time. “Belfast’s medical leaders such as RJ Johnstone in the 1930s – MP in the Northern Irish parliament and a professor in Queen’s medical school – resisted attempts at expanded local authority in maternity and child welfare. This was largely out of a desire to protect the expanding voluntary hospital sector, which included the opening of the new Royal Maternity Hospital in 1933.” Click here to read about ‘The divisive legacy of free healthcare in Ireland’ from the Medical Independent.

Image from http://leftfilmreview.net/2013/08/10/elysium-2013/ [accessed 10 October 2013]

by Robyn Atcheson

Whether it’s the upstairs/downstairs divide in Downton Abbey or the musical tales of poor orphans like Oliver and Annie, popular entertainment engages with the themes of wealth and poverty time and time again.  This summer’s sci-fi blockbuster Elysium took the theme of a rich/poor divide and set it in the not-too-distant future.

Starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, Elysium is set in the year 2154 when rich and poor do not even inhabit the same planet.  The poor have been left behind on over-populated and disease-ridden Earth; the rich inhabit Elysium, a space station tantalisingly visible from Earth. Based on the classic Elysian Fields, citizens on this extra-terrestrial utopian society enjoy the benefits of advanced technology, including cures for all illnesses.  The only way to reach Elysium is to buy your citizenship, thus ensuring that only the rich make it there.  While the film as an escapist action-packed thriller was clearly made for popcorn entertainment, it also raises some of the same questions and themes that this project seeks to uncover.   Without spoiling the plot for those who haven’t seen it, there are certain characteristics of this movie that resonate with the kind of urban poverty that existed in the nineteenth century.

The very nature of Elysium being a floating paradise in the sky creates a distinct geographical boundary between the rich and the poor, those who can afford the literal high life and those who can’t.  Geographically dividing the rich from the poor was a common feature through the nineteenth century, as towns expanded so too did the space between different economic groups.   Elysium is presented as paradise; every glimpse of life there is opulent, grand and luxurious, showing its citizens as privileged, passing their time at parties, or sunbathing in the perfectly controlled sunshine.  In contrast, Earth is dirty and dusty; its citizens queue and trudge their way to menial jobs or lie begging in the streets.  While rich and poor were less clearly divided in the nineteenth century, (masters and servants often lived in the same house as a result of the domestic service system), technological advances in this imagined future ensure that the rich don’t even have to breathe the same air as the poor. And when they become sick, individual medical pods located at home guarantee they don’t stay sick for long – a cure for cancer is merely a button-push away.

The hero of the story (Matt Damon’s character) works in very dangerous conditions in a factory, making products for the rich on Elysium.  The parallels with nineteenth-century mill and factory workers are all too striking here.  The workers fear unemployment as it will mean the end of the little economic security they have, while managers demand an unbearable level of productivity.  If a worker is injured, he is relieved of his job immediately; no longer an asset to the factory, he is quickly disposed of to make room for someone more efficient.  Without an income and clearly desperate for money, crime is rife among the poor and the streets are teeming with the injured, ill and unemployed begging and stealing for food and shelter.  While these statements refer to the landscape of the movie, they also apply neatly to the towns of nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland.

Perhaps the most striking feature of this movie in relation to the conditions of the poor in the nineteenth century is the aspect of health and disease.  Disease only exists among the poor on Earth, spreading rapidly due to chronic over-population and cramped, unhygienic living conditions.  Health care costs mean that only the most basic level of care is available.  Meanwhile, on Elysium medical technology heals broken bones, eradicates cancerous cells and cures infections.  Every citizen of Elysium has access which effectively means that there is no sickness.  There are obvious comparisons to be made with the provision of health care to the poor in the nineteenth century.

Neill Blomkamp, writer and director, has been quoted as saying that this movie wasn’t just about the future but was a statement on what was happening today. And it is worth noting that the slums of LA in the movie were filmed in contemporary Mexico[1]. Nevertheless, Elysium borrows heavily from the past as well, and echoes urban poverty and the rich/poor divide in the 19^th Century British Isles.