Footnotes on Friday

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The fault of the poor

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Some of the rhetoric of economists who support the current financial system sounds suspiciously familiar to my history-geek’s ear, and one prime example is the British government’s reaction to the crisis in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Great Hunger, as it was known in Ireland, seemed to the British government of the day a fairly minor affair; something the poor had undoubtedly brought on themselves by their improvident dependence on a single crop.

Never mind that it was about all they had time to grow as they laboured for the wealthy, who owned all the land and decided what should be grown there. Wheat crops were harvested and exported, using Irish labour. Those labourers couldn’t afford to buy what they’d grown for their masters, but instead planted potatoes in the small patch of land around their cottages. In 1845, half the potato crop failed in Ireland, but nobody died as a result, partly as a result of government relief efforts. The views of Sir Randolph Routh, the man running the relief programme, make chilly reading when we consider what followed.

The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, lead the people to indolence and all kinds of vice, which habitual labour and a higher order of food would prevent. I think it very probable that we may derive much advantage from this present calamity.

Blame the victim, much?

In 1846, almost the entire crop failed followed by one of the coldest winters on record. The new minority government reduced its relief efforts, and made relief largely dependent on participating in useless public works: roads that went nowhere, walls that surrounded nothing.

From the beginning of 1847, the Tory government came under attack from Disraeli’s Whigs. In response, they introduced soup kitchens, the only really effective response of the entire miserable affair, watery soup being better than nothing. But summer brought the third successive year of crop failures,. The government brought in a Poor Law Act mandating workhouses, but failed to stop the export of corn.

The debates of parliament make chilling reading, as one person after another reflected on the ill effects of helping the undeserving poor, and the need for the Irish to simply make more effort. I get a strong sense of deja vu when I read these remarks in the light of more modern public debates about food, refugee, and other crises where the rich are being asked to share their resources.

That year, Oscar Wilde’s mother had this poem published:

Weary men, what reap ye?
Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?
Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?
Would to God that we were dead
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread … We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure
bask ye in the world’s caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

Despite urgent pleas from English officials and others, the government did nothing, many politicians continuing to blame the Irish poor for their own demise. In 1849, as the harvests began to recover in some parts of Ireland, in others the deaths continued. One official enquiry concluded:

Whether as regards the plain principles of humanity, or the literal text and admitted principle of the Poor Law of 1847, a neglect of public duty has occurred and has occasioned a state of things disgraceful to a civilized age and country, for which some authority ought to be held responsible, and would long since have been held responsible had these things occurred in any union in England.

The population of Ireland dropped by half in the fifty years following the start of the famine. Ireland took over a century to recover, and the descendants of those who failed to help when help was needed suffered the retribution of those scarred by the sufferings of their own ancestors. It would be nice to think that today’s politicians could learn from this and other similar tragedies, but I’m not holding my breath.

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Hydrotherapy and fashion

Buxton Crescent — built for the spa trade

I’ve been doing some research for the novella I’m writing, The Beast Next Door. It is set in the spa town of Bath, and in a nearby village, so I’ve been looking at spa towns.

Bath is possibly the best known in Regency romance writing, but it is by no means the only one.

Cheltenham was very popular in the day, especially after George III took the waters there in 1788. Royal Leamington in Warwickshire was also popular with the Georgian wealthy. In Derbyshire, Buxton was popular, its Crescent offering accommodation, shops, restaurants and assembly rooms for dancing and gossip. Tunbridge Wells in Kent was another place for the Regency belle and beau to see or be seen. (It was, purportedly, discovered in 1606 when a young nobleman with a raging hangover tasted the water and felt miraculously recovered.)

Harrowgate in North Yorkshire was famous throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and visitors often included European royalty.

Some spas didn’t really take off until the Victorian era. Charles Darwin was a fan of Great Malvern in Worcestershire. In Powys, Wales, more than 30 springs made Llandrindod Wells a popular resort, especially after the coming of the railway. In the Highlands, Strathpeffer came into its own in the 1870s.

And those are just a drop in the bucket!

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Slavery in the Cape Colony

The slave lodge in which the Dutch East India Company (VOC) kept its slaves. The lodge was built in 1679, and was used to house slaves until 1811, when the new British government converted it into government offices.

The first slaves arrived in the Cape Colony in 1658. Slavery was abolished in 1834 — in what was to become South Africa as well as in the rest of the British Empire. In between, thousands — as many as 71,000  — of people from India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Indonesia and the East African coast were brought here to work as slaves.

Their diverse origins and therefore languages, the fact that they were mostly scattered and isolated on farms in the hinterland, and the skewed gender balance (four men for every woman) meant that, unlike in other slave-owning cultures, they didn’t develop their own slave society until the nineteenth century, and then mainly in Cape Town.

Life on the isolated farms was brutal, encouraging  many to attempt escape despite the punishment that would follow if they were caught.

Slaves in the countryside ate food grown on the farms. Sometimes they also ate fish and rice. Some slave owners took advantage of the lack of legislation and gave their slaves food of a very poor quality. One visitor wrote in 1804 that: “black bread, half sand, and the offal of sheep and oxen are their general fare”. On the other hand, on some farms, slaves had small pieces of land where they grew vegetables for their own use. Domestic or house slaves usually received better food than the slaves who worked in the fields.
(https://slavery.iziko.org.za/slaveexperience)

Some did better in private ownership in Cape Town itself, as a Dutch sea captain suggests in a possibly exaggerated account written towards the end of the 18th century.

“I would reckon that a white servant in Europe does twice, or even three times more work than these ‘slaves’; but I would also be certain that, in a house where everything is well ordered, four or at most six slaves can easily do work. However, I believe that, except for the least substantial burghers, there are many houses, large and small, where ten or twelve are to be found. As they divide tasks, they are necessary. One or two have to go out each day to fetch wood, which takes all day. If the mistress leaves the house, there must be two for the sedan chair. The slave who is cook has an assistant in the kitchen. One does the dirtiest work every day . . . and two are house slaves. Many Cape women do not gladly sleep without a maid in the room, and thus one is kept for this and, better clothed than the others, also has the job of lady’s maid and carries the Psalm Book behind on visits to church. If there are children, each has a maid, although sometimes two daughters share. Small children need one to themselves. This is without one who washes and makes the beds, a seamstress and a knitter, as three or four are always kept busy that way, and I still have none for the stable.”
(C. de Jong, ‘Reizen naar de Kaap de Goede Hoop . . . 1791-1797’, 3 vols (Haarlem, 1802-3), pg. 143-4.)

On the other hand, how hard slaves worked even in the town, and how they were treated, depended entirely on the disposition of their owner. Those retained in the slave lodge either worked for the company or were hired out for labour.  They lived in terrible conditions.

The Slave Lodge was dark, wet and dirty. A subterranean stream flows under the Slave Lodge and this stream flooded the cellar of the Lodge during winter. The roof also leaked which led to hardship in the wet winter months. The slaves only received blankets after 1685. Before then, they had nothing to cover themselves against the cold. However, Höhne, the Slave Overseer, reported in 1793 that the bedding stayed wet in winter and that the slaves never had time to properly wash and clean their belongings. Statistics show that the death rate was higher during winter than in summer. The building was very dark and without adequate air circulation. There were no windows in the building, only slits in the walls with bars. Only a few of these slits faced the outside of the building. Louis Michel Thibault, the building inspector, reported in 1803 that the building was so dark inside that one needed a lantern even in the day.

Furthermore, the Lodge was very dirty. Mentzel wrote in 1785 that the stench was unbearable in the Lodge. The stench was especially bad in the vicinity of the eight toilets next to the quarters of the mentally ill. Pigs were kept in the courtyard and fattened on garden refuge to be sold to the free citizens to earn an income for the slaves.
(https://slavery.iziko.org.za/slavelodgelivingconditions)

Women faced sexual exploitation, of course. The shortage of female slaves was echoed by the shortage of women overall. From late in the seventeenth century, the VOC issued regulations forbidding relations between Europeans and female slaves. They didn’t stop European men visiting the slave lodge, however, which was known to operate as a brothel. Mulatto children and cases of men who purchased a slave’s freedom and married her suggest  no-one took the regulations very seriously.

In the book I’m writing at the moment, the British have taken over the Cape Colony for the second time (after returning it to the Dutch a few years earlier). The slave lodge has been closed, but slavery is still legal, and slaves still outnumber free people in the colony by around three to one.

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Would you like to fly in my beautiful balloon?

Balloons rise over my valley at the start of the annual Wairarapa Balloon Festival

One of my characters is currently flying over 1840s Madras in a balloon, so I’ve been reading Richard Holmes’ book Falling Upwards. Balloons, he points out, gave our ancestors their “first physical glimpse of a planetary overview”. From up above balloonists could contribute to forecasting weather, researching geology and other earth sciences, and — if only because winds are fickle — improve (or make worse) international communication.

The first successful hot air balloonist were the Montgolfier brothers. They were the children of a French paper manufacturer, and one of them was a dreamer. Joseph-Michel Montgolfier watched laundry drying over a fire, and was much taken by the way it caught the hot air and floated upwards. In 1782, he made some experiments with a small box made from wood and cloth. Success led him to approach his brother, and he and Jacques-Étienne built a larger model together.  In 1783, several experiments brought them to the attention of the King, as well as scientists and other flight enthusiasts. The first human passengers were carried October (tethered) and November (when they traveled 8 km in 25 minutes).

From the dawn of time, people had dreamed of flying. Now a lucky few could finally do so.

Frenchmen were the first hot-air balloonists, but others quickly took up the challenge. The French scored another first, though, with the first military balloon regiment, founded in 1794. The opposing armies hated them. They couldn’t do a thing without being observed from on high, so whenever the balloons came close enough, every weapon that could be mustered was fired at the basket. This, says Holmes, “made the military aeronaut’s position both peculiarly perilous and peculiarly glamorous.”

That was the beginning. Throughout the nineteenth century, aeronauts explored the limits of what was possible with a balloon, and sometimes — with dire consequence — beyond those limits. Holmes says that they came from many different walks of life, had many different approaches and interests, but all had in common a single compelling desire: they wanted to fly.

Nicolas Camille Flaummarion, one of those nineteenth century aeronauts, wrote of those early days when suggesting that the balloon was not the final answer to the desire for flight, and that some other method remained to be invented:

…already it has done for us that which no other power ever accomplished ; it has gratified the desire natural to us all to view the earth in a new aspect, and to sustain ourselves in an element hitherto the exclusive domain of birds and insects. We have been enabled to ascend among the phenomena of the heavens, and to exchange conjecture for instrumental facts, recorded at elevations exceeding the highest mountains of the earth.

Doubtless among the earliest aeronauts a disposition arose to estimate unduly the departure gained from our natural endowments, and to forget that the new faculty we had assumed, while opening the boundless regions of the atmosphere as fresh territory to explore, was subject to limitations a century of progress might do little to extend. In the time of Lunardi, a lady writing to a friend about a balloon voyage she had recently made, expresses the common feeling of that day when she says that ” the idea that I was daring enough
to push myself, as I may say, before my time, into the presence of the Deity, inclines me to a species of terror ” — an exaggerated sentiment, prompted by the admitted hazard of the enterprise (for Pilatre de Kozier had lately perished in France, precipitated to the earth by the bursting of his balloon), or dictated by an exultant and almost presumptuous sense of exaltation : for the first voyagers in the air, reminded by no visible boundary that for a few miles only above the earth can we respire, appear to have forgotten that the height to which we can ascend and live has so definite a limitation.

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Hey, shortie!

Army and Navy records give us a good idea of height (and nutrition) during the mid years of the 19th century.

Sandhurst students aged 16 to 19 were exceptionally tall compared to international standards and their own poorer compatriots. The high-nobility of Germany, sons of hereditary princes and barons, were as tall as the sons of the British gentry, but no one else was.

Even low-fee-paying Sandhurst students had a 10cm advantage over youth in the various US military establishments. Which is all the more startling, given that Americans males were, on average, the tallest men in the world — 5c to 6cm taller than the average British man. However, while the rich of Britain took the average up, the poor brought it down. And there were more poor.

The boys who joined the Marine Society and Sea Cadets, a charitable venture designed to supply men for the navy, were the shortest group in Europe and America. At 16, they averaged less than 1.5 m. The average difference between them and the Sandhurst boys of the same age was 22cm.

As a measure of the gap between rich and poor, that’s telling.

 

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Please, please, Mr Postmaster

I’ve written before about the Penny Post in the context of Christmas Cards, but I find the whole development of mail and postage in the United Kingdom interesting. For various reasons, I’ve been researching foreign mail – letters sent from the United Kingdom to overseas countries or vice versa.

In the beginning, such mail was very haphazard and unpredictable, sent by whatever ship happened to be available. We’re talking sailing ships, so too much wind and your letter could end up at the bottom of the sea; too little and it isn’t going anywhere. Other hazards included pirates and enemy ships.

Even under the best of conditions, transport was slow, relying on navigation techniques that only slowly improved over the years before the invention of the chronometer, as well as prevailing winds and ocean currents.

Sending letters overseas

A letter from England to Australia in the early years of British settlement might take eight months or a year to reach its destination, and if it required an answer, the original request is going to be at least 18 months in the past before the response arrived.

By the nineteenth century, when most of my stories are set, you had several options for sending letters from England to places overseas.

  1. You could deliver it to a post office, pay their fee, and leave it to them.
  2. You could ask a private business with overseas links to send your letter through their system.
  3. If you lived in a seaport, and if a ship in that port was heading in the right direction, you could ask the captain to take your letter for you.
  4. If you lived in London, you could go to coffee houses where ship captains met with merchants to bargain for cargoes, and — for a small fee — add your letter to a mail sack going to the right place. The coffee house would bargain with the appropriate captain.

Sending a letter from overseas

In many parts of England’s far flung empire, there was no postal system, but any ship’s captain would accept mail for ports along his route. With no regular service, the length of time before a letter arrived could not be known.

Say you were travelling to Cape Town, like the heroine of my next Redepenning novel. Mia might write a letter to her English relatives from the Canary Islands, and leave it to be sent back to England. But the next ship might be going to England via the Caribbean and then Canada, and her letter would therefore take the long way home.

From early in the 18th century, the Royal Mail had its own ships, called Packet Boats, to cover the route between England and Ireland, and England and Europe. The Royal Mail could also send mail on private ships, under the Ship Letter Act of 1799. The captains of such ships had a legal obligation to hand letters to the Postmaster at their first port of arrival in England, and were paid a small sum for doing so.

It’s a far cry from the instant gratification of email and direct messaging, but be patient, and it worked. Mostly. Eventually.

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The Georgian population boom

Throughout early modern history, Britain’s population changed at about the same speed as the rest of Europe. A really bad epidemic of the plague would drop the total numbers for a while, but on the whole there was a gradual increase, averaging less than one percent a year up until 1625, then remaining stable for 125 years, then increasing at a slow rate again to take 150 years to double.

Britain followed the pattern until the 1700s. In 1714, George 1, the first of the Hanoverians, came to rule over a country of 5.25 million. In 1760, the population had grown to 6.15 million, a healthy 17 percent at a time population growth in most of Europe was static. But the next 50 years would see a massive change. In 1815, the population was 10.25; almost double the 1714 figure. France in the same period saw a 35 percent increase, and the Dutch figures remained much the same.

Why did the population grow so fast?

Scholars give two reasons why Britain’s growth was faster than that of other nearby countries.

The first was a drop in mortality. Britain had more people because fewer of them died. From early in the eighteenth century, Britain began imposing quarantines on imports and ships sailing from places known to have the plague or other highly feared diseases. Innoculation against smallpox helped, too. People still died of typhus, cholera, and other diseases, but the number of deaths in each epidemic dropped dramatically.

The second was the age at marriage. Before the eighteenth century, the mainly agriculture-based workforce would put off getting married until they could afford a cottage and a small piece of land. Average age at marriage for women was 26 in the 17th century, and for men it was 28.  Fertility drops (on average) after 30, so not marrying until after 26 means fewer children overall.

The enclosure acts changed all that. The biggest landowners scooped up all the land, and people who would have been small-holders had to work for wages or migrate to the new jobs in city manufactories. Our working couples no longer had a reason to wait, so they married earlier and faced the challenges of finding work together. By the 19th century, the average age of marriage was 23 for women and 25 for men. (Not in the aristocracy. They married for different reasons, sometimes as young as 13 or 14.)

Since women now had a longer fertile period in marriage, and less chance of dying of disease, the number of children per couple increased.

In the next 150 years, decreasing infant and maternal mortality meant the British population doubled every 40 years, providing factory workers for industrial revolution and upsetting theorists like Malthus, who thought the upwards curve was the way things had always been, and that it would continue.

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The more things change, the more they remain the same

I came across a comparison between the risks of travelling by stage coach versus steam packets. With the recent automated car accident fresh in my mind, and having often been told how much safer air travel is than road travel, I thought I’d share it. Does any of it sound familiar?

If the number of persons who have been killed, maimed, and disfigured for life, in consequence of stage-coach mishaps, could be ascertained, since the first establishment of steam-packets in this country, and on the other hand, the number who have been similarly unfortunate by steam boilers bursting, we should find that the stage-coach proportion would be in the ration of ten to one!

A solitary “blow up” of a steam-packet is “noised and proclaimed” from the Land’s End to the other extremity of the island; while hundreds of coach-accidents, and many of them fatal, occur, which are never heard of beyond the village, near to which the casualty takes place, or the neighbouring ale-house.

These affairs it is to the interest of the proprietors to “hush up,” by means of a gratuity to the injured, rather than have their property ruined by an exposure in a court of justice. Should a poor man have a leg or an arm broken, through the carelessness of a drunken coachman, his poverty prevents his having recourse to law.

Justice, in these cases, nine times in ten, is entirely out of the question, and an arrangement, between him and the proprietors, is easily effected; the unfortunate fellow, rather receiving fifty or a hundred pounds “hush money” than bring his action, when, perhaps from some technical informality in the proceedings (should he find a lawyer willing to act for him, being poor), he would be nonsuited, with all the costs of both parties on his own shoulders, and be, moreover, ruined for ever, in both purse and person.

 

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Nurturing a physical connection to history

A few weeks ago, Caroline Warfield and I, and our husbands, revisited the Buried Village, the location of Forged in Fire, my story in last year’s Bluestocking Belles’ anthology. Long ago, it was Te Wairoa, a thriving farming community set up by an enthusiastic

missionary. When Spencer set up his ideal community in 1852, he divided each allotment by fencing, and he used poplar poles, as his posts, pounded into the ground.

Later, after European farming methods depleted the soil, the Maori inhabitants found a more lucrative crop than wheat: tourists. Te Wairoa was the starting point for a visit to the Pink and White Terraces, acres of thermal ponds cascading down hillsides above a lake that could be reached only by a boat journey across Lake Tarawera.

That all ended on the night of the Tarawera eruption. By the end of the four-hour eruption, the Pink and White terraces were gone, and six villages around Lake Tarawera were wiped off the face of the earth with all their inhabitants. Te Wairoa, slightly sheltered behind a hill,  was still buried 1.5 metres deep in volcanic ash, and survivors needed to dig themselves, or be dug, out.

Over the next 126 years, those buried fence posts grew into magnificent 40 foot poplar trees. In 2010, however, they began to fall. The owners decided they were a health risk, and removed them all.

When we visited last year, we were impressed to see the mighty trunks sprouting again, and this year, we asked if we could take cuttings.

They’re on the shady side of our house: nine small cuttings in pots we are keeping damp, as poplars prefer. I hope one or more grows, a clone of the tree that was initially cut to make fence posts, that survived a volcanic eruption, that grew to shelter an archaeological dig, that was cut down when its size and age made it unsafe, and that grew again. Life is resilient.

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Horse racing in Georgian England

Writing stories set more than a hundred and fifty years ago, especially stories with characters who have a penny or two, means writing about horses — if only to mention them in passing. Many of my books include journeys, so ‘in passing’ has meant researching carriage and riding horses, including how they were bred and stabled. Along the way, I somehow managed to end up with at least two heroes who were horse breeders: almost the only ‘trade’ a gentleman could engage in without attracting social censure.

This week, I went a step further, when a subscriber-only story for my newsletter turned out to be about the heiress to a racing stud, whose marital fate will be decided by a horse race.

But what kind of horse race in the years just after Waterloo? What were the rules? How long was the course likely to be? Even, as it turned out, what might a villain slip to a horse to prevent it from running, and what symptoms of poisoning would the horse show? (Probably night shade, my vet and author friend Lizzi Tremayne and I decided.)

Here are some of the sources I consulted when writing The Fifth Race, which will be available in the newsletter I send tomorrow.

18th Century foundation of the Jockey Club, and silk colours by owner

Going to the races

Horse racing on the Georgian index

Regina Jeffers on Thoroughbred Horse Racing

Training the 18th century racehorse