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The mystery of the five wounds

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On September 14, 1224, a Saturday, Francis of Assisi—noted ascetic and holy man, future saint—was preparing to enter the second month of a retreat with a few close companions on Monte La Verna, overlooking the River Arno in Tuscany. Francis had spent the previous few weeks in prolonged contemplation of the suffering Jesus Christ on [...]

The great tea race

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Captain John Keay, master of the crack new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866—560 tons of first and second pickings, freighted at the high price of [...]

The Christmas Truce

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Even at the distance of a century, no war seems more terrible than World War I. In the four years between 1914 and 1918, it killed or wounded more than 25 million people–peculiarly horribly, and (in popular opinion, at least) for less apparent purpose than did any other war before or since. Yet there were [...]

The most terrible tunnel

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At the beginning of the 19th century, the port of London was the busiest in the world. Cargoes that had traveled thousands of miles, and survived all the hazards of the sea, piled up on the wharves of Rotherhithe—only for their owners to discover that the slowest, most frustrating portion of their journey often lay ahead [...]

The Monster of Glamis

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“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.” That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish [...]

The mysterious Mr. Zedzed, the wickedest man in the world

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Late in November 1927, an elderly Greek man sat in his mansion in Paris and tended a fire. Every time it flickered and threatened to die, he reached to one side and tossed another bundle of papers or a leather-bound book into the grate. For two days the old man fed the flames, at one [...]

On heroic self-sacrifice

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No nation is short of monuments to its heroes. From the Lincoln Memorial and Nelson’s Column to the infamous gold-plated statue of Turkmenbashi—which until its recent demolition sat atop a 250-foot-high rotisserie in Turkmenistan and rotated throughout the day to face the sun—statesmen and military leaders can generally depend upon their grateful nations to immortalize [...]

Closing the Pigeon Gap

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At midnight on November 12, 1870, two French balloons, inflated with highly flammable coal gas and manned by desperate volunteers, took off from a site in Monmartre, the highest point in Paris. The balloons rose from a city besieged—the Franco-Prussian War had left Paris isolated, and the city had been hastily encircled by the Prussian [...]

Run out of town on an ass: how Queen Victoria (allegedly) struck Bolivia off the map

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To be one of Queen Victoria’s ambassadors in the middle of the 19th century, when British power was at its height, was to be something close to a king—in parts of the world, close to a god. Backed by the full might of the Royal Navy, which ruled unchallenged over the Seven Seas, solitary Englishmen [...]

The worst job there has ever been

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Life in a nineteenth century city could be blissful… if you were one of the Victorian era’s 1%. For the great majority, though, it involved little that would be familiar to readers of Austin, Trollope or even Hardy. You need to turn to Dickens to get the full flavour of a life struggling for a [...]

Fishmonger’s Hall: How William Crockford beggared the British aristocracy

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William Crockford—identified here as “Crockford the Shark”—sketched by the great British caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson in about 1825. Rowlandson, himself an inveterate gambler who blew his way through a $10.5 million family fortune, knew the former fishmonger before he opened the club that would make his name.

William Crockford—identified here as “Crockford the Shark”—sketched by the great British caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson in about 1825. Rowlandson, himself an inveterate gambler who blew his way through a $10.5 million family fortune, knew the former fishmonger before he opened the club that would make his name.

The great majority of the club’s members were serious, indeed inveterate, gamblers. The equivalent of about $40 million is believed to have changed hands over Crockford’s first two seasons; Lord Rivers once lost £23,000 ($3 million) in a single evening, and the Earl of Sefton, a wastrel of whom the diarist Charles Greville observed that “his natural parts were excessively lively, but his education had been wholly neglected,” lost about £250,000 (almost $33 million today) over a period of years. He died owing more than $5 million more, a debt that his son felt obliged to discharge.

The redistribution of wealth, it seems safe to say, is vital to any functioning economy. Historians can point to plenty of examples of the disasters that follow whenever some privileged elite decides to seal itself off from the hoi-polloi and pull up the ladder that its members used to clamber to the top of the money tree. And while there always will be argument as to how that redistribution should occur (whether compulsorily, via high taxation and a state safety net, or voluntarily, via the hotly debated “trickle-down effect”), it can be acknowledged that whenever large quantities of surplus loot have been accumulated, the sniff of wealth tends to create fascinating history—and produce some remarkable characters as well.

Take William Crockford, who began his career as a London fishmonger and ended it, half a century later, as perhaps the wealthiest self-made man in England. Crockford managed this feat thanks to one extraordinary talent—an unmatched skill for gambling—and one simple piece of good fortune: to be alive early in the 19th century, when peace had returned to Europe after four decades of war and a generation of bored young aristocrats, who a few years earlier would have been gainfully employed in fighting Napoleon, found themselves with far too much time on their hands.

This week’s Smithsonian essay looks at the history of Crockford’s Club – probably the most exclusive, most opulent and most deadly means ever devised to part rich and stupid men from their money. It’s still not certain quite how much money the former fishmonger earned from his gambling hell over the 16 years of the club’s life, but the club’s chronicler was in no doubt that the total was colossal.

“One may safely say, without exaggeration,” concluded Gronow, who really ought to have known, “that Crockford won the whole of the ready money of the then existing generation.”


The crucifixion of Prince Klaas: Antigua’s disputed slave rebellion of 1736

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Prince Klaas, leader of the supposed slave rebellion on Antigua, on the wheel.

Prince Klaas, leader of the supposed slave rebellion on Antigua, on the wheel.

Not every slave shipped to the New World from Africa ended up in the Deep South of the United States. In fact, well over 95% of those who made the journey found themselves in the Caribbean or Brazil, where most were set to doing hard labour on sugar plantations. Conditions were brutal; the Caribbean islands in particular were riddled with disease, and mortality rates were vastly higher there than they were in the US.

This week’s Smithsonian essay takes a look at slavery on the British island of Antigua – and at one slave who decided to do something about it. It’s the vexed tale of inhuman cruelty, of the foundation stone of Britain’s wealth – and of a strange rebellion that bore more than a passing resemblance to the infamous Gunpowder Plot, and which may or may not have had much basis in reality.


“My little soldier”

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The funeral of James Idle in the village of Hullavington, on August 29, 1914.

Picture the British countryside and the chances are that you are picturing the unmatched beauty of the Cotswolds, in England’s green heart, west of London. Picture the Cotswolds, and you have in your mind’s eye a place like Hullavington: a handful of cottages, some thatched, but all clustered around a village green, a duck pond and a church. The latter will most likely be ancient, 600 or 700 years old, and its graveyard will be filled with generation after generation of villagers, the same family names carved on tombstones that echo down the centuries even as they weather into slabs of rock.

Visit the church at Hullavington, though, and your eye will soon be drawn to one century-old grave, placed against a bank of ivy and remarkable not merely for its pristine whiteness, but also for the identity of the young man buried there. James Idle, who died a couple of miles away late in August 1914, was a soldier who had no family or friends in the village; indeed, in all likelihood he’d never even been there when he was killed guarding a railway in the very first month of the First World War. But Idle’s funeral—held a few days later in the presence of a handful of men from his regiment and a gaggle of respectful villagers—inspired a remarkable response in one girl who witnessed it. Marjorie Dolman was only 9 years old when she watched the soldier being carried to his grave; she is probably among the village girls pictured in the contemporary postcard shown above. Yet something about the funeral touched her so deeply that, from then until almost the end of her life (and she died at age 99), she made it her unbidden duty to lay fresh flowers daily on Private Idle’s grave.

You can read more about this poignant story in Past Imperfect – this week’s post is up on the site now.


The secret plot to rescue Napoleon by submarine

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Tom Johnson, the famous smuggler, adventurer, and inventor of submarines, sketched in 1834 for the publication of Scenes and Stories by a Clergyman in Debt.

Tom Johnson, the famous smuggler, adventurer, and inventor of submarines, sketched in 1834 for the publication of Scenes and Stories by a Clergyman in Debt.

Napoleon Bonaparte caused so much damage – and roused so much fear – during his extraordinary career that only the most extreme of measures were considered sufficient when he was finally captured. Exile to St Helena, in the South Atlantic–in those days the remotest inhabited island in the world–was intended to put an end to the threat he posed to Europe’s ruling elites. Yet even the emperor’s incarceration at Longwood House was not quite the end of his remarkable story, for a whole series of more or less fantastical plots were hatched by Bonapartist loyalists to rescue his from his island fastness.

These madcap schemes, which included efforts to obtain Napoleon’s liberty by fast yacht, new-fangled steamboat, and even by balloon, never amounted to much, but among them is a still more bizarre story that turns out to have its foundations in remarkable fact. in 1820, Tom Johnson, one of the most famous and romantic criminals of his day – a notorious smuggler and prison-breaker who had earned a richly-deserved reputation for extreme daring – claimed to have been offered £40,000 (about $3 million now) to rescue the emperor from St Helena. And he came up with a scheme to do it… one that involved the use of submarines eight decades before the invention of the first practical underwater boats.

The story has lodged firmly in the margins of history, dismissed by the few who heard of it as nothing but a fantasy. This week’s Smithsonian essay explores it – and finds archival evidence to suggest that Johnson’s elaborate plot was a good deal more real than has ever been acknowledged.


The blood eagle

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Vikings as portrayed in a 19th-century source: fearsome warriors and sea raiders.

Vikings as portrayed in a 19th-century source: fearsome warriors and sea raiders.

Things not to do when you travel in time. No.238: don’t kill a Viking, then let yourself get captured by his vengeful son. The result is unlikely to be pleasant; in fact, according to a number of histories, it would probably involve your own gory sacrifice to Odin in an unpleasant and agonising rite known as “the blood eagle.”

Turn aside now if you’re reading this while eating.

At its most elaborate, sketched by Sharon Turner in the History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799) or J.M. Lappenberg in his History of England Under the Anglo-Saxon Kings (1834), the ritual involved several distinct stages. First the intended victim would be restrained, face down; next, the shape of an eagle with outstretched wings would be cut into his back. After that, his ribs would be hacked from his spine with an ax, one by one, and the bones and skin on both sides pulled outward to create a pair of “wings” from the man’s back. The victim, it is said, would still be alive at this point to experience the agony of what Turner terms “saline stimulant”—having salt rubbed, quite literally, into his vast wound. After that, his exposed lungs would be pulled out of his body and spread over his “wings,” offering witnesses the sight of a final bird-like “fluttering” as he died.

Famous victims of the blood eagle are supposed to have included Ælla, king of Northumbria, Halfdán Long-legs, and Maelgualai, King of Munster. But, as this week’s Smithsonian essay points out, historians remain divided as to whether it was a real ritual–or a violent sort of historic libel. Weigh the evidence for yourself, then decide.


Friedrich Engels’ Irish muse

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Friedrich Engels lived a life replete with contradiction. He was a Prussian communist, a keen fox-hunter who despised the landed gentry, and a mill owner whose greatest ambition was to lead the revolution of the working class. As a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, he provided, for nearly 40 years, the financial support that kept his collaborator Karl Marx at work on world-changing books such as Das Kapital. Yet at least one biographer has argued that while they were eager enough to take Engels’s money, Marx and his aristocratic wife, Jenny von Westphalen, never really accepted him as their social equal.

Amid these oddities lurks another—a puzzle whose solution offers fresh insights into the life and thinking of the midwife of Marxism. The mystery is this: Why did Engels, sent in 1842 to work in the English industrial city of Manchester, choose to lead a double life, maintaining gentleman’s lodgings in one part of the city while renting a series of rooms in workers’ districts? How did this well-groomed scion of privilege contrive to travel safely through Manchester’s noisome slums, collecting information about their inhabitants’ grim lives for his first great work, The Condition of the Working Class in England? Strangest of all, why—when asked many years later about his favorite meal—would a native German like Engels answer: “Irish stew”?

This week’s essay takes a look at the early life of the midwife of Marxism – and finds Engels adrift in early industrial Manchester. There he met and fell for an illiterate but fiery Irish girl named Mary Burns. And it was she, this slice of recovered history suggests, who helped introduce him to the local slums and to life as lived by working people – encounters that helped shape the great communist’s radical career.

Read more at Past Imperfect now .

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Stoney Jack and the Cheapside Hoard

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Maverick archaeologist George Fabian Lawrence – better known as Stoney Jack, the navvies' friend. Think Raiders of the Lost Ark. Only without Nazis. And in Wandsworth.

Maverick archaeologist George Fabian Lawrence– better known as Stoney Jack, the navvies’ friend. Think Raiders of the Lost Ark. Only without Nazis. And in Wandsworth.

It was only a small shop in an unfashionable part of London, but it had a most peculiar clientele. From Mondays to Fridays the place stayed locked, and its only visitors were schoolboys who came to gaze through the windows at the marvels crammed inside. But on Saturday afternoons the shop was opened by its owner—a “genial frog” of a man, as one acquaintance called him, small, pouched, wheezy, permanently smiling and with the habit of puffing out his cheeks when he talked. Settling himself behind the counter, the shopkeeper would light a cheap cigar and then wait patiently for laborers to bring him treasure. He waited at the counter many years—from roughly 1895 until his death in 1939—and in that time accumulated such a hoard of valuables that he supplied the museums of London with more than 15,000 ancient artifacts and still had plenty left to stock his premises at 7 West Hill, Wandsworth.

“It is,” the journalist H.V. Morton assured his readers in 1928,

perhaps the strangest shop in London. The shop sign over the door is a weather-worn Ka-figure from an Egyptian tomb, now split and worn by the winds of nearly forty winters. The windows are full of an astonishing jumble of objects. Every historic period rubs shoulders in them. Ancient Egyptian bowls lie next to Japanese sword guards and Elizabethan pots contain Saxon brooches, flint arrowheads or Roman coins…

There are lengths of mummy cloth, blue mummy beads, a perfectly preserved Roman leather sandal found twenty feet beneath a London pavement, and a shrunken black object like a bird’s claw that is a mummified hand… [and] all the objects are genuine and priced at a few shillings each.

This week’s Smithsonian essay takes a close look at one of the most controversial figures in British archaeology. Antiquary or academic? Hero or villain? But then, why choose? For me, Stoney Jack Lawrence was all four.


The last secret of the H.L. Hunley

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Submarine inventor James R. McClintock as he looked in the later 1870s, from a carte de visite photographed in New Albany. McClintock was living in the Illinois town when he journeyed to Boston in February 1879–apparently to meet his end there.

James R. McClintock, the inventor of the H.L. Hunley, shortly before journeying to Boston in February 1879–apparently to meet his end there. Image: Naval Historical Center.

At a quarter to nine on the evening of February 17, 1864, Officer of the Deck John Crosby glanced over the side of the Federal sloop-of-war Housatonic and across the glassy waters of a calm Atlantic. His ship was on active duty, blockading the rebel port of Charleston from an anchorage five miles off the coast, and there was always the risk of a surprise attack by some Confederate small craft. But what Crosby saw that night, by a wintry moon that barely illuminated the dark ocean, was a sight so strange that he was not at first quite certain what it was. “Something on the water,” he recalled it to a court of enquiry a week later, “which at first looked to me like a porpoise, coming to the surface to blow.”

Crosby told the Housatonic‘s quartermaster of the object, but it had already disappeared–and when, a moment later, he saw it again, it was too close to the sloop for there to be time to slip the anchor. The Housatonic‘s crew scrambled to their action stations just in time to witness a substantial explosion on their starboard side. Fatally holed, their ship sank in a few minutes, taking five members of her crew with her.

It was not clear until some time later that the Housatonic had been the first victims of a new weapon of war. The ship–all 1,240 tons of her–had been sunk by the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley: 40 feet of hammered iron, hand-cranked by a suicidally brave crew of eight men, and armed with a 90-pound gunpowder charge mounted on a spar that jutted, as things turned out, not nearly far enough from her knife-slim bow.

The story of the Housatonic and the Hunley, and of the Hunley‘s own sinking soon after her brief moment of glory, of her rediscovery in 1995 and her eventual salvage in 2000, has been told many times. We know a good deal now about how the submarine came to be built–of the construction of two prototypes, and how the Hunley herself was riveted together at Mobile–not to mention the design defects and the human errors that drowned two earlier Hunley crews, 13 men in all. We also know a little of the men who did the actual work: James McClintock and Baxter Watson, two talented mechanics who were running a steam gauge business in New Orleans when the war broke out. We even have a shrewd idea of the division of labor between the two men, for Watson’s son once confided that while his father had built the Hunley, it was McClintock who designed her. Of the three men responsible for the Hunley, then, it was probably James McClintock who played the most important role–and, as thing turn out, it is McClintock who also has by far the strangest tale to tell.

The sinking of the Housatonic. Contemporary sketch by–probably–the artist William Ward. Image: Library of Congress.

The sinking of the Housatonic. Contemporary sketch by–probably–the artist William Ward. Image: Library of Congress.

The central mystery of McClintock’s life, in fact, involves his death in 1879. We know what is supposed to have happened to him in that year, for his own grandson, Henry Loughmiller, writing to the early Hunley researcher Eustace Williams sometime prior to 1958, baldly stated: “He was killed at the age of 50 in Boston Harbor when he was experimenting with his newly invented submarine mine.” Loughmiller’s account has been picked up and accepted by every one of the dozens of authors who have written about Confederate submarines in the half century since then. Yet fresh research suggests that each part of his sentence can be challenged. Those who met McClintock in 1879 thought him much closer to 60 years old than 50; the explosion that supposedly claimed his life took place outside the confines of Boston Harbor; and, strangest of all, the evidence that McClintock was actually killed by it is remarkably flimsy. Many people heard the explosion, but not a single person actually witnessed it. There was no corpse. There was no inquest. Not so much as a shred of mangled flesh was ever recovered from the water. And 16 months later, in November 1880, a man who said his name was James McClintock walked into the British consulate in Philadelphia to tell a most outlandish tale and offer his services to Queen Victoria as a secret agent.

James McClintock's invention, the submarine H.L. Hunley, on a jetty at Mobile. Only a few weeks earlier, the submarine had sunk during a trial, killing all eight members of her crew.

James McClintock’s invention, the submarine H.L. Hunley, on a jetty at Mobile in the fall of 1863. Only a few weeks earlier, the submarine had sunk during a trial, killing all eight members of her crew.

The events that led McClintock to Boston in the winter of 1879 had their beginnings not in a besieged Charleston but in a boyhood spent navigating the great rivers of the American interior. Census records confirm that the submarine inventor was born in Ohio, and family tradition suggests that he grew up in Cincinnati and left home at an early age to join the crew of one of the great riverboats that plied the Mississippi, acquiring sufficient experience and skill to become “the youngest steamship captain on the river” in the years before the outbreak of the Civil War. At some point, McClintock also began to show talent as an engineer and inventor. Caught in New Orleans by the war, he and his partner Baxter Watson drew up the plans for a new machine for making Minié balls, the rifled musket bullets used by both sides throughout the conflict. According to the New Orleans Bee, the two men boasted that their invention would cost only $2,00 or $3,000 to make, and “with it two men can turn out a thousand balls per hour, or with steam power it makes eight or ten thousand per hour. This one machine, worked night and day, could turn out 1,200,000 balls every week, more than enough to supply the Confederate armies in the most desperate and extended war possible.”

The Minié ball machine was never made–an indication, probably, that its real worth had been thoroughly exaggerated. But it served as a calling card, and must have helped to persuade Hunley to assemble a consortium that invested somewhere north of $30,000 in McClintock’s submarines. Reading between the lines of Civil War accounts, it seems likely that it was the desire to recover this investment, as much as patriotic fervour, that persuaded the boats’ owners to persevere in the face of repeated disaster: at least three sinkings, reported stiflings and near-stiflings, and even the death of Horace Hunley himself, who, having fatally dived to the bottom during trials at Charleston in October 1863, was recovered from his salvaged submarine three weeks later–”a spectacle,” one contemporary report related,

indescribably ghastly; the unfortunate men were contorted into all kinds of horrible attitudes, some clutching candles, evidently attempting to force open the manholes; others lying in the bottom, tightly grappled together, and the blackened faces of all presented the expression of their despair and agony.

New Albany, Indiana, in the middle of the 19th century. The township stood on the north bank of the Ohio river, which during the Civil War marked the border between Union and Confederate territory.

New Albany, Indiana, in the middle of the 19th century. The township stood on the north bank of the Ohio river, which during the Civil War marked the border between Union and Confederate territory.

Of all the men known to have boarded the Hunley, indeed, only about half a dozen escaped death in her iron belly–yet McClintock himself survived the war, and one of the keys to understanding the events of 1879 is to establish why he did so. It was not, apparently, because he declined to take the risk of diving in his own submarines; he conducted most of the preliminary experiments himself, and never hesitated to put himself in a position of danger. Rather, the inventor claimed, his own skill and caution kept him alive while others died in his inventions. When, in the fall of 1872, McClintock traveled to Canada in an attempt to sell his submarine designs to the Royal Navy, the officers who interviewed him proclaimed themselves “strongly impressed with the intelligence of Mr McClintock, and with his knowledge on all points, chemical and mechanical, connected with torpedoes and submarine vessels.”

The circumstances that led McClintock to Boston are only hazily known. By 1879 he was living in New Albany, on the Ohio River at the southern tip of Indiana, where his occupation was recorded as “salesman.” This suggests that a considerable reversal of fortune had occurred to him since 1872, when he had been the moderately prosperous owner-operator of a dredge boat on Mobile Bay. He was also married and the father of three teenage daughters, and the evidence of 1872 suggests that he was keen to leverage his expertise in building secret weapons to make a fortune in the shady private armaments market. By 1877, certainly, he had established contact with two other men who shared these views–George Holgate, a Philadelphian then just setting out on what would become an infamous career as a free-lance bomb-maker, and the mysterious J.C. Wingard, who was by profession a New Orleans river pilot and who had worked with McClintock in Mobile during the war.

The Clerkenwell explosion, on December 13, 1867, was part of an attempt to rescue several Irish republicans from a London jail. Four people died and 68 more were injured, and in the resulting hysteria 50,000 Britons volunteered as police auxiliaries and six Irishmen were tried for murder.

The Clerkenwell explosion, on December 13, 1867–part of an attempt to rescue several Irish republicans from a London jail–focused British attention on bomb-makers.

Both these men, it is fair to say, were extraordinary characters. Holgate, who seems to have been born in lowland Scotland, was the prolific inventor of an alarming collection of elaborate explosive devices which he hawked indiscriminately to all comers–Irish freedom fighters, Cuban patriots and Russian nihilists. Wingard was even more remarkable. When an early sideline as a prominent medium was disrupted by the Civil War, he too turned to invention, re-emerging in New Orleans in 1876 as the proprietor of a death ray that he claimed was powerful enough to annihilate enemy ships across several miles of open water.

It is worth pausing here to look in greater detail at the two chancers with whom McClintock chose to associate himself. Holgate was a would-be criminal mastermind who would, within a year or two, delight in giving interviews in which he trumpeted his lack of principles. “I no more ask a man,” he informed one newspaper reporter who had enquired about his customers, “whether he proposes to blow up a Czar or set fire to a palace… than a gunsmith asks his customers whether they are about to commit a murder.” His past was murky. He claimed to be the former proprietor of a London paint shop which had actually been a front for a bomb-making business, though there is no trace of any such activities in a British press that became obsessed with bombers when the Irish Republican Brotherhood–a precursor to the IRA–began using them in London from 1867.

By the early 1870s, in any case, Holgate was certainly living in the United States, where he pitched up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, purchasing a gun shop and touting a highly dubious invention which, he boasted, used injections of ozone to keep fruit, vegetables and even beef fresh for weeks. He was, the local Northwestern newspaper would recall, a “blatherskite” and “blowhard… one of those wild erratic individuals who now-a-days are gaining such cheap notoriety by cheap means.” But he was also–potentially, at least–a very dangerous man. The wares that he touted, Ann Larabee records, included a good deal more than mere conventional explosives:

a cheap hand grenade, a bomb concealed in a satchel that had a fuse running through its keyhole, and a hat bomb comprised of dynamite pressed between two sheets of brass sewn into the crown with a fuse running around the rim. His “Little Exterminator” operated through a delicate watch mechanism that moved a tiny saw, releasing a chemical that smelled like cayenne pepper, killing anyone within one hundred feet.

The Tennessee preacher Jesse B. Ferguson witnessed the mediumistic performances of James Wingard–and was convinced of their veracity.

The Tennessee preacher Jesse Babcock Ferguson witnessed Wingard’s mediumistic performances–and was convinced of their veracity.

James Wingard had enjoyed, if anything, an even more peculiar career. In common with most of the men who earned their living on the Mississippi, “Captain” Wingard was almost entirely uneducated–”a plain, simple, straightforward man,” Emma Hardinge wrote in 1870. He exhibited, nonetheless, extraordinary talents as a medium. The great spiritualism craze, which had burst on the United States late in the 1840s, quickly developed its own specialisms, and Wingard became renowned as early as 1853 as a faith healer and for the “spirit drawings” that he produced in darkened seance rooms “on paper which had previously been examined and found not to contain any marks.” His most remarkable performances, however, involved the production of automatic writing, messages that were supposedly produced by spirits that had taken control of a medium’s body, though in Wingard’s case the performance would have been acclaimed had it been performed on stage. According to Thomas Low Nichols, the revivalist preacher Jesse Babcock Ferguson swore that he had seen Wingard “write with both hands at the same time, holding a pen in each hand, sentences in different languages, of which he was entirely ignorant. He saw him, as did many other persons of undoubted credibility, write sentences in French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic.”

The Civil War found Wingard in New Orleans, and changed him. Just as the crisis had turned James McClintock’s interests towards bullets, it focused Wingard’s thoughts on an early sort of machine gun. This device was never built, but like the Minié ball machine it was extravagantly promoted. Wingard claimed that weapons made to his design would be capable of discharging bullets at the rate of 192 a minute “at a range as great as any gun then in use.”

Wingard's "Nameless Force" makes the press. An advertisement placed by the inventor in the New Orleans Times-Picayune of May 7, 1876.

Wingard’s “Nameless Force” makes the press. An advertisement placed by the inventor in the the New Orleans Times-Picayune of May 7, 1876.

What makes all this noteworthy is that Wingard’s interest in mechanical death-dealers persisted after the war, and early in 1876 he reappeared in New Orleans touting a still more remarkable invention. Now calling himself “Professor” Wingard, he claimed to have invented an astonishing new weapon capable of  annihilating enemy warships at a distance of anything up to five miles. The manner in which this destruction was to be effected was left vague, though Wingard went so far as to explain that his weapon utilised electricity, which in the 1870s was for many still mysterious; it seemed not at all impossible that it might be able to destroy targets–as Wingard claimed– so utterly that it would “leave no trace of them in their former shape.” But there was more to the supposed invention than this, for in the advertisements that he placed in the New Orleans press, and the interviews that he gave to journalists, Wingard spoke  of a “Nameless Force” which in some mysterious way transmitted electrical power across water and focused it upon its target. The Nameless Force, he confidently promised, was destined to become “a factor controlling the destinies of a nation.”

The result of all this public relations work was a tremendous interest in Wingard’s invention that somehow survived two unsuccessful efforts to demonstrate the Nameless Force on Lake Pontchartrain. Chastened by his double failure, Wingard decided not to invite the New Orleans public to witness a third attempt on June 1, 1876, but a “committee of gentlemen” was present when, at 2.35pm, the Professor discharged the weapon from a small skiff. It was aimed at an old wooden schooner, the Augusta, which had been anchored about two miles away, off a popular amusement park on the southern shore known as the Spanish Fort.

The Spanish Fort amusement park on Lake Pontchartrain was the spot chosen by "Professor" Wingard for a public demonstration of his Nameless Force.

The Spanish Fort amusement park on Lake Pontchartrain was the spot chosen by “Professor” Wingard for a public demonstration of his Nameless Force.

This time, it seemed, the Nameless Force took effect, and the Augusta “suddenly blew up” about 90 seconds after Wingard’s invention was discharged. When the witnesses reached what remained of the vessel, they found her “shattered in small fragments,” and it seemed somehow all the more impressive that Wingard “could not receive the congratulations of his friends” as he had somehow sustained bad burns to one hand in the course of the operation.

From our perspective, the most important outcome of the demonstration was not Wingard’s brief lionization in New Orleans, but a deflating coda reported by the Galveston Daily News a few days later. According to that paper, “a delegation of newsboys, who happened to be in the vicinity, with a spirit of scientific research… visited the schooner despite repeated warnings to keep away, and reported that they found a large gas pipe filled with powder, and a wire leading towards [the skiff] that was anchored some distance away.” The entire demonstration, in short, had been a fraud; the only “force” involved, the News concluded, was a quantity of gunpowder concealed beneath the Augusta’s decks, and a long wire, “tightened by means of a windlass on the skiff,” which triggered the detonation of the explosives. This discovery dented Wingard’s reputation, and he seems not to have been heard from again until he unexpectedly appeared in Boston late in 1879.

What happened to the trio of would-be death-dealers that October can be established from local newspaper reports. These show that the men appeared in Boston in the first days of the month, that they had chartered the steamboat Edith, and that on October 13 they hired a second boat, the yacht Ianthe, with a rowboat as tender, from a local firm named Hutchins & Prior. Hutchins supplied a Nantucket man, Edward Swain, as crew, and on that same afternoon Swain sailed Ianthe to a spot off Point Shirley, to the east of Boston Harbor. It is at this point that accounts become confused, but the most considered and most detailed state that Wingard had taken command of the steamer and was towing an old hulk, which was to be used as a target. Holgate had been due to join Swain in the tender, but complained of seasickness and retired into Ianthe‘s deckhouse to lie down, so McClintock took his place, carrying with him a “torpedo” – mine – packed with 35 pounds of dynamite, which (the Boston Daily Advertiser reported) he had boasted was powerful enough to “blow up any fleet in the world.”

Boston and its harbor in 1877.

Boston and its harbor in 1877.

Shortly thereafter, with the tender about a mile from the Ianthe and two miles from the Edith, there was an ear-shattering explosion. Wingard, speaking to the Advertiser, claimed that he had been “looking the other way” at the fatal moment, but turned in time to see a column of spray and debris rising high into the air. Holgate, who said he had been lying in his bunk, likewise missed the explosion, but when the Ianthe and the Edith converged on the spot there was no trace of McClintock or Swain; all they could see floating on the surface was a mass of splinters.

Neither Holgate nor Wingard seem to have been at all anxious to make comments to the press, and both men quickly left Boston – Holgate after securing McClintock’s possessions from his hotel bedroom and without reporting the incident to the police: “He had a horror of recounting the event,” the Philadelphia Times explained after interviewing the old bomb-maker two decades later, “and so he said: ‘There can’t be an inquest unless there is a body to hold it upon, and there is not even a scrap left of my unfortunate companions.’” Indeed, perhaps because neither of the victims was Bostonian, the authorities seem to have taken remarkably little interest in what had happened. I have found no trace that there was ever any real investigation, nor even much curiosity as to why a trio of civilians were experimenting with such a powerful explosive charge.

A Harvey towing torpedo – one of a new generation of weapons being developed in the 1870s. According to George Holgate's version of events, McClintock's fatal "torpedo" was a device of this type.

A Harvey towing torpedo – one of a new generation of weapons being developed in the 1870s. According to George Holgate’s version of events, McClintock’s fatal “torpedo” was a device of this type.

Thus far, the account found in contemporary reports contains nothing to contradict Henry Loughmiller’s belief that his grandfather died that day in Boston. Read carefully, however, the surviving accounts do contain some odd pieces of testimony that simply do not mesh with the tales that Holgate and Wingard recounted. The Daily Globe, for instance, reported that Holgate’s involvement in the tragedy had been considerably greater than he was willing to admit; the “torpedo” was electric, the Globe explained, and the explosion had occurred when Holgate somehow set the charge off remotely. Strangest of all was a note in the same paper stating that a reliable witness–a hunter out shooting at Ocean Spray–had seen McClintock’s rowboat still afloat after the explosion, “so that the men, he thinks, could not have been blown to pieces.”

Nothing came of any of this at the time. Holgate hastened to New York, and then home to Philadelphia, wiring McClintock’s family–so he said–to tell them of the awful accident. Wingate vanished. Boston’s harbor police dropped the half-hearted enquiries they had made, and nothing more was heard from any of the participants for more than a year.

A good deal did happen in the interim, however, and perhaps the most significant of these developments took place in New York, where an ambitious splinter group from an Irish secret society known as the Clan na Gael had begun to plan a large-scale terrorist campaign on the mainland of Britain–the first, in fact, that there had ever been there. Led by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, an Irish journalist who had been elected “Head Centre” of the entire Fenian movement in the USA, it began raising funds and looking for ways to manufacture bombs and smuggle them across the Atlantic.

Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa–loudmouth, Irish freedom-fighter and would-be mastermind of Irish republicanism's first major British mainland bomb campaign.

Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa–blowhard, Irish freedom fighter, and would-be mastermind of Irish republicanism’s first major British mainland bomb campaign.

O’Donovan Rossa and his associates were nothing if not ambitious–they raised $43,000 [just over $1 million today] with the aim of spreading “terror, conflagration, and irretrievable destruction” the length and breadth of England, and even established a “Dynamite School” in Brooklyn to teach recruits how to make, conceal and use their bombs. But the loose-lipped Rossa was also enduringly indiscreet about their plans, and by the fall of 1880–a year after the explosion in Boston, but months before their terror campaign was due to begin–British diplomats in the United States were already at a state of high alert, and desperately seeking information about how exactly Rossa planned to spend his money.

It was against this background that Robert Clipperton, the British consul at Philadelphia, received an unexpected visitor in October 1880. This man introduced himself as James McClintock, explained that he had a background in submarine and mine warfare–and revealed that he had been hired by Rossa’s Skirmishing Fund to build 15 examples of a new sort of torpedo so powerful, he boasted, that a single weapon filled with 35 pounds of explosives “could sink an ironclad if exploded under her bottom, and could be carried in a great-coat pocket.”

The Philadelphia McClintock’s purpose in calling on Clipperton was to offer his services as a double agent. In exchange for payments of $200 [equivalent to $4,650 today] each month, he was willing to betray his employers, slow down the work, hand over samples of the weapons, and guarantee not to supply working models to Rossa’s terrorists. Asked why, he replied that “to speak plainly, he was after money.”

Clipperton was impressed by his visitor, and so were his masters in the British embassy at Washington. The British naval attaché, Captain William Arthur arrived post-haste in Philadelphia, where on November 5 he met with McClintock and recommended his recruitment as a spy. The weapons, Captain Arthur wrote, seemed viable, and the informant’s plans were workable–the real doubt was his honesty, not truthfulness. As a result of this report, the man calling himself McClintock was paid $1,000, and Clipperton and his assistant, George Crump, continued to meet with him well into 1881. That March, the consul was handed samples of three different sorts of bomb–one disguised as a lump of coal and intended to be slipped into the bunkers of a transatlantic steamship, to explode with catastrophic consequences when it was shoveled into a furnace while the ship was out at sea.

Alfred Nobel's great invention, dynamite–a stablilized form of nitro-glycerine–was the weapon of choice for a new generation of bombers–including Philadelphia's George Holgate.

Alfred Nobel’s great invention, dynamite–a stablilized form of nitro-glycerine–was the weapon of choice for a new generation of bombers–including Philadelphia’s George Holgate.

Who, though, was the man whose appearance in Pennsylvania caused Clipperton’s diplomats so much concern? The first thing to say about him is that he was just as slippery and traitorous as he appeared to be. By the time the official correspondence–lodged today in Britain’s National Archives–petered out in July 1881, he had successfully extracted a four-figure sum from both Rossa’s Irish freedom fighters and Queen Victoria’s secret service fund. He had managed this, moreover, while cheating and betraying not one but both of his employers. Rossa never received his final consignment of torpedoes, but the samples that McClintock supplied to the British were not the real thing, either–“the contents of his cases,” a worried official reported from London when the test results came in, “are not dynamite, but a powder made to resemble it of a very slightly explosive quality.” In the last analysis, moreover, the Philadelphia McClintock got away with everything, slipping away before either the British or the Fenians could lay their hands on him. It seems to be the case that he was never heard from again.

There are certainly problems with the idea that the McClintocks of 1879 and 1880 were one and the same. One is that the real James McClintock never returned to his family. He was listed as dead–killed in Boston–in the mortality schedule for 1880 that was compiled in New Albany, and his grandson knew of nothing, nearly a century later, to suggest this was not the case.

For McClintock to have survived the explosion, moreover, requires him to have been something more than simply the victim of shoddy Boston newspaper reporting; Holgate was still vividly retelling the story of his atomization as late as 1896. For the Confederate submariner to have still been alive in 1880 would have meant that he had deliberately set out to fake his death–and, probably, to become a murderer as well, for the unfortunate Edward Swain was never seen again. McClintock would surely have needed a good reason to take these drastic steps, and it is possible to speculate that he had one–by the time he got to Boston, he was definitely short of money, and a spectacular apparent death might have seemed a good way to escape his creditors, or some backer calling in a debt.

In the final analysis, however, there is no way to be certain that McClintock was desperate, and there are really only two ways to determine whether Clipperton’s informant really was the man he said he was. One is to ask whether the events of 1879 make any sense viewed as a fraud. The other is to search the British archives for scraps of information that could only have been provided by the real McClintock.

There is evidence, as we have seen, that the Boston explosion may not have taken place in the way it is supposed to have. No one saw the rowboat disintegrate, nor found any trace of bodies. But it strains credulity to suppose that McClintock rigged an explosion and then made a clean getaway without assistance from Wingard and Holgate. It would have been all but impossible to escape the scene without being observed by one of them.

"Professor" Wingard put himself up in Boston's United States Hotel, pictured here in 1883 and said by some to be the city's "finest hotel... surpassed only by the Astor House in New York and by the St Charles Hotel in New Orleans." His confederates McClintock and Holgate stayed at the less ostentatious Adams House Hotel.

“Professor” Wingard put himself up in Boston’s sumptuous United States Hotel, pictured here in 1883. McClintock and Holgate stayed at the less ostentatious Adams House.

That the two men might have helped McClintock fake his death is not entirely implausible; neither was a paragon of decency. But it is hard to imagine what their motive might have been, unless McClintock was their boss and paying them. Holgate’s accounts, in fact, suggest this was the case–he went to great lengths to stress just how little he had really had to do with the experiments. But then Holgate must have feared implicating himself, and there is in fact another clue, long buried in the archives of the Boston Daily Advertiser, which suggests that things in fact went differently: according to the Advertiser’s files, Wingard lodged at the United States Hotel, while McClintock and Holgate put up at the Adams House.

This, it turns out, is a telling detail, for in 1879 the United States was Boston’s second-best hotel, while the Adams House was a far less imposing establishment. From this it seems logical to conclude that it was Wingard, and not Holgate and McClintock, who was in command of the experiments in Boston, and a solitary report in Chicago’s Daily Tribune seems to confirm it. In the Tribune’s version of events, Wingard’s real reason for traveling to Boston was to stage another fraudulent trial of his Nameless Force for the benefit of fresh investors, and he spent the first half of October assembling a joint stock company willing to plough $1,500 into his spurious death ray. The explosion put an end to that (the Tribune wrote), and a shaken Wingate actually confessed to his investors that the blast had taken place while two of his men were on their way to install hidden charges on the hulk selected for his demonstration.

If Wingard had nothing to do with McClintock’s disappearance, though, only two possibilities remain. One is that McClintock died, and that Holgate was an opportunist. In this scenario, the Philadelphia informant was Holgate, posing as his old partner in order to prise money from the British. A couple of details suggest that this might actually have been the case. One is that ‘McClintock’ chose to reappear in Philadelphia–which was, by 1880, Holgate’s home.  The other is that the man who turned up at the British consulate explained that his device contained a very specific charge–35 pounds of explosives. Presumably not coincidentally, that was precisely the size of the device that Holgate told the Boston press had blown up James McClintock.

A pre-war Daguerrotype of James R. McClintock: ?1829-?1879. Image: Naval Historical Center.

A pre-war Daguerrotype of James R. McClintock. Inventor, likely crook, possible spy. Born ?1829. Died ?1879.
Image: Naval Historical Center.

The alternative scenario is that Holgate and McClintock were in fact in league. In this interpretation, McClintock simply stayed on board the Ianthe and sent Swain off to die in his stead in the rowboat. Knowing that the explosive charge was designed to be detonated remotely by wire, just as it had been in New Orleans, adds some weight to this theory, for if Swain rowed off trailing cable, as he must have done, the charge could have been detonated at any point–and, just as the Boston Globe alleged, the explosion might have been triggered by Holgate. All McClintock needed to do at that point was to stay below while the Ianthe and the Edith converged upon the fatal spot. Wingard need have been none the wiser, McClintock (presumably) escaped his creditors, and Holgate gained himself a sleeping partner with useful experience of explosives and of underwater warfare.

It may be that we will never know for sure. The papers in the British archives contain no physical description of Clipperton’s informant, and all that can be suggested with much certainty is that the strange coincidence between the size of the charge used in Boston and the one offered to the British a year later means that the man who appeared in Philadelphia was not some unknown third party; it must have been either Holgate or McClintock.

If it was Holgate, though, why bother to pose as his former partner? It is true that Holgate was no expert in underwater warfare, while McClintock was. But it defies belief to suppose that McClintock’s name would have carried weight with any British diplomat in 1880. His role as the designer of the Hunley had never been disclosed. His visit to Canada was a state secret. And it would not be until well into the next century that his role in the destruction of the Housatonic would be celebrated.

Bearing all this in mind, perhaps the salient point is this: the Philadelphia McClintock was able to convince the British naval attaché, Captain Arthur, that he knew all about both mines and submarines. This would not have been an easy trick to pull, for it so happened that Arthur was himself an expert; his last posting, before coming to America was as Captain of HMS Vernon, the Royal Navy’s chief research establishment for underwater warfare. So maybe, just maybe, the triple agent who tricked the British and the Irish terrorists in Philadelphia, and got away with $2,000 and his life, was precisely who he said he was: James R. McClintock, inventor of the HL Hunley, betrayer of countries, causes, friends and his own family, and the faker of his own strange death.

Sources

Primary: British National Archives: Admiralty papers. ‘Submarine warfare,’ 1872, Adm 1/6236 part 2; ‘Fenian schemes to employ torpedoes against HM ships,’ 1881, Adm 1/6551; digest for August 9, 1872 and October 19, 1872 at cut 59-8 of Adm 12/897; digest for February 8, 1873 at cut 59-8 of Adm 12/920. Foreign Office Papers. New Orleans consulate. Cridland despatch no.2 commercial of April 5, 1872 enclosing statement by James McClintock, March 30, 1872, and Cridland to Foreign Office July 17, 1872, both in FO5/1372; Fanshawe to Cridland, December 20,1872, Cridland despatch no.7 commercial of January 3, 1873, McClintock to Cridland, January 7, 1873, Cridland to Foreign Office, May 25, 1873, all in FO5/1441. Philadelphia consulate. Political correspondence for 1881 in FO5/1746 fols.100-02, 146-7; FO5/1776, fols.65-71, 80-5, 247, 249, 265, 291; FO5/1778 fols.289, 403; United States censuses 1860 and 1870; Eustace Williams, “The Confederate submarine Hunley documents,” np, Van Nuys, California, 1958, typescript in the New York Public Library. Secondary: Anon. “Some scientific hoaxes.” In  Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, June 12, 1880; Victor M. Bogle. “A view of New Albany society at mid-Nineteenth Century.” In Indiana Magazine of History 54 (1958); Boston Daily Advertiser, October 15, 16, and 20, 1879; Boston Evening Transcript, October 15, 1879; Boston Daily Globe, October 14, 15, 16 and 20, and November 17, 1879; Boston Weekly Globe, October 21, 1879; Carl Brasseaux & Keith P. Fortenot. Steamboats on Louisiana’s Bayous: A History and Directory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004; Chicago Daily Tribune, November 14, 1879; Mike Dash. British Submarine Policy 1853-1918Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London 1990; Esther Dole. Municipal Improvements in the United States, 1840-1850. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin 1926; Ruth Duncan. The Captain and Submarine H.L. Hunley. Memphis: privately published, 1965; Charles Dufour. The Night the War was Lost. Lincoln NE: Bison Books, 1964; Eaton Democrat (OH), June 20, 1876; Floyd County, Indiana, mortality schedule, 1880; Galveston Daily News, June 6, 1876; Emma Hardinge. Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record. New York: The Author, 1870;  Chester Hearn. Mobile Bay and the Mobile Campaign: the Last Great Battles of the Civil War. Jefferson [NC]: McFarland & Co., 1993; Ann Larabee. The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; New Orleans Daily Democrat, March 22, 1877;  New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 12+May 30+June 4, 1876;  New Orleans Daily Times, October 15, 1879; Thomas Low Nichols. Supramundane Facts in the Life of Rev. Jesse Babcock. London: F. Pitman, 1865; Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, March 21, 1883; Ouachita Telegraph [LA], November 14, 1879; Philadelphia Times, February 26, 1896; Mark Ragan. Union and Confederate Submarine Warfare in the Civil War. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1999; Mark K. Ragan. The Hunley. Orangeburg [SC]: Sandlapper Publishing, 2006; KRM Short. The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain. Atlantic Highlands [NJ]: Humanities Press, 1979; Niall Whelehan. The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.


Friedrich Engels’ Irish muse

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Portrait of a young revolutionary: Friedrich Engels at age 21, in 1842, the year he moved to Manchester–and the year before he met Mary Burns.

Friedrich Engels lived a life replete with contradiction. He was a Prussian communist, a keen fox-hunter who despised the landed gentry, and a mill owner whose greatest ambition was to lead the revolution of the working class. As a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, he provided, for nearly 40 years, the financial support that kept his collaborator Karl Marx at work on world-changing books such as Das Kapital. Yet at least one biographer has argued that, while they were eager enough to take Engels’s money, Marx and his aristocratic wife, Jenny von Westphalen, never really accepted him as their social equal.

Amid these oddities lurks another—a puzzle whose solution offers fresh insights into the life and thinking of the midwife of Marxism. The mystery is this: Why did Engels, sent in 1842 to work in the English industrial city of Manchester, choose to lead a double life, maintaining gentleman’s lodgings in one part of the city while renting a series of rooms in workers’ districts? How did this well-groomed scion of privilege contrive to travel safely through Manchester’s noisome slums, collecting information about their inhabitants’ grim lives for his first great work, The Condition of the Working Class in England? Strangest of all, why—when asked many years later about his favorite meal—would a native German like Engels answer: “Irish stew”?

Manchester in 1870, the year Engels left the city he had lived in for 28 years. It was the largest industrial town in England and a noted center of the profitable cotton trade.

To answer these questions, we need to see Engels not as he was toward the end of his long life, the heavily bearded grand old man of international socialism, but as he was at its beginning. The Friedrich Engels of the 1840s was a  gregarious young man with a facility for languages, a liking for drink and a preference for lively female company. (“If I had an income of 5,000 francs,” he once confessed to Marx, “I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces.”) It was this Engels who arrived in England in December 1842–sent there to help manage a factory part-owned by his wealthy father, by a family desperate to shield their young radical from the Prussian police. And it was this Engels who, to the considerable alarm of his acquaintances, met, fell for and, for the better part of two decades, covertly lived with an Irish woman by the name of Mary Burns.

Burns’ influence on Engels—and hence on communism and on the history of the world in the past century—has long been badly underestimated. She makes at best fleeting appearances in books devoted to Engels, and almost none in any general works on socialism. And since she was illiterate, or nearly so, not to mention Irish, working class and female, she also left only the faintest of impressions in the contemporary record. The sterling efforts of a few Manchester historians aside, almost nothing is known for certain about who she was, how she lived or what she thought. Yet it is possible, reading between the lines of Engels’ writings, to sense that she had considerable influence on several of her lover’s major works.

Mary Burns’ younger sister, Lizzie, c.1865. Lizzie lived with Engels after her sister died, and married him a day before she herself died. No image of Mary is known to exist.

Let us begin this attempt at recovered memory by sketching the main setting for the tale. Manchester, it must be said, was a poor choice of exile for a young man whose left-wing convictions had so concerned his family. It was the greatest and most terrible of all the products of Britain’s industrial revolution: a large-scale experiment in unfettered capitalism in a decade that witnessed a spring tide of economic liberalism. Government and business alike swore by free trade and laissez fairewith all the attendant profiteering and poor treatment of workers that their doctrines implied. It was common for factory hands to labor for 14 hours a day, six days a week, and while many of them welcomed the idea of fixed employment, unskilled workers rarely enjoyed much job security. Living conditions in the city’s poorer districts were abominable. Chimneys choked the sky; the city’s population soared more than sevenfold. Thanks in part to staggering infant mortality, the life expectancy of those born in Manchester fell to a mere 28 years, half that of the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. And the city still bore the scars of the infamous Peterloo Massacre (in which cavalry units charged down unarmed protesters calling for the vote) and had barely begun to recover from the more recent disaster of an unsuccessful general strike.

Engels had been sent to Manchester to take up a middle-management position in a mill, Ermen & Engels, that manufactured patent cotton thread. The work was tedious and clerical, and Engels soon realized that he was less than welcome in the company. The senior partner, Peter Ermen, viewed the young man as little more than his father’s spy and made it clear that he would not tolerate interference in the running of the factory. That Engels nonetheless devoted the best years of his life to what he grimly called “the bitch business,” grinding through reams of stultifying correspondence for the better part of 20 years, suggests not so much obedience to his father’s wishes as a pressing need to earn a living. As part-owner of the mill, he eventually received a 7.5 percent share in Ermen & Engels’ rising profits, earning £263 in 1855 and as much as £1,080 in 1859—the latter a sum worth around $168,000 today.

Engels’s father – also Friedrich – sent his son to Manchester to work for his business partner Peter Ermen – a taskmaster who tolerated little independence in his managers.

What made Engels different from the mill owners with whom he mixed was how he spent his wealth (and the contents of Peter Ermen’s petty-cash box, which was regularly pilfered). Much of the money, and almost all of Engels’ spare time, was devoted to radical activities. The young German fought briefly in the revolutions of 1848-9, and for decades pursued an intensive program of reading, writing and research that resulted in a breakdown as early as 1857 but eventually yielded a dozen major works. He also offered financial support to a number of less-well-off revolutionaries—most important, Karl Marx, whom he had met while traveling to Manchester in 1842. Even before he became relatively wealthy, Engels frequently sent Marx as much as £50 a year—equivalent to around $7,500 now, and about a third of the annual allowance he received from his parents.

Few of Engels’ contemporaries knew of this hidden life; fewer still were aware of Mary Burns. As a result, almost all of what we know of Burns’ character comes from Engels’ surviving correspondence and a handful of clues exhumed from local archives. It is not even certain where they met. Given what we know of working-class life during this period, it seems likely that Mary first went to work around age 9, and that her first job would have been as a “scavenger,” one of the myriad of nimble children paid a few pennies a day to keep flying scraps of fluff and cotton out of whirring factory machinery. The noted critic Edmund Wilson took this speculation further, writing that by 1843 Mary had found a job in Ermen’s mill. But Wilson gave no source for this assertion, and other biographers argue that Engels’ less-than-gallant pen portrait of his female employees—”short, dumpy and badly formed, decidedly ugly in the whole development of the figure”—makes it unlikely that he met the “very good natured and witty” young woman whom Marx remembered on the factory floor.

The Manchester slums of the mid-19th century were the subject of Engels’ first book, and a district that—thanks to his lover Mary Burns—he came to know remarkably well.

If Mary was not a factory girl, there were not too many other ways in which she could have made a living. She lacked the education to teach, and the only other respectable employment available was probably domestic service; an 1841 census does suggest that she and her younger sister, Lizzie, worked as servants for a while. A “Mary Burn” of the right age and “born in this parish” is recorded in the household of a master painter named George Chadfield, and it may be, as Belinda Webb suggests, that Burns took this job because it offered accommodation. Her mother had died in 1835, and she and her sister had to come to terms with a stepmother when their father remarried a year later; perhaps there were pressing reasons for their leaving home. Certainly a career in domestic service would have taught Mary and Lizzie the skills they needed to keep house for Engels, which they did for many years beginning in 1843.

Not every historian of the period believes that Mary was in service, though. Webb, noting that Engels described taking frequent, lengthy walking tours of the city, argues that Mary would scarcely have had the time to act as his guide to Manchester had she labored as a factory hand or servant, and may instead have been a prostitute. Webb notes that Burns was said to have sold oranges at Manchester’s Hall of Science–and “orange selling” had long been a euphemism for involvement in the sex trade. Nell Gwyn, King Charles II’s “Protestant Whore,” famously hawked fruit at Drury Lane Theater, and the radical poet Georg Weerth–whom Mary knew, and who was one of Engels’ closest associates—penned some double entendre-laced lines in which he described a dark-eyed Irish strumpet named Mary who sold her “juicy fruits” to “bearded acquaintances” at the Liverpool docks.

That Engels’ relationship with Mary had a sexual element may be guessed from what what might be a lewd phrase of Marx’s; taking in the news that Engels had acquired an interest in physiology, the philosopher inquired: “Are you studying…on Mary?” Whatever the truth, while Engels did not believe in marriage—and his correspondence reveals a good number of affairs—he and Burns remained a couple for almost 20 years.

Nothing is known for certain about Mary’s involvement in Engels’ political life, but a good deal can be guessed. Edmund and Ruth Frow point out that Engels describes the Manchester slum district known as Little Ireland in such graphic detail that he must have known it; Mary, they argue, “as an Irish girl with an extended family…would have been able to take him around the slums…. If he had been on his own, a middle-class foreigner, it is doubtful he would have emerged alive, and certainly not clothed.”

The interior of an Irish hovel during the great famine of 1845-50. Engels toured Ireland with Mary Burns in 1856, when almost every village still suffered from the consequences of the disaster.

Engels’ acquaintance with Manchester’s worst slums is a matter of some significance. Though he had been born in a business district in the Ruhr, and though (as his biographer Gustav Meyer puts it) he “knew from childhood the real nature of the factory system”—Engels was still shocked at the filth and overcrowding he found in Manchester. “I had never seen so ill-built a city,” he observed. Disease, poverty, inequality of wealth, an absence of education and hope all combined to render life in the city all but insupportable for many. As for the factory owners, Engels wrote, “I have never seen a class so demoralized, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress.” Once, Engels wrote, he went into the city with such a man “and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working people’s quarters.” The man heard him out quietly “and said at the corner where we parted: ‘And yet there is a great deal of money to be made here: good morning, sir.'”

Making the acquaintance of the Burns sisters also exposed Engels to some of the more discreditable aspects of the British imperialism of the period. Although born in England, Mary’s parents had been immigrants from Tipperary, in the south of Ireland. Her father, Michael, labored on and off as a cloth dyer, but ended his days in miserable poverty, spending the last 10 years of his life in a workhouse of the sort made notorious in Oliver Twist. This, combined with the scandal of the Great Famine that gripped Ireland between 1845 and 1850, and saw a million or more Irish men, women and children starve to death in the heart of the world’s wealthiest empire, confirmed the Burns sisters as fervent nationalists. Mary joined Engels on a brief tour of Ireland in 1856, during which they saw as much as two-thirds of the devastated country. Lizzie was said to have been even more radical; according to Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, she offered shelter to two senior members of the revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood who were freed from police custody in 1867 in a daring operation mounted by three young Fenians known as the Manchester Martyrs.

Three young Fenians free two senior Irish revolutionaries from a Manchester police van in November 1867. They were captured and hanged, but the freed men—Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy—escaped to the United States. Some sources say Lizzie Burns helped spirit the pair out of Manchester.

Thanks to Manchester’s census records and rates books from this period—and to the painstaking work of local labor historians—it is possible to trace the movements of Engels and the Burns sisters under a variety of pseudonyms. Engels passed himself off as Frederick Boardman, Frederick Mann Burns and Frederick George Mann, and gave his occupation as bookkeeper or “commercial traveler.” There are gaps in the record–and gaps in Engels’ commitment to both Manchester and Mary; he was absent from England from 1844 until the very end of 1849. But Burns evidently retained her place in Engels’ affections through the revolutionary years of 1848-9. Webb notes that, after his return to Manchester, “he and Mary seem to have proceeded more formally,” setting up home together in a modest suburb. Lizzie moved in and seems to have acted as housekeeper, though details of the group’s living arrangements are very hard to come by; Engels ordered that almost all of the personal letters he wrote during this period be destroyed after his death. Engels seems to have acknowledged Mary, at least to close acquaintances, as more than a friend or lover. “Love to Mrs Engels,” the Chartist Julian Harney wrote in 1846. Engels himself told Marx that only his need to maintain his position among his peers prevented him from being far more open: “I live nearly all the time with Mary so as to save money. Unfortunately I cannot manage without [private] lodgings; if I could I would live with her all the time.”

Engels and Mary moved frequently. There were lodgings in Burlington and Cecil Streets (where the Burns sisters appear to have earned extra money by renting out spare rooms), and in 1862 the couple and Lizzie moved into a newly built property in Hyde Road (the street on which the Manchester Martyrs would free Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy five years later). But the years–and perhaps Engels’ long absences on business, private and revolutionary—began to take their toll. In her 20s, Eleanor Marx recorded, Mary “had been pretty, witty and charming…but in later years [she] drank to excess.” This may be no more than family lore—Eleanor was only 8 when Burns died, and she admitted in another letter that “Mary I did not know”—but it seems to fit the known facts well enough. When Burns died, on January 6, 1863, she was only 40.

Jenny Marx—neé Jenny von Westphalen, a member of Prussia’s aristocracy—in 1844.

If it is Mary Burns’ death, not life, that scholars focus on, that is because it occasioned a momentous falling-out between Engels and Marx—the only one recorded in four decades of close friendship. The earliest signs of discord date back several years. During a sojourn in Belgium between 1845 and 1848, during which the two men wrote the Communist Manifesto, Mary went to live in Brussels, an unusual adventure in those days for someone of her sex and class. Jenny Marx had few acquaintances among working-class women, and was undoubtedly shocked when Engels held up his lover as a model for the woman of the future. Burns, Jenny thought, was “very arrogant,” and she observed, sarcastically, that “I myself, when confronted with this abstract model, appear truly repulsive in my own eyes.” When the two found themselves together at a workers’ meeting, Simon Buttermilch reported, Marx “indicated by a significant gesture and a smile that his wife would in no circumstances meet Engels’ companion.”

It was against this backdrop that Engels wrote to Marx to tell his friend of Mary’s death. “Last night she went to bed early,” he wrote, “and when at midnight Lizzie went upstairs, she had already died. Quite suddenly. Heart disease or stroke. I received the news this morning, on Monday evening she was still quite well. I can’t tell you how I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.” Marx sympathized–briefly. “It is extraordinarily difficult for you,” he wrote, “who had a home with Mary, free and withdrawn from all human muck, as often as you pleased.” But the remainder of the missive was devoted to a long account of Marx’s woes, ending with a plea for money. “All my friends,” Engels fired back in anger, “including philistine acquaintances, have shown me, at this moment which hit me deeply, more sympathy and friendship than I expected. You found this moment appropriate to display the superiority of your cool intellect.”

Engels in later life. He died in 1895, at age 74.

Marx wrote again, apologizing, extending more elaborate condolences and blaming his first letter on his wife’s demands for money. “What drove me particularly mad,” he wrote, “was that [Jenny] thought I did not report to you adequately our true situation.” Mike Gane, among other writers, suspects that Marx objected to Engels’ love of a working-class woman not on the grounds of class, but because the relationship was bourgeois, and hence violated the principles of communism. Whatever the reason for the argument, Engels seems to have been glad when it ended.

He lived with Mary’s sister for 15 more years. Whether their relationship was as passionate as the one Engels had enjoyed with Mary may be doubted, but he was certainly very fond of Lizzie Burns; just before she was struck down by some sort of tumor in 1878, he acceded to her dying wish and married her. “She was of genuine Irish proletarian stock,” he wrote, “and her passionate and innate feelings for her class were of far greater value to me and stood me in better stead at moments of crisis than all the refinement and culture of your educated and ascetic young ladies.”

Historians remain divided over the importance of Engels’ relations with the Burns sisters. Several biographers have seen Mary and Lizzie as little more than sexual partners who also kept house, something that a Victorian gentleman could scarcely have been expected to do for himself.  Terrell Carver has suggested that “in love, Engels does not seem to have gone in search of his intellectual equal.” Others see Mary Burns as vastly more important. “I wanted to see you in your own homes,” Engels wrote in dedicating his first book to “the Working Classes of Great Britain.” “To observe you in everyday life, to chat with you on your conditions and grievances, to witness your struggles.” He never could have achieved this ambition without a guide, certainly not in the short span of his first sojourn in England. And achieving it marked him for life. “Twenty months in Manchester and London,” W.O. Henderson observes – for which read 10 or 15 months with Mary Burns — “had turned Engels from an inexperienced youth into a young man who had found a purpose in life.”

Sources Roland Boer. “Engels’ contradictions: a reply to Tristram Hunt.” International Socialism 133 (2012); William Delaney. Revolutionary Republicanism and Socialism in Irish History, 1848-1923. Lincoln [NE]: Writer’s Showcase, 2001; Edmund and Ruth Frow. Frederick Engels in Manchester and “The Condition of the Working Class in England”; Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1995; Mike Gane. Harmless Lovers? Gender, Theory and Personal Relationship. London: Routledge, 1993; Lindsay German. Frederick Engels: life of a revolutionary. International Socialism Journal 65 (1994); W.O. Henderson. The Life of Friedrich Engels. London: Frank Cass, 1976; W.O. Henderson. Marx and Engels and the English Workers, and Other Essays. London: Frank Cass, 1989; Tristram Hunt. The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. The Life and Times of the Original Champagne Socialist. London: Penguin, 2010; Sarah Irving. “Frederick Engels and Mary and Lizzie Burns.” Manchester Radical History, accessed April 3, 2013; Mick Jenkins. Frederick Engels in Manchester. Manchester: Lancashire & Cheshire Communist Party, 1964; Jenny Marx to Karl Marx, March 24, 1846, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, 38. New York: International Publishers, 1975; Marx to Engels, January 8, 1863; Engels to Marx, January 13, 1863; Marx to Engels, January 24, 1863; Engels to Marx, January 26, 1863, all in Marx/Engels Collected Works, 41. New York: International Publishers, 1985; Belinda Webb. Mary Burns. Unpublished Kingston University PhD thesis, 2012; Roy Whitfield. Frederick Engels in Manchester: The Search for a Shadow. Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1988.


Queen Victoria’s £5: the strange tale of Turkish aid to Ireland during the Great Famine

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A destitute Irish family search a stubble field for healthy potatoes at the height of the Great Famine of 1845-51. At least a million people–one in eight of the population–starved to death during the disaster. Thousands more, though, were saved by the exertions of relief funds–the contributors to which included both the Ottoman sultan and Queen Victoria.

A destitute Irish family search a stubble field for healthy potatoes at the height of the Great Famine of 1845-51. At least a million people–one in eight of the population–starved to death during the disaster. Thousands more, though, were saved by the exertions of relief funds–the contributors to which included both the Ottoman sultan and Queen Victoria.

The most striking thing about the ghastly blight that ruined Ireland’s potato crop in 1845 was that the harvest had seemed healthy, even robust, when it was lifted from the ground. Within a day or two, however, rot set in. Potatoes that had looked firm and edible turned black and then disintegrated into a stinking, liquid mess. No one knew why. John Lindley, the editor of the Gardeners’ Chronicle, guessed that this “wet putrefaction” was a disease borne in from the Atlantic by torrential gales. Others thought that the blight had somehow risen up from underground, so that the soil itself was now infected. The one certainty was that every measure tried to save the harvest failed. “All specifics, all nostrums were useless,” the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith observed. “Whether ventilated, desiccated, salted, or gassed, the potatoes melted… and pits, on being opened, were found to be filled with diseased potatoes–‘six months’ provisions a mass of rottenness.’” The blight struck everywhere that year, from North America to Belgium, and the Irish had long been distressingly familiar with disastrous harvests; twenty-four previous crop failures had been recorded between 1728 and 1844. Several of these had caused suffering “horrible beyond description,” and it has been estimated that very nearly half a million people died during Ireland’s “Year of Slaughter” (1740-41), when a freezing winter caused the oat crop to fail. But the catastrophe of 1845 was was remembered as the greatest of them all, and it affected Ireland more profoundly than it did anywhere else, with the possible exception of the Scottish Highlands.

The fungus Phytophthora infestans was responsible for the great potato blight of 1846. The strain had its origins in Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest in he 16th century.

The fungus Phytophthora infestans was responsible for the great potato blight of 1846. The strain had its origins in Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.

The underlying reason why the famine’s impact was profound was that the Irish population had ballooned. It rose from 3.2 million in 1750 to 8.2 million a century later: an enormous total, nearly a third higher than it is today. The result was a severe shortage of land. At least a quarter of the country’s farmers scratched a living from tiny plots of five acres or less, and this in turn meant that, in order to survive, families had to turn over all their land to the cultivation of the highest-yielding, most nutritious crop. By 1845, the potato was not only the staple but in many cases the only food sustaining a huge number of Irish men, women and children. The blight (which we now know was caused by a fungus) thus brought with it five long years of starvation. While the disease reigned, perhaps a million died of hunger in Ireland, and 1.5 million more were forced to emigrate. Had overpopulation been the sole cause of the catastrophe, the Great Famine of 1845-51 would be remembered today as a natural disaster on a grand scale – an act of god that could not have been averted. But the Ireland of the 1840s was scarcely some remote community on the fringes of the world, forced to fall back on its own inadequate resources. It lay close to the heart of the British empire, which was then the richest and most powerful state on earth. Had the British really wanted to, they could have harnessed those resources and minimised the loss of life. They failed to do so, and, in consequence, the famine produced bitter resentment in Ireland at the time – and a rich folklore thereafter.

Abdülmecid I, the reigning Ottoman sultan, gave generously to the cause of famine relief – but did he also send ships packed with aid to Ireland?

Abdülmecid I, just 24 years old in 1847 but the reigning Ottoman sultan, gave generously to the cause of famine relief – but did he also send ships packed with aid to Ireland?

Two tales in particular emerged from all this anguish and anger, and are still widely believed in Ireland today. Both involve immensely wealthy monarchs – the first Queen Victoria and the second Sultan Abdülmecid (Abdul Mejid) I, who ruled the Ottoman empire from far-off Istanbul. Both accounts deal with the ways in which powerful rulers responded to the misery in Ireland. But while Victoria’s actions were found wanting, the story of Abdülmecid’s munificence was held to shame the Queen, and it became such an article of faith that it was immortalised in Ulysses. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres,” one of Joyce’s characters explodes in the midst of a harangue against the British. “But the Sassenach [Englishman] tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janiero.” The details of the two legends are straightforward, though their origins are a good deal less so. Ireland’s hatred of Victoria is rooted in the firm belief that the British queen contributed a paltry £5 to the cause of famine relief – that at a time when desperately poor Irish emigrants, struggling to survive in the slums of New York, contrived to send home more than $326,000 [about £9 million today] in just two months, and even the Choctaw tribe, ravaged by disease and confined to a reservation in far-off Oklahoma, donated $170. Victoria’s contemptuous act of indifference appears in a variety of guises; the Irish nationalist leader Charles Parnell once delivered a speech asserting that she gave absolutely nothing. The most damaging version of the tale, however, adds that, on the same day that the queen made her pathetic donation, she gave a considerably larger sum to an English dogs’ home. That incendiary suggestion certainly helps to explain how Victoria acquired the nickname of “the famine queen,” by which she is still commonly known in Ireland – not to mention why (as one historian notes), when a crowd gathered to watch her statue being removed from its plinth some years after the country attained independence, somebody “stepped forward and waved a five pound note in the face of the bronze monument…. [and] everyone realised the significance of the gesture.”

Queen Victoria in 1847, the year that her contribution to a private fund for Irish famine relief provided the basis for a potent piece of Irish folklore.

Queen Victoria in 1847, the year that her contribution to a private fund for Irish famine relief provided the basis for a potent piece of Irish folklore.

What Sultan Abdülmecid did, meanwhile, is just as difficult to make out. It is generally accepted that the sultan sent a personal donation of £1,000 to London – an act of considerable generosity, particularly when it is remembered that there were no links of any real significance between Ireland and Turkey. But some accounts suggest that he did much more than that. In one version of the story, the sultan tried to give as much as £10,000 [£1 million now], only to be told that it would be diplomatically embarrassing for him to donate significantly more than had Victoria. In another, he responded by reducing his gift to a more acceptable amount – while simultaneously making sure that further help was sent behind British backs. It is still quite commonly believed in parts of Ireland that this aid took the form of several Turkish ships, which were quietly sent to unload badly needed foodstuffs in a port on the east coast. One telling of the tale even suggests that Abdülmecid’s merchantmen had to run the gauntlet of a Royal Navy blockade in order to bring their life-saving cargoes in Ireland. To understand why gifts given by two monarchs more than a century and a half ago are still remembered in Ireland, it is first necessary to grasp why private charity was vital in those famine years. Understanding charity, in turn, requires a brief sketch of official policy. The British government of the day was a firm believer in laissez-faire economics, the idea that minimal regulation and minimal state intervention was the surest way to prosperity. Today, laissez-faire is commonly taken to mean “do nothing” in an excruciatingly heartless way – a sort of “I’m all right, Jack” economics that excuses the rich from all responsibility for the poor. It was not originally intended to mean any such thing, and the economists of the day hoped that limiting state intervention would also cut down on corruption and so make things better for everyone.

Sir Charles Trevelyan cancelled state aid programmes in Ireland for fear that the poor would become dependent on government handouts. He welcomed famine as a means of controlling the Irish population.

Sir Charles Trevelyan cancelled state aid programmes in Ireland for fear that the poor would become dependent on government handouts. He welcomed famine as a means of controlling the Irish population.

While it may be unfair to criticise Lord John Russell’s Liberal administration for its sincere belief that the market could be trusted to respond properly to the crisis in Ireland, however, it is much harder to understand its decision to place Sir Charles Trevelyan in charge of the relief effort, and allow him to end a programme that was keeping three million Irish men and women alive with a daily ration of soup and bread. Trevelyan’s views on Ireland were a matter of public record. He cared more that government aid might make the Irish permanently dependent on Britain than he did about the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women and children. In large part, this was because Trevelyan saw the blight (these are his words) as “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence,” and starvation as “the sharp but effectual remedy” for the problem of over-population. Trevelyan’s views might not have mattered so much had the ruling class in Ireland thrown their full resources into famine relief, but they did not. Joyce’s passage in Ulysses neatly summarises the charges that are often made in this respect: that Ireland was amply supplied with crops, but that these were callously kept out of the hands of the peasantry and sold at a profit abroad, leaving the Irish themselves to starve. There is some truth in this allegation, for the famine did not strike every part of Ireland equally – and while some landlords made great efforts to help their desperate tenants, self-interest was endemic, too. The Britain of the late 1840s was mired in recession, and minded to look to its own interests first. When, in the midst of the famine years, it passed a law introducing “Rate-in-Aid,” a new tax intended to increase the supply of cash to the worst-hit areas of Ireland, the levy was collected only in Ireland. “The philosophy underlying this legislation,” notes Christine Kinealy, “was that the Irish Famine was an exclusively Irish responsibility, not a British or imperial one.” Much has been written, in this context, about the despicable behaviour of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy which effectively ruled the country. The Anglo-Irish were Protestants who, by the first half of the nineteenth century, controlled 95 percent of all the land in Ireland, and who for the most part continued to collect rents, evict non-paying tenants, and sell the produce of their estates where it would realise the largest sums ( in England, not, as Joyce would have it, in Brazil). There remains spirited debate as to whether or not Ireland really was a net exporter of food during the famine years, but it is incontestable that most Irishmen believed it was, and the nationalist agitator John Mitchel memorably charged that each relief ship sailing into an Irish port with her holds full of grain was “sure to meet six ships sailing out with a similar cargo.”

Loss of population in Ireland, 1841-51. The loss was greatest in the districts coloured purple, and still considerable in those rendered in green. The population actually rose in areas coloured blue-black. Map from Paul S. Ell, Mapping the Great Famine.

Loss of population in Ireland, 1841-51. The loss was greatest in the districts coloured purple, and still considerable in those rendered in green. Thanks to rural flight to the cities in search of food and work, the population actually rose in areas coloured blue-black. From Paul S. Ell, Mapping the Great Famine. Click to enlarge.

All this meant that the only real prospect of delivering effective aid to Ireland was often private charity. Here the initial response to news of the famine in Ireland was generous; a great public appeal launched in England during the disaster’s peak year, 1847, raised £170,000 [equivalent to $25.6m today]. But the mood did not last, for existing prejudices also played an important part their part in determining responses to the famine. The Irish had long been seen by many Britons as as feckless and corrupt, the authors of their own misery and hence undeserving of aid. This was certainly something that Trevelyan believed – he wrote that “the greatest evil we have to face is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people.” The same message was driven home by dozens of Protestant churchmen, who preached that the potato blight had been ordained by God as just punishment for Popery and a heavenly verdict on an abuse-ridden and above all Catholic economic system. In consequence, as bad news continued to stream across the Irish Sea, the British public’s initial eagerness to help all too often gave way to indifference and worse. A second public appeal for famine relief, made only a few months after the first, raised a mere £30,000 [$2.9m].

Queen Victoria’s £5

Victoria was Queen of England, Queen of Scotland, Queen of Ireland and – nominally at least – the ruler of an empire that stretched around the world and upon which the sun never set. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine her in the image of her 21st century successors, forever touring different territories and greeting grateful subjects. In a reign that lasted more than 60 years, the famine queen spent no more than two months in Ireland, and a mere seven days in Wales. Her relationship with Ireland was a complex one. The monarchy was popular there, much more so than was the British state, and thus played in important role in maintaining peace and stability in what was an increasingly turbulent period. James Murphy writes of royalty as a “golden bridge… whereby the Irish might become reconciled to their position within the United Kingdom.” Yet popular belief – in Ireland at least – holds that Victoria disdained all things Irish, and that, for the whole of the famine years, she took little or no interest in the plight of her subjects on the far side of the Irish Sea. That is contestable, but it is certainly true that one motive for her decision to make a first journey there in the summer of 1849 was because (as she herself wrote, in the usual third person) “it must be disagreeable to her that people should speculate whether she dare visit one of her dominions.” The trip itself was kept brief and private, and had to be carefully stage-managed. The Queen and her consort, Prince Albert, travelled by sea. Their itinerary called for no visits to any hospital or workhouse, avoided the need to journey through the devastated countryside, and kept the monarch well away from any contact with the rural poor.

Victoria and Albert leave Kingstown (today Dún Laoghaire, the port of Dublin) for Belfast on 11 August 1849  – neatly avoiding  any need to travel through the devastated Irish countryside.

Victoria and Albert leave Kingstown (today Dún Laoghaire, the port of Dublin) for Belfast on 11 August 1849 – neatly avoiding any need to travel through the famine zones in the Irish countryside.

Victoria received an enthusiastic reception from the Irish that she did encounter, and it is estimated that as many as a million people may have thronged to see her – though some members of the Catholic clergy, notably Michael Slattery, the Archbishop of Cashel, complained bitterly of the Queen’s “indifference” to the poor, and refused to sign a Loyal Address. She recorded some generally positive impressions, finding Ireland “rather foreign,” and Cork “not at all like any English town,” but noting approvingly that “the women are really very handsome… such beautiful black eyes and hair and such fine colours and teeth.” What she did not do, during her visit, was make any contribution to the cause of famine relief. There is no evidence that she was criticised for this, and that was very probably because she had already made an appropriate donation two years earlier. Whatever the legend that grew up later around the Queen’s contribution to the cause, contemporaries believed she had been generous. There is, in fact, no room for ambiguity about the scale of her donation. When the British Association for the Relief of the Extreme Distress in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland – which would become the main private fund-raising group sending money to Ireland – was organized in 1847, it was quick to boast in print that “Her Majesty the Queen immediately directed that her name should be placed at the head of a list of donors for a contribution of £2,000 [about $330,000 today], with a most gracious promise of such further amount as the exigency might demand.” This made Victoria, in fact, by some distance the largest private donor to the relief effort, and she later gave a further £500 to a Ladies’ Clothing Fund.

Bridget O'Donnel and her children – one of several engravings made at the time of the famine by the Illustrated London News that have helped to fix historians' perceptions of the catastrophe.

Bridget O’Donnell and her children – one of several engravings made late in 1849 by the Illustrated London News that have helped to fix historians’ perceptions of the catastrophe. The pregnant O’Donnell was evicted from her cottage for non-payment of rent and subsequently miscarried.

Clearing the Queen of contributing a purely derisory amount, however, does not solve the mystery of why the Irish came to believe so firmly she had done so. Nor is it the same thing as concluding that her donation was much more than a token. There can be no doubt, in this respect, that she might have given more – she received an income of £385,000 a year from the British government’s Civil List (£60,000 of which was intended for her private use), personally owned vast tracts of land, and had a private fortune of some £5 million. That she might, and perhaps should, have been more generous is not some ahistorical revisioning of a Queen seen through 21st Century eyes. The unpublished archives of the period reveal that at least one man firmly believed that she should have set a better example than she did. The document in question is a note scribbled on the back of the original record of Victoria’s donation and signed by Stephen Spring Rice, secretary to the Relief Association. Spring Rice wrote that the sum originally received had been only £1,000, an amount that is placed in stark perspective by the fact that it was only four times the total that the servants in the royal palaces had banded together to collect at the same time. Spring Rice was sufficiently indignant to protest. According to his note, he “refused to place or abstained from placing the subscription on the list and went to G. Grey [Sir George Grey], Secretary of State, to say it wasn’t enough.” It was only after he had lodged his protest that the amount was doubled, and an announcement was also made that the Queen had promised to give more if necessary. (It was necessary, of course, but it seems she never did give more.) Spring Rice’s protest was, of course, kept private, and it does not seem particularly likely that any word of it reached ears in Ireland. Yet the tall tale of the monarch’s contemptuous donation to famine must have its origins at some point before it was first recorded in the 1890s, and James Loughlin goes so far as to argue that while the legend of the Queen’s £5 emerged only gradually, and “became fully developed only during the nationalist struggles of the later nineteenth century… its origins entered the Catholic Irish popular imagination during the famine itself.”

Food riots were a feature of the famine in several of the worst-hit districts. here a mob attacks a potato store in Galway, in the impoverished west. Government assumptions that the laws of supply and demand would ensure a good supply of affordable provisions had proved mistaken.

Food riots were a feature of the famine in several of the worst-hit districts. Here a mob attacks a potato store in Galway, in the impoverished west. Government assumptions that the laws of supply and demand would ensure a good supply of affordable provisions had proven mistaken.

There seems to be no evidence that this was in fact the case, and the reality, insofar as it can now be traced, seems to be that contemporary Irish anger was directed at Victoria’s ministers, and not directly at the Queen herself. The moderate Dublin paper The Freeman’s Journal called for a sharp line to be drawn between the monarch and her “starvation ministry,” and for the most part this was what happened. The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, was labelled “the Attorney General of Starvation” by the Irish press, and Lord Clarendon, the Queen’s representative in Dublin, acquired the epithet “the starvation Viceroy,” but the association of Victoria herself with blame for the famine dates only to her Golden Jubilee celebrations in 1887. In one highly ironic sense, this damaging development was a product of a successful British propaganda campaign. The government of the 1880s strove to turn Victoria and her Diamond Jubilee into a symbol of British success. If she could take credit for imperial triumphs, though, the Irish nationalists responded, she ought also to accept the blame for British failures, not least the disasters of the famine years. Criticism of of the Queen escalated in the decade or so that followed – the fiery Irish nationalist Maud Gonne coined the phrase “famine queen” to describe Victoria at the time of the elderly monarch’s state visit to Ireland in 1900 – and it was given an unexpected new focus by the “Kerry bog slide“, a catastrophe that swept a tide of liquid peat a mile wide and 30 feet deep through a valley in south-west Ireland on 28 December 1896. In the aftermath, it was reported, Victoria donated £5 to Katie Donnelly, an Irish girl whose mother, father and six siblings all died in the disaster. Though the donation was in line with others received at the time, it seemed pathetically inadequate compensation for such a complete loss, and James Murphy notes that the nationalist newspaper United Ireland “drew attention to the incident and used it to criticise the amount of Irish tax payers’ money the queen was receiving for her upkeep.” It may be that confused accounts of this donation fused with memories of the hungry years to create the specifics of the Queen’s legendary meanness in 1847; at least, no other such incident that might have been conflated with the Great Famine in Irish minds has yet been discovered.

One of the most memorable images of the famine years was this engraving from the Illustrated London News, showing two uncoffined corpses being drawn by an emaciated horse. It was entitled "Funeral in Skibbereen."

One of the most memorable images of the famine years was this engraving from the Illustrated London News, showing two uncoffined corpses being drawn by an emaciated horse. It was entitled “Funeral in Skibbereen.”

 “Three Turkish ships on the Boyne”

If Victoria had proposed to give only £1,000 to the Irish, then, but was persuaded to increase that to £2,000, what of Abdülmecid? It is here that the story gets both more complicated and considerably more fascinating. The bare facts are that the records of the great relief association do record a donation from the Turkish sultan, and that the amount subscribed was £1,000: itself twice what Prince Albert had donated, and the same as the sums gifted by Victoria’s mother and the King of Hanover. That would have been remarkable enough, given that by 1847 the Ottoman Empire was the “Sick Man of Europe,” practically bankrupt, and still struggling to recover from the Greek War of Independence and a large-scale revolt in Bosnia. What is even more surprising is that there is really is good evidence that the Sultan had wanted to give more – and even hints that, when he was persuaded not to, he took private steps of his own to send aid of the most practical kind. Irish accounts dating to the 1850s insist that this aid came in the form of three ships stuffed with food, which succeeded in unloading their precious cargoes on the wharves of Drogheda.

The Irish port of Drogheda during the famine period.

The Irish port of Drogheda, on the River Boyne, during the famine period.

Let us look, first, at the legend, which in its most detailed incarnation is of worryingly recent origin. It came to popular attention only in 2010, when Mary McAleese, the then President of Ireland, delivered a speech during an official visit to Turkey. According to McAleese, not only did the Irish owe a debt of gratitude to their hosts for Abdülmecid’s generosity a century and a half earlier, but Drogheda’s coat of arms had been modified to commemorate the docking of the Sultan’s ships with the addition of some Muslim symbols: a crescent moon and star. The Irish press spent an enjoyable day or two demolishing these claims – Drogheda’s arms turned out to have been granted eight centuries earlier by King John – but in the process they did lay the local origins of the legend bare. A plaque commemorating the arrival of Ottoman aid in Drogheda, it transpired, had been placed on the Westcourt Hotel in 1995 (according to the city’s mayor, Frank Godfrey, the hotel had formerly been the City Hall, and must therefore have been where the Sultan’s seamen had been put up in 1847). Godfrey had had the tale from the Turkish ambassador to Ireland, one Taner Baytok. Baytok, in turn, had been told it by an old woman who lived in a retirement home located directly under the Turkish embassy in Dublin, and verified the story by turning up an article that no one else seemed to be able to find. It had been written, he recalled, by Thomas P. O’Neill – by then dead, but a very real and highly distinguished professor of history at University College Galway, the author of the authorised biography of Éamon de Valera – and published in a magazine titled The Threshold. But attempts to locate the article, and indeed the magazine itself, all failed. Nor did the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, turn out to contain any record of the dispatch of Turkish vessels to Ireland.

The coat of arms of the Irish port of Drogheda, showing the crescent moon and star (top) that confused Mary McAleese.

The coat of arms of the Irish port of Drogheda, showing the crescent moon and star (top) that confused Mary McAleese.

It would be all too easy, given this convoluted state of affairs, to assume that the story of Abdülmecid’s ships was nothing but the product of fantasy or error – and perhaps even that there was no truth in the suggestion that the Sultan had been pushed to reduce his offer of monetary aid to a level which would not embarrass Queen Victoria. Easy, but wrong, because a little additional research turns up a fascinating paper trail that not only seems to confirm accounts of Abdülmecid’s generosity, but even provides an intriguing hint that Ottoman ships may indeed have docked at Drogheda. The story of the Sultan’s determination to make a substantial donation to famine release, to begin with, can be traced back to Charles Mackay’s supplement to W. Cooke Taylor’s three volume Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel. This is a contemporary source, published in 1851, and it was written by a noted journalist who not only worked for, and went on to edit, the highly influential Illustrated London News, but was also the father of Marie Corelli, the most spectacularly successful popular novelist of the late Victorian period. Mackay himself is still remembered for his Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and he published his fourth volume to Taylor’s biography of the former Prime Minister only a handful of years after the events that he described.

Charles Mackay, the Scottish biographer of Sir Robert Peel, was the first to ascribe an attempted donation of £10,000 to Sultan Abdülmecid I. Photo: Herbert Watkins, late 1850s.

Charles Mackay, the Scottish biographer of Sir Robert Peel, was the first to ascribe an attempted donation of £10,000 to Sultan Abdülmecid I. Photo: Herbert Watkins, late 1850s.

In his volume of the Life, Mackay suggested that Abdülmecid decided on a donation to famine relief after hearing of a letter, issued in Queen Victoria’s name in January 1847, that set out the dire situation in Ireland. “One of the most remarkable instances of the universal interest and sympathy manifested on this occasion,” the writer added,

“was in the offer of no less than £10,000 by the Sultan, besides some ship-loads of provisions. His Majesty’s ministers represented, however, that Queen Victoria having subscribed only £2,000, it would not be respectful for a foreign sovereign to subscribe a larger sum; and the Sultan confined his subscription to £1,000, which was duly dispatched to Ireland.”

It is worth pausing here to consider Mackay’s brief passage in greater detail, for it contains in essence the full version of all modern accounts of Abdülmecid’s contribution: the offer of £10,000, British objection to the offer, and its revision to a more fitting total. Mackay also seems to have been the earliest author to mention the idea of Turkish aid ships, though it will be noted that his account implies that the idea of sending them was dropped when the Sultan’s gift was scaled back to £1,000.

Daniel MacDonald's painting "The discovery of the potato blight in Ireland" dates to c.1852 and depicts a moment of horror observed at the time by Father Theobald Matthew, who wrote inAugust 1846 of a journey between Dublin and Cork that revealed "one wide waste of purifying vegetation." In many places, Matthew encountered "wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly [at] the destruction that had left them foodless."

Daniel MacDonald’s painting “The discovery of the potato blight in Ireland” dates to c.1852 and depicts a moment of horror observed at the time by Father Theobald Matthew, who wrote in August 1846 of a journey between Dublin and Cork that revealed “one wide waste of putrifying vegetation.” In many places, Matthew encountered “wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly [at] the destruction that had left them foodless.”

I have done some brief research into Mackay and his sources without really being satisfied that I can account for where he got this extraordinary information. He was a well-connected journalist, but there is nothing in the brief life contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Angus Calder to suggest that those connections extended to the world of politics. Mackay was, moreover, a lifelong liberal, while Peel had led the Tories [that is, the conservatives], which must imply that he was unlikely to have been especially close to many figures in the government of the time. It seems reasonable to suppose that Mackay came upon his information while researching his contribution to the Life and Times, but how he got that job, and who he spoke to in completing it, is not clear from the volume itself, which is neither footnoted nor referenced. It does seem fairly likely that Mackay was personally acquainted with his predecessor, Taylor; both men were prominent campaigners against the protectionist Corn Laws that Peel abolished. If so, he may have inherited papers and other information, and it is interesting to note, in this respect, that Taylor was an Irishman who, in 1847, was offered a position by the British Viceroy in Dublin, Lord Clarendon. He was subsequently employed as Clarendon’s personal statistician. It is not impossible that this job placed Taylor in a position to know a good deal about the internal workings of the relief effort at  precisely the time that Abdülmecid became involved in it.¶
William Cooke Taylor, author of the first three volumes of Peel's Life and Times, was centrally placed in the Irish administration in Dublin.

William Cooke Taylor, author of the first three volumes of Peel’s Life and Times, was centrally placed in the British administration in Dublin. Image: Wikicommons.

Whatever the truth, there are three other works that bear on the question of the Ottoman Sultan’s efforts to aid Ireland and these, together, help to fill out and confirm much of Mackay’s account. The first is the mysterious article written by Thomas P. O’Neill, and cited by Taner Baytok; the second a book that O’Neill points to, the journals of the Irish nationalist politician W.J. O’Neill Daunt. The third is the shipping records of Drogheda, researched – since the originals are not available to historians – in local newspapers by the Irish writer Brendan Matthews. Between them, these sources tell us all that we know, if not all that we may ever find, about the mysterious Turkish ships that are supposed to have appeared on the Boyne in 1847. It is sensible to start with Thomas P. O’Neill and the article that he placed so obscurely in The Threshold. With a certain amount of effort I was able to establish that this publication did exist.§ It was not, however, a journal of history, but the house magazine of the Lyric Players, a theatre company founded in 1951 and based in the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. Under the editorship of the Players’ founder, Mary O’Malley, The Threshold published mostly poetry and literature, but also a smattering of articles on Irish history. O’Neill’s contribution, which appeared in its second issue in the summer of 1957, was titled “The Queen and the Famine.” It provides a thoroughly researched (if unfortunately unreferenced) overview of the whole of the story. O’Neill seems to have been the first historian to discover Spring Rice’s explosive manuscript account of his wranglings over the amount of Victoria’s donation, and was certainly the only one sufficiently familiar with local folklore to understand the significance of what occurred when the famine queen’s statue was removed from its plinth in Dublin. As was noted above, he also knew enough of William J. O’Neill Daunt to realise that Daunt’s journal provided the vital clue that apparently resolves one central mystery of this obscure byway of history – how Abdülmecid acquired an interest in Ireland in the first place.

The removal of the statue of Queen Victoria from outside the Irish parliament building, Leinster House, in 1948. Forty years later, at the request of the Lord Mayor of Sydney, the statue was shipped to Australia and re-erected outside the Queen Victoria Building in that city. It was probably on this occasion that a spectator stepped forward and waved a £5 note at the Queen, 101 years after her donation to famine relief sparked the events dissected in this essay.

The removal of the statue of Queen Victoria from outside the Irish parliament building, Leinster House, in 1948. It was probably on this occasion that a spectator stepped forward and waved a £5 note at the Queen, 101 years after her donation to famine relief sparked the events dissected in this essay. The statue was preserved and re-erected some years ago outside the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, Australia.

If we turn now to A Life Spent for Ireland, a selection from Daunt’s journals that was edited by the old nationalist’s daughter and published in London shortly after his death in 1894, we find that the Sultan appears to have learned of the famine from his Irish physician, Justin McCarthy of Cork. Daunt had his account from McCarthy’s son, who was in Scotland in 1853 and met him there. According to Daunt’s journal, their conversation took place on 18 January of that year:

“McCarthy… told me that the Sultan had intended to give £10,000 to the famine-stricken Irish, but was deterred by the English ambassador, Lord Cowley, as Her Majesty, who had only subscribed £1000, would have been annoyed had a foreign sovereign given a larger sum…”

Now, Daunt cannot have been Mackay’s source, for he met Justin McCarthy’s son two years after the final volume of Peel’s Life and Times was published. It is possible that Mackay was McCarthy’s, but the incidental detail and the addition of Lord Cowley (who was the Duke of Wellington’s nephew and certainly was ambassador to the Sublime Porte at this point) in Daunt’s account implies that this was not the case. It is possible to suggest, therefore, that the two versions of the tale are probably independent and hence corroborate each other. Finally – the handful of readers who have staggered this far will be heartened to know – there is the matter of the shipping records of Drogheda, the small port to the north of Dublin at which, Irish tradition insists, Abdülmecid’s cargoes were unloaded. These records are summarised by both the local newspapers of the day, the Argus and the Conservative; shipping news was a staple of most periodicals at this time, since it was vital to the fortunes of the merchants and investors who made up a high proportion of their readers. They suggest that ships hailing from anywhere but Ireland and Britain were rarities in famine-era Drogheda – a point that would certainly explain why the Sultan’s ships seem to have made a great impression in the port’s collective memory. Nonetheless, no fewer than three vessels flying foreign flags did tie up at Drogheda between 10 and 14 May 1847, some five months after Abdülmecid would have read the appeal issued on behalf of Queen Victoria for aid to be sent to Ireland.

WJ O'Neill Daunt, from a photo taken in old age

W.J. O’Neill Daunt, whose 1853 meeting with the son of Abdülmecid’s surgeon provides some corroboration for the legend of Turkish aid to Ireland in the famine years. From a photo taken 40 years later, in old age, and published by his daughter.

According to the researches of Brendan Matthews, one of these ships was probably Prussian: she was named the Alita or the Meta, and her home port was Stettin, on the Baltic Sea. The other two, however, came from the Balkans, which were then still under Ottoman control. They were the Porcupine and the Ann – two rather English names for ships – and they apparently had English masters, for their names were Cleveland and Floyd. Nonetheless, they had sailed from Turkish Thessalonica (today Salonika, in modern Bulgaria). All three merchantmen carried cargoes of wheat and “Indian corn” – cheap maize, one of Ireland’s principal imports during the famine years. This is a remarkable find – more so given the rarity of foreign commerce in small Irish ports in those days – but it is only fair to point out that the newspapers contain a strong indication that the cargoes of the Porcupine and the Ann were trade goods, not charity; they were consigned to local merchants based in Louth and Meath, who it might be expected would sell them rather than give them away. Speculation in imported corn, moreover, was scarcely unheard-of two years into the Great Famine; the Ottomans grew it, and the owners of the Porcupine and the Ann presumably knew that they did. It is, of course, still possible that the two ships were chartered on Abdülmecid’s orders, and perhaps the only way of now guessing if they were would be to establish if they were the only vessels out of Balkan ports to unload cargoes in Irish ones during this period. If it could be established that other ships from Turkish ports called at Drogheda or Kingstown in those years, the case for a regular commerce in importing foodstuffs for the starving Irish would become a great deal stronger. Whether or not the ships brought wheat and corn for free distribution or for sale, however, it is possible to speculate that a remarkable chain of happenstance was forged in Drogheda during the starvation years. A wealthy queen’s donation, a Sultan’s noble gesture, and the coincidental arrival of unknown ships from unknown ports could well have supplied the germs of legends that continue to resonate in Ireland today. Footnotes § I note that since I went to all this trouble, months ago, Google Books has digitised a run at Indiana University and made it available for searching via snippet view. Such are the travails of the non-digital researcher. ¶ I did locate one published allusion to Abdülmecid’s desire to contribute a sum greater than £1,000 to famine relief that predates Mackay’s work – a travelogue on Smyrna that appeared, rather obscurely, in the ninetieth volume of Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine and Humorist in 1850. Since this passing reference did not mention the larger sum of £10,000, or the ships, it cannot have been Mackay’s source, but it does indicate that the story was somehow in circulation before he wrote. Acknowledgement My thanks to Megan Halsband of the Library of Congress for her help in tracking down a copy of Thomas P. O’Neill’s elusive Threshold article. Sources Anon. “Cork and the Queen’s reign. Freeman’s Journal, 1 May 1897. Anon. “Obituary: Wm. Cooke Taylor, LLD.” Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1850; Anon. “President of Ireland Mary Robinson addresses the Choctaw People.” Bishinik: The Official Publication of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, June 1995; Anon. “Sidelines.” History Ireland 18, May/June 2010; Anon. “Matthews uncovers more proof about aid from the Ottoman Empire.” Drogheda Independent, October 17, 2012; Henry Christmas. The Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Medjid Khan: a brief memoir of his life and reign, etc. London: Shaw’s Family Library, 1854; Alison Comyn. “Ottoman ships on the Boyne.” Drogheda Independent, May 23, 2012; KH Connell. “Land and population in Ireland, 1780-1845.” Economic History Review 2 (1950); William J. O’Neill Daunt. A Life Spent for Ireland. Being Selections from the Journals of the Late W.J. O’Neill Daunt, Edited by his Daughter. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896; Paul S. Ell. “Mapping the Great Famine.” Unpublished paper, School of Sociology, The Queen’s University of Belfast, 2000; S. Engler et al. “The Irish famine of 1740-41: famine vulnerability and ‘climate migration.‘” In Climate of the Past 9 (2013); Peter Gray. Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004. Said Gul. “The Great Irish Famine and the Ottoman humanitarian aid to Ireland.” The Pen, 30 December 2011; John Killen. The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts, 1841-1851. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995; Christine Kinealy. “Private responses to the famine.” Multitext project in Irish history, nd; Christine Kinealy. “International relief efforts during the famine.” Irish America, August/September 2009; Christine Kinealy. “Famine Queen or faery? Queen Victoria and Ireland.” In Roger Swift & Christine Kinealy (eds), Politics and Power in Victorian Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006; Christine Kinealy. “‘The widow’s mite': private relief during the Great Famine.” History Ireland 16 (2008); Noel Kissane. The Irish Famine: A Documentary History. Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 1995; James Loughlin. The British Monarchy and Ireland: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; ‘Mahmouz Effendi.’ “Smyrna: the ‘City of Figs.'” Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine and Humorist 90 (1850); James H. Murphy. “Fashioning the Famine Queen.” In Peter Gray (ed), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837-1901. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004;  Thomas P. O’Neill. “The Queen and the Famine.” In Threshold v1n2 (Summer 1957); Philip O’Regan. “Skibbereen and the Great Hunger.” Southern Star, 9 May 2009; Patrick O’Sullivan. The Meaning of the Famine. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1997; WC Taylor and Charles Mackay. Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel. London, 4 vols.: Peter Jackson, 1846-51; Lytton Strachey. Queen Victoria: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 1921; Roger Swift and Christine Kinealy. Politics and Power in Victorian Ireland. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006; Weldon Thornton. Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968; Pauric Travers. “Reading between the lines: the political speeches of Charles Stewart Parnell.” Studia Hibernica 31 (2000-01).


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