Man behind the Famine
QUESTION Did Charles Trevelyan ever come to regret any of his actions or decisions made during the Great Famine?
CHARLES Trevelyan, who was in charge of the UK government’s relief efforts during the Great Famine never expressed remorse or regret for his actions – and often inaction – making the effects of the famine much worse than they would otherwise have been.
Trevelyan, who was born in Taunton, south-west England, in 1807, came from a well-off family. His father was an Archdeacon in the Church of England. When he was 19, Trevelyan joined the East India Company and was sent to India, where his intellectual skills and hard work earned him rapid promotion. He returned to England in 1840 when he was made assistant secretary to the Treasury, a job he held until 1859.
It was his job at the Treasury that made the effects of the Great Famine in Ireland much worse than they should have been as he was in charge of the relief efforts made by the UK government.
After the famine started in 1845, Trevelyan publicly stated that the disaster was a divine act of providence. He was also anti-Irish. In 1848, two years after the Famine started, he wrote a book about his experiences called The Irish Crisis. In that book, he said the physical evil of the famine ‘wasn’t the great evil with which we have to contend, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. They are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence’.
In other words, Trevelyan blamed the ordinary people of Ireland for bringing the worst effects of the famine on themselves.
Quite apart from his unbending religious beliefs, he was also a great believer in laissez-faire economics – letting the private market take care of the problem. Relief programmes that were started at the beginning of the Famine were shut down on Trevelyan’s orders as he believed that if people in Ireland were given unlimited relief they would come to rely on government aid rather than finding their own solutions to the failure of the potato crop that had caused the Famine.
The government in London had also bought substantial quantities of corn to store at depots throughout the worst affected areas but Trevelyan decided that this was no solution to the problem and insisted this food distribution be handed over to private enterprise. At the same time, shiploads of grain were being exported from Ireland to England. His beliefs in the free market were also instrumental in persuading the UK government to do nothing to prevent mass evictions.
Many of the UK government’s agents in Ireland as well as numerous other well-placed people, such as the clergy warned Trevelyan that his policies were leading to disaster but he refused to come to Ireland to see the plight of famine victims.
He remained unyielding in his refusal to change his policies or attitudes towards Ireland.
When Queen Victoria came to Ireland in 1848 Trevelyan was one of those rewarded for his efforts – in his case, becoming a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. In 1874 he was made a baronet so that he could call himself Sir Charles Trevelyan.
The effects of the famine were dire, made much worse by Trevelyan’s determination to make people in Ireland stand on their own feet. By 1850, around 1.25million people had died and between 1845 and 1855, a total of 2.1million had emigrated.
The potato blight eventually spread to the western highlands of Scotland by the early 1850s and Trevelyan’s response was to encourage people from the areas worst affected to emigrate to Australia.
Eventually, at the end of the 1850s, Trevelyan returned to India, where he assumed high office. He died in London in 1886, aged 79.
His reputation never recovered, and during his lifetime he never turned from his pious evangelistic views or expressed any remorse that his actions in Ireland had had disastrous consequences for the Irish people.
Patricia McKee, Dublin 12.
QUESTION In the final episode of M*A*S*H, what was the piece of classical music Major Charles Winchester was trying to teach an orchestra of captured prisoners?
ACCORDING to The Complete Book of M*A*S*H (by Suzy Kalter, Columbus Books, 1984), ‘Charles spent much of his time worrying whether he’d get the job he wanted as Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Mercy Hospital, Boston.
‘To take his mind off things he taught Mozart’s Quintet for Clarinet and Strings to a group of Chinese soldier-musicians who had surrendered to him one day when he was on his way to the latrine.’
In a most poignant scene from Goodbye, Farewell And Amen, Major Winchester, in his dressing gown, watches his orchestra being taken away from the camp on the back of an army truck — they are playing Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A, as he had taught them.
Shortly afterwards, the Armistice (ending the Korean War) is declared to great celebration. The scene was written to show that music is a universal language.
Stephen Dorff, by email.
...WOLFGANG Amadeus Mozart’s (1756-1791) Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K. 581, was written in 1789 for his friend, the clarinettist Anton Stadler (1752-1812).
It is a work for one clarinet and a string quartet i.e. two violins, a viola and a cello. Mozart was enamoured with the clarinet which was still a relatively young orchestral instrument at the time.
Mozart had met Stadler in the early 1780s and the two struck up a firm friendship, based not only on Stadler’s virtuoso playing but also his jovial character. Stadler was somewhat dissolute; he borrowed money from Mozart which he never repaid, but it appears not to have concerned the composer.
All Mozart’s great works for the clarinet — the Concerto, the Clarinet Quintet, the ‘Kegelstatt’ (Skittle Alley) Trio and the obbligato parts in two arias from La clemenza di Tito — were composed for Stadler. Mozart wrote to him (in 1785): ‘Never should I have thought that a clarinet could be capable of imitating the human voice as it was imitated by you.
‘Indeed, your instrument has so soft and lovely a tone that no-one can resist.’ It was Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, his final instrumental work, that is considered the ‘jewel in the clarinettist’s crown’.
This was completed in October 1791, less than two months before the composer’s early death at the age of just 35. It was Anton Stadler who gave the première in Prague on October 16, 1791.
Maurice Powell, by email.
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