SCOTLAND'S POTATO FAMINE
The bitter cold and potato blight-induced famine of 1846 caused misery, death and then insurrection during one of the bleakest winters in Scottish history, says James Hunter
The blight of 1846 and the bleak winter that ensued
When George Pole made his way into the Barra township of Bruernish on 13 January 1847, he was confronted by indications of the sort of crisis a later age would call a humanitarian catastrophe. The immediate cause of the misery affecting this crofting settlement’s 27 families was the runaway plant disease – blight – that had deprived them of potatoes.
This wouldn’t have mattered had alternative foodstuffs been available in quantity, but that was not the case. Barra, said by a sixteenth-century cleric to be ‘fertill and fruitful in corne’, might once have been a grain-producing locality where oatmeal and barley-meal were common foodstuffs. But now little of either was to be found on an island where nearly every scrap of arable land had been given over to potatoes.
In Bruernish, George Pole an ‘inspecting officer’ on the staff of the Commissariat – the military provisioning agency made responsible for famine relief in the Highlands and Islands the previous autumn – reported, ‘I found few families with any meal at all.’
What he did find though were widespread ‘diarrhoea and typhus fever’ – standard accompaniments of famine.
Prior to his transfer to Oban, the Commissariat’s forward base for the duration of Scotland’s famine winter, Pole had served in Ireland.
Blight had struck in Ireland a year before it reached Scotland, and it was there that he and his colleagues helped ensure the 1845 potato crop’s loss resulted in few, if any, deaths from hunger.
The return of blight in 1846, together with the less interventionist Irish policy resulting from Tory premier Robert Peel’s ousting by his Whig rivals, meant that this success would not be repeated. In the course of what Irish people call ‘Black Forty-Seven’, Ireland’s famine death toll would be measured, insofar as it could be measured at all, in hundreds of thousands.
When Scotland’s potato crop was wiped out by blight the country was
“The relief effort came too late to prevent starvation
thrown into crisis. In the Hebrides and West Highlands the relief effort came too late to prevent starvation and even death. In the east, towns in Aberdeenshire and as far north as Wick rose up to protest against the increasing cost of oatmeal, their only other source of nutrition. In desperation and in the grip of a bitter winter many families seized grain carts and blockaded ships in an attempt to bring their plight to the attention of the nation and ensure that they had food for their loved ones.
In a sworn statement taken down by Lochmaddybased sheriff-substitute Charles Shaw, Barra crofter Neil MacNeil tells of his four-year old son’s death from hunger. He and his family, MacNeil says, were so lacking in resources that they ‘depended upon the charity of friends’ for months. Those friends were, however, ‘themselves so scarce’ that they had little food to spare. Sometimes there were days when ‘the only thing tasted’ by MacNeil, his wife and their five children was ‘warm water’. This is why the boy who died could be given
just a little ‘thin gruel’ usually once, more rarely twice, a day. ‘He never complained of pain,’ MacNeil says of his dead son, ‘but he wasted away day by day till he became so weak that he could not sit up.’
The boy, Sheriff Shaw notes, died on 15 January 1847. His small son, the bereaved father tells Shaw, ‘had not tasted a morsel the previous day’ because there had been ‘nothing to give him’.
The famine relief effort – of which Commissariat officers like Pole were part – would go a long way to preventing a similar cataclysm in Scotland’s potato-dependent crofting districts – deaths from hunger being confined to just one or two localities. But this became apparent only in retrospect. Throughout the opening weeks of 1847 the West Highlands and Islands teetered on the edge of catastrophe.
Elsewhere in the north there were fears that famine was about to affect many more communities. Those fears were especially acute in localities bordering the Moray Firth.
People there were less reliant on potatoes than in crofting areas, where potatoes were often the sole source of nutrition. But in part because blight’s onset coincided with a steep downturn in incomes from fishing, families in Moray Firth towns and villages found it increasingly difficult to purchase the oatmeal to which they’d turned in the absence of potatoes – all the more so because oatmeal, by the start of 1847, was soaring in cost.
Meal prices, it was said, could be reduced by stopping outbound shipments of oats and other cereals. But this was rejected by politicians who refused to interfere with market mechanisms. And so people began to stop shipments by force. Hence the following February 1847 comment, in a London publication: ‘Food riots have been spreading in the North of Scotland to so great an extent that several parties of military have been despatched from Edinburgh. In some parts the country is described to be nearly in a state of insurrection.’
In Portgordon a customs officer tries to hold off an enraged ‘mob’ by brandishing, as he puts it, ‘a pointed pistol in each hand’. Garmouth is plunged into chaos ‘by the unruly proceedings of a number of women’ who bring its grain trade to a halt. Moray’s sheriff, together with an accompanying force of special constables, is besieged in a Burghead inn that comes under fierce attack. In Elgin the same sheriff is forced to open the town jail and release a protest leader.
Inverness, where for a fortnight or more law enforcement becomes impossible, is ringed by illegallyestablished roadblocks where every grain cart is inspected and – if bound for the harbour – turned back.
In Avoch the local population are
“His small son had not tasted a morsel the previous day
confronted by heavily armed soldiers. There are similar confrontations in Invergordon where prisoners are freed by people who use a battering ram to stove in the door of the building where they are being held. In Beauly, a farmer’s grain cart is pitched into the river. In Pulteneytown, a harbourside community adjoining Wick, bayonet-wielding troops open fire on a stone-throwing crowd, and bloodshed ensues.
Savage sentences are imposed on some rioters – several being condemned to transportation to one of Britain’s penal colonies in Australia. But though there is repression, there are concessions too. Protesters – who, the authorities concede, loot no food – do not want, they insist, something for nothing. What’s demanded is meal at a price folk think fair. And this, eventually, is what’s provided – the better-off, in very many places, contributing generously to funds that make it possible to subsidise the cost of meal. And so the famine winter’s ‘state of insurrection’ ends in a victory for the thousands who took to the streets.