The Forgotten Holocaust

… Having learned from that villain Burrows that a number of the starving tenants on the estate were attempting to feed themselves by shooting one or two rabbit and grouse, my dear husband has forbidden the use or ownership of private arms. I did what I could to impress upon him that by such action he effectively condemns yet more Irish people to the same lingering death that now afflicts every morbid corner of this land. To no avail; his word is final. ‘I will not allow these peasants to roam at will over the countryside with loaded weapons,’ said he. ‘Today it is a rabbit they will shoot. Tomorrow a gentleman, for the pennies in his purse or the meat on his table. We shall not permit anarchy, and there’s an end to it. Nor shall I allow you to meddle in the affairs of the estate.’

Yet meddle I shall, for I cannot simply stand by and do nothing.

… This morning I rode across the blighted fields to the cottages of our three nearest peasant neighbours, the Callaghans, McCormicks and Driscolls. To the Callaghans I gave a share of what little money I have been able to collect and keep hidden, ever fearing that Edgar might find it and discover that I have been secretly selling pieces of the jewellery he gave me. I then crossed the hill to the cottage of the McCormick family, to give them their share of the same in the hope that they might make use of it to provide for themselves. When I entered the cottage, stretched in one corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and the rags that covered them, were the three children huddled together, pale and shrivelled. They turned their sunken eyes upon me as I entered, but were too weak from hunger to rise. In another corner, prostrated on a bed of sodden straw, sat a poor creature, barely human in her squalor and evidently close to death. In a piteous croak, the old woman implored me to give her something to eat, but all I could give was the small sum of money I could spare.

Unable to bear the sight any longer, I hurried onwards towards the Driscolls’ thatched hut beyond the wood, to find there a spectacle even more ghastly: the hut in ruins, reduced to burnt wreckage on the blackened ground. This I knew was the work of the house tumblers, unspeakable rogues employed by my own husband to force eviction upon their very countrymen. The family were gone, dead perhaps, buried in the pits now that the carpenters have no more wood for coffins, or else sent to the workhouse. I reined my horse around and wept for bitter shame as I returned to Glenfell House. I am weeping still.

… Yesterday I was attending to my stable when I came upon little Moira O’Brien, one of the servant girls, sobbing forlornly in the hay barn. ‘What sorrows you, my dear?’ I asked her, giving her a handkerchief. ‘Pray dry your tears and confide in me.’ Barely able to speak at first for her grief, she then related a tale so extremely distressing that I have not been able to shake it from my mind. I did not sleep for a single minute last night and my hand trembles as I force myself to write these words:

It is dreadful. Two of Moira’s cousins, Sean and Liam McGrath, and seven other young men of the county are sentenced to death for the crime of armed robbery after gathering up arms and attempting to raid a convoy of food and livestock bound for Wicklow Port. What manner of desperation could have prompted such a foolhardy course? Everyone has seen the long columns of redcoats marching side by side with the wagons, muskets aloft and gleaming in the sun. Yet in their unthinking folly, Sean and Liam and their friends attacked from the wooded high ground as the convoy passed along a narrow road outside Loughrea. It is said the clamour of gunfire and the great clouds of powder smoke could be discerned for miles. How could nine inexperienced farmers have expected to succeed against English soldiers, to say nothing of escaping alive with enough food to feed their hungry families?

Three of their band were killed outright in the battle, if a battle it can be called. Michael Murphy received a musket ball in his right arm, shattering the bone so horribly that it was caused to be removed at the shoulder. The rest were quickly rounded up and are now in the gaol awaiting execution. Their poor heartbroken families have petitioned for clemency, begging for the sentence to be commuted. Even deportation to the penal colonies of New South Wales must be better than hanging.

‘I shall do no such thing,’ Edgar remonstrated with me when I pleaded, pleaded with him this morning to use his influence in the matter. ‘These men deserve no less than the full punishment of the law; they shall have it next Thursday at dawn. I will be there in person to watch them drop, and to the Devil with them.’

August 19th, 1847

I have made a discovery that shakes me to the core. I am at a complete loss as to what to think, or what to do with such knowledge. Oh, Stephen, where are you when I am in such need of a friend to confide in? I am alone and can do nothing but record upon these pages the turmoil of my mind.

I have often wondered what goes on behind the locked door of my husband’s laboratory in the east wing. He will let no servant enter, nor have I ever been permitted to see inside. He habitually spends many hours shut in that room, refusing to speak afterwards of his work, on the grounds that his botanical and chemical researches lie so far beyond the limits of his wife’s mental powers that to discuss them would be futile.

Inquisitiveness has not seldom driven me to venture to the laboratory door when he is inside, keeping silent as a mouse lest he detect my footstep and wondering at the peculiar odours that emanate from behind it. I have sometimes tried to peek through the keyhole, but could see only the opposite bare wall.

The only human being Edgar will allow into the laboratory is his Royal Society colleague Heneage Fitzwilliam, whose visits to Glenfell have long been a frequent … I shall not say ‘pleasure’, for although the respectable gentleman’s scientific eminence is without question, I have always found his manner somewhat odd. For days on end, many times repeated, have they closeted themselves inside the room, speaking in low tones as if conferring on matters of a highly secretive nature.

Now I come to my discovery. I shall not dwell on how the key fell into my hands today, or how I discovered where my husband keeps it hidden inside the cigar box on his desk. Seizing the opportunity while he is away on some business (whose nature he did not choose to reveal to me), I retrieved the key and ran to the laboratory, all sense of guilt quite overcome by curiosity.

The laboratory is a smaller room than I had expected it to be, yet containing such an amazing variety of instruments and other scientific objects whose names and purposes I cannot guess at, except to say they are connected with Edgar’s botanical investigations. On a long table, covered with papers and books, I came across a heavy ledger filled with entries and notes in my husband’s careful hand. I could make little sense of them, but they appeared to comprise an extensive record of experimental results, dating from the year forty-five to the present. In another book I came upon many drawings of plants similarly dated. Upon a wooden rack sit rows of jars filled with preserved plant specimens, which have been labelled in order and range from those apparently plucked in a state of perfect health, to others bearing signs of disease. The more recent the date, the more withered and ill-looking the plant, as though marking a progression.

Little do I know of botany — but to have lived here in Ireland for any length of time is to know and recognise these specimens as coming from the common potato plant that we see — used to see — growing everywhere around. What can Edgar and his colleague have been doing with them? I asked myself over and over, and could come to no answer until I discovered the box.

It is a plain wooden item, the size of a lady’s sewing box, with a lid that hinges open to reveal the red velvet of its lining. Protected inside, I found a row of small glass tubes — I imagine one could call them phials — each stoppered with a tiny bung and containing some manner of thick brown fluid that resembles … well, I will not say what it resembles. I tentatively uncorked one of them and held its opening to my nose, only to recoil in disgust at its odour before quickly replacing the bung. The phial, like the rest, bears a label in Edgar’s hand with the name ‘Phytophthora infestans’.

Following my discovery, my mind awhirl as to what it could all signify, I replaced the items as I had found them and fled the laboratory, locking the door. Hastening directly to Edgar’s study I returned the key to its hiding place, then perused his bookcase and brought down a Dictionary of Ancient Greek. My knowledge of such things being severely limited by the meagre education reserved for my sex, I spent some time looking up the words I had seen on the labelled phials of noxious fluid. From this investigation I quickly learned that the stem ‘phyto’ refers generally to the plant kingdom, and that ‘phthora’ is the old Greek term meaning destruction, corruption and ruin. ‘Infestans’ I did not need to be told must describe an infestation, an infection or blight.

A blight, intended to destroy plants? Is this what my husband and his scientific colleague have been working on all this time? The foul substance; the potato plant samples in their varying states of corruption; the profuse notes of all their experiments; the conclusions are too unthinkable to contemplate.

Unthinkable, and yet inescapable. I am not a person of any great scientific understanding but it is clear to me that the goal of Edgar’s researches has been the deliberate creation of as severe a withering and devastation of the potato crop as modern science could contrive. God help us. It is more than I can bear. Can my husband truly be responsible for the starvation that afflicts Ireland?