Irish Famine

[Waterways]

In 1847 7,500 Irish people were buried in a paupers grave. Half were under 5. Does anyone know where this grave is?

On Clarence Dock gates:

The dock is so historical in that most of the Irish migrants fleeing starvation entered England via this dock. A plaque has been placed on the dock gates which says, "Through these gates passed most of the 1,300,000 Irish migrants who fled from the Great Famine and 'took the ship' to Liverpool in the years 1845-52"

Clarence Dock is still there, the indestructible granite quays and all. It
just needs digging out.

The outline of the quays canm still be seen.

[Waterways]

This descibes the multitude of Irish living on the streets of Liverpool around the north end docks.

'Redburn, His First Voyage' by Herman Melville 1849

"Previous to this, having only seen the miserable wooden wharves and shambling piers of New York... in Liverpool I beheld long China walls of masonry; vast piers of stone; and a succession of granite-rimmed docks, completely enclosed. The extent and solidity of these structures seemed equal to what I had read of the old pyramids of Egypt. In magnitude, cost and durability the docks of Liverpool surpass all others in the world... for miles you may walk along that riverside, passing dock after dock, like a chain of immense fortresses.

Prince's Dock, of comparatively recent construction, is perhaps the largest of all and is well known to American sailors from the fact that it is mostly frequented by the American shipping. Here lie the noble New York packets, which at home are found at the foot of Wall-Street; and here also lie the Mobile and Savannah cotton ships and traders."

"Prince's Dock is generally so filled with shipping that the entrance of a newcomer is apt to occasion a universal stir among all the older occupants. The dock-masters mount the poops and forecastles of the various vessels and hail the surrounding strangers in all directions:- "Highlander ahoy! Cast off your bowline and sheer alongside the Neptune!"- "Neptune ahoy! Get out a stern line and sheer alongside the Trident!"- "Trident ahoy! Get out a bow line and drop astern of the Undaunted!" And so it runs round like a shock of electricity; touch one, and you touch all. This kind of work irritates and exasperates the sailors to the last degree.

At twelve o'clock the crews of hundreds and hundreds of ships issue in crowds from the dock gates to go to their dinner in the town. (cooking fires being strictly prohibited within the dock estate) This hour is seized upon by multitudes of beggars to plant themselves against the outside of the walls, while others stand against the curbstone to excite the charity of the seamen... The first time that I passed through this long lane of pauperism, it seemed hard to believe that such an array of misery could be furnished by any town in the world"

[Sloyne]

At twelve o'clock the crews of hundreds and hundreds of ships issue in crowds from the dock gates to go to their dinner in the town. (cooking fires being strictly prohibited within the dock estate)

And this was the start of the dish and description of the accent and name given to the people of Liverpool; "SCOUSE".

[Waterways]

And this was the start of the dish and description of the accent and name given to the people of Liverpool; "SCOUSE".

We are Liverpudlians.

[Sloyne]

We are Liverpudlians.

You keep saying that and I got your message the first time, on another web site, but, as you are wrong in a lot of the things you post I have taken the liberty of applying scepticism to a lot of your posts. Thank you.

[Sloyne]

We are Liverpudlians.

Now I know it's not the definitive work on encyclopedia's but I think most on this forum will give it some credence.

WIKIPEDIA:

SCOUSE
From wikepedia, the free encyclopedia.

Scouse is the accent and dialect of English found in the northern English city of Liverpool, in some adjoining urban areas of Merseyside and less commonly in northwestern Cheshire and Skelmesdale West Lancashire. Inhabitants of Liverpool are called Liverpudlians but are more often described by the slang term Scouser.

[bazzacat]

Engels description of the Irish is the dismay of many a budding Marxist- but no doubt he wrote as he saw it, and his mistress was Irish too, so I see no evidence for a deep seated grudge..

Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845

Irish Immigration
We have already referred several times in passing to the Irish who have immigrated into England; and we shall now have to investigate more closely the causes and results of this immigration.

The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east side of St. George's Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither. It has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population. Thus there are in London, 120,000; in Manchester, 40,000; in Liverpool, 34,000; Bristol, 24,000; Glasgow, 40,000; Edinburgh, 29,000, poor Irish people. [4] These people having grown up almost. without civilisation, accustomed from youth to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them among a class of the English population which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate education and morality. Let us hear Thomas Carlyle upon this subject:

"The wild Milesian [6] features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back -- for wages that will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar. The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work. The uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon native out, takes possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder. Whoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming, but sunk.... That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish, competing with them in all the markets: that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price; at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to an equality with that."

If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages? The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses. I have occasionally heard the Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most thickly populated parts of Manchester. The majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin. In short, the Irish have, as Dr. Kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted with it. Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered, and which is the Irishman's second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working- people's quarters and poison the air. He builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England. The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in England. So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration. And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman's life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery?

With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle, with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English working-man should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong, degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status -- in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi all

The Irish actor Tyrone Power (1795-1841), grandfather of the movie actor of the same name, left some descriptions of Liverpool in his book Impressions of America During the Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. Though this is slightly before the famine, I recall reading that on being on the landing stage at Liverpool he was solicited for a handout by a poor Irishwoman and that he gave her a shilling. In March 1841, Power died at sea aboard the steamer "President" sailing from New York to Liverpool at the conclusion of his second trip to America. The vessel is thought to have struck an iceberg.

Chris

[Waterways]

You keep saying that

Maybe because we are.

as you are wrong in a lot of the things you post

I am not. So you think that I am wrong in that people from Liverpool are Liverpudlians. Are we Mancunians then?

[FKoE]

"Through these gates passed most of the 1,300,000 Irish migrants who fled from the Great Famine and 'took the ship' to Liverpool in the years 1845-52"

And most of the Irish who settled in Liverpool, settled and stayed along the Scotty ward for over a century. Until Hitler bombed them and later when Thatcher abandoned them. The eternal refugees aye.




Are Liverpudlians English or are they Scouse by the way?

[Waterways]

Now I know it's not the definitive work on encyclopedia's but I think most on this forum will give it some credence.

WIKIPEDIA:

SCOUSE
From wikepedia, the free encyclopedia.

Scouse is the accent and dialect found in the northern city of Liverpool

Total tripe. It isn't. It is a dish originating from Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Liverpool does not have dialect. It has an accent. Any dope can contribute to Wiki, and one did.

[FKoE]

Total tripe. It isn't. It is a dish originating from Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Liverpool does not have dialect. It has an accent. Any dope can contribute to Wiki, and one did.

Liverpool has a dialect,distinctive from the rest of Lancashire and its various accents.

And Scouse is thought to have evolved from Lab Skwas, and Irish stew

[Waterways]

Engels description of the Irish is the dismay of many a budding Marxist- but no doubt he wrote as he saw it, and his mistress was Irish too, so I see no evidence for a deep seated grudge..

Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845

Irish Immigration
We have already referred several times in passing to the Irish who have immigrated into England; and we shall now have to investigate more closely the causes and results of this immigration.

These people having grown up almost. without civilisation, accustomed from youth to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them among a class of the English population which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate education and morality. Let us hear Thomas Carlyle upon this subject:

"For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status -- in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics.

It is clear they regard the Irish as an underclass because of their ways and habits. It is clear both regarded the working class Irish as uncivilised and dirty. Neither is complimentary of them. They are a gregarious race who even in the USA stuck together mainly in the eastern cities.

It must be something in the culture of them. They have never been renowned as bright or progressive people, probably with some justification. Yet, those who settled in the USA became quite the opposite, so it is not in genes, more in the culture.

At the time of the famine the Irish were regarded as lazy. They only grew one crop, the potato and most had a still going. The diet was of spuds and alcohol for many of them. When that failed there was little else to fall back on. Their limited diet reduced their growth and resistance to illness too. The Irish were always small people to the English. A kid being brought up in the middle of Ireland would not know anything else in life.

[ChrisGeorge]

Total tripe. It isn't. It is a dish originating from Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Liverpool does not have dialect. It has an accent. Any dope can contribute to Wiki, and one did.

Hello Waterways

Yes it does appear that the dish, scouse, originates from Scandinavia and from Irish stew. But it is now Liverpudlian, which is undeniable even if it came from somewhere else originally.

The late Fritz Spiegl was surely an expert on the Liverpool dialect and this is how one of his books is described in a local bookseller's catalog which I would say is authoritative on the matter of the definition of "Scouse"--

"Scouse International: The Liverpool Dialect in Five Languages
by Fritz Spiegl
£2.49 paperback

The word Scouse has three meanings.

1. An inhabitant of Liverpool.

2. The accent or dialect in which he or she speaks.

3. The best-known local dish, which is a variation of Irish Stew.

We hope you will enjoy meeting the local people, hearing them speak, and eating the food with them. This book will help you to understand all three.
Scouse Press (2001) ISBN 0901367370"

Chris

[Kev]

Weve been here before, why not start a thread, Liverpudlian Versus Scouse or something so we can keep this thread on topic.