Diarmaid Ferriter: Notion that Trevelyan family should throw us a few quid is a farce

The suggestion by Laura Trevelyan, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary at the British Treasury from 1840-59, that her family might throw us a few quid to make amends for the Famine seems to belong to the realm of farce. How much compensation would suffice for the Famine dead? And what about forced emigration and evictions? Can they be thrown into the mix too? And just what was the extent of fatalities Trevelyan, who had responsibility for overseeing the response to the Famine, can be blamed for? While we’re at it, surely we’re owed a few extra bob from plenty of others for centuries of imperial exploitation and the social engineering and displacement arising from plantations?

Speaking to BBC Radio Ulster’s The Nolan Show, Laura Trevelyan, a former BBC journalist, responded to a question regarding the possibility of paying reparations. “If the Irish Government said the Trevelyan family are liable for what Sir Charles Edward did, then of course that would have to be considered.” But she also acknowledged that his views were not “entirely clear”. While “acting as an official for the British government” Trevelyan both insisted the famine was the result of divine providence and that under no circumstances should the Irish be allowed starve.

Historians looking at Trevelyan’s voluminous archive of mid-19th century correspondence have reached different conclusions. Christine Kinealy, author of numerous books on the Famine, including This Great Calamity (1994) suggested he was a dislikable, if efficient civil servant, part of a set of evangelical providentialists with racist views of the Irish as superstitious and lazy.

Kinealy’s assessment was that “a group of officials and their non-elected advisors were able to dominate government policy... were able to manipulate a theory of free enterprise, thus allowing a massive social injustice to be perpetrated within a part of the United Kingdom.” These findings chimed with Cecil Woodham-Smith’s popular nationalist history The Great Hunger, first published in 1962, in placing responsibility for the Famine crisis on the shoulders of Trevelyan: “Ireland was… abandoned to Trevelyan’s operation-of-natural causes system and laissez-faire”.

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The crucial point is the extent to which civil servants were to blame for implementing the policies of their political masters

Robin Haines, who authored the entry on Trevelyan for the Dictionary of Irish Biography, published in 2009, questioned such an interpretation, highlighting his “outstanding ability” and “strong civic sense” and the evolving interpretations of his impact and legacy that suggested: “Although his intemperate statements and bombastic nature have drawn the wrath of his critics, he was not the architect of relief policy, and does not deserve the blame for the government’s parsimonious response to the catastrophe. Rather, as assistant secretary to the treasury, and civilian head of the commissariat, he was responsible for deploying official expenditure of about £10 million (roughly £500 million in modern values) in relief.”

The crucial point is the extent to which civil servants were to blame for implementing the policies of their political masters. While Trevelyan advocated the laissez-faire policies of the administrations under which he worked, he was also, insists Haines, strongly anti-sectarian and saw the real villains as the landlords in Ireland who had abrogated their responsibilities and were often vilified in Britain during the famine for their failures.

He held much sympathy, Haines suggests, for the poor in a country to which he had “ties of affection and ancestry.” Contrast those assertions with the conclusion of Irish economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda, who has also examined Trevelyan’s papers: Trevelyan believed “the famine had been ordained by God to teach the Irish a lesson and therefore should not be too much interfered with”. It amounted to, Ó Gráda tells us in his 1998 book, Black ‘47 and Beyond, a policy of “doctrinaire neglect.”

Seeks to rehabilitate

The most recent book on the Famine, by Charles Read, The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis (2022), partly seeks to rehabilitate Trevelyan. What mattered most, according to Read, were contemporary fears that borrowing to import foodstuffs would destabilise sterling convertibility. Whigs ignorant of macroeconomics were unable to borrow to finance relief efforts without “panicking markets” and a run on gold bullion at the Bank of England, with the resultant scaling back of public assistance programmes.

None of this messy, layered history invalidates the horrors of the Famine or the assertion of another of its historians, James Donnelly, that ‘a million people should never have died in the backyard of what was then the world’s richest nation’

In this version, also drawing on Trevelyan’s correspondence, greater mortality was an “unintended result” of economic policies combined with parliamentary weakness. Prime minister John Russell presided over an administration and party that had wings such as “moderate liberal” “moralists” and “free traders”. The excessive focus on Trevelyan, Read suggests, obscures “the more important influence” of chancellor of the exchequer Charles Wood.

[ The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis: Myths nailed, villain exposed ]

None of this messy, layered history invalidates the horrors of the Famine or the assertion of another of its historians, James Donnelly, that “a million people should never have died in the backyard of what was then the world’s richest nation”. But depicting Trevelyan as the chief or sole villain is distorted history and a reminder of the inadequacies of contemporary scapegoating of historical figures.