Jonathan Bardon - Hallelujah: the Story of a Musical Genius and the City that Brought his Masterpiece to Life

For Carol

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Year of the Slaughter: A Grim Prologue

B LIADHAIN AN IR

Every year energetic Dubliners rise early to climb Killiney Hill, south of the city, to greet the dawn on midsummers day. As they look down to watch the first rays touch some of the most sumptuous private residences in the country and brighten a part of the Irish Sea, often compared with the Bay of Naples, only a few of them will know why there is an obelisk at the summit, or why there are remains of a huge wall surrounding the hill. These constructions are evidence of a great relief scheme to provide work for the starving in 1741, funded by John Mapas of Rochestown, one of the few wealthy Catholic landowners remaining in south County Dublin at the time. And close to a grand Palladian mansion in Co. Kildare, Castletown House, stands another obelisk huge, elaborate and 70 feet high erected by the orders of Lady Katherine, widow of a former Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, William Conolly. This too had been put up at the same time and for the same purpose to provide work for the starving. Two years later in 1743 a Major Hall of Churchtown, south of the city, erected a very large conical stone building, broad at the base and narrow at the top, with a spiral stairway on the outside. This was no gentlemans folly: known for a time as the Inkbottle and later as the Bottle Tower, it had been built as a barn to hold such a large store of grain so that no one in the area would ever starve to death again. These are modest reminders of what today is a little-known event, an episode which was nevertheless one of the greatest tragedies in the history of modern Ireland, a famine so terrible that it was recalled as bliadhain an ir, Year of the Slaughter.

It was also a crisis that persuaded members of the Charitable Musical Society for the Release of Imprisoned Debtors in Dublin that an unprecedented step should be taken to raise the relief fundsso desperately needed. As tens of thousands were perishing from hunger and fever, members of this charity joined forces with the governors of Mercers Hospital and the Charitable Infirmary in the city, to invite over from London the greatest composer they knew of, George Frideric Handel. They would ask him to conduct a benefit concert of compositions of his own choosing in the Societys new Music Hall in Fishamble Street. It was in this way that the sacred oratorio, Messiah, came to be given its first performance in Dublin on 13 April 1742.

T HE G REAT F ROST

On 29 and 30 December 1739 the most violent storm for several years past brought with it bitter cold from the east. As the New Year began three ships foundered in Dublin Bay a French vessel bringing in casks of brandy, a Riga fly-boat laden with flaxseed, and a Liverpool sloop with a cargo of salt and earthen ware. All the passengers on the sloop were drowned and the body of its captain was found on Merrion Strand covered over with ice.

Throughout January 1740 Arctic weather gripped Ireland, so intense that vast numbers of fish were found dead around the shores of Strangford Lough and Lough Neagh. In north Tipperary a whole sheep was roasted on top of 19 inches of ice on the River Shannon at Portumna, at the eating of which they had great mirth, and drank many loyal toasts. Afterwards a hurling match was played on the ice between two teams of gentlemen. So sharp was the frost that people from Tyrone walked directly across the frozen waters of Lough Neagh as they travelled to the market in Antrim town.

Lasting seven weeks, this Great Frost froze the sea around both English and Irish ports, halting the shipping of coal from Cumbria, Ayrshire and south Wales across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Desperate citizens tore up hedges and ornamental shrubs around the city, and 14 men were arrested for felling trees in Phoenix Park. At night Dublins streets were plunged into darkness: most street lamps had no fuel left since waterwheels could not turn to press enough rapeseed to replenish them with oil; and lamplighters found that the few still with oil were quickly extinguished by the extreme cold.

Ireland was not alone: all of western Europe north of the Alps and the Pyrenees was gripped by this intensely cold weather. Air

T HE MOST DREADFUL CALAMITY THAT EVER BEFELL THIS POOR KINGDOM

Over nearly all of Europe the winters for the previous ten years had been exceptionally mild and generally harvests had been bountiful. This had not been the case for Ireland: here the Great Frost hit the ordinary people of the island particularly hard as it followed a succession of half a dozen years of abnormal weather severely reducing farm yields. The most vulnerable, found mostly in the southern half of the country, were those who depended on the potato both for food and as a cash crop. Now the temperature plummeted so greatly that potato stores in straw-covered clamps in the ground were turned to inedible pulp. As Michael Rivers, a Co. Waterford merchant, observed, the frost:

has already destroyed a great part of the potatoes that lie in the cabins that lodge them and most of the potatoes of our country that are in the ground, by which the poor are likely to suffer greatly.

Three weeks later Richard Purcell wrote from north Cork:

The eating potatoes are all destroyed, which many will think will be followed by famine among the poor, and if the small ones, which are not bigger than large peas and which be deepest in the ground, are so destroyed as not to serve for seed, there must be sore famine in 1741 If no potatoes remain sound for seed, I think this frost the most dreadful calamity that ever befell this poor kingdom.

Around Upper and Lower Lough Erne the usual cost of a barrel of potatoes was between 8s and 10s; in 1740 the price had risen to 32s a barrel. The price asked in Dublin for a barrel of oats went up from 7s to 12s, and by May 1741 it had reached 15s.

In Dublin a fund was launched to deal with the crisis. Donations were collected in the more prosperous Church of Ireland parishes in the east of the city to provide relief to artisans and weavers in the Liberties. During the last week of January nearly 80 tons of coal and 10 tons of meal were freely distributed. The viceroy, the Duke of Devonshire, ordered that 100 be taken from the state coffers to be added to Dublins appeal fund.

So many wild birds had been killed by the cold that there was an eerie silence across the land. This poem appeared in Faulkners Dublin Journal:

No lark is left to wake the morn

Or rouse the youth with early horn;

The blackbirds melody is oer

And pretty robin sings no more.

No thrush to serenade the grove

And soothe the passions into love,

Thou sweetest songster of the throng,

Now only live in poets song.

Huge numbers of cattle and sheep had been killed by the extreme cold. On 3 February Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patricks Cathedral, hoped that we have almost done with this cursed weather it was reported from Lismore in Waterford at the end of March. In April a correspondent from north Wexford wrote to the Dublin newspaper, Pues Occurrences:

Without rain what is to become of us? The corn that is sowed is perishing, the corn we have in our haggards is so prodigious dear the poor cannot purchase it As for flesh meat they cannot smell to it, they have lost all their sheep long ago, and now their last stake, their little cows are daily and hourly dropping for want of grass.