Free Three Famines by Thomas Keneally Page B

it only if they needed it. The Indian maize, or ‘yellow male’ as the Irish called it, probably saved lives, even if the Irish cursed it. Improperly ground, it generated another name based on its influence on the gastric system: ‘Peel’s brimstone’.
    Peel’s interference in the market did not sit so well with believers in political economy, and aggrieved many among his Tories. But it was part of a broader plan. From October 1845 onwards, Peel struggled with his party to abolish the Corn Laws. These import tariffs had been originally introducedafter the Napoleonic Wars to compensate British farmers for the post-war fall in prices, and had kept grain prices throughout Britain high. Peel argued that not only Ireland, but the condition of England as well, required the repeal of the Corn Laws. He did so as a proponent of enlightened Toryism. He told his party that he foresaw an English revolution and the shadow of the scaffold falling over the privileged if grain prices were not reduced.
    The resistance in Parliament was immense. As the Duke of Wellington, one of Peel’s party, said, ‘Rotten potatoes have done it all. They put Peel in his damned fright.’ The Corn Laws were in fact repealed, but Peel’s government was so divided by the process that it fell in June 1846. Yet, in reality, the reduction in the duty that supported grain-growers was abolished only gradually, which did not much help the poor of Britain in general, let alone the ordinary Irish. When – to the astonishment of the populace – the potato crop failed again in the autumn of 1846, there was still a duty of four shillings per quarter on corn.
    Now the talented Lord John Russell was prime minister, and under his administration the famine would take on its full, deadly exorbitance. Trevelyan’s new master was of a pragmatic mind, rather as Peel had been. He was intelligent, sometimes strangely shy, and he had been a notable champion of the Reform Bill of 1832, without which it was believed Britain’s unrest, inequalities and ridiculous electoral system would have dragged it down into chaos. As prime minister, he was surrounded in Parliament by free-trade radicals of the kind who had been subject to the same influences, and believed the same principles, as Trevelyan. Charles Wood,Trevelyan’s immediate superior as chancellor of the exchequer in Russell’s government, subscribed absolutely to the principles Trevelyan brought to famine relief. Yet his name – like Russell’s – is barely known to Irish nationalists and to laymen interested in the famine. It did not appear in aggrieved folksongs, nor was it repeated bitterly to the young at Irish hearthsides, nor is it nowadays tunefully denounced in pubs before Irish international rugby test matches.
    Russell was ultimately responsible for subsequent government policies on Ireland, and Wood approved of them. But it was Trevelyan, as the man in charge of government’s mercy to Ireland, who became an infamous figure to Irish nationalists, who hated political economy and believed it could not be applied to their country, and who then, in turn, informed popular feeling.

7
Villains and Heroes: Bengal
    T HE VILLAINS IN the case of the Bengal famine are far more diffuse. As Charles Trevelyan did, the Marquess of Linlithgow, Victor Alexander John Hope, viceroy of India and thus head of British administration in India, has an especially poor name. But it has not remained a byword in India, the way Trevelyan’s has in Ireland. Nor were his actions backed by as clearly perceived a set of principles as those that Trevelyan followed. Linlithgow was not the man of ideas that Trevelyan had been. His talents were described by one British official as ‘pedestrian’. His behaviour was an amalgam of incomprehension, administrative failure and a sense of racial superiority. Unlike Trevelyan, he was no scholar.
    Instead, Linlithgow was a Scots banker – ‘tall, strongly-built and staunch,’ said Time