Laura Trevelyan denies family responsibility for Irish famine deaths.

 

Laura Trevelyan

The English civil servant Charles Edward Trevelyan, was in charge of famine relief in Ireland during the Great Hunger, brought about by the potato blight, in the mid-1840s. It's estimated that around 1 million people died of starvation and a further 2 million people were forced to emigrate.

The former BBC journalist, Laura Trevelyan, is a direct descendant of Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan. He was her great, great, great-grandfather. After working for the BBC for thirty years, she left the corporation to become a full-time slavery reparations campaigner. The Trevelyan family recently agreed to donate more than £100,000 to the Caribbean island of Grenada, where they once owned around 1,000 slaves. When slavery was abolished in the 1830s, the Trevelyan family received £34,000 in official compensation, the equivalent of £3m in today's money. When Laura Trevelyan was asked why her family would pay compensation to Grenada over slavery and not to Ireland over the famine, she said her family had personally profited from the sale of sugar harvested by slaves, whereas, her ancestor, Charles Trevelyan, had been carrying out government policy. However, she said that if the Irish government felt that the family were responsible for the actions of their ancestor, they would have to consider it.

The journalist and Irish nationalist, John Mitchell, accused the British government of committing genocide in Ireland. He referred to the murderous effects of allowing the grain harvest of 1846 to be exported when people were experiencing hunger. The refusal of the British government to make fighting the famine a UK charge and the legislative decree of June 1847, that said that Irish ratepayers must bear all the expense of relieving the destitute. This led to clearances and evictions. Mitchell famously said that Providence had provided the potato blight but the English had provided the famine.

Ireland had been part of the Union since 1801, so it's people became subjects of the United Kingdom and Ireland. In 1846, the former Irish Chief Secretary under Sir Robert Peel, said of Trevelyan, that he "knew as much about Ireland as his baby, if he has one." Although Charles Trevelyan was a civil servant and a Bible reading Protestant, he played a vital role in influencing Irish policy and he had the power of life or death over huge numbers of starving Irish people. A laissez-faire ideologue, Trevelyan ensured that there was to be no interference with food exports from Ireland and he reversed Sir Robert Peel's policy of grain shipments to Ireland. He actually wrote to Baring Brothers Bank, to cancel a ship load of Indian corn that was being sent as famine relief. Baring congratulated him on "the termination of his feeding efforts." He also sought to close down relief schemes believing that wages of nine to ten pence a day, were far too high. Men died of starvation while waiting for wages owed to them.

The English historian, A.J.P. Taylor compared Ireland in the 1840s, to Bergen Belsen and said that the "the English governing class" had the blood of "two million Irish people" on its hands. That the death toll was not higher, Taylor savagely remarked, "was not from want of trying." Charles Trevelyan, seemed to think that the famine was an act of Providence, a calamity that had been sent by God to teach the Irish a lesson.

Laura Trevelyan says that it was when she was Ireland covering the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement, that she first became aware of how odious the name Trevelyan was to many Irish people. She had people sing the ballad 'The Fields of Athenry' to her when they discovered her name. Martin McGuiness had said to her what a coincidence it was that the BBC had sent a Trevelyan to cover the negotiations. A member of Sinn Fein had asked her how she could be driving around south Armagh, when she had the blood of the Irish on her hands? Trevelyan says that she didn't understand what he was talking about. This led her to do research on Charles Trevelyan which culminated in her publishing the book, 'A Very British Family' in 2006.