The Night of the Big Wind: 6-7 January, 1839
by Turtle Bunbury
Bridget Mooney and her four young brothers
were putting the final touches on a large snowman outside their wooden
cabin in County Mayo when the hurricane struck. The Mooneys did not know
the hurricane was coming. Nobody in Ireland knew.
Today, we
get on first-name terms with our hurricanes long before they threaten
Irish shores. Sandy, Charlie, Katrina, Irene. [1] We watch them coming
in on the weather forecast and we know its time to button down and wrap
up warm.
But back on 6th January 1839, the entire island of
Ireland was subjected to a tempest of such ferocity that it became the
date by which all other events were measured. The Night of the Big Wind -
known as ‘Oiche na Gaoithe Moire’ - was the JFK assassination or the
9/11 of the 19th century. It was the most devastating storm ever
recorded in Irish history and made more people homeless in a single
night than all the sorry decades of eviction that followed it. And if
there was one place you didn’t want to be that dreadful Sunday night, it
was inside a wooden cabin in County Mayo.
The calm before the
Big Wind struck was particularly eerie. Most of the eight million people
living in Ireland at the time were preparing themselves for Little
Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany. The previous day had seen the
first snowfall of the year; heavy enough for the Mooneys to build their
snowman. By contrast, Sunday morning was unusually warm, almost clammy,
and yet the air was so still that, along the west coast, voices could be
heard floating on the air between houses more than a mile apart
At
approximately 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the rain began to fall and
the wind picked up. Nobody could possibly have predicted that those
first soft raindrops signified an advance assault from the most
terrifying hurricane in human memory. By 6 o’clock, the winds had become
strong and the raindrops were heavier, sleet-like, with occasional
bursts of hail. Farmers grimaced as their hay-ricks and thatched roofs
took a pounding. In the towns and villages, fires flickered and doors
slammed. Church bells chimed and dogs began to whine. Fishermen turned
their ears west; a distant, increasingly loud rumble could be heard upon
the frothy horizon.
Mrs Mooney shouted for her children to
come inside this instant. At Glenosheen in County Cork, a well-to-do
German farmer called Jacob Stuffle began to cry. At Moydrum Castle in
County Westmeath, 78-year-old Lord Castlemaine decided to turn in early
and go to bed. In the Wicklow Mountains, a team of geographic surveyors
headed up by John O’Donovan, finally made it to their hotel in
Glendalough; they had been walking all day, often knee-deep in snow.
Sailing upon the Irish Sea, Captain Smyth of the Pennsylvania studied
his instruments and tried to make sense of the fluctuating pressures.
By 10 o’clock, Ireland was in the throes of a ferocious cyclone that
would continue unabated until 6 o’clock in the morning. The hurricane
had roared across 3000 miles of unbroken, island-free Atlantic Ocean,
gathering momentum every second. It hit Ireland’s west coast with such
power that the waves actually broke over the top of the Cliffs of Moher.
Reading contemporary accounts, the impression is that if we did not
have such magnificent cliffs forming a barrier along our west coast, the
entire country would simply have been engulfed by water. The noise of
the sea crashing against the rocks could be heard for miles inland,
above the roar and din of the storm itself. The earth trembled under the
assault; the ocean tossed huge boulders onto the cliff-tops of the Aran
Islands.
Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the hurricane
was that it took place in utter darkness. People cannot have known what
was going on. The wind churned its way across the land, extinguishing
every candle and lantern it encountered. The darkness was relieved only
by the lightning streaks that accompanied the storm and the occasional
blood-red flicker of the aurora borealis burning in the northern sky.
All across the country, hundreds of thousands of people awoke to the
sound of the furious tempest, their windows shattered by hailstones,
their brick-walls rattling, their rain-sodden thatched roofs sinking
fast. As the wind grew stronger, it began to rip the roofs off houses.
Chimney pots, broken slates, sheets of lead and shards of glass were
hurtled to the ground. (Rather astonishingly, someone later produced a
statistic that 4,846 chimneys were knocked off their perches during the
Night of the Big Wind). Many of those who died that night were killed by
such falling masonry. Norman tower houses and old churches collapsed.
Factories and barracks were destroyed. Fires erupted in the streets of
Castlebar, Athlone and Dublin. The wind blew all the water out of the
canal at Tuam. It knocked a pinnacle off Carlow Cathedral and a tower
off Carlow Castle. [3] It stripped the earth alongside the River Boyne,
exposing the bones of soldiers killed in the famous battle 150 years
earlier. Roads and railway tracks in every parish became impassable. All
along the Grand Canal, trees were pulled up by the roots and hurled
across the water to the opposite bank.
The
Mooney’s timber cabin was one of thousands destroyed by the storm.
Surviving inhabitants had no choice but to flee into the pitch-black
night in clothes that were presumably soon utterly drenched by the
intense rains and snows which accompanied that cruel, piercing wind. The
Mooney family sought shelter in a hedge outside Castlebar; they
survived the night but the parents caught a fatal fever and died soon
afterwards, leaving five homeless orphans.
Farmers were hit
particularly hard. Hay-ricks in fields across Ireland were blown to
pieces. Wooden fences and dry-stone walls collapsed, allowing fearful
livestock to run away. Sheep were blown off mountains or killed by
tumbling rocks. Cattle were reported to have simply frozen to death in
the fields. The next morning, one of Jacob Stuffle’s neighbour recalled
seeing the distraught German ‘standing high up on a hillock looking with
dismay at his haggard farm … his comfortable well-thatched stacks swept
out of existence. Suddenly, he raised his two hands, palms open, high
over his head, and looking up at the sky he cried out in the bitterness
of his heart, in a voice that was heard all over the village 'Oh, God
Almighty, what did I ever do to You and You should thrate (treat) me in
that way!'
Stuffle was not the only man who believed the
hurricane, occurring on the night of the Epiphany, was of Divine origin.
Many saw it as a warning that the Day of Judgment would soon be here.
Some believed the Freemasons had unleashed the Devil from the Gates of
Hell and failed to get him back in again. Others maintained this was
simply the night the English fairies invaded Ireland and forced our
indigenous Little People to disappear amid a ferocious whirlwind. (Irish
fairies, of course, are wingless and can only fly by calling up the
sidhe chora - the magic whirlwinds).
The well-to-do did not
escape; many mansions had their roofs stripped off. Lord Castlemaine was
fastening his bedroom window when the storm blew the windows open and
hurled him ‘so violently upon his back that he instantly expired’. His
brother-in-law, the Earl of Clancarty, later reported the loss of nearly
20,000 trees on his estate at Ballinasloe. Similar figures came in from
other landed estates in every county; one landlord declared his woods
were now ‘as bald as the palm of my hand’. On January 6th 1839, timber
was a valuable commodity. 24 hours later, so many trees had fallen that
timber was virtually worthless. Millions of wild birds were killed,
their nesting places smashed and there was no birdsong that spring. Even
crows and jackdaws were on the verge of extinction.
In his
hotel room in Glendalough, John O’Donovan was fortunate not to share
Lord Castlemaine’s fate. He was struggling with the shutters when ‘a
squall mighty as a thunderbolt’ propelled him across the room. When he
viewed the damage next morning, he described it as if ‘the entire
country had been swept clean by some gigantic broom’.
Dublin
resembled ‘a sacked city …the whirlwind of desolation spared neither
building, tree nor shrub’. The Liffey rose by several feet and
overflowed the quay walls. The elms that graced the main thoroughfare of
the Phoenix Park were completely levelled, as were the elms at the
Royal Hospital Kilmainham. The trees on Leinster Lawn outside the
present-day Dail were unrooted and scattered ‘like prostrate giants on
their mother earth’. The back wall of the Guinness Brewery collapsed
killing ‘nine fine horses’. A witness next morning described how ‘the
noble animals [were] stretched everywhere as if sleeping, but with every
bone crushed by the ponderous weight of the wall’. Military sentry
boxes were blown off their stands and ‘scattered like atoms’. A glass
shop on Nassau Street became ‘a heap of ruins’. On Clare Street, a
chimney collapsed on a woman who had only just got into her bed, killing
her instantly. Police stations and churches opened the door for
thousands of terrified citizens who brought their young and frail in for
protection. Even churches could not be trusted on this night of
Lucifer. The steeple of Irishtown chapel caved in and the bell from the
spire of St Patrick’s Cathedral came down like a meteorite; mercifully
nobody died in either instance. Phibsborough Road was a bombsite of
exploded windows and fallen chimneys ‘as if by shot and shell’. One of
the 40 female inmates at the Bethesda Penitentiary on the
north-side(where the National Wax Museum stands today) took the
opportunity to ignite a fire that destroyed the building as well as the
surrounding houses, school-house and chapel. Two firemen died trying to
extinguish the flames. [2]
The hurricane did not stop in
Dublin. It pounded its way across the Irish Sea, killing hundreds of
luckless souls caught at sea. It killed nearly 100 fishermen off the
coast of Skerries. It killed Captain Smyth and the 30 people on board
the packet-ship Pennsylvania. Ships all along the west coast of England
were wrecked; dead bodies continued to wash up onshore for weeks
afterwards. At Everton, the same wind unroofed a cotton factory that
whitened all the space for miles around, ‘ as if there had been a heavy
fall of snow’.
Estimates as to just how many died that night vary
from 300 to 800, an astonishingly low figure given the ferocity of the
storm. Many more must have succumbed to pneumonia, frostbite or plain
old depression in its wake. Those bankrupted by the disaster included
hundreds who had stashed their life savings up chimneys and in thatched
roofs that disappeared in the night.
Even in those days it was
‘an ill wind that turned none to good’ and among those to benefit were
the builders, carpenters, slaters and thatchers. The Big Wind also
inspired the Rev Romney Robinson of the Armagh Observatory to invent his
world-famous Robinson Cup-anemometer, the standard instrument for
gauging wind speed for the rest of the 19th century.
But
perhaps the most unlikely beneficiaries of the Night of the Big Wind
were those old enough to remember it when the Old Age Pensions Act was
enacted in January 1909, 70 years after the event. The Act offered the
first ever weekly pension to those over 70. It was likened to the
opening of a new factory on the outskirts of every town and village in
Britain and Ireland. By March 1909, over 80,000 pensioners were
registered of whom 70,000 were Irish! When a committee was sent to
investigate this imbalance, it transpired that few births in Ireland
were ever registered before 1865. As such, the Irish Pensions Committee
decreed that if someone’s age had 'gone astray' on them, they would be
eligible for a pension if they could state that they were ‘fine and
hardy’ on the Night of the Big Wind. One such applicant was Tim Joyce of
County Limerick. 'I always thought I was 60', he explained. 'But my
friends came to me and told me they were certain sure I was 70 and as
there were three or four of them against me, the evidence was too strong
for me. I put in for the pension and got it'.
BIBLIOGRAPHY "The Wrong Kind of Snow," Antony Woodward & Rob Penn (Hodder & Stoughton, 2008).
"The Night of the Big Wind," Peter Carr and Geoffrey Fulton (White Row Press Ltd, 1991)
With thanks to Rob Penn, Michael Purcell, Peter Walker and others.
[1] Such cute and cuddly names inspired me to write to The Irish Times
at the height of the swine flu outbreak. To my considerable shock, they
actually published the letter on Tuesday, August 4, 2009, and it was
read out on Morning Ireland to boot. The letter was entitled 'Preparing
for swine flu' and ran as follows:
'Madam, – As I sit here wrestling with an unidentified
flu, I find myself compelled to raise an objection to the name of the
pandemic presently sweeping the globe. Swine flu is an unpleasant name.
It suggests that those infected will develop cloven hooves, stubby feet
and curly tails. I was no less impressed with the name bird flu which
implies that sufferers will sprout wings and begin clucking.
Can we not take a leaf from the team who bestow such cuddly names
upon those devastating hurricanes and cyclones? It is not without
precedent – rubella and pneumonia are pretty enough to be characters in a
Jane Austen novel. Even the “Spanish flu” had a touch of romance and
elegance about it. But being told you have “swine flu” adds insult to
injury. It began in Mexico, so perhaps we could call it the Mexican flu,
or choose a sweet Mexican name like Chantico or Carlos Santana or Salma
Hayek? If I was told I had Salma Hayek, I would feel better
immediately. – Yours,etc,TURTLE BUNBURY'
[2] Extract from Gentleman's magazine and historical chronicle, Volume 11, p. 200-201:
"In Ireland, the storm seems to have been even worse than in this
island [ie: Britain], and particularly at Dublin which in many places
presented the appearance of a sacked city. Houses burning, others
unroofed, as if by storm of shot and shell, a few levelled with the
ground with all their furniture within, while the rattling of engines
cries of firemen and labours of the military resembled the very aspect
and mimicry of war. The Bethesda Episcopal chapel and the three
adjoining houses were burned to the ground. In Sidney avenue, in the
house of Mr Collins, a servant boy and a woman were killed by the
falling of a stack of chimneys, and among the most serious sufferers by
the gale was Mr Guinness the eminent brewer. The back wall of a large
stable on his premises was blown in by the violence of the wind burying
under its immense weight nine fine horses. The ball which surmounted the
spire of St Patrick's cathedral was blown down as was a portion of the
steeple of Irishtown church and Phibsborough church was much injured by
stones falling on the roof. The streets were covered with such
quantities of broken slates and tiles that they looked as if they were
prepared for Macadamisation. The trees in the Rotunda gardens were torn
up by the roots. Lady Mountjoy's house was nearly destroyed by the
falling of a stack of chimneys and the house of the late lamented Lord
Norbury suffered in a similar manner. In Athlone from forty to fifty
houses were blown down. Major Gen Sir Parker Carroll, commanding the
district, narrowly escaped being crushed by the fall of a stack of
chimneys whilst Lord Castlemaine, less fortunate, whilst fastening his
bedroom window at his seat Moydrum Castle co Westmeath was thrown so
violently on his back that he instantly expired. Entire ricks of hay and
corn were carried across the Shannon. The town of Loughrea is nearly
all destroyed seven houses burned and 100 levelled to the ground. In the
town of Moate 70 houses were consumed. Tullamore is literally
devastated. At Garbally, the estate of Earl Clancarty, not a tree is
left standing. Two thousand trees at the seat of the Bishop of Meath,
Ardbraccan, were blown down. The beautiful American plantations at Oriel
Temple, Collon, were almost entirely swept away. Portarlington was
literally sacked by the fury of the gale. At Kilkenny the chimney of the
new gas works fell and levelled all the other buildings, seven houses
were burned. The country around Slane, Co. Meath, presents an awful
appearance. One third of the trees in the Marquis of Conyngham's demesne
are torn up by the roots. Carlow has suffered much. A mile in length of
the wall surrounding Colonel Bruen's demesne at Oak Park was levelled.
At the small but picturesque demesne of Lady Bellingham at Castle
Bellingham, upwards of 200 of the finest oaks and elms were destroyed.
In Belfast, a number of the great factory chimneys were levelled,
destroying all buildings in the vicinity. In Newry there was an immense
destruction of property and several lives lost. The loss of lives in
Ireland as far as it could be ascertained in Dublin was at least 400."
[3] On Thursday, January 6th 1791, the Freeman's Journal (p.3) reported
that 'last Saturday morning inhabitants of Carlow experienced the
greatest hurricane remembered by the oldest inhabitants. Houses in the
vicinity were unroofed, chimnies blown down and trees torn up by the
roots, but we hear of no personal injury received by the inhabitants'.
Sans vous
commander, je vous demande d'aimer plus que jamais ceux qui vous sont
proches ; le monde est une triste boutique, les cœurs purs doivent se
mettre ensemble pour l'embellir, il faut reboiser l'âme humaine. Je
resterai sur le pont, je resterai un jardinier, je cultiverai mes
plantes de langage. A travers mes dires vous retrouverez ma bien-aimée ;
il n'est de vrai que l'amitié et l'amour. Je suis maintenant très loin
au fond du panier des tristesses. On doit manger chacun, dit-on, un sac
de charbon pour aller en paradis. Ah ! comme j'aimerais qu'il y ait un
paradis, comme ce serait doux les retrouvailles.
by Turtle Bunbury
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