Irish immigrants brought fear of typhus to Lancashire towns and villages

How they were treated and the effect such large numbers of new arrivals had on communities in the late 1840s was examined in a talk by Dr Lewis Darwen called Mass Migration in a Time of Crisis – Lancashire and the Irish Famine 1846 to 1848.

Speaking at the Harris Museum, Preston, he said: “More people came to Lancashire during the famine than to any other part of Britain.”

Research by the Memories Page has shown that the 1851 census records 119 people who were born in Ireland but were then living in Ulverston.

They came to Ulverston from Dublin, Wexford, Wicklow, Kerry, Sligo, Waterford, Mayo, Galway, Cavan and Drogheda.

Dr Lewis said 300,000 arrived through the port at Liverpool in 1847 and 120,000 were described as “paupers” – having no money to support themselves.

They were also weak, malnourished and often infected with the contagious typhus – termed by Victorians the “Irish fever”.

It brought flu-like symptoms which could kill in a fortnight.

An estimated 10,000 people in Lancashire died from typhus fever in 1847 alone.

Poor Law officials were in charge of dealing with it and many areas set up wooden field sheds on the edge of towns – such as Burnley, Preston and Oldham - to isolate patients and halt the spread of the disease.

Dr Lewis said: “The fear of typhus fever was very strong.”

Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser records two 1848 deaths from typhus, which may have been related to the arrival of people escaping starvation in Ireland but bringing disease with them.

On October 6 Agnes Burton, died at Fountain Street, Ulverston.

She was the 14-year-old daughter of watchmaker Isaac.

On November 23 Agnes Denny, died at Lindal, aged 13. She was the daughter of Mr W. Denny and was buried at Dalton the day after her death.

By the 1840s in Ireland an estimated one third of the population was eating only potatoes and from 1845 there was a series of blights which made the crop unfit to eat.

Dr Lewis said: “The potato offered a perfectly healthy way of living but if the crop fails it is a catastrophe.”

An editorial in Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser for April 26 in 1849 noted the conditions faced by those who were still in Ireland.

It said: “Men, women and children are perishing by hundreds and by thousands of sheer starvation.

“The face of the country presents such an aspect of utter misery and destitution as was never before witnessed.

“The inhabitants have sunk to the very lowest state of helpless wretchedness.”

The Irish spread through Lancashire at a time of industrial depression in 1847 and 1848 where work was hard to find.

The conditions faced by young men wandering the North West of England in search of work and food could be desperate and seldom won much sympathy from officials in charge of “relief” – what we might call the dole.

Kendal magistrates on January 24 in 1849 sent a man from Ireland to the town jail for seven days for sleeping rough in some cinder ovens.

The Ulverston paper noted that the prison governor gave him sixpence to get out of town but the man turned up at the office of the relieving officer seeking cash.

He was turned down and promptly broke a window – the result being another two months in Kendal House of Correction.

The paper noted: The practice of window-breaking is becoming quite a common ‘dodge’ amongst wandering vagabonds to accomplish the task of getting into prison.

“In these places they get good wholesome food and when confined for two or three months, they get plenty of it.”

When Irish immigrants found work it was at lower rates than those paid to English workers – causing anger and occasionally violence.

In May 1849 there was a report of a “melee” between fighting English and Irish “navvies” labouring on a new railway near Lancaster.

It was said to have been sparked by Irish workers accepting as little as a shilling and sixpence (7p) a day.