Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 19 July 2012

Technical Memories (Part 25)

The Uncertainties of War

“Many of the citizens of Cork were given a sidelight on Sunday of the horrors of war as they watched the arrival of refugees from Belgium by the Cork Steam Packet Company, SS. Inniscarra…every detail of every happening in the conflict is eagerly sought, the development of affairs closely watched, and the significance of every move fully weighted” (Southern Star, 3 October 1914, p.7).

The 53 Belgians, who arrived to Cork in October 1914, numbered six groups of families-grandfathers and grandmothers, fathers and mothers and children. There were 12 men, 24 women, and 17 children. They came from small towns about Louvain, and spoke Flemish-only three of them, spoke French. They were only a small portion of thousands who came to the refugee centre at Alexandra Palace, London. Those that came to Cork were escorted by a Belgian lady named Lily Coulier. This young lady was engaged in the north of England as a governess, and hearing of the stress of her fellow country mean and women, with the permission of her employer, she offered her services to one Emile de Cartier, a Belgian diplomat and envoy in China and Siam. He resided in London at the time and was Director of the Relief Committee in England. Lily’s knowledge of English made her invaluable as an escort.

In the Cork context, Lily joined her group, 53 in number, at Paddington station and travelled with them to Fishguard. There, two nuns of the Little Sisters of the Poor, Montenotte, Cork, met her and helped her to escort her group to Cork on the SS Inniscarra. Miss Coulier told a representative of the Cork Examiner that she was to bring circa eighty refugees to Cork, but some of them hid themselves so as not to come. They did not want to be too far away from home. The City of Cork Steam Packet Company gave their premises at St Patrick’s Quay to house the 53. Whilst in Ireland, they were not allowed seek employment. The Southern Reporter reported; “Cork will not see these Belgians want for food. This may be expressed in the enthusiastic reception given them yesterday morning…the wharf was thronged, and with fresh accessions to the crowd to about nine o’clock, when the SS Inniscarra berthed there was a dense throng on the quayside, and hearty cheers greeted the exiles”.

The SS Inniscarra, which had a gross tonnage of 1,412, was built at Newcastle by Wigham Richardson, and Co. in 1903.On 12 May 1918, the SS Inniscarra, on a voyage from Fishguard to Cork with a general cargo, was sunk by a German Submarine, 10 miles to the south east of Ballycotton Island. A total of 28 people lost their lives on that occasion. It was one of many ships targeted by the German Navy during World War I.

The targeting of food supplies is discussed in the Journals of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for 1914-1915. Dr. Denis Kelly, Bishop of Ross, in an address to the Department, and in view of the uncertainties of war, made a number or arguments for the retention in Ireland of as many food supplies as possible. He gave a warning against the sale of breeding stock, and recommended the retention of sufficient seed to sow a greatly extended area of grain crops. He argued as well for the economising of grain and other concentrated feeding stuffs by sowing crops suitable for soiling in spring, and the saving of flax weed in districts where the crop was grown. 

Dr. Denis Kelly (1997-1924, from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary) impressed on the Department that farmers, labourers, and all those having land suitable for the purpose, should make provision for growing for household purposes cabbage and other vegetables suited for winter cultivation. He also asserted that occupiers of land had a duty to make immediate preparation in the national interest as well as their own, for a largely-increased area of tillage crops, especially grain and potatoes, necessary for the food of our people. Noting in his address to the Department: “if war be accompanied by want of food, or even by scarcity of food. in order to feed our own people, we would require three-quarters of a million acres of wheat, When I was a child this country did sow half a million acres of wheat, but the sowing is now down to 37,000 acres. The area under oats should be increased to one million acres. The area under potatoes is now 383,000 acres. In 1861, Ireland grew over one million acres”.

Ireland depended largely on the exportation and sale of its crops from the tilled land. Asking a what if question, “what would happen if the fleet of the German Navy succeeded in getting control of the Atlantic Ocean, even for a short period?” He noted: “there will be undoubtedly be great suffering and great shortage of food.  We ought to get that fact well into our minds. We saw the other day that two large German food ships were seized by our navy as prizes of war. That food has not reached Germany and never will”.

To be continued…

Caption:

650a. SS Inniscarra berthed at Penrose Quay, c.1915 (picture: Cork City Library)

Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 12 July 2012

Technical Memories (Part 24)

The Die of War

“The present juncture, notwithstanding the inevitable disturbance in the labour market, is favourable for active preparation for the great commercial developments resulting from the war. With the prospect of new markets it becomes essential to study the conditions for supplying them, and to adjust our methods of production and distribution accordingly” (George Fletcher, Assistant-Secretary of Technical Instruction, 20 April 1915).

In George Fletcher’s paper of 1915 (see last week) he alluded to a number of conditions, physical, geographical and social that Irish industry needed to focus upon. He pointed to the fact that the larger portion of Ireland was unsuited to the introduction of large, highly-organised industries, such as those that characterised the north of England and the north east of Ireland. The principal factors to consider were the cost of labour, the cost of raw material, the neighbourhood of markets and cost of transport, the cost of motive power, and rents.

Industrially and commercially the interests of Ireland were intimately bound up with those of Great Britain, which was by far the country’s greatest market, and as Fletcher noted what concerned one country concerned the other. On presenting information on the numbers involved in agriculture in Ireland the numbers had decreased in the late nineteenth century by nearly 100,000 and those engaged in industrial work alone decreased only by 26,000. The land under cultivation had diminished by about one half since 1851. In general, the population diminished at the same rate as the land went out of cultivation. Ireland was also without coal and iron and lacked certain other raw materials as well. According to Fletcher, it was also a regrettable fact that just as the change from tillage to cattle rearing displaced human labour so did the change from the simpler methods of production to the use of machinery. He noted though that on several occasions, the displacement due to the introduction of machinery was temporary and was followed by increased employment as factories sough to produce more.

George Fletcher flagged that the higher cost of living in cities necessitated higher wages; “The workman in the smaller towns can, with lower wages, secure greater comfort. The difference between the rates of wages will, in many cases, be sufficient to turn the balance in favour of the small town. The value of labour cannot be measured by the rate of wages alone. Low wages do not imply cheap labour”. He gave the example, that closely associated with the linen weaving industry of Ulster was the hand-embroidery of linen. The industry was essentially a home industry. It was carried on by women and girls, and yielded in the region of £250,000 per annum in wages. In times past it was considerably larger. For twenty years previously to 19195 it had declined, both as to the number of persons employed and the prices paid for work. Manufacturers were getting their linen embroidered abroad. Huge quantities of handkerchiefs were sent to Switzerland, to be embroidered on machines introduced no less than fifty years previously. As a result the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction undertook to aid in the maintenance of two schools of machine embroidery, one at Ballydougan, Co. Down and the other at Maghera, in Co. Derry.

Before war broke out, Germany was sending Ireland over a million pound’s worth of toys and games per annum. The export of such goods from the United Kingdom to Germany was of the value of £50,000. The cutting-off of the supply of nearly a million pound’s worth of toys was to Fletcher “a serious menace to domestic peace; the nursery was in danger, and immediately men’s and women’s minds were turned to producing toys”.

Before the war Ireland was importing into the United Kingdom from Germany over a million pound’s worth of glass and a further £1 ¼ million’s worth from Belgium.  Experiments were being conducted in the laboratories of the Royal College of Science with a view to testing the suitability of Irish sand to make Irish glass. The first results were encouraging and awaited verification by tests on a commercial scale. To Fletcher, another great opportunity arose from the country’s leather trade. German exports to Ireland per annum amounted to over £2 million’s worth of leather. In his conclusions, George Fletcher considered that a condition essential to success was high efficiency in production and that, “the war had brought home to a large number of people truths which a year ago found only unwilling hearers”.

During World War One over two thousand Corkmen were killed, some eleven hundred of them from Cork City alone. Many of them lie buried with hundreds of thousands of other British soldiers in the cemeteries of northern France and Flanders. At the South Mall is a memorial to those Irishmen who died in the First World War.  It was erected in 1925, and is one of the few example Irish examples of its type. Carved in relief on a modest limestone obelisk, sitting on a plinth, is the profile of a Munster Fusiliers soldier in full military uniform, head down, gun at rest.

To be continued…

Caption:

649a. Gravestone, A Soldier of the Great War, Tyne Cot Cemetery, Belgium (picture: Kieran McCarthy)

Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 5 July 2012

Technical Memories (Part 23)

Calls to Arms

By the time the Crawford Municipal Technical Institute perhaps settled down in its educational programmes, its goals shifted again not just for the Cork institute but for other institutes across Ireland. The advent of World War I or the Great War again changed the focus of the country’s needs.

During World War I (1914–1918), Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which entered the war in August 1914 as one of the Entente Powers, along with France and Russia, when it declared war to halt the military expansion of the Central Powers. The central powers consisted of the German Empire, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. At the outbreak of the war, most Irish people, regardless of political affiliation, supported the war in much the same way as their British counterparts and both nationalist and unionist leaders initially backed the British war effort. Over 200,000 Irishmen fought in the war, in several sites and just under 30,000 died.

Arising from the blockade of imports and exports to and from Ireland George Fletcher, the assistant secretary of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, reflected in a paper delivered to the Insurance Institute of Ireland in April 1915 on new opportunities for the country’s existing resources. He was one of the first gentlemen to be recruited by Sir Horace Plunkett, the first vice president in the Department, following its establishment in 1899. In Fletcher’s paper (published afterwards), he reflected on the Department’s work to that point in time and also outlined the uses of technical instruction in the crisis that lay before it.

Commenting of the introduction of machinery and steam power, the change in the nature of apprenticeships through the new conditions of manufacture, and by the application of science to industry Fletcher deemed technical schools as essential to industrial progress. Yet he noted that the vast majority of Ireland’s youths never received any school education after the age of thirteen or fourteen; they never entered either an evening continuation school or a technical school. Hence to Fletcher, “they receive little direct education for their business in life; such a state of things constitutes a grave national danger and calls for immediate remedy”. Technical education should be provided to the army of workers in the country but also the economic leaders, what he described as “captains of industry”. He argued that technical institutes should be more generally availed of and in connection with this some lessons should be taken from the educational organisation of Germany. A great leap in industrial progress could also be affected if employers fully realised the advantages to be derived from providing technical education to their apprentices.

Scientific research was an important aspect to George Fletcher who noted that there should be “a more intelligent appreciation of the importance of and a greater readiness to apply the teachings of science to industrial uses”. He further related that to protect the interests of trades as a whole and to promote their development, the cultivation of a community of interests amongst manufacturers should be encouraged. Those ideas could be greatly assisted by the formation of manufacturers’ associations. 

George Fletcher also spoke of the feasibility of small but well-organised industries in Ireland, and called for a great extension of their kind in Ireland’s smaller towns. Backing up his statements, he critiqued the state of imports and exports in Ireland and the opportunities available arising from Germany going to war. In 1912, the imports into the United Kingdom of manufactures from Germany amounted to some 40 million pounds. The corresponding exports from the United Kingdom to Germany were about 30 million pounds- a difference of 19 million pounds. The export of German manufacturers to the Overseas Dominions and Foreign Countries outside Europe amounted to over 80 million pounds. Fletcher on Germany’s industries and international connection noted of the country’s choice to disconnect from the market: “it is certain that Germany has suffered in enormously great degrees owing to the removal from the seas of Germany’s shipping and the cutting-off of supplies by neutrals. Some 40 per cent of Germany’s total port trade was to countries now at war with her and other sources of supply are now being developed. She is suffering acutely by the stoppage of supplies of raw materials. Germany’s woollen trade depends largely, therefore, on imported wool, two thirds of which came from countries now hostile-most of it from Australia and the Cape.”

Under the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction strong and successful efforts had been made, to encourage home and cottage industries. The production of Irish woollen goods had nearly doubled since 1904. Another example, the lace industry, yielded a valuable supplement to the family income in many an Irish rural home. The number of persons employed in this industry increased from 2,099 in 1901 to 3,004 in 1911. To Fletcher, effort needed be made to conserve and develop such industries “that the tendency is for work to pass, sooner or later, into the factory”.

To be continued…

For an up to date index of Our City, Our Town articles, see www.corkheritage.ie

Caption:

648a. World War I propaganda poster (source: ebay)