Tuke’s Emigration Scheme
The following excerpts
have been extracted from a memoir of James Hack Tuke (1819-1896) written by his
friend, Sir Edward Fry, in 1909.
James
Hack Tuke was born in York on September 13, 1819, the second son and seventh
child of Quakers Samuel Tuke and Priscilla Hack. He was educated in York at a
day school attended by North Country Quakers. When Tuke was nine years old, his
mother died, and at the age of sixteen, he left school and joined his father at
a counting-house, where his father was a senior partner in a firm of tea
merchants.
“In
August 1845, Tuke sailed for America. While on board the steamer, he met
William Forster, the father of the future Chief Secretary of Ireland, William
Edward ‘Buckshot’ Forster, a man who would have a major impact on Ireland
during the years of the Land League.
“From New
York, Tuke traveled by carriage to Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati,
Louisville, and St. Louis. He crossed into Canada and visited Quebec, Montreal,
and Toronto. During his travels, he made notes of all the people and places he
had visited, including Louisville, and noted the evils of slavery.
“After
his return to England, Tuke learned of the disaster that was taking place in
Ireland. He traveled to Ireland with the elder William Forster for the purpose
of providing famine relief. In Donegal, they contacted the local gentry and
ministers of various denominations for the purpose of establishing soup
kitchens and visited the cottages of those in greatest distress.”
“In 1847,
the worst year of the Great Famine, James again returned to Ireland, travelling
throughout Connaught where ‘we saw enough of misery and wretchedness to dispel
all other visions. He entered homes where the inhabitants were dying from the
‘fever’ that claimed so many.’ He wrote of entire villages devoid of all human
habitation because the people who once lived there had been evicted, their
roofs pulled down about their heads. He also visited feeding stations where the
Poor Law officers attempted to feed the starving. He counted 300 people at one
such station, many of them in various stages of fever, starvation, and
nakedness. He was so moved by what he saw that he published a pamphlet in
England describing the plight of the Irish.
“Many
Irish fled Ireland for England, some ending up living on the doorstep of Samuel
Tuke, James’s father, in York, who offered a small field near his own home for
the erection of a wooden building to serve as a fever hospital. It was there
that James caught the fever—the effects of which stayed with him for the rest
of his life. When the mini-famine of 1877-79 appeared to be a repeat of Black
’47, Tuke devised a plan that would save thousands from their wretched
existence.”
In 1879,
the second year of the mini-famine, Tuke returned to Ireland. Although there
was hunger and want, there was not starvation. But it was on that visit that he
became “strongly impressed with the necessity of assisting families to emigrate
in order to lessen the fearful crowding of those who were attempting to live on
small patches of land.”
Emigration
was not a new idea. Hundreds of thousands of Irish had fled to America during
the Famine and post-Famine years. Many landlords horrified by the scenes taking
place on their estates had paid the passage money for their tenants. Other
landlords, for less altruistic reasons, saw emigration as a way of clearing the
land of impoverished tenants, thus reducing the amount of poor rates they had
to remit to the Government to support local workhouses. The cleared land was
almost always turned into pastureland.
