Skibbereen
April 1847
‘THE POOR MAN,’ HENRIETTA HAD SIGHED WHEN DAN TOLD HER THAT his friend Reverend Robert Traill of Schull had contracted typhus. Mindful of the terrible effects of the illness, she had prayed for his recovery.
Two days later, as they sat in the drawing room, Dan broke the news gently.
‘I’m afraid, my dear, that Reverend Traill has unfortunately died.’
‘It’s so desperately unfair, Dan,’ she said, unable to hide her anger. ‘He was such a devoted minister, and he and his wife, Anne, worked tirelessly, feeding hundreds of people in Schull every day. Now, because of his good works and charity, he has been taken.’
‘Fair doesn’t come into it, my dear! Robert Traill was a dedicated church man with a fine mind, who deserved a better end.’
‘I must write to Anne to express my sympathy,’ Henrietta said, thinking of the poor widow and her children, now left to cope alone.
‘I see here that the government has finally opened a soup kitchen,’ Henrietta observed as she read aloud from the newspaper article describing the official opening of the government’s first large soup kitchen in Dublin, at the esplanade near Phoenix Park, beside Dublin’s Royal Barracks. ‘At last, they and the Lord Lieutenant are doing something to address the situation.’
‘About time too,’ Dan said caustically.
‘It was a grand affair, by all accounts, with his Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge, Lord Bessborough, the Lord Lieutenant and the Lord Mayor of Dublin all in attendance for the gala launch. It was quite a social occasion for Dublin’s fashionable young women and gentry. Apparently, Dublin society paid five shillings each to watch the paupers feed, and there is also to be a Government Fever Ball later this month.’
‘My dear, opening a soup kitchen for the poor is certainly not what I consider a social occasion, and how rude to treat the hungry as if they were animals from Dublin Zoo!’
Henrietta smiled wryly and carried on, for she could see he was curious.
‘A renowned French chef from London’s Reform Club, a Mr Alexis Soyer, has developed the nutritious soup recipe himself, and it says that he can make up to one hundred gallons of soup for less than a pound. The soup kitchen has a three-hundred-gallon soup boiler and an oven that can bake one hundredweight of bread at a time.’
‘That is bigger than our boilers!’ remarked Dan rather enviously. ‘But I know well that to make that quantity of soup for less than a pound is near impossible.’
‘And more soup kitchens are set to open throughout the country,’ Henrietta continued as she passed him the newspaper.
‘The more the better,’ he agreed, re-reading the article avidly and scratching out notes in the small leather notebook he always carried.
Dan pored over Soyer’s recipe assiduously.
‘If this is made in the quantities Mr Soyer suggests, it would have little nutritional value,’ he insisted, and was delighted when, not long after, an article in The Lancet concurred with his findings, declaring Soyer’s soup ‘quackery’.
Dan’s sentiments were further vindicated when Sir Henry Marsh, the Queen’s own physician, came out and declared that the soup would pass through the human system too quickly to assuage hunger and nourish the body.