So apocalyptic was the January 1839 hurricane which blew in from Atlantic, it was believed at the time to be a battle between English and Irish fairy folk\n<\/p>\n
The date was known as Nollaig na mBan, \u2018women\u2019s Christmas\u2019, when women across the country took a day off from their traditional roles within the home as a reward for all their effort and visited friends and family.<\/p>\n
The temperature rose dramatically by mid-afternoon before rain started around 3pm. The Ordnance Survey had been carrying out observations at Phoenix Park for a decade and their readings showed how quickly the atmosphere was changing during the day. As evening approached, people were aware of an approaching storm.<\/p>\n
By 10pm Ireland was hit with the full force of a hurricane that would last at least eight hours. It had travelled over the Atlantic Ocean gathering momentum, before crashing over the west coast. Waves even broke over the top of the Cliffs of Moher. And so the destruction began.<\/p>\n
The Enniskillen Chronicle wrote the next day: \u201cThe gale increased in violence until it became a perfect hurricane, unroofing houses, blowing down chimneys, prostrating boundary walls and almost everything that offered resistance\u201d.<\/p>\n
As windows shattered and the thatch on rooftops blew away, the people of Ireland were in darkness, only able to see in the flickers of lightning and the light of an apparent aurora borealis. In recorded memories of the event, the main sensory experience was the sheer noise of the storm, \u201cthe deafening roar of a thousand pieces of artillery\u201d, a reporter wrote on January 10.<\/p>\n
Thousands of trees were blown down across Ireland. Fires broke out, fanned by the fierce winds. Along the Tyrone-Monaghan border there was a fire in almost every townland. In Dublin, the Bethesda Chapel caught on fire, burning the church, its attached school, six town houses and the House of Refuge for reclaimed females.<\/p>\n
The River Liffey overflowed, there were flash floods in Strabane and all the water was reportedly blown out of a canal near Tuam. The earth was stripped alongside the River Boyne, exposing the bones of soldiers killed in battle 150 years earlier. Fish were found six miles inland while vegetation even 40 miles inland tasted of brine.<\/p>\n
It is difficult to calculate the number of lives lost that night. Estimates put the death toll between 250 and 300 people. Many sailors died at sea, including the captain and entire crew of the \u2018Andrew Nugent\u2019, wrecked off Arranmore Island. Lord Castlemaine was fastening his bedroom window at Moydrum Castle in Athlone when the storm blew it open, hurling him across the room and killing him instantly. Those who died in the aftermath, from injuries, pneumonia, frostbite or other related consequences of the storm have never been counted.<\/p>\n
Stacks of hay and corn were devastated by fire. The houses that suffered the most were those of the lower classes. Some families and communities were only just recovering from the effects of the storm by 1845 when Ireland faced another national catastrophe with the first failure of the potato crop.<\/p>\n
As they sought to make sense of the seemingly apocalyptic event they had lived through, people turned to religion and superstition. The storm was variously interpreted as a battle between English and Irish fairy folk, the devil causing havoc and as a warning from God that the Day of Judgment would soon arrive. With the onslaught of the Great Hunger six years later, it is no wonder that people were afraid to name this terrible event.<\/p>\n
By the end of the century, the name used by the poor to discuss the trauma of January 1839 was most commonly \u2018The Night of the Big Wind\u2019. It had become easier to discuss this freak occurrence than the more traumatic An Gorta M\u00f3r, the Irish term for the Great Hunger of the late 1840s.<\/p>\n
In a strange twist, cultural memories of the night were also to become very lucrative in the next century.<\/p>\n
In 1909 the Old Age Pension Act was implemented in the United Kingdom. Old age was deemed to include those 70 years old and above. In Ireland \u2013 still part of the UK at this point \u2013 this was a problem, as birth registration had not been made compulsory in Ireland until 1864. Many old people, particularly Catholics, had no way to prove they were over the threshold. Memories and anecdotal evidence were turned to as a means of establishing whether someone was eligible.<\/p>\n
Being able to give an account of your memory of \u201cthe Big Wind\u201d was a sure-fire way of establishing you were over 70. Pension bureaucracy noted that quite a lot of people had the same memory and even recounted it in the same phrase: \u201cI was able to eat a potato out of my hand on the night of the big wind.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was an easy to remember expression but also showed the individual was old enough to feed themselves in 1839.<\/p>\n
By March 1909, 80,000 people in the United Kingdom had applied for the pension \u2013 70,000 were Irish.<\/p>\n
One such pensioner was Tim Joyce from Co Limerick, who cheerfully recounted: \u201cI always thought I was 60. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr Robyn Atcheson is a social historian based at Queen’s University Belfast. She will give a talk on the ‘Night of the Big Wind’ at Holywood Library, Co Down, on Saturday January 10. Further info and tickets here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So apocalyptic was the January 1839 hurricane which blew in from Atlantic, it was believed at the time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[30061,61,60,43,92832,767],"class_list":{"0":"post-228395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-fermanagh-news","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-queens-university","13":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}