This story began as a series of blog posts. They are linked below and form Bloodlines, Part 1.
The story continues in Bloodlines, Part 2
Chapter 11: Famine’s children
Johanna Devereux and John Grady were five and four years old respectively when the potato blight first appeared in Ireland. The disease caused a partial failure of the potato crop on which so many Irish people depended. The blight returned the following year, in 1846, with much more severe effects, pushing Ireland into an extended nightmare of hunger and disease.
During the Great Famine, between 1845 and 1851, about one million people died of starvation or hunger-related disease, and a further one million people emigrated. It was, as Irish ambassador Daniel Mulhall and many others have written, an unparalleled food crisis in the western world, decimating the Irish population and causing long-term economic and political effects. [1]
The Great Famine is one of many tragedies to beset Ireland. For a small country, not much bigger than Tasmania, it’s had more than its fair share of troubles: invasion and occupation, suppression and murder, civil war, severe poverty and over-crowding, famine, intolerance and displacement. Many emigrants carried Ireland’s troubles with them – how could you not? - and it’s clear that multiple generations of Irish families in Australia have relived the trauma of Ireland’s history. In different ways, in different contexts, to be sure. But it’s part of our DNA. You can see this written into the faces of our forebears, especially that of our great grandfather William.
William was Johanna and John’s fifth child, named after his younger brother who died in Hartley. William followed his father into brick-carting, and the two of them were peas in a pod, I reckon: long and lean in the body, angular faces, hair cropped short, lips held tight against the brick dust. They wouldn’t have looked out of place among the monoliths on Easter Island, those ancient stone carvings thought to represent the ancestors’ spirits.
William had siblings on either side, in this world and the next, and when you hear a roll-call of Johanna and John’s children [2], together with information about the length of time they spent here and their cause of death, you get a sense of Irish history writ small:
William Grady. Born 1867. Died 1867, aged 5 months. Cause of death: dysentery
John Grady. Born 1868. Died 1877, aged 9. Cause of death: gangrene
Margaret Grady. Born 1870. Died 1929, aged 59. Cause of death: heart failure
Patrick Grady. Born 1872. Died 1942, aged 70. Cause of death: undocumented
William Grady. Born 1874. Died 1904, aged 90. Cause of death: heart failure
Mary Ellen Grady. Born 1877 (twin). Died 1973, aged 95. Cause of death: undocumented
Timothy Grady. Born 1877 (twin). Died 1878, aged 4 months. Cause of death: dysentery
John Grady. Born 1879 (twin). Died 1963, aged 84. Cause of death: undocumented
Timothy Grady. Born 1879 (twin). Died 1924, aged 44. Cause of death: tuberculosis
Johanna Grady (Cissy). Born 1882. Died 1946, aged 64. Cause of death: cancer
Honora Grady. Born 1885. Died 1886, aged 13 months. Cause of death: marasmus
In the late 1800s, after the railway line to Bathurst railway was completed, John and Johanna returned to Sydney.
John established a brick carting business at the Gore Hill brickyards, using money he and Johanna saved from the railway job to lease or buy several horses and drays. The North Shore train line was being built at the time, and this encouraged substantial urban development and increased demand for materials. John’s timing was good. It was hard and dusty work, though, and the business was a considerable investment for John and Johanna to make.
We can get a sense of how it is to work with horses and drays for a living by asking someone who did it.
Allan Gillham is a good example. He owned a horse and dray for 22 years in Sydney, working for WC Penfold, ferrying goods from the city stores to customers around town. Rising costs - including $32,000 to maintain three Clydesdales – eventually forced Gillham to close his business, and when he did, he told the Sydney Morning Herald: “This isn't really a job - it's a part of your life. You've got to be with your horses seven days a week. You've got to feed them, look after them. They're just like little babies. I will be losing the biggest part of my life.” [3]
John cared for his horses seven days a week, feeding and grooming them, not only protecting his investment but perhaps seeing them as an extension of family. He relied on them, and vice versa, which goes some way to explaining the following:
“Older members of the family know little about John and Johanna. John is said to have never completely recovered from the drowning of his horses when the punt on which they were travelling to Manly sunk whilst crossing Pittwater, some years before the erection of the Spit Bridge.” [4]
The hand-operated punt John O’Grady boarded with his horse and dray to cross Middle Harbour. Image courtesy of Mosman Council Digital Library, no: DSC2001 .
The accident happened in September 1888.
John left home early to take a load of bricks from Gore Hill to Manly. He stopped at a sandspit near Chinaman’s Beach, on the Mosman side of Middle Harbour, to board the punt that would take him and his horses and dray across to Clontarf.
“There is a long, often quite sad history from the crossing of Middle Harbour. The earliest evidence I found talks about a man named Barnard Kearns who in 1830 started rowing passengers from Shell Cove to Clontarf.
“In the 1850s a man named Peter Ellery was rowing passengers across the Spit. He also started a punt service to ferry both cattle and men, with the charge being less if horses swam across themselves to which at least one account indicates the horses quite enjoyed the swim.
“Unfortunately Mr Ellery’s punt regularly broke down leading the Government to replace the service with their own in 1870. While larger it was also unreliable as well as unsafe. In September 1888 the punt capsized throwing five men, eight horses and drays carrying bricks into the water. Sadly all of the horses drowned.” [5]
John was one of those five men thrown into the harbour, together with his horses attached to loaded drays.
A terrible sight, it would have been, to see these precious animals mercilessly pulled under. Life-threatening for John and his fellow brick-carters, too. They would not have known how to swim but if they were to survive they needed to get themselves clear of eight thrashing horses and hang on to a capsized punt until help came. Either that or dog-paddle to shore.
[1] Ireland's Great Famine may be a footnote in 19th century European history, but it is fundamental to an understanding of Ireland's story, writes Daniel Mulhall in ‘Ireland’s Great Famine and its after-effects’, 3 December 2018. Retrieved 8 May 2022. https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/usa/about-us/ambassador/ambassadors-blog/black47irelandsgreatfamineanditsafter-effects/
“While there were many striking developments in Ireland throughout the 19th century - Robert Emmet's Rising of 1803, the achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the Repeal movement of the 1840s, the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, the emergence of the Fenians in the 1860s, the land war of the 1880s and the rise and fall of Charles Stewart Parnell between 1880 and 1891 - nothing came close to the Famine in terms of the scale of its short-term and long-term effects. Its immediate impact was devastating. It was the last incidence of mass hunger in the western world.
“The Famine’s immediate impact in terms of mortality and population loss is clear. The Famine's longer-term economic and political effects require some interpretation. The most consequential of these was mass emigration from Ireland: 6 million people left between 1841 and 1900. This figure exceeded the total population of Ireland at the beginning of the 19th century. Dispute about the causes of the Famine has had a long afterlife. From the word go, Irish nationalists laid the blame squarely at the feet of the British Government and saw it as an invincible argument in favour of self-government. Historians tend to be more understanding of the undoubted inadequacies of the Famine relief effort on account of the unprecedented scale of the tragedy that beset Ireland.
“Whatever view is taken about responsibility for the Famine, the fact that it had such catastrophic effects engendered a profound sense of grievance that became a death knell for the Union between Britain and Ireland. It is true that the Union survived for seven decades after the Famine, but that was because Britain was the strongest State in the world at the time and was not for turning on the Union no matter how much discontent there was in Ireland. It took the effects of a world war and a dramatically changed international environment to give Ireland an opportunity to win its independence.”
[2] Maureen Clarke notes: “Sometime after his marriage to Johanna, John began using the surname O’Grady. All of his children’s births have been registered as Grady but the deaths have been registered as both Grady and O’Grady.”
[3] End of the Dray. Sydney Morning Herald. 29 October 2005. Retrieved 4 May 2022: https://www.smh.com.au/national/end-of-the-dray-20051029-gdmc6r.html
[4] Maureen Clarke, op cit.
[5] The Spit Punt, Life Before the Spit Bridge. History of Sydney 4 May 2016. Retrieved 4 May 2022: http://www.historyofsydney.com.au/the-spit-punt/