SNIPPET: The winter of 1846/47 was extremely harsh. Snow fell in early November and there was continuous frost. Local relief committees, comprised of the local magistrate, Roman Catholic priest, Protestant clergyman, the Poor Law Guardians and the three largest ratepayers, who had been up to then selling meal at market prices, were informed by the government that they were to distribute free soup from January onwards. The setting up of soup kitchens was not a new idea. The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) had set up central relief committees in Dublin and London in November 1846. These committees collected information from agents around the country with regard to the hardest hit areas. Leitrim was in a "fearful measure of distress" according to the Board of Works Inspector, Captain LAYARD and advocated that soup shops be established at every police barracks throughout the country. The Quakers collected funds to set up soup kitchens themselves and also sent funds to local relief committees to do likewise in their areas. The Quakers made the largest contribution of 15 pounds towards the establishment of a soup kitchen in Manorhamilton in February 1847. The local relief committee donated 4 pounds, Mr. TOTTENHAM of Glenfarne Hall donated 5 pounds and Mrs. TOTTENHAM 2 pounds. This money was to go towards buying boilers and strainers and the buying of foodstuffs. This outdoor relief, given to persons who were not inmates of the workhouse, was preferable to going into the workhouse, where the family would have to give up its plot of land and be segregated. People were encouraged to continue to tend their land. At a Manorhamilton Board of Guardians meeting in April 1847, it was agreed that any person holding more than one acre of land should not be entitled to outdoor relief unless the land was cultivated. The soup kitchen distributed the soup on two conditions: (1) That the application for relief should be made in person, with the exception of the sick and elderly. (2) That the relief should be in the form of cooked food so that it could not exchanged or sold. The term "soup: soon came to mean anything cooked in a boiler and distributed in a liquid state, thick or thin. Doubts were soon expressed as to the soup's nutritional value and many doctors were of the opinion that all the soup kitchens did was simply prevent the people dying of starvation. The soup comprised of basically the same recipe: One oxhead, without the tongue 28 lb turnips 3.5 lbs onion 7 lbs carrots 21 lb pea meal 14 lb Indian cornmeal These ingredients were boiled in a strainer which sat into the boiler and when cooked, sufficiently or not, they were lifted out and strained, the liquid "soup" being left behind. Each ration was to consist of 1 lb biscuit, meal or flour or 1 quart of soup, thickened with meal and 4 oz of bread or biscuit. For a people used to a staple diet of potatoes and milk or buttermilk, this soup did not compensate. The method of distribution at the soup kitchens was very degrading and was hated by the recipients. Each person was required to bring a bowl, pot or tin and stand in line until the soup was ladled into it. Dysentery, and infection of the intestine was rife in Manorhamilton throughout 1847. A highly infectious bacterial disease, it was passed from person to person. With overcrowding in the workhouses and through the close contact of people in the soup kitchens there was little wonder that it spread so quickly and caused so many deaths. Originally intended to be an emergency measure, outdoor relief continued throughout the 1847, 1848 and into the late summer of 1849. At the end of September 1849, the Manorhamilton committee struck off all the recipients of outdoor relief except the old and the ill. The committee offered admission tickets to the workhouse in which there was room at that time. The steaming apparatuses and boilers used by the relief committee were auctioned on 1 Nov 1849. In early January 1850, there were just fifty people on outdoor relief in the whole of the Manorhamilton Union. A strainer, said to have been used in Manorhamilton during the famine year, is now on display in the County Sligo Agricultural Museum in Riverstown. -- Excerpts, "Leitrim Guardian" yearly magazine (1996)