The big freeze up and blizzard of White ’47

PART ONE

By Tom Gillespie

SEVENTY-five years ago this week (1947), Ireland was gripped by a freezing blizzard in what became known as White '47.

The hardships encountered by families at the time were vividly recorded by John Gunnigan in the 2010 Ballyhaunis Annagh parish magazine.

He wrote:

When I was young, whenever the Famine was mentioned somebody always said Black '47 was one of the worst years of the Great Famine (1845 to '49).

Now, whenever a heavy fall of snow is mentioned, you will always hear someone of my age saying something about the big blizzard of 1947.

I think that year could be called White '47. The wheel has gone the full circle. Everyone thinks of the last week of February as the date of the blizzard, which it was, but the big freeze-up started much earlier than that.

We had two blizzards that year.

The first one, a small one, was on January 11. This followed the worst harvest I ever remember. That was the year that the people came out from the towns to help the farmers save the crops. I think the schools were closed for a while too.

We wouldn’t have got much help here in the west, as we didn’t have big farms like other parts of the country. In spite of that the crops were very important to us.

The war had only finished up the previous year and everything was still rationed. We depended on our barley and oats to feed our stock. It was October when we finally got the last of the harvest saved.

The bad weather continued right through November and December and we woke up on the morning of January 11 to a heavy fall of snow. It was a Sunday morning and we were up in good time as we had to feed the stock before we walked to Mass in Woodfield Church about a mile away.

I remember seeing snow drifts for the first time in my life as we made our way down to Mass and my father wondering if Fr. Concannon’s car would be able to make it through the snow.

Aghamore was four miles away and some of the drifts were big. We all sat there in the church, for how long I don’t know, but I don’t think anyone was in any doubt but he would come. When he arrived he apologised for being late, but he had to walk nearly all the way as the car only got as far as the village of Aghamore when he got stuck in a drift.

He came into our house on his way home and my mother gave him a pair of dry socks - as he was wearing light boots and his socks were wet - and a good breakfast.

The poor man was fasting, as everyone had to do at that time. My father told me to harness the pony to the trap and he would drive him home. We had a ‘back-to-back’ trap and a good pony.

They set off for Aghamore nice and warm with a rug round their knees to keep out the cold. About 20 minutes later my father arrived back to change out of his ‘Sunday best’ as they had also gotten stuck in a drift a few hundred yards into the journey.

He had taken the pony from the trap, put the rug on his back and got Fr. Concannon up on him and set him off for Aghamore with instructions to leave the pony in Glavey’s stable.

When my father got changed and put his heavy boots on - there was no such thing as wellingtons or any kind of rain wear at the time - he left for Aghamore to bring the pony home.

When he got to Glavey’s Jack gave him a glass of whiskey, which Fr. Concannon had paid for earlier. When he had that finished Jack said ‘a bird never flew on one wing’ and filled him another. How he rode the pony home after that I will never know, but he got home in great form. Some of the neighbours had turned the trap around so he was able to bring it home with him.

That snow stayed on the ground for about a week and then the most of it thawed. When it was nearly all gone - just the remains of the drifts left - it really started to freeze. My memory of the next few weeks is that we never saw the sun, just thick cloud and hard ‘black frost’.

Of course at that time there was no electricity or running water. The only heat in the house was the open fire in the kitchen. That fire was also used for all cooking and baking and the big pots of potatoes that had to be boiled for the pigs and fowl.

The river where the stock got water was frozen over and we had to break a hole in the ice and fill tubs and we had to drive the cattle to get a drink.

This weather lasted right through the end of January and the first three weeks of February. The wind was coming from the east all this time and on the evening of the 23rd it started blowing a gale.

When we all awoke on the morning of the 24th it was still blowing hard and it was quite dark and bitter cold. Of course there was no heating of any kind in the bedrooms at that time. At last my father called out to me to go to the kitchen and light a candle and see what time it was. After a bit of trouble I got the candle going by taking a coal out of the ash pit and blowing on it.

To everyone’s surprise it was after ten o’clock! When we got out of the house by the back door we found a howling blizzard in progress and there was about two feet of snow stuck to the front of the house: that was the reason it was so dark - the daylight couldn’t get in the windows.

My father and I wrapped ourselves up as best we could and we fed the cattle and horses. There was no way we could bring them for a drink that day.

Soon after we got the breakfast we discovered that we had run out of water in the house. My youngest sister and I were sent off with two buckets to the well, which wasn’t far away. We couldn’t find it as it was covered with snow. We were then sent to another well a bit further away with the same result. We then tried a neighbour’s well and we drew a blank there too.

At that stage we were exhausted and my parents decided to put a pot on the fire and fill it with snow and melt it. That is how we managed for water all that day and most of the next. Looking back now I often think that my sister and myself could have been lost in the blizzard that day. We were only kids: I was just turned 15 and she was only 12.

We lived to tell the tale. Thank God! The blizzard was still on when we went to bed that night, but when we got up the next morning the snow had stopped falling and the sun was shining for the first time for about six weeks.