Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  The migratory trends set in the eighteenth century were confirmed and extended after 1800. They also become easier to quantify after 1851, when for the first time the Scottish census began to record places of birth by county, indicating that by mid-century a third of the population had crossed a county boundary or moved from a rural to an urban environment. The modernization of farming practices and changing levels of expectations in the countryside that were mentioned so frequently in the Statistical Account of Scotland as major causes of emigration from the rural Lowlands continued unabated throughout much of the nineteenth century, and by the 1870s had created labour shortages in areas such as Aberdeenshire. Agriculturists’ mobility was provoked not only by the economic implications of farm consolidation, which dashed the hopes of many aspiring small tenant farmers, but also by the loss of status involved in such curtailment of opportunities, the threat and reality of permanent landless-ness and changes in accommodation arrangements that saw farm workers housed in squalid bothies and chaumers. Many rolling stones stayed no longer than six months on any one farm. In the 1840s the contributor to the New Statistical Account for the parish of Kinellar in Aberdeenshire bemoaned the breakdown of mutual respect between farmers and farm servants that had taken place over the previous half-century. Like many of his contemporaries, he blamed the ‘roving disposition’ of farm servants not only on the erosion of their prospects but also on the ‘idleness and dissipation’ encouraged by the biannual feeing fairs, when farmers went to market to hire strangers on the strength of outward appearance alone. 8

  At the same time, the profile of Highland migration changed significantly, as the protracted economic problems in many parts of that region vastly increased its dependence on migrant income. In the first place, migration expanded to incorporate virtually the whole crofting area. Secondly, it began to encompass many more people, from a much wider spectrum of Highland society, as heads of household were forced to join their children on the southward trek in order to earn enough money to pay the rent. Thirdly, the distinction between temporary and permanent relocation became increasingly blurred, as migrants postponed their return for months or even years, impelled not only by acute need at home but also by enhanced employment opportunities in the Lowlands that allowed them to dovetail different types of seasonal work. Permanent migration developed more readily among southern and eastern Highlanders, whose associations with the Lowlands went back to the eighteenth century, than among crofters from the north and west, who tended to regard it as a short-term expedient. Established patterns of movement were reinforced, as Edinburgh recruited migrants from the central and north-east Highlands, Dundee and Perth recruited from Highland Perthshire, Aberdeen drew on the eastern parts of Ross, Cromarty and Inverness-shire, and the western Lowlands continued to pull in large numbers from Argyll, Bute and parts of the Hebrides. In 1851 11. 33 per cent of Greenock’s population was Highland-born, and the chain migration which saw that town forge strong links with particular parishes in Skye, or Edinburgh receive large numbers from the eastern seaboard of Sutherland, was to be replicated time and again in patterns of emigration. Highland migrants found work in domestic and farm service, the east coast and Clyde herring fishery, industrial enterprises and construction, but military service, which had been so important between 1760 and 1815, became much less significant after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

  For both Highlanders and rural Lowlanders, the burgeoning industrial towns provided the main stimulus to migrate, thanks to higher wages and the perception of better conditions than in farming or crofting. By 1851 Scotland was the second most urbanized country in Europe, surpassed only by England and Wales. By the end of the century a third of the Scottish population lived in one of the four main cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, with the spotlight falling primarily on the geologically rich area of the west-central belt. This was where the textile industries of the early nineteenth century gave place first to coal and iron extraction, and subsequently to the related industries of heavy engineering, steel and shipbuilding. The workforce for these enterprises came largely from Scottish migrants and Irish immigrants. By 1901 the western Lowlands contained 44 per cent of Scotland’s population, some counties doubled, trebled or quadrupled their numbers between 1831 and 1911, and Lanarkshire increased its population by a massive 356 per cent. In 1851 Glasgow held 329,097 people, 35 per cent of whom had come from other parts of Scotland. By the end of the nineteenth century nearly 2 million of Scotland’s 4. 5 million people lived in and around that city, a trend which was further reinforced after 1900.

  The road to England

  The scattering of Scots across the length and breadth of England is so ubiquitous as to be taken almost totally for granted, and there is remarkably little scholarly or popular commentary on this most obvious and persistent form of migration. Even in the nineteenth century, when demographic upheaval becomes more measurable, the southward trek of Scots to England is more difficult to quantify than internal migration, since the county of birth of Scottish immigrants was not stated in the English census until 1911. Anecdotal evidence indicates, however, that there was a long-established tradition of cross-border mobility, dating back to medieval times, and until 1800 England was probably the major recipient of Scottish emigrants. In the mid-fifteenth century there were up to 11,000 Scots in England, coming mainly from eastern Scotland and settling primarily in Northumberland if they were unskilled and London if they were skilled tradesmen or professional men. In 1705, just before the parliamentary union, there were allegedly between 500 and 1,000 Scottish hawkers in England. 9 The flow increased significantly after 1707, and by the mid-eighteenth century the main concentrations of Scots were found in the border counties, Lancashire, East Anglia and London. The formation of the Norwich Scots Society in 1775, to relieve indigent Scots, was a reflection of the significance of itinerant harvesters in Norfolk, at the same time as permanent Scottish settlement was taking place in the English coalfields, and around 10,000 Scottish craftsmen were making their way annually to London. Several contributors to the Statistical Account of Scotland mentioned that London in particular had become a magnet for many enterprising young Scots, sometimes as a first destination, sometimes as the ultimate move in step-migration, and sometimes as a staging post on a route that eventually took them overseas. Whereas those who went south to ‘Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paisley or London’ from the parish of Dyke and Moy in Morayshire seldom returned, the opposite was true of those who went to England from Kilfinichen and Kilviceuen in the Western Isles and from Kells in Kirkcudbrightshire. In the former it was ‘common practice ’ to migrate in April — to England as well as the Lowlands — and return in November, while young men from the south-west tended to ply their trade as pedlars in England for up to twelve years, after which those who were ‘sober and industrious, commonly return … with L. 800 or L. 900, or L. 1000.’ 10 John Harrower from Shetland was less fortunate. When his business failed and he left Lerwick in 1773 with a supply of stockings to sell, it was his intention to make his way to Holland, where he would repair his fortunes and subsequently return home. Instead, after being forced to sell his wares at a loss in Newcastle and Sunder-land, he landed in London, where, reduced to utter penury and unable to find work, he was obliged in February 1774 to take out an indenture ‘to go to Virginia for four years as a schoolmaster’. Once across the Atlantic, his prospects improved, but his hopes of bringing his wife and children to join him in ‘the woods of America’ were dashed by his death in 1777. 11

  As Harrower’s experience shows, Scots did not always have an easy time in England. Anti-Scottish prejudice was rife even before Dr Johnson turned the invective into a fine art. Penniless pedlars who allegedly jostled the English on the Great North Road, selling ‘cheap trinkets and trivial household devices’ as they made their way south, were lampooned in abusive doggerel in the windows of inns along the route. Until 1834 Scots vagrants were able to exploit the more liberal administration of the poor laws i
n England, although they were much less prominent than the Irish as supplicants for poor relief. Meanwhile Scots who went to London to follow their professions often found that they could achieve credibility only by anglicizing their names and disguising their accents. 12 English antagonism was rooted in the belief that avaricious Scots were taking the best jobs and consuming the wealth of their southern neighbours, particularly during the highly unpopular rule of Lord Bute, the first Scottish prime minister, in the 1760s. But not only were Scots caricatured as ‘a set of hungry adventurers’; they were disliked on account of their allegedly disproportionate success in business, allied to a mixture of clannishness, drunkenness and moralistic, judgemental Presbyterianism. And in his tongue-in-cheek diatribe The Unspeakable Scot, T.W. H. Crosland described England in 1902 as ‘a Scot-ridden country’ which had a ‘rooted dislike ’ for the ‘bumptiousness and uncouthness’ of its immigrants from the north. ‘The Scot,’ he asserted, ‘never soars above mediocrity; he never has an inspiration or a happy thought; he cannot rise to occasions, and while he is most punctual in his attention to duty and most assiduous and steadfast as a labourer, his work is never perfectly done, and too frequently it is scamped and carried on without regard to finish or excellence.’ 13

  1. Cartoon of ‘The Caledonian Voyage to the Money-Land’, early nineteenth century.

  Sporadic hostility was no deterrent, and during the eighteenth century Scots became prominent in English administration, medicine, journalism, publishing, engineering, banking and architecture. In London, where the Adam brothers made a significant impact, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Somerset House, Blackfriars Bridge and Greenwich Hospital were also designed by Scots, while engineers like Thomas Telford, John Rennie and John Macadam transformed road communication across Britain. Throughout London, according to Charles Knight, ‘they swarm in counting-houses and engineer shops’, while at government level the patronage of Henry Dundas won them clerkships in the India Office as well as cadetships in the East India Company’s service. 14 Doctors such as the neurologist Charles Bell, the obstetrician William Smellie and Sir John Pringle, King’s Physician and President of the Royal Society, paved the way for their nineteenth- century successors, many of whom also ‘swarmed to the highest heights’ of their profession. 15 Thomas Graham of Glasgow held the Chair of Chemistry at University College London from 1837 to 1855, while his former pupil Joseph Lister became Professor of Clinical Surgery at King’s College, as well as the pioneer of antiseptic procedure. St Bartholomew’s Medical School was established by two Scots, David Pitcairn and John Abernethy, while the medical schools and infirmaries in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield were all founded by Scots. Most of these doctors had been trained at Edinburgh or Glasgow, but the first eye hospital in London — Moorfields — was founded by an Aberdeen graduate of the city’s Marischal College, John Farre. A survey of the careers of Aberdeen University students after the fusion of the city’s two universities in 1860 reveals that of 1,115 Scots-born medical graduates sampled between 1860 and 1882, 298 spent the whole or part of their careers in England. The largest numbers were to be found in London, Yorkshire and Lancashire, but Scots-born doctors made their way to almost every English county, and in virtually every year examined England was the first destination of Aberdeen’s medical graduates. They included Aberdonian John Baker, who became Medical Superintendent at Broadmoor State Mental Hospital, and Home Office Medical Adviser on the Criminally Insane, Peterhead-born epidemiologist Charles Creighton, who went to Cambridge, and Ellon-born James Reid, who became Royal Physician to Queen Victoria and her two successors. A rather less orthodox career was followed by another Aberdeenshire man, William Stables, who successfully combined the careers of naval surgeon and novelist. 16

  In the sphere of the arts, the Pall Mall Gazette was founded by George Smith from Morayshire, while Aberdonian James Perry became proprietor of London’s Morning Chronicle. Smith was also responsible for co-publishing the poems of Robert Browning and John Ruskin and the novels of Charlotte Brontë and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as commissioning Thomas Hardy to write Far from the Madding Crowd for the Cornhill Magazine, a journal which he helped to revitalize. Other notable Scottish publishers in London included Daniel Macmillan, John Murray and Adam Black. By the late nineteenth century, however, Scots publishers and journalists in England had acquired a rather tarnished reputation on both sides of the border. The Scottish journalist in London was allegedly worthy but stodgy, ‘punctual, dogged, unoriginal and a born galley-slave … a plagiarist of ideas’. 17 Novelists and publishers, meanwhile, were seen as not only defecting to England but also selling their literary souls to the English market. The once vibrant Edinburgh Review and its Tory rival Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine steadily lost subscribers as they became indistinguishable from their English counterparts, just as Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, which had enjoyed enormous popularity when it first appeared in 1832, suffered a similar fate after editorial control shifted to London and it began to cater for an English readership which demanded stereotypical Scottish anecdotes. But the critics’ greatest wrath was reserved for the three novelists of the kailyard school and their mentor, William Robertson Nicoll, an Aberdeenshire minister who moved to London to become editor of the nonconformist evangelical magazine The British Weekly. S. R. Crockett, J. M. Barrie and Ian Maclaren all came to novel writing via journalism, and the books they produced in the decade after 1888 were — on Nicoll’s instruction and in response to the demands of an English readership — characterized by a sentimental, Eden-like rural domesticity that was very far removed from the nasty, dirty, unhealthy and poverty-ridden reality of life for a growing number of urban Scots.

  There was less equivocation about the impact of Scottish businessmen and industrialists on England’s economic development. In the eighteenth century the Lancashire cotton industry attracted several Scottish entrepreneurs, including the McConnels, Kennedys and Murrays of Kirkcudbrightshire, all of whom came to Manchester in the 1780s as apprentice spinners to fellow Scots William Cannan and James Smith. By 1816 Adam and George Murray employed 1,125 workers in their own Manchester factory, while McConnel and Kennedy, who had joined forces in the 1790s, employed 1,020, including several Scots, in what was to become the largest cotton-spinning firm in Britain. The exploitation of shared origins was also evident in the case of the Grants from Speyside, a father and son who, after the famine of 1782 in Scotland, gave up their precarious living as cattle drovers and came to Lancashire, where, having failed to secure work in Manchester despite a letter of introduction to Richard Arkwright, they were employed by another Scot, one Mr Dinwiddie, in his printworks at Bury. Further anecdotal evidence suggests that ‘vast numbers of Scotch artisans’ were employed ‘in every factory in England’, with William Cobden being criticized for employing too many Scots in his establishment at Chorley and Scots achieving publicity as both strikers and strikebreakers in an incident at Bridgewater Foundry in 1836. 18 While many Scots established their own firms in England, others invested in chemicals, shipping and heavy-industrial enterprises, and both raw materials and processed goods crossed the border in an interdependent, two-way flow. At the same time the Scottish banks — the first of which opened a branch in London in 1864 — were also an important source of investment funds, not least in Cumberland, where they bolstered the commercial connections between that county and the west of Scotland iron industry.

  By 1851 there were 130,087 Scots resident in England and Wales and between 1830 and 1914 600,000 trekked south. Some, like Samuel Chalmers of Aberdeen, stayed only briefly, spending part of 1854 working as a druggist’s assistant before enlisting in the service of the East India Company. Although he immediately capitalized on the widespread network of Scots in the capital and attributed his employment to the fact that ‘the Scotchman is preferred here to any other’, he also attempted, somewhat incongruously, ‘to forget our Scoticisms as fast as possible ’. 19 Nor did he find the streets of London to be pav
ed with gold, for on 12 March he wrote to his father, ‘Please send me £1, as I am almost bankrupt and very hungry.’ Not all transient or seasonal travellers made for London. Every year thousands of Scottish herring fishermen and women gutters followed the fishing to Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft in an industry which remained buoyant on the whole until the First World War. Other transients came to work in construction or in the extractive industries, such as coal mining or the Westmorland and Welsh slate quarries. The vast majority, however, settled permanently, attracted by higher wages and better opportunities in trades and professions. ‘A distinct people they undeniably remain,’ observed Charles Knight of London’s Scottish community, 20 yet on the whole — and T. W. H. Crosland’s acerbic observations notwithstanding — Scots who settled south of the border in the nineteenth century generally became an integral part of English society through a seamless, largely unnoticed and steady migration.

  The continental and Irish traditions