Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  Conclusion

  From the earliest days of organized emigration, agents constituted a prominent and recurring thread in the complex fabric of movement from the British Isles. Nowhere was that thread more prominent than in Scotland, which was regarded as a particularly fruitful field of endeavour by agents whose priority was usually to secure competent agriculturists. While some agents may have played a part in igniting the initial spark of public interest, their real significance lay in the way in which they were able to translate a vague restlessness into the concrete decision to emigrate. At times this simply meant filling the otherwise empty head of the would-be emigrant with alluring images of the particular El Dorado that they represented, but on other occasions it involved the more difficult task of changing a mind that was already made up. Thus John MacLennan could congratulate himself when in 1910 he persuaded a wealthy farmer and his son to invest their savings of £2,400 in Calgary rather than New Zealand. In the same year Aberdeen engine driver Robert Rhynes took up a farm on the other side of Canada, after a chance encounter with an agent from Prince Edward Island. ‘I was,’ he recalled fourteen years later, ‘intending to go West, but the agent representing the island was in Aberdeen, and I met him at the Kittybrewster [agri-cultural] Show. His story induced me to come here and look round, and I am not disappointed that I did not go West.’ 67

  By marrying supply with demand, agents clearly filled a niche in the market, whether they were involved in the provision of vessels, land or employment, and their strategies became more complex as the century progressed and the volume of emigrants increased. Surviving evidence suggests that, despite some examples of sharp practice and disillusioned recruits — inevitable in such a diverse and long-term enterprise — most of the agents were honest brokers. Their clients were generally willing exiles, men and women of skill and initiative, who were inspired primarily by the quest for better conditions and prospects than they could secure in Scotland. The degree of opposition agents encountered from vested interests at home suggests that they were generally careful, rather than indiscriminate, recruiters, although at the same time as they were accused of draining Scotland of brain, sinew and capital, they had to field brickbats from overseas critics, whose perception of the calibre of the emigrants was very different. But whether they were regarded as a blessing or a curse, the ubiquitous agents played a key part in the scale and direction of emigration. By the end of the nineteenth century the thread of agency activity had been woven indelibly and indispensably into the fabric of Scottish emigration in an increasingly sophisticated, professional and multi-layered form.

  5

  HELPING THE HELPLESS

  ‘Well-planned and wisely conducted child-emigration … contains within its bosom the truest solution of some of the mother country’s most perplexing problems, and the supply of our Colonies’ most urgent needs.’ 1

  ‘The majority of these children are the offal of the most depraved characters in the cities of the Old Country.’ 2

  These contrasting sentiments represent the tip of an iceberg of controversy that raged around the emigration of disadvantaged children. For more than half a century after 1870 a barrage of bouquets and brickbats was bestowed on a complex movement that saw approximately 100,000 juveniles shipped overseas from British orphanages and rescue homes. Of all the debate generated by the emigration question, none has been more passionate and polarized than the debate surrounding child emigration. On the one hand, it was praised by its promoters as a means of repairing the economic and spiritual health of recruits, solving labour-supply problems at home and abroad, and bolstering the bonds of empire. On the other hand, it was demonized by its detractors, as either an unethical device for dumping destitute and degenerate juveniles on unenthusiastic colonies, a cynical strategy to delay state welfare provision at home, or a cruel disruption of the dynamic of the family unit, however dysfunctional that unit might be. In the middle of the debate stood the emigrants themselves, individuals who had little say in the matter or the manner of their relocation, and whose welfare hinged largely on a fortuitous placement with an understanding family. In recent years the subject has been revived by a flurry of books, articles and television programmes, some of which have sought to assess the emigrationists’ aims, achievements and limitations in the context of their time, while others have favoured an overtly antagonistic approach, sometimes taking advantage of hindsight to sensationalize the movement.

  What were the objectives, achievements, limitations and blind spots of those who promoted child emigration? What were the antecedents of a movement which grew from a trickle into a flood in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and persisted until as late as 1968? Who were the Scottish philanthropists, and did their aims and activities conform to, or differ from, those of their better-known English counterparts? Where were the emigrants sent, for what purpose and with what effect? What can we learn about their experiences before, during and after their emigration, from their own recollections, as well as from the reports of their sponsors and the reactions of the host communities? In tackling these questions, we are fortunate in being able to draw on a wide range of contemporary as well as retrospective literature. Dependent on promotional pamphlets and attractive annual reports to stimulate public interest and donations, the voluntary agencies produced regular publications which contained both theoretical justifications and practical illustrations of their work, often incorporating letters from ostensibly satisfied emigrants. Some institutions also pioneered the modern social work practice of building up meticulous factual case files on all inmates, while extra endorsement of their programmes could be found in much of the British press and in hagiographies of their founders. Colonial newspaper editors and correspondents, on the other hand, were often less complimentary, as were the reports of occasional official investigations into malpractice, while Lucy Maud Montgomery immortalized the antipathy of Canadian society to home children in Anne of Green Gables. The jury is therefore not short of evidence on which to assess the merits and demerits of juvenile emigration.

  Sponsored child emigration: theory and practice

  Most child emigrants travelled and settled with their families, but by 1800 there was already a well-established tradition of sending batches of unaccompanied pauper children across the Atlantic, some as indentured servants, others as convicts. They generally remain shadowy figures, although there are a few well-documented exceptions, the most notable being Peter Williamson, who, as we saw earlier, was kidnapped with ‘amazing effrontery’ by a group of Aberdeen city merchants and magistrates and shipped to Philadelphia. 3

  By the end of the eighteenth century attitudes had begun to shift away from the simple punishment or indiscriminate export of delinquents and vagrants towards the rehabilitation of children through emigration. Yet the underlying philosophy remained contentious and contradictory, as emigrationists and commentators alike struggled to disentangle motives of reform from an ingrained desire to punish actual or potential criminals. In the 1820s and 1830s social reformers such as the Spitalfields Quaker Peter Bedford and the retired naval captain Edward Brenton sent destitute children from the streets of London to farms and households in Cape Colony. By the time that Brenton’s Children’s Friend Society was dissolved in 1840, amidst accusations that its recruits were treated like slaves or convicts, it had sent around 1,300 children to South Africa. The spotlight shifted to the Antipodes in the 1840s, when young delinquents were sent out from reformatories such as Parkhurst in the Isle of Wight and the Philanthropic Society’s Redhill School in Surrey, while in the depths of the Irish Famine 4,175 workhouse orphans were controversially sent to New South Wales by the Irish Poor Law Commissioners. As President of the Ragged School Union, Lord Shaftesbury also advocated the removal of children to Australia until 1853, as did Thomas Guthrie, the Free Church cleric who opened three ragged schools in Edinburgh in 1847. When, in response to fears that they would be contaminated by immoral influences from the Australian gold dig
gings, ragged school recruits were redirected to North America, the foundation stones were laid for a movement that was soon to dominate the whole history of child migration from the British Isles.

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, industrial schools and reformatories sprang up across Britain, the former catering for vagrant and uncontrollable children, along with those found in bad company or convicted of petty offences, and the latter dealing with those found guilty of more serious offences. Led by the Liverpool Education Authority, which by 1914 had sent out nearly 1,200 children to Canada, many of these schools played the emigration card, using agencies such as the Salvation Army, Dr Barnardo’s, the Children’s Aid Society and the Catholic Emigration Society to dispatch suitable children who had been given a basic education and training in a trade. To the surprise of a parliamentary committee which reported on Scottish reformatory and industrial schools in 1914, relatively few Scottish delinquents were sent overseas, perhaps because of inadequate public support. 4 Among those which did participate were Wellington Park Boys’ School in Edinburgh, the Kibble Reformatory in Paisley, and in Glasgow the Girls’ Industrial School and Reformatory and the Maryhill Industrial School. In Aberdeen, site of the first industrial school in Britain, the governors worked hard during the 1860s to assist the emigration of former inmates. Between 1878 and 1915 thirty-three children in all emigrated from Aberdeen’s four industrial schools, as well as twenty-four inmates of the city’s two reformatories.

  By the late nineteenth century, however, a growing army of philanthropists was more concerned that emigration should prevent, rather than cure, delinquency among juveniles. Charitable societies, both national and provincial, mushroomed in response to clamant social and economic problems, which were tackled from a range of motives and in a variety of ways. Assisted emigration was integral to many relief schemes, sometimes standing alone, sometimes incorporated into a home-based programme of reform. Charities did not concern themselves exclusively with juveniles; by the end of the century the Salvation Army claimed to be the world’s largest emigration and employment agency for destitute or unemployed working-class people, while women’s emigration had become increasingly linked with the Salvationists, as well as other specifically female sponsoring societies. But at the same time the sponsored emigration of children and adolescents had become a big and especially controversial business, associated partly with the Salvation Army, but primarily with the names of Thomas Barnardo and, in Scotland, William Quarrier, as well as a supporting cast of more obscure, but still significant, provincial philanthropists. As with assisted adult emigration, the focus of most of the children’s schemes was Canada, the nearest and cheapest destination, and in 1889 the Canadian Department of Agriculture listed over fifty agencies involved in bringing juveniles from Britain to the Dominion. 5

  The main catalyst for the philanthropists was the practical argument that both the nation and empire would benefit from a policy of removing surplus citizens from Britain to thinly populated colonial locations. Not only would problems of overpopulation, pauperism and unemployment be solved, it was argued; incessant colonial demands for cheap farm and domestic labour would also be met. But philosophical considerations were of equal, if not greater, significance. Like Shaftesbury earlier in the century, many of the philanthropists were evangelical Christians, inspired by the biblical mandate to care for both body and soul, and they were convinced that the spiritual, as well as the economic, condition of their needy recruits would be improved if they were removed from depraved and deprived urban environments in Britain and sent to the morally unpolluted air of rural Canada. Those involved in child care welcomed emigration as an ideal device to give destitute or abused children a fresh start in life by removing them from corrupting influences at home. After 1900, when eugenic arguments about racial purity came into vogue and the secular cause of imperialism replaced salvation as the main theoretical justification for assisted emigration, young emigrants were regarded as an even greater asset, constituting ‘the bricks with which the empire would be built’. 6 In the eugenic context, rural Canada was commended more for its healthful than for its moral qualities, as a land where the future of the empire could be secured by transplanting young people from the overcrowded and debilitating environments of Britain’s city slums, before their constitutions had been irreparably damaged.

  Although the practice of child migration was to become associated primarily with Dr Thomas Barnardo, the pioneers of the movement were two women, Maria Rye and Annie Macpherson. In 1869 Miss Rye took her first party of seventy-five girls (aged four to twelve) to Niagara-on-the-Lake, where, after admitting them into her newly established receiving home in the former jail and courthouse, she placed them out in the locality with farmers who promised to treat them like their own children in return for the performance of light duties. Five years later her work was subjected to scathing attack in an official report by Andrew Doyle, an English Local Government Board inspector, who accused her of bringing over larger parties than she could manage, providing inadequate after-care facilities and lining her own pocket by charging English poor law unions for the removal of paupers. As a result, restrictions were imposed on the removal of pauper children for almost a decade, although the work of Rye ’s contemporary, Annie Macpherson, largely escaped censure. Macpherson, a social worker in the East End of London and the evangelical daughter of a Scottish Quaker, took her first party of 100 destitute children to Canada in 1870. Her recruits were prepared for emigration in a British training home opened by Lord Shaftesbury, where they were taught marketable skills while arrangements were made for their supervised passage, reception and distribution. Macpherson operated three distributing homes in Canada. The first, at Belleville, Ontario, was managed for thirty years by her friend Ellen Bilborough, while her sisters, Rachel Merry and Louisa Birt, were respectively involved both with initial receiving centres in London and Liverpool and with distributing homes at Galt, Ontario, and Knowlton, Quebec. Annie Macpherson’s work was to provide both the theoretical inspiration and the practical model for many later emigra-tionists.

  Rye and Macpherson did not have the field to themselves for very long, although several evangelical children’s societies which subsequently implemented assisted emigration programmes sent their young charges to Canada under Annie Macpherson’s care. Barnardo used her receiving centres for ten years, until 1882, when he decided to develop his own system. He had been deterred until then by the restrictions imposed after the Maria Rye scandal, but by 1882 financial constraints on his work in Britain and the encouragement of influential supporters convinced him that emigration should form a more integral part of his rescue work. Following a donation from Liverpool MP and industrialist Samuel Smith, Barnardo sent his first party of fifty-one boys from Liverpool to Canada in August 1882. The success of that venture encouraged him to repeat the experiment the next year, when he also sent out a girls’ party, and acquired his first Canadian distributing home, Hazelbrae, in Peterborough, Ontario. In 1887 he acquired an 8,000-acre training farm in Manitoba, where youths were tutored in the techniques of prairie agriculture with a view to taking up farm labour or applying for homestead grants, and his network of Canadian depots expanded steadily throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Very few children were sent to Australia because of Barnardo’s concern about inadequate protective arrangements for a party of boys sent out in 1883, and his later idea of setting up children’s homes in South Africa was abandoned on the grounds of cost and Dutch settler hostility to British immigration.

  By Barnardo’s death in 1905 33 per cent of his 60,000 children had been sent to Canada, and his homes rapidly became the biggest, best-known and most controversial of the growing number of juvenile emigration agencies, responsible for over one-third of all children sent from Britain to Canada between 1870 and 1930. 7 Barnardo was a contentious figure in Canada, particularly during the economic depression of the 1890s. The dregs of Britain’s city slums, it was claimed, were filling Canadian
jails, taking scarce jobs from unemployed Canadians and introducing defective children, such as George Green, a Barnardo boy with learning difficulties and bad eyesight whose employer was scandalously acquitted of a charge of manslaughter after George died following repeated beatings. Barnardo was also controversial in Britain, where critics claimed that he was depleting the ranks of female domestic servants and male farm workers, a claim which he firmly refuted by pointing out that the vast majority of his children were placed in situations at home.