Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  While the miners came largely from the coal-rich central belt of Scotland, seasonal or episodic emigration was also practised by large numbers of Aberdeenshire granite tradesmen who played a key part in establishing a flourishing granite industry in the USA, particularly in New England. They too were enticed by the offer of high wages, for when the United States began to exploit its granite deposits after the Civil War, it had to purchase the skills of experienced quarrymen and cutters who could instruct a native labour force. Scottish masons were in particular demand, and in the 1870s and 1880s it was not unusual for around 200 granite tradesmen to be lured away from Aberdeen each spring to the American quarries and stoneyards. Some settled down permanently, but many returned to Aberdeen each winter and became long-term seasonal emigrants, going back to the USA each spring when the quarries and yards reopened; others might remain abroad for some years before returning to Aberdeen with their nest-egg.

  Both permanent and temporary emigrants were effective recruitment agents. From time to time men were recruited by American granite companies or building contractors who sent agents to Scotland to engage labour for specific contracts, perhaps with the added incentive of a free two-way transatlantic passage; at other times men simply responded to advertisements in the local press. A large number, however, went to the USA either with no guarantee of employment or under a private arrangement. Many had friends who had crossed the pond and they used these connections to secure jobs. Tradesmen who settled down and established their own businesses in the USA played an especially significant part in the origin and maintenance of the links between America and Aberdeen. Not only did reports of their success arouse general interest in the USA’s prospects; even more importantly, granite quarries and yards opened by Aberdonians in various parts of New England and in New York State often acted like a magnet to subsequent seasonal emigrants. For instance, several Aberdonians were employed by the New York firm of Booth Brothers, which was established in 1887 by William and John Booth of Kemnay and subsequently won a number of large contracts, including the stone work for the St Louis Post Office and the Boston Court House. The mechanical polishing of granite — already developed in Aberdeen — was introduced into the USA in 1869 when Aberdonian John Westland, along with Gordon McKenzie and George Patterson from Huntly, set up a polishing yard at Quincy, having had machinery on the Scottish model manufactured in Boston. After Westland’s death in 1872, the firm was carried on by his surviving partners, who had by 1885, according to the Boston Post, ‘absolutely carved their fortune out of granite ’. 46

  Emigration and trade went hand in hand, and Aberdeen’s flourishing American export trade in polished granite owed much to the activities of entrepreneurial granite tradesmen. Although American orders were generally negotiated by agents who paid regular visits to Aberdeen, temporary emigrants also brought back American orders for home yards, while those emigrants who set up granite yards of their own on returning to Aberdeen were particularly influential in cementing trade links, using the capital they had saved in the United States to become manufacturers on their own account, and their American contacts to sustain their order books. Stonecutters also had their interest in the USA aroused through the preparation of American orders, as well as through their conversations with returned emigrants, who often worked on these export orders at home during the winter before re-emigrating in the spring. The huge return wash of emigrants undoubtedly helped to swell the subsequent outflow, since advice and encouragement could be imparted personally, doubts and enquiries could be answered on the spot, and enthusiastic emigrants might persuade friends and colleagues to accompany them on their next transatlantic trip. Particularly strong links were forged with New England, and Scottish communities began to form in such places as Quincy, Massachusetts, Concord, New Hampshire, Vinalhaven, Maine, and most notably Barre, Vermont, with many granite workers returning to the same location year after year:

  Those who settled wrote their friends and relatives or gave the information personally — especially when revisiting Scotland. For there were numerous such journeys in those days … Not uncommon was the intention on such departures to remain permanently in the homeland — with goodbye here accordingly. But that was usually in the early winter with a complete right about face in the spring. Many a sudden decision then — the wanderlust developing over a week end or even on the way to work Monday morning. The announcement of that resolution to a fellow workman and by night it was all through the different yards … that so-and-so was going to America. Before the close of that week a group would likely be well on the broad Atlantic headed Barre-ward for they invariably travelled in groups both going and coming. 47

  Scottish granite tradesmen were in demand not only in the north-eastern United States. ‘From the Atlantic to the Pacific comes the cry for more men,’ wrote one correspondent of the Granite Cutters’ Journal in 1902. 48 It was answered by cutters and masons who turned their steps to such far-flung locations as Alabama, Texas, California and Vancouver, as well as by those who cut stone for the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City and by the many who moved freely and frequently between Vermont and Quebec, or between Maine and New Brunswick.

  Railway construction also gave temporary labouring work to Scots in various parts of the world. James Gordon, from Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire, arrived in Montreal in June 1886, but spent only two days in the city before securing a six-month contract with the Canadian Pacific Railway and moving west to British Columbia. After spending two weeks working in a sawmill, he found the labour too strenuous and moved on to another job, building snow sheds to protect the newly completed line. The workforce was international and the job hazardous, as he recalled in his diary:

  I am sorry to say that many a young man lost his life that summer in the Rockies there was accidents nearly every day I myself came to an accident in the end of the year a piece of wood fell on my back that finished my work in the Rockies I lay about two weeks in the tents when I took very bad with rehumitism [sic] some friends of mine singled the train to stop I was then carried with a blanket to the train I had to go 40 miles to the hospital it was kept up by the men working on the railway we had to pay 2/- per mounth There was one Docter in the Hospital he did not put himself to much trouble with the patients.

  After spending three weeks in hospital, Gordon collected his wages and cashed in his free rail pass back east. In an attempt to cure his rheumatism, he spent another six weeks in a Toronto hospital at a cost of 15s a week. He then worked on the Welland Canal briefly before going on strike, suffering a relapse and returning to Toronto, where he found three months’ work digging out house foundations. Other temporary jobs in various parts of Ontario followed, often among fellow Scots, before the death of his parents, within nine weeks of each other, dictated the return of the rolling stone to Aberdeenshire. Accompanied by his brother, who by autumn 1889 was working alongside him in Toronto, James took ship at Montreal, observing that ‘on the journey homeward there is little amusements the people are not so hearty as when going out’. 49

  Sojourning tradesmen, we have seen, were sometimes given a rough ride by workmates and unions. But it was not just unwitting strikebreakers who felt they had been misled by disingenuous recruiting agents. Perhaps temporary emigrants, particularly contract labourers, were more vulnerable to fraud and malpractice than those who emigrated under no obligation, or alternatively perhaps the speculative, ‘get rich quick’ approach of some of those who played the international labour market engendered an impatient, critical spirit that could not brook disappointment or delay in achieving their anticipated goal.

  When looking at the recruitment of emigrants, passing reference was made to the vilification of R. B. Arthur, a booking agent from Aberdeen, by a group of labourers whom he had sent out to Quebec on a six-month contract with a lumbering company. Many of the 100 men recruited for the North Shore Power Railway and Navigation Company at Clarke City were disappointed in their expectations of sending home money to their families
, who as a result had begun to suffer severe hardship. Not only were their earnings to be just 8d per day for a nine-hour day; like the granite cutters in Austin twenty years earlier, they were not to receive any payment at all until the passage money had been repaid in full, and men with families, who had been promised a £2 bonus on arrival, were never given this gratuity. The men were not employed indoors, as they had been led to believe, but were labouring in the open air, in a remote, inaccessible location 350 miles from Quebec City, where weather conditions and poor communications ensured that they would be effectively prisoners until the spring. Some of their wives back home had been forced to apply for parish relief, and one of the local newspapers, the Evening Gazette, waged a crusade on their behalf:

  Husbands have left their wives and families at home, and as the promises which induced them to give up their situations have not been fulfilled, they are barely able to keep themselves far less to send money home for support of those near and dear to them. The unfavourable reports which have come home have had a deterrent effect on several young men who intended to leave for Canada shortly, and some official statement would be welcomed to allay the feelings of many as to the prospects which Canada affords for the industrious artisan. 50

  R. B. Arthur was quick to defend himself against his accusers and in a letter to the Aberdeen Journal on 30 October he blamed the ‘misleading information’ published two days earlier on a few ‘hysterical’ wives. Insisting that he had made full enquiries into the Clarke City firm’s business standing before sending out any emigrants, he noted that recruits who had gone out in spring 1907 — and their dependants — had so recommended the arrangements that around 200 men left behind were eager to join them as soon as work became available, and some wives too had made plans to join their husbands once the St Lawrence reopened. Arthur’s position was supported by both the Canadian government emigration agent for northern Scotland, John MacLennan, and the editor of another local paper, the Evening Express. The former claimed that many people who emigrated by means of advanced passages were ‘careless and indifferent respecting those they leave behind’, while the latter felt that it was easy for emigrants with unrealistic expectations of a land ‘overflowing with milk and honey’ to blame their disappointment on misinformation by agents, pointing out that few agents were likely to risk the heavy penalties imposed on those who wilfully deceived clients, just for the sake of a few shillings’ commission. At the same time, though, the editor thought the complaints coming back from Clarke City were of more substance and merited the official inquiry which by that time had been promised by the Canadian immigration authorities. 51

  Letters from disillusioned emigrants began to appear in the press from late October. On 31 October the Evening Gazette published two such letters, from a boxmaker and a sawyer who had found conditions at Clarke City intolerable. The boxmaker, in a hastily written note, complained that recruits were not even told when there was to be a postal collection, for fear they would abscond on the mail boat. He went on bitterly:

  God knows when we are to get any money. They don’t even pay us on pay day. It is always a week or so past the time before we get paid. There are some boys here getting all their passage money kept off them this pay day, so they will be left without a penny, but … if they don’t watch themselves there will be a riot here, for we are getting played on too much now. I have been seriously thinking of doing a bolt before the snow comes here, as everybody that is here is leaving with the last boat. It is sickening working here, as the gaffer is a French Canadian, and he gives all the best work to his countrymen, and they all speak French, so we don’t know what they are saying, and can’t follow them with the work. We have been digging out trenches every day we have been working, and my legs and feet are soaking wet every night. It is an awful place. It is always raining in torrents, so bad that we cannot work. We have lost four days already since we started.

  Another recruit, James Troup, in an interview with the Evening Gazette on 20 November, described Clarke City as nothing more than a collection of wooden huts in the bush, where the men were housed in rough bothies:

  On the second day after arrival most of the men commenced to work. They were divided into squads; some worked at concrete, some filling holes in the river … Work had not been in operation but a few days when a great many of the men complained of illness, due to the water, and a general feeling of discontent as to the class of work at which they were engaged, the belief having been that they were to be employed at a pulp mill.

  A delegation of up to fifty recruits had then marched on the site manager, complaining that they had been employed under false pretences, but although the manager promised to redeploy them at more congenial work, many grievances remained, particularly over the non-payment of wages. Troup went on to relate how after three weeks — by which time he had earned £9 but had not received a single payment — he had returned to Quebec along with three companions. By then it was too late in the season to find work, and they were forced to seek help from the St Andrew’s Association, which arranged for them to be fed by the Salvation Army and then sent them on by steamer to Montreal. But employment prospects were even worse there, and after pleading unsuccessfully for a passage on several transatlantic vessels, Troup stowed away in the coal bunkers of a Dundee steamer and in that way returned to his home in Aberdeen.

  On 9 January 1908 John MacLennan wrote a lengthy letter to the Aberdeen Journal in support of his beleaguered booking agent, refuting the allegations made by Troup and other complainants. He denied that the men had ever been promised either wages of 11s per day or a £2 starting bonus. The misunderstanding had apparently arisen because one of the June recruits had written home saying he was earning 11s per (twelve-hour) day, and another had sent home a £2 bonus to his wife before he had even begun work. But MacLennan, having scrutinized all the Clarke City company’s correspondence with Arthur, said the bonus was never intended to be the universal right of all employees; it was to be granted at the company’s discretion, while it had also been made perfectly clear that no wages would be paid until the fare had been fully recouped. Nor were the men ever promised anything other than general labouring work, despite the claims of some that they had been engaged to work indoors at specialist tasks. MacLennan also pointed out that the company had incurred substantial financial losses as a result of the desertion of some recruits and the incompetence of others. Of ninety-eight men who had sailed from Glasgow, twenty-three had refused to proceed from Quebec to Clarke City, and although denied their services, the company was still obliged to pay £126 10s to the steamship company for their fares. Some of the other recruits had never done a day’s manual labour in their lives, and MacLennan ventured to suggest that emigrants who sought prepaid passages were often less committed, less adaptable and much more ready to complain than men who paid their own way.

  These criticisms did not go unchallenged. Within two days MacLennan’s claims had been contradicted by an anonymous correspondent, who followed up his letter of 11 January with a second onslaught four days later. Pointing out that there were more ways of misleading people than telling out-and-out falsehoods, he insisted that the full conditions of their employment had not been adequately explained to the Clarke City recruits. If they had really been told — as MacLennan claimed — that they would not be able to send home any funds until their fares had been paid off, then clearly they would not have abandoned their families without the means of support. And if, as MacLennan also suggested, the men were shiftless and lazy, then surely this reflected badly on R. B. Arthur’s selection procedure. In his second letter, the unnamed correspondent went on to complain that MacLennan’s statement had replaced the original promise of an impartial Canadian government inquiry into the grievances of the Clarke City recruits. Instead of taking evidence on the spot, from the men actually involved, the Canadian immigration authorities had simply commissioned a report from their man in Aberdeen, who had reached his conclusions without a full knowl
edge of the facts, and largely on the evidence of two witnesses, one of whom had never been to Clarke City.

  The last public word on the dispute went to R. B. Arthur, whose advertisements had initiated the whole controversy. On 27 January he wrote to the Aberdeen Journal, again denying that the men had been misled in any way. While interviewing applicants, he insisted, copies of an official circular, quoting a minimum wage rate of 15c and a weekly boarding charge of $3, had been clearly displayed on his desk; he had also pointed out the position of Clarke City on the map and had passed around letters from previous recruits. In response to Arthur’s request of October 1907 that the company should investigate the complaints that had been appearing in the Aberdeen press, some recruits had taken it upon themselves to defend their employers’ interests, and Arthur cited two such items of correspondence. Both letters were written by George Robertson. While the first praised the increasing accessibility and prospects of Clarke City, the other, which was countersigned by five of his workmates, described the favourable way that the Aberdeen recruits had been received, despite the inability of some men to perform manual labour. All employees who had requested an advance had been promised that this would be allowed once they had got some time in, and during November most of the married men had in fact been able to send home $35—40 (£7—8) to their families.