Socio-economic Dislocation and Inter-war Emigration to Canada and the United States: A Scottish Snapshot

Abstract

During the 1920s emigration from Scotland exceeded the natural growth of population. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the mechanisms of relocation, the regional and occupational origins and destinations of the emigrants or their demographic profile. This article draws on the recently compiled Scottish Emigration Database to provide a quantitative snapshot of the circumstances of 18,512 passengers who embarked on the lower Clyde in the first four months of 1923. The first section explains the rationale, methodology and historiographical context of the database. Then, after outlining the economic, social and political climate in inter-war Scotland, the article investigates the extent to which decay, dislocation and disillusionment – or alternatively opportunity and ambition – provoked transatlantic emigration. Reference is made to local and regional issues within Scotland, notably in the urban-industrial central belt and the crofting communities of the Hebrides. Setting the Scottish experience within the wider framework of British emigration policy between the wars, it also evaluates the effectiveness of empire settlement legislation in recruiting and retaining settlers for Canada against the competing attractions of the United States.

Notes

1. Thomson, Scotland that Distressed Area, 5.

2. Carrier and Jeffery, External Migration; Finlay, Modern Scotland, 1914–2000, 101.

3. These figures are derived by comparing the Board of Trade's quarterly returns with the passengers recorded in the Scottish Emigration Database for the same period. See ‘Passenger movement from and to the United Kingdom’, The Board of Trade Journal, 1923, 661, and The Scottish Emigration Database, available at: <http://www.abdn.ac.uk/emigration>.

4. Ibid. The full Access database is stored by the Arts and Humanities Data Service in the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex (AHDS History, SN 5161, Scottish Emigration Database, 1923).

5. The manuscript records can be consulted in Board of Trade: Commercial and Statistical Department. Outwards Passenger Lists, 1890–1960, BT 27, The National Archives. The digitised images can be consulted at AHDS History, SN 5193, Scottish Emigration Database (Images), 1923.

6. As well as the Ships' Table, which lists all the vessels included in the digitised images, and the Passengers' Table, which provides personal and demographic information on every passenger whose details have been transcribed, there is an index which lists all the manifests that were digitised, most of which have not yet been transcribed.

7. See, for instance, MacLeod, Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland; MacKenzie, A History of the Highland Clearances; Prebble, The Highland Clearances; Craig, On the Crofters' Trail.

8. Donaldson, The Scots Overseas. See also, inter alia, Devine, The Great Highland Famine; Gray, ‘Scottish Emigration’; Harper, Emigration from North-East Scotland; Richards et al., That Land of Exiles; Devine, Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society; Szasz, Scots in the North American West, 1790–1917.

9. See, for instance, Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; Laxton, The Famine Ships; Keneally, The Great Shame.

10. Confident imperialism was represented by Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain, and defensive imperialism by Carrothers, Emigration from the British Isles. Recent general surveys include Richards, Britannia's Children, and Murdoch, British Emigration 1603–1914. The genealogical approach is exemplified by Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas. Emigrant letters are explored in McCarthy, Irish Migrants in New Zealand, 1840–1937, oral testimony in Hammerton and Thomson, Ten Pound Poms, and regional dimensions in Payton, The Cornish Overseas.

11. Erickson, Emigration from Europe, 1815–1914; Erickson, Who Were the English Emigrants of the 1820s and 1830s?; Baines, Emigration from Europe, 1815–1930.

12. See, for instance, Vecoli and Sinke, A Century of European Migrations, 1830–1930; Van Vugt, Britain to America.

13. The most recent publications include Brooking and Coleman, The Heather and the Fern, Jupp, The English in Australia and Harper, Emigrant Homecomings.

14. Erickson, ‘The Uses of Passenger Lists for the Study of British and Irish Emigration’. Nor have scholars utilised the detailed Finnish and German passenger records.

15. Slaven, The Development of the West of Scotland 1750–1960, 185; Lee, ‘Scotland, 1860-1939: Growth and Poverty’.

16. Slaven, The Development of the West of Scotland 1750–1960, 186–90.

17. Buxton, ‘Efficiency and Organization in Scotland's Iron and Steel Industry during the Interwar Period’.

18. Slaven, The Development of the West of Scotland, 196, 199.

19. Symon, Scottish Farming Past and Present; Coull, ‘The Scottish Herring Fishery in the Interwar Years, 1919–1939’.

20. Hunter, The Claim of Crofting, 38.

21. The groups that amalgamated to form the NPS were the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association, the Scottish National League, the Scottish National Movement and the Scottish Home Rule Movement.

22. Finlay, ‘National Identity in Crisis’, 253, 257–59

23. Lewis Spence to Sir John Gilmour, 2 July 1927, AF51/178, National Archives of Scotland.

24. Finlay, ‘Scottish Nationalism and the British Empire, 1919–1939’.

25. Croucher, We Refuse to Starve in Silence, 66.

26. Thomson, Scotland that Distressed Area, 26, 37; Finlay, ‘National Identity in Crisis’, 245.

27. Buxton, ‘Economic Growth in Scotland between the Wars’.

28. Lee, ‘Scotland, 1860–1939: growth and poverty’, 451.

29. Finlay, ‘National Identity in Crisis’, 244.

30. Thomson, Caledonia or the Future of the Scots, 67.

31. Harper, Emigration from Scotland between the Wars, 7; Lee, ‘Scotland, 1860–1939: Growth and Poverty’, 430.

32. Ibid., 429.

33. Constantine, Unemployment in Britain between the Wars, 1–2.

34. Gray, The Worst of Times, 160.

35. Plant, Oversea Settlement, 91.

36. Headmasters' Conference, Bulletin No. 3, 1928, Hudson Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba, quoted in Macinnes, Harper and Fryer, Scotland and the Americas, 160–61.

37. Press & Journal, 26 Feb. 1924. Most of the recruits came from the area around Maud, where Craighead was based.

38. The average age of the married couples was 34.7 (39.2 for the women and 30.3 for the men).

39. Press and Journal, 16 April 1923.

40. Ibid., 23 April 1923; Glasgow Herald, 23 April 1923.

41. For a fuller evaluation of MacDonell's schemes, see Harper, ‘Enigmas in Hebridean Emigration’.

42. Unattributed memorandum from Noxon to W. J. Egan, Deputy Minister of Immigration, 7 Feb. 1925, RG76, C-4661, vol. 6, file 41, part 2, Library and Archives Canada; Stornoway Gazette, 19 June 1925.

43. Harper, Emigration from Scotland between the Wars, 99. For a detailed account of the experiences of the Metagama emigrants, see Wilkie, Metagama.

44. Harper, Emigration from Scotland between the Wars, 35.

45. The percentages were 40.44 and 36.92.

46. Board of Trade, An Industrial Survey of the South West of Scotland, 200.

47. Carrier and Jeffery, External Migration, 64.

48. Aberdeenshire accounted for twenty-eight such passengers, and the other north-east coastal counties of Banff, Moray, Easter Ross, Sutherland, Kincardineshire and Angus for a total of fourteen.

49. Only sixteen passengers were specifically recorded as working in the jute industry. The figure of thirty-three includes those who were listed as machinists, spinners, weavers or mill, textile and factory workers.

50. The Aberdeen passengers included, for example, twenty shipwrights, seven boilermakers, six riveters, five platers and two caulkers.

51. For example, 1,000 engineers went to the United States but 368 to Canada. The figures for other trades were: miners – 632 and 213; fitters – 275 and 63; platers – 204 and 42; plumbers – 193 and 44; steel workers – 179 and 39; turners – 167 and 37; bricklayers – 129 and 39; riveters – 80 and 23.

52. The Scotsman, 20 Jan. 1923, 10; Sifton, ‘The Immigrants Canada Wants’, 16.

53. Annie Noble, interviewed by M. D. Harper, 16 Sept. 1985.

54. A further fifty-three disembarked at Portland, Maine, one at Philadelphia and one at New Orleans.

55. The Scotsman, 25 Feb. 1926, 11.

56. Mrs Bella Mackay, Torlum, Benbecula, interviewed by M. D. Harper, July 1995. According to Mrs Mackay, who was born in Alberta in 1930 but returned to Scotland with her widowed father in 1939, many colonists would have liked to come back, but lacked the means to do so.

57. The Scotsman, 10 July 1932, 10.

58. Ibid., 17 July 1934, 7a.

59. An interactive page on the Scottish Emigration Database website currently allows visitors to the site to register supplementary information about individuals who appear on the database. When funds permit, it is hoped to extend the project to include decennial samples of the outward passenger lists from 1890 to 1960 and, more ambitiously, to construct a parallel database of return migration which will sample records from the passenger lists of inward-bound vessels.