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English Emigration, Kinship and the Recruitment Process: Migration from Melbourn in Cambridgeshire to Melbourne in Victoria in the Mid-Nineteenth Century1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Paul Hudson  and
Dennis Mills
Paul Hudson
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
Dennis Mills
Affiliation:
Branston, Lincoln, UK.
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Extract

There are still comparatively few investigations which look, in detail, at who the rural English emigrants of the nineteenth century were, the villages and communities they came from, and the rural kinship and recruitment networks which supported their decision. Deficiencies in the published statistical returns, and the fact that good historical data about the English is mainly concerned with the first half of the nineteenth century, have not helped further emigration research. This has led to the situation whereby English emigration has been largely disregarded by some historians or, because British governments were initially preoccupied with emigration as a means of relieving distress, interpretations have tended to rest, precariously, on generalisations that English emigration was the product of economic dislocation. The dearth of historical studies is most striking if we note that, between 1853 and 1930, the English contributed over nine million emigrants to the European diaspora, that numerically they dominated Britain's non-Irish (English, Scottish and Welsh) emigration to most of the destinations available to them, and that the English have proved to be some of the most mobile and persistent of all international migrants.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , April 1999 , pp. 55 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

2. For a discussion of the available British statistical data see Baines, D., Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 47–56.Google Scholar

3. For a discussion of these issues see Erickson, C., Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 11–15, 93–4.Google Scholar

4. Baines, , Migration, pp. 63–4;Google ScholarJupp, J., Immigration (Melbourne, 1991), pp. 14–15. For instance, eighty per cent of unassisted immigrants to Victoria, Australia, in 1852 were English.Google Scholar

5. By the middle of the twentieth century, it has been estimated, some 140 million people of British and Irish stock were permanently settled around the globe, and a large proportion of these were English migrants. See Macdonald, D., ‘The Great Migration’, in Bartlett, C.J. (ed.), Britain Pre-eminent (London, 1969), p. 75.Google Scholar

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11. The similarity of name between the sending village and the capital of Victoria is fortuitous. The state of Victoria takes its name from the young queen whose affection for her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, accounts for his name being given to the capital of the state. The Lamb family took Melbourne as their title to reflect their connections with the Derbyshire village of that name.

12. Mills, D.R., ‘The Quality of Life in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, in the Period 1800–50’, International Review of Social History, 23 (1978), 388;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMills, D.R., Lord and Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1980), pp. 70–1;Google ScholarMills, D.R., ‘The Residential Propinquity of Kin in a Cambridgeshire Village, 1841’, Journal of Historical Geography, 4, 3 (1978), 266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The speculative cottage-building in open villages was in sharp contrast to tied cottages on estates, some of which are described in Mitson, A. and Cox, B., ‘Victorian Estate Housing on the Yarborough Estate in Lincolnshire’, Rural History, 6, 1 (1993), 29–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a map of high- and low-wage areas, and corn-growing and pastoral areas see Caird, J., English Agriculture in 1850–51, second edition, ed. Mingay, G. E. (London, 1968), frontispiece.Google Scholar

13. The data relating to the Melbourn emigrants can be found at Victoria Public Records Office (VPRO) reels 1–14. Hereafter known as Australian ships' lists. These ships' lists were used extensively in Holt, S.C., ‘Family, Kinship, Community and Friendship Ties in Assisted Emigration from Cambridgeshire to Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1840–67’, unpublished La Trobe M.A. thesis, 1987.Google Scholar

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16. See, for example, ‘Building a New Britannia’ in Jupp, , Immigration.Google Scholar

17. Ibid. p. 14.

18. For emigration pathways established by other nationalities see Templeton, J., ‘The Swiss Connection: The Origins of the Valtellina-Australia Migrations’, Australian Historical Studies, 26, 104 (04 1995), 393–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20. The emigrants were ‘assisted’ to Australia through funds provided by the colony of Victoria and administered by the CLEC in England: Holt, , ‘Family, Kinship, Community’, p. 6.Google Scholar

21. Ibid. p. 55.

22. Although there were other landing points in Victoria, such as Port Fairy, Geelong and Portland, Melbourne is seen as the main destination for the purposes of this article.

23. Emigration from Melbourn to the USA, British North America, and the Cape was identified from Melbourn Vestry Minute Book 1835–51, Cambridgeshire Record Office, PI 17/8/5 and Royston Union Poor Law Guardians' Minute Books Jan. 1842-March 1858, Hertford County Record Office (HCRO), Hertford. Mormon emigration data were taken from Ellison, D. (ed.), To the Great Salt Lake from Litlington (Bassingbourn Village College, 1979), pp. 1–6.Google Scholar Thanks also to Margaret Murray for family history data.

24. Erickson, , Leaving England, p. 168.Google Scholar

25. Ibid, p. 100.

26. This was also the case for other organised emigrations. See, for instance, Hudson, P., ‘English Emigration to New Zealand, 1839–1850: An Analysis of the Work of the New Zealand Company’, unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 1997, pp. 264–70.Google Scholar

27. The data on female occupations in the ships' lists are sparse and have not therefore been included in the tables. There was relatively little specialised work that women undertook in Melbourn as there was no lace-making or straw-plaiting, though casual summer work in the fields and domestic service would be available.

28. Agricultural workers were also going to New Zealand in relatively large numbers during the 1840s. See Hudson, P., ‘From White Rose to Long White Cloud: Yorkshire Emigration to New Zealand, 1842’, Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 15 (1995), 39–41.Google Scholar

29. Erickson, , Leaving England, p. 198.Google Scholar

30. Mills, , ‘Quality of Life’, pp. 388–90;Google ScholarMills, , Lord and Peasant, pp. 70–1;Google ScholarMills, D.R., ‘The Nineteenth Century Peasantry of Melbourn, Cambridgeshire’, in Smith, R.M., (ed.), Land, Kinship and Lifecycle (Cambridge, 1985), passim, especially pp. 496–8.Google Scholar

31. Pigot and Company's Directory of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, etc. (London, 1839), pp. 66–7.Google Scholar

32. Mills, , ‘Quality of Life’, p. 389.Google Scholar

33. Mills, , Lord and Peasant, p. 70;Google ScholarMills, , ‘The Nineteenth Century Peasantry’, pp. 484–5.Google Scholar

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35. Erickson, , Leaving England, p. 189.Google Scholar

36. Ibid, p. 191; Macdonald, C., A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand (Wellington, 1990), pp. 19–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37. Bush, J., ‘“The right sort of woman”: Female Emigrators and Emigration to the British Empire, 1890–1910’, Women's History Review, 3, 3 (1994), 386–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar About 50% of emigrants from Yorkshire to New Zealand in 1842 were female: see Hudson, , ‘From White Rose’, p. 42.Google Scholar

38. Erickson, , ‘Emigration’ Part 1, p. 362.Google ScholarHudson, , ‘From White Rose’, p. 41.Google Scholar

39. Dalziel, R., ‘Emigration and Kinship: Migrants to New Plymouth 1840–1843’, New Zealand Journal of History, 25, 2 (1991), 128.Google Scholar

40. Mills, , ‘Residential Propinquity’, pp. 273–6.Google Scholar

41. Ex info. Mr Frank Calvin, Thornborough, Bucks.

42. British emigrants going to Australia have, more recently, been shown to be ‘well informed’ individuals who ‘shrewdly took advantage’ of assistance schemes: Haines, , ‘Indigent Misfits’, p. 246.Google Scholar

43. Ibid, p. 225.

44. See, for example, Hudson, , ‘English Emigration’, pp. 270–309;Google ScholarHedges, J., ‘The Colonisation Work of the Northern Pacific Railroad’, The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 13, 3 (1926), 311–42;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHvidt, K., ‘Danish Emigration prior to 1914: Trends and Problems, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 14 (1966), 176;CrossRefGoogle ScholarRunblom, H. and Norman, H. (eds.), From Sweden to America: A History of the Migration (Minneapolis, 1976), pp. 189–97.Google Scholar

45. Templeton, , ‘The Swiss Connection’, pp. 406–8.Google Scholar

46. The following paragraphs are based on Holt, ‘Family, Kinship, Community’, Chapter 3.

47. Despatch from Grey, Earl to Fitzroy, , 31st 01 1848Google Scholar, quoted in Holt, , ‘Family, Kinship, Community’, p. 61.Google Scholar

48. HCRO, Royston Union Poor Law Guardians' Minute Book 1842 (pages not numbered). Much of the evidence regarding Johnson's activities come from the Royston Union Guardians' Minute Books.

49. Hereafter known as the Cambridge Chronicle.

50. Cambridge Chronicle, 14th October 1848, p. 1.

51. Cambridge Chronicle, 11th March, 1850; Cambridge Chronicle, 14th September, 1850.

52. Return of Expenses, CLEC, 16th April 1849.

53. A short biography of William Ison in Hitch, D.E., A Mere Village: A History of Fowlmere Cambridgeshire, (self published from Clifton Without, Yorkshire, 1993), p. 230.Google Scholar

54. Hitch, , A Mere Village, pp. 229–34.Google Scholar

55. Erickson, , Leaving England, p. 130.Google Scholar

56. Hudson, , ‘From White Rose’, p. 42.Google Scholar

57. Baines, , Migration, p. 35.Google Scholar

58. Erickson, , Leaving England, p. 191.Google Scholar