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ОглавлениеThe Emigrant – Fuel for Trade and Empire
In the evidence on the convicts in New South Wales a number of the colonists commented that Scottish emigrants were much preferred as settlers to any other nationality. The Scottish labourers were preferred because they were ‘more skilful workmen, they are better agricultural servants, also better shepherds …’ and wherever skilled labour was needed employers preferred the Scottish emigrants. To help encourage Scottish emigration to New South Wales, Crown lands were being sold to pay for assisted passages and … three ships having recently sailed from the United Kingdom, with several more being expected from the Western Highlands. He said that in the main the Scots were found to be keen to emigrate as they hoped one day to establish themselves as landowners. Because of this willingness on the part of the Scots the emigration officers were able to select those they wanted and usually picked married couples as near 30 years old as possible.
From Transportation. Report from the Select Committee.
Minutes of evidence, 1837, vol XIX (Sessional no. 518)
EMIGRATION IN THE EARLY nineteenth century was the result of both force and persuasion. Until the 1850s emigrants from the Highlands were forced to leave the land because of evictions whereas in the Lowlands the decision to emigrate was driven largely by the desire to improve living standards. Whatever the reason, Scotland lost between 10 per cent and 47 per cent of the natural population increase every decade. Those leaving Scotland during the period 1921–30 exceeded the entire natural increase despite the United States placing quotas on emigrant numbers in 1922. The scale of the emigration was exceeded only by Ireland and Norway.
The introduction of the US quota system was a severe blow to many passenger shipping companies on the Atlantic. The Anchor Line was forced to close its Mediterranean transatlantic passenger route which was heavily dependent on emigrant traffic from Italy (see chapter 12). Two new ships, Caledonia and Transylvania, had to be redesigned as a consequence, with greatly reduced steerage accommodation. It also meant that Anchor Line was overstocked with passenger liners leading to its inevitable collapse in the 1930s.
Transylvania (1925), with one smoking funnel and dummies to fore and aft, was too late for the Anchor Line Mediterranean to New York emigrant service and was reconfigured to work from the UK.
Emigrant traffic, both to the United States and Canada, as well as to South Africa and the Antipodes, was the mainstay of many shipping companies – Henderson’s Albion Line, for example, was renowned for the carriage of migrants to New Zealand under the sponsorship of the Free Church of Scotland and enjoyed a near monopoly on the transit of passengers from the Clyde to Otago (see chapter 4). Only when the New Zealand government sponsored its own line of steamships did the Albion Line clippers get into financial difficulties, sail having become little match for steam by the 1890s.
The importance of the emigrant to the mother country cannot be overstated, the more so in the case of the skilled emigrants from Lowland Scotland who retained their links with Scottish business. The Scottish emigrant was a vital catalyst to the pre-eminence of Scotland as a maritime nation for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is important to appreciate how the expatriate Scottish communities fuelled Empire and trade and underpinned Scottish maritime endeavour. The global impact of these emigrants is apparent to this day. The largest Highland gathering in the world is now held in Singapore – caber tossing, the lot – and in many Nova Scotian communities the older folk recount how Gaelic was their first language and the language used in school. Today there are few towns and cities in the world which do not have some kind of Caledonian Society or Club, even if only to celebrate Robbie Burns once a year in the local hostelry.
The Scottish emigrant took more with him than just his name. He also took experience and skills: the skill of the Highlander to survive on near barren land in a wild climate, and the Lowlander took his industrial skills and business acumen. In addition, they took pride in their homeland and their personal contacts with Scotland, people they could do business with and people they could trust as their agents. The Scottish business network was, and to a certain extent still is, a club whose membership depended simply on provenance. Membership was a bond that ensured trust and fair play. No other nation of people achieved this bond, not the expatriate English who invariably merged into the background of their overseas destination, not the Norwegians or the Irish, who for the most part were unskilled, nor any other European emigrant expatriate.
Scottish emigration took place in two phases. The notorious Land Clearances preparatory to the introduction of the four-legged Highlander, the sheep, produced a massive outgoing of crofters and farmers seeking a new start in North America and Australia. The exodus was accelerated with the decline of the hand loom and the decimation of herring stocks, which conspired to bring abject poverty to both Lowlander and Highlander. The stories of hardship on the long voyages with families cramped in poor accommodation with inadequate nourishment and poor sanitation are legion. Indeed, that so many families survived the journey is remarkable and the statistic that on many voyages new arrivals could equal the number of deaths was surprising.
One example of the conditions is reported in Papers relative to emigration to the North American Colonies. Accounts and Papers, 1852, vol XXXIII, p71 (sessional no. 1474):
The return includes information in the form of letters on the emigration of 1,681 destitute Highlanders from South Uist, and a further 986 from Lewis. The emigration agent in Quebec reported that immigrants had arrived from South Uist in a very poor condition. They had been existing on the island by eating shellfish and seaweed collected from the rocks at low water before being sent to Canada; their passage had been paid by the proprietor, Colonel Gordon. Upon arriving at Quebec it was found that they had insufficient funds or food for travelling across Canada to their final destination. On the voyage from Scotland, the wife of the captain had spent her time organising the making of clothes for the emigrants. One man leaving the ship was found to have no other clothes than a woman’s petticoat. The Quebec Emigration Agent was very scathing concerning some of the proprietors for sending out tenants unable to fend for themselves, and at a time of the year when no employment existed for them.
The emigrants were packed in the ’tween decks, and life aboard the sailing ships could be tedious and uncomfortable. Deaths aboard ship were interspersed with new births, and life went on much as it could, despite the cramped conditions on board. More often than not a teacher was on hand to attend to the children’s education, and a surgeon attended to the passengers’ ills. A contemporary report by Captain J H Taylor of the Albion Line clipper Timaru described the emigrant’s lot:
The surgeon got £1 per head for every soul he landed. Many people in those days came to sea for their health, thinking that a long sea voyage would be beneficial. They generally gained strength in the tropics but after we got into the high southern latitudes the weather there was generally very cold and the sudden fall in temperature was often too much for weakened bodies having only gained temporary strength in the tropics and they soon passed away …
The first funeral aboard was always a very sad and serious event for the passengers, and generally tears were shed and everyone was present. As the time passed a similar event happened and fewer people were present, and when the third, fourth and fifth funerals took place it was noticed that many did not come and some did not even stop their games on deck to be present.
On the outward passage of the Timaru in 1877, south of Tasmania, there having been five deaths and four births, the surgeon naturally anxious to have his list of passengers back to the original number and he had evidence that a birth might take place before reaching our destination and, sure enough, three days before we arrived, at 1am the doctor called me up with great glee and said ‘No. 5 has arrived’ and the £1 per head was now secure.
The Albion Line’s Timaru (1874) was an iron-hulled full-rigged ship built by J E Scott at Greenock. (Oil painting by K A Griffin)
The Clearances peaked in the 1840s and early 1850s. Knox (see reference section) wrote:
The landlord’s course of action was based on the fact that the Highland economy had collapsed, while at the same time the population was still rising. As income from kelp production and black cattle dried up, the landlord saw sheep as a more profitable alternative. The introduction of sheep meant the removal of people. The crofting population was already relying on a potato diet and when the crop failed in the late 1830s and again in the late 1840s, emigration seemed the only alternative to mass starvation. The policy of the landlord was to clear the poorest Highlanders from the land and maintain those crofters who were capable of paying rent.
The Dukes of Argyll and Sutherland and other large landowners financed emigration schemes. Offers of funding were linked to eviction which left little choice to the crofter. However, the Emigration Act of 1851 made emigration more freely available to the poorest. The Highlands and Islands Emigration Society was set up to oversee the process of resettlement. Under the scheme a landlord could secure a passage to Australia for a nominee at the cost of £1. Between 1846 and 1857 around 16,533 people of the poorest types, comprising of mainly young men, were assisted to emigrate. The greatest loss occurred in the Islands, particularly Skye, Mull, the Long Island and the mainland parishes of the Inner Sound.
Subsequent to 1855 mass evictions ceased and emigration became a choice rather than a necessity. For the next forty years decline in the Highland population was less than in the rural Lowlands. The Highlands experienced a 9 per cent fall in population between 1851 and 1891 (Ireland in the same period faced a 28 per cent reduction). In addition the Crofters’ Holding Act of 1886 provided security of tenure and in due course new crofts were developed so that by 1950 over 2,700 new tenant crofts had been created.
But people still chose to leave the Highlands with the promise of a better, perhaps even an affluent life, in a new country. By the 1930s the population of the Highlands was little over half that of a hundred years before. Many moved south into the Lowlands of Scotland and England but a substantial proportion, preferring to stay in contact with the land, left for permanent migration to Canada where the attractions of Ontario and Nova Scotia were compelling; the majority of nineteenth century settlers in Nova Scotia were of Scottish extraction. In Nova Scotia in the first half of the nineteenth century, 59 per cent of UK settlers were Scots-born.
As for the emigrant from Lowland Scotland, Knox wrote:
Keeping in touch with the land was not a consideration for the urban emigrant from the Scottish Lowlands. The decision to emigrate in this part of Scotland was purely voluntary. Indeed, emigration was seen by trade unions and other voluntary groups as a practical solution to unemployment and economic depression. Lowlanders were moved to leave their birthplace by a combination of low wages, poor housing conditions and unemployment. The high points in emigration statistics corresponded with years of severe economic depression. These occurred in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the mid-1880s, and the period 1906–13 … In fact in the economic depression of the 1920s emigration exceeded the natural increase in population. This was brought to a halt in the 1930s as the world trade depression saw emigrants return home. Indeed, the numbers leaving Scotland in the 1930s were at their lowest for a century.
The rise in emigration from urban areas saw a shift in the pattern of overseas settlement and the social status of emigrants. In the early 19th century it was the poorer members of society who chose to migrate. From the Highlands it was the landless peasants; from the Lowlands it was the unemployed craftsmen and labourers and small farmers. The country of settlement tended to be Canada. In fact, in the period 1825–1835 over 70% of emigrants from Scotland settled there.
The picture changed considerably in the twentieth century when skilled workers became the mainstay of the emigrant population. In 1912 and 1913, 47 per cent of adult male emigrants from Scotland were described as skilled, compared with just 36 per cent of the migrants leaving England and Wales, and only 29 per cent of the Scottish emigrants were described as labourers. Emigration progressively attracted the urban population, and ability and skills largely determined the destination of the emigrant. Unskilled labourers tended to go for Canada and Australia, while South Africa and the United States attracted craftsmen and other skilled workers.
Knox concluded:
The outflow of people was made easier by the revolution in transport. The steamship did not dramatically alter the cost of passage from Scotland to the USA, but it did reduce greatly the travelling time. In the 1850s it took around six weeks to cross the Atlantic; in 1914 it took only a week. The reduction in travelling time allowed for temporary migration as well as permanent; something unthinkable in the days of sailing ships. Also if things did not work out in the New World then the price of a steamship ticket brought you back to your native land in a week. Emigration seemed less risky in the age of the steamship.
The movement of Scots continued well into the 20th century. In fact, until 1989–1990 there had been only one year (1932–1933) in which Scotland experienced a greater inflow than outflow of people. Taking the twentieth century as a whole, Scotland … experienced a net loss through emigration of around 2 million people. During the 1920s and 1930s the principal aim of the emigrants was to find work and wages and escape mass unemployment at home. Age-wise this has generally most affected the age group 16–29; in terms of occupation, skilled rather than unskilled workers; and in terms of sex, men rather than women. Although most of the emigrants were able to make a better life for themselves and their families abroad, the impact on Scotland has been less favourable. Many of the most productive and talented Scots have left their birthplace to enrich, both economically and culturally, other countries at the expense of their own.
Scotland’s loss, it seems, was the receiving countries’ gain, but it was this gain that was so crucial to the development of trade and wealth creation. Chapter 8 describes the entrepreneurial, investment and creativity of the expatriate Scot, many of whom became leading merchants and businessmen in Liverpool and London as well as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But it was by no means all bad news for Scotland. The emigrants sailed from their homeland in Scottish-owned ships promoting Scotland as an important focus of shipowning, and once established overseas, the expatriate migrant promoted agriculture and developed trade and merchanting that required a maritime network to export and deliver produce back to the UK. Of course, it was Scottish-owned and managed shipping companies that were preferred for this trade. The deep-sea fleet required servicing and maintaining whilst it was in foreign ports and it was often Scots’ enterprise and know-how that developed the engineering facilities to provide these services.
The Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company in February 1956 with British India Line’s Sangola (1947) under refit. (P&O)
One of the more remarkable examples of success in the engineering field is that of the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company which illustrates how the skills of the Clyde, Aberdeen and other Scottish ports were propagated around the world. John Lamont was an early European settler in Hong Kong who was to become one of the foremost entrepreneurs of the new colony. He was a skilled carpenter and shipbuilder who had left Tiree in search of better reward for his services overseas and arrived in Hong Kong in his mid-thirties. The Chinese ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain in 1842 following their defeat in the Opium Wars. Within a year Lamont had set up a repair yard and slipway at East Point under the sponsorship of Jardine Matheson & Company to service that company’s sailing barques (see chapter 4). Lamont often had a queue of ships awaiting attention, but still managed to build small vessels, including the first foreign ship to be constructed in Hong Kong, the 80-ton schooner Celeste, which he completed as early as February 1843. Ten years later, in 1853, John Lamont built Hong Kong’s first steamship, the wooden-hulled Queen, which had been ordered by local businessman, and fellow Scot, Douglas Lapraik.
In 1859 John Lamont built Hong Kong’s first dry dock, the Lamont Dock, at his yard in Aberdeen (a district on the south side of the colony, named after the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the Earl of Aberdeen).
John Lamont placed the following advertisement for his dry dock in a local newspaper in April 1861:
It is 335 feet long with a breadth inside the coping stone of 78 feet and a depth of 22 feet. At spring tides the depth of water at the sill of the dock is 18 to 18½ feet and at neap tides from 15 to 16 feet. Attached to the dock are engineering workshops with lathes of all sizes, planing, punching and shearing machines of the best description, a large foundry, saw mills with both vertical and circular saws, a powerful steam hammer, and every requisite and appliance for the repair of vessels both of wood and iron – the whole under the superintendence of European foremen. For particulars regarding docking and other charges, apply at East Point or at Aberdeen.
Lamont was also an innovator, and proposed lining dry docks with rubber, then a new product.
Encouraged by the success of Lamont Dock, he went into partnership with Douglas Lapraik, to construct a larger dock. The British government gave them a grant of £3,000, as there was then no facility in the region that could accommodate the larger British warships of the day. Lamont added yet another dry dock to his enterprise, the Hope Dock, but all this expansion was attracting the attention of the big boys, and in 1865 a consortium formed by P&O, Jardine Matheson and Douglas Lapraik purchased Lamont’s interests to create the Hong Kong, Canton & Whampoa Dock Company.
The Nautical Magazine and Journal of the Royal Naval Reserve, 36, 1867, reported:
On the 15 June, the new dock at Aberdeen belonging to the Hong Kong, Canton, and Whampoa Dock Company, was opened in the presence of the Governor and a large party of invited guests. The dock is, of course, constructed with the intention of accommodating either the ironclad Warrior or Black Prince (for draught of water), or the Pacific Mail Company’s steamer the Great Republic (for breadth of beam) … Under these circumstances, it would not be surprising if Her Majesty’s huge ironclads be sent out to the China station, for the existence of this magnificent dock now opened in Aberdeen Bay, Hong Kong, removes what would otherwise be an insuperable objection to their presence – namely, the impossibility of dock repair in the event of an accident.
A contemporary report, quoted in the Tiree journal Sìl Eòlais, 24, November 2011, described John Lamont:
Slim and bronzed, with humorous grey eyes, Lamont always wore at least one item of Scottish tartan, and spoke such broad Scot that no one understood him when he first arrived. He, like Douglas Lapraik, had settled in Hong Kong with a Chinese ‘Protected Woman’. He was also one of those rare men who were able to move in any society and seemed equally at home whoever he happened to be with … One must admire such a man who could overcome all obstacles, get on with everybody and create for himself a happy home life with his two young boys and their Chinese mother.
Tiree Gaelic would have been Lamont’s first language and he probably learnt most of his English at sea. He was proud of his Scottish identity, and despite the Dress Act which prohibited the personal wearing of tartan from 1746, Lamont sent out a strong message of its nonsense before it was repealed in 1782. Europeans were strongly discouraged from marrying local girls, but Lamont settled down with Awa Moy, and had two sons, Charles in 1847, and Archibald in 1851. The boys were both baptised in 1852 and were sent to a small private school in Peebles and later to Eton. They both settled in Scotland.
John Lamont also returned on a visit to Scotland, and died in Aberdeen in August 1866 at the age of sixty-two. He had certainly done well in his adopted country. He left £1,000 (the equivalent today of £80,000) to his eight Tiree nephews and nieces, and an allowance of £400 a year (the equivalent today of £30,000) to his sons until they reached the age of thirty, when they received their full inheritance. Matheson was his executor.
The Hong Kong and Whampoa Docks were heavily bombed by the Japanese before their invasion of Hong Kong in 1941, but remained operational. The assets of the yard were transferred to the Tsing Yi site of the Hong Kong United Dockyards in the 1970s. In 1985 the area was redeveloped and Lamont’s docks now lie beneath the second largest private housing estate in Hong Kong.
The story of John Lamont was repeated around the globe. Scottish enterprise was able to support regional development and enhance the fortunes of Empire. Whether Empire encouraged emigration or emigration encouraged Empire is a question that is hard to answer. That the Scottish migrant had a specific and important role in Empire is indisputable. Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke, writing in 1888, remarked that: ‘In British settlements, from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen’.
Even in the nineteenth century expatriate Scots who had settled in North America dominated the tobacco trade in the south and fur-trapping in the north. In Canada, Scot Lord Mount Stephen was the driving force behind the creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and soon one-third of the country’s business elite were of Scottish origin. India also became a hugely important trading partner. Most of its railway engines were built at Springburn, while Dundee became the centre of jute manufacture in the world.
Education and religion were other areas of cultural life where the Scottish influence was overwhelming. Religious motives were important also; the Otago settlement in South Island New Zealand and the Waipu settlement in the North Island were populated by Scottish emigrants sponsored by the church. Dunedin (Gaelic for Edinburgh) had its own university by 1869. In Waipu, Gaelic was the first language until the 1880s and was still widely used in the 1920s.
The post-World War II Scottish emigrant ships were Captain Cook, extroopship Empire Brent and formerly the Donaldson liner Letitia, Captain Hobson, formerly the Henderson liner Amarapoora and the Anchor Line steamer Cameronia. Amarapoora had served on behalf of the International Refugee Organisation until she was taken in hand by Alex Stephen & Sons yard for conversion for the emigrant run in time for her first voyage to Wellington in May 1952 as Captain Hobson. This voyage returned the Henderson company back to its original business, that started by the Albion Line to New Zealand almost a century previously.
The three emigrant ships were operated by the Ministry of Transport to satisfy the demand for assisted passages to the Dominions. Captain Cook, still under Donaldson management and Captain Hobson, under Henderson management and named after the first Governor of New Zealand, served emigrants travelling to New Zealand, while Cameronia, still under Anchor Line ownership, served the Australian emigrant. R S McLellan described her refit:
Captain Cook (1925), ex-Empire Brent, ex-Letitia.
The writing room aboard the New Zealand Government’s emigrant ship Captain Cook. A postcard posted aboard ship in 1954 with a message which began ‘Just a line of a reminder to let you know I have not forgotten you. There were pictures, dances, games of all sorts …’
The main lounge aboard Captain Cook reflecting her more glorious past on the North Atlantic.
The after dining room, not quite so glorious.
All the troop-carrying quarters and most of the original passenger accommodation had been dismantled and new accommodation built for the carrying of emigrants. Rooms with two, four and six berths, and hot and cold running water, had been built; the original six public rooms on the promenade deck had been retained, and one of the other public rooms had been fitted out as a nursery. The main engines had been completely overhauled and the boilers and most of the auxiliaries renewed. She sailed from Glasgow on 1 November [1948] with 1,276 emigrants bound for Fremantle, Melbourne and Sydney.
Cameronia was sold to the Ministry of Transport in January 1953 to become the troopship Empire Clyde, retaining an Anchor Line crew and Anchor Line management but operated by the Sea Transport Service out of Glasgow. Captain Hobson sailed under berth arrangements with Shaw Savill & Albion and was transferred to the New Zealand government in 1951, complete with her Henderson Line crew. She completed her final voyage to Wellington in May 1958 and was later sold for demolition. Empire Clyde was withdrawn and scrapped in 1957. In 1960 the government-sponsored service ceased and the last of the Scottish emigrant ships, Captain Cook, was laid up and withdrawn. Thereafter, the Italian-owned Sitmar Line offered cheap fares for emigrating families until the late 1960s, after which the emigrant service was operated by air. It is ironic that an Italian-owned company should provide a sea service for British emigrants, much as the Anchor Line had done earlier for Italian emigrants.
Empire Clyde (1921), formerly the Anchor Line’s Cameronia, served on the post-World War II assisted passage to Australia for the Ministry of Transport
