Abstract
A precise definition of the official policy, following the re-introduction of large-scale assistance in 1847, is epitomized in CLEC Secretary Stephen Walcott’s response to a memorial from the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses of Dublin to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland requesting that Irish assisted emigrants be allowed to embark for their colonial destinations directly from Irish ports, rather than from Plymouth. The memorialists were concerned that the Plymouth-bound emigrants were ‘in many instances obliged to make journies at great expence and serious inconvenience from the most distant parts of Ireland to the place of embarkation’. In the opinion of the Corporation, embarkation at the ports of Dublin, Cork, Galway, Londonderry, or Belfast ‘would be a great means of accommodation and succour to these persons’ and it accordingly humbly prayed that the Lord Lieutenant ‘kindly and humanely [use his] high influence in the proper quarter with the view of removing some of the great and harrassing difficulties placed in the way of these poor people by the existing arrangements’.1
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Notes
Marjory Harper, Emigration from North-East Scotland, vol 1 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988) pp. 125, 138, passim.
Wood and Rogers to Merivale, 19 August 1848, encl. in No. 5, Grey to Fitzroy, 30 August 1848, ‘Papers Relative to Emigration’, BPP 1849 (593) Vol. XXXVIII, p. 74. This comment may have misled T.A. Coghlan, who concluded that the Colonization Society was a recruiting arm of the CLEC, and that all ‘assisted’ emigrants (as opposed to ‘free’ candidates) ‘were sent to Australia under the auspices of this Society’. See Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia (4 vols, London, 1916) Vol. II, p. 365.
CLEC to T. Elliot (Permanent Under-Secretary of State) 10 October 1849, Enc. in No. 10, Grey to Fitzroy, 26 October 1849, ‘Papers Relative to Emigration’, BPP 1850 [1163] Vol. XL, p. 127.
Ibid. See also Speech of the Hon. Francis Scott, MP (London, 1848), p. 10: ‘Prussia took but 6d., Russia, 8d.; France ls 6d.; and the United States, 5s 8d. per head of the population for our manufactures. Canada took £1.15s.; the West Indies £2.17.6; the Cape £3.2s; and the Australian colonies £7.14.3d’. This argument is reiterated in all of Scott’s and Kingston’s lectures, speeches, articles and pamphlets, and is based on Charles Buller’s speech to the House on 6 April 1843 which was published as a pamphlet On Systematic Colonization and later included in E.G. Wakefield’s A View of the Art of Colonization (London, 1849).
W.T. Haly, Sen. to Elliot, 1 April 1848, Enc. in No. 5, CLEC to Elliot, 4 April 1848, Ibid, p. 99. J.B. and W.T. Standish Haly were involved in the Committee, the latter was Secretary. See also Kenneth W.A. Bray, ’Government-Sponsored Immigration into South Australia, 1872–86’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Adelaide, 1972) p. 113.
E.W. Bonham to Viscount Palmerston, 21 March 1848, in Elliot to CLEC, 25 March 1848, ‘Papers Relative to Emigration’, BPP 1847–48 [986] Vol. XLVII, pp. 96–7.
J.F. Leslie Foster, an erstwhile member of the NSW Legislative Council, was a committee member on Caroline Chisholm’s Family Colonization Loan Society, The Highland and Island Emigration Society, and a number of societies promoting the emigration of women. He was author of an emigrant guide distributed by the prominent publisher of emigrant material, Trelawney Saunders, for 1 shilling, entitled The New Colony of Victoria, or Port Phillip, together with some account of the other Australian Colonies (London, c.1851).
See Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, Vol. II, pp. 593–95. John McDonald and Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Passenger fares on sailing vessels to Australia in the nineteenth century’, Explorations in Economic History, 28 (1991) p. 196.
See Howard L. Malchow, Population Pressures: Emigration and Government in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Palo Alto: Sposs, 1979);
G.F. Plant, Oversea Settlement: Migration from the United Kingdom to the Dominions (London: Oxford University Press, 1951) for an investigation of emigration promotion based on imperial themes. Marjory Harper canvases the role of philanthropic societies in fostering empire migration from Scotland in Emigration from North-East Scotland, volume two.
Chapters 5 and 6 of A. James Hammerton’s Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration (London: Croom Helm, 1979) deal with the work of Maria Rye and others interested in distressed gentlewomen, and the re-emergence of emigration propaganda.
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© 1997 Robin F. Haines
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Haines, R.F. (1997). Experiments in Charitable Cooperation. In: Emigration and the Labouring Poor. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25704-1_8
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