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Trade Unions and Emigration in Late Victorian England: A National Lobby for State Aid
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2014
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That the state might owe its poor and unemployed a helping hand to emigrate to wherever there were jobs found common enough expression in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1820s and 1830s there were the conflicting schemes of Wilmot-Horton and E. G. Wakefield. Carlyle advocated in 1843 a state emigration service to provide a bridge to the colonies, and Irish troubles periodically provided a source of speculation about the usefulness of state emigration as a solution to agricultural distress. For Tories it could be a conservative measure to diminish at a stroke economic distress and the social disruption it bred, while some Liberals viewed it as a necessary rationalization of the labor market and supported it in the same spirit, and with the same arguments, as the Cheap Trains Act. Organized labor itself had had recourse on occasion to the emigration of members both as a restrictive guild practice and a militant trade dispute tactic.
The extent to which trade unions continued to favor emigration benefits after mid-century has been a subject of some dispute. There is also the question of trade union attitudes toward schemes of state emigration — distrusted by many in the early Victorian period as transportation of the poor. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate a strong continued interest in an emigration solution by many trade unions well into the 1880s, and that after mid-century much of organized labor turned from emphasis on emigration benefits provided by the union to acceptance of and agitation for a state program of emigration assistance funded by the national exchequer.
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- Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1976
References
1. For Wilmot-Horton see Johnston, H. J. M., British Emigration Policy, 1815-1830 (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar; for Wakefield, see Mills, R. C., The Colonization of Australia (1829-1842): The Wakefield Experiment in Empire Building (London, 1915)Google Scholar. Radical attitudes toward colonies in general are treated in Winch, Donald, Political Economy and the Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar. Carlyle, Thomas, Past and Present (1st ed., 1843; London, 1909), pp. 273–74Google Scholar.
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14. Reginald Brabazon, later (1887) 12th Earl of Meath, was heir to an Irish earldom who used his fortune to advance a number of social reforms of the kind associated with the Earl of Shaftesbury.
15. Beginning in 1873, with the Hospital Saturday Fund. This work involved him for the first time in contact with working men and public speaking from platforms. He was sensitive to the difficulties such movements faced in attracting “real working men” and their leaders rather than the extremists and cranks who presented themselves at meetings, and attempted to solve this problem by widely publicized meetings and “a genuine election” of working class committeemen. Earl of Meath, Memories of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1923), pp. 204–5Google Scholar.
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17. Among the labor leaders who supported the emigration resolutions at the Workmen's Conference on October 13, 1883, were Thomas Ashton of the Oldham Cotton Spinners, Allen Gee of the Huddersfield Weavers' and Spinners' Association, James Mawdsley of the Manchester Cotton Spinners, J. Ambler of the Hull Trades Council, W. Beech of the Oldham Trades Council, W. A. Coote of the London Compositors, Dyke of the Cab-Drivers' Cooperative, J. Judge of the Leeds Trade Council and the Leeds Boot and Shoe Rivetters, J. C. Laird of the Newcastle Trades Council, Luke of the London Paper Stainers, Edward Memmott of the Sheffield Trades Council, Noon of the London Trades Council and the Ladies' Bootmakers, W. H. Patterson of the Durham Miners, John Potter of the Maid-stone Trades Council, W. H. Rowland of the London Cab-Drivers Association, T. Smith of the London Trades Council and the Cab Drivers, and Edward Woods of the Ironworkers' Friendly Society. Times, Nov. 15, 1883.
18. See, for example, the scheme presented to the Colonial Office in February of 1886. P.P. 1886 (C. 4751).
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21. Until the early 1870s the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners (the commission was terminated in 1878) published a yearly informational handbook, but it was too expensive to have been widely used.
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34. Ibid., 12. The Ironfounders spent £4,712 in emigration benefits from 1877 to 1889, more than any other of the emigrating unions mentioned by Burnett in his testimony. P.P. 1889, Report of the Colonization Committee, 92.
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36. The State-Directed Colonization Series, II, 121. The Glasgow shipwrights did not join the Association, but did signify their approval of its goals, as did the trades councils of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
37. Ibid., 124.
38. The National Association of Nut and Bolt Makers (Darlton, Cumberland), the Operative Plumbers' Association (Liverpool), and the Steam Engine Makers' Society (Manchester), though not Association members, sent their approval of the goals of the movement to the colonization conference in 1886.
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40. The Colliery Enginemen's Association (Durham) sent approval to the 1886 conference, but did not join.
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44. The Journeymen Brassfounders Association signified their approval in 1886.
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46. Coote was an unsuccessful candidate (Lib-Lab) for North Camberwell in 1883. He later helped organize the Municipal Employees Union. By the mid 1880s he was becoming increasingly pre-occupied with the largely middle class movement for the suppression of prostitution and the white slave traffic, and was secretary of the National Vigilance Committee.
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