Abstract

This article draws on an unusually rich archive to explore the motives and mentality of poor English emigrants in the early nineteenth century. In 1819, the Colonial Department advertised a subsidized emigration scheme to South Africa; 2000 people wrote letters of application preserved in the National Archives. In studying the emigrant poor, historians have been primarily dependent on numerical data derived from passenger lists. The letters of application of 1819 allow more nuanced conclusions about the circumstances and the aspirations of the poor emigrant at a time of severe economic distress. The correspondence shows which trades were particularly drawn to emigration, particularly the framework knitters and the weavers who had lost not only their regular income but their trades. The letters also shed light on the gender tensions which lay beneath the surface of what was promoted as family migration. Most telling of all, the letters show that among the poor there was more to the decision to emigrate than fatalism and passivity. Poor emigrants expected to have to work for their living, but with the reward of greater security, enhanced prosperity, and – in the case of the male majority – the achievement of ‘independence’.

Keywords: Emigration, poverty, unemployment, gender

From the ‘cape of despair’ to the Cape of Good Hope: letters of the emigrant poor in early nineteenth-century England

In October 1819 the Duke of Newcastle’s representative received a letter from Henry Holland, a 22-year-old Nottingham stone mason writing on behalf of a group of his fellow workers. They wished to apply for places on a recently announced government-assisted emigration to South Africa, ‘we being disposed to proceed as colonists to the Cape of Good Hope, having nothing in view but the Cape of Despair in this our Native Land’.11 Nottinghamshire County Record Office (hereafter NCRO), QACP 5/1/4/14, Holland to Godfrey, 18 Oct. 1819.View all notes The hopes vested in the Cape of God Hope proved a chimera: within three years the condition of the settlers there was so dire that a relief fund was set up for them in England. Yet in the chilly economic climate of the post-war years the despair that Holland voiced was all too prevalent.

The Cape scheme of 1819 has been extensively studied, both as the largest of six ventures in state aided emigration during the administration of Lord Liverpool, and as the foundation of the English-speaking community in South Africa.22 Isobel E. Edwards, The 1820 Settlers in South Africa. A study in British colonial policy (London, 1934); H.J.M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1972); M.D. Nash, Bailie’s Party of 1820 Settlers (Cape Town, 1982).View all notes However, it merits close attention for a reason of greater relevance to the social historian. All too often in the history of English emigration, the departing emigrant is reduced to a statistical abstraction without a voice. The chances of reclaiming that voice are greatest in the case of propertied emigrants who had ready access to ministers and to the print media. The emigrant poor are much more elusive. If they wrote anything bearing on the decision to leave, its prospects of survival were slight. The Cape scheme is remarkable for the scale of its archival residue. Henry Holland was one of nearly 1500 individuals who expressed an interest in emigrating to the Cape. In all the government received approximately 2000 letters from prospective emigrants.33 The National Archives,

London (hereafter TNA), CO 48/41–46. The whole series has also been placed online by the South African Genealogical Society: www.EGSSA/org/1820-SettlersView all notes They came from all classes, because the 1819 scheme aimed to attract a microcosm of English society. Although the material circumstances of applicants are not always evident, between one third and one half of them can be categorized as poor. Most obviously they included workhouse inmates and other people receiving relief from the parish, but their number extended far beyond the ranks of the pauper. A realistic definition of poverty must extend to all the unemployed, including skilled men who had enjoyed sufficient income for their needs until they were brought low by the recession. Also included are those who were described as ‘labourers’ or ‘husbandmen’ – men who might still be in work, but on meagre and usually unreliable wages – who were the core of the ‘labouring poor’.44 Given the disparate nature of the poor, it is not surprising that no one has been able to offer a convincing numerical estimate of the numbers who emigrated from England between 1815 and 1850.View all notes The applications of the emigrant poor in 1819 comprise a cross section of the English poor, in terms of occupation and region. Where they appear to be wholly inadequate is in terms of gender. The 1819 scheme was planned as an emigration of families and it largely fulfilled that intention, thus conforming to the pattern of family migration which has been identified as the dominant one in the early nineteenth century.55 Dudley Baines, Emigration from Europe 1815–1930 (Basingstoke, 1991), 39–44.View all notes Yet although women comprised 36% of adult emigrants they have only a marginal presence in the record. In this article I give particular attention to the inferences that can be drawn from this documentary imbalance.

The changing image of emigrationDuring the period 1815 to 1850 approximately half a million English people emigrated to the USA or the colonies.66 Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge, 1985), 58.View all notes Notwithstanding the much greater flow of emigrants in the second half of the century, historians rightly recognize the pre-1850 incidence as a telling indicator of a society experiencing major economic adjustments. The outflow was of course not confined to the poor. The majority of emigrants were bound for the USA, and most of them were in a position to fund their passage. Government emigration schemes subsidized emigrants, but the numbers of poor were limited by the official reluctance to overburden the receiving countries with paupers. All the same, the poor emigrated in significant numbers. Yet the footprint of the poor emigrants is faint. In so far as they feature in the historiography they are the passive targets of other people’s initiatives and are categorized accordingly – selected by the Poor Law authorities, charitable bodies, or colonial governments on a recruitment spree. The agency of the emigrant poor has tended to go by default.

James Belich has advanced a more positive interpretation. He observes that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the associations of the ‘emigrant’ were almost entirely negative: commentators dismissed him as indigent, feckless and gullible. By mid-century increasing use of the term ‘settler’ gave a more wholesome impression: of a quest for self-improvement and a purposeful contribution to a new society overseas. For Belich this transition was crucial to the emergence of a global Anglo-world of English-speakers, which drew together Britain, the empire and the USA.77 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth. The settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, 2009).View all notes However, instead of positing a gradual process, in which the later colonization schemes of Edward Gibbon Wakefield played a crucial part, he dates the transition precisely to the years 1815 to 1818. According to Belich this was when ‘settlerism .… converted emigration within the Anglo-

world from an act of despair that lowered your standing to an act of hope that enhanced it’.88 ibid., 164.View all notes

Belich’s analysis has raised the profile of emigration history, but he has not transcended the limitations of the genre. He recognizes that his thesis depends on fathoming ‘the inside of people’s heads’, but the people he investigates are the opinion-makers of press and Parliament, not the emigrants themselves. The surge of publications on emigration during these years certainly presented emigration in a newly positive light, and this partly explains the public support for a number of assisted emigration schemes. Yet it is far from clear whether a favourable press was matched by a more sanguine attitude on the part of emigrants themselves. At one extreme emigration was an unmitigated confession of abject failure; at the other extreme it was embraced as a means of enhancing income and social status. It is not easy to determine where any particular emigration should be placed on this continuum.

Emigrants and immigrantsThe best documented aspect of the emigrant experience is their arrival overseas and their reactions to the country of settlement. It is not surprising that letters home survive in considerable numbers: they were treasured as the sole remaining evidence of the family’s far flung members. Since Charlotte Erickson’s pioneer work in the 1970s, several substantial studies of emigrant letters have been published.99 Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Emigrants. The adaptation of English and Scottish immigrants in nineteenth-century America (Ithaca, 1972); David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives. The personal correspondence of British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century (New York, 2006); David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation. Personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia (Ithaca, 1994); Wendy Cameron et al. (eds), English Immigrant Voices. Labourers’ letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s (Montreal, 2000).View all notes ‘Substantial’ is an understatement: as David Gerber has remarked, such letters ‘are probably the largest single body of the writings of ordinary people to which historians have access’.1010 Gerber, op. cit., 5.View all notes This material is often referred to as emigrant letters, but the label makes for confusion. In every case these are the letters of immigrants, written home after the voyage. For that reason they have been mostly studied by scholars hailing from the USA and former colonies whose interest is in the contribution of the newcomers to their countries of destination.

Compared with the plentiful surviving immigrant letters, emigrant letters are very thin on the ground. There is no equivalent body of family letters written at the time of the emigration, least of all in the case of the emigrant poor. It seems likely that most of the pre-voyage deliberation was conducted face-to-face. If letters were written to more distant kin and friends, the poor were least likely to have the means to preserve them. However, family letters are not the only available resource.1111 There are also a small number of settler reminiscences which touch on the circumstances of their departure from England. For a noted instance, see John Tosh, ‘Jeremiah Goldswain’s farewell: family and fortune in early nineteenth-century English emigration’, History Workshop Journal, LXXVII (2014), 26–44.View all notes The fullest documentation of emigrants was a by-product of the public funding of emigrants by governments and charitable organizations. Due process required the recording of names and minimal personal details of emigrants, and these have featured in the compilation of emigration statistics. From the perspective of the social historian the crucial issue is whether the surviving documentation goes beyond this spare record. Passenger lists must in many cases have been preceded by letters of application, but few of these have survived. Writing of Australia, Eric Richards says that virtually all the applications for

subsidized passages have been destroyed.1212 Eric Richards, ‘The limits of the Australian emigrant letter’, in Bruce S. Elliott et al. (eds), Letters across Borders. The epistolary practices of international migrants (Basingstoke, 2006), 62.View all notes It is this meagre residue which makes the Cape emigration in 1819 so significant in documenting the emigrant poor. Because the scheme was offered at a time of acute economic distress, it attracted many expressions of interest; and because it was directly administered by the Colonial Department, all correspondence was methodically filed away. Applications from individual emigrants survive in large numbers, and at precisely the time when according to Belich a major shift in attitudes to emigration was taking place.

The emigrant applicationsThe Cause of my address is this. I, John Smith, Frame Knitter, am at this time totally without employment and have been so a length of time not through any misconduct of mine nor any other cause but the Great Damp in trade.1313 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/20, Smith to Godfrey, 19 Oct. 1819.View all notes

The 1819 letters from poor applicants are a repetitive litany of despair, a desperate reaction to unemployment, under-employment, or irregular employment. Collapsing demand, and in some cases the obsolescence of whole trades, was taking its toll on workers’ livelihoods. Shopkeepers lamented the ‘deadness of trade’. George Watson, a London joiner, stated that it was quite impossible for him to subsist on ‘the few Weeks and Days that I work through the year’.1414 TNA, CO 48/46/250, Watson to Goulburn, 22 July 1819.View all notes Richard White, a London rope maker, declared that to be denied productive use of his own hands was ‘one of the bitterest visitations of Providence’.1515 TNA, CO 48/46/389, White to Adams, 23 Aug. 1819.View all notes In a joint application John Ready and Bernard Musmay wrote, ‘this is to let you know that we’re out of all manner of employ. And as we’re Single young men we should be very glad to go over to the cape of good hope.’1616 TNA, CO 48/45/507, Ready and Musmay to Goulburn, no date.View all notes Informing many of these applications was fear of going on the parish. Some applicants predicted that, if their application was refused, their next resort would be ‘the prospect of absolute poverty’.1717 TNA, CO/48/41/120, Anderson to Bathurst, 27 Sept. 1819. See also NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/84, Mee to Godfrey, 4 Nov. 1819.View all notes

The letters were addressed to the Secretary of State, Earl Bathurst, in the expectation that he or his Under-Secretary Henry Goulburn would read them. For most writers this would have been the first time they had addressed distant authority. One convention for making requests of this kind was to draw up a petition. In 1819 a number of the better off emigrants did so, but the poor were ill-quipped to write in this way. However many of them knew enough of epistolary convention to employ a respectful or deferential manner. Richard Carr, no longer able to find work even as a day labourer, concluded his letter to Bathurst, ‘I therefore trust to your Lordship’s known humanity to save a perishing but loyal family from destruction’.1818 TNA, CO 48/42/347, Carr to Bathurst, 27 Sept. 1819.View all notes The dignity of the recipient weighed with less accomplished letter-writers too. John Andress from Mile End described himself as a young man without employment or parental support: ‘i have scarce the Nescerarys [sic] of this Life and i am almost Reduced to extremity’; he concluded his letter ‘with very Great Respect’.1919 TNA, CO 48/41/29, Andress to Bathurst, 23 July 1819.View all notes Few applicants chanced their arm with something more direct, as Thomas Broome did: ‘Don’t treat this as a commonplace note but give me an answer. My Lord, reflect I am a poor penshionar [sic] and you can serve me say will you or will you not.’2020 TNA, CO 48/41/259,

Broome to Bathurst, 28 July 1819.View all notes Most writers knew it was wiser to flatter the august recipient.

Given the extent of illiteracy, it is likely that many applicants relied on others to compose their application. Roger Schofield estimated a male illiteracy rate of 35 to 40% at this time, based on inability to sign the marriage register.2121 R.S. Schofield, ‘Dimensions of illiteracy, 1750–1850’, Explorations in Economic History, X (1972), 445–6.View all notes However, the relevant criterion here is the more demanding one of being able to write a letter. In his study of letters of the Essex poor, Thomas Sokoll places the literacy rate of labourers at about one third, making of letter-writing a minority accomplishment.2222 Thomas Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty: the record of Essex pauper letters’, in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty (Basingstoke, 1997), 134.View all notes In the case of illiterate applicants the 1819 letters give no indication of who wielded the pen, but the more colloquial or loosely composed letters were probably dictated while other applicants would have requested a better-educated neighbour to compose their application.

The vast majority of applicants assumed (correctly) that the authorities were not interested in a supporting life story. Most of them emphasize their current unemployment or under-employment, but they do not provide a history of their working lives, beyond stating how long they had been in need. Specific skills are mentioned, especially experience of farming, which was the projected occupation of most of the emigrants. Many applicants claimed to ‘have been brought up to husbandry from their infancy’.2323 TNA, CO/48/42/241, Clarke to Goulburn, 23 Aug. 1819.View all notes

Addressing a remote government official commonly resulted in a spare and expressionless statement of need, but some writers conveyed something of their emotional state, especially as it affected family dependents. A London leather dresser wrote, ‘Who can describe the agonised and desperate feelings that take possession of a man on hearing his children cry for food, and can procure none for them’.2424 TNA, CO 48/43/291, Garner to Goulburn, 26 June 1819.View all notes John Stubbins of Nottingham declared that his motive was ‘an absolute and impervious call upon my feelings for my numerous family .… feeling as a father I wish to do all in my power for their comfort’.2525 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/1, Stubbins to Newcastle, 30 Aug. 1819.View all notes When reading these poignant statements of domestic distress it is hard not to share the reaction of the Eastern Cape historian Winifred Maxwell. After reading the whole series she was profoundly moved by ‘the spectacle revealed in the letters of frustrated strength and energy fretting to avert distress and destitution’; her intensely emotional response may explain why Maxwell never wrote the study of the emigration for which she was uniquely qualified.2626 Winifred Maxwell, Reconsiderations (Grahamstown, 1970), 6.View all notes

The documentary contextThe distinctive features of the 1819 applications can best be conveyed by placing them alongside two contemporary categories of correspondence: letters home from emigrants overseas and letters addressed to the Poor Law authorities. In the first place it is important to make a sharp distinction between emigrant letters and immigrant letters because they were very different in purpose and tone. Immigrant letters like those presented by Erickson and Fitzpatrick were conversations between family members. They can be read as firsthand information about the country of settlement (hence their prominence in colonial historiography). Yet their real purpose was to maintain personal relationships with those who

were now separated by many months’ voyage.2727 This is especially emphasized in Fitzpatrick, op. cit., which unusually includes fourteen sequences of letters in both directions.View all notes One of the most frequent requests by settlers was for more letters and more information about their kin. News from home was appreciated as an ‘ocean of consolation’, in the poignant phrase of a poor Irish emigrant to New South Wales in 1855.2828 ibid., 19–20.View all notes Settlers responded to news about their family members with expressions of concern, relief or disapproval. The descriptions of life overseas which they offered in return were often distorted by the longing to have other members of the family join them overseas.2929 William Pike, an emigrant to the Cape in 1819, assured his family that they would find ‘plenty of land for nothing’, as well as a good dinner and a bed to lie on: Albany Museum, Grahamstown, MS SM 2600, Pike to parents, 10 Nov. 1820.View all notes However, the enduring emotional bond with home did not lead immigrant writers to reflect on their own decision to emigrate. It was an almost universal feature of emigration in the early nineteenth century that emigrants drew a veil over the circumstances of their departure, either because they were too painful, or because they undermined a necessary focus on building a new life overseas. In fact that mind-set was evident even before the emigrants arrived: shipboard diaries were characterized by a focus on aspirations for the future rather than regret about the past.3030 Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia. Shipboard diaries by nineteenth-century British emigrants (Manchester, 1994).View all notes

In a sense immigrant and emigrant letters can be regarded as two sides of the same coin, but more can be gained from a comparison with the main body of letters composed by the English poor. During the past twenty years new light has been shed on their epistolary culture by the editing and publication of the letters they wrote to the parish authorities. Many claimants of poor relief lived at a distance from the parish in which they had ‘settlement’ (i.e. where they were eligible on grounds of residence). They had to make a written application to the overseers of the parish from which they sought relief.3131 Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty’, op. cit.; Thomas Sokoll, ‘Writing for relief’, in Andreas Gestrich, Steven King, and Lutz Raphael (eds), Being Poor in Modern Europe. Historical perspectives 1800–1940 (Oxford, 2006), 91–109.View all notes Applicants to the 1819 emigration scheme who were in receipt of poor relief were drawn from a similar background. Indeed they may well have applied for settlement, but their approach was different. Partly this was a matter of presentation: applicants to the Colonial Department were treading new ground without benefit of established conventions, whereas applicants for settlement were in a position to know how the overseers of the poor should be addressed. Applicants for settlement could best support their case by telling the story of their successive places of work, sometimes at considerable length: Carolyn Steedman calls them ‘enforced autobiographies’.3232 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester, 2001), 55.View all notes The emigrant letters, on the other hand, lack narrative depth. The Poor Law authorities were much more approachable than government ministers; it was therefore possible to adopt a more intimate tone which ‘might almost be mistaken for private correspondence’.3333 Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty’, op cit., 131.View all notes In view of the right to relief upheld by common law, applicants for settlement often conveyed a sense of entitlement. Potential emigrants on the other hand were all too aware that their chances were entirely at the discretion of distant authority.

Like the applications for poor relief, the letters of application cannot be treated as a transparent documentary record. Yet in three respects they shed light on the circumstances and attitudes of the emigrant poor, which will be discussed below. First, they allow us to focus on those occupations which generated a significant emigrant outflow. Second, they reveal the play of gender dynamics among men, and to some degree between men and

women. Third, they shed light on the anticipation of an improved life overseas which – for some emigrants at least – diminished the intensity of their present despair.

The Cape emigration schemeThe Cape emigration of 1819 was the biggest of the six state-aided schemes in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War.3434 Johnston, op. cit., 159.View all notes It took some 4000 emigrants to the eastern part of the Cape known as the zuurveld (sour veld) and recently named Albany: it was the first substantial emigration from Britain to South Africa, and it proved to be the foundation of the English-speaking community in that country. It was launched in a blaze of publicity. On 12 July Nicholas Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced in the Commons that £50,000 was to be spent on assisting unemployed workmen to settle in the Cape. Within three days the first applications were arriving at the Colonial Department. The issuing, on 17 July, of an official circular outlining details of the scheme prompted a flood of enquiries: contemporary estimates varied from 10,000 to an improbable 90,000.3535 Blackwoods Magazine, Oct. 1819, 81, put the figure at 10,000 ‘on pretty good authority’.View all notes In August Downing Street was mobbed by people awaiting the result of their applications.3636 John Barrow, ‘The Cape of Good Hope’, Quarterly Review, Nov. 1819, 205.View all notes In most cases Bathurst and Goulburn, the responsible ministers, could give only a perfunctory response, sending out stock replies to applicants while attempting to provide a more detailed response to serious contenders.3737 TNA, CO 48/13/80, Goulburn to Watson, 9 Oct. 1819.View all notes Successful applicants were notified in September, but repeated alterations in the composition of the emigrant parties caused a high level of correspondence up to the eve of the first sailings in December. At the local level a great deal of correspondence must also have passed between intending emigrants and their sponsors, but only one such collection is known to survive.3838 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4. See Clive Burton, Settlers to the Cape of Good Hope: organisation of the Nottinghamshire party, 1819–1820 (Port Elizabeth, 1971).View all notes

The high degree of public interest was the direct result of economic distress. The coming of peace in 1815 brought a sharp recession, as war-time industries contracted and demobilized soldiers swelled the ranks of the unemployed. Wages stagnated, while the price of wheat rose. The country was also adjusting with great difficulty to medium-term structural changes: the proletarianization of the agrarian labour force, and the introduction of new techniques of production at the expense of the handloom weavers and other proto-industrial workers. For all these reasons the cost of poor relief reached record levels after the war, topping £7 million between 1817 and 1819.3939 Mark Blaug, ‘The myth of the Old Poor Law and the making of the New’, Journal of Economic History, XIII (1963), 180; E.J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London, 1969), 76.View all notes The resentment of the propertied at the rising burden of the Poor Rate accounted for the enthusiasm with which Vansittart’s announcement was received in the Commons.

The government was also reacting to the alarm felt among the propertied at the possibility of popular insurrection, fuelled by mass meetings of workers in the north of England.4040 Johnston, op. cit., 36; Malcolm Chase, 1820. Disorder and stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester, 2013), 17.View all notes In the spring and summer of 1819 there was considerable support for assisted emigration among working men.4141 Nash, Bailie’s Party, op. cit., 8–9.View all notes This gave substance to the view in government that emigration might prevent the slide of distress into overt discontent. Writing to Goulburn a week after Peterloo to urge approval of the emigrants he was sponsoring, the MP for Liverpool predicted

that, otherwise, discontent among the lower classes ‘will ere long again burst forth with increased violence’.4242 TNA, CO 48/43/379, Gladstone to Goulburn, 24 Aug. 1819.View all notes Yet applicants who were deemed to be trouble makers were not welcome, and in some instances were debarred.4343 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/118, ‘A list of persons that have been rejected to emigrate & who are of improper character’, 11 Dec. 1819; TNA, CO 48/45/109, Smith to Goulburn, 6 Oct. 1819.View all notes If applicants had radical sympathies, they did not advertise them in their letters of application.

Despite the rationale given to the Commons by Vansittart, the 1819 scheme was not fundamentally a measure of poor relief. This was because its implementation was the responsibility not of the Treasury but of the Colonial Department, which had different priorities. Officials there advocated assisted emigration as a means of creating viable settler communities overseas, as in Canada and New South Wales.4444 David S. Macmillan, ‘Commercial and industrial society in Great Britain and Ireland 1814–1824: a study of Australian immigrant applications’, Histoire Sociale, VI (1973), 181–201.View all notes Their thinking had more to do with social engineering overseas than social cleansing at home. Nevertheless, as the process of implementation unfolded, large numbers of poor were recruited to the scheme.

The recruitment of emigrantsThe Colonial Department invited applications from gentlemen to act as proprietary leaders. They undertook to recruit men of the lower orders and to pay their deposits of £10 per adult male; in return the leader would receive 100 acres of land in Albany in respect of each recruit. Here in outline was the microcosm of English society which the Department aimed to create overseas. The Times praised the scheme as achieving both poor relief and colonial development:

Carry out as settlers all the families who have not bread or labour here, and we lay for posterity another England, with which, by skilful government, the mother country will be joined by bands indissoluble.4545 The Times, 18 June 1819, quoted in G.E. Cory, The Rise of South Africa, vol. 2 (London, 1913), 10.View all notes

Yet this was emollient rhetoric. The emphasis on proprietary leadership opened the Colonial Department to the charge that in planning ‘another England’ at the Cape it was frustrating Parliament’s intention in voting funds for the relief of the unemployed.4646 James Hogsflesh reported to the government on a public meeting in London where this was the general view. TNA, CO 48/43/704, Hogsflesh to Bathurst, 12 Aug. 1819.View all notes

It was anticipated that the party leaders would fill their quotas mostly with indentured labourers, as had been common practice in emigration to the American colonies before 1776.4747 Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West. A passage in the peopling of America on the eve of the revolution (New York, 1986).View all notes The precise terms of engagement were left to the party leader’s discretion. The length of service varied from three to six years. Party leaders undertook to pay wages and to set a limit on working hours (both varied from one party to the next); accommodation, food and clothing also featured in some of the contractual agreements. At the end of the period of service, the men would acquire tenure or title to their allowance of land (usually specified as 100 acres).4848 Cory, op. cit., 39, 41.View all notes The golden reputation of the Cape seemed to promise the proprietary leaders a handsome

return on their initial investment. In fact high status individuals needed greater inducements to abandon their home country and commit to a distant colony. Bathurst’s initial plan foundered on a lack of take-up. Of the 53 parties who sailed from England, only 18 were proprietary, and these accounted for only about one quarter of all emigrants.4949 The emigration scheme was not confined to English emigrants, but they were the overwhelming majority. There were distinctive conditions of poverty in Scotland and Ireland which are not discussed here.View all notes Within a few weeks of the initial announcement, therefore, the Colonial Department was obliged to relax the regulations to encourage a more open recruitment.5050 TNA, CO 49/11/228, Goulburn to Bennet, 30 July 1819.View all notes The principle of hierarchy was diluted. The scheme was now open to groups of contracting individuals paying their own deposits: all communication with the Department should be conducted with a single person, who was formally the leader but in most cases indistinguishable from the rest of the group in social status. These joint-stock parties were mostly led by artisans, shopkeepers and professional men. Some were drawn from a single small town or a cluster of parishes and numbered no more than the prescribed minimum of 10 settlers. London produced three large parties of around 100 settlers each.5151 Nash, Bailie’s Party, op cit., 19–20.View all notes

The poor had an acknowledged role in the proprietary parties as indentured labour. In some cases the recruited men came from the leader’s immediate neighbourhood, and may even have been in his service already. Thus George Pigot, a gentleman farmer from Berkshire, responded to the high level of poor rate in his parish by signing up 20 indentured servants.5252 TNA, CO 48/45/169, Pigot to Dundas, 31 Aug. 1819.View all notes In other cases prospective leaders put out a call for recruits wherever the distress was most keenly felt. William Wait, a London businessman, went to Marlow to recruit his labourers, offering what appeared to be mild conditions of service in order to attract the unemployed of the town.5353 Una Long (ed.), The Chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain, vol. 1 (Cape Town, 1946), 1.View all notes

Indentured service was the surest indicator of poverty in an emigrant. However, the indentured were not the only poor emigrants. They also featured in the joint stock parties in large numbers. A contract between equals suggests an association of men of similar rank, and this was what ministers intended. Yet the poor were needed in the joint-stock parties since they were accustomed to labour, without which the settlement could not survive. The issue was who would pay for their deposits. Many parishes were prepared to pay deposits as the price of offloading some of their claimants, thus relieving the pressure on the poor rate. In Frome, Somerset, fourteen poor families were signed up for Samuel James’s party: the outlay charged to the parish on deposits, gratuities and outfitting came to £225.5454 Somerset Record Office, DD/LW 49, Frome vestry book, 30 Sept. 1819.View all notes In London 11 men from the Refuge for the Destitute in Hoxton joined William Clark’s party; he intended ‘to make a happy peasantry to these persons who [see] the colony as their only refuge against evils that overwhelm them’.5555 TNA, CO 48/42/272, Clark to Bathurst, 3 Sept. 1819; M.D. Nash, The Settler Handbook. A new list of the 1820 Settlers (Diep River, 1987), 59–60.View all notes In Cam, Gloucestershire, the parish authorities, ‘overburdened with poor’, proposed to send to the Cape at least 10 men with large families.5656 TNA, CO 48/42/444, Cooper to Goulburn, 19 Oct. 1819.View all notes Far from limiting this process, ministers were under pressure to give more ground to the relieving purpose which had been announced in Parliament. They therefore permitted five parties composed exclusively of poor people, to be paid for by the parish, and led by ‘an intelligent individual’. In Birmingham, for example, the governor of the workhouse organized a party of 10 inmates under the direction of Edward Gardner, a

local tradesman.5757 TNA, CO 48/42/284, Cheshire to Bathurst, 6 Sept. 1819; Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 73–74.View all notes

The net result was an emigration in which the poor were more heavily represented than the Colonial Department had planned initially – and many more than the more status-conscious settlers would have liked.5858 Arthur Keppel-Jones (ed.), Philipps, 1820 Settler (Pietermaritzburg, 1960), 24.View all notes Just how many poor were involved, and of what categories, is impossible to determine with any precision. The party lists not only provide unreliable data regarding occupation; they are also silent on the degree of deprivation: we cannot tell whether an emigrant described as a wheelwright or a baker was still in work or unemployed. All that can be said is that the poor amounted to something between a third and a half of the settlers who sailed for the Cape.

The applications from aspiring party leaders convey their reasons for applying, but they also give the age, occupation and family status of all the individuals whom they intended to recruit. Many of the poor emigrants who secured places in the scheme must have written letters of application, but since recruitment was devolved to the party leaders at local level, it was they who received applications, and they probably had little reason to take these letters on the voyage or to arrange for their preservation in England. Only one local collection is extant, documenting the major party from Nottinghamshire; and the explanation for its survival is that the party was promoted and amply resourced by the Duke of Newcastle.5959 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4, letters from applicants to Edward Smith Godfrey.View all notes Ironically it was the unsuccessful applicants who left the fullest record. The Colonial Department archive includes not only letters from actual emigrants, but letters from people who stood no chance of going because they were applying through the wrong channels. The Department did not make decisions on individuals, but on whole groups as presented by their leaders. Hundreds of poor men had heard mention of the planned emigration, without being aware of this critical qualification. Individuals speaking only for themselves were told to get in touch with a potential party leader in the locality. If no such person was recruiting, this response was tantamount to rejection. Failed applicants accounted for 80% of all letter writers, and they were filed along with those of successful applicants. The archive is thus a record of not only actual emigrants, but the circumstances and mentality which prompted people to contemplate emigration.

OccupationThere is a great deal of data about occupation in the letters and the party lists. Specific trades – like mason or carpenter – are clear enough, but generic labels are less easy to interpret. There was no precision or consistency in the meanings attached to ‘labourer’, husbandman’, ‘agriculturalist’, ‘farmer’ and ‘countryman’. ‘Husbandman’ is a particularly slippery term. From the late eighteenth century onwards it was changing its meaning from a small tenant working his own land to be synonymous with a wage-earning labourer.6060 Thomas Sokoll, Household and Family among the Poor: the case of two Essex communities in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (Bochum, 1993), 110–11, 320; Peter H. Lindert, ‘English occupations, 1670–1811’, Journal of Economic History, XL (1980), 694–5.View all notes Both meanings appear to feature in the lists of emigrants. In addition, individuals had a variable relationship to their occupational labels. This is a familiar problem in emigration studies. ‘What does the term “occupation” mean?’, asks Robin Haines. ‘Does the nominated occupation refer to the last job, or to the job the person was trained to do, or to one of several jobs performed in his or her life, or to the job the person hoped to do in

Australia?’6161 Robin F. Haines, Emigration and the Labouring Poor. Australian recruitment in Britain and Ireland, 1831–60 (Basingstoke, 1997), 47.View all notes What was true of emigrants to the Antipodes in the 1840s was no less valid in the case of applicants for the Cape in 1819. It is not possible to give a statistical breakdown of the occupational categories of poor people in the Cape emigration.

The accuracy of the documentation is further undermined by the under-representation of the agricultural labourers who accounted for the majority of applicants in the rural areas. Given the official promise of 100 acres, their motivation was high. Yet workers on the land were least likely to write applications to the Colonial Department: their access to public information was limited, and their level of literacy was relatively low. These limitations applied even more strongly to indentured servants. Since they were recruited directly by the proprietary party leaders, they had no reason to write to the government, even supposing they were literate.

In spite of these difficulties, two occupations stand out from the letters with reasonable clarity. Both of them are evidence of some of the most keenly felt distress. First, the framework knitters of the north and Midlands were hit by collapsing demand in 1819. In Nottinghamshire hosiers tried to protect their profit margins by putting up frame rentals and by reducing the price they paid for finished goods; they also recruited unskilled workers to produce inferior knitwear. Hundreds of framework knitters were forced out of work.6262 J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (London, 1919), 182, 194–202; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1969), 580–84.View all notes Nottinghamshire had been the scene of extensive frame-breaking during the Luddite disturbances of 1811–12, but by 1819 that protest had run its course.6363 Matthew Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism and the makeshift economy of the Nottinghamshire framework knitters’, Social History, XLII (2017), 365–98.View all notes As E.P. Thompson put it, ‘only emigration to the Cape of Good Hope offered a means of escape’.6464 Thompson, op. cit., 602.View all notes According to the nineteenth-century historian of the hosiery industry, 300 families of knitters accepted offers of emigration to the Cape.6565 William Felkin, History of Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacturers (Cambridge, 1867), 441.View all notes We have very full information for the Nottingham party led by Thomas Calton. 112 letters of application survive. Fourteen of the 56 men who left for the Cape under Calton’s leadership were framework knitters, and of these were heads of household who would have employed family members and perhaps others on their frames.6666 Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 52–54.View all notes

That the emigration was an enforced response to downward pressure on wages is clear enough, but in the south it was also a response to structural changes which undermined traditional notions of what constituted proper employment for the working man. During the war the West Country weavers had prospered from the demand for military clothing, but when peace came they were quickly exposed to competition from the new large-scale mills in the West Riding. As a result of the introduction of the jenny, spinning had already been centralized in workshops owned by the clothiers. The weavers – the elite of the industry – were anxious that they too would be forced into workshops under the employer’s supervision.6767 J. De L. Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640 to 1880 (Oxford, 1971), 157–9; Hammond and Hammond, op. cit., 156–64.View all notes Yet that outcome was inevitable if the southwestern woollens were to keep pace with the West Riding. Six emigrant parties were recruited from weaving towns in the West Country. Wiltshire and Somerset were worst hit. In Frome the town was reported to be ‘all a tiptoe to

go to the Cape of Good Hope’; 30 weavers and cloth workers were included in the list of first enquiries.6868 TNA, CO 48/41/454, Bunn to Colonial Dept, 30 Aug. 1819; TNA, CO 48/43/744, Hill to Goulburn, 24 Aug. 1819.View all notes They were leaving behind a familiar form of household production which was not just in recession, but in terminal decline.

GenderIf the 1819 letters of application have much to say about occupation, they appear to be almost silent on gender. The party lists indicate that women accounted for 36% of all adult emigrants to the Cape, but no more than a handful wrote to the Colonial Department.6969 Lynne Bryer and Keith S. Hunt, The 1820 Settlers (Cape Town, 1984), 24.View all notes The reason was that women were confined by a very narrow and uncompromising patriarchal culture. The official aim was to promote family migration, and over 800 families were recruited.7070 Alan G. Brunger, ‘The geographical context of planned group settlement in Cape Colony: the 1820s emigrants’, Journal of Historical Geography, XXIX (2003), 54.View all notes Families were thought to promote social stability, especially in taming the restless energy of unaccompanied young men, a feature which later became even more pronounced in the Australian colonies. In 1819 the key objective was to establish working agrarian households founded on traditional notions of gender complementarity. Party leaders were expected to recruit whole families. The future growth of the colony was assured by the very large numbers of children: 44% of all emigrants were under the age of 18.7171 John Tosh, ‘Children on “free” emigrant ships: from England to the Cape of Good Hope, 1819–20’, History Australia, IX (2012), 8.View all notes The party from Burslem in Staffordshire comprised 11 men and 29 children, a not untypical ratio.7272 TNA, CO 48/44/442, Liversage to Goulburn, 12 Nov. 1819; Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 87.View all notes

Yet the preponderance of families did not bring women into the limelight. The Colonial Department’s assumption was that all women registered for the emigration stood in a dependent relationship to a family head: as wife, daughter, sister or servant. Officials communicated only with male persons and did not accept applications from women. The archive includes only a handful of letters from women, usually to intercede for a male applicant.7373 Thus Elizabeth Reynolds recounted her background as the daughter of an army officer murdered in Jamaica, in order to advance her husband’s application: TNA, CO 48/45/640, Reynolds to Bathurst, 18 Oct. 1819.View all notes In recruiting members and presenting them for official approval, party leaders conformed to this framework. Wives were listed, but with no indication as to whether they might be working in partnership with their husbands, for example as weavers or knitters. Recruiting practice was particularly restrictive with regard to single women. The party lists included single women over the age of 18, but their relationship to a male family head was always defined, whether of kinship, affinity or service. There was almost no scope for females travelling on their own, though anecdotal evidence tells of single women simulating a marriage, either to avoid a strict enforcement of the dependency rule, or to avoid paying a deposit on their own account.7474 Pamela Barnes, Barnes Ancestry. The story of an 1820 British settler family in South Africa (Howick, 1984), 4.View all notes This exclusion of single women is all the more remarkable because they were hardly unknown as emigrants – in the 1770s their participation in the exodus to North America was recorded – and in the 1830s their emigration to Australian would be explicitly promoted.7575 Bailyn, op. cit., 113, 136; A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen. Genteel poverty and female emigration, 1830–1914 (London, 1979).View all notes The difference is that those emigrations were commercial initiatives, responding to local demand

without conforming to a regulatory scheme. By contrast the Cape emigration was organized from London, and it bore the imprint of the Colonial Department’s somewhat rigid notions of social engineering.

The absence of female signatories does not necessarily mean that wives played no part in planning the family’s move.7676 Robin Haines, op. cit., 256–7, has raised the possibility that women were the prime movers of pauper emigration from the 1830s, but she has found no evidence to support her suggestion.View all notes Without letters from women, however, we are dependent on men’s interpretation of the marital tensions which sometimes came to the fore at this time. As a strategy of improved breadwinning, emigration was logically the husband’s business, based on his perception of the local labour market and whatever information he had gathered about economic opportunities in the colony. Yet emigration also meant sundering the ties of family and community. The main focus of this tension was likely to be the emigrant’s wife, drawn to her own kin and the social life of the neighbourhood. William Cobbett may well have been correct in declaring that wives were generally resistant to emigration because of their strong ties to neighbourhood and kin; but rather than give in to their opposition, he insisted the man must ‘overcome the scruples, the remonstrances, and the wailings of his wife’ and, if necessary, she must be left behind.7777 William Cobbett, The Emigrant’s Guide (London, 1829), 33–38. See also Erickson, op. cit., 241, 258, 261.View all notes That was the decision of Thomas Maddox, who in October 1819 petitioned the Colonial Department for permission to proceed to the Cape as a single man at a reduced tariff. His wife had previously agreed to go with him, but having heard unfavourable reports about the Cape she had now changed her mind.7878 TNA, CO 48/44/729, Maddox to Bathurst, 5 Oct. 1819. In the end Maddox did not emigrate.View all notes James Thomas also applied to emigrate as a single man, but he intended to desert his wife and four children; after enquiries were made he reappeared and reluctantly took his family with him.7979 TNA, CO 48/42/547, Coker to Bathurst, 18 Dec. 1819; TNA, CO 48/42/557, Coker to Bathurst, 23 Dec. 1819.View all notes As Olive Anderson has shown, absconding husbands were a recurrent feature of emigration in the nineteenth century.8080 Olive Anderson, ‘Emigration and marriage break-up in mid-Victorian England’, Economic History Review, L (1997), 104–9.View all notes There were doubtless other undetected cases in 1819.

The epistolary silence of women bears witness to the coercion many of them experienced at the hands of their men folk. Lacking independent means and dependent on their husbands, they had little chance of maintaining the sinews of their social and familial life in England. Very few were in a position to behave as Thomas Maddox’s wife did. The majority had little choice but to go along with whatever undertaking the head of the family had made with his fellow emigrants. Government, party leaders and heads of household were as one in upholding a strictly enforced patriarchy. The Albany settlement bore the enduring imprint of that formation over many decades. In 1870, at the time of the fiftieth anniversary, the patriarchal order in Albany was still being upheld by a one-sided reading of the colony’s origins. As Henry Dugmore put it in verses composed for the occasion, the settlers were to be honoured as ‘fathers for children seeking a home / in Afric’s [sic] southern wilds’.8181 Henry H. Dugmore, The Reminiscences of an Albany Settler (Grahamstown, 1958, first published in 1871). He emigrated from England as a child in 1820.View all notes

However, the relative silence of women does not mean that the letters tell us nothing about gender. They have much to say about masculine aspiration and generational tension. The priority attached to families not only restricted the scope for women emigrants; it also meant that married men comfortably outnumbered bachelors.8282 A sample composed of three of the

largest settler parties totalling 300 emigrants yields 196 married and 96 unmarried men: Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 40–43, 115–18, 140–2.View all notes Throughout the nineteenth century young bachelors were attracted to emigration. They were less constrained by bonds of family than married men, and they were more easily swayed by the prospect of adventure. Colonial governments often complained about the preponderance of young single men reaching their shores – hence their interest in promoting the immigration of single women.8383 Hammerton, op. cit.; Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies. The foundations of modern New Zealand society 1850–1900 (Auckland, 1989).View all notes In 1819 young men applied for inclusion in the Cape scheme in large numbers, but their chances of acceptance were not good: they feature prominently among the applications which were turned down. The labour of young men was certainly needed in Albany: the settlement was intended to be self-sufficient, since the Cape authorities had expelled the indigenous Xhosa from Albany in 1812 as a security measure. Yet neither the Colonial Department nor the Cape government wanted a flood of young men to descend on Albany. They were expected to take their place in a well proportioned social community, with married men in the ascendant.

At the same time, the permanent loss of young men living at home was hardly a matter of indifference to their parents. Patriarchal authority properly extended over sons until they had accumulated the means to marry and set up a household of their own. Emigration offered the possibility of doing so at an earlier age. Some youngsters applied with the full approval of the parents who saw the departure of their sons as a necessary retrenchment in the cost of family subsistence. John Holt, aged 18, and William Henson, aged 19, applied to join the Nottinghamshire party because ‘our parents wish for us to go to the Cape of Good Hope’.8484 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/60, Holt and Hanson to Godfrey [no date].View all notes Other parents in less extreme circumstances obstructed their emigrant offspring in order to retain their earning potential. When 17-year-old Jeremiah Goldswain resolved to go as an indentured labourer, he had first to face down the opposition of his widowed mother.8585 Long, op. cit., 3–4; Tosh, ‘Jeremiah Goldswain’s last farewell’, op. cit., 36–38.View all notes Alternatively, emigration could be driven by a sense of family grievance: William Pilkington, a Nottinghamshire farmer and butcher, at 29 still lived with his parents, and he wished to emigrate because of his father’s treatment of him.8686 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/40, Pilkington to Godfrey, 24 Oct. 1819.View all notes In such cases young men were acting out a rejection of the patriarchal integrity that parents wished to maintain.

Separation from parents was one constituent of ‘independence’ – that cardinal criterion of mature masculine status. To live under one’s parent’s roof, or to be dependent on any other relative, was incompatible with a fully attained manhood. William Lee was a printer and bookbinder, aged 25. A fire destroyed the London premises of his most recent employer. Redundancy in his trade meant he could secure employment in only six months out of 12; being compelled to live ‘on the industry of a brother’ was the ultimate humiliation.8787 TNA, CO 48/44/245, Lee to Goulburn, 19 July 1819.View all notes ‘Independence’ also depended on having the wherewithal to maintain the dignified position of a working man in honest employment, able to support his household without recourse to charity or the Poor Law. At the age of 23, Richard Mee had been without work as a surgeon for two years; he was now reduced to harvesting and labouring, with ‘no prospect but the work house before me which I can’t endure’.8888 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/84, Mee to Godfrey, 4 Nov. 1819.View all notes Independence regained was the lens through which a majority of emigrants perceived their prospects. The idea was cogently expressed in the prospectus drawn up by one aspiring party leader: the purpose of the scheme was ‘to ensure to the Poor the means of supporting themselves and with prudence to become in seven years, or perhaps less time, honourable

independent Men, leaving at their death a Provision for their Wives and Children’.8989 TNA, CO 48/41/40, Prospectus enclosed in Adams to Goulburn, 31 July 1819.View all notes Young men sought to create overseas the independent household which was beyond their grasp at home. In Albany the demographic balance between male and female was scarcely in their favour, but the daughters of older emigrants were considered eligible to marry at a younger age than in England.9090 Cory Library, Grahamstown, microfilm 155, Fowler to mother, 7 Oct. 1823.View all notes

Looking forwardThus far the motivation for emigration has been presented as almost entirely negative: the last resort in a diminishing set of options to escape poverty and destitution. Yet despair was not the only sentiment experienced by emigrants. Here we come to the nub of the debate about the mind-set of the emigrant poor. Was their field of choice so confined that they were no more than human flotsam involuntarily borne away overseas? Or was being a settler construed in positive terms, corresponding to the enhanced public standing of emigration which James Belich detects in the immediate post-war years? These questions would be redundant if emigration had been compulsory, but, although early nineteenth century emigration is often dismissed as ‘shovelling out paupers’, there was no compulsion in the case of the Cape scheme.9191 The phrase ‘shovelling out paupers’ was not coined until 1842: Johnston, op. cit., 168.View all notes The government promoted it as a voluntary emigration. Parishes were encouraged to pay deposits for poor emigrants, but they were told that this must be on the basis of consent.9292 Cory, op. cit., 12–13.View all notes The poor were brought into the scheme by persuasion, not coercion.

The issue of agency is therefore open to more nuanced analysis. Any decision to emigrate, however desperate, involves anticipation of the future as well as the mixture of relief and regret at leaving home. It was reported from south Wales that poor people were so ready to leave that ‘they would have gone on board any ship without enquiring where they were to be carried’.9393 TNA, CO 48/45/454, Rowcroft to Bathurst, 22 July 1819.View all notes That was an extreme reaction. Information about the eastern Cape may have been scanty and unreliable, but it circulated widely in broadsheets and advertisements, and poor people formed their expectations accordingly. At first blush the prospects were enticing. The government and the press enthused about Albany as a fertile land of almost paradisal quality, implying that the Cape of Good Hope might live up to its felicitous name. Thomas Pringle, the leader of a party from the Scottish borders, detected ‘a sort of Utopian delirium’, affecting the sober as well as the gullible.9494 Thomas Pringle, Some Account of the Present State of the English Settlers in Albany, South Africa (London, 1824), 6.View all notes One advertisement ran: ‘the most healthy climate in the world .… a country where labour will flourish & meet with its reward.’9595 TNA, CO 48/45/586, Promoter’s advertisement posted in Exeter.View all notes It was also alleged by critics of the scheme that emigrants expected ‘an escape from labour’.9696 Edward Blount, Notes on the Cape of Good Hope Made during an Excursion in that Colony in the year 1820 (London, 1821), 137.View all notes That might suggest an assumption that cheap black labour would be readily available. In fact the Xhosa had been expelled from Albany in 1812 as a security measure, and labour exploitation did not feature in the promotion of the scheme.9797 Ben Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror. John Graham and the Cape’s eastern frontier (Johannesburg, 1986).View all notes What Edward Blount meant by an ‘escape from labour’ was a country which would yield its fruit ‘without the sweat of the brow’.9898 Blount, op. cit., 137.View all notes Such comments betray a strong whiff of class prejudice. They are not matched by any statements made by the emigrants

themselves. In fact the available evidence suggests a more down-to-earth approach. William Lee, a London butcher, was entirely realistic: ‘I have duly and deliberately considered the subject of Emigration, considered that the undertaking is hazardous – fertile with toil and hardship, and requiring fortitude of mind as well as perseverance of body.’9999 TNA, CO 48/44/245, Lee to Colonial Dept, 19 July 1819.View all notes He was echoed by William Palmer:

As I find trade at present very dead and nothing likely to stir which enables me to get my living here I therefore make application as I find that persons of good health and strong constitution is wanted for the fertilizing of the Cape of Good Hope as my mind is fully satisfied to go if I can agree with the terms proposed for the emigration.100100 TNA, CO 48/45/39, Palmer to Colonial Dept, 24 July 1819.View all notes

The initial experience of Albany confirmed this view. The poor did better in the colony, William Fowler believed, because, unlike the wealthy, they knew they would get nothing without working for it.101101 Rhodes House, Micr.Afr.366, Fowler to mother, 2 Dec. 1822.View all notes

Of particular interest are expectations about the relations of production at the Cape. The emigration drew on two aspirations. For the majority of emigrants who were members of joint stock parties the attraction was land, to which they would gain individual title in short order (the leader’s sole role being merely to allocate it). The individual allowance of 100 acres seemed generous by English standards, although its quality in the conditions of the Eastern Cape was much less so. This entitlement applied not only to the ‘respectable’ tradesmen and professional men who formed the backbone of the joint stock parties, but to poor men who had been paid for by the parish, and who could have acquired such a sizeable holding by no other means. The acquisition of land was warmly anticipated, both by the rural poor and by those town dwellers who believed they could make a go of farming.

Members of proprietary parties also looked forward to a grant of land, but with less confidence. Allocation was at the discretion of the party leader, whose good will could not be relied upon. In the case of indentured servants, delay was written into their contracts since they must first complete their period of service. An early sceptic was James Moorcroft who remarked of his fellow emigrants ‘it don’t appear that they have any land given them; it seems to be all the property of one person’.102102 TNA, CO 48/44/533, Moorcroft to Bathurst, 29 July 1819.View all notes Of more immediate concern to emigrants from a labouring background were the conditions of service which they would encounter on arrival at the Cape. Many intending emigrants had misgivings about entering indentures. Writing on behalf of 10 families in Blackburn, Joseph Wood declared that they were unwilling to be bound to one person ‘as we do not know how he may act with us when we arrive’. In order to be free men in the Cape, they preferred to scrape together the deposit money themselves.103103 TNA, CO 48/46/414, Wood to Bathurst, 31 Aug. 1819.View all notes In Manchester five men withdrew from John Stanley’s proprietary party having heard reports that they would be made slaves on arrival at the Cape.104104 TNA, CO 48/45/1048, Stanley to Goulburn, 27 Oct. 1819.View all notes Others approached their emigration in a more sanguine spirit, trusting to their leader and his promises for the future.105105 Tosh, ‘Jeremiah Goldswain’s farewell’, op. cit., 26, 35–36.View all notes For many applicants the crucial context may have been the rapid decline after 1815 of service in husbandry, particularly marked in the southern counties. Young labourers were denied steady employment, a roof over their heads and a personal bond with their master.106106 Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England

(Cambridge, 1981), 7–10, 122–33; Keith Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social change and agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985).View all notes Direct evidence is lacking, but it is possible that in recruiting from the labouring class some of the leaders promised a restoration of the traditional terms of service in husbandry. Thomas Philipps recruited 21 men from Pembrokeshire; no fewer than ten were labourers under the age of 26.107107 Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 105.View all notes When he reached his allotted land in Albany, Philipps built a ‘men’s house’ for his workers, immediately adjacent to his farm house, where they ate their meals in the family kitchen.108108 Philipps to Miss Harries, 15 July 1821, in Keppel-Jones, op. cit., 1820 Settler, 102–3.View all notes

In two cases there is evidence of something more radical than the hope of restoring what was lost. Two labourers on the Wiltshire–Somerset border performed the role of leader in a joint stock party. Edward Ford led a party of nine labourers and one weaver; Charles Hyman’s party comprised nine labourers, a bricklayer, a weaver and a gardener. Some of these men must have been funded by the parish; the documentation does not reveal how the two leaders were able to pay their deposits, although it is most likely they were supported by the parish as well. Hyman at the age of 20 held pronounced views about how his party should be organized. He intended to forego the privileges of leader and apply egalitarian principles. Rejecting any assumption of superiority over his fellow emigrants, he promised that ‘every person going under my direction will enjoy everything equal to myself’:

Going in this brotherly way I make no doubt by our joint exertions we shall be able to surmount those difficulties which will naturally be in the way. And as every man will have his own interest at heart, I have every reason to hope we shall all flourish as much as any company that will proceed there.109109 TNA, CO 48/43/780, Hyman to Goulburn, 8 Sept. 1819.View all notes

William Winning wrote from London outlining a similar ethos for his party of ‘distressed mechanics’:

We are each of us sufficiently intelligent to act for himself and the chief was chose for honest simplicity that there might be no lording it over the rest, but each act as a free compact & well concerted body.110110 TNA, CO 48/46/350, Winning to Colonial Dept, 16 Aug. 1819.View all notes

Winning was rejected. Hyman’s proposal was accepted. It is tempting to conclude that his democratic principles accounted for the fact that his party was one of the few to hold together during the testing early years of the settlement.111111 Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 83.View all notes

ConclusionOnce established in Albany the emigrants would become a constituent part of the culturally loaded collective known as ‘the 1820 Settlers’; but in England in 1819 the word ‘settler’ was reserved for party leaders and others who took assets with them overseas. The thousands who applied to the Colonial Department in 1819 were unquestionably ‘emigrants’.112112 In a few cases they are referred to as ‘settlers’: for example, TNA, CO 48/45/287, Philipps to Goulburn, 8 Oct. 1819.View all notes The discursive shift which James Belich identifies from ‘emigrant’ to ‘settler’ was class-specific: it did not apply to indentured labour or paupers on

the parish or the unemployed. Yet if poor emigrants were not yet ‘settlers’, their background and their aspirations confound a monolithic view of the emigrant condition. The applicants’ letters of 1819 are less than transparent statements of motive and mentality, but they reveal more about the intentions and attitudes of poor emigrants in the early nineteenth century than we know from any other source. They enable us to take soundings in the world of the emigrant poor, revealing a more nuanced picture than the wholly negative mind-set so often attributed to the common emigrant at the time. Thus to label the emigrants as ‘unemployed’ is an accurate but insufficiently precise usage. The framework knitters and the weavers had lost not only their regular income but their trades, made obsolete by new methods of production. The Cape scheme fits the designation ‘folk’ or ‘family migration’ which is commonly given to emigration in the first half of the nineteenth century, but it also brings to light the gender tensions which lay beneath the surface of family life: the uncompromising patriarchal bias of the scheme, and the play of masculine anxiety and aspiration. Perhaps most telling of all, the letters show that even among the poor there was more to the decision to emigrate than fatalism and passivity. Poor emigrants expected to have to work for their living, but with the reward of greater security and enhanced prosperity. An analysis of this process of looking forward, on however misleading a prospectus, goes some way to explaining both the decision to leave home and the emigrants’ ability to endure the pain of separation.

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes1 Nottinghamshire County Record Office (hereafter NCRO), QACP 5/1/4/14, Holland to Godfrey, 18 Oct. 1819.

2 Isobel E. Edwards, The 1820 Settlers in South Africa. A study in British colonial policy (London, 1934); H.J.M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1972); M.D. Nash, Bailie’s Party of 1820 Settlers (Cape Town, 1982).

3 The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), CO 48/41–46. The whole series has also been placed online by the South African Genealogical Society: www.EGSSA/org/1820-Settlers

4 Given the disparate nature of the poor, it is not surprising that no one has been able to offer a convincing numerical estimate of the numbers who emigrated from England between 1815 and 1850.

5 Dudley Baines, Emigration from Europe 1815–1930 (Basingstoke, 1991), 39–44.

6 Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge, 1985), 58.

7 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth. The settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, 2009).

8 ibid., 164.

9 Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Emigrants. The adaptation of English and Scottish immigrants in nineteenth-century America (Ithaca, 1972); David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives. The personal correspondence of British immigrants to North America in the nineteenth century (New York, 2006); David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation. Personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia (Ithaca, 1994); Wendy Cameron et al. (eds), English Immigrant Voices. Labourers’ letters from Upper Canada in the 1830s (Montreal, 2000).

10 Gerber, op. cit., 5.

11 There are also a small number of settler reminiscences which touch on the circumstances of their departure from England. For a noted instance, see John Tosh, ‘Jeremiah Goldswain’s farewell: family and fortune in early nineteenth-century English emigration’, History Workshop Journal, LXXVII (2014), 26–44.

12 Eric Richards, ‘The limits of the Australian emigrant letter’, in Bruce S. Elliott et al. (eds), Letters across Borders. The epistolary practices of international migrants (Basingstoke, 2006), 62.

13 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/20, Smith to Godfrey, 19 Oct. 1819.

14 TNA, CO 48/46/250, Watson to Goulburn, 22 July 1819.

15 TNA, CO 48/46/389, White to Adams, 23 Aug. 1819.

16 TNA, CO 48/45/507, Ready and Musmay to Goulburn, no date.

17 TNA, CO/48/41/120, Anderson to Bathurst, 27 Sept. 1819. See also NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/84, Mee to Godfrey, 4 Nov. 1819.

18 TNA, CO 48/42/347, Carr to Bathurst, 27 Sept. 1819.

19 TNA, CO 48/41/29, Andress to Bathurst, 23 July 1819.

20 TNA, CO 48/41/259, Broome to Bathurst, 28 July 1819.

21 R.S. Schofield, ‘Dimensions of illiteracy, 1750–1850’, Explorations in Economic History, X (1972), 445–6.

22 Thomas Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty: the record of Essex pauper letters’, in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty (Basingstoke, 1997), 134.

23 TNA, CO/48/42/241, Clarke to Goulburn, 23 Aug. 1819.

24 TNA, CO 48/43/291, Garner to Goulburn, 26 June 1819.

25 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/1, Stubbins to Newcastle, 30 Aug. 1819.

26 Winifred Maxwell, Reconsiderations (Grahamstown, 1970), 6.

27 This is especially emphasized in Fitzpatrick, op. cit., which unusually includes fourteen sequences of letters in both directions.

28 ibid., 19–20.

29 William Pike, an emigrant to the Cape in 1819, assured his family that they would find ‘plenty of land for nothing’, as well as a good dinner and a bed to lie on: Albany Museum, Grahamstown, MS SM 2600, Pike to parents, 10 Nov. 1820.

30 Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia. Shipboard diaries by nineteenth-century British emigrants (Manchester, 1994).

31 Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty’, op. cit.; Thomas Sokoll, ‘Writing for relief’, in Andreas Gestrich, Steven King, and Lutz Raphael (eds), Being Poor in Modern Europe. Historical perspectives 1800–1940 (Oxford, 2006), 91–109.

32 Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester, 2001), 55.

33 Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty’, op cit., 131.

34 Johnston, op. cit., 159.

35 Blackwoods Magazine, Oct. 1819, 81, put the figure at 10,000 ‘on pretty good authority’.

36 John Barrow, ‘The Cape of Good Hope’, Quarterly Review, Nov. 1819, 205.

37 TNA, CO 48/13/80, Goulburn to Watson, 9 Oct. 1819.

38 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4. See Clive Burton, Settlers to the Cape of Good Hope: organisation of the Nottinghamshire party, 1819–1820 (Port Elizabeth, 1971).

39 Mark Blaug, ‘The myth of the Old Poor Law and the making of the New’, Journal of Economic History, XIII (1963), 180; E.J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London, 1969), 76.

40 Johnston, op. cit., 36; Malcolm Chase, 1820. Disorder and stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester, 2013), 17.

41 Nash, Bailie’s Party, op. cit., 8–9.

42 TNA, CO 48/43/379, Gladstone to Goulburn, 24 Aug. 1819.

43 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/118, ‘A list of persons that have been rejected to emigrate & who are of improper character’, 11 Dec. 1819; TNA, CO 48/45/109, Smith to Goulburn, 6 Oct. 1819.

44 David S. Macmillan, ‘Commercial and industrial society in Great Britain and Ireland 1814–1824: a study of Australian immigrant applications’, Histoire Sociale, VI (1973), 181–201.

45 The Times, 18 June 1819, quoted in G.E. Cory, The Rise of South Africa, vol. 2 (London, 1913), 10.

46 James Hogsflesh reported to the government on a public meeting in London where this was the general view. TNA, CO 48/43/704, Hogsflesh to Bathurst, 12 Aug. 1819.

47 Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West. A passage in the peopling of America on the eve of the revolution (New York, 1986).

48 Cory, op. cit., 39, 41.

49 The emigration scheme was not confined to English emigrants, but they were the overwhelming majority. There were distinctive conditions of poverty in Scotland and Ireland which are not discussed here.

50 TNA, CO 49/11/228, Goulburn to Bennet, 30 July 1819.

51 Nash, Bailie’s Party, op cit., 19–20.

52 TNA, CO 48/45/169, Pigot to Dundas, 31 Aug. 1819.

53 Una Long (ed.), The Chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain, vol. 1 (Cape Town, 1946), 1.

54 Somerset Record Office, DD/LW 49, Frome vestry book, 30 Sept. 1819.

55 TNA, CO 48/42/272, Clark to Bathurst, 3 Sept. 1819; M.D. Nash, The Settler Handbook. A new list of the 1820 Settlers (Diep River, 1987), 59–60.

56 TNA, CO 48/42/444, Cooper to Goulburn, 19 Oct. 1819.

57 TNA, CO 48/42/284, Cheshire to Bathurst, 6 Sept. 1819; Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 73–74.

58 Arthur Keppel-Jones (ed.), Philipps, 1820 Settler (Pietermaritzburg, 1960), 24.

59 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4, letters from applicants to Edward Smith Godfrey.

60 Thomas Sokoll, Household and Family among the Poor: the case of two Essex communities in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (Bochum, 1993), 110–11, 320; Peter H. Lindert, ‘English occupations, 1670–1811’, Journal of Economic History, XL (1980), 694–5.

61 Robin F. Haines, Emigration and the Labouring Poor. Australian recruitment in Britain and Ireland, 1831–60 (Basingstoke, 1997), 47.

62 J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (London, 1919), 182, 194–202; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1969), 580–84.

63 Matthew Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism and the makeshift economy of the Nottinghamshire framework knitters’, Social History, XLII (2017), 365–98.

64 Thompson, op. cit., 602.

65 William Felkin, History of Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacturers (Cambridge, 1867), 441.

66 Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 52–54.

67 J. De L. Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640 to 1880 (Oxford, 1971), 157–9; Hammond and Hammond, op. cit., 156–64.

68 TNA, CO 48/41/454, Bunn to Colonial Dept, 30 Aug. 1819; TNA, CO 48/43/744, Hill to Goulburn, 24 Aug. 1819.

69 Lynne Bryer and Keith S. Hunt, The 1820 Settlers (Cape Town, 1984), 24.

70 Alan G. Brunger, ‘The geographical context of planned group settlement in Cape Colony: the 1820s emigrants’, Journal of Historical Geography, XXIX (2003), 54.

71 John Tosh, ‘Children on “free” emigrant ships: from England to the Cape of Good Hope, 1819–20’, History Australia, IX (2012), 8.

72 TNA, CO 48/44/442, Liversage to Goulburn, 12 Nov. 1819; Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 87.

73 Thus Elizabeth Reynolds recounted her background as the daughter of an army officer murdered in Jamaica, in order to advance her husband’s application: TNA, CO 48/45/640, Reynolds to Bathurst, 18 Oct. 1819.

74 Pamela Barnes, Barnes Ancestry. The story of an 1820 British settler family in South Africa (Howick, 1984), 4.

75 Bailyn, op. cit., 113, 136; A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen. Genteel poverty and female emigration, 1830–1914 (London, 1979).

76 Robin Haines, op. cit., 256–7, has raised the possibility that women were the prime movers of pauper emigration from the 1830s, but she has found no evidence to support her suggestion.

77 William Cobbett, The Emigrant’s Guide (London, 1829), 33–38. See also Erickson, op. cit., 241, 258, 261.

78 TNA, CO 48/44/729, Maddox to Bathurst, 5 Oct. 1819. In the end Maddox did not emigrate.

79 TNA, CO 48/42/547, Coker to Bathurst, 18 Dec. 1819; TNA, CO 48/42/557, Coker to Bathurst, 23 Dec. 1819.

80 Olive Anderson, ‘Emigration and marriage break-up in mid-Victorian England’, Economic History Review, L (1997), 104–9.

81 Henry H. Dugmore, The Reminiscences of an Albany Settler (Grahamstown, 1958, first published in 1871). He emigrated from England as a child in 1820.

82 A sample composed of three of the largest settler parties totalling 300 emigrants yields 196 married and 96 unmarried men: Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 40–43, 115–18, 140–2.

83 Hammerton, op. cit.; Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies. The foundations of modern New Zealand society 1850–1900 (Auckland, 1989).

84 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/60, Holt and Hanson to Godfrey [no date].

85 Long, op. cit., 3–4; Tosh, ‘Jeremiah Goldswain’s last farewell’, op. cit., 36–38.

86 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/40, Pilkington to Godfrey, 24 Oct. 1819.

87 TNA, CO 48/44/245, Lee to Goulburn, 19 July 1819.

88 NCRO, QACP 5/1/4/84, Mee to Godfrey, 4 Nov. 1819.

89 TNA, CO 48/41/40, Prospectus enclosed in Adams to Goulburn, 31 July 1819.

90 Cory Library, Grahamstown, microfilm 155, Fowler to mother, 7 Oct. 1823.

91 The phrase ‘shovelling out paupers’ was not coined until 1842: Johnston, op. cit., 168.

92 Cory, op. cit., 12–13.

93 TNA, CO 48/45/454, Rowcroft to Bathurst, 22 July 1819.

94 Thomas Pringle, Some Account of the Present State of the English Settlers in Albany, South Africa (London, 1824), 6.

95 TNA, CO 48/45/586, Promoter’s advertisement posted in Exeter.

96 Edward Blount, Notes on the Cape of Good Hope Made during an Excursion in that Colony in the year 1820 (London, 1821), 137.

97 Ben Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror. John Graham and the Cape’s eastern frontier (Johannesburg, 1986).

98 Blount, op. cit., 137.

99 TNA, CO 48/44/245, Lee to Colonial Dept, 19 July 1819.

100 TNA, CO 48/45/39, Palmer to Colonial Dept, 24 July 1819.

101 Rhodes House, Micr.Afr.366, Fowler to mother, 2 Dec. 1822.

102 TNA, CO 48/44/533, Moorcroft to Bathurst, 29 July 1819.

103 TNA, CO 48/46/414, Wood to Bathurst, 31 Aug. 1819.

104 TNA, CO 48/45/1048, Stanley to Goulburn, 27 Oct. 1819.

105 Tosh, ‘Jeremiah Goldswain’s farewell’, op. cit., 26, 35–36.

106 Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981), 7–10, 122–33; Keith Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social change and agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985).

107 Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 105.

108 Philipps to Miss Harries, 15 July 1821, in Keppel-Jones, op. cit., 1820 Settler, 102–3.

109 TNA, CO 48/43/780, Hyman to Goulburn, 8 Sept. 1819.

110 TNA, CO 48/46/350, Winning to Colonial Dept, 16 Aug. 1819.

111 Nash, The Settler Handbook, op. cit., 83.

112 In a few cases they are referred to as ‘settlers’: for example, TNA, CO 48/45/287, Philipps to Goulburn, 8 Oct. 1819.