85Overseas migration thing.82 In Canada, for example, boarding houses, immigrant hostels and lodges are said to have prospered precisely because they offered residents ‘a familiar, often familial, environment’.83 So much can be seen from the protection these institutions gave to many vulnerable single female migrants, who were met at railway stations, ‘mothered’ by matrons and helped to find employment in domestic service. It is also apparent from the way boarding houses, hostels and lodges portrayed themselves as ‘homes away from home’, spatially segregated, and attractive to recently arrived migrants by virtue of their English character, and their familiar food, accents, conversation and values.
Settler societies Settler societies proliferated during the second half of the nineteenth century, offering ‘a recognisable form through which a social network could be created’.84 Part of their attraction was that they sought to maintain some form of attachment, however loose, vague or sentimental, to the ‘mother country’.85 They also practised a form of ethnic exclusivity, smoothing an immigrant’s path with introductions to people of the same religion or from the same region. Thus, in an era before state welfare, these societies gave their members a competitive advantage in employment markets, took on roles of mutual aid, offered companionship and fellowship, and sponsored a whole range of cultural activities, particularly in the sphere of education.86 Instances are also recorded of their members returning to their ‘home’ communities to recruit more migrants.87
Settler societies also fused a sense of provincial sentiment with national belonging. Many English and Scottish emigrants took particular pride in their place of origin within the British Isles. Aberdeen, Cambrian,
82 A. R. McCormack, ‘Networks among British Immigrants’, in H. Tinker (ed.), The
Diaspora of the British, Collected Seminar Papers 31, Institute of Commonwealth Studies,
University of London (1982), pp. 62–4.
83 A. R. McCormack, ‘Cloth Caps and Jobs: The Ethnicity of English Immigrants’, in
J. M. Bumsted (ed.), Interpreting Canada’s Past, 2 vols., Vol. II: After Confederation
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 182.
84 See, for example, R. Sweetman, ‘Towards a History of Orangeism in New Zealand’, in
B. Patterson (ed.), Ulster–New Zealand Migration and Cultural Transfers (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2006), pp. 154–64 (quote from p. 159).
85 B. Jones, ‘Welsh–Australian Organizations and the Promotion of British and Welsh
Identities in the 1930s and 1940s’, paper given at the British World Conference, University
of Melbourne, July 2004.
86 Ibid., p. 175.
87 See for example the chief of the Scottish Caledonian Society, Inverness-shire-born Hugh
Fraser’s visit to the Highlands in 1882–3, in E. Richards, ‘Scottish Voices and Networks
on Colonial Australia’, in A. McCarthy (ed.), A Global Clan (London: B. Tauris, 2006),
pp. 150–83 (p. 164).
86Cornish, Cumberland, Devonian, Glasgow, and Lancashire and Yorkshire Associations, in addition to the better-known Sons of England, Caledonian and St Andrew’s Societies, and the Orange Order, all flourished in the colonies. They were cultural rather than political, a forum for settlers from the same city or county to meet and mix. They evinced a highly regionalised sense of what it meant to be English, Scottish, Irish or British.
Although research into settler societies is still in its infancy, it is clear that they played an important, if somewhat neglected, role in the rapid assimilation of many British migrants into colonial society. For example, their proliferation among the English-speaking communities of the Cape, Natal and Transvaal was a striking feature of the social history of South Africa in the later nineteenth century. Settler societies helped new arrivals to find work. They made social introductions. They dispensed charitable aid to those who had fallen on hard times. They assisted the victims of wars, and commemorated the sacrifices made by colonial troops during imperial campaigns.88 Caledonian societies were probably the most successful. The Scots were a large and strong community in South Africa, retaining a distinctive sense of their cultural identity well into the twentieth century, albeit positioning their Scottishness firmly within a wider British context.89 Yet settler societies were also popular among the English – especially the Cornish. They met regularly to remember the ‘old folks’ at home and to preserve local customs and traditions, which became harder to keep alive over time as a result of intermarriage and assimilation. Canadian settler organisations similarly promoted friendly relations between migrants who hailed from the same town, city or region. They did so by organising recreational activities, such as music, dance and sport; by providing material support (insurance, medical and other benefits); and by helping the newly arrived to find work – for example, through the patronage of other members who had supervisory responsibilities. The origins of Scottish settler societies in Canada stretch back to the early nineteenth century: a party of Lewis emigrants were supposedly saved
88 A. S. Thompson, ‘The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c. 1870–1939’,
English Historical Review 118 (2003), 617–50 (pp. 629–30); J. Lambert, ‘ “Preserving
Britishness”: English-Speaking South Africa’s Patriotic, Cultural and Charitable
Associations’, paper given to the Jubilee Conference of the South African Historical
Association, University of Pretoria, July 2006.
89 J. Hyslop, ‘Cape Town Highlanders, Transvaal Scottish: Military “Scottishness” and
Social Power in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa’, South African
Historical Journal 47 (2002), 96–114; J. MacKenzie with N. R. Dalziel, The Scots in
South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772–1914 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2007).
87Overseas migration from starvation in 1841 when a donation from Montreal’s St Andrew’s Society enabled them to reach their final destination.90 Throughout the rest of the century such societies trumpeted Scottish ethnicity, preserved Scottish symbols and gave members the opportunity to celebrate their national origins through a range of social functions.91 Meanwhile, the Sons of England – an English cultural society that, in the words of a Cumberland woman from Winnipeg, aimed ‘to keep the British tradition going’ – had about 40,000 Canadian members by 1913.92
The Orange Lodge Order – the fraternity at the heart of Ulster Unionism – was likewise well established in the dominion, where it functioned as a ‘community-building frontier organisation’.93 Its birthplace was in Ontario among loyalist settlers who were determined to maintain their religious convictions and defend British institutions, and who ‘shared a belief in future greatness and progress achieved as an integral part of the British Empire’.94 There were possibly as many as 100,000 Ontarian Orangemen by the end of the nineteenth century.95 For Irish Protestants in the province Orangeism was a way of life. Its branches (or lodges) were ‘an avenue of association’, serving to extend ‘a colonial frame of mind’ among settlers who were becoming increasingly aware of the growing threat from the world’s great republic to the south, and from Catholic, French-speaking Quebec to the east.96 Thus, by the early 1900s, the Order was a social and political force to be reckoned with.97 In 1867, the Orange Order was renamed the ‘Imperial Grand Orange Order of the World’. This new title neatly captures the way in which the
90 Harper, Adventurers and Exiles, p. 357.
91 J. M. Bumsted, ‘Scottishness and Britishness in Canada, 1790–1914’, in M. Harper
and M. E. Vance (eds.), Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova
Scotia, c. 1700–1990 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1999), p. 99; Harper, Adventurers and
Exiles, p. 359.
92 Richards, Britannia’s Children, p. 230.
93 R. M. Sibbett, Orangeism in Ireland and throughout the Empire, 1688–1938
(Belfast: Henderson and Co., 1914), 2 vols., Vol. II, pp. 522, 541.
94 C. J. Houston and W. J. Smyth, ‘Transferred Loyalties: Orangeism in the United States
and Ontario’, American Review of Canadian Studies 14 (1984), 193–211 (quotation from
p. 197), and The Orange Order in Nineteenth Century Ontario: A Study of Institutional Cultural
Transfer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); D. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Orange Order’,
paper given to Ireland and Empire workshop, University of Leeds, March 2006.
95 The total membership is uncertain but was certainly well into the tens of thousands in
Ontario. See here H. Senior, Orangeism: The Canadian Phase (Toronto: McGraw-Hill
Ryerson, 1972), pp. 47, 59.
96 A. Bielenberg, ‘Irish Emigration to the British Empire’, in Bielenberg (ed.), The Irish
Diaspora (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 251–72 (p. 228).
97 There were more Orange lodges in Canada than there were in Ireland – some 2,000 in
total – and many of its members held major public offices.
88empire was built into the terminology of Orangeism, but in a way that did not exclude the United States. With regard to the law, language and other facets of culture, America remained a part, if an ambiguous one, of the British diaspora. That said, the Order was weaker in the United States, where, by the later nineteenth century, there were approximately only 10,000 members belonging to some 350 lodges (6 per cent of the world’s total), largely confined to the north-east and areas adjacent to the Canadian border. Unsurprisingly, the American republic did not warm to an organisation devoted to the maintenance of British constitutional and cultural forms. Orangemen living there had to downplay their monarchist tradition and imperial sympathies, and to look instead to other ‘nativist’ groups – such as the American Protestant Association – to defend their religious interests.98 English migrants to America, meanwhile, did not tend to regard themselves as a separate group. In The American Commonwealth (1888), James Bryce, the Liberal statesman and later British Ambassador to Washington (1907–13), went so far as to suggest that the English lost their identity almost immediately on arrival in the United States, where they were ‘absorbed into the general mass of native citizens’.99 Recent scholarship supports Bryce’s claim. It shows how the American-English evinced much less concern than their Welsh or Scottish counterparts for ‘old-country culture’,100 and were thus less likely to form ethnic communities or to produce ethnic publications.101 Moreover, in so far as they did exist, English immigrant institutions were less elaborate than those of the Scots, Welsh or Irish: the English in America did not sense their culture was under threat and so felt less of a need to preserve it.102 They were joining a society that was, in some measure, already familiar to them by
98 Houston and Smyth, ‘Transferred Loyalties’, pp. 194, 200, 206.
99 J. Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1888), Vol. II,
pp. 360–1.
100 R. T. Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America (New Haven: Harvard University
Press, 1953) p. 176.
101 W. E. Van Vugt, Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth Century Immigrants to the United
States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 4.
102 A. Murdoch, British Emigration, 1603–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),
p. 117; O. Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 161; B. Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England
and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), p. 143. There were,
of course, exceptions. In the late nineteenth century, the Sons of Malta, the Sons of
St George and the Albion Society were active in bringing Englishmen together in the
American West, but such organisations appear to have been less prevalent among the
English than among other nationalities. See C. C. Spence, British Investments and the
American Mining Frontier, 1860–1901 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958),
p. 13.