89Overseas migration virtue of previous flows of English migrants from the early seventeenth century.103
Emigration agents, railways, and shipping companies Representing the interests of colonial governments, and railway and shipping companies, professional agents were active across the British Isles throughout the nineteenth century. Their influence, especially with regard to choice of destination, could be crucial.104 Initially newspaper editors, emigrants or first-generation colonials, later war veterans or career civil servants, their task was to go into local communities, to extol the advantages of migration and to promote the virtues of particular places. To do this, they travelled widely in their districts, distributing pamphlets, delivering lectures, organising agricultural displays and, most important of all, corresponding with and interviewing potential migrants – personal contact and persuasion, as well as the individual testimony of successful migrants, were key to successful recruiting.
As early as the 1840s, the New Zealand Company had a team of a hundred local recruiting agents informing people about its colonisation project. These agents made extensive use of the local press and met potential migrants in the area for which they were responsible. They raised New Zealand’s profile, and supplied potential migrants with information regarding soil conditions, the climate and food prices.105
A decade or so later, the Canadian government began to promote immigration. It opened an emigration office in Liverpool and stationed itinerant agents across the United Kingdom. From 1874 these agents were supervised by a Chief Emigration Agent, Edward Jenkins, and from 1880 by Canada’s newly appointed High Commissioner, Sir Alexander Galt. Both Galt and his successor, Sir Charles Tupper, were ‘greatly concerned with the promotion of emigration and devoted much of their time to this matter’.106 From 1899, Canadian emigration work was placed in the hands of a special Emigration Commissioner, W. T. R. Preston. He
103 Van Vugt, Britain to America, pp. 156–7.
104 On the work of emigration agents, see especially M. Harper, Emigration from North-East
Scotland, 2 vols., Vol. II: Beyond the Broad Atlantic (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press,
1988), pp. 16–18, 21–3, and Emigration from Scotland between the Wars (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 53–66; Hudson, ‘English Emigration to
New Zealand’; Hudson and Mills, ‘English Emigration, Kinship and the Recruitment
Process’, pp. 66ff; and H. Gordon Skilling, Canadian Representation Abroad: From Agency
to Embassy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1945), pp. 1, 16.
105 Hudson, ‘English Emigration to New Zealand’, pp. 684–5, 688, 690–1.
106 Gordon Skilling, Canadian Representation Abroad, p. 8.
90was responsible for the work of agents in Britain and on the European continent,107 and his role was primarily one of promotion. Agents were carefully chosen for their local contacts and knowledge. As well as distributing huge supplies of advertising material, they were expected to make direct contact with prospective migrants by giving illustrated lectures and by attending agricultural markets and fairs. Their aim was to create a mood favourable to Canada among the British public, and to advertise its advantages over other destinations. The reports these Canadian agents sent back to Ottawa were often pessimistic in tone. They highlighted the depth of poverty among rural labourers, and the higher levels of assistance provided by the Australasian colonies. Nonetheless, it is agent activity that partly accounts for the remarkable interest in Canada shown by British emigrants during the quarter-century before the First World War. From 1896 to 1906, the Canadian government and trans-continental railway companies spent 4 million dollars publicising the opportunities for settlement on the western prairies, while the Minister of the Interior, the youthful and energetic Clifford Sifton (1896–1905), completely overhauled the publicity and immigration programmes of his department, and brought Canada’s representatives in Britain under the closer direction of Ottawa.108 Sifton’s preference was for farmers and farm labourers – this was why he also made a determined effort to recruit immigrants from the American West.109 His successor, Frank Oliver (1905–1911), although similarly committed to populating ‘the last, best West’, took a different approach. He gave precedence to ethnic and cultural origins over occupation, and cared little whether British migrants came from the towns or the countryside.110 Whatever their origin, Oliver felt that migrants from the ‘mother country’ were ‘ready-made’ citizens for Canada who would reinforce its British heritage. Under his tutelage, new immigration offices were opened in Exeter, York and Aberdeen, and bonuses were paid to shipping and government agents for each labourer recruited from Britain and placed in Ontario or Quebec. Like the Canadian government, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) – the largest private landowner in western Canada – undertook immigration work. The rapid development of the prairies was essential to the
107 Harper, ‘British Migration’, p. 84.
108 M. F. Timlin, ‘Canada’s Immigration Policy, 1896–1910’, The Canadian Journal of
Economics and Political Science 26 (1960), 517–20.
109 F. Hawkins, Critical Years in Immigration: Canada and Australia Compared (Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), pp. 5–6.
110 V. Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates: Canadian Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1540–
1997 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997), pp. 79–88.
91Overseas migration expansion of the company’s passenger and freight traffic, and the CPR lost no time in launching a vigorous campaign to encourage migration from Britain.111 Its first agent was the Quebec-born businessman and journalist, Alexander Begg (1839–97), who spent four years (1883–7) extolling the attractions of rural life in Canada through a mixture of press releases, advertisements, pamphlets and posters. After only six months, Begg could report that over one million pieces of literature had been distributed in Britain. He was particularly keen on publishing settler testimonies in an effort to counteract misleading representations of Canada in the British press. The main innovation of his successor, Archer Baker, was a ‘Travelling Exhibition Van’, which is known to have notched up visits to 500 places in the year 1893, when it was inspected by well over a million people.112 From 1903, the CPR introduced its own steamer service direct to Canada in the hope of stemming the loss of those people who, having landed in US ports, then succumbed to the country’s lure.
The ‘easy dominance of the flow to the United States’ meant that the settler colonies made greater use of agents’ services to divert migrants to their shores.113 These agents, it must be remembered, were trying to recruit migrants from a relatively fixed pool. It was not unknown for them to embellish information, even if they were not quite as culpable in this regard as the railway and shipping companies, which had a not entirely undeserved reputation for peddling false impressions and making fraudulent promises.114 Some recruiting campaigns actually provoked rebuttals in the local press, either from emigrants who had taken the journey only to be disappointed by what awaited them on their arrival, or by other local figures (such as religious ministers) who took it upon themselves to go and see whether conditions in the colonies were all they were cracked up to be. In the case of the railways, however, the United States did use emigration agents extensively.115 By the mid nineteenth century American
111 H. A. Innis, A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (Toronto: David and Charles,
1971), pp. 205–6, 223–6, 292; W. K. Lamb, History of the Canadian Pacific Railway
(New York: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 218, 251–4.
112 J. B. Hedges, Building the Canadian West: The Land and Colonization Policies of the
Canadian Pacific Railway (New York: Read Books, 1939), pp. 94–104.
113 Ibid., pp. 152–3.
114 For an insightful discussion of the ‘emigration business’, and the role of agents within
it, see B. Jones, ‘Raising the Wind’: Emigrating from Wales in the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries, annual public lecture, Cardiff Centre for Welsh American Studies,
Cardiff University, 2003 (Cardiff: Cardiff Centre for Welsh American Studies, 2004),
pp. 15–20. Accessed at www.cardiff.ac.uk/welsh/resources/RaisingTheWind.pdf on 7
September 2009.
115 It is even claimed that some of the most ‘seductive’ emigration propaganda came from
this source. See, for example, Richards, Britannia’s Children, pp. 184–5.
92railroad companies were ‘the single most important factor’ in the colonisation of the region west of the Mississippi.116 Prairies had to be rapidly converted into homesteads if the railways were to generate enough passenger and freight traffic to make a profit. To provide a return on their capital, railroads thus vigorously pursued settlers. They had land of their own to sell, close to new and projected rail tracks and granted to them by government. But they also worked consistently for the colonisation of government lands. Their objective was to promote settlement of all types.
As we shall see in Chapter 5, British investors had large sums of capital tied up in the American railways. In the case of the Illinois Central Railroad, they went so far as to appoint their own investigators to assess the potential of the company’s lands. The investigators were no less than the manufacturer and radical MP, Richard Cobden (1804–65), and the agricultural authority, James Caird (1816–92).117 In 1857, Cobden published a letter endorsing the possibilities for land settlement offered by the Illinois Central. This was not entirely disinterested. Cobden had been declared bankrupt in the mid 1840s, and a sizeable portion of the £80,000 raised by well-wishers on his behalf had been invested in the railway. Meanwhile, in 1858, Caird went out to the United States to survey the company’s lands. He traversed the entire line several times, interviewing farmers, traders and leading politicians along the way. His letters to the press contributed to the Illinois Central’s sophisticated advertising campaign in England, as did his booklet, Prairie Farming in America (1859), of which thousands of copies were distributed. The booklet reminded British farmers that America was now only a fortnight’s journey away, and claimed that the Illinois lands were superior to any other in the West: cheap, fertile, available on easy credit, and with a plentiful supply of nearby labour. Where the Illinois Central led, other railroad companies soon followed. The Northern Pacific Railroad, chartered in 1864, had ‘vast areas to sell in Minnesota and further west’ – 190,000 km2 in all.118 It set up a subsidiary land company that, in turn, organised a Bureau of Immigration seeking to attract settlers to the sparsely populated and undeveloped region it served. Between 1871 and 1873 the Bureau issued a newspaper in Britain, Land and Emigration, and from its Liverpool agency it also sent out hundreds of thousands of posters, handbills and cards to its local agents. Two specifically English settlements were established in
116 J. B. Hedges, ‘The Colonization Work of the Northern Pacific Railroad’, The Mississippi
Valley Historical Review 13 (1926), 311–42 (p. 311).
117 P. W. Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonisation Work (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1934), pp. 214–17.
118 Hedges, ‘The Colonization Work’, pp. 314–42.
93Overseas migration Minnesota at this time – the Yeovil Colony (a religious and temperance group), and the Furness Colony. By 1883 the company could draw on the services of some 831 ‘active local agents’ stationed across the British Isles, compared to its 124 ‘general agents’ in other parts of Europe. An advertisement placed in a west of England newspaper neatly summed up the Pacific’s message: ‘For the amount of a single year’s rental in Great Britain, a British tenant farmer may obtain in Minnesota the freehold of a large and productive farm.’119 Yet we must not get carried away. The results of all this railroad advertising were hardly equal to the effort involved. On the contrary: the majority of British farmers and agricultural labourers appear to have made their own way across the Atlantic. The number who settled in Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri or elsewhere as a direct result of railroad propaganda was never large, and none of the farming communities that owed their exist-