93ence to these colonisation schemes grew beyond a few hundred people.120 Moreover, by the 1890s there was little railroad land left at prices that European immigrants could afford, and remaining homesteads were mostly in places unattractive to them.121 Increasingly, transatlantic shipping lines took the railroads’ place in promoting colonisation. Much of their extensive advertising was little more than the announcement of sailings and fares, as many newspapers came to incorporate regular columns of this type of information. To be sure, the shipping lines did employ local booking agents and passage brokers, who had the task of selling tickets to migrants, and who, having other occupations, often worked part-time.122 In 1890, the five biggest shipping lines had approximately 3,600 such people working on commission for them in the British Isles.123 However, interested in their own rewards, and with limited personal knowledge of the places they promoted, booking agents and passage brokers were not perhaps the best people to proffer advice to migrants, a point later emphasised by the Dominions Royal Commission (1912–17).

Charities By the late nineteenth century, migrants received help from sixty or more charities. Some of these organisations catered for special categories of

119 P. M. Taylor, The Distant Magnet: European Emigration to the USA (New York: Harper

and Row, 1971), pp. 78–9.

120 Jones, ‘The Background to Emigration’, p. 63.

121 Ibid., p. 79.

122 Passage brokers date back to the 1820s, when firms began charting vessels for transport-

ing migrants, and employed (often unscrupulous) agents to drum up business. The com-

petition between them probably kept fares lower than they would otherwise have been.

123 Ibid., p. 80.

94people; others embraced migration as a solution to the problems of the urban poor as a whole. The Salvation Army led the way. In pursuit of its goal of rehabilitating the ‘submerged tenth’ of the British population it became the largest single emigration agency in the British empire. The Salvation Army selected colonists, supervised their relocation and secured them work. By the early twentieth century it had helped tens of thousands of working-class men and women to make their way to the colonies, the majority to Canada.124 Barnardo’s was another charity involved in migration work. Along with the Salvation Army and a clutch of other philanthropic emigration agencies, Barnardo’s became noticeably more imperial in its operation from the 1870s onwards.125 This shift in policy was partly the product of imperial idealism. Edwardian philanthropists increasingly spoke of children as the ‘bricks’ from which the ‘edifice’ of empire was to be built. Thus from 1882 Barnardo’s began sending juveniles to the colonies in large numbers. By 1914 over 30,000 children had left Britain under the auspices of the society to work as urban apprentices or as servants in rural homes: 28,689 to Canada and 2,342 to Australia.126 Barnardo’s schemes were not without controversy, for a significant number of these children were effectively abducted from their parents, leaving without their consent or even their knowledge.

By the early 1900s British charities were playing a bigger part in organising overseas migration than ever before. The majority operated on a more modest scale than the Salvation Army or Barnardo’s. For example, from 1901 to 1911 the Self-Help Emigration Society assisted 5,317 migrants, the Church Emigration Society 4,327, and the Charity Organisation Society 17,631. Virtually all of them prioritised migration to the colonies over that to the United States. In 1910, they clubbed together under the umbrella of the Royal Colonial Institute to lobby for state support for empire migration, without which they argued that larger schemes of resettlement were unlikely to emerge.127

Single women were a particular focus for the philanthropy of promoters of empire migration.128 During the 1860s a network of women’s societies, working in conjunction with the colonial authorities, set about improving the management of female migration. Their aim was to ensure

124 Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, p. 157.

125 Thompson, Imperial Britain, pp. 147–50. For precursors to Barnardo’s, see the emigra-

tion work of the social reformers Maria Rye and Annie MacPherson in the 1860s and

1870s, under which a total of approximately 17,000 children emigrated to Canada;

I. Pinchbeck, Children in English Society, 2 vols., Vol. II: From the Eighteenth Century to the

Children Act of 1848 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 562–75.

126 Harper, ‘British Emigration’, p. 82.

127 Thompson, Imperial Britain, pp. 46–9, 139–40.

128 See especially L. Chilton, Emigrating Women: British Female Migration to Canada and

Australia, 1830s–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

95Overseas migration a ‘healthy’ gender balance in the colonies. They took it upon themselves to find suitable female migrants, to supervise their voyages, to arrange for their reception and protection on arrival, and to assist with funding through subsidies and repayable loans. Their major achievement was to make emigration a more respectable and less dangerous experience than it had been earlier in the century.129 Women’s emigration societies tapped into the demand for colonial female labour. With the lure of assisted passages, they recruited significant numbers of women to their schemes. A leading organisation was the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCES). It was formed in 1861–2 to find occupations for educated middle-class women, mainly as governesses. Two offshoots of the FMCES were the Colonial Intelligence League and the South African Colonisation Society, both of which also catered for middle-class women. In 1884, the British Women’s Emigration Association (BWEA) was formed. The BWEA’s interests included the recruiting and transfer of domestic servants. Rooted in Christian philanthropy and imperial patriotism, it and other kindred bodies assisted approximately 20,000 women to migrate to the colonies between 1884 and 1914.130 Of course, many British women still preferred the United States, yet female emigration societies helped to secure for the colonies a larger share than would otherwise have been so.131 Moreover, many of the women whom they helped to move to the colonies continued to participate in, and take advantage of, these networks after arrival: Membership within an empire-wide community of women emigrators and emigrants, who were linked by their ties to Britain and by their shared assumptions concerning the benefits bestowed upon colonial societies by the ­immigration of virtuous British women, provided emigrants with a frame­work within which to situate their own experiences and attitudes towards migration and settlement. For some women this sense of community was immensely helpful. It provided them with a clear sense of identity and purpose – not as outcasts from their homeland, not as foreigners to their new locales, but as participants in a mass movement of like-circumstanced British female emigrants.132 More practically, female migrants provided useful information regarding local conditions to charities back in Britain, took care of the reception of new migrants, and served as friends to those who had recently settled in their neighbourhoods and communities.133

129 A. J. Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–

1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 148–86.

130 Thompson, Imperial Britain, p. 142.

131 Van Vugt, Britain to America, p. 129.

132 Chilton, Emigrating Women, p. 261.

133 For a Canadian organisation acting as host to female migrants, and feeding back into

debate about migration in Britain, see K. Pickles’ study of the Imperial Order of the