96Trade unions Trade unions were lukewarm to emigration, yet there were exceptions to this rule. During the 1840s several unions in Britain began to develop colonial connections by setting up emigration funds, which were sometimes seen as an alternative to tramp relief and as an outlet for surplus labour. Thus many of the skilled craftsmen who emigrated from Britain to New Zealand in the mid century had their journey subsidised by a trade union in their home country.134 The London Typographical Society went a step further. It regularly corresponded with typographical associations in Australia to assess the state of the trade there and to report back to its members on opportunities for employment.135 Some of the emigration agents employed by the colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century also had trade union backgrounds. They (and their unions) played an important role in the steep rise in the number of assisted emigrants to New Zealand during the 1870s. One of these agents was Christopher Holloway of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union (ALU). The New Zealand authorities paid Holloway to travel throughout the colony in 1874 so that he could interview migrants and send favourable accounts of their experiences to the ALU’s journal. After his return to Britain in 1875 Holloway then took a post as a peripatetic recruiter, ‘a position he filled most effectively for the next five years’.136 Indeed, it was the ALU that probably did the most of all unions to promote emigration during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Yet it lacked the resources to do this under its own steam, and was heavily reliant on the assistance provided by colonial governments to sponsor the emigration of its members. From 1872 to 1881 it is estimated that 40,000 to 50,000 agricultural labourers and their families may have taken advantage of this assistance.137
From the early 1900s several major trade unions moved to establish overseas branches, the best known of which was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE). In 1907, the ASE had 101,837 home members, 5,209 colonial members and 3,038 American members.138 Many of its ‘globe-hopping’ members moved frequently between the mines, plantations, and railway and port construction projects across the British
Daughters of the Empire: Female Imperialism and National Identity: The Imperial Order of
the Daughters of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
134 Simpson, The Immigrants, p. 143.
135 Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, p. 69.
136 Simpson, The Immigrants, pp. 179–80.
137 P. Horn, ‘Agricultural Trade Unions and Emigration, 1872–1881’, HJ 15 (1972), 87–102.
138 Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, p. 70. For the ASE’s fluctuating Australian mem-
bership, see Kirk, Comrades and Cousins, p. 96.