Change Everything No 13: Special Midweek Edition on Migration History

Reading Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Worker in Industrialising Europe, 1815-1870

It didn’t start in the 1970s

British economic migrants have been heading to Europe for a very long time, as Artisans Abroad, by Fabrice Bensimon makes clear. This didn’t start in the era of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. (Sorry the book is horribly expensive; I got from the London Library new books’ shelf. Maybe you could get it from your local library?)

The book digs into records to try to get down the social scale, right to illiterate linen spinners and railway navvies. It was not just servants travelling with middle-class and higher Britons who got to experience the culture shock, and pleasures, of the Continent in the 19th century, although there were certainly been plenty those. And there were also just men and women from ordinary backgrounds with wanderlust.

So the fascinating William Duthie (1819-70), who was trained as a goldsmith, although his father was in debtors’ prison, jumped on a trading schooner to Hamburg, then tramped to Altona, Leipzig and Vienna, working along the way until he got to Paris, where he spent 17 months, “working in a workship with three Russians, two Germans, an Italian and a Frenchmen.” Marrying back in London, he settled in Islington and published A Tramp’s Wallet, stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France (1858). And happily available on Project Gutenberg.

But probably mostly always to remain nameless are linen and jute spinners and female workers in machine lace who moved to a land where they did not speak the language and can have known little of what they were getting into. Take for example linen and jute workers from Ulster and Dundee. Men were employed as carders, mechanics and foremen, the women, often wives and sisters, as spinners and winders. (p. 109) (And there’s a rather nice account of the Belfast linen industry here and an account of Scottish wheels in the National Collection here.)

Although Bensimon finds the name of one, wonderfully bolshie, worker Jess Young, probably from Dundee, from the records of a French labour court in Ailly. She refused to “care for both sides of the spinning frame”, saying she had only done one side in Britain. “She might be the Jessie Young, a linen spinner from Dundee, who worked in 1848 at the La Foudre factory in Petit-Quevilly, from whence she had to leave with other workers in March 1848.” (It was only 70 miles from the site of the court case.) (p. 116)

Although focused on migrants, in telling their story Bensimon manages to provide a lot of detail about the lacemakers of Nottingham. The lace runners in 1840 there went on strike against the intermediary mistresses or agents. Their address ‘To the Lace-Runners of Nottingham” is quoted: “No wonder that misery enters our dwellings - that we are in the depths of poverty; that our children are crying for bread, while there is a swarm of locuts hovering between us and the manufacturers, ready to devour one half of our hire, it is not enough that we have to compete with machines.” (p. 132) Sadly, after three weeks the strike was defeated, despite a protest march of up to 600 through Nottingham.

My favourite character in the book did not emigrate, but is a rare working class 19th-century woman who wrote a book and had it published. Mary Bailey was a Nottingham lace embroiderer and wife of a tailor. ((The city was a major centre of the lace industry.) She published, in 1826 Poems: Humorous and Sentimental, with the help of 91 subscribers, of whom 68 were women, their names published in the back. Her obituary in 1828 recorded that she learned to read and write while a ladies maid “to a family of rank and title”. She’d born at least 11 children, the youngest just six weeks old when she died of an “inflammation fixed on her lungs”, according to the obituary, for which she could not afford treatment, her husband being long-term sick. (p. 165)

She has the same kind of political awareness that you find with Mary Hutton, the Sheffield Chartist poet who was her contemporary. So Mary Bailey, who would have worked 12-14 hours a day in her home, in a darkened space because it was thought light would damage the lace, wrote in a ‘Petition to the British Fair’

You ladies of Britain, we most humbly address,

And hope you will take it in hand,

And at once condescend on poor RUNNERS to think,

Who dress’d at your glasses you stand.

How little you think of that lily white veil,

That shields you from gazers and sun:

How hard have we worked, and our eyes how we’ve strain’d,

Wheth those beautiful flowers we run.

View the fall-room, where beauty beams round,

And shines with such elegant grace,

And think you in no ways indebted to us -

The RUNNERS of NOTTINGHAM LACE.” (p. 104)

But back to the migrants, and imagining their experience. They would mostly have had little education, mostly Sunday school. “In 1856 in Landerneau, out of 93 Scottish workers, 51% of the men and 84% of the women could not sign their employment booklets (livrets de travail); that is below the average literacy rates in Scotland.” (p. 145) Although some managed, like surely, Marine Cusine, 31, “the only foreigner living with 604 French people in Cliponwille”. (Recorded in the census, we know nothing more.) (p. 145)

Although there are always, of course, the annoying prodigies. (I say as one who struggles with languages.) “Former Chartist and temperance lecturer Robery Lowery (1809-63) remembered a shoe maker named Thomas who had gone with him to Paris in a deputation ‘to assure the French that the English people did not sympathise with the acts of Lord Palmerston’, probably in the early 1840s: ‘He could speak French fluently … a native of Cornwall, was apprenticed to a shoemaker at Falmouth, where he acquired his French from mixing with the French boatmen who came there. This he afterwards improved by books. He was thus frequently called in to interpret at the principal hotel… Afterwards a German ship with emigrants for America was wrecked near Falmouth in the autumn, and the Germans had to remain until the spring before they could proceed on their voyage, some of them lodged at his mother’s and he became very intimate with one of the young women; he got the rudiments of the German from her, which he followed up by books until he could read, write and speak it fluently.” (pp. 144-5)

But most were getting along by the sweat of their brow, and perhaps the help of stereotypes, which assumed the meat-eating English were tougher than the “deprived” French, plus they brought the skills acquired through earlier industrialisation.

“In Charenton, near Paris, where Manby and Wilson ran an ironworks, there were 248 British workers in 1824. With their families and a few other Britons, this community, one of the largest in France, totalled about 640 people. By October 1825, the factory was reported to employ 350 British workers, alongside 350 French ones. In Calais, there had been a continuous inflix of British lace workers since the 1810s… thousands of British workers and their families lived there,… although not all were lacemakers, as they included publicans and other trades, a large proportion were, including women and children. In Calais as in Britain, it was common in lacemakers’ families for women and for children at an early age to work in the embroidery and the finishing parts of the process.” (pp 40-41)

Of course, this was only a small part of the mass flow of migration from the UK over the century and later. “For example in the 1815-52 period in Britain, 2.37 million passengers (including non-British) left UK ports for overseas destinations (excluding the Continent) and from 1853-1869, 2.68 million Britons left.” (p. 43) There was a particular flood of miners out of Cornwall (from which one side of my family a couple of generations back is said to descend) - “in the last quarter of the centry … 40 per cent of Cornwalls young adult males and over 25 per cent of its yound adult females”. Most didn’t go to the Continent, however, although their skills were attractive.

“In 1840, Joseph Locke was appointed engineer for the Paris-Rouen line… When it came to organising its construction, including four long tunnels and five viaducts across the Seine that were all technically challenging and required a large workforce, Mackenzie and Brassey made their calculations and resorted to British subcontractors… In total, 2,000 to 5,000 British workers most of whom were itinerant navvies, crossed the Channel and moved long the line as it was built, or sometimes from one line to another.” (p. 84) The French still used wooden shovels and “basket” wheelbarrows, the British brought their own, superior, tools. They had learned their skills in the “canal mania” of 1760-1830, then that quickly transferred to railways. Maddox Brown Work paintings are suggested as a symbol of this.

And it was deeply dangerous work. “One rare navvy autobiographer born around 1820 remembered working in a tunnel ‘for about three months’. ‘It is rather chokey kind of work, all done by candle-light, and the smoke makes the air thick and misty.’ He recorded a terrible experience in Dorset. “I was in a tunnel that fell at both ends. There was only one man and me and some horses buried in it, and he drove a hole through the ground (he was about eight hours doing it) and then he and me got out, and left the horse in for three days and nights.” (p. 88)

Movement wasn’t necessarily for extra wages, sometimes it seems they may even have been lower, but so also the cost of living. And “The British economy was unstable in these years, and for a British worker lower wage rates overseas might not mean lower income overall if there was greater certainty of employment.” (p. 53)

This was the period of British industrial lead: “In iron, following the two key technological breakthroughs of Berny’s smelting of iron with coke at Coalbrookdale in 1709 and Henry Cort’s method of bar iron relying on puddling and rolling in 1783-4, the British acquired a significant lead in the sector, while on the Continent older techniques were still used. In the decades that followed the Napoleonic wars, the ‘forge a l’anglaise’ which combined puddling furnaces to produce wrought irons and rolling mills for shaping was a must across western Europe… In France, Belgium and the west of Germany, a series of iron works were set up in this period, which marked the beginning of large scale iron manufacturing on the Continent. In each case, the technological input of British workers, especially Welsh puddlers and rollers, proved crucial.” (p. 75)

An accessible read, Artisans Abroad, and so many great stories of subaltern history. Would be good OUP if it was available at an accessible price?

Almost the end

Since we are on the garment industry, and thinking how this was once such an expensive product despite its makers being paid a pittance, shifting to the current day, makers are still paid a pittance, but “fast fashion” is being sold for little more. Of which the standout business in Shein. Even I, who buy virtually no new clothes, get bombarded with their adverts online, not to mention their presence no billboards all over the Tube, with images that always make me wonder how little the seamstresses must be paid.

Founded in only 2008, and now apparently ready for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) at $60 billion (down from a top valuation of $100 billion), the US may reject it over slave labour concerns, but the UK is apparently keen to leap in to be Shein’s stockmarket home. Standards? Not apparently for us…

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