Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  By that time, however, the intensified Canadian recruitment campaign, coupled with the extension of bonuses to the non-prairie provinces, was generating an unremitting stream of enquiries that the Glasgow office found it ever harder to cope with unaided. So in 1907, shortly after the Glasgow agent, J. Bruce Walker, had moved to London to become Assistant Superintendent of Emigration, he successfully argued the case for an additional permanent agent to be sent from Canada to cover the north of Scotland. While Malcolm McIntyre headed the Glasgow agency, lecturing and visiting booking agents in twenty-one counties, in places as far apart as Campbeltown and Crieff, Carnoustie and Castle Douglas, John MacLennan, a Gaelic-speaking Canadian of Highland descent, arrived in Aberdeen with his wife and two children on 4 February to open a new regional office at 26 Guild Street, adjacent to the docks and railway station. He followed the usual procedures of distributing literature to individuals and institutions, liaising with booking agents and lecturing and interviewing throughout his area. His surviving weekly reports to his superiors in Ottawa supplement his more general annual reports, giving a detailed insight into the range of his activities, and in particular revealing the daunting and unremitting workload that was imposed on him. Most of his office time was spent in initiating or answering correspondence, and in interviewing ticket agents or prospective emigrants. In his first annual report he noted that the office, which was open to the public from 8.15 a.m. to 9.30 or even 10.30 p.m., six days a week, had received an average of twenty-five to thirty visitors daily, but sometimes many more. During the first week of opening, he had conducted 258 interviews, 114 of them in one day, and during the following week he interviewed 345 visitors. He also received an average of 100 letters per week, though in winter 1909—10 his incoming mail increased dramatically, and during one week in January 1910 he received a record 1,299 letters. When he arrived in Aberdeen, he was faced with a backlog of mail to answer, and he continued to send out about 100 items of correspondence a week, including maps, atlases and parcels of promotional literature. During 1908 his office dispatched a total of 7,500 school atlases and 150 wall maps, as well as 45,000 pamphlets to booking agents, who clamoured for still more in order to keep up with public demand.

  It was also part of MacLennan’s duties to inspect all the booking agencies within his territory, as well as to receive their bonus claims and forward them to Ottawa. By February 1909 he had visited — sometimes more than once — 149 of the 190 booking offices in his area, which sometimes involved making weeklong trips to the Northern or Western Isles. He often took the opportunity, during visits to outlying areas, to interview individuals who were interested in emigrating but could not readily attend his office in Aberdeen; on one occasion in February 1911 he spent six hours one evening at John Sinclair’s Elgin agency, interviewing twenty-three people, nearly all of whom he persuaded to book passages to Canada.

  But probably more important than the formal interviews were the spontaneous discussions that arose in the course of MacLennan’s attendance at markets, shows and hiring fairs all over his area. His weekly reports in May and November made frequent reference to feeing markets, and throughout the summer he was kept busy attending shows throughout the north. In July 1908 he was given the use of a motorcar (which was usually confined to England) to assist his summer campaign, and it duly appeared at seven agricultural shows, including one at Keith which was attended by over 20,000 people. In a four-week period in July and August 1909 MacLennan attended fourteen shows scattered throughout his enormous district, and he also made it his business to attend events as diverse as the weekly farmers’ market in Aberdeen and the annual Highland gathering in Braemar. In addition, he undertook an extensive lecture campaign throughout his district, sometimes arranging his speaking engagements to coincide with visits to shows or hiring fairs. He was a popular speaker who often drew capacity audiences. In the season 1908—9, he delivered a total of eighteen lectures to over 6,000 people, while many others were allegedly disappointed in their efforts to hear him. On 28 January 1909 the Aberdeen Journal reported that — as in Huntly fifteen months earlier — hundreds had failed to gain admittance to a lecture in the fishing community of Fraser-burgh; in the same month 400 turned out to hear him lecture in the small country town of Insch, while in March he was greeted by an audience of 1,800 in Elgin, the county town of Morayshire. 52

  MacLennan did not work entirely unaided. Probably his most successful assistant was Hugh McKerracher, a Gaelic-speaking Ontarion whose parents came from Glenlyon and Rannoch while his wife was from Aberdeenshire. He was appointed in May 1907 to take charge of the horse-drawn travelling exhibition wagon in the north of Scotland, as well as to assist MacLennan at agricultural shows with what the latter regarded as one of his department’s most effective means of advertising. McKerracher’s ‘singularly fortunate ’ appointment and ‘splendid work’ were warmly commended by J. Bruce Walker, Assistant Superintendent of Emigration, while the Aberdeen Journal acknowledged his skill in convincing his audience of Canada’s attributes:

  Mr McKerracher has a frank, hail-fellow-well-met sort of manner, with a good gift of speech, and an unbounded enthusiasm for Canada. He has the knack of interesting those whom he meets by the glowing accounts he gives of the great field awaiting agriculturists in Canada. He shows how Scotsmen have developed the resources, and increased the land values of the country districts, and he has been adding his quota to the number of emigrants who have elected to make the Dominion their home.

  Walker’s successor, J. Obed Smith, reporting in 1909 on the work of the Aberdeen office, confirmed that the choice of travelling agent had been vindicated in that ‘no better service could be accomplished’ than that provided by McKerracher, under MacLennan’s guidance, and he went on to stress ‘that to get more of the class of people we require we must get away from the larger towns into the smaller places, just as Mr McKerracher does among the Highlands of Scotland’. 53

  A lengthy press account of McKerracher’s visit to Carloway in Lewis in April 1911 provides a clear snapshot of the practical application of Smith’s prin-ciple:

  Behind and on either side of the waggon was emblazoned in golden letters the inspiring and much-favoured name ‘Canada’. It was readily recognised as the Canadian Government waggon, and this happy discovery was sufficient to enkindle to the highest pitch the people ’s interest and enthusiasm, and secure for the gentleman in charge … a warm, whole-hearted Highland welcome. The horses were pulled up in front of the Public School, and as the afternoon was one of bright sunshine and the occasion most opportune for exhibiting the young people’s interest in Canada, all the senior classes were allowed outside, and with gladsome shout they soon arranged themselves around the waggon. Much interest was taken in the samples of seeds of different varieties that were displayed in glass cases effectively arranged on each side of the waggon in pleasing and characteristic manner. Mr MacKerrachar [sic], in his capacity as Dominion Government emigration agent, gave a short spirited address, and when he intimated that he would give a lecture in the evening on Canada, illustrated with magic lantern views, the announcement was greeted with loud hurrahs for Canada and the maple leaf for ever by the boys and girls as they rushed back to resume work in school. It was felt that the evening meeting would soon be widely advertised and the issue of bills for that purpose superfluous. Before eight o’clock the accommodation of the school, large and commodious as it was, was taxed to its utmost capacity, extra seats having had to be arranged along the whole available floor space. When Mr Mackerracher [sic] appeared he found himself face to face with a large and intelligent gathering … Mr Ranald Macdonald, J.P., headmaster, who presided, briefly introduced the lecturer, proclaiming his own partiality for Canada and his strong faith in its unlimited possibilities and high destiny. His preference for Canada was enhanced, too, by the fact that many of the choicest young men and young women who had passed through his hands as pupils in the school were today scattered all over Canada, and all doing well a
s was evidenced by their occasional ample remittances to their parents at home. Mr Mackerracher [sic] spoke first in Gaelic and afterwards in English. He undoubtedly had a good subject in Canada, and while he dealt with it in all its aspects, forcefully and eloquently describing it as an unrivalled field for emigration, a country of vast extent and inexhaustible resources and of great potentialities for the future, it was felt, as view after view of scenes throughout the Dominion appeared on the screen, that with all his praise of the country in no instance did Mr Mackerracher [sic] exaggerate or overstate the case for Canada. 54

  McKerracher continued to canvass the Highlands until the outbreak of the First World War, when his horses were commandeered and he himself, being too old for active service, returned to Canada in 1915. But his effectiveness was such that, when the Canadian Immigration Department was looking to appoint a travelling agent in the Highlands at the end of 1920, McKerracher was the obvious choice. By that time, however, the Aberdeen agency to which he was attached had undergone several changes of personnel. In April 1911 — at the time of McKerracher’s visit to Lewis — John MacLennan was moved to the Liverpool office, being succeeded by W. B. Cumming, whose grandfather had emigrated from Elgin to Canada around 1830. Both Cumming and his pre-war successors, Frederick Campbell and G. G. Archibald, stepped up the winter lecturing campaign, particularly in rural areas; there were seventy-seven such lectures in winter 1911—12, 103 the following year and 122 in 1913—14, delivered by the agents themselves, the office clerk, James Murray, Hugh McKerracher and Mrs H. Niblett of Winnipeg, with further talks by a number of farm delegates and unofficial lecturers, usually successful settlers who had come home to visit. Similar activity characterized Malcolm McIntyre ’s agency in the south of Scotland, where in January 1911 he addressed an audience of 3,000 in Glasgow City Hall, and in February 1912 anticipated a ‘record year’ on the grounds that agents and delegates were reporting a ‘sustained interest’ in Canada. 55

  ‘When I came back to Scotland Canada seemed to be the least mentioned and least thought about of the colonies, but a few months have changed all this’: so claimed Thomas Duncan in 1897. 56 He was not the only agent to emphasize the effectiveness of his work. John MacLennan’s weekly reports frequently mentioned the stir of interest in farming circles. In 1907 he reported that booking agents could not find enough accommodation on the ships to meet the demand from farm servants in his region, and in 1911 he claimed, ‘Canada is the chief topic of conversation in the north of Scotland’. 57 Perhaps the opposition encountered by the agents was also a reflection of their impact on rural communities, as well as further evidence of the contentious nature of agency work. In 1908 — the season after the Clarke City dispute had been batted back and forth in the local press — John MacLennan complained on more than one occasion about how newspaper hostility was creating ‘uphill work’ in the recruitment of emigrants, with a noticeable slackening of business both at his own office and at the booking agencies:

  It is a difficult matter to create any enthusiasm this year for Canada. In spite of our statements that there are ample opportunities and abundance of work for the agriculturist and Railroad laborer, yet the Press has poisoned the public mind respecting the terrible suffering claimed to exist in Canada that our work this year is going to be greatly hampered and will show a big falling off. The same condition obtains everywhere through my district. Mr Bredin our delegate did not have a single caller in some of the offices visited. 58

  Conservative newspapers such as the Aberdeen Journal were also a mouthpiece for ‘large farmers’ who, according to MacLennan, opposed the depopulation of the farm servant community. By 1910 he was acutely aware of their antagonism:

  In meeting and speaking with the large farmers throughout the district, I find the feeling growing against our work. I am told everywhere that we are taking the best men and leaving only second and third class. I am confining my lectures

  8. Advertising for agricultural settlers by the Canadian government agent, Scottish Farmer, 29 January 1927. The format of advertisements changed little after the First World War.

  this year to the purely rural districts and trying as far as possible to meet the objections and opposition raised. It is indispensable to our success that we do not antagonise too much the large farmers, as they are still a powerful force in the community. 59

  But agents’ comments on press attitudes convey a mixed message, encompassing apathy and enthusiasm, as well as overt hostility. Thirty-three years earlier, special agent James Ross had ‘found the public press in both England and Scotland, with few exceptions, either lukewarm or utterly indifferent on the subject of emigration to Canada’. 60 By 1899, however, perhaps owing to the efforts of the agents themselves, chief Scottish agent H. M. Murray could claim that Canada held ‘a good position’ in the columns of the Scottish press, and he thanked the fifty newspapers in which he had advertised ‘for the freedom with which they have granted us space for the insertion of many paragraphs and notices which might be of interest to the intending settler’. 61 And while the Aberdeen Journal was a constant thorn in the flesh of the agents by the early twentieth century, its Liberal rival the Aberdeen Free Press was regarded in a much more favourable light. In 1911 J. Obed Smith even recommended to his head office in Ottawa that its editor, John Bruce, should be given financial help with the publication of occasional illustrated supplements which advocated emigration. ‘There is,’ he wrote, ‘no better friend to Canada than this newspaper, and it has an enormous circulation throughout not only the North, but extending to the Southern parts of Scotland’. 62

  Contention, contradiction and confusion were also evident from time to time in the relationship between federal agents and those who represented the provinces, the railway companies or simply themselves, as well as in arguments between agents and their recruits. Although federal agents were supposed to promote emigration to every part of the Dominion even-handedly, in the 1870s some of the older provinces felt that their interests were being sacrificed to the goal of filling up the prairies. For that very reason, the New Brunswick authorities in 1872 granted 50,000 acres in the heart of the province to William Brown, a captain with the transatlantic Anchor Line, in return for a promise that he would establish a ‘Scotch Colony’ on his land grant. Basing himself in his home town of Stonehaven, Brown enlisted the aid of his friend John Taylor, editor of the Stonehaven Journal, as well as Thomas Potts, the Canadian government’s special emigration agent, and spent the autumn and winter on a lecturing campaign in the counties of Kincardine, Aberdeen and Banff. On 22 April 1873 he chartered a special train to take around 700 recruits to board the SS Castalia in Glasgow for the transatlantic voyage. After being piped ashore at Saint John by members of the local St Andrew’s Society, they continued 168 miles upriver to New Kincardineshire, to find a mud-and-snow-encased shanty town that bore no resemblance to the picture painted by Brown. Although ninety houses had been promised, only forty had been started, of which two were finished, the logging road into the settlement had not been opened up, and, with snow still lying two feet deep on the higher ground and a similar depth of mud lower down, only a small area had been cleared to permit the movement of heavy sledges. Not surprisingly, the views of disillusioned settlers soon began to filter back to Scotland. One angry correspondent wrote to the Montrose Review:

  The place that they had planned out for us is very bad … They said that there was about 40 trees on the acre; but 400 on the acre is like the thing. I never saw such a miserable looking place in my life. About half the colonists have left, and others are leaving every day … We have been taken the advantage of too bad I think. I, for one, could take Brown the manager, and drown him. Drowning is not bad enough for him. It makes my blood boil in my veins to think of it. The free men are not so very bad; but those who have a wife and family are very bad … Mostly all of them have left good places and come to this abominable place. Everything is very high in price, and not much work going on. If things do not
change in a month or two, I will not stop here such a long winter and nothing to do. I could not think of stopping here. The land of the colony is awful bad; some places all gravel, others all large stones, and in some places about 2 ft. 6 in. of snow … There was no ground cleared and ready for cropping as was promised to be. 63

  William Brown was an amateur agent who acted largely on his own behalf and, although he was blamed for bringing out too many pioneers, harsher criticism was reserved for the New Brunswick government, which had not fulfilled its obligations to prepare the land for occupation and planting. Provinces which sent their own representatives to the British Isles often exasperated the federal agents. After a brief truce from 1874 to 1880, the in-fighting resumed when, led by Ontario, the older provinces began to reinstate separate offices overseas, leading, in J. Obed Smith’s opinion, to public perceptions of ‘an overdose of energy to induce people to emigrate to the Dominion’. John MacLennan also felt the effect of this conflict on northern Scotland when he complained in 1907 that the provincial agent for Ontario was determined to sabotage the work of the federal agents, finding ‘general fault with everything we are doing [and going] among the agents discrediting the work of our Government in Ontario in matters of finding situations’. 64 He was also critical of some railway company agents who competed with each other and with the federal government for settlers. Others, like the Canadian Pacific Railway representative A. Moore of Calgary, were simply incompetent, for he had, claimed MacLennan, failed in his mission in Aberdeen because ‘he is not a good speaker and has not a sufficient knowledge of general conditions to enable him to answer enquirers readily and satisfactorily’. The competence of some of the farm delegates also came under fire from MacLennan and not only because they were liable to promote their own area of settlement at the expense of the claims of Canada as a whole. He complained about two farm delegates from Manitoba who held meetings in his district in spring 1908. One of these men, A. R. Bredin, although ‘very agreeable and approachable and thoroughly competent to answer questions’, was ‘not aggressive enough’ and did not take the initiative with interviewees in terms of anticipating their questions and answering them ‘without waiting’. And the demeanour of Donald Grant, who showed ‘indifference to his apparel and personal appearance’, militated against the success of his campaign. 65 Finally, relations within the ranks of the career civil servants who served as federal emigration agents were not always harmonious. In August 1912 W. B. Cumming resigned from the Aberdeen agency over a pay dispute, only a month after Malcolm McIntyre had been transferred from Glasgow to Birmingham because of an irreconcilable ‘personal disagreement’ with some officers of a Canadian steamship company operating out of the Clyde. 66