Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  13. Jessie MacLaren McGregor (1863.1906), MD Edinburgh 1899, was one of the first women medical graduates of Edinburgh University. She emigrated to the United States but within a few days died as a result of spotted mountain fever following a tick bite.

  included many former military and naval officers, although Catharine regarded with a mixture of amusement and irritation the egalitarian attitudes that ‘the inferior class of Irish and Scotch’ settlers soon acquired from their ‘Yankee ’ neighbours. Susanna, who also arrived in 1832 and, like her sister, regarded emigration as an act of duty rather than pleasure, was horrified by her first glimpse through the dense forest of the ‘miserable hut’ where the family was expected to settle, although she too soon became not only reconciled, but enthusiastically devoted, to her adopted country. 66

  Most female emigrants were anonymous, however, offering only fleeting glimpses of their experiences in letters and diaries. Some, like Mary and Betty Stocks, emigrated in family groups as the wives, mothers and daughters of farmers or — less frequently — tradesmen. Maggie Wallace eventually went to Manitoba in 1904, more than twenty years after her brother William had first asked her to join him and his brother on their homestead ‘to cook our meals, keep the house and dairy clean, and stitch our garments’. Beseeching her to ‘give the country a trial for a year’ and encouraging her that she could easily find work in her profession of teaching ‘if at any time you should discover that you did not like the farm work’, William also promised to arrange her return home if she did not like Canada. Until 1904, however, Maggie was unconvinced that there was any ‘great necessity’ for her to emigrate, and when she did at last agree to go, it was to take up a homestead which William had secured for herself and her husband. 67 Most of the Scottish women who feature in the Saskatchewan pioneers’ questionnaire also came in family groups to settle on homesteads. They included Margaret Smith from Linlithgow, who recalled the difficulties of having to live in a tent with her husband and four children after they arrived in North Battleford in 1906 to find ‘not a house, nothing but prairie … no where to eat and no where to sleep’. That winter, according to another 1906 arrival, Jessie Ross from Aberdeen, brought temperatures of up to sixty degrees below zero. Six months after her husband emigrated, also in 1906, Margaret McManus from Lanark followed with her children and sister, only to find that her letters had gone astray and she had to remain in the immigration hall in Saskatoon for six weeks until he could collect her and take her on a two-week journey to their homestead, across a trail strewn with buffalo bones. Like Margaret Smith, she lived initially in an earthen-floored sod house, until after six years ‘the walls began to give out, & the rain came in’. 68

  Women who emigrated in company with, or at the behest of, their families attracted far less contemporary attention than those who went out on their own. Large numbers of single women took up positions of domestic service or factory work, some in response to the advertisements of recruiting agencies and others under the auspices of employers and emigration societies. Others forged careers as teachers, governesses and nurses. Although British emigration was largely unregulated, there was a clear element of social engineering in the activities of female colonization societies, which steered women to the empire, where it was hoped they would both exert their ‘hallowing influence ’ and redress the chronic gender imbalance. Indeed, perhaps the main distinguishing characteristic of British female emigration was the way in which it was explicitly harnessed to the cause of imperialism, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, although many of the emigrants may have been blissfully unaware of that wider agenda. Women were also less likely to be itinerant, and those who anticipated or experienced the loneliness of a backwoods farm or prairie homestead may — like Margaret Farquharson from Logie Coldstone — have been more prone than men to doubts and disillusionment.

  The specific encouragement of independent female emigration began in the era of systematic colonization, when attempts were made by the British and colonial governments, assisted by a number of charitable societies and individuals, initially to repair the gender imbalance in Australia and then to send selected female emigrants to Britain’s other settler colonies. From about 1870 the campaign took on a new lease of life in response to the economic depression in Britain, and for more than three decades after 1884 the British Women’s Emigration Association dominated the organization of sponsored female emigration, supervising the work of many smaller provincial associations. The twin arguments that had produced the earliest schemes to assist women emigrants — ‘civilizing’ the colonies and reducing the chronic surplus of women in Britain — were re-emphasized, not only with respect to working-class women but also as a legitimate means of improving the status and prospects of ‘distressed gentlewomen’. The widely publicized and chronic shortage of domestic servants overseas was commonly cited as a major justification for the societies’ activities, though they also pointed out that in the colonies a competent woman who earned her own living was treated as a social equal by her employers, while women who still balked at the idea of domestic service were promised employment as teachers, nurses and mothers’ helps. Women were also encouraged to believe that, as well as remunerative and congenial employment, they would stand a better chance in the marriage market than they would at home. By the turn of the century the case in favour of the emigration of educated women was greatly strengthened by the popularity of the eugenics movement and the upsurge of imperialistic sentiment. While the eugenicists recommended emigration as a short-term device for eradicating the ongoing surplus of women in Britain, they advocated it primarily as a means of promoting racial purity in the colonies. These ideas were readily adopted by the female emigration societies, which increasingly embraced a wider, imperial function, particularly after the Boer War. Recruits were told that they were ‘missionaries of empire’ who were setting forth not only to fill positions of employment but ultimately, and more importantly, to become the wives of British settlers and the mothers of a future British colonial generation.

  Such arguments did not go unchallenged. While commission-hungry booking agents were criticized in the colonies for irresponsible, indiscriminate recruitment of unsuitable and shiftless women such as Mary Rait, Isabella Mitchell and Rose McIntyre, emigration societies were accused of a more insidious conspiracy to export a surplus female population from Britain. In the 1830s complaints had centred on the moral and physical shortcomings of workhouse girls sent from England and Ireland to Australia, but by the end of the century concern was also expressed about the attitude and aptitude of ‘genteel’ emigrants who were said to be pretentious and incapable, despite the societies’ assurances that, once trained in basic domestic duties, they would be more adaptable, reliable and socially acceptable than working-class emigrants. From the home perspective, however, the insatiable colonial demand for domestic servants provoked much criticism that emigration societies which assisted the removal of these women were depleting Britain of a scarce, rather than a surplus, commodity.

  The societies sought to counter domestic criticism by insisting that they recruited primarily from the ranks of shop and factory employees, or among middle-class girls who would never consider going into service at home. They also claimed that the highly specialized servants required for domestic service in Britain were unsuited to the more basic needs of colonial employers. At the same time, they tackled colonial criticisms of the girls’ calibre by implementing rigorous vetting and training programmes. The British Women’s Emigration Association worked through local committees, scattered across the country, made up of voluntary workers who made an initial selection of candidates, helped them complete their application forms and checked their references. The final decision lay with the BWEA’s London headquarters, which booked the passages of successful applicants and authorized loans of the fare where necessary. Hostels were opened in Liverpool and London to house emigrants before they sailed, and reception centres at the debarkation po
rts looked after them on arrival and generally forwarded them to places of employment.

  Scottish women were often recruited and assisted in their own localities. In 1850 nineteen young women from Shetland — where there was a gender imbalance of three to one — were sent to Adelaide with the assistance of Lady Franklin and a committee of philanthropists in Lerwick. All found work within twenty-four hours of their arrival, and the average wage of 5s per week represented untold riches to girls who had rarely earned more than 8s per quarter at home. 69 During the 1860s and 1870s several inmates of the Female School of Industry in Aberdeen were sent overseas, particularly to Otago and Victoria, thanks to the fund-raising activities of the school’s governors, Farquhar Spot-tiswoode and his wife, who were convinced that assisted emigration relieved pauperism and snatched some of their most vulnerable recruits from the jaws of prostitution. 70 But perhaps the best-documented Scottish female emigration agency was the Aberdeen Ladies’ Union, which between 1883 and 1914 oversaw the emigration of 330 women, primarily to Canada, under the patronage of the dynamic Ishbel Gordon, Countess of Aberdeen. The ALU did not concern itself solely with emigration. Its aim was to coordinate women’s welfare work in the city of Aberdeen, and to that end it operated recreational and educational clubs, a servants’ training home and an employment registry. But the sponsorship of emigration was always integral to its work, and was reinforced by Lady Aberdeen’s three-month sojourn in Canada in 1890, followed by a five-year residence from 1893, during her husband’s tenure of office as Governor-General.

  When the Aberdeen family first visited Canada in 1890, they were accompanied by eight household servants, all of whom remained in the Dominion with their employers’ blessing. During their travels in 1890 and 1891 they encountered several girlswho had emigrated from their own estates, including onewho, despite the birth of an illegitimate child, was still in service with her original employer in Kingston and another who was farming with her husband in British Columbia, raising fruit and vegetables to sell to the miners and railway construction workers in their area. Lady Aberdeen was particularly satisfied with the operation of her seven-year-old emigration scheme, which had initially seen her recruits dispatched under the care of her friendWilliam Quarrier, along with his parties of home children. After 1889 she utilized the facilities of the BWEA to transport the girls and secure repayment of their loans, while at Quebec and Montreal theWomen’s Protective Immigration Society generally found immediate work for the new arrivals. Contacts were also established with theYWCA and the Girls’ Friendly Society, and from 1897 the Girls’ Home of Welcome in Winnipeg made particular efforts to attract Scots. Although more generous donations and prompt repayment of loans would have allowed the scheme to expand, there were advantages to a small-scale operation, which — if we are to believe the union’s annual reports — met with the approval of both employers and recruits. ‘Nice healthy sensible girls’ was the verdict of Jane Evans, secretary of theWomen’s Protective Immigration Society in Montreal, on a contingent that arrived in June 1886, while Robert Acton, immigration chaplain at Montreal, who supervised a large transatlantic emigrant party in 1889, singled out seven Aberdeen girls for particular commendation, and wrote to the Ladies’ Union committee that ‘we could readily place 500 more of the same kind’. Several girls encouraged friends and relatives to join them, including a group of Winnipeg hospital ward maids who returned to Aberdeen in 1895 to persuade their friends to accompany them back to Canada, while another Winnipeg recruit reported in 1896 that ‘everything was much better than we expected’. 71

  It is difficult to know whether such sentiments were representative, and whether the experiences of the majority of female emigrants exceeded or disappointed their expectations. Glowing testimonials reproduced in fund-raising reports are clearly suspect, as are formulaic letters in promotional magazines such as The Imperial Colonist. Lady Aberdeen’s perception of the treatment of female emigrants at Quebec was very different from that of some of the new arrivals. Visiting the reception centre in 1893, she described the facilities:

  The arrangements are all v. well made. There is a large long central sort of hall where they go on arriving with their baggage & sit & rest. In this place there are stalls where they can buy provisions for their journey & also socks, books etc. We asked what they bought most & found it was cheese — then tins of condensed milk, coffee, tongues, sausages etc. Out of this room there is the dining room, where preparations for very comfortable meals, breakfast, dinner were being made. Each meal can be had for 25c. Then there are a limited number of rooms upstairs where girls arriving without friends or who are not well can stop for a few days free, or are found places for. Then there is the place where all the steerage passengers baggage have to be fumigated, with the exception of articles of leather, & books, & then we looked through one of the colonists sleeping cars where the seat makes into berths for which bedding can be purchased for $2.25. 72

  Lady Aberdeen’s impressions were corroborated by the booking agent H. W. J. Paton, who described the care taken of the girls on board ship as well as the careful arrangements made for their reception and employment by the Toronto lady superintendent, Mary Carmichael, and her colleagues in Quebec and Montreal. Chaperoned from the time they left home, they were put under the watchful eye of the chief stewardess on the Atlantic crossing. ‘The girls wear a distinctive badge,’ he reported proudly. ‘They are all berthed together on the steamer and are looked after specially in every way till they arrive at Landing Port.’ 73

  A much more negative picture of the segregation and supervision of female emigrants was painted by two women whose complaints appeared in the Aberdeen press in 1913. According to the daughter of William Miller, a jeweller in Aberdeen, her party, which had sailed from Liverpool to Quebec in May, had been treated no better than cattle, confined in a customs shed for a day on arrival and then dispatched to Montreal without food. There they were accommodated ten to a room, and the following day prospective employers ‘came to interview the live-stock’, with those who did not receive appointments being sent on to Toronto, where the procedure was repeated. Meanwhile, a domestic servant recruited by a local booking agency alleged that inadequate liaison between the Scottish booking agent, Isabella Stewart, and Mary Carmichael had left her temporarily stranded in Toronto, with no papers and no employment. Potentially more serious was the plight of those who fell victim to fraudulent agents, such as Joseph Christie, an erstwhile town councillor, alcoholic and failed businessman, who in 1909 induced nine young Aberdeen women to emigrate to Nova Scotia. When the promise of a free return passage, accommodation and a year’s employment as herring filleters and gutters in Halifax did not materialize, the destitute girls were taken under the wing of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the North British Society while jobs were found for most of them in domestic service. 74

  Most emigrant accounts bore out agents’ assurances that conditions for domestic servants were better abroad than at home. Elspet Knowles wrote home enthusiastically to her local newspaper shortly after she emigrated from Stone-haven to New Brunswick:

  You may tell all the servant girls about Stonehaven that I never was so well off. The people here are not so proud, and their servants live as they do themselves. You get a nicely-furnished room for yourself — a mirror you can see yourself in from top to toe. You could have your clothes warm every morning if you chose, for there is a stove that burns all night, and pipes running through the house to keep it warm. The servants in Stonehaven do not enjoy the same comfort as the servants in St John’s, although they work for little more than half the wages. 75

  Elspet’s appreciation of modern conveniences and social equality was echoed by Maggie Masson, who in 1913 emigrated from Whitehills in Banffshire, with no complaints about the situation secured for her by Isabella Stewart. Everything was ‘so much easier than in the homeland’, she wrote to Mrs Stewart. ‘We have a lovely electric washing-machine, so we can sit and eat bre
akfast and have the washing going on at the same time. We dine at the same table as the master and mistress, and travel first-class with them. I cannot thank you enough for recommending me to a good family.’ 76

  Elspet Knowles and Maggie Masson had emigrated to better themselves, and would have been disappointed if their experiences had not matched their expectations. For Mary Williamson, however, a convict transported from Aberdeen to Australia in 1845, the experience of enforced emigration was on the whole more positive than she had expected, as she explained in a letter to the governor of the East Prison:

  We had a prosperous voyage, and my child, little Margaret, was permitted to accompany me. She is in the Orphan School, a most excellent institution; and, let me tell you, Government is our best friend, for settlers in these parts are selfish in the extreme; for, regardless of our toil, they ‘spur a free horse to death.’ For want of discrimination they confound the good with the bad, and, by this means, we are glad to fly to the female factory at Paramatta for shelter, gladly accepting of an asylum there to shield us from the tyrannical oppression of our merciless mistresses; but as there is never a rule without an exception, so there are some good ladies who get bad servants. If we were not prisoners, this colony would delight us. 77