The 'Local' Irish in the West of Scotland 1851-1921

G. Vaughan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137329837
• eBook ISBN: 9781137329844
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Vaughan renews perspectives on the changes brought about by Irish migrant communities in terms of identity, politics and religion. The book examines on the experience of generations of Irish migrants in the West of Scotland from the aftermath of the Great Famine until the creation of the Republic of Ireland.

1

Tracking Down the Irish

Abstract: Chapter 1 opens with a geographic and urban portrait of Airdrie, Coatbridge and Greenock. There follows an overall picture of Irish migrants in the Monklands and Greenock using the 1851, 1871, 1901 and 1911 census evidence (with systematic samples allowing the exploration of family patterns and the establishment of comparisons between the occupational profiles of Highlanders, Lowlanders and Irishmen). Whereas Irish Catholics could be clearly identified in Scotland, Irish Protestants have been considered to be more ‘invisible’. Yet, by a careful examination of local prison registers which recorded religious affiliations, this chapter argues that, whilst on the one hand, Irish Protestant religious affiliations differed from the Scottish ones, on the other hand, Catholic and Protestant occupational profiles were quite similar.

Vaughan, Geraldine. The ‘Local’ Irish in the West of Scotland, 1851–1921. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137329844.

One of the most notable features of Irish migration to Scotland was the steady flow of migrants throughout the Victorian era.¹ In 1851, at the climax of the migration movement, 207,367 Irish-born lived in Scotland − 7.2 per cent of the total population (compared with 2.9 per cent in England). In 1901, there were still 205,064 Irish-born recorded in Scotland, although their proportion had decreased to 4.6 per cent (3.3 per cent in 1921).²

Alongside traditional seasonal agricultural migrants, Victorian Scotland’s growing industrial sector needed a low-paid workforce – for ‘Irish settlement reflected the pull of job opportunities at least as much as the push of home circumstances’.³ Back in the 1820s, the Glasgow press readily complained of ‘the cheapness with which this Class of persons get over from Ireland to Scotland in the steam boats threaten[ing] to overwhelm the west of Scotland with the miserable beings in the lowest state of wretchedness and want’.⁴ In fact, early nineteenth-century rural Irish immigrants had settled in the South West (Wigtonshire and Kircudbrightshire) whereas industrial workers headed for Ayrshire, Renfrewshire and Glasgow where weavers and navvies were required.⁵ In his pioneering study of the Irish in Scotland, Handley indicated how the Irish had contributed to the ‘enormous expansion of the population of Lanarkshire in the nineteenth century’ which increased from 146,699 in 1801 to 530,169 in 1851, with Glasgow itself numbering 344,986 that same year.⁶ The Irish-born represented 13 per cent of the county’s population in 1841. In neighbouring Renfrewshire, one-tenth of the population was Irish-born, overwhelmingly concentrated in Paisley, Renfrew, Port Glasgow and Greenock.⁷

Departing from Glasgow, trains transported migrants to the ‘magnet’ villages and towns of the Monklands, a coal and ironstone mining region lying only a few miles east.⁸ In its centre was the town of Airdrie, a town which had acquired the status of Parliamentary burgh in 1832 and of Municipal burgh in 1849.⁹ Irish migrants had come to settle in the early nineteenth century to work in the town’s linen industry – but the increasing number of migrants in the 1840s reflected a change in the nature of industrialization, namely ‘the ascendancy of heavy industry over agriculture and handloom weaving’.¹⁰ In 1841, Father Daniel Gallagher of Airdrie reported to a Parliamentary commission that a third of the Irish settlers worked in mines whereas 54 per cent of them worked as general labourers.¹¹ Ten years later, in 1851, the Airdrie population reached 25,000 (five times its recorded 1821 population). Similarly, Coatbridge rose from being a village of 741 inhabitants in 1831 to a town of over 8,000 in 1851. The Baird brothers developed the mining of the local blackband ironstone in Coatbridge and its neighbourhood.¹² In 1841, the Parliamentary Inquiry on mining gave a vivid description of this industrial town on the rise:

At night, ascending to the hill on which the established church stands, the groups of blast furnaces on all sides might be imagined to be blazing volcanoes, at most of which smelting is continued on Sundays and weekdays, by day and night, without intermission.¹³

Further west, on the banks of the River Clyde, trade with the British colonies had contributed to the commercial and industrial growth of Greenock since the eighteenth century. In the early 1830s, as many as 4,000 Irish migrants were employed in the town’s various industries:

the rest are labouring men, many of whom work at the quays, loading and unloading vessels; others are engaged by the farmers… a good many work as ship carpenters; a great many are engaged in the sugar factories; some in the foundries.¹⁴

The town had 37,000 inhabitants in 1851, roughly a tenth of the Glaswegian population. Although Greenock’s success as a trading port was declining by the 1850s, its industries connected to the naval trade prospered, with a steadily growing number of sugar refineries, rope works and shipbuilding yards.¹⁵ The port of Greenock served Irish migrants disembarking from the steamers as well as a great number of Scots emigrating to the New World. This illustrated what T. M. Devine has identified as the ‘Scottish emigration paradox’.¹⁶ As a consequence, the harbour area was a place of tension, a symbol for many contemporaries of Scotland’s ‘talent drain’ as well as what could be perceived as the ‘invasion’ of the sons and daughters of Erin. One result of this situation was the 1855 anti-Catholic riots which started off on the steps of the Steam Boat Quay, where John Orr (known as the ‘Angel Gabriel’) excited a mob, an event which led to several days of religious upheaval.¹⁷

The census evidence

In the Monklands, the arrival of the Irish was sometimes interpreted as an ‘occupation’ of Scottish territory, as reported in the local press: ‘Go, for us, into any of our towns and villages – our own amongst the rest – and inquire or look around you, and it will be frequently difficult to say whether you are in Scotland or in Ireland’.¹⁸ This statement exaggerated the actual numbers of Irish residents. In 1851, the Airdrie Sheriff Archibald Alison stated that 15,000 Irish lived in the Monklands (out of a population of 50,000). The census samples of Airdrie and Coatbridge in 1851 indicate that a third of the inhabitants were Irish-born. In Airdrie, by 1861, the Irish represented 18.5 per cent of the total population. As regards Irish Catholics, Father Michael O’Keeffe counted 6,395 parishioners in 1868 (40 per cent of Coatbridge’s population).¹⁹ According to decennial censuses, the proportion of Irish-born ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Tracking Down the Irish
• 2  Irishness(es)
• 3  Irish Catholic Socializing
• 4  Educating the Irish Catholics
• 5  Local Politics
• 6  National(ist) Issues
• 7  The Impact of the First World War
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Select Bibliography
• Index