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A
topic that has somehow been largely neglected by historians of
the Irish Diaspora is that of onward, or third country,
migration (Marshall 2005: 270, n. 7; 274, n. 8; 276, n. 50).
During most of the nineteenth century North America was the
main destination for Irish migrants with, of course, many of
those heading across the Atlantic travelling via Liverpool.
But with employment opportunities available closer to home, it
is hardly surprising that many Irish migrants avoided the
greater expense, time and hardship of an Atlantic crossing and
instead sought work in the towns and cities of industrial
England. But what remains entirely unknown is how many of
these migrants hoped or expected that their stay in England
would only be as long as needed to raise enough money for an
onward passage to the United States or elsewhere nor what
proportion were successful in re-migrating to third countries.
Conditions
for Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century England were
generally grim, with some of the worst experienced by the
community in Wednesbury, in the industrial Midlands. With a
population in 1861 of 22,000, Wednesbury was one of a string
of 'horrid manufacturing towns' (RMR, Vol. 1, No. 5, 28
September 1867) linked together by chains of metal works and
furnaces merging into virtually a single conurbation to form
the iron and coal producing district known as the 'Black
Country'. The area - described by the American consul in
Birmingham as 'black by day and red by night' (Burritt 1868:
3) - both impressed observers for the vast concentration of
its heavy industries within a relatively small area, and also
shocked for the environmental brutality that had been
committed. 'The landscape, if landscape it can be called,'
wrote an anonymous visitor in the 1860s, 'bristles with
stunted towers capped with flame, and with tall chimneys
vomiting forth clouds of black smoke, which literally roofs
the whole region' (SPCK 1864: 12). The soil too was
contaminated, long having been turned 'ink-black' by slurry
and other waste, while the air was 'hot and stifling and
poisoned with mephitic odours' (SPCK 1864: 12). Industrial
noise was constant, often deafening, with an incessant bang
and clang and roar and boom of ponderous hammers thundering
without the pause of a single moment.
It
was to this environment that Father George Montgomery entered
in 1850 when he was sent to Wednesbury to establish a Roman
Catholic mission. Born in Dublin in 1818, the son of a former
Lord Mayor of Dublin, Montgomery grew up in wealthy, staunchly
Protestant, family, an unlikely background for one who would
spend much of his life serving a Catholic community in one of
the harshest corners of industrial England. After taking Holy
Orders in the Church of Ireland and then a period caring for
parishes in Sligo and Dublin, Montgomery was one of many
Anglican priests to convert to Roman Catholicism during the 1840s and
1850s. Admitted to Oscott College, a Catholic seminary in
Birmingham, Montgomery was ordained as a priest in 1849. After
a period of study in Rome, Montgomery returned to England,
lecturing to Catholics in Bilston, a south Staffordshire coal
mining community, from where he was sent to neighbouring
Wednesbury (Marshall 2005: 46).
During the 1840s, Wednesbury's approximately 3,000 Catholic
(overwhelmingly Irish) residents had been left virtually
ignored by church authorities. Due to the flood of
immigrants to England fleeing the famine in Ireland, combined
with an increase in self-confidence amongst English Catholics,
the Roman Catholic Church was stretched beyond its capacity to
meet the spiritual needs of a rapidly growing population. On
arrival in Wednesbury, Montgomery immediately set about
raising money for building work, with St. Mary's Church,
positioned astride a hill-top overlooking the town, opening in
1852. Eager to win local trust, Montgomery saw himself as both
the spiritual and moral protector of the town's Catholic - and
specifically Irish Catholic - community. Shocked by what he
considered to be the miserable and amoral state to which his
parishioners had descended in England, Montgomery felt
obliged, as a missionary priest, to play a central role in the
community to which he had been sent to serve. One of his first
campaigns was to bring a halt to the 'deadly melees' that were
a regular feature of Wednesbury Irish life, the police having
dismissed the community as too 'depraved' to make intervention
worthwhile. Montgomery soon won considerable respect and
affection from his parishioners and, financially forever in
debt and surviving on the barest of necessities, he was
admired, both locally and further a field, for living
extremely modestly (WWBA, 18 March 1871; WRCS,
19 March 1871).
As
the Wednesbury mission became secure, Montgomery concentrated
his attention on education and emigration, expounding his
views of these subjects in The Rev. G. Montgomery's
Register. [1] Published on an
occasional basis from August 1867 and circulated both within
the parish and to friends beyond, the four-page newssheet
featured a mix of local church news, passionate declarations
concerning the position in England of poor Catholics and
extracts from letters that he had received from former
parishioners emigrants living in the United States. Montgomery
was convinced that the British state was utterly untrustworthy
and was possessed with an irreconcilable hatred of the
Catholic religion. Certain that the state's recent interest in
subsidising Catholic schools was to exert control through
financial means, Montgomery called for self-reliance, urging
priests and laity to establish and maintain schools on a
strictly independent basis, setting an example with the
Wednesbury mission school. But while education remained a
major concern, it was to emigration that Montgomery dedicated
much of his energy.
Soon after taking up his position in Wednesbury, Montgomery
began receiving letters from Irish former residents of the
town who had emigrated to the United States, hundreds of whom
had settled in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. These letters
frequently contained paid passages for emigrants' friends and
relations who had been left behind in Wednesbury, a fact that
caused Montgomery to observe that his mission was in effect
serving as a depot for United States-bound emigrants.
Recognizing this reality, Montgomery felt justified in
directly intervening in the migration process, taking it upon
himself to investigate possible new destinations and to enter
into negotiations with their agents. Indeed, given the
conditions that prevailed in Wednesbury, not only did he feel
that it was appropriate to assist his parishioners to
emigrate, he felt that it was his duty to do so, declaring:
'We hear our divine Saviour saying, ‘When they persecute
you in one state, flee ye to another,' and we look whither
we may flee to obey this precept' (RMR, Vol. 1, No. 6,
19 October 1867).
Montgomery argued that if the Irish were to remain in England,
it was vital that they improve their position economically as
'without temporal prosperity - speaking of the run of mankind,
and taking people in masses - there can be no spiritual
prosperity' (RMR, Vol. 1, No. 5, 28 September 1867). He
felt, however, even a modest standard of living in England was
an unrealistic goal, with the best that he might achieve would
be 'to dress the wounds of the perishing wayfarer' (RMR,
Vol. 1, No. 5, 28 September 1867). For there to be a hope of
eternal salvation, Montgomery concluded that the Irish must
escape England, to be 'conveyed to a place where [they] may be
thoroughly taken care of' (RMR, Vol. 1, No. 5, 28
September 1867). Acknowledging, however, the Church's
ambivalent attitude with regard to emigration from Ireland
itself, Montgomery was at pains to point out that the
situation of the Irish in England was entirely different:
I
am not disturbing a people who are at home contented and
settled, but I am trying to direct their migrations people who
are on the move in search of a home. To my view the Irish in
England, considered as a body, are like the traveller in the
Gospel, who lay in the way ‘stripped and wounded and half
dead'. The poor people are wounded with five grievous wounds.
They are suffering compulsory and extreme poverty; they are
strangers in the land; they are expatriated strangers, who
have neither country nor home; their progeny is becoming
extinct in the cities and great towns of England; and their
children are apostatising from the Catholic faith (RMR,
Vol. 1, No. 5, 28 September 1867).
Montgomery first considered an Oregon settlement scheme, and
in 1853 he unsuccessfully sought funds to visit the United
States where he hoped to find wealthy Irish-American patrons
willing to finance agricultural settlements in the western
territory. Of his motives behind this plan, Montgomery later
recalled, 'it seemed to me a pity that the expatriated
Catholic peasants of Ireland should die out in the English
towns - a miserable proletarian population without religion or
patriotism.' (RMR, Vol. 1, No. 1, 31 August 1867).
Although he believed that the spiritual condition of Catholics
in the United States was slightly better than was the case of
those in England, he lamented the danger to faith and morals
that Catholics continuously faced in both of these
Protestant-dominated countries. Considering the negative
influences in both England and the United States, Montgomery
was keen to encourage migration to a Catholic country, one
where the Irish would enjoy protection, security of faith and
morals, impossible, agreed Henry Formby, a fellow Catholic
priest and admirer of Montgomery, either in England or in 'the
mixed and often godless society of the United States' (Formby
1871: 10-11).
Rejecting the United States, Montgomery instead looked towards
South America as a possible destination for the Irish poor in
England. How exactly he became such a fervent proponent of
Brazil is not entirely clear but he was clearly attracted by
the Brazilian government's land colonisation programmes that
sought to encourage independent family farms. Montgomery
maintained that agriculture, rather than manufacturing or
industry, was the more 'eligible' way of life, and was
convinced that 'as God had given the earth to the children of
men', it was the necessary work of both 'enlightened
statesmanship' and 'Christian Charity' to assist families of
destitute workers to migrate overseas where they could take
possession of uninhabited fertile lands that were awaiting
exploitation (Formby 1871: 11-14). Montgomery himself recorded
that he began to seriously consider the practical possibility
of Brazil as a destination for emigrants from the British
Isles in 1866 after reading an article in the Standard
(6 April 1866), a London newspaper. 'In no latitude,' the
article extolled, 'can there be discovered greater national
wealth. The surface is enormous, the soil exuberant, the
seaports are magnificent, the navigable rivers unparalleled,
the mines inexhaustible; and yet Brazil pines for people.'
With such a country apparently yearning for immigrants,
Montgomery entered into correspondence with the article's
author, said to be an Englishman who had lived in Brazil for
fifteen years. Encouraged by all that he heard, Montgomery
went on to canvass the opinions of others who had first-hand
experience of the country. Amongst these was Joseph Lazenby,
an Irish Jesuit at the Colégio do Santissimo Salvador in
Desterro, the capital of Santa Catarina, who told him of an
apparently successful agricultural colony in the southern
province largely inhabited by Irish men and families from New
York. Having satisfied himself that Brazil (and in particular
Santa Catarina) was 'a fit place for the settlement of poor
Catholics astray in England' (RMR, Vol. 1, No. 2, 28
September 1867), with support growing for the emigration
scheme - with some going so far as to believe that Brazil
offered the best hope of an Irish cultural renaissance, with
the Irish language being the future language of the settlement
(UN, 15 February 1868) - Montgomery began to take
practical measures to assist his parishioners to emigrate.
Oliver Marshall
[1] The first issue (Vol. 1, No.
1) of The Rev. G. Montgomery's Register is dated 31
August 1867. The only known surviving copies of the newssheet
are held by the Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives, St. Chad's
Cathedral (ref. P303/6/2). The last issue in the collection is
Vol. 1, No. 13, dated 4 July 1868; issue No. 7 is missing.
References
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WWBA - The Wednesbury and West Country Advertiser
(Wednesbury). |
