Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria

Culture, Conflict and Migration Culture, Conflict and Migration The Irish in Victorian Cumbria DONALD M. MacRAILD Unive...

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Culture, Conflict and Migration

Culture, Conflict and Migration The Irish in Victorian Cumbria DONALD M. MacRAILD University of Sunderland

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 1998 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS Senate House, Abercromby Square Liverpool, L69 3BX

Copyright ß 1998 Donald M. MacRaild The right of Donald M. MacRaild to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 0–85323–652–6 cased 0–85323–662–3 paper

Set in Plantin by Wilmaset Limited, Birkenhead, Wirral Printed and bound in the European Union by Bell & Bain Limited, Glasgow

In memory of my grandfather, Frank Ward

Contents List of figures and tables Note on the text Preface Acknowledgements 1

Culture, conflict and migration: themes and perspectives

viii x xiii xxiii

1

2

Patterns of arrival and settlement

27

3

Work

64

4

Catholicism and nationalism

99

5

The emergence and identity of Orangeism

137

6

Sectarian violence and communal division

170

Conclusions

203

Select bibliography

212

Index

231

Figures and Tables Figures 1 2

The thirty-two counties of Ireland The principal towns of Irish settlement in industrial Cumbria

xi xii

Tables 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 3.1 3.2 3.3

The Irish-born population of the four principal countries of settlement, 1841–1901 The Irish-born population in the four main British cities of settlement, 1841–1871

6 6

Population growth in five northern counties, 1851–1901 (000s) 37 Population growth in the main urban centres of west Cumberland and north Lancashire, 1841–1911 38 The Irish-born populations of three northern counties, 1851–1891 38 The Irish-born populations of four Cumbrian towns, 1851–1891 39 Origins of the Irish-born population of three Cumbrian towns, 1851–1891 42–43 The birthplaces of the children of the Irish-born in Cumbria 45 Male-to-female ratios within the Cumbrian-Irish community 50 Male-to-female ratios among the Cumbrian Irish-born (1871) in comparative perspective 51 Average persons per Irish-headed household, 1851–1891 54 Percentage of lodgers born in Ireland 55 The workforce in Cumberland employed in coal mining and iron (and related) trades, 1851–1881 The occupational groups of adult Irish-born males in Cleator Moor, 1851–1861 Irish-born employed in the Cleator Flax and Jute

70 71

Figures and Tables

3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

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Mill as a percentage of total adult Irish-born population 75 The occupational groups of adult Irish-born males in Cleator Moor, 1871–1891 79 The occupational groups of adult Irish-born males in Barrow-in-Furness, 1871–1891 79 Occupations of male Irish-born heads of household in four Cumbrian towns, 1851–1891 84 Occupations and projected religion of the Irish-born in Cumbria, 1851–1891 85–91

4.1

The main Catholic centres of Cumberland in 1851

101

5.1

Orange lodges in Cumbria in the 1870s and 1880s 145–46

Note on the text Cumbria is the administrative county formed in 1974 from the old counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and parts of Lancashire and North Yorkshire. The Lancashire element is contained between two rivers—the Lune and the Duddon—and equates to Furness, or ‘Lancashire north of the sands’ as it was known. The term Cumbria is not a new one, and is thus deliberately employed, not as some geographical anachronism, but as an expression which immediately brings to mind more than is implied by Cumberland and Westmorland. Cumbria is also useful because it suggests that north Lancashire, the region around Barrow-in-Furness, had (and has) more in common with Whitehaven and the west Cumberland mineral belt than with the bulk of mill-town Lancashire to the south. This is a useful observation because, in terms of industrialisation (generally) and Irish migration (in particular), both north Lancashire and west Cumberland were shaped by the presence of iron-ore deposits. The main industrial towns of Cumbria—Barrow, Millom, Whitehaven, Workington, Maryport and Cleator—were, it is true, geographically isolated from one another; but, in cultural, economic and social terms, there was much to unite them. The term migration is consciously employed in this book because under the terms of the Act of Union (1801)—however invidious that legislation might have been—the Irish who arrived in England were migrants. The terms ‘immigrant’ and ‘immigration’ are more valueloaded than ‘migrant’ and ‘migration’ because they deny or ignore the legislative realities of nineteenth-century social organisation. By so doing, these terms also pander to the language of exclusion and difference which the Victorians themselves were wont to use with reference to what they viewed as an undesirable alien influence amongst them.

Fig. 1 The thirty-two counties of Ireland

Fig. 2 The principal towns of Irish settlement in industrial Cumbria

Preface There has been a quite remarkable growth of interest in the Irish in Victorian Britain over the past twenty years; prior to that point, however, very little had been written about what was, until the advent of ‘New Commonwealth’ immigration, the largest influx of people into Britain.1 Beyond the early, pioneering works of Handley and Jackson, there was little to excite would-be readers; indeed, it might be presumed that historians, in their anxiety to uncover other aspects of the social and economic impact of the Industrial Revolution, had overlooked the important roles played by ‘Paddy’ and ‘Biddy’.2 In recent years (notably since the ‘Troubles’ erupted in Northern Ireland), however, most of the major centres of Irish settlement have been brought under the microscope.3 Thus, today we have a much keener understanding of the interplay between economic development, social change and Irish settlement in the emerging towns and cities of industrial Britain. Historians are now able to draw on a plethora of micro-studies of Irish settlement, focusing particularly on single towns or industries in the major northern centres from Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire to County Durham, Northumberland and central Scotland.4 Despite recent important developments, however, there remain several key weaknesses in the current historiography. First, the bulk of studies seem to have been circumscribed by geographical limitations. Thus, general histories of the industrial period continue to be dominated by Carlyle’s ‘wild Milesians’, Engels’s Irish pig and by the ‘Condition of England’ imagery of half-starved peasants packed into the slums of Manchester and Liverpool.5 Much has been written about the Irish in those great, dystopian conurbations of industrial Britain which drew vivid social comments from contemporaries; but much less is known about Irish experiences in smaller, though perhaps more typical, towns. Second, Irish migrants are too often viewed by historians as part of a uniform, indeed homogeneous, religious group. In what might be seen as a faint echo of the prejudices of Victorian society itself, this scholarly obsession with the poor Catholic Irish has resulted in a perceived synonymity between the terms ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’. As a consequence, Pro-

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testant settlers in Britain have been almost entirely overlooked: this is despite the fact that they, and not Catholics, were the most important element in pre-1815 migrations (as the American experience has shown) and that these Ulster-born Protestant emigrants continued to leave in considerable numbers in the age of industrialisation (as settlement patterns in Scotland would suggest).6 Third, the tendency to focus on big cities and on poor Catholics has also led to a chronological foreshortening of the historian’s span of attention in which the 1830s and 1840s (though especially the Famine years) are seen as the defining moments of Irish settlement in Britain. This, too, skews our conception of the Irish, for it can be deduced that, in spite of much new work, we still know surprisingly little about the later Victorian period. It is noticeable, moreover, that these three weaknesses come together to underpin what is the key theoretical anomaly in Irish migrant studies: the belief (to which most writers seem to subscribe, whether consciously or subconsciously) that, following a few turbulent years (particularly after the Great Famine), Irish settlers quickly blended into the wider working class. This notion of ‘ethnic fade’, of absorption or integration, has, in turn, reinforced the historian’s consideration of the crisis years, because, we are supposed to believe, the 1850s and 1860s (which followed the period of classic Famine-driven settlement) were unique in terms of their ethnic antagonism and Irish ‘difference’, and that the explosion of communal violence which lit up particularly Lancashire in these decades was the last great surge of antipathetic feeling before calm restored itself. Thus, within a generation or so of the mid-1840s influx, most studies implicitly suggest, the Irish were indistinguishable from their hosts. In this conception of Irish migrant history, sectarianism is consigned to the uniquely turbulent world at midcentury; and questions of ethnic difference are seen as hermetically sealed from considerations of class. Even one of the few historians to have made a study of the Irish in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries dismisses Liverpool and Glasgow as special cases, peculiar and unrepresentative in terms of their shared tradition of deep-seated, long-lived and cross-generational sectarian animosity.7 The following discussion has, therefore, been shaped in reaction to what are perceived as weaknesses in the historiography of the Irish in Britain. The Cumbrian angle clearly suggests that a

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concentration upon the Great Famine years, followed by an acceptance of the dominant ‘ethnic fade’ argument, falls far short of the realities of Irish migrant life. Consequently, this examination deliberately eschews a Famine-centred chronology and instead offers a detailed examination of an important but non-traditional region of significant Irish settlement during the later Victorian years.8 It also attempts to integrate the study of Irish migrants with the wider developments that were shaping the new industrial culture of northern England. The reason for this approach is quite simple: Irishness, however defined, maintained a distinctiveness in later-century Cumbria which cannot be explained in terms of huge numbers (as in the Famine) or by an overwhelming Irish penetration of the political culture of a particular place (for example, New York or Liverpool). This does not mean that Liverpool, Glasgow and other archetypal centres are no longer important; but it does mean that historians, like the Irish themselves, need to fan out from the classical centres of industrial Britain to consider new areas of importance. If the tale which unfolds here might be seen as similar, on one level, to that recounted by historians writing on the Famine era, on another plane it is very different. The Cumbrian Irish who settled in great numbers from the later 1850s were not half-starved, huddled wretches, driven blindly from the reaches of Famine or pestilence; they cut very different figures from those deck passengers who staggered into Liverpool in the Black ’47, many of whom died in dark, fetid and overcrowded cellars.9 Nor were they all uniformly Catholic. Although the majority were Catholic and most were to be found in the worse classes of work, and while many lived in the worst accommodation that the Cumbrian towns could offer, this was not the most striking feature of their emerging presence there. In fact, the single and most obvious feature of Irish culture in Cumbria centred upon communal division—just as it did in the 1850s in those more frequently studied centres of reception. As in New York and Philadelphia or Liverpool and Glasgow (although admittedly to a lesser degree), the culture of the Irish communities of this part of the north west of England was shaped by two forms of ‘difference’: that which separated Protestant Irish and Catholic Irish, and that between the host population and the Irish Catholics. This latter division was increased, it will be argued here, by the allegiance between Protestants (Irish and English) through the

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networks of the Orange Order which grew massively in the 1870s. This axis of popular Toryism was important for reasons that were nebulous, although allegedly historical and clearly nationalistic. Rooted in perceptions of the Protestant ascendancy, Orangeism was given renewed and increasing relevance in the second half of the nineteenth century by several key developments. Of these, antiCatholicism was the most potent in uniting aspects of Irishness and Englishness. However, at the same time as resistance to Catholicism could bring together an impressive array of middle- and workingclass Protestants in Victorian England, the links between church, state and nation were never more obvious, nor politically relevant, than in the fierce Orange and Tory resistance to Irish nationalist organisations (in general) and the home rule movement (in particular). In addition, it is also clear that a string of national events and movements—Fenian stirrings in the 1860s, Murphyite demagoguery in the 1870s, the Phoenix Park Murders of the 1880s, anti-Catholicism and ritualism in the 1890s and 1900s, and organised manifestations of home rule versus Orange Unionism throughout—had important local and regional repercussions. Each of them played a role in determining the way the English viewed the Irish, while they all affected the way the Irish viewed both the English and each other. Thus, while this book examines Cumbria as a non-traditional centre of Irish migration, in which communal violence and ethnic tensions were nevertheless important, its revelations are important in more than a local-regional sense. For this reason, the first chapter provides a platform from which to examine the Cumbrian casestudy. Here we consider in some detail the wider issues which surround the host-newcomer/intra-Irish tensions which were associated with being Irish in nineteenth-century Britain. Not only does this chapter consider the generic influences of Orange versus Green in Britain, it also frames key questions in terms of trans-atlantic traditions of anti-Catholicism, nativism and Orange-conservatism. Here it is argued that the sectarian dimension of Cumbrian Orangeism must be seen in broad, comparative perspective. The focus of the book then turns specifically to the Cumbrian dimension and the chapters that follow can be divided into two. The first part (Chapters 1 and 2) considers patterns of settlement and work experiences, for these provide the socio-economic context of Irish settlement; the second strand (Chapters 3 to 6) evaluates the

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cultural formations of Cumbrian-Irish migrants and assesses their impact upon the wider community. Let us consider the focus of these chapters in greater detail. Chapter 2 examines Irish migrants and their emergent communities in three ways. It begins by considering the early nineteenthcentury dimension of Irish migration to Cumbria, and the increasing anxiety associated with pauper Irish and Scotch settlement. These early settlements picked up considerable momentum in the years between 1815 and the 1840s and played a major part in shaping anti-Irish attitudes long before the Famine exploded a problem into a tragedy. The chapter then moves on to the postFamine period, for it was then that the region witnessed the most significant influx of migrants. It looks at the emergence of growing and then large-scale settlement and considers in close detail (through the interrogation of five decades [1851–91] of census enumerators’ handbooks) the origins and patterns of Irish settlement in Cumbria—where did they come from and how did they get there? In this section is revealed the overwhelming Ulster origins of Cumbria’s Irish—a factor which strongly influenced subsequent cultural attachments and traditions. Thirdly, the chapter considers the social conditions of the Irish in the new communities, using census data to detail the quantitative picture of Irish community experience. This material is set against more general observations upon the state of the communities in question, paying particular attention to reports into the sanitary conditions of Whitehaven in the 1840s and 1860s and to popular agitations against living conditions in Barrow-in-Furness in the 1870s. The next chapter uses census records for five decades (1851–91) and four Cumbrian towns of significant migrant settlement (Barrow, Whitehaven, Workington and Cleator Moor) to examine the employment patterns of the Irish in nineteenth-century Cumbria. Barrow and Cleator, as the most important settlements by the 1870s, are accorded particularly detailed treatment. This analysis of occupation patterns builds on the previous chapter by demonstrating that, while the Irish in Cumbria were absent from the ranks of the middle class, they were found in most of the major occupations the region’s industries offered, and that they were far from an outcast, alien or indeed occupationally ‘different’ people. Space is also given over to consider the types of work they did, examining their significance in trades such as iron mining, shipbuilding and

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factory-based flax and jute manufacture. Tentative projections are also offered as to the religion of workers in a number of important trades. This is done by comparing census material from Cumbria and Ireland. This, then, leads to the second major theme of the book where the focus turns specifically to the question of competing Irish identities, religious and cultural antipathy and communal violence. Chapter 4 is broadly concerned with the social history of the Catholic Irish in Cumbria. It demonstrates the emergence of a strong religious community in the region and shows how the Irish were central to its development. The chapter broadly considers the often varying directions in which the Catholic Irish were pulled. It examines the role of the church, with its emphasis upon spiritual renewal and Smilesian self-improvement; it looks at the role of the priests, as ‘policemen of the faith’; and it demonstrates clearly that, while the church discouraged political allegiance to the home rule cause, Irish priests in particular were much more responsive to the realities of an Irish migrant existence which placed parish, politics and social life ahead of Cullenite notions of a perfectible and uniform Catholic practice. This chapter also considers the influence of Fenianism and official Irish nationalist politics upon Catholics in Cumbria, and a previously overlooked body of documents, relating to major parish-diocese controversy in Barrow in 1903, is used to explain the complicated relationships that existed between bishops and priests; clergy and laity; political life and spiritual life; Irish Catholics and an English church. Chapter 5 follows this examination of Catholic and Irish national cultures by looking at the antithetical history of Orangeism in Cumbria. At this point we pay particular attention to the re-birth which occurred in the region after 1870. What unfolds here is the impression that the Cumbrian region hosted an Orange network that was perhaps Britain’s third-placed, in terms of size and influence, coming behind only the Glasgow region and Liverpool. This chapter explains the ways in which Irish Protestants played a vital role in reinvigorating the movement and how their pronouncements, made through the Orange medium of a strongly Tory, loyalist and Unionist ideology, gave these working-class settlers a crucial hold on life in the new community. The chapter charts the transformation of the Orange Order from a crude, reactionary and spontaneous ‘Church and King’ mob into the organised, uniform symbol of working-class

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Toryism which came to occupy a place on the constitutional right of late Victorian politics. Comparisons with Glasgow and Liverpool are made throughout, and the growing maturity of Orangeism, and its increasingly strong bonds with the Tory party, are pieced together by examining the Cumbrian dimension of key political events, such as the home rule crises of 1886 and 1893, often through the letters of Orangemen, and their nationalist enemies, which appeared in the local press. The final chapter draws together the competing aspects of Irishness and Englishness in a detailed examination of the role of communal violence and sectarianism in Cumbrian social life in the period. It is argued here that this kind of violence was a central experience and helped to defined Irish life in the new communities. It is also clear that there remained a real prospect of Orange-Green trouble well beyond the period (from the 1850s to the 1870s) which is traditionally associated with such events. This chapter examines, in general terms, the annual outbursts of Orange-Day aggression which lit up Cumbrian life, but it also details four defining riots: the Barrow anti-Irish riot of 1864; the Murphy riots in Whitehaven in 1871; the Orange Day riot in Cleator Moor in 1884; and the Wycliffe Preachers’ riots in Barrow in 1903. These occurrences tore apart the communities in question, while each explosion also highlights key aspects of Irish-related violence. These include: the notion of wage competition; the role of anti-Catholicism in prompting violent backlashes against the migrants; the place of Orangeism in the scheme of communal disaffection; and the tension between freedom of speech and liberty. In examining these events, we will see that the spectre of violence posed real problems for Victorian consciousness.10 The scale of the violence uncovered in this chapter also demonstrates further, and beyond question, that a culture of Irishness, and varieties within it, flavoured life in places like Cumbria (unfashionable places with historians) and not just in the great centres which are traditionally associated with Irish settlement.

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NOTES 1 As M. A. G. O´ Tuaithaigh once wrote: ‘Unlike their American cousins, the Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Britain have, until recently, received comparatively little scholarly attention from historians’: ‘The Irish in nineteenth-century Britain: problems of integration’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, Vol. 31 (1981), p. 149. 2 J. E. Handley, The Irish in Scotland, 1789–1845 (Cork, 1943) and The Irish in Modern Scotland (Cork, 1947); J. A. Jackson, The Irish in Britain (London, 1963). Earlier economic historians in general accorded the Irish little in the way of analytical attention, though see Arthur Redford, Labour Migration in England, 1800–1850 (London, 1926), pp. 114–48 which (understandably, given its subject matter) discusses the Irish in some depth. See also J. H. Clapham, ‘Irish immigration into Great Britain in the nineteenth century’, Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, Vol. 5 (June 1933), pp. 596–604). North of the border, the best example of an Irish migrant dimension of economic history can be found in D. F. Macdonald, Scotland’s Shifting Population, 1770–1850 (Glasgow, 1937), pp. 77–85. 3 For London, see Lynn Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979). The Lancashire dimension is well served by W. J. Lowe, The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: The Making of a Working-class Community (New York, 1989). Much new research on Scotland can be found in T. M. Devine (ed.), Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1991). Glasgow and Liverpool have both been the focus of excellent studies: T. Gallagher, Glasgow, the Uneasy Peace: Religious Tension in Modern Scotland (Manchester, 1987) and F. Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819-1914 (Manchester, 1988). 4 F. J. Williams, ‘Irish in the East Cheshire silk industry, 1851–1861’, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 136 (1986), pp. 99–126 is a fine example of a single-industry study, while A. P. Coney, ‘Mid-nineteenth century Ormskirk: disease, overcrowding and the Irish in a Lancashire market town’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 84 (1989), pp. 83–111 proves there was Irish life in Lancashire beyond the classic settlements of Liverpool, Manchester and the mill towns. There are several fine studies of single towns in Yorkshire. See, for example, F. Finnegan, Poverty and Prejudice: A Study of Irish Immigrants in York, 1840–1875 (Cork, 1982); T. Dillon, ‘The Irish in Leeds, 1851–61’, Thoresby Miscellany, Vol. 16 (1979), pp. 1–29; C. Richardson, ‘Irish settlement in mid-nineteenth century Bradford’, Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research, Vol. 20 (1968), pp. 40–57; and ‘The Irish in Victorian Bradford’, The Bradford Antiquary, Vol. 9 (1976), pp. 294–316. The north east is very much under-studied, though R. J. Cooter’s thesis is one of the best regional studies: ‘The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle, c.1840-80’ (MA, University of Durham, 1973). The best single-town, north-east micro-study is: P. Norris, ‘The Irish in Tow Law, County Durham, 1851-71’, Durham County Local History Society, Vol. 33 (1984), pp. 41–70. Excellent Scottish case-studies are: R. D. Lobban, ‘The Irish Community in Greenock in the nineteenth century’, Irish Geography, Vol. 6 (1971), pp. 270–81; W. Walker, Juteopolis: Dundee and its

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Textile Workers (Edinburgh, 1979); B. Collins, ‘Irish emigration to Dundee and Paisley during the first half of the nineteenth century’, in J. M. Goldstrom and L. A. Clarkson (eds), Irish Population, Economy and Society (Oxford, 1981). 5 T. Carlyle, Chartism (1839); F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). For a standard representation of the Irish, see P. Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: The Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (London, 1983 ed.), pp. 178–79. Even recent monographs examining Irish settlement, however, have also taken Engels’s account at face value: Ruth-Ann Harris, The Nearest Place that Wasn’t Ireland: Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Labor Migration (Ames, Iowa, 1994). For a discussion of this trend, see D. M. MacRaild, ‘Irish immigration and the ‘‘Condition of England’’ question: the roots of an historiographical tradition’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1995), pp. 67–85. 6 For the Scotch-Irish leaving Ulster for colonial America, see James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1962), esp. Chapters 12–16; Estyn Evans, ‘The Scotch Irish in the New World’, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 95 (1965), p. 39–49; Maldwyn A. Jones, ‘Ulster emigration, 1783–1815’, in E. E. R. Green, Essay in Scotch-Irish History (London, 1969), pp. 46–68; K. A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford, 1985), esp. Chapters 4 and 5. D. H. Akenson’s Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 (Dublin, 1988) establishes the global importance of Ireland’s Protestant migrants. By contrast, only Graham Walker’s short article addresses specifically the issue of Irish Protestant migration to Britain: ‘The Protestant Irish in Scotland’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society, pp. 44–66. 7 S. Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939 (Buckingham, 1993), p. 5. John Belchem’s writings are a starting point for any criticism of ‘ethnic fade’ and any defence of the importance of the Liverpool Irish experience. See, for example, ‘The immigrant alternative: ethnic and sectarian mutuality among the Liverpool Irish during the nineteenth century’, in O. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts (eds), The Duty of Discontent: Essays for Dorothy Thompson (London, 1995), esp. pp. 231–32. See also my discussion below, pp. 2– 4. Fielding’s argument, that the Manchester Irish experience is more typical of the national picture than Liverpool’s, presents clear problems where this work is concerned. If we add Cumbria to the Liverpool- or Glasgow-type experience, and also presume something similar occurred on Tyneside (where Protestant shipbuilders from Belfast were present in considerable numbers), and acknowledge that sectarianism was perhaps more virulent in towns such as Preston and Oldham (post-1850) than it was in Manchester, then the pendulum swings markedly towards Orange-versus-Green culture as a common cultural experience for a majority of the Irish in northern Britain. 8 R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989), goes some way to providing an agenda for wider approaches. Fielding, Class and Ethnicity is the best example of work that avoids the famine-centred perspectives. R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985) demonstrates the domination of famine-centred perspectives. For the most comprehensive statements on the limitations of the historiography, see R. Swift, ‘The historiography of the Irish in Britain’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide

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(Leicester, 1992), I: The Irish in the New Communities; idem, ‘The historiography of the Irish in Britain: some perspectives’ in P. Buckland and J. Belchem (eds), The Irish in British Labour History (Liverpool, 1993), pp. 11–18 discusses these issues further and also provides a plan of action for future research. 9 This harrowing end of many of these ‘settlers’ is recounted in moving detail by Neal, Sectarian Violence, Chapter 3. 10 The problem of balancing individual freedoms against severe and episodic violence, which plagued the authorities in later Victorian and Edwardian Cumbria, was similar to that uncovered for an earlier period by Donald C. Richter, Riotous Victorians (Athens, Ohio, 1981).

Acknowledgements I have accrued a number of debts during the preparation of this work, and these deserve proper acknowledgement. I would like to thank the British Academy for the award of a three-year Major State Studentship, which supported the PhD upon which this book is based, and the Institute of Historical Research for a Scouloudi Postgraduate Fellowship which gave me the luxury of a fourth ‘writing-up’ year. The final stages were made much easier in 1996 with a one-semester sabbatical from the University of Sunderland. A number of bodies allowed me to present papers based upon this research. I am indebted to the following: Ian Kershaw and the Staff-Postgraduate Seminar at the University of Sheffield for the earliest opportunity to air my views; the late Paul Nunn who invited me to deliver a paper to the Conference of Northern Economic and Social Historians, Sheffield Hallam, November 1991; F. M. L Thompson, Roland Quinault, Alan O’Day and others for kind comments on a paper presented to the IHR Victorian Edwardian Seminar in December 1992; participants at the Ecclesiastical History Conference, Nottingham, 1994 and the Victorians and Race Conference, Leicester, July 1995, which was a valuable forum for the exchange of ideas; participants in the British Association for Irish Studies conference, University of Sunderland, September 1995. I would also like to acknowledge those who published my earlier findings on the Cumbrian Irish, and who gave excellent editorial advice in the process. Particularly, thanks to Panikos Panayi and Leicester University Press; Shearer West and Scolar Press; Francis Devine and Emmet O’Connor of Saothar; B. C. Jones and W. G. Wiseman, of the Cumberland and Westmorland Society. I am grateful to the staff of a number of libraries and archives, including the Public Record Office at both Kew and Chancery Lane; the British Library newspaper division at Colindale; the Lancashire Record Office, Preston; Barrow-in-Furness Reference Library; Cumbria Record Offices at Barrow and Carlisle; Whitehaven Public Library; Cleator Moor Public Library; the libraries of the Universities of Sheffield and Sunderland; Newcastle upon Tyne Public Library. Many thanks to my old friend Colin Edgar of the

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Carlisle News and Star who provided numerous fertile leads; and to John D. Marshall who gave encouragement in the crucial early stages and whose own work is a monument to local and regional history. A number of friends, and colleagues old and new (in Sheffield, Sunderland and elsewhere) have supported me with advice, encouragement and lubrication throughout. Many thanks to: Dom Alessio, Clyde Binfield, Mike Braddick, John Burnett, Robert Cook, Richard Cawardine, Tim Cooper, Paul Dalton, John Davey, Pauline Elkes, Sylvia Ellis, Ian Kershaw, Pete Kirby, Edmund King, Merv Lewis, Roger Lloyd-Jones, Kenny Lunn, Kevin McDermott, Dave Mayall, Eliane Meyer, Andrew Milling, Parita Mukta, Panikos Panayi, Jeff Patton, Matt Perry, Mike Rapport, Elaine Robinson, Stephen Salter, Len Scales, Haicheng Song, Richard Thurlow, Peter Waldron, Peter Wilson and John Woodward. Special thanks also to L. W. Brady, Sam Davies, John Herson, Bob Morley and Ron Noon—the historians at the former Liverpool Polytechnic (now Liverpool John Moores University) who set me on my way; all the historians at Sheffield and Sunderland, not mentioned above; and to my friend Jeremy Black who is a great motivator. For comments on the final draft, I wish to thank my colleague, Tony Hepburn; Robin Bloxsidge of Liverpool University Press; and an anonymous reader for the same Press. Without my students at Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam and Sunderland, the process of writing history would have been rendered virtually meaningless: thanks to them all. My greatest academic debt is, however, to Colin Holmes and David E. Martin, who supervised the original thesis and have offered an endless stream of good advice and encouragement ever since. Finally, I must acknowledge my family, which has been a bottomless well of love and support. My grandmother, Margaret, and my parents, Neil and Wendy, have always supported me in my research; so, too, has my sister, Margaret. Of all my debts, though, the one I will most enjoy trying to repay is also the greatest: that which I owe to my wife and son, Lisa and Michael. None of the aforementioned is responsible for my errors. DON MacRAILD Whitley Bay December 1996

CHAPTER 1

Culture, conflict and migration: themes and perspectives ‘In spite of nearly thirty years in an English industrial town’, Peter Donnelly wrote in his autobiography, ‘my parents are still peasants, retaining the outlook they had when they just left home.’1 Donnelly’s family migrated—perhaps just after the Great War—from Yellow Rock, ‘a hillside in South Armagh’, to the north Lancashire shipbuilding town of Barrow-in-Furness, when he was six years of age. Like most of those who settled in west Cumbria, Donnelly was an Ulsterman by birth; unlike the majority, his early life afforded him great opportunities. Donnelly went to Ushaw college, County Durham, to study for the priesthood, but he was drummed out for a lack of application. By the age of twenty-one, he was back in Barrow—a well-educated man with a penchant for poetry, theology and classics, but without prospects befitting his education. His failure at Ushaw, and a series of dead-end jobs, bred in Donnelly a melancholy disposition which stirred the sentimental visions of Yellow Rock and Ireland which litter his musings; a love of pastoral Ireland, he repeatedly reminds us, alienated him from ‘Dirty Barrow’. At the same time, Donnelly’s writings also evince a strong sense of family and community throughout—a feeling of belonging which was, in reality, a product of life in Barrow, for the Donnellys only returned to ‘Yellow Rock’ for holidays. Donnelly’s memoir is an evocative telling of his life. It is more than merely a trip down memory lane, for it occasionally uncovers the darker side of the migrant’s world. Shortly after his ignominious return from Ushaw, Donnelly was detailed by his disappointed parents to be the family representative at the funerals of friends and neighbours—an experience which clearly lived on in his memory. Donnelly tells, for example, how the ceremony for one man, Mick Rush, left ‘an impression of loneliness which constantly intrudes upon me’. Rush, it seems, left Ireland as a young man and never returned. He was a bachelor and spent his life in lodgings. Despite

2


his evident loneliness, Rush was popular with children who cadged pennies from him, even though he would ask: ‘Where would I get it? Sure I haven’t the price of a pig’s waistcoat.’ Rush had no family in Barrow, and when he died of cancer of the mouth, only four people turned out to collect his body from ‘a slab in the workhouse’. Although Donnelly was cocooned by a close-knit family, the despair of unemployment led him to liken Rush’s lonely life to his own youthful search for an identity: As I sat there [on a London-bound train] looking at the chimneys and considering my future, I began to know the desolation of spirit which have weighed always on men like Mick Rush, in places where no one knew them nor cared who they were. God rest him.

Rush and Donnelly were separated by more things than connected them. Both, of course, were Irish; each was a Catholic; yet their experiences of education, family and community differed greatly. In fact, Donnelly’s sense of Irishness seems to have been more acute than that of Rush, even though he had migrated to Barrow as a small boy. Despite the fact that Donnelly’s sense of Irishness was as much the creation of imagination as experience, he was Irish. Yet studies of the Irish in Britain make little allowance for the likes of Donnelly, ignoring the simultaneous malleability and hardiness which featured in the identity of such people. In fact, as John Belchem argues, most studies tend to adopt ‘an unproblematical assimilationist perspective’ in which the Irish were quickly absorbed into the ranks of the host community.2 Yet this was true of neither the lonely Mick Rush nor of the dreamer Peter Donnelly. The notion that the Irish passed rapidly into the ranks of the native working class might suggest that these men were exceptional; that failure, loneliness, or some tortuous search for identity, set them apart. In the context of this study, however, the ‘assimilationist perspective’ has a perhaps greater importance as it requires a concomitant belief that extraneous factors promoting a sense of identity—for example anti-Irishness and intra-Irish division— faded quickly once the mass immigration of the Famine years had ended. Yet this research suggests that, even as late as the Edwardian years, national identities and ethnic violence had far from completely receded. The history of Irish migration to Cumbria in fact demonstrates that the internecine conflict, which characterised the mid-Victorian period, lived on for a generation or more. Far from

Themes and Perspectives

3

fading quickly with the passing of the Famine, sectarianism within the Irish communities of northern England—viewed as marginal ‘party’ strife in the early and mid-Victorian period—actually became more important as the migrants moved nearer to mainstream religious and political life. Where once Orangeism had been a marginal proletarian movement, the emergence of serious debate over home rule gave its battle-cries of loyalism, unionism and patriotism a much sharper contemporary relevance which Tory politicians and clerics were quick to utilise. Even Donnelly (writing in 1950), while jesting about some funeral he attended during the 1920s or 1930s, could slip in matter-of-fact references to sinister features of an Irish migrant’s life. ‘For some of these occasions’, he remembered, ‘I wore a bowler hat, which had been going to funerals for twenty five years, and I would not doubt that it was a turncoats hat, for its was the solemn kind of bowler which goes stolidly to ‘‘the field’’ on the glorious twelfth of July.’3 Donnelly’s biography leaves us with no idea of what life had in store for him. It was written when he was perhaps in his midthirties and begins, as it ends, with the author—a repressed spirit— aching to write great poetry and to escape the mundane regime of life in a northern industrial town. Yet, in a certain sense, Donnelly was lucky, for his vivid imagination and sharp writing skills enabled him to have a say, however brief or marginal, and to record for posterity his views. Donnelly was just one man in the rich tradition of migration to Cumbria which, though it has roots in the seventeenth century and earlier, really began in earnest in the nineteenth, when towns like Barrow emerged to attract labour migrants. Donnelly was, in fact, part of one of the most important migrations between Ireland and Britain, but one which has until now been overlooked in favour of the archetypal centres of Clydeside and Lancashire. This book clearly demonstrates that there is evidence other than Donnelly’s to suggest Irish settlement in Cumbria is of considerable significance in the period. As we shall see later, the Irish cultures of Liverpool and Glasgow were hardly unique; indeed, the Cumbrian context provides vital insights into what must be seen as a cross-regional Irish settlement with its focus on communal disharmony and sectarianism. The make-up of the Irish community in Cumbria—with overwhelming traditions of Ulster migration and concomitant divisions between Orange and Green— supports the notions that ethnic Irishness in the new communities

4


was no more homogeneous or monolithic than it had been in Ireland. Before going on to examine the nature and variety of Cumbrian Irishness, this chapter considers some of the central issues which underpin later discussions. It provides an overview of the wider context of migration to non-traditional places such as Cumbria and explains how key distinctive elements of Irishness were maintained in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also reflects upon features of Irishness (particularly Orange and Green identities) which survived the process of migration from Ireland to be established in a modified but recognisable form in the new communities. As the phenomenon of ethnic conflict is central to the second part of this book, moreover, this chapter goes on to discuss the nature, extent and persistence of anti-Irish violence in the Victorian period. Although this book concerns a relatively small-scale migration of Irish within the United Kingdom, it must be viewed as part of a wider phenomenon. Indeed, as this discussion unfolds, we shall see that the context of Irish settlement in Victorian Cumbria was both historical and global.

I ‘Population movement’, Philip Curtin argues, ‘is so obvious in world history that many historians have paid little attention to it until recently.’4 Yet since the middle of the sixteenth century, 100 million people have left Europe for an alternative life in the New World; while between 1820 and the 1980s perhaps five million of these migrants travelled to the United States from Ireland alone. The Irish headed for all manner of places during the nineteenth century, at a time when migration from Ireland reached a peak. Although a large majority headed for North America and Britain, Australia and New Zealand, there were other notable migrations, for example, to Argentina where 30,000 had settled by 1864.5 In the seventeenth century, following the ‘Flight of the Earls’, Irish mercenaries, ‘The Wild Geese’, established a tradition of military migration, offering their services to various European monarchs. At around the same time, there was also a noticeable increase in Irish pauper migration to Britain and this type of population movement continued to develop, much to the chagrin of British ratepayers,


5

until long after the Napoleonic Wars. In the eighteenth century permanent Irish settlements emerged in places like Manchester and London, and the Scotch-Irish became ‘the most constant and at times the largest element among European migrants to mainland North America’, with an estimated 2,500 per annum from Ulster disembarking in the thirteen colonies of the United States.6 Meanwhile, Irish recruitment in European armies, especially those of France, Spain and Austria, continued down to the revolutionary period,7 while throughout the early-modern period, though most noticeably from the mid-eighteenth century, seasonal harvest workers—Spalpeens—annually crossed St George’s Channel to bring in British crops from Kent to Scotland.8 These early and temporary migrations, however, did not impact upon native communities to the same extent as later patterns of large-scale and permanent settlement. The process of migration from Ireland to Britain increased markedly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From 1815, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, migration began to flow apace, and by the 1830s the Irish were disembarking in American ports at the rate of 20,000 per annum.9 By the 1840s and 1850s, the movement reached flood proportions. This accelerating drift from Ireland was principally the result of massive population growth. When allied to an iniquitous and inequitable distribution of land, and the exigencies of famine, these demographic strains became intolerable. Between 1780 and 1841, Ireland’s population doubled to 8.2 million; yet, as emigration continued, that figure had almost halved to 4.5 million in 1891. Whereas, until the Famine, the advent of large-scale migration had prevented even greater population increase, its principal demographic effect thereafter was to exacerbate a decline influenced by environmental disaster and changing marital and fertility patterns. By 1891 the continuing culture of migration meant that nearly 40 per cent of the world’s Irish-born were to be found outside their country of origin. The main receiver nations are detailed in Table 1.1 The majority of the Irish who headed for new lives in Britain, America and the southern hemisphere in the years after 1815 were economic migrants. While many of these Irish came from rural backgrounds, it has traditionally been argued that the Irish among Handlin’s ‘uprooted’ went on to seek out an urban life in the cities of America—as did their counterparts in Britain. Indeed, Foster

6


Table 1.1 The Irish-born population of the four principal countries of settlement, 1841–1901 Year

Britain

USA

Canada

Australia

1841 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901

415 727 806 775 781 653 632

962 1,611 1,856 1,855 1,872 1,615

122 227 286 223 186 149 102

213 227 184

Source: derived from D. H. Akenson, Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 (Dublin, 1988), Appendix H, p. 182.

and Fitzpatrick agree that once in their new homes the migrant Irish constituted the model ‘urban proletariat’.10 The big cities which attracted the largest Irish populations were also those which developed a vigorous expatriate culture. The context for anti-Irish and Orange-versus-Green division, for example, was overwhelmingly urban. Thus, the importance of the huge Irish-born populations of the Great American cities of New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia cannot be ignored; nor can other important settlements in cities like Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Albany. The urban dimension is also central to the British experience, as Table 1.2 illustrates. Comparison of Tables 1.1 and 1.2 shows that in 1841 over 40 per cent of the Irish in Britain were to be found in these four large cities, a proportion which only dropped slightly in the following Table 1.2 The Irish-born population in the four main British cities of settlement, 1841–1871

London Liverpool Manchester Glasgow

1841

1851

1861

1871

75,000 49,639 33,490 44,345

109,000 83,813 52,504 59,801

107,000 83,949 52,076

91,000 76,761 34,066 68,330

Source: Census of England and Wales, 1841–71; Census of Scotland, 1841–71.


7

thirty years. In America, patterns of settlement were if anything more focused. In 1870 nearly 95 per cent of Irish-born people in the United States were concentrated in twenty states, mainly in the heavily urban and industrial regions of New England, Middle Atlantic and Upper Midwest, while over 50 per cent of the Irishborn resided in the three eastern states of New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Moreover, ‘of the forty-three most populous cities in America in 1870, the Irish were the largest first generation immigrants group in twenty-seven, and second in the rest’.11 While many of the pre-Famine Irish were to be found living and working outside the big eastern and midwest cities, the desperate migration of the 1840s changed this. By 1870, only 15 per cent of the Irishborn population of the United States were engaged in agricultural work, compared with more than fifty per cent of the native-born. During the period from 1870 to the 1920s, historians agree, New York was in many ways—demographically, politically and religiously—an Irish city.12 By 1860 the Irish-born accounted for 204,000 (24 per cent) of the New York population, and 23 per cent in Boston. In 1871 more than two-thirds of New York’s workforce was foreign-born, with the Irish accounting for nearly 30 per cent. Although other immigrations outstripped that from Ireland in the later nineteenth century, the Irish still constituted 12.5 per cent of the city’s population in 1890. In Philadelphia, comparable proportions, if not absolute numbers, were observed. In 1850, 72,312 Irish-born were living within the county boundaries, accounting for some 18 per cent of the total. In 1860 the migrant group had grown to 95,458, or 17 per cent, out of a total Philadelphian populace of 565,529.13 On both sides of the Atlantic, from the 1820s, urban development, industrialisation and mass immigration resulted in a revival of popular evangelicalism and a reinvention of anti-Catholicism, the vitriolic nature of which had not been seen since the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The social turmoil of 1830s America helped to spur no-popery and anti-Catholicism because, as Hennesey has argued, ‘the shaping of a cosmopolitan society’ was seen as a threat to ‘the values of village-green America’: That dark specter, the city, loomed evil on the horizon, and it was peopled by teeming hordes of odd-smelling, odd-looking, odd-speaking immigrants. Too many of them ended up in the penitentiary and work-

8

Culture, Conflict and Migration house. They drank too much, and some did so on Sundays. A startling percentage were Roman Catholics.14

We might add that these words could easily apply to Lancashire or industrial Scotland; or that notable clusters of these new settlers were of Irish stock. Thus, when allied to innate nativist viewpoints, the size of new Irish settlements in the 1820s and 1830s became a key factor in promoting tensions—tensions which were increased enormously by the savage effects of the Great Famine (1845–52). Given the severity of the Famine, it is perhaps understandable that historians have traditionally concentrated upon this dimension of Irish migration, the impact of which was most obvious in its urban dimension.15 By the mid-1830s, annual emigration to America was increasing but remained comparatively modest. What came after, however, was to dwarf previous migrations. In 1847, as famine raged, the United States received over 100,000 victims; four years later, the figure had more than doubled to 221,253. Whereas between 1841 and 1846 some 278,000 Irish voyaged to America, the figure reached an enormous 1,180,000 in the years 1847 to 1854, which is more than arrived in the subsequent quarter of a century.16 Meanwhile, as a result of the same forces, between 1841 and 1851 the Irish-born population of Britain nearly doubled. Indeed, from 1847 to 1853, Neal estimates, more than 500,000 Irish paupers landed in Liverpool alone. Simultaneously, all existing settlement Irish communities were massively swollen by the arrival of Irish migrants fleeing the Famine.17 The impact of this great disaster is perhaps most noticeable over the long term: between the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the Famine, around one to one-and-a-half million Irish left their homeland; from 1845 to 1870 the figure was close to three million. During the Famine years from the mid-1840s until the mid-1850s, around one million Irish died of starvation and disease.18 Those who survived to migrate overwhelmingly went to urban manufacturing areas, where their social formations became most noticeable; as did the scale of negative reactions. Not unnaturally, this immense human disaster casts a long shadow over the historiography of Irish migration. For much of the time the study of Irish migrants in Britain has centred upon the generations that fled ‘the Blight’ and the marginal position of the communities they forged. In addition, their place within contem-


9

porary debates concerning the wider problems of urbanisation, poverty and popular discontent—what Carlyle dubbed the ‘Condition of England’ question—perpetuated the image of Irish migration as a rural-to-urban phenomenon. Thus, ‘the consensus view on the subject’19 has been that the process of migration was socially dislocating and that once in the new communities the Irish were characterised by poverty and ‘apartness’ or ‘outcastness’. Such studies have highlighted the ‘demoralisation of the Irish immigrants’, and concentrated upon the big centres like Liverpool, Manchester, London and Glasgow, reflecting the way in which the Irish appeared in the social commentaries of the day. At the same time, the Great Famine dominates Irish history in a much more pervasive sense. It commands mythical status and fundamentally influences the way historians look back on nineteenth-century Ireland. The Famine, with its immense social costs and its impetus to emigration, has achieved a peerless political importance in the writing of Irish history; consequently, historians have tried to harness its deep psychological importance. The Famine is, then, central to our understanding of history, particularly that written from the ‘populist-nationalist paradigm’ in which it is argued that ‘the excess mortality of the late 1840s was entirely, or almost entirely, due to a negligent government and cruel landlords’.20 Few would question the obvious exploitation of AngloIrish political and economic relations, nor try to defend the cruelty of successive English governments’ treatment of Ireland; for many writers, though, it is about more than that. In the United States where the nationalist strain is strong, many writers conform to Clark’s assertion that ‘The Famine was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy’.21 It is from this conception of Ireland’s struggle with England that historians on both sides of the Atlantic have developed an image of Irish emigrants as exiles ‘forced to seek life elsewhere’.22 First evoked for political purposes by men like Mitchel, the concept of ‘exile’ quickly became part of the emerging Irish nationalist project. When A. M. Sullivan addressed the National Banquet at the Rotunda in Dublin in 1861 on the subject of ‘the Irish Abroad’, he described America as a new and vital place, providing ‘wealth for honest labour, homes for the exile, and manhood for the Old World slave’.23 Sullivan’s words strike a remarkably resonant chord with much writing on Irish migration of the past few decades.24

10


Yet there are also positive images which historians have employed to assess the experience of Irish migrants. As well as emphasising the calamitous nature of Famine migration, many earlier works focused upon the fortitude of the new arrivals. These studies centre on the mutualism of expatriate Irish identity and the important role of the Catholic church and Irish priests in ‘reforging Irish Catholic culture’.25 However, it might be argued that by developing the themes of spiritual fortitude, communitybuilding and nascent associationalism these historians strengthen the images of ‘outcastness’ which necessitated displays of ethnic adaptability in the first place.26 Most organisations of the Irish in the mid-Victorian Diaspora were constructions of necessity which migrants used to survive life in the new communities—family, neighbourhood, church, pub and a host of other support networks. Unsurprisingly, the ethos of mutual support of migrants began in earnest during the post-1815 period with socio-political formations such as Orangeism and the various Hibernian societies. The associationalism of the Irish provided a vital foothold in the new communities as the migration gathered pace in the decades up to the Famine. The increasingly impersonal nature of arrival gave formal parish-level institutions, such as the Ribbon and Orange societies, a greater social relevance.27 These two movements had their roots in the conflicting clandestine traditions of lower-class Ireland, and migrants introduced them into the new communities in Britain and America. In the postNapoleonic period, moreover, throughout the new communities, Ribbonism and Orangeism acquired a greatly enhanced position. As the scale of migration increased, Belchem contends, traditional networks of mutual support—family, kinship and friendship— were no longer able to cope with the task of integrating newcomers into the expatriate community and so formal grass-roots organisations assumed responsibility for the important task of providing access to work as well as a sense of neighbourhood and community. Thus, although the church vehemently opposed oath-bound secret societies, and extended its proscriptions to trade unions, by the 1830s there were Orange and Ribbon elements in most sizeable Irish communities of northern England, from Whitehaven through Preston to Liverpool and Manchester. In 1837, in Liverpool alone, there were perhaps 1,350 Ribbon society members. The shadowy networks of Ribbonism and Orangeism, then, provided a


11

broad-based welcome prior to Famine; thereafter, when popular anti-Irishness and anti-Catholicism increased dramatically, they were sufficiently well-established to act as a platform for ethnic self-defence and conflict.28 The planting of Catholic churches, and the propagation of Orange lodges in the main cities of Britain and North America, increased the potential for animosity between hosts and settlers. In Midlands towns like Wolverhampton which attracted large-scale settlement in the early Victorian years, Swift has shown, there was a commensurate development in sectarian division.29 These patterns were repeated elsewhere. By the 1850s, anti-Catholicism and antiIrishness formed a common strand in Anglo-Saxon culture in both Britain and North America: it was expounded from the pulpit and taught to children. Throughout central Scotland from Dundee and Edinburgh to Greenock, Paisley and Ayr endemic anti-Irish and intra-Irish violence showed how the Glaswegian model was far from unique. As in Liverpool, the pugnacity of popular and evangelical forms of Protestant faith not only welcomed the Orange Order but also alienated Catholic incomers.30 The patterns of migration and settlement after the Famine exacerbated this ethnic division. Much increased numbers of settlers both enhanced existing communities and pushed settlement into new regions and industries. The Cumbrian examples described in this work suggest that in the Victorian period—a period when Irish issues shook the political system, and Irish Catholicism offended native inclinations—the localities and regions, with their pockets of Irish settlement and resulting anti-Irish sentiment, provide vital and interesting case-studies of the wider anxieties of the British people. The scale of migration, and the historical antagonisms which strained Anglo-Irish relations under the Act of Union, deeply influenced the nature of English society during the long nineteenth century. As the Famine passed into memory, the Irish increasingly fanned out from traditional areas of residence to encompass all industrial and manufacturing districts. Whereas in the early industrial period Irish settlement was particularly prevalent in big cities (like Manchester and London) or in ports of entry (for example Liverpool and Glasgow), by the late 1860s and early 1870s hundreds of smaller places, such as the ones examined here, had attracted such communities. In 1871, the Irish persisted in seeking work in towns of more than 10,000 inhabitants, and in

12


both Britain and America, the Irish continued to flock to largely unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. In Philadelphia and Massachusetts, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, in parts of Cumbria and central Scotland, the Irish were significant in the textiles workforce; in New York, like Manchester, up to two-thirds of construction workers were Irish; in Philadelphia, as elsewhere across the Diaspora, they built canals and railways and 25-30 per cent of the Irishborn were recorded in the census as labourers. Irish communities may have been found throughout the archetypal textile centres but were also located in garrison towns like York and Winchester; they developed communities in all the towns of the Clyde and Lanarkshire but were also harboured in naval ports on the south coast of England. From the 1860s, Irish miners were even beginning to break into the well-defended mining strongholds of County Durham and Northumberland, and the north east in general developed one of the most important Irishborn populations in Britain, as migrants settled in all major towns from Darlington to Bishop Auckland; through Durham and Sunderland to Newcastle and Morpeth; and along the Tees, Wear and Tyne rivers. While earlier iron manufacturing districts like those in Staffordshire and South Wales still contained numbers of Irish workers, newer steel towns like Consett, Middlesbrough, Barrow and, later, Workington also became home to significant cohorts of Irish. By the 1870s most native residents of the urban townscape had first-hand experience of living side-by-side with Irish neighbours.31 In America, a similar process of diffusion was apparent: thus, although the Irish continued to people the great cities, there was a drift to smaller urban settlements and a concomitant spread of Irish traditions as well as of native awareness of them. In 1890, for example, ‘the most Irish town in the United States’ was the coppermining settlement of Butte, Montana, where 8,000 first- and second-generation Irish comprised 27 per cent of the town’s 30,000 inhabitants. These proportions are similar to Cleator Moor, the ‘Little Ireland’ of Cumberland, an iron-mining community with a population 20–35 per cent Irish-born in the thirty years to 1881.32 The variations in the nature of Irish communities, and cultural nuances in the towns they settled, threw up a bewildering array of sub-plots in the story of how Anglo-Irish relations unfolded in the regions. At the same time, larger questions of nation, religion and


13

economy remained at the heart of English perceptions of Irishness, and the advent of anti-Irish violence and intra-Irish division provides a resonant theme to settlement experience throughout the great industrial regions of Britain: Birmingham and the west Midlands; Lancashire and Yorkshire; the north east and Scotland.

II In a recent study, Panikos Panayi trenchantly describes ethnicity as ‘the way in which members of a national, racial or religious grouping maintain an identity with people of the same community in a variety of official and unofficial ways’.33 While endorsing Panayi’s view, this book also adopts what Dale T. Knobel calls a ‘sociopsychological rather than an anthropological definition of ethnicity’, assuming it ‘to be subjective and ascribed rather than objective and ideal’.34 Central to the problem of defining ‘Irishness’ is, therefore, the way in which the native population viewed newcomers. Victorian imagery of the Irish in Britain is loaded with half-truth and myth; skewed representations built on centuries of Anglo-Irish friction. In both Britain and the United States, Anglo-Saxonist visions of inferior Celts are still reflected in the historian’s construction of an imagined Irishness. The texts of the Victorian social commentators, with their references to ‘wild Milesians’ and pigloving Paddies, are even today utilised by historians to reconstruct an Irish community languishing in the darker recesses of urban Lancashire and Yorkshire.35 The particular Irishness created by the like of Carlyle and Engels illustrates how, despite the obvious importance in the nineteenth century of varieties of Irishness, many observers still preferred to frame perceptions of the Irish in what Conor Cruise O’Brien calls the ‘pejorative singular’.36 For witnesses of mass Irish settlement in Britain, for those who read of agrarian violence in Ireland, there was only one kind of Irish: a uniformly violent and dangerous specimen called ‘Paddy’. In this sense, the Irish suffered from what G. S. Goschen, the Liberal Unionist, described in 1886 as ‘a double dose of original sin’, damned as they were by their class and their race. The perceived inferiority of the Irish was seen as an almost natural product of their being proletarian Celts.37 In an age when the ruling elite generally feared the levelling tendencies of the

14


working class, the Irish stood out as either agrarian rebels, nationalist conspirators or industrial militants. Condemned as Catholic, Celtic and lower class, they were viewed as a people who, like any other colonial tribe, required the firm hand of Anglo-Saxon government. Moreover, questions about home rule and Empire were discussed in the sinister language of the day which was then being popularised by Anglo-Saxonist historians like Kingsley, Freeman, Stubbs and Froude.38 At the same time, the ‘subjective’ and ‘ascribed’ dimension of ethnicity can also be seen existing within Irishness. Irish ethnic identity, with its separation of Catholic and Protestant, threw up important divisions which, from the outside (to native Britons), appeared to be ‘internal’ to the ethnic group. For this reason, while the ethnicity of the Irish influenced their interactions with the host British community, it was also shaped by competing notions of Irishness as they were expressed both at home and in the new communities. Violent repercussions were thus created both by British versus Irish and intra-Irish animosity. Never was the variety of Irishness brought home more clearly to Victorian opinion-makers than in the 1880s, when the home rule question, by throwing open the rich potential of Ulster particularism, taught the English that there were at least two Irelands. As English imperialist aspirations and Irish nationalist resistance rose to prominence in the aftermath of the Act of Union (1801), so the nature of socio-cultural divisions in Ireland grew more intense. While the English traditionally viewed the division between Catholicism and Protestantism as part of the fabric of Irish society, it is true to say that these socio-cultural alignments assumed a much greater importance and deeper complexity in the Victorian period. Indeed, Akenson describes the cultures of Catholicism and Protestantism as ‘cosmologies’, by which he means ‘two over-arching psychologies, two complex networks of ideology, faith, social practice, and economic arithmetic’.39 Few groups were more ardent, or more blinkered, in upholding these cosmological divisions of Irish society than the Orange Order. It is something of these twin cosmologies which, we shall see in later chapters, influenced the shape and meaning of Cumbria’s Irish community; this was also the case with the Irish in Lancashire, Glasgow or in key American cities such as New York. Given popular native perceptions of Irishness, it is little wonder that


15

Protestant migrants denied they were ‘other’ Irish like their Catholic equivalents. In an attempt to divorce themselves from their Catholic-Celtic countrymen, Orangemen from the 1870s increasingly echoed the language of Anglo-Saxonism gripping the Victorian middle and upper class. A monolithic conception of Irishness as Catholic clearly repelled Orangemen with their deep commitment to the Protestant Ascendancy and the British constitution. The Irish were a people of two cultures, only one of which corresponded to the wider British world-view. Catholicism was central to British definitions of Irishness as it was negatively perceived; while antiCatholicism, a root expression of a wider British identity, set many Irish migrants apart from the logic of national identity. Thus, antiCatholicism strengthened the distinctiveness of Irish Catholic culture in the new communities, simultaneously building a bridge between Irish Protestants and their British counterparts. Despite the clearly different ‘varieties of Irishness’, it is not always possible to disentangle anti-Irish from intra-Irish prejudice and violence. English and Irish Protestants were both anti-Catholic, and the Orange Order attracted both native and Irish adherents. In later nineteenth-century Liverpool most Orangemen were English; yet in Glasgow they were mostly Irish-born or first-generation settlers. In Cumbria, both migrants and non-migrants were part of the Orange scene. Despite these problems, we are still left to reflect on the fact that Britain was a turbulent place for Irish settlers. This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that these migrants were not the only incomers to settle in nineteenthcentury Britain. Indeed, Defoe’s ‘Mongrel nation’ attracted a bewildering array of European and increasingly non-European migrants in the modern period.40 Yet, while the experience of violence and antipathy coloured the lives of most settlers in Britain, until the twentieth century no group seems to have experienced the same degree of aggressive opposition as the Irish. Anti-Jewish behaviour occurred intermittently in places like London and Leeds, although this can be explained by the fact that antiSemitism, like anti-Catholicism, was embedded in the native psyche with serious consequences for Jewish settlers (not least in the 1930s), in terms of nativist expressions of national identity. The ubiquitous charge of workplace competition also resulted in violence against Jewish and other immigrant groups. While Holmes’s works can call upon many incidents of anti-immigration

16


violence against the Jews, Poles, Lithuanians and other minority groups, it is fair to say that, prior to the Great War, when antiGerman aggression erupted with such great ferocity, no ethnic violence matched the long-run scale and near-endemic nature of the anti-Irish riot.41 Nor did Scots navvies or Welsh workers fall victim to the kind of violence which is detailed in this book. While Prussians, French, and the occasional ‘man of colour’ were returned in Cumbrian censuses, or hauled before magistrates, none received the lampooning treatment or violent abuse, from the press or the people, which was reserved for the Irish. How can we explain the acute animosity manifested towards Irish settlers? What was so distinctive about this increasingly English-speaking migrant community that made it so vulnerable to violent attack? The answer lies partly in numbers. In 1891 when, for example, the German-born population of Britain numbered only a little over 50,000, the equivalent Irish-born figure was 653,152. In the same year, in fact, there were more Irish-born in Liverpool alone (66,071) than there were German-born in all of Britain.42 The fact that Irish communities emerged in all major industrial areas also explains the scope, if not the intensity, of antiIrish violence in British society. Yet the Scots-born population of Cumberland was similar in size to the Irish, and in Barrow, in 1911, the Scots-born were proportionately more significant than in any other borough in England, and certainly outnumbered the Irish, yet they did not experience a commensurate level of violence; indeed, the Scottish dimension of Irish migration suggests it is much more likely that they fell in with the opposition—for example the Orange Order—when anti-Irish violence erupted. The reasons for antiIrish violence, it must be argued, centred on a complex collection of economic, cultural and religious animosities which were fired by the turbulence of Anglo-Irish politics in the period.43 Since the early eighteenth century, violent reprisals had been exacted against the Irish by English workers fearful of competition. In London, in 1736, violence broke out against Irish labour which was competing for harvesting work, and in the same year English weavers rioted against their Irish counterparts who, they claimed, were undercutting rates. This episode was part of a growing trend of textile violence, stimulated in part by imports of cheap Indian calico, which resulted in weavers’ violence being made a capital offence. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, as middle-class


17

ratepayers throughout the country fretted about the burden of Irish paupers, the working class became restive as Irish workers began to colonise certain sectors of the economy. There were complaints, ranging from those of female market-gardeners in Richmond to the rather more violent protestations of Lancashire labourers, Lanarkshire miners or agricultural workers from Scotland to Lincolnshire.44 As immigration gathered momentum, violence increased. In South Wales, for instance, where sizeable permanent Irish settlement was a feature of the 1820s, the Irish tended to congregate in heavy manual labour, and were not usually in direct competition for skilled work, or occupations, such as mining, which the native population tended to control. In 1826, at the Bute ironworks in the Rhymni valley, violence accompanied the hiring of allegedly cheap gangs of Irish labour to build new blast furnaces. Elsewhere in Wales, this question of undercutting wages surfaced regularly. At Pontypool in 1833 Welsh ironworkers used this excuse to drive out Irish competitors. The Irish in South Wales were also the victims of ‘Rough Music’, whereby clandestine groups of indigenous workers dressed in ceremonial garb, gathered outside Irish homes, blowing horns and ritually humiliating their victims. In 1834, the owner of the Dowlais ironworks was threatened with violence unless his Irish workers were discharged. Yet this was not just about the persecution of poorly-paid unskilled workers who worked for less than the going rate. One example from Wales, also from 1834, provides an added dimension to this subject of anti-Irish violence in the workplace. This time the victim of ‘Rough Music’, John Corbet, was a skilled mason who held regular employment paying 18s per week. The reason for this attack, it seems, was jealousy; indigenous workers envied both his skill and status.45 By the 1850s, such violence was near-endemic. Furthermore, the pressures of migration after the Famine increased the perceived economic pressure of the Irish, while the fierce anti-Catholic backlash against the Papal Aggression of 1850 (when the Pope restored the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in England and Wales)—itself an acknowledgement of the size of England’s Irish community— provided clear evidence of the unique intensity with which the British upheld their cherished Protestant ascendancy. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, violence became a way of life in the northern communities where Irish settlement was greatest. Thus, in

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Manchester (from early in the century), and in Liverpool (until the Second World War), working-class settlements were habitually parted on ethnic lines by Orange-related violence. Smaller places were also the scene of such outbreaks with one of the most famous explosions occurring in Stockport in 1852, during protracted reactions to the Papal Aggression, when local Tories used the Orange card to aid their electoral fortunes.46 In 1863, outbursts of violence accompanied declarations of migrant Catholic support for the Pope during the Garibaldi affair.47 There were regular bouts of violence in reaction to Fenianism in the later 1860, and between 1866 and 1871 William Murphy, the most famous of the popular Protestant demagogues, habitually whipped up working-class anti-Catholicism and anti-Irishness during his lecture tours, causing considerable unrest in communities from Plymouth to Tynemouth and Wolverhampton to Whitehaven.48 If casual drink-related violence and commonplace Orange riots are added to these specific examples of anti-Irish behaviour, then violence can be seen as a central lived experience of Irish migrants. Although most of these examples illustrate native animosity, contemporary commentators often took them to be a measure of the violent propensities of the Irish themselves. Violence was central to the Irish stereotype constructed by Victorians, and the emergence of a widespread and increasingly popular press made endemic the images of Irish violence. Communities like those examined here must have been turned against the Irish by a daily diet of newspaper stories denouncing the ‘Kilkenny Cats’ or a ‘proper Donnybrook Fair’. Members of the reading public also developed their own views based upon first-hand experience of Irish migrants’ street culture. Native perceptions, as well as being shaped by images of violence, were also formed from second-hand reports of the ‘state of Ireland’ itself, where, from the later eighteenth century, the extent of agrarian, political and terrorist violence was impressive. Indeed, ruling Ireland under the terms of the Act of Union presented a headache of constitutional morality for successive British governments. ‘Coercion’, ‘administration by force rather than by consent’,49 was inimical to the Victorians’ much-lauded values of liberty and freedom; yet Britons thought Ireland needed it. Furthermore, at such times as during the Land War, British newspapers daily carried stories of ‘atrocities in Ireland’, and acts like the Phoenix Park Murders


19

struck to the core of society, prompting often violent reprisals against the migrant communities. Similar crises of identity also pervaded Irish Catholic/Protestant relations elsewhere in the Diaspora. The strength of Scottish, English and Scotch-Irish emigration encouraged an anti-Catholic culture in Canada where, unlike in the United States, loyalty to the British system still meant something positive. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth century, Smyth and Houston have shown, Orangeism was arguably stronger in Canada than anywhere but Ireland itself. By 1870 there were about 930 lodges in the Canadian Orange heartland of Ontario, whereas in eastern America there were just 43 lodges—although this figure had climbed to 350 by the turn of the century.50 By 1886, estimates suggested some 200,000 Orangemen lived in Canada. The Orange Order was, moreover, present throughout the empire; no colony escaped its great reach, and it is this which explains why it has been estimated that, during the later years of Victoria’s reign, there were perhaps one million lodgemen across the globe.51 Not all existing or former colonies accepted Orangeism in an unreconstructed form, though a fluidity in re-manufacturing its identity was a hallmark of the global order. For American republicans and democrats, the Orange Order’s defence of the settlement of 1688 and of the British constitution was loaded with negative connotations: indeed, such sentiments reminded Americans what they fought against in the 1770s. The limitations of traditional Orange loyalism moved the American arm of the movement to take on a different role to its British counterpart; the republican spirit in America meant that the key tenets of Orangeism required certain modifications. The fact that it blossomed in the United States as well shows the malleability of Protestant-Irish communal formations, as well as illustrating the real political and socio-cultural power of nativist Anglo-Saxon sentiments in the republic. While contemporary New Yorkers claimed that Orange violence merely underscored the extent to which ‘Tammany Hall has turned the city over to the ‘‘wild Irish’’’, Michael A. Gordon offers another explanation. He argues that, instead of defining themselves as ultraloyalists, as perpetrators and defenders of the Protestant Ascendancy, American Orangemen used the movement to promote their brand of Irishness in the future of the republic.52 Orangeism in the New World owed its initial impetus to Irish Protestant migrants but

20


quickly attracted English, Scots, native and even German-born supporters. The success of Orangeism abroad was due to its appeal to basic religious and Anglo-Saxonist values and cannot be explained ‘solely in terms of a successful ethnic transfer’.53 Despite obvious different experiences, Orangeism in Britain and the New World remained remarkably consistent in its core values, and, although Orangemen in England looked back to 1688, and those in America looked forward to the future shape of the republic, certain basic features united them in common cause. In both instances, for example, the old enemy of Catholicism proved crucial to their wider project. Whether set by an American or British agenda, violence between Catholics and Protestants (Irish versus British, Irish versus Irish, Orange versus Green) was a regular and defining feature of their struggles across the globe. That antiCatholicism ran through the Orange philosophy in, say, New York and Philadelphia, bore testament to an American WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture that was not, at heart, very different from that in Britain. ‘Anti-Catholicism was’, as Burchell has written, ‘as old as the republic and never completely dormant.’54 Just as American history is pitted with tales of sectarian strife, so is that of Lancashire, Scotland, Canada and Australia. None of these cases matched the deep, structural (as well as cultural) divisions endemic in Belfast, which witnessed serious riots in 1857, 1864, 1872 and 1886 as well as throughout the present century.55 The riots elsewhere in the Diaspora were, however, important in defining the nature of ethnicity and the limited opportunities for Catholic Irish assimilation. The 1870s were important years for the development of Orangeism, not only in Cumbria, but across the world. In the late 1860s, Orange marches began to re-emerge in Belfast in a much-emboldened form. The repeal of the Party Processions Act in 1870 cleared the way for widespread violence in Lancashire and Cumbria, while the most riotous scenes in New York since the Draft Riots of 1863 occurred between Irish Orangemen and Catholics in 1870 and 1871. The latter year saw twelve people killed and dozens injured.56 Yet this form of violent behaviour did not end in the 1870s; rather, in Cumbria this decade marks the beginning of deep-rooted sectarian communal division, presaged by industrial development and largescale Irish settlement. This book is concerned with the maintenance of forms of Irish


21

ethnicity. Much of what follows considers the nature of Irish identities and the way the Irish were perceived. This study considers the features of Irishness (whether Orangeism and nationalism or anti-Catholicism and popular patriotism) which promoted distinctive strands of Irish ethnicity. After all, it was these differences which helped to determine outward expressions of community and inward senses of identity. Much of what unfolds in these pages bears comparison with the Irish experience in other towns where sectarian violence coloured the cultural characteristics of the middle and working classes. Historians are slowly beginning to uncover a process of Irish migration that was significantly Protestant as well as prominently Catholic, a factor clearly central to this study. This development promises to tell us much more about the nature of Irish cultural attachments as they were exported to the new communities. The following discussion of the Cumbrian scene demonstrates that sectarian violence, anti-Catholicism and Irish-related violence were not simply Liverpudlian or Glaswegian phenomena; nor did they disappear after the 1870s.

NOTES 1 Peter Donnelly, The Yellow Rock (London, 1950), p. 12. 2 John Belchem, ‘Nationalism, Republicanism and exile: Irish emigrants and the revolutions of 1848’, Past and Present, Vol. 146 (1995), p. 103. For a defence of the ‘assimilationist perspective’, see John Rex, ‘Immigrants and British labour: the sociological context’, in K. Lunn (ed.), Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society (Folkestone, 1980), p. 26. An excellent general discussion of these issues is S. Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England (Manchester, 1993), Chapter 1. 3 Donnelly, The Yellow Rock, p. 110. 4 ‘Migration in the tropical world’, in Virgina Yans-McLaughlin, Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology and Politics (New York and Oxford, 1990), p. 21. 5 Patrick McKenna, ‘Irish migration to Argentina’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity (Leicester, 1992), I: Patterns of Migration, pp. 63–83. For Australia, see D. H. Akenson, Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 (Dublin, 1988); Patrick O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia (Sydney, 1986); D. Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Cork, 1994); John O’Brien and Pauric Travers (eds), The Irish Emigrant Experience in Australia (Dublin, 1991). 6 See two essays in O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide, I: P. Fitzgerald,

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‘ ‘‘Like crickets to the crevice of a Brew-house’’: poor Irish migrants in England, 1560–1640’, pp. 13–35 and J. McGurk, ‘ ‘‘Wild Geese’’: the Irish in European armies (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)’, pp. 36–62; L. M. Cullen, ‘The Irish Diaspora in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in N. Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migration, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 113, 116. For Ulster migrations, see James G. Leyburn, The Scotch Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1962), pp. 157–84; M. A. Jones, ‘Ulster emigration 1783–1815’, in E. E. R. Green (ed.), Essays in Scotch-Irish History (London, 1969), pp. 46–68; K. A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford, 1985), esp. Chapters 4–6. 7 McGurk, ‘ ‘‘Wild Geese’’ ’; Cullen, ‘Irish Diaspora’, pp. 121–26. 8 A. O’Dowd, Spalpeens and Tatie Hokers: History and Folklore of the Irish Migratory Agricultural Workers in Ireland and Britain (Dublin, 1991); S. Barber, ‘Irish migrant agricultural workers in nineteenth-century Lincolnshire’, Saothar, Vol. 8 (1982), pp. 10–22. 9 R. A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848–1880 (Manchester, 1979), p. 1. 10 For an exposition on the centrality of the urban experience, see D. N. Doyle, ‘The Irish as urban pioneers in the United States, 1850-1870’, Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1991), pp. 36–59. Also, see Alun Munslow, ‘ ‘‘A bigger, better and busier Boston’’: the pursuit of political legitimacy in America: the Boston Irish, 1890–1920’, in O’Sullivan, Irish World Wide, I: p. 128; R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), pp. 357–58; D. Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration, 1801–1921 (Dundalk, 1984), pp. 69–71. Recently, King, Akenson and others have tried to counter the urban dimension by examining the Irish in the rural regions of Canada and western America. By 1870, King argues, the Irish in California were as much rural as urban. In San Francisco, for example, ‘California’s only fully urbanised county, the Irish[-born] numbered 25,864 from a total population of 149,473’. The pioneering role of the Irish communities in Queensland and Argentina offers further support to King’s arguments that historians need to look beyond the stereotyped image of Irish slum dwellers in the Lower East Side of Manhattan or in Manchester’s ‘Little Ireland’. J. A. King and M. Fitzgerald, The Uncounted Irish in Canada and the United States (Meany, Toronto, 1990); see also J. A. King, ‘The Murphies and the Breens of the overland parties to California, 1844 and 1846’, in O’Sullivan, Irish World Wide, I: pp. 84–109. See McKenna, ‘Irish migration to Argentina’; M. E. R. McGinley, ‘The Irish in Queensland: an overview’, in O’Brien and Travers (eds), Irish Emigrant Experience in Australia, pp. 103–19. The best examinations of the ‘rural Irish’ refer to Canada, where urban attachments were not the norm. Indeed, as C. J. Houston and W. J. Smyth have demonstrated, most of the Irish in Canada were settled before the Great Famine: Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links and Letters (Toronto, 1990). See also D. H. Akenson’s pathbreaking studies of Canadian Irish settlement: The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal, 1984) and Being Had: Historians, Evidence and the Irish in North America (Port Credit, Ontario, 1985). 11 Munslow, ‘Bigger, better and busier Boston’, p. 128. See also K. A. Miller, ‘Class, culture and immigrant group identity in the United States: the case of


23

Irish-American identity’, in Yans-McLaughlin (ed.), Immigration Reconsidered, pp. 106–08, for a succinct overview of the importance of the urban Irish. 12 N. Glazer and D. P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 219–91. 13 M. A. Gordon, Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York, 1870 and 1871 (Ithaca and London, 1993), p. 7; D. Clark, Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Urban Experience (Philadelphia, 1973), pp. 29, 31. 14 James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York and Oxford, 1981), pp. 118–19. 15 See R. Swift, ‘The historiography of the Irish in Britain’, in O’Sullivan (ed.), Irish World Wide, II: The Irish in the New Communities, pp. 52–81; see also R. A. Burchell, ‘The historiography of the American Irish’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol 4, No. 3 (1985), pp. 281–305. 16 Figures from Burchell, San Francisco Irish, p. 1. 17 Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819-1914 (Manchester, 1988), p. 82; for an example of another town affected by increased Famine migration, see F. Finnegan, Poverty and Prejudice: A Study of Irish Immigrants in York, 1840–1875 (Cork, 1982), pp. 16–34. 18 Cormac O´ Gra´da, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780-1939 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 173–209. 19 For the speed of developments, see R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), pp. 1–12, and their The Irish in Britain, 1815– 1939 (London, 1989), pp. 1–9. 20 O´ Gra´da, Ireland, p. 174. For an American example of this school, see Dennis Clark, Irish in Philadelphia, pp. 24–37. 21 Clark, Irish in Philadelphia, p. 25. 22 Gordon, Orange Riots, p. 5. 23 A. M. Sullivan, Speeches and Addresses, 1859–1881, 4th edition (Dublin, 1886), pp. 14–19. 24 For trans-atlantic comparisons, see Lyn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in London (Manchester, 1979), and K. A. Miller, Emigrants or Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford, 1985). 25 The term is Lees’s: Exiles of Erin, pp. 164–212. Good American examples are Clark, Irish in Philadelphia and Brian C. Mitchell, The Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821–61 (Urbana and Chicago, 1988). 26 G. Connolly, ‘Irish and Catholic: myth or reality? Another sort of Irish and the renewal of the clerical profession among Catholics in England’; R. Samuel, ‘The Roman Catholic church and the Irish poor’; S. Gilley, ‘Vulgar piety and the Brompton Oratory, 1850–60’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in the Victorian City. See also Lees, Exiles of Erin, pp. 164–212. 27 John Belchem’s works are central to our understanding of the associational culture of Irish migrants in Britain. See, for example, his ‘The Year of Revolutions: the political and associational culture of the Irish immigrant community in 1848’, in idem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History, 1790–1940 (Liverpool, 1992); ‘ ‘‘Freedom and Friendship to Ireland’’: Ribbonism in early nineteenth-century Liverpool’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 39 (1994), pp. 33–56; ‘The immigrant alternative: ethnic and sectarian

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mutuality among the Liverpool Irish during the nineteenth century’, in O. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts (eds), The Duty of Discontent: Essays for Dorothy Thompson (1995). 28 For Ribbonism in Ireland, see Tom Garvin, ‘Defenders, Ribbonmen and others: underground political networks in pre-famine Ireland’, Past and Present, Vol. 96 (1982), pp. 133–55 and M. R. Beames, ‘The Ribbon societies: lower-class nationalism in pre-Famine Ireland’, Past and Present Vol. 97 (1982), pp. 128–43. The only comprehensive treatment of Ribbonism is Belchem, ‘ ‘‘Freedom and Friendship to Ireland’’ ’; for the Catholic church’s opposition to oath-bound secret societies and trade unions, see J. H. Treble, ‘The attitude of the Roman Catholic church towards trade unionism in the north of England’, Northern History, Vol. 5 (1970), and G. P. Connolly, ‘The Catholic Church and the first Manchester and Salford trade unions in the age of the Industrial Revolution’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 135 (1985), pp. 125–60. 29 R. Swift, ‘ ‘‘Another Stafford street row’’: law, order and the Irish presence in mid-Victorian Wolverhampton’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1984), pp. 5–29. 30 For examples of anti-Irish and intra-Irish division in Scotland, see Elaine McFarland, Protestants First: Orangeism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990); T. Gallagher, Glasgow. The Uneasy Peace: Religious Tension in Modern Scotland (Manchester, 1987); idem, ‘ ‘‘A Tale of Two Cities’’: communal strife in Glasgow and Liverpool before 1914’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City, pp. 106–29. Alan B. Campbell, The Lanarkshire Miners: A Social History of their Trade Unions, 1775–1874 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 178–204. 31 An excellent overview of the spread of later Irish migration to Britain is C. G. Pooley, ‘ ‘‘Segregation or integration? The residential experience of the Irish in mid-Victorian Britain’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in Britain, pp. 60–83. 32 See below, Chapter 2, Table 2.4, p. 39. 33 P. Panayi, Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1945 (Manchester, 1994), p. 76. 34 Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn., 1986), p. xi. 35 See A. B. Reach’s reports on Lancashire and Yorkshire in J. Ginswick (ed.), Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, 1849–1851, 8 vols (London, 1983), I: Lancashire and Yorkshire; Ruth Ann Harris, The Nearest Place, pp. 168–83. For a critique see D. M. MacRaild, ‘Irish immigration and the ‘‘Condition of England’’ question: the roots of an historiographical tradition’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1995), pp. 67–85. 36 L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (New York, 1968), p. 22. 37 Ibid., pp. 23–24. 38 Most of the literature tries to refute Curtis’s notion that Victorian attitudes towards the Irish in Britain were ‘racist’. Such criticisms, however, fail to appreciate the deep importance of inferior white races in Victorian conceptions of evolution. See S. Gilley, ‘English attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900’, in C. Holmes (ed.), Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society (London, 1978); D. G. Paz, ‘Anti-Catholicism, anti-Irish stereo-


25

typing and anti-Celtic racism’, Albion (Winter 1986), pp. 601–16; R. F. Foster, ‘Paddy and Mr Punch’, in idem, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Anglo-Irish History (London, 1993), pp. 171–94. 39 Akenson, Small Differences, p. 127. See also D. M. MacRaild, ‘ ‘‘Principle, Party and Protest’’: the language of Victorian Orangeism in the north of England’, in Shearer West (ed.), The Victorians and Race (Leicester, 1996), pp. 128–40. 40 It is impossible to provide here an exhaustive bibliography of other minorities. Holmes, John Bull’s Island is the best overview of immigration to Britain in the modern period. It covers all the major themes, including violence; briefer is his A Tolerant Country? Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain (London, 1991). See also Panayi, Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism. For the German, see, idem, German Immigrants in Britain, 1815-1914 (Oxford, 1995); also see L. Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Leicester, 1988); C. Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (London, 1979). Violence against a number of immigrant groups is the subject of P. Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in Britain, 1840-1950 (Leicester, 1996, 2nd ed.). 41 Holmes, John Bull’s Island, passim; for anti-German behaviour, see P. Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (Oxford, 1991); also, idem, German Immigration, pp. 201–52 and ‘AntiGerman riots during the First World War’, in Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence, pp. 65–91. 42 Neal, Sectarian Violence, Table 7, p. 9. 43 A. O’Day, ‘Varieties of anti-Irish behaviour in Britain, 1846–1922’, in Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence, pp. 26–43. 44 A. Redford, Labour Migration in England, 1800–1850 (Manchester, 1926), pp. 115, 136, 138; Ian Gilmour, Riots, Risings and Revolutions: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1993 ed.), p. 253; A. Campbell, The Lanarkshire Miners: A Social History of their Trade Unions, 1775–1974 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 178–201. 45 P. O’Leary, ‘Anti-Irish riots in Wales, 1826–1882’, Llafur, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1991), pp. 28–30. 46 Neal, Sectarian Violence, passim; Pauline Millward, ‘The Stockport riots of 1852: a study of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in the Victorian City, pp. 207–24. 47 S. Gilley ‘The Garibaldi Riots of 1862’, Historical Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1973), pp. 697–732 and Frank Neal, ‘The Birkenhead Garibaldi riots of 1862’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 131 (1982), pp. 87–111. 48 Details of Murphy’s activities are quite sparse, but see W. L. Arnstein, ‘The Murphy Riots: a Victorian dilemma’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 19 (1975), pp. 51–71. See also D. M. MacRaild, ‘William Murphy, the Orange Order and communal violence: the Irish in West Cumberland, 1871–1884’, in Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence, esp. pp. 44–47. 49 The bibliography on violence in Ireland is impressively large. For an excellent overview of the issues, see Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), pp. vii–x, 1–50. 50 C. J. Houston and W. J. Smyth, ‘Transferred loyalties: Orangeism in the

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United States and Ontario’, American Review of Canadian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1984), pp. 193–211. A fuller account can be found in the same authors’ excellent book, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto, 1980). 51 Report of the Proceedings of the Grand Orange Lodge of New Zealand, 1899, quoted in Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, p. 85; see pp. 84–111 for full details of the strength of Canadian Orangeism. 52 Gordon, Orange Riots, p. 5. 53 Houston and Smyth, ‘Transferred loyalties’, p. 197. 54 Burchell, San Francisco Irish, p. 2. 55 See, for example, A. C. Hepburn, A Past Apart: Studies in the History of Catholic Belfast, 1850–1950, esp. Chapter 10. 56 Foster, Modern Ireland, pp. 389–90; Neal, Sectarian Violence, pp. 176–95; Gordon, Orange Riots, passim; C. D. MacGimpsey, ‘Internal ethnic friction: Orange and Green in nineteenth century New York, 1868–1872’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 1, No. I (1982), pp. 39–59.

CHAPTER 2

Patterns of arrival and settlement Nineteenth-century Cumbria did not conform to the typical northern English model of Irish migration. This was due to a number of geographic and economic factors which significantly affected the nature of Irish arrival. In terms of the economy, the area had more in common with Scotland and the north east than with the developing regions of south and central Lancashire. During the nineteenth century, iron and coal became the staple industries of west Cumberland while for Furness (around Barrow) the same was true of iron, steel and ships. This economic development resulted in four major types of Irish settling in the area: unskilled labourers; iron ore (though few coal) miners; a variety of workers in metals; and both skilled and unskilled shipbuilders. The majority came from Ulster and included both Catholics and Protestants. Their impact upon the culture of the region, with Orange-Green division and repeated sectarian strife becoming part of the social fabric from the 1870s, also encourages comparison with the Scottish picture. Irish settlement in Cumbria was also different, chronologically, from that in Lancashire, where the Famine years dominate the historical landscape. Nothing Cumbrians experienced could match the grim and horrible image of Famine-driven Irish migration to Lancashire so graphically portrayed by Lowe and Neal.1 Settlement in Whitehaven and Carlisle conformed to the classic ‘Condition of England’ image of Irish settlement, but lacked the scale seen elsewhere. In the 1840s, as the Liverpool authorities were bewailing the Irish presence thrust upon them, Barrow was but an inconsequential village, while Cleator Moor, Workington, and the West Cumberland iron-ore mining communities were only just taking off into sustained industrial growth. Within thirty years, each was thriving and Irish settlement in the region had become considerable. These observations on chronology suggest that formative economic devel-

28


opments, urban growth, and the mass arrival of the Irish, took place entirely in the years beyond the Famine. This region is important for reasons not indicated by a historiography which centres upon the 1840s, and associated poverty and disorganisation, as the key to understanding Irish settlement because Cumbria largely stood aside from this kind of ‘flood’ immigration. Thus, if Cumbrians despised the Irish, or feared their presence, as they often did, then a study of the region’s Irish will tell us much about wider and deep-seated negative attitudes towards the Irish, and the emergence of ethnic tensions which mirrored their settlement patterns. If we are looking away from the Famine as central to the study of Irish immigration, what do we learn of the history of Cumbria? First, that Irish immigration to the Lake Counties was a long and continuous process, particularly on the Cumberland coast. Second, that in north Lancashire, there was no strong trend of Irish immigration in the pre-industrial period, although this changed during the 1860s and 1870s when the growth of Barrow and its hinterland encouraged a rapid rate of in-migration from all areas including Ireland. Third, that despite the existence of some Irish settlement in the early modern period, particularly in Whitehaven and Carlisle, the second half of the nineteenth century was most important as far as large-scale Irish arrival to Cumberland was concerned. While this question of timing appears naturally to have been dictated by sustained economic development, the emergence of modern industrial production in the region did not alone dictate the type of Irish migrants entering the area. Although Cumbria’s mineral-based, heavy engineering and shipbuilding industries must have appeared attractive to potential migrants from eastern Ulster, where Ireland’s economy was most modern, the geographical proximity of these two industrial regions, their historical connections, and improving sea transport, further strengthened the fact that the Irish in Cumbria came predominantly from the north of Ireland. It was this series of linkages that gave nineteenth-century Cumbria an ethnic-sectarian culture which appeared at times like that in Belfast, Liverpool and Glasgow. Thus, it will be argued in subsequent chapters, economy and migration linked together in shaping the socio-cultural history of the region. Prior to 1800, however, although Whitehaven and other places enjoyed healthy trade with Ireland, there was little to suggest that Cumbria would become a major recipient of Irish settlement. After

Patterns of Arrival and Settlement

29

1815, things in Cumbria, and throughout Britain, began to change noticeably. By the time of the Famine, Irish settlement was already well-entrenched; it had become part of the landscape, and featured in the social literature of the day. It is demonstrable, for example, that the clamour of negative public opinion against Irish settlement was galvanised, rather than created, by the observation of Faminedriven departures. This can be illustrated by reference to the many early nineteenth-century parliamentary reports into vagrancy and poor relief, wherein the Irish bulk large in negative terms. By the 1830s Irish migrants were already the subject of a lengthy sociological study by George Cornewall Lewis; equally, writers like Kay and Carlyle raised their acid pens to denigrate the morality of Britain’s Irish community long before the Famine. In fact, immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, Cumbrian observers—employers, civic dignitaries and local office-holders—began canvassing parliament and various select committees with their fears concerning the rising tide of Irish and Scottish pauperism. By the mid1830s, in both local and national arenas, among well-known polemicists and unknown justices of the peace, a kind of moral panic was emerging. By the mid-1840s, fear of an Irish flood was commonplace.2 It is clear, therefore, that the Irish dimension of the ‘Condition of England’ question noticeably pre-dates the Famine. Throughout industrial Cumbria many communities were still required to welcome Irish settlers well into the later Victorian years. This chapter seeks to say more about patterns of Irish settlement in Cumbria throughout the century in question. What emerges in these pages is a sense in which Irish migration to the region was a longitudinal process whose greatest numerical impact was felt after the 1850s, as a direct consequence of the rapid industrialisation of the coastal fringe of the region between Barrow and Maryport. These emerging Irish communities are considered here, principally in terms of their size, origins and social characteristics.

I The earliest Irish settlement of Cumbria relied heavily on the port of Whitehaven which, from the mid-seventeenth century, developed modest but increasingly important trade connections with

30


Ireland. At about the same time, nearby Workington was designated as one of six English and Welsh ports for the removal of Irish paupers.3 By the 1690s, Irish, Scots and Manx settlers were wellestablished in the vicinity and, according to a doubtless apocryphal local legend, one of their number was Jonathan Swift, who spent his first three years (1667 to 1670) in Whitehaven. Swift was allegedly inspired to create Liliput when watching ant-like labourers on the thriving docks below his cliff-top vantage point.4 In the eighteenth century, Whitehaven continued to develop Irish connections which became more important as the port’s empire trade was eroded by the rise of Liverpool and Glasgow. With the rise of the Cumbrian Irish trade, migration was inevitable. In 1704, one observer noted that ‘the country here is in great measure supplied with [smuggled] beef and other provisions from Ireland’.5 One of Whitehaven’s most prominent merchants was Walter Luttridge, the self-made son of an Irishman, who shook off his lowly beginnings as a master mariner. At the pinnacle of his career, Luttridge was prosperous enough to keep agents in many towns, including Newcastle, Kendal, Darlington, Belfast, Dublin, Liverpool, Bristol and Manchester.6 To the north, in Carlisle, developments in textiles encouraged an influx of significant numbers of Irish and ‘Scotch’ weavers.7 In the southern part of Cumbria, early Irish connections were more diffuse. Although the emerging iron-smelting industry of Furness encouraged some migration between the region and Scotland and Ireland, Ulverston was the only town in the area which contained any sizeable Irish settlement. In 1800, 150 Irish were resident in the town when the total population numbered a little over 3,000.8 At the time of the French Wars a more noticeable and permanent Irish presence emerged in Cumbria, although the greatest opprobrium at this time was reserved for temporary arrivals, especially paupers and beggars, whose numbers were also increasing. As early as the 1810s, northern ratepayers began to complain bitterly about the burden of Celtic paupers, and, with government attention turned time and again to the question of the poor law, Cumbrian notables were hardly slow to join the debate. In 1817, for example, John Curwen, a prominent member of West Cumberland’s mine-owning gentry, gave bleak evidence to the Select Committee on the Poor Law—an inquiry which eventually gave rise to the Sturges Bourne Act (1819), named after its chairman.9 Curwen brought to the committee’s attention the case of Rockcliff


31

near Carlisle, a small rural parish where nearly 50 per cent (£182 out of £384) of the poor rate was spent on Irish and Scots itinerants. Curwen claimed that Rockcliff was not an isolated case: I believe it will be found in all the principal towns of the county, there is almost the same proportion of Irish and Scotch pressing on the poor rates; so that we may assume one-third of the whole charge on the county of Cumberland is paid to Irish, who have no settlement, and who have surreptitiously intruded themselves upon us.10

Later in the decade, things seem not to have improved, and the agitation against pauper migrants increased. The ratepayers of one parish, Stapleton, even petitioned parliament with the claim that ‘bearing hard on the Petitioners is the Irish and Scotch gaining settlement by six weeks’ residence in England’. They went on to plea that this ‘should be extended to five or six years’.11 While the popularity of Malthusian ideas is traditionally portrayed as the driving force of poor law reformers and abolitionists alike, it is clear that the spectre of Irish immigration, and the absence of a poor law in Ireland, preyed heavily on the minds of local and national observers. It was the financial burden of a growing pauper population, and the seemingly degenerate immorality of these Irish and Scots, which inspired Cumbrian magistrates, poor law guardians and others to support initiatives for reform. In the 1820s such matters were still of some concern in Cumbria. Local powers had been increased by national legislation, but Irish pauperism continued to press on charitable structures. At another select committee hearing—this time attuned specifically to the problem of vagrancy—Cumbrian civic leaders again offered their assessment.12 The evidence of John Christian, magistrate and erstwhile Poor Law Guardian in Allendale and Workington, is interesting as much for its revelations about the harsh treatment of paupers as it is about the problem of pauperism itself. Christian, who was quizzed extensively, clearly held grave reservations about the system of removal. He was especially worried because magistrates and poor law officials, employing the broadest possible definition of the word ‘family’, were apt to apply a cruel and indiscriminate reading of the law. At a cost of five shillings plus two for victuals, the Guardians of Workington could, in Christian’s words, cause ‘great cruelty to individuals and families’. Later, his testimony was more expansive:

32

Culture, Conflict and Migration I have seen the opinions of eminent counsel on the subject, whether an English wife or children, born in England, of an Irish pauper, having himself no settlement in England, are liable to be removed along with him when he becomes chargeable to the parish; the opinion of the counsel being . . . that they must go; though the English wife has settlement of her own, she must be sent along with him.13

While these paupers were roundly and uniformly condemned, a more equivocal line was taken on those Irish who were gainfully employed. Farmers, for example, realised the utility of Irish spalpeens, even if magistrates and parish constables were less convinced. During the 1830s Irish labourers were attracted to hiring fairs in places like Dalton-in-Furness, where they were blamed for ‘the drunkenness, quarrelling and fighting, which defied all law, civil and ecclesiastical’, in the town.14 This palpable and growing concern is all the more interesting because Whitehaven and Carlisle were the only towns in Cumberland which had sizeable and permanent Irish communities in 1836, when the Select Committee report into living conditions of Irish in Britain was published. At this time Carlisle contained 1,200 Irish, ‘a great many of them very poor’, and Whitehaven some 400 ‘mostly poor labourers’.15 By 1841, with 80 to 90 baptisms per year, and steadily increasing immigration, the Irish-born population in Whitehaven doubled to 800, one sixth of the 4,881 in the county.16 By the 1840s the people of Cumberland were doubtless well aware of a local Irish presence; they would also have been familiar with the national, religious and economic antipathies that became near-endemic as Irish settlement increased. In Cumbria, for example, the construction of the railway line encouraged industrial growth and with it Irish and other in-migration. The railway era also gave the Lake Counties their first serious recorded outbreak of anti-Irish violence. During the building of the Lancaster to Carlisle line, thousands of navvies descended on a narrow strip of the region, from north Lancashire, through Westmorland and Cumberland. In February 1846 trouble erupted among the English and Irish contingents which resulted in several days of unrest and rioting. These disturbances required yeomanry intervention and incited terror among the locals.17 As news of the Famine broke and immigration increased, the local press acted as a mouthpiece for the innate fears and prejudices of the public. The following editorial comment is typical of opi-


33

nions endemic to the press in the later 1840s, and reflects the perennial problem of vagrancy, not just the new crisis of the Famine: ‘The Irish are by nature and habit, dirty, proud, lazy beggars, and so they will remain until this country sees the expediency of making them shift for themselves, as do the ‘‘thrifty sons of Scotland’’ ’.18 At the same time, the continued problem of the Famine exposed the Janus-faced nature of English perceptions of Ireland. The Irish may have appeared a thoroughgoing nuisance, but their plight also preyed on the charitable urges of Victorian consciences. Thus, the press, while still pointing out deficiencies in the Irish character, sometimes appealed for humanity. ‘Whatever may be the faults and follies of the Irish people’, one Whitehaven editor averred, ‘their present distressing position . . . presents a loud and irresistible call upon the benevolence of every industrious Briton.’19 Indeed it did; and some in Whitehaven were not slow to react. Within a week, the same newspaper reported a collection of 50 guineas by the Society of Friends, while the town simultaneously founded a ‘Ladies’ Irish Clothing Society’ with the intention of collecting warm garments for despatch to the needy of Ireland.20 Within months, however, the spectre of Irish migration was again being aired. Initiatives like collections of money and clothes were meant to keep the Irish in Ireland; but such charity had its limitations, and the scale of Irish settlement in the second half of the 1840s showed how miserably inadequate private initiatives were. This is how the Whitehaven press viewed the prospect of Irish labour migration: . . . our own artisans have nothing to spare now . . . and there is . . . a probability of their having less . . . We have said it, and we repeat it, that the land of Ireland ought to support the poor of Ireland—that we have enough to do to pay our own taxes or poor rates, without those of the Irish gentry. . .21

In keeping with earlier initiatives, the Whitehaven Herald in 1847 was able to report that Irish paupers were being shipped back whence they came.22 However, in the following year the problem went unabated and local observers prompted a campaign to appoint the Superintendent of Police as temporary relieving officer so that he could check the veracity of individual claims for relief. This type of improvement in poor law administration had met with some success in Liverpool, and, when the same was eventually done in

34


Whitehaven, it also led to some reduction in the problem of Irish pauperism there.23 Inevitably, perhaps, the loudest voice of opposition to the immigration of poor Irish came from the middle classes; after all, it was they who shouldered the financial burden of a spiralling poor rate. In truth, though, Irish settlement had a wider impact in Whitehaven—as Robert Rawlinson, the government’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, was to discover. Visiting the town in 1849—just as he visited many others in the wake of an epidemic of cholera and typhus—Rawlinson intimated that there is ‘such an amount of human wretchedness and misery’ in Whitehaven that ‘few people in better circumstances would believe it existed’.24 Local dignitaries, organised around the Harbour Trustees, were rather irritated by the news that Rawlinson was to visit them and, in an effort to knock him out of his stride, they conducted their own census with which they were determined to show that Whitehaven had a death rate lower than the 23 per 1,000 which was the qualification for Rawlinson’s visit. Unperturbed by claims that his tables of figures were ‘cooked’, Rawlinson descended on Whitehaven and for two full days solicited various opinions as to the town’s state.25 The resulting testimony singled out the Irish several times. A man called Spencer, who had lived adjacent to the Whitehaven burial ground for 38 years, was asked why disease had struck the town so hard, and he answered: ‘one cause of fever in Whitehaven was that the Irish will go, for shelter, into any house, and they [the local ruling class] had no authority to prevent people from occupying them till they were properly cleansed’.26 T. F. I’Anson, a local surgeon, blamed the fever on ‘atmospheric conditions, and its severity in Whitehaven to the close packing of the poorer inhabitants’; but he noted in particular that ‘nearly all the cases in Ribton Lane were from two lodging houses which are always crowded with Irish’.27 In just three months of 1847, I’Anson revealed, twelve cases originated in one lodging house in Harmless Hill alone.28 While the Irish almost inevitably featured in this post mortem, some respondents claimed others, such as landlords, were culpable. In particular, Lord Lonsdale’s dwellings were singled out as execrable, but the Harbour Trustees’ solicitor, Lumb, failing utterly to see the irony of his words, asserted that ‘it was monstrous to attack the property of a nobleman—quite monstrous’.29 In the 1850s, the famine-driven exodus had clearly lifted, but


35

the question of Irish pauperism, in general, continued to exercise the minds of many prominent men, local and national alike. As each select committee came and went, so the Cumbrian faction did their duty, revealing the onerous burden of a peripatetic horde of Irish wandering from parish to parish. In 1855, William Wilson, a former Whitehaven Poor Law Guardian, furnished the Select Committee on Poor Law Removals with details of the number of paupers returned to Ireland. Between 1847 and 1853, the total sent back was no more than eight—far fewer, in fact, than the numbers removed in the earlier decades of the century, and a far cry from the thousands sent back from Manchester and Liverpool, although Wilson later admitted these figures for Whitehaven excluded those returned voluntarily.30 Furthermore, figures for indoor relief were much higher, which is not surprising given the joint pressures imposed by the Famine and a rigorous application of poor-law orthodoxy in these post-1834 years. In 1847 there had been 684 vagrants in the workhouse, of whom 404 were Irish, 127 English and 111 Scots. However, Wilson proudly reported how magistrates, having been greatly disturbed by this pauper problem, introduced a new, more rigorous system of indoor relief with the consequence that the three figures fell to 65, 56 and 19 respectively. Wilson explained that the system involved ‘not giving them any food in the morning until they had broken a sufficient quantity of stones to pay for that food’.31 The cruelty revealed by this intimation can be set against the position in Furness, where Irish pauperism was less of a problem and receding, a fact shown by the humorous disposition of one newspaper editor: A visible change has taken place of late years with regard to vagrancy; for in years gone by no sooner had the sun crossed the vernal equinox than our villages began to be thronged with wayfarers, whose only means of support was the powers they had upon the sympathies of their fellow beings. Now, a vagrant of such a class is a great rarity. What has wrought a change is a topic of politicians to dwell upon. And as the beggars were chiefly Irish, we are naturally led to inquire which of the great national convulsions has exterminated vagrancy—free trade, the Irish famine, or the discovery of the gold fields.32

Indeed, the 1850s did witness considerable changes in the nature of Irish migration: most of these were derived from broader economic developments in the region, and not simply from the decline in peripatetic pauperism. Although the Cumbrian Irish community

36


of the second half of the nineteenth century had old roots, patterns of permanent settlement increased noticeably in the post-Famine years, as migrants—Irish and others—were brought to the region by increased opportunities in coal and especially iron mining. The transport revolution of the 1840s brought railways even to remote spots like Cumbria and, by the early 1860s, the whole region between Carlisle and Lancaster, through the coal and iron fields, was attached to the national network. The region’s mineral lines also connected Maryport, Workington and Whitehaven to Durham and the north east and Barrow to the rest of Lancashire. Rail links brought internal commercial unity to the area and promoted population movement within the Lake Counties. The introduction of steamer services in the 1860s added Barrow to the list of northwestern ports with direct trade and passenger links with Ireland. These developments clearly influenced a general re-ordering of population in which growing Irish settlement was an important part. Tables 2.1 and 2.2 illustrate the extent to which the population of certain of the region’s new industrial towns outstripped that of older, established towns as well as that of the county itself. To the south, Barrow (which was then in Lancashire) had growth rates which were impressive even by that county’s dizzy standards. Industrial and transport developments in Cumbria not only increased migration to the region but also transformed existing settlement patterns. In 1836, Whitehaven and Carlisle had been entirely dominant as far as Irish settlement was concerned; by 1851 the Whitehaven district alone contained 4,175 Irish settlers, with 525 of those in the burgeoning iron-ore centre of Cleator and Cleator Moor. By the 1850s and 1860s increased local iron-ore production, and the manufacture of iron, steel and ships, halted the creeping demise of old towns, like Whitehaven, and breathed life into newer settlements, from Barrow and Millom in the south, to Workington and Cleator in the north. Between 1851 and 1881, the population of Cumbria shifted markedly towards its coastal regions and the area around Carlisle, and the Irish-born portion of the county, steady at around five per cent, was exceeded only in places like Lancashire and Tyneside.33 Indeed, there was remarkable symmetry, in proportional terms, between the Irish populations of Cumberland and the north-east counties (Table 2.3), while in certain pockets of Cumberland the Irish presence was much above the county rate (Table 2.4). The Irish-born settlement in Cleator

195 391 2,031 304 58

– – – – –

% 205 509 2,429 343 61

1861

Source: Census of England and Wales, 1851–1901.

Cumberland Durham Lancashire Northumberland Westmorland

1851 5.1 30.2 19.6 13.2 5.2

% 220 685 2,189 387 65

1871 7.3 34.6 16.1 12.8 6.2

% 251 867 3,454 434 64

1881 14.1 26.6 22.5 12.1 71.5

% 267 1,016 3,927 506 66

1891

Table 2.1: Population growth in five northern counties, 1851–1901 (000s)

6.4 17.2 13.7 16.6 3.1

% 267 1,187 3,897 603 64

1901

0.0 16.8 70.8 19.2 73.0

%

Patterns of Arrival and Settlement 37

38


Table 2.2: Population growth in the main urban centres of west Cumberland and north Lancashire, 1841–1911 Year

Barrow

Cleator

Whitehaven

Workington

Carlisle

1841 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911

c.150* c.660* 3,315 18,911 47,259 51,712 57,586 63,770

763 1,779 3,995 7,061 10,420 9,464 8,120 8,301

17,420 20,636 21,073 22,208 22,435 21,811 21,593 21,484

6,945 6,280 6,467 8,413 14,361 23,749 26,139 25,065

24,488 29,320 32,723 34,628 39,509 42,195 49,088 49,551

Source: Census of England and Wales, 1841–1911. *Estimates for 1843 and 1850 respectively.

Moor, for example, peaked in 1871 at a total of 2,497 (36 per cent); in Barrow, a decade later, the equivalent figure was 5,046, a little over ten per cent of the town’s total inhabitants.34 During the second half of the nineteenth century, the nonCumberland-born population of the county amounted to up to one quarter of the whole,35 while throughout the years 1851–1891 the impact of migrants upon the area was considerable, and in the same period the resident Irish-born of the county, for example, only dropped below four per cent after 1881. Similarly, the Scots also were no strangers to Cumberland, with Carlisle constituting something of a second home to them. With the availability of work in the iron and coal industries of West Cumberland, the Scots presence accounted for between 3.8 and 4.9 per cent of the county total from 1851 to 1891.36 The growth of industrial West Cumberland enTable 2.3: The Irish-born populations of three northern counties, 1851–1891

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

Cumberland

%

Northumberland

%

Durham

%

9,866 10,529 11,870 11,826 6,371

5.1 5.1 5.4 4.7 2.4

12,666 15,034 14,506 10,414 9,613

4.2 4.4 3.8 2.7 2.0

18,501 27,729 37,515 27,663 22,496

4.7 5.5 5.5 3.2 2.2

Workington Whitehaven Cleator Moor Barrow

392 1,822 525 –

1851 6.2 6.9 25.9 –

% 477 1,448 1,438 –

1861 7.4 6.9 36.0 –

% 784 1,238 2,497 805

1871 9.3 5.8 35.4 4.3

% 1,790 1,324 2,643 5,046

1881

Table 2.4: The Irish-born populations of four Cumbrian towns, 1851–1891

12.5 5.9 25.4 10.7

% 1,705 869 1,569 4,249

1891

7.2 4.0 14.2 6.2

%


40


couraged not only Celtic migration, but the wider demographic changes which were a particular feature of that area of the county. As can be seen from Table 2.4, in each town—bar the old port town of Whitehaven—noteworthy Irish-born populations continued to grow until well into the second half of the century. While a quantitative picture of Irish settlement in individual towns or counties can be discerned from census material, it is less simple to construct an adequate picture of the processes and patterns of migration which attracted Irish-born migrants in the first place. It is also difficult to reconstruct their communal experience after arrival. Having examined something of early Irish settlement in West Cumbria, it remains for us to consider the origins and social position of these growing communities. For example, was there an obvious pattern of origin and arrival which linked the Cumbrian Irish? This question is addressed now.

II Initially, historians agree, the majority of Irish travelling to Britain headed south or east to the nearest port. The point of departure and the location of the nearest Irish port played an important part in determining which migrants went where. Consequently, broad patterns of migration are noticeable. The Ulster Irish mostly embarked from Belfast, Londonderry or Newry for Glasgow and the Cumbrian ports from Barrow to Maryport; the Leinster Irish sailed from Dublin to Liverpool; while those from Munster made their way to Bristol, Wales or London from southern ports like Cork.37 In the pre-Famine years, a large proportion of the Irish settled in these ports of arrival. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the emergence of newer attractions—like Workington, Barrow and Cleator, and their equivalents in other regions— fostered greater diffusion in the trends of Irish migration to Britain. Throughout our period certain core associations were built up and maintained between sender and receiver nations. In general, it can be argued, Irish migration from town to town did not represent aimless wandering, but the sum of the migrants’ responses to a variety of networks that tied the new communities together. Patterns emerged because migration was part determined by attempts to improve life chance. Indeed, a number of useful case studies


41

clearly demonstrate the existence of established routes for Irish migrants within Britain. In Leeds during the 1850s, Dillon argues, the Irish-born came from a number of Irish counties—predominantly Dublin (26 per cent), Mayo (8.7 per cent) and Tipperary (8.7 per cent)—via ports in South Wales, and from Liverpool and Glasgow.38 Not only is this a wide section of all places of possible entry, but it is also indicative of a sense of purpose to migration. As Dillon says, these Irish did not spend much time in any of the port areas for ‘the majority had quickly headed for the expanding and prosperous town of Leeds’.39 As might be expected, the origins of the Bradford Irish were not dissimilar from those in nearby Leeds; nor, indeed, was their likely route of travel. In 1851, Queens was the county of birth of 32.9 per cent of the Bradford Irish-born, while the western counties of Mayo and Sligo accounted for 13.8 and 11.1 per cent; Dublin, with 8.2 per cent, was in fourth place.40 In a general sense, most of the Irish who headed for the West Riding seem to have come from Connaught and Leinster, with Munster in third place. It can also be assumed that the Irish-born in Bradford, who came from those counties, would have travelled on a route taking in Dublin and Liverpool, Bristol or South Wales. Elsewhere in Yorkshire, the story was not unfamiliar. In York, in 1851 the Mayo-born Irish accounted for 40.8 per cent of the town’s Irish population.41 By 1861 the Mayo contingent still accounted for 32.2 per cent, a figure which, despite a drop to 27.6 per cent in 1871, was nevertheless a continuously significant proportion. Analysis of the York Irish has shown that 80, 70.8 and 77.6 per cent of the city’s Irish population came from six southern counties, predominantly in the west of Ireland, Mayo included.42 Similar evidence shows that 40 per cent of the Irish in Stafford came from Galway, Roscommon and Mayo: especially from Castlerea, an area that straddled all three of these counties. Herson points out that many Irish who arrived in Stafford had no connection with families in the area, but a significant proportion are covered by some degree of ‘pattern’ or ‘chain’ migration.43 Laying aside the part played by geographical linkage as a factor in destination, the evidence of all four of these historians suggest key elements of kinship and communal ties in the process of immigration. Given the importance of geography in these matters of arrival and settlement, we might expect the Irish in Cumbria to have hailed both from Ulster and the south-east counties, for both had direct

Down Antrim Armagh Londonderry Tyrone Fermanagh Monaghan Cavan Donegal Ulster ALL ULSTER Louth Meath Dublin Wicklow Wexford Carlow Kildare Longford Westmeath King’s Queen’s Kilkenny ALL LEINSTER

County

76.10 13.10 8.70 2.30

2.20

0.70 2.10 0.00

92.40 100.00

5.50 1.10 2.20

62.70 7.70 11.00 2.20

Workington 1871 1881

1.10 1.10

1861

1.40

78.00

39.00 10.70 22.00 2.10 0.70 1.40 0.70 0.70 0.70

1851

0.00

82.10

4.40

13.30

64.40

1891

1861

11.80

1.10

76.50 80.90 11.80 3.40

Whitehaven 1871 1881

0.00

0.00

1.70

0.00 12.40

2.30 1.10

5.60 1.10

98.30 95.90 100.00 85.40

8.30

83.30 84.50 10.40 6.70

1851

23.30

5.70

17.60

76.90

65.70 5.40 2.90 2.90

1891

Table 2.5: Origins of the Irish-born population of three Cumbrian towns, 1851–1891 Barrow 1881 1891

2.30 0.10 0.10 0.20

1.40 1.00 2.10

0.30 21.20 11.10

4.60 1.60 0.60

8.60 0.30 3.80

4.30

0.50

3.80

12.80 15.30 18.30 15.80 36.80 42.80 6.10 5.70 10.60 6.80 4.80 4.80 11.30 9.40 8.20 2.40 1.30 1.40 1.00 2.20 3.40 4.80 1.20 1.40 0.90 1.40 0.30 0.10 61.30 77.70 92.30

1871

42 Culture, Conflict and Migration

2.20

0.00

0.00

1.10 2.20 2.20 0.00

15.50

0.00

2.20

1891

1.40 2.80 8.50 11.70

2.20 1.10

1.10

1.10

Workington 1871 1881

15.50

1861

0.70

0.70

7.10

0.70

2.80

3.60

1851

0.00

1.70

1.70

0.00

1851

0.00

3.50 3.50

0.00

1861

(continued)

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

2.10

0.00

Whitehaven 1871 1881

0.00

0.00

0.00

1891

4.50 4.50

0.70 0.30 1.40 0.30 1.00 3.70

0.30 1.00 1.40 2.70 3.80 9.20

1871

3.70 3.70

2.90 0.30 0.10 2.20 0.20 1.50 0.20 4.50

0.70 0.20 1.30 0.60 0.10

0.00

0.50

0.50

2.90

1.40

0.50

Barrow 1881 1891

*Includes illegible entries and instances where returns mentioned towns, like ‘Newtown’, which occur in many counties, n = 1,982 (all towns).

Sligo Leitrim Roscommon Galway Mayo Connaught ALL CONNAUGHT Clare Limerick Tipperary Waterford Cork Kerry ALL MUNSTER NK other*

County

Table 2.5:


44


sea routes to our region, with boats from Barrow, Whitehaven, Workington and Maryport regularly visiting ports on the eastern side of Ireland, like Dublin, Newry and around Belfast. In trying to ascertain the origins of the Irish in Cleator Moor we are faced with problems of enumeration. Of the three censuses under scrutiny in this chapter, only the 1851 returns provide a picture of where the Irish came from. At a time when 525 (29.5 per cent) out of a population of 1,779 were Irish, the census returns note 45 specific places of Irish origin, but thirteen of these are illegible. Of the other 32, it is possible to detect a northern bias in the origins of the local Irish population, with nine coming from County Down, seven from County Antrim, three from both Derry and Dublin and one each from Counties Fermanagh and Kildare. This small sample, however, does not provide a basis for firm generalisation and two subsequent censuses add nothing to this line of enquiry. Remarkably, in 1861 when 1,438 Irish were present in a total population of 3,995 (some 35.9 per cent in all), only one Irishman, an iron-ore miner from Wexford, is noted by the census enumerator as being from anywhere other than ‘Ireland’. In 1871, when the population of Cleator had doubled to 7,061, and the Irish proportion had reached 2,497 (35.4 per cent), not one of this enlarged group was noted by town or village of origin. For Barrow, Whitehaven and Workington, enumerations were a little more thorough. From these it has been possible to compile Table 2.5 which provides an interesting picture of Irish settlement in Cumbria. The overall impression gained from Table 2.5 is that migration links between Ireland and Cumbria were remarkably consistent throughout the period under discussion. In all five census decades, migrants from Ulster utterly dominated these Irish communities. Within this pattern of Ulster-orientated departures, the county of Down consistently provided the majority of the Irish communities in Whitehaven and Workington, with a share ranging between 40 and 85 per cent. In addition, only on one or two occasions (for instance in Whitehaven in 1891) did the Irish-born in Connaught or Munster reach double figures. It might also be noticed that, in the cases of Whitehaven and Workington, the three easternmost counties of Ulster—Antrim, Down and Armagh—together provided an overwhelming share of those Irish-born who settled in the region. These data give the impression that settlement in Barrow was rather more broad-based than in the other two places, for most Irish

107 73 41

2

3 2 2 6

1 2

91 37 11

4

1 1

2 1

1

9 4

1 7 10

46 91 18

4

9 4

9 1

1

125 132 24

6

7 1 1 1

6

109 177 48

2 2

1 5

1

6

1

1

2

3 5 5

2

2

1

1

4

213 138 88 103 89 134 129 112 14 14 2 10 4

3

2

1

49 155 7

Whitehaven 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

3

1

1

3

1

2

3 1

2

1

4

129 141 206 174 34 79 185 145 14 8 35 21

1

1

3

72 229 21

Cleator Moor 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

1 16

5 7

4

28

76 79 8

5

1 36

18

242 175 13

25

6 1

16

182 208 9

Barrow 1871 1881 1891

*The receiver town is either Workington, Whitehaven, Cleator Moor or Barrow. {Other includes: America, USA, ‘at Sea’, ‘off Cape Good Hope’, Prussia, France, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, London— but none in significant quantities.

Ireland Receiver town* Cumberland Westmorland Lancashire and Cheshire Northumberland Durham Teesside Yorkshire Scotland Wales Isle of Man Other{

Workington 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

Table 2.6: The birthplaces of the children of the Irish-born in Cumbria


46


counties get some form of mention in connection with the town; nor was the dominance of one or two counties quite as striking as it was in west Cumberland. However, two observations can be made on this point. First, that the sample size for Barrow is much bigger, as, by 1881, was the town’s Irish population; second, despite the obvious spread of places of origin among the Barrow Irish, Ulster still dominated. By 1871 patterns had begun to emerge in the nature of Irish arrival in Barrow that were clearly entrenched by 1881. A closer examination of Table 2.5 illustrates that the Barrow Irish of 1871 and 1881 had their origins primarily in the two east coast counties of Ulster, Antrim and Down. Furthermore, Tyrone was also well represented with Fermanagh less so. Even allowing for the different sizes of these two counties (198,000 and 85,000, respectively, in 1881), the former, Tyrone, was proportionately more heavily represented in the Barrow figures. A common observation for the region’s entire Irish-born community is, therefore, that their birthplaces were mainly in the Protestant heartlands of Ireland, the most typical of the nine Ulster counties and two-thirds of modern-day Northern Ireland. The nature of settlement in certain towns confirmed this CumbriaUlster connection. In Barrow, in 1871, for example, 61.3 per cent of the Irish-born came from the nine counties; the figure for 1881 (77.6 per cent) reflected the northern bias of the local Irish community even more strikingly than in the previous census; and by 1891, the Ulster figure had climbed to over 90 per cent.44 This pattern was confirmed by the fact that, during the 1870s, the proportion of Irish from Connaught and Leinster halved while the proportion from Munster increased only slightly to a little over five per cent. Elsewhere, such trends were perhaps more striking. In north-west Cumbria, for instance, the Ulster figure occasionally reached 100 per cent, as it did, for example, in Whitehaven (in 1871) and Workington (in 1881). There are a number of explanations for these patterns of Irish arrival. As well as familial ties and geographical proximity, work was central to the migrants’ choice of destination. Thus, while textile workers from north-east Ireland had long been attracted to the region, the emergence of shipbuilding in Barrow explains the growing preponderance of the Ulster-born among the local Irish community in the 1870s. Not only was Barrow host to a growing shipyard which attracted incomers, but the nature of shipbuilding


47

itself meant that the town gradually became part of wider migration trends within this industry. These movements ran in periodic and geographic cycles, driven by boom and slump, occurring between Belfast, the Clyde, the north east and, later, Barrow. Migration between the shipbuilding areas was often prompted by the disputes of skilled workers which threw unskilled, often Irish, labour out of work. It has also been argued that all the skilled labour in the Barrow and Belfast yards was trained on the Clyde, thus strengthening the culture of migration among all ranks of labour.45 That Barrow, and the other towns of coastal Cumbria, developed such strong Ulster connections impacted heavily on the region’s communal culture. As if to strike this point home, closer examination of the 1881 census for Barrow emphasises not only the Ulster bias of the Barrow Irish-born, but reveals an even more specific bias which sharpened further the potential for ethnic and sectarian strife in the town. Of the total Irish denoted in the census by a specific place of origin, 205 came from Belfast. This suggests that about 20 per cent of the Barrow Irish came from Ireland’s great industrial city. When this figure is taken in conjunction with the figure for Antrim we can see that 336 Irish, or 36.8 per cent of the sample, came from that Ulster county alone. Furthermore, Table 2.5 shows that, in addition to those from Antrim, 149 (16.3 per cent) of the Irish in the sample for 1881 came from Down—the county which provided most of the Irish-born communities of Whitehaven and Workington. In combination, then, 52.1 per cent of the sample of Barrow Irish came from these two easternmost counties of Ulster. Further analysis of census evidence, in relation to the birthplaces of the non-Irish within the Irish communities, also allows us to conjecture, tentatively, upon the nature of Irish migration to Cumbria. The evidence presented in Table 2.6—which details the preponderance of Cumberland among the birthplaces of non-Irishborn offspring of Irish-born migrants—suggests that the majority of Irish in the north of the region came via the county’s ports, probably Whitehaven. Equally, it is discernible that the Barrow Irish-born population came to the town in three main ways: either directly, through Scotland, or via Lancashire. In the case of Scotland, most of the Barrow Irish came from Glasgow. Those heading to the town through Lancashire spent some time in coastal and port towns such as Fleetwood, Morecambe, Southport and Liverpool. Some with children born in Lancashire also passed through the mill

48


towns, like Blackburn and Preston, and Manchester. The picture for later years is complicated somewhat because, as the size of the Irish-born element of the Irish population decreased, enumerators were recording an increasingly diverse array of non-Irish-born children. Yet, even in 1891, when Irish migration to the region had fallen off significantly, the majority of the children of the Irishborn originated in either Ireland or the receiver town, which suggests the importance of direct transfer between Ireland and Cumbria. In each of these four census years there is also some mention of the north east, and especially County Durham. A number of the Irish in Workington seem to have passed through the mining, iron manufacturing and engineering areas of County Durham at some time, with places like Blackhall, Bishop Auckland, Witton Park, Pelaw and Gateshead being mentioned. The Irish in Workington also showed a certain, limited connection with Middlesbrough and the Teesside iron districts. In the case of Barrow, north-east Irish connections were mainly due to migrants passing through other shipbuilding towns, for example, Jarrow and Sunderland. The Isle of Man is also represented in the figures for all of the towns, and that island seems to have been something of a staging post for those moving between the two countries. As we might expect, however, Cumberland features heavily as the birth place of second-generation settlers in all towns. Even in Barrow, Cumberland was the fourth most frequent birthplace of Irish children. Thus, we can deduce, the general trend of movement was directly into the region and then within it. The preponderance of Ulster origins among the Cumbrian Irish-born might help to explain the rapid rise of Orangeism in the area, for a number of these settlers must have been Protestants hailing from areas with an Orange tradition. Barrow’s strong Belfast connection is especially relevant in this respect, while the strong Scots presence—in shipbuilding, iron, steel and mining—strengthens further the likelihood of linkages, through migration, between forms of British and Irish Orangeism. Similarly, these communities were mainly male dominated, which might help us to comprehend their participation in the region’s infamous, violent, drink culture. Table 2.7, for example, illustrates very clearly that in all but one instance—Cleator Moor in 1851—male Irish settlers massively outnumbered their female counterparts, usually by no less than


49

30 per cent. This can have done little for the development of a balanced community. Furthermore, if we extract figures for 1871 and compare them with those contained in published census material we can observe that, whereas Cleator Moor’s Irish population had been characterised by an increase in the ratio of men to women, it did not reach the same proportions as the ten towns with the highest ratios. As can be seen from Table 2.8, Barrow had the highest ratio of Irish males to females of any industrial town and was only surpassed, as might be expected, by those towns with a high military presence. Why should Barrow feature such a gender imbalance when compared with our other Cumbrian towns? The principal explanation concerns timing. When the census was taken, in 1871, Barrow was virtually a huge building site, and thus attracted men more than women. At the same time, Barrow contained no specifically women’s work, unlike in Cleator Moor where a flax and jute mill explained the town’s gender imbalance in favour of women in 1851 (Table 2.7) and also helped to balance out male arrivals to the iron trades in the following decade. The flax and jute mill, however, could not prevent Cleator’s gender balance being turned around after the 1860s when developments in the iron industry led to even more male work. The second reason for Barrow’s exceptional position relates to pace of arrival and development. Compared with Whitehaven and Workington, growth in Barrow in the 1860s was breathtaking and most arrivals were young men. It is also noticeable that in the 1870s and 1880s, when similar growth rates struck Workington’s iron and steel industries, and the town’s population doubled, so its Irish-born population became heavily male-dominated with proportions similar to Barrow’s during the peak period (Tables 2.4 and 2.8). While the overall picture of Cleator Moor’s Irish populace is one of permanency, the changing proportions of men against women (in favour of the former) suggest that the core community was fairly continuously supplemented by the in-migration of young Irish males. In Barrow, the numerical preponderance of male over female suggests something similar—a high arrival rate—though one suspects that migratory chains within the shipbuilding industry probably added to the fluidity of Barrow’s population, encouraging short-stay arrivals throughout the town’s history. In Whitehaven, the dominance of coal- and port-related work, with its potential for attracting male in-migrants, was offset

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

236 240 476 1,183 1,039

M

156 233 308 607 666

151.3:100 103.0:100 154.4:100 194.9:100 156.0:100

Workington F M:F 1,038 815 679 743 459

M 784 633 559 581 410

132.4:100 128.8:100 121.5:100 127.4:100 112.0:100

Whitehaven F M:F 81.7:100 124.0:100 146.7:100 133.5:100

Cleator Moor F M:F

236 289 796 642 1,496 1,020 1,511 1,132

M

Table 2.7: Male-to-female ratios within the Cumbrian-Irish community

– – 218.2:100 154.5:100

Barrow F M:F

– – – – 552 253 3,063 1,983

M



51

Table 2.8: Male-to-female ratios among the Cumbrian Irish-born (1871) in comparative perspective Colchester Winchester Canterbury BARROW Middlesbrough Portsmouth Plymouth Dorchester Yarmouth Merthyr Tydfil WORKINGTON CLEATOR WHITEHAVEN

314.2:100 235.6:100 228.8:100 218.2:100 193.7:100 174.2:100 171.8:100 171.8:100 162.3:100 160.0:100 154.4:100 146.7:100 121.5:100

Source: Census of England and Wales, 1871; after C. G. Pooley, ‘Segregation or integration? The residential experience of the Irish in mid-Victorian Britain’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in Britain, 1815–1939, Table 2.3, p. 69.

by two things: the evolutionary and historical nature of its Irish community and the town’s stagnating growth rates in the second half of the century.

III In assessing residential experience in these two towns, it is important to note one or two general points. First, it can be argued that the immaturity and isolation of Cleator and Barrow predetermined the type of reception all newcomers would encounter. Both places, products primarily of the nineteenth century, were entirely without the court-style dwellings traditionally associated with disease, squalor and overcrowding, in general, and with a prevalent stereotype of the Irish, in particular. For this reason, the Cleator and Barrow Irish communities were not, on the whole, physically isolated or spatially separated.46 Yet the speed of growth, particularly in Barrow, threw up its own kind of problems. Conversely, Whitehaven, an old eighteenth-century town, was, as our consideration of the Rawlinson Report (1849) illustrated, an appallingly overcrowded place, whose environs were dominated in the 1840s

52


and 1850s by cellars, courts, slums, rookeries and a (generally) old and dilapidated housing stock. Thus, Whitehaven was roundly condemned by Rawlinson. In almost every street he uncovered ‘scenes of utter destitution, misery, and extreme degradation’. Many lacked privies or water supplies; others housed inadequately serviced ash-pits. Rawlinson was also appalled to find pigs kept in many of Whitehaven’s 281 cellar dwellings, and he noted that the local House of Correction, though still standing and in use, had been condemned some time earlier by the Inspector of Prisons. Yet he observed that the town’s vagrants’ lodging houses, 24 in number, ‘rank with the better-conditioned room tenements’.47 Overall, conditions in the town were poor; nor did Rawlinson find much to impress him in Penrith, Carlisle and Keswick. The latter place, he argued, ‘is encompassed by foul middens, open cess pools and stagnant ditches, or by still fouler drains’.48 While the picture painted in subsequent decades was marginally better, future reports still indicated the general poverty of living conditions in Whitehaven.49 Though not faced with life in eighteenth-century court-type dwellings, the Barrow Irish had to contend with overcrowding of a different type, born not of age and decay, but of the failure of the local business class to provide for the residential needs of the workers who were so vital to their industrial plans. In Cleator, the prevalence in the town of two-up-two-down accommodation encouraged overcrowding.50 Previous work carried out into Irish settlement in Cleator has suggested some clustering within the community, in certain streets and roads.51 However, more detailed research reveals that the Irish in Cleator, being the second largest national group in the town behind the English, were present in every street on the Moor. The exception is provided by Cleator village where, between 1851 and 1891, there was a consistently smaller density of Irish residents than on the Moor. Meanwhile the building of tenements meant that 12.9 per cent of Barrow’s housing stock was only two-roomed, and living conditions in Barrow in the 1860s and 1870s were an especial cause of concern for local editors—men like George Carruthers and Joseph Richardson52 — and provide a worthy case study of the experience of Irish settlers in a new town. Barrow had several key problems so far as working men’s accommodation was concerned. Areas of the town centre were


53

poor, while Barrow Island was undoubtedly the blackspot. The ‘Scotch’ buildings, located near the town’s steelworks, provided an example of the worst type of accommodation. The Dundee firm of Smith and Caird, which built the Scotch Flats, apparently had experience of similar undertakings in Scotland. During 1871 and 1872 these ‘Scotch buildings’—a triangular tenement structure of between three and four storeys—were erected. Inside could be found a courtyard which housed a bandstand-like refuse tip, and communal privies. The complex comprised approximately 260 separate dwellings which ‘met a very urgent need and, though not everyone’s choice of ideal residence, they served a most useful purpose for many years’.53 They were certainly functional, as was any dwelling space in the rapidly-expanding Barrow. In truth, though, these residences were dreadful. They were smaller than the Barrow Island Flats—which were built a few years later, again by Smith and Caird—yet in 1881 they provided homes for 1,317 people: an average per flat of about five.54 Of this number, 253 (19.2 per cent) were Irish-born.55 These flats were the product of innovations which their creators felt would alleviate the continual pressure upon available living space which rapid industrial development had fostered. In fact, finding accommodation for several thousand people, as these various flats did, failed to make the required impression, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Between 1871 and 1874 in particular, dwelling space was in acute demand and the new arrivals had to slot in where they could. In some extreme cases, such as that of a Tyrone-born labourer Peter Nugent, small, two-up-two-down houses were crammed with inhabitants. Nugent, his wife and three children were enumerated in 1871, living in Preston Street with their eleven lodgers, all except one of whom came from Ireland. The same census revealed another Irish labourer, living in nearby Scott Street with his extended family, who headed a household which contained fifteen people.56 Similarly, John Kintchley’s household contained sixteen people. One dwelling in Duncan Street even housed two families, headed by Patrick and John Moore (probably brothers or cousins), and a further sixteen people. None of these, however, could compare with the house of Arthur Quinn in Harrison Street. This dwelling was so overcrowded that it was brought to the attention of the Medical Officer of Health, who was reported to have entered Quinn’s home on two

54


separate occasions—27 July and 5 August 1874—to find 35 people, then 33, in residence. Quinn, who it was alleged kept five lodgers while renting rooms to three further families, claimed he had no option but to take in so many people because his weekly rent for the house was an extortionate one pound. Besides, he argued, his lodgers were all ‘proper dacent chaps’.57 Not all Irish families were packed into their dwellings like Quinn’s household. Yet the overall picture of Irish household size within our four communities suggests very clearly that the Cumbrian Irish experience was worse even than that shown in an average of Irish communities in Lancashire. Of the Cumbrian towns under scrutiny here, only Workington, in 1851 and 1861, came near to the size of household experienced by the Lancashire Irish. In Cleator Moor the rate in 1851 was double that calculated nationally, as was nearly the case in Barrow in 1871 (Table 2.9). These Irish households, which were considerably larger than the average in each town, were not simply statistical expressions; they were also the sphere of important lived experience. Closer examination of the structure of these larger-than-average households indicates quite a clear degree of social cohesion to the units. For example, very few of the Irish heads sampled were married to nonIrish spouses, and only a minority of the members of these households—children aside—were other than Irish-born. This point can be illustrated by reference to the percentage of lodgers born in Ireland. Lodgers represented a key economic stimulus to poorer households; they were a necessary part of the family economy. For Table 2.9: Average persons per Irish-headed household, 1851–1891 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 Irish ALL Irish ALL Irish ALL Irish ALL Irish ALL Workington Cleator Moor Whitehaven Barrow Lancashire England & Wales

5.9 4.4 9.9 7.1 6.0 5.2 – – 5.8 5.3 4.8

5.0 6.6 5.7 – 5.3

4.2 6.3 5.0 – 5.0 4.5

6.7 4.8 7.4 6.6 6.0 4.8 8.3 – 5.2 5.0 4.5

7.0 6.4 5.8 7.3 –

5.5 6.1 5.1 6.9 –

6.3 6.7 5.6 6.9 –

Source: Census of England and Wales, 1851–1891; Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, Table 7, p. 56.

5.5 5.6 – 6.9 –


55

Table 2.10: Percentage of lodgers born in Ireland Year

Workington

Whitehaven

Cleator Moor

Barrow

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

88.9 82.8 72.2 86.4 68.1

83.9 78.9 61.2 87.3 41.2

76.9 89.5 89.5 87.5 70.0

– – 88.6 81.7 72.0

migrant groups, however, the nationality of lodgers might be seen as a sensitive index of communal cohesion. The ‘Irishness’ of households can be seen as a measure of isolation but might just as easily reflect a more positive factor in migration—the existence and maintenance of mutual support networks. At any rate, the figures in Table 2.10 demonstrate the preponderance of Irish-born lodgers in Irish-headed households. While the solidarity of these Irish communities perhaps worsened the impact of their residential experience, it also must have had a positive dimension. We have seen examples of Irish overcrowding which persisted from Whitehaven to Barrow from the 1840s until the 1870s. Yet one of the worst examples still remains to be discussed: that of the Barrow Island cottages, which were the region’s worst example of expediency and exploitation in the face of spiralling urban growth. George Carruthers, editor of the Barrow Pilot, thought it appalling that ‘workers are permitted to herd like cattle in such pigsties as the Brick Cottages belonging to Ship Building Company’, although he added: ‘even in the better class of workmen’s houses overcrowding is permitted to a fearful extent’.58 In terms of sanitation, space and general amenities, these dwellings were the worst in the town’s short history. The huts had originally been erected to house the itinerant labourers constructing the Cavendish dock between 1863 and 1867. However, the scarcity of accommodation continued long afterwards, not least because this dock was only the first in a series that was not completed until 1879. When the Shipbuilding Company was constructed between 1871 and 1872, the board needed to meet the demands of both peripatetic dock navvies and permanent shipyard workers, and housed them in wooden huts, what Marshall called an ‘unhappy precursor of the modern prefabricated estate’.59 Despite assurances that these huts

56


were temporary, and later improvements which meant they were increasingly made from brick not wood, this unsatisfactory form of accommodation was still home to 1,133 Barrovians in 1881. Furthermore, 892 (78.8 per cent) of these inhabitants were Irishborn, 530 men and 362 women.60 In all, 17 per cent of the Barrow Irish-born population was to be found in these huts when the 1881 census was taken. It seems from the way that the town was constructed, that recent arrivals had little option but to endure the huts on the Island. Evidently, the Irish, a traditionally highly mobile workforce, figured prominently in this pitiable accommodation. Though it was convenient for shipyard employers to have their workforce so close at hand, the workers who lived there were angered by the housing conditions rather than enamoured by the prospect of living on the doorstep of their place of work. Most probably shared the views which one irate resident aired in a letter to the Barrow Vulcan. Picking up on the point that recent arrivals were driven to the worst housing by pressures associated with a rapidly growing population, ‘Bolt’ suggested that the residents of the huts were plagued by overcrowding. The pressure on space, evident even in Barrow proper, the writer argued, impinged upon the moral wellbeing of the inhabitants, not least because people had to share ‘mixed-sex rooms’. In an appeal ‘To the responsible patrons’, ‘Bolt’ demanded, ‘Give us better homes, that we may live decently and not in a state of semi-barbarity. . .’61 The people of Barrow Island, with a high proportion of Irish, were both physically and culturally separated from the town’s wider population. The press often criticised the drunkenness of these inhabitants and made regular reference to their unruly, often violent behaviour. Yet the Island did contain its progressive element. In January 1874, about 100 of the hut dwellers formed a pressure group to publicise their appalling environment. They were spurred on by the news that the Shipbuilding Company was to raise their rents.62 The president of the residents’ committee, Joseph Lambert, had more than one axe to grind on behalf of his peers. Lambert was involved in the local home rule campaign, and his part in this demand for social improvement, as well as his commitment to Irish political freedom, says much for the exigencies of life in this new community. In his speech to the meeting, Lambert upbraided the board of the Shipbuilding Company over its intention to increase


57

rents. He claimed that the proposed increase, from 3s per week to 3s 6d, was unjustified as, even at the old rates, the company grossed £2,792 per annum.63 Lambert claimed that this environment merited no price hike; whereas the entire population of the Island, he argued, was around 3,000, accommodation was available for only half that number. He said that in some of the Brick Huts there were as many as sixteen inhabitants, while conditions outside were little better, with ‘stagnant water of the very worst description . . . found to underlie the huts to a depth of ten–twelve inches’.64 What was more, Lambert argued, the conditions were ignored by the shipyard authorities and were a danger to life and limb: The amount of disease which existed was quietly kept from the public eye and ear, and from the Corporation, and it was only just that the public should know the real state of affairs. There were now four distinct cases of small-pox and one or two of typhoid, the most dangerous of all fevers.65

The residents of the Barrow Island Huts were regarded, from the mainland, as a collection of drunkards, an aggressive mob, and the presence of the Irish in great numbers did not temper these opinions. Nor did the amount of illicit brewing that went on in the huts, or the violence that accompanied the residents’ drinking. Lambert was annoyed, however, that all of the residents of that locality were tarred with the same brush. The Barrow Pilot article concluded with Lambert’s attack upon the aspersions cast on the inhabitants of the huts by a local newspaper: The Chairman [Lambert] remarked that the BARROW DAILY TIMES had said that the people of Old Barrow were not worthy of the sympathy of the ratepayers, as they were only a drunken lot of working men, and it was for the purpose of showing the people of Barrow that such was not the case that they had held this meeting.66

Whether drunken or not, and Lambert certainly was not, these people lived in conditions that deserved attention. In consequence, their meeting passed a motion imploring the Corporation to use its borrowing powers to improve conditions on the Island. It is without question that insanitary conditions led to disease and sickness, not to mention demoralisation and misery.67 Despite enduring some miserable conditions, the Irish-born population of Cumbria was not as marginalised by social geography as their compatriots living in Manchester or Liverpool in the 1830s or 1840s. Conditions of life in Cumbria drew the opprobrium of the

58


likes of Rawlinson, but no Kay, Engels or Lyon Playfair brought the local Irish population to the fore. Yet, in keeping with the response to Irish settlement elsewhere, the native population harboured a general feeling that the Irish were responsible for much of the social decay—particularly in Whitehaven were they had settled longest; but none of the communities outlined here could be called an Irish ghetto.68 The Irish in Cumbria tolerated some miserable living conditions and their household sizes were consistently above both the national and local averages. This, though, tells us as much about mutualism and the exigencies of migration as it does about social dislocation, for Irishmen on the move naturally looked to their countrymen for shelter and a general helping hand. In fact, the nearest we have in Cumbria to an Irish ghetto was to be found either hidden in the courts, cellars and lodging houses of Whitehaven, or among the 17 per cent of all Irish-born in Barrow in 1881 who were resident in the Barrow Island Huts. Rawlinson’s report on Whitehaven confirms the lower position of the Irish, as does Lambert’s reaction against living conditions in Barrow nearly thirty years later. In general, however, the Irish shared the worst accommodation that the town had to offer with English, Scots and Welsh; but they were especially prevalent in the town’s worst living areas. It must also be remembered, however, that the huts were cheaper than other accommodation in the town. Yet the linkage between this point and the Irish in the huts does not necessarily bear any significance in terms of poverty because the majority who lived there worked in the shipyard, where wages were high, and were also skilled men. The 1870s, then, increasingly saw the huts being inhabited by skilled shipyard tradesmen who, with men like Lambert among their number, and with families in accompaniment, took less kindly to the huts than did those labourers and navvies who built the docks and for whom this accommodation was originally intended. Perhaps we can conclude with the observation that the term ‘ghetto’ is more of a psychological than a physical state? It might also be said to be a more accurate measure of the psychology of English observers than of the Irish themselves. Later chapters of this book certainly suggest that Irishness was partly, and importantly, a construct formulated by those witnesses of widespread labour migration—poor law guardians, clerics, journalists and the like. Before moving on to examine some of these elements of Irish culture in west Cumbria, it is first necessary to provide an analysis of the role of the Irish in the labour


59

market, for work was intrinsic to the nature of migration and, while it encouraged the arrival of new people, it also shaped the culture of the new communities.

NOTES 1 W. J. Lowe, The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: The Making of a Working-Class Community (New York, 1989), pp. 21–41; F. Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819-1914 (Manchester, 1988), pp. 80–104. Although of lesser scale, the experience in York was nevertheless grim. See F. Finnegan, Poverty and Prejudice: A Study of Irish Immigrants in York, 1840–1875 (Cork, 1982), pp. 16–34. Also see C. Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 1845–52 (Dublin, 1994), pp. 297–341. 2 See D. M. MacRaild, ‘Irish immigration and the ‘‘Condition of England’’ question: the roots of an historiographical tradition’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1995), pp. 67–85. 3 A. Redford, Labour Migration in England, 1800-1850 (London, 1926), p. 132. 4 Annie Eaglesham, ‘The growth and influence of the West of Cumberland shipping industry, 1660-1800’ (PhD, University of Lancaster), 1977, p. 337; J. Godwin, ‘Early bowling-greens in Whitehaven’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, Vol. 90 (1990), p. 267. Equally apocryphal is the claim that the prodigious Swift learned to read before he was twelve months old. 5 J. V. Beckett, Coal and Tobacco: The Lowthers and the Economic Development of West Cumberland 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 85. 6 Ibid., p. 142. 7 Eaglesham, ‘The growth and influence of the West of Cumberland shipping industry’, p. 360. 8 A. Fell, The Early Iron Industry of Furness and District (London, 1968), pp. 363–67. First published in 1908; J. D. Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution (Beckermet, 1981 ed.), pp. 104–09. 9 Report of the Select Committee on the Poor Law (1817), vi, pp. 84–86; N. McCord, British History, 1815–1914 (Oxford), p. 74. 10 Report of the Select Committee on the Poor Law (1817), vi, p. 85. 11 ‘Petition from the rateable inhabitants of the Parish of Stapleton, County of Cumberland’, Journal of the House of Commons, Vol. 84 (1819), p. 152; Redford, Labour Migration, p. 119. 12 Report of the Select Committee on the Laws Relating to Vagrancy (1821), iv, pp. 55–57. 13 Ibid., p. 56. 14 Kendal Chronicle, 17 September 1831, quoted in J. D. Marshall and J. K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the Mid-Twentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change (Manchester, 1981), p. 3. The image of these drunken revellers,

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however, contrasts with a later period when, claims Fitzpatrick, Mayo’s 10,000 migratory workers sent home postal orders for £100,000 between 1876 and 1880: ‘ ‘‘A curious middle place’’: the Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989), p. 19. 15 Testimonies of Revd Joseph Marshall (Carlisle) and Revd Gregory Holden (Whitehaven): Report of the Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland: App. G, The State of the Irish in Great Britain (1836), p. 159. 16 Ibid.; Census of England and Wales, 1841. 17 T. Coleman, The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men who Made the Railways (London, 1985), pp. 95–96. The contemporary view is found in the Westmorland Gazette, 14, 21, 28 February 1846. It was rumoured that these events dated back to the previous year and trouble which flared up on the Milnthorpe stretch of the line: J. D. Marshall, ‘Some aspects of the social history of 19th century Cumbria: (II) crime, police, morals and the countryman’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, Vol. 70 (1970), pp. 228–29; Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A curious middle place’’ ’, p. 19. 18 Whitehaven Herald, 5 December 1846. 19 Ibid., 23 January 1847. 20 Ibid., 30 January 1847. 21 Ibid., 6 June 1847. 22 Ibid., 17 July 1847. 23 Frank Neal, ‘Lancashire, the Famine and the poor laws’, Irish Social and Economic History, Vol. 22 (1995), p. 36. For Liverpool see idem, Sectarian Violence, pp. 80–110; and ‘The Irish steamship companies and the Famine Irish’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1986), pp. 28–61; evidence of William Wilson, retired Poor Law Guardian, Whitehaven Union, to Report of the Select Committee on Poor Law (1855), p. 50. 24 Report of the General Board of Health on a Preliminary Inquiry into Sewerage, Drainage and Supply of Water, and Sanitary Condition of Inhabitants of the Town of Whitehaven (1849), p. 13; C. F. O’Neill, ‘The ‘‘Contest for Dominion’’: political conflict and the declines of the Lowther ‘‘interest’’ in Whitehaven, 1820-1900’, Northern History, Vol. 18 (1982), p. 142. The full inquiry was covered by the press: see Whitehaven Herald, 23 February 1849, which contains much material that Rawlinson did not include in his final report. 25 Rawlinson, Sanitary Conditions, p. 8. 26 Whitehaven Herald, 13 February 1849. 27 Ibid. 28 Rawlinson, Sanitary Conditions, p. 11. 29 Whitehaven Herald, 13 February 1849. 30 Report of the Select Committee on Poor Law Removals (1855), pp. 49–55, see p. 50; evidence of John Christian, in Report of the Select Committee on Vagrancy (1821), iv, pp. 55–57, implies that at this time vagrants were removed from Whitehaven on a regular basis, although no actual figures are given. Between the years 1846 and 1853, the total number removed from Manchester reached 4,732, with 62,780 being the number for Liverpool. See Neal, ‘Famine Irish and the Poor Laws’, Table 4, p. 38. 31 Report of the Select Committee on Poor Law Removals (1855), p. 50.


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32 Ulverston Advertiser, 14 April 1853. 33 Census of England and Wales, 1851; Census enumerators’ handbooks, Cleator Moor: PRO HO/107/2437; Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, p. 85. 34 Census enumerators’ handbooks: Cleator Moor, 1871, RG/11/5191–92; Barrow-in-Furness, 1881, RG/11/4285–93. 35 Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, p. 85, Table 4.3. The figures contained there suggest that for each of the five censuses mentioned (1851-1891) the total non-Cumberland population was respectively: 17.1, 18.8, 20.6, 23.6, and 22.0 per cent. 36 Census of England and Wales, 1851–91; Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, p. 85. The Scots in Carlisle numbered 3,241 in 1851. 37 D. Large, ‘The Irish in Bristol in 1851: a census enumeration’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), p. 38. The author says that the Bristol Irish population in 1851 was larger than that in any other town or city of the south west and South Wales, due in part to improvements made, during the 1820s, to communications between the city and southern Irish ports such as Cork, Waterford and Dublin. L. H. Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1979), p. 44. M. A. G. O´ Tuathaigh, ‘The Irish in nineteenth-century Britain: problems of integration’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, Vol. 31 (1981), p. 15. See also, Davis ‘Little Irelands’, p. 105. 38 T. Dillon, ‘The Irish in Leeds’, Thoresby Miscellany, Vol. 16 (1979), Table 4, pp. 6–7. 39 Ibid., p. 7. 40 C. Richardson, ‘Irish settlement in mid-Victorian Bradford’, Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research, Vol. 20 (1968), Table 4, p. 42. 41 Finnegan, Poverty and Prejudice, Table 4, p. 69. The author is fortunate in that the York census enumerators recorded the specific birthplace of 39.7 per cent of the Irish in the 1851 census. 42 By 1861 the percentage of the Irish enumerated by specific place of birth had dropped to 12 per cent. Ten years later there was a slight improvement with the figure climbing to 19.3 per cent. Connaught was the preponderant province. The other five counties were Dublin, Galway, Roscommon, Sligo and Cork. See ibid., tables on pp. 4, 20–21, 69, 94–95; also p. 70. 43 John Herson, ‘Irish migration and settlement in Victorian England: a smalltown perspective’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in Britain, p. 89. Herson’s sample is small: in only 47 cases, over three censuses (1841-71), was a specific locality of origin recorded. In addition, the hypothesis about Castlerea is based on 23 out of this sample. 44 We see here that the Ulster bias among the Barrow Irish is almost as strong as the Southern/Connaught bias among the York Irish. See Finnegan, Poverty and Prejudice, Chapter 5, esp. pp. 69, 94–95. 45 S. Pollard and P. Robertson, The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1979), pp. 163, 197. 46 On the whole, urban Cumberland was one of the most overcrowded counties in England. The levels of overcrowding in Whitehaven and Carlisle stood at about 30 per cent. Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, pp. 96–97.

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47 Rawlinson, Sanitary Conditions, pp. 14–20 and passim. 48 Rawlinson quoted in Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, pp. 91–92. 49 The Sanitary Reports of the Sub-Committees of the [Local] Board of Health, Made after the Inspection of the Town of Whitehaven (1863). 50 Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, p. 97. 51 J. D. Marshall, ‘Cleator and Cleator Moor: some aspects of their social and urban development’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society Vol. 78 (1978), pp. 163–75; Ross Barber, Iron Ore and After. Boom Time, Depression and Survival in a West Cumbrian Town: Cleator Moor, 1840-1960 (York, 1976). 52 Carruthers edited the town’s first paper, the Barrow Herald, from 1863, before setting up his own Barrow Pilot. Richardson was brought to Barrow in 1867 by James Ramsden to set up the Barrow Times. He did, however, maintain a fairly independent line on social questions. 53 A lively though sometimes erroneous history of the Scotch Buildings is Melville’s ‘Old Scotch buildings in Hindpool’, Barrow News, 9 June 1972. The ‘useful purpose’ came to an end when they were demolished in 1956. Marshall, Furness, p. 348. 54 This estimate is based on Melville’s assertion that there were about 260 flats within the complex. This is less than the town’s average, which was raised from 6.7 to 7.3 between 1871 and 1874. 55 Census enumerators’ books, Barrow-in-Furness, 1881. The largest minority in the flats were the Scots who represented 519 (39.4 per cent) of the total. All told, the Celtic population living in the flats totalled 772 (58.6 per cent). 56 Census enumerators’ books. This household contained the head, his wife, three children and ten lodgers. 57 Barrow Pilot, 15 August 1874; Pollard, ‘Town Planning’, p. 168, n. 77. 58 Barrow Vulcan, 13 June 1874. Perhaps we can forgive Richardson the strange image he creates of cattle herding into pigsties. The press referred to these dwellings as the ‘Brick Huts’. However, in the census records, the address is ‘Brick Cottages’. 59 Marshall, Furness, p. 361. 60 Census enumerators’ books, Barrow-in-Furness, 1881. This figure represented 17.68 per cent of the entire Irish population of Barrow in 1881. 61 Barrow Vulcan, 15 August 1874. 62 Barrow Pilot, 10, 31 January 1874; Marshall, Furness, pp. 361–62. 63 Barrow Pilot, 31 January 1874. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Lambert threatened to alert the Local Government Board to the conditions of Old Barrow. Marshall, Furness, p. 361. 68 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), p. 480, has argued that the Irish were not ‘pressed back’ into ghettos. J. M. Werly ‘The Irish in Manchester, 1832-49’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 18 (1973), p. 345, however, disagrees and puts forward a number of persuasive points to suggest that the Irish communities in Manchester did fulfil some of the criteria of


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‘ghetto-isation’. Werly, p. 347, ‘Irish Town’ and ‘Little Ireland’ in Manchester ‘existed as both physical ghettos and also institutional ghettos culturally apart from English’. Werly’s work has been criticised in M. Busteed, R. I. Hodgson and T. F. Kennedy, ‘The myth and reality of Irish migrants in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester: a preliminary study’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide (Leicester, 1992), II: The Irish in the New Communities, pp. 26–51. Graham Davis concludes that the concept of ‘Little Ireland’ was more myth than fact: The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914 (Dublin, 1991), pp. 51–82.

CHAPTER 3

Work The majority of the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain were economic migrants. The fact that migration coincided with early industrialisation, allied to the pace and scale of arrival, encouraged contemporaries to see Irish immigration as inextricably linked to the growing social problems of the day. As such, the growing Irish community was an important and much observed feature of the new industrial landscape. To Engels, for example, Irish workers were a reserve army of labour; hapless instruments of employers’ grand plans for industrial expansion and personal profit; tools of terror to prise apart the nascent working class. Indeed, employers generally supported Engels’s assertion that ‘The rapid expansion of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command’.1 Thus, we are led, by contemporary reports, to believe that the Irish worked for under-wages while occupying whole sectors of the sort of work which required endurance and physical strength, rather than skill in great measure.2 As Cornewall Lewis surmised in 1836: The introduction of so large a number of Irish into Great Britain has . . . been influenced by the qualities which the Irish bring into competition with the English and Scotch workman. The most valuable of these, and those to which employment of the Irish has been mainly owing, are willingness, alacrity, and perseverance in the severest, the most irksome, and most disagreeable kinds of coarse labour . . .3

As a result of the alleged enthusiasm with which the Irish embraced the dirt, heat and pollution of the new industrial workplace, employers desired both to sing their praise and to protect their rights of entry into early Victorian Britain against a mounting tide of opposition. After all, there was, proponents of migration might say, a clear tension between the impression of the Irish as, simultaneously, a burden on the poor rate and a central component in Britain’s new economic machine. Alexander Carlile, cotton master

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of Paisley, summed up employers’ anxieties about Irish labour when he warned Cornewall Lewis that it would be ‘most detrimental to the town and neighbourhood, were the Irish immigrations stopped or even seriously interfered with . . .’4 Contemporary debates, concerning the role of the Irish in the British employment market, have done much to galvanise the historian’s perception of Irish migration as a concentrated movement of enormous impact which is best understood in the terms set out by the Victorians themselves.5 Yet employers held no monopoly over what we might term images of Irishness. Although they preferred to encourage Irish settlement, others would have stopped it with immediate effect. Subscribers to the latter opinion feared the negative moral influence of the Irish on the indigenous working class and were usually those who had nothing to gain from the hardworking Irish—priests, doctors, magistrates, poor law guardians, crusading journalists and the like. At the same time as employers defended their rights to Irish labour, social consciences were also pricked by the fear that the dissolute and rough-living Irish would, as Kay feared, teach ‘the working classes a pernicious lesson’.6 For their part, indigenous workers also supported the antiIrish platform, but for different reasons. British labourers seemed most fearful of the idea that the Irish might undercut wages or else colonise whole sectors of the economy.7 Thus conflicting images of Irish labour migration, and its putatively central position in the early Victorian economy, served as a timely reminder that all was not well in the unequal struggle between colony and coloniser. While we can question blanket assessments of the role, nature and image of Irish labour, the evidence of contemporaries does continually suggest that the Irish were indeed to be found in the hardest and most onerous classes of work. Furthermore, where the Irish in early Victorian Britain were skilled, it seems they were only marginally so. Irish tanners and coopers, for example, usually engaged in the worst aspects of their trades, preparing hides or producing ‘simple kegs or pails at home after working hours when they could not get casual work as journeymen coopers on the docks’.8 Similarly, while the Irish often found artisanal work, they were usually restricted to trades like tailoring and shoemaking which displayed an increasing propensity towards ‘sweating’ and low wages as the century progressed. In addition, the Irish were commonly drawn into the skilled occupations, such as black-

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smithing, for which life in rural Ireland had prepared them. Weaving is another notionally skilled trade that Irishmen often practised before arrival in Britain. By the 1790s as many as 5,000 Irish handloom weavers were to be found in Manchester; in Macclesfield, in the middle of the century, many weavers in the local silk industry were also Irish.9 Throughout early-Victorian Britain, then, many of the dirtiest and unhealthiest occupations were associated with Irish settlers. In west Lancashire, Irish labour was found in significant numbers in some of the worst factory-based occupations, such as chemicals and sugar-refining. In Liverpool, for instance, it was estimated that the Irish comprised somewhere around 500 sugar boilers and 600 employed in chemicals. Greenock was another place where, employers told Cornewall Lewis, the Irish presence in similar rough factory occupations was strong; moreover, they remained heavily represented in the same sector very much later in the century. In 1851, for example, 68.2 per cent of all sugar-refiners in Greenock were Irish; forty years later the proportion stood at 60.9 per cent.10 While the commonest perception is of the Irish found wherever labour was needed, such as on the railways in the 1840s, perhaps the most significant of all their contributions was made to the urban construction industry.11 Although Irishmen here found skilled work (as masons, carpenters, joiners and bricklayers), the majority were restricted to unskilled trades, carrying the hod or assisting bricklayers in other ways. As one contemporary said, Irishmen made their living by ‘excavating earth for harbours, docks, canals and roads, carrying heavy goods, [and] unloading and loading vessels, &c’.12 By the 1830s, in Manchester, Irish labourers dominated all lower types of building work, with one employer claiming that for twenty five years ‘no bricklayers’ labourers have been English’.13 Another observer suggested that the Irish were ‘born bricklayers’ labourers, and they die bricklayers’ labourers’.14 In Greenock, where employers painted a similar picture, one of their number argued that ‘all the mason’s labourers are Irish without exception. . .’15 A generation later, the strength of Irish labour in the building trade seemed to have persisted. For example, in 1864 a Barrow employer, Andrew Woodhouse, remarked that the Irish dominated such works because ‘there is not an Englishman that will carry a hod’.16 Although, by the 1830s, the Irish were present throughout

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northern England and central-lowland Scotland, it is commonly supposed that they were absent from some important occupational opportunities. One of these was in the coal mining sector, particularly with face-work, hewing, etc. Two socio-economic factors are credited with keeping the Irish out of the collieries: first, the isolated and rural nature of most coal areas, which militated against the Irishman’s seeming preference for urban areas; and second, the inward-looking nature of colliery communities—fostered by the miners’ geography, work and Methodist religion—where job controls excluded outsiders from opportunities in the better classes of work.17 There is little evidence that the Irish penetrated the great northern coalfield of Durham in the first half of the century, although they were found in smaller or more primitive coal districts like west Cumberland and central Scotland. On the Duke of Portland’s estates in Ayrshire and Wigtonshire, for example, Irish workers had been employed in pit work since 1798, although the Duke’s agent claimed that they worked mainly as ‘labourers, as diggers with the spade’. Indeed, he continued, ‘there are very few in the mines; they do the banking department above ground, filling waggons, &c’.18 Irishmen were employed on the Cumbrian coalfield in a similar capacity, although correspondence between the Whitehaven mine agent, John Peile, and his County Durham counterpart, John Buddle, suggested that the Irish found work at the face of the Cumbrian coalfield. Peile’s words, however, enforced the popular contemporary view that pitmen could not be made, from Irish labourers or any other form of human capital, but had to be born and bred to the pit. Indeed, the Irish presence at the coalface was something Peile wanted to remedy. He explained to Buddle that a recent explosion at the Whitehaven colliery was caused by: . . . a great ignorance in the Workmen, indeed our Pitmen are a most ignorant race & few of them are regularly bred & the majority composed of Irish and other Trampers, that only turn to us when no other employment can be had, and it may be readily conceived how ignorant they must be of their own safety and how difficult to impress their minds with a proper sense of care & of dangers . . .19

Peile went on to ask Buddle to send him ‘ ‘‘regular bred’’ pitmen ‘‘from your numerous band’’ to come and supervise in Cumberland’.20 Buddle might have complied but he himself was rocked the following month by the loss of 59 men at Penshaw colliery, when it

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was shown that even true-bred Durham men were not immune to the dangers of colliery life. Peile’s words suggest that there were Cumbrian-Irish miners of sorts; but these men were not all hapless fools unable to grasp the mining tradition. They knew, for example, that unionisation was one good way of countering the brutal regime of Lord Lonsdale, the ‘absolute monarch’ of the Cumbrian coal fields. During the great strike of 1844 the Miners’ Association sent P. M. Brophy (a prominent member of the Irish Universal Suffrage Union who was imprisoned after the Great Conspiracy Trials of 1842) to organise the men, but Lonsdale and his overseers threatened to bring in Irish blacklegs to beat the strike as they had done in the past. The fact that Brophy was Irish indicates something of the nativity of the miners he was trying to organise. Despite Brophy’s efforts to publicise the miners’ plight, and to dissuade Irish workers from black-legging, Lonsdale kept his pits producing. The strike on the Cumberland coalfield was a failure; it collapsed with 278 miners still without work and two key men, Garratty and Doran, imprisoned.21 The names of these two suggest that Irishmen were just as likely to lead a strike as break it. Overall, however, as we shall see later, the proportion of Irish coal miners and colliers remained fairly low throughout the century, and was utterly insignificant next to their presence in iron ore mining which was an altogether dirtier, heavier and less appealing branch of the subterranean economy. Although the mines and ports of Cumbria had provided work for Irish settlers long before the Famine, this chapter seeks to build on the apprehension that Irish labour migration continued in the later Victorian period. It also approaches Irish arrival from the viewpoint that migrations to less familiar places like Barrow and Cleator Moor became the norm in the age of popular sectarian strife. This chapter also moves discussion away from the commonly-held view that Irish settlers were restricted to those jobs which required the lowest skill levels, and which offered in return the lowest wages. Iron mining, for example, was hard and dirty but also relatively well-paid. In the shipbuilding sector, we shall see, there were skilled as well as unskilled jobs for Irishmen. At the same time Irish labour’s degree of difference was not simply about a lack of skills, for as it seems the majority of labour in Victorian Britain was unskilled. The following survey of the Irish in west Cumbria shows that they simply acquired the kinds of work that the region offered. Unsurprisingly, then, the

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Irish in Cleator dug iron ore and in Barrow they worked with iron and steel and built ships. Moreover, of no place in Cumbria can it be categorically stated that the occupational structure of the Irish population was retarded by inherent factors of nationality or ethnicity. This chapter is divided into three parts: the first examines the early occupation of the Irish in Cleator, for it was in the mining region of west Cumbria that the earliest stirrings of large-scale migration were seen. The second part looks at the development of linen and flax milling as this sector was soon colonised by Irish workers. The final section compares the industrial occupation profiles of the Irish in both Cleator and Barrow, using later census material to highlight the continuities in Irish occupational experiences.

I The Irish in Cumbria entered a region of contrasting working-class fortunes. In west Cumberland agricultural wages were relatively high, but these paled next to those available to miners.22 Migration from the land was surely encouraged by the fact that in Whitehaven, during the 1870s, a collier could ‘earn twice as much as a country labourer for distinctly less hours’.23 In 1864, amidst one of Barrow’s boom periods, a local observer claimed that ‘work is plentiful, wages good and provisions are cheap. Labourers are earning 3s 6d per day; artisans 4s 3d and upwards.’24 Yet good rates of pay were often offset by high food prices, and rents in Barrow reflected a market in which supply was massively outstripped by demand. Throughout the 1860s there had been complaints about the cost of shelter, which was estimated at between 5s and 5s 6d per week in 1867.25 Wages remained fairly high during the boom periods of the mid-1860s and the 1870s, a fact attested to by Alfred Mault, organiser of the building employers’ combination, and a man whose vested interest it was to project this image of decent wage levels. He claimed that bricklayers’ labourers—many of whom were Irish—received higher rates in Barrow even than in London.26 Mault’s optimism aside, the Barrow Times was still able to estimate that while wages were 2s higher than in Preston, rents were 3s more.27 Despite the precarious balance between wages and living costs, the increasing Irish presence in Cumbria in this period should not surprise us. The work opportunities upon which they thrived were there in

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abundance. More striking than general county growth rates, however, is the emergence of two specific communities, Barrow and Cleator Moor. By the 1870s, these were clearly the most important receivers of Irish arrivals, and it is to an examination of the occupational profile of their Irish-born workers that we now turn. The most important stimulus to Irish settlement in Cumbria was provided by work; or, more specifically, by the opportunities provided by iron and coal and shipbuilding. In Cumberland, it was the extraction industries (especially iron-ore) which attracted the Irish. During the period of greatest Irish settlement, between 1851 and 1881, iron and the related trades witnessed a huge increase in production. This was reflected not only in the absolute numbers of men employed but also in the proportion of men so employed (see Table 3.1). In 1851, iron accounted for a workforce of 2,865 (3.3 per cent); forty years later, the equivalent figure was 12,839 (12.4 per cent). Many of these workers, not least in Cleator Moor, were Irish-born or of Irish descent. The Cleator Moor censuses illustrate that the Irish presence in the iron ore industry in the early years was not as dominant as it would be later. In fact, during the 1850s strong links between iron mining in Cleator Moor and the Irish presence had only begun to emerge. The classification of local Irish-born occupations in 1851 and 1861 given in Table 3.2 illustrates the growth locally of this trend. We might expect that the small size of Cleator Moor, its geographical isolation and narrow economic base, would impose Table 3.1: The workforce in Cumberland employed in coal mining and iron (and related) trades, 1851–1881 1851

1871 %

Coal Iron manufacture Iron mining Blacksmiths General workers in metal Engineers

3,804 216 369 1,298 747 235

3.9

3.3

Source: Census of England and Wales, 1851–91.

1881 %

5,199 2,310 3,771 1,387 868 1,359

5.0

9.2

% 7,686 4,015 4,613 1,487 812 1,912

7.5

12.5

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Table 3.2: The occupational groups of adult Irish-born males in Cleator Moor, 1851–1861 1851

Class Class Class Class Class Class Total

I II III IV V VI

1861

Total

%

Total

%

– – 38 94 63 1

– – 19.4 48.0 32.1 0.5

– 1 88 374 223 17

– 0.1 12.5 53.2 31.7 2.4

196

100.0

703

100.0

The classes shown are: Class I: large employers, merchants, bankers, property owners, professionals (church, law, medicine etc.) Class II: small employers, dealers, retailers, teachers, clerical workers, subordinates in the church, etc. Class III: artisans and skilled trades, small traders (beerhouse keepers and traders, etc.) Class IV semi-skilled (agriculture and mining), transport workers, soldiers, sailors, policemen Class V: unskilled labourers, hawkers, street traders Class VI: the unemployed, ill, infirm, retired Classes I–V have been adapted from the Registrar General’s classifications (1891); see also Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971), pp. 350–57. Class VI is my own addition.

limitations on the Irish in terms of their employment opportunities. Table 3.2, however, indicates that there was quite a degree of variation in occupational experience. During the ten years in question, the Irish in Cleator were barely represented in the ranks of the middle classes (class I and II); nor, conversely, were they restricted merely to class V, the unskilled workers. Furthermore, as the century progressed, there was an increased subtlety in the occupational profile of the Irish-born population. From the figures in class IV, for both of these years, it is clear that the majority of adult Irish males were employed in semi-skilled occupations. The main reason for this concentration is the categorisation of the mining trades as semi-skilled and not as unskilled.28 In 1851, for example, a total of sixty Irishmen were either iron ore miners (22) or coal miners (38), representing a total of 30.6 per cent of the total

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(196). In 1861, at which point the adult Irish males totalled 703, the numbers employed in coal had risen only slightly to 49 (6.9 per cent), whereas the increase of those Irish-born employed in iron mining had kept slightly ahead of growth rates among the Irishborn in general, reaching 267 (38.0 per cent). When added to the small numbers returned as lead and copper miners, the total Irishborn employed in mining accounted for 45.8 per cent of the total. Thus mining was the dominant occupation among the Irish-born in Cleator Moor. In second place was the ubiquitous entry of ‘labourer’, accounting for 19.4 per cent of all adult male employment, or well over half of all those employed in class V jobs. Labouring in Cleator Moor, however, was not the exclusive domain of the Irish; they occupied a much broader economic base than that. Also interesting is the agricultural sector within the early Irish community. In 1851, 23 (11.7 per cent) Irish-born men worked the land; by 1861 there were 12 (1.7 per cent). Another important occupational development of the 1850s was the rise of the Irish-born beerhousekeeper.29 In 1851, the embryonic nature of the local Irish-born community was reflected by the fact that the local census did not record a single Irish-born beerhousekeeper, nor even a beerseller. In the local trade directory for Cumberland, issued in 1847, there were five inns in the township, the proprietors of which all had English-sounding names.30 By 1861, the Irish had established a niche for themselves. The census of that year included ten Irish-born males for whom a partial income was earned by selling beer.31 Of this number, however, not one was a publican alone. Some worked in the mining and metal trades, others kept shops or were dealers; one was a shoemaker. Each probably ran a small beershop in his own front room. The fact that these men could not earn their living solely from beer does not detract from the importance of this facility. The rise of these small beer suppliers represents an important link in the expatriate Irish network. The case of Barrow illustrates with particular clarity the deficiencies of the decennial census, as peak growth rates did not align with the timing of the censuses. Between 1861 and 1871, for example, the workforce changed considerably, with huge growth between 1863 and 1867, before settling back into the pattern first suggested in 1861. In that year the iron trade was prominent in the industry of Barrow; by 1871 the emergence of large-scale, modern

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steel manufacture had ensured the local reliance upon the metal trades. In between, however, something altogether different had happened to the demography of the town. In the mid-1860s, in what seemed to be a throw-back to the construction boom of the 1840s that was associated with railway ‘mania’, Barrow was hit by a massive influx of traditional navvies—among them a good proportion of Irish—who were to build the town’s huge docks complex and the steelworks. These two projects gave Barrow its particular character. In the words of Sidney Pollard, ‘With the 1,500 navvies needed for the dock works undertaken by Brassey & Field, the 3,000 hands employed in the steelworks in 1865 and others attracted by the building prospects, the flow of immigration became a torrent’.32 In fact, the flow of immigrants was so great that within five years of the 1861 census, the population of Barrow had burgeoned to approximately 16,000.33

II Despite its obvious importance within the context of the Victorian family economy, the role of women in the workplace is one which has, until recently, received scant interest from historians. This is no less true of Irish women. As historical research is largely the domain of men, this fact is less than surprising. Female writers have striven with some purpose to alter this position but it remains the case that women receive less attention than they should. As such, the dominant methodology succeeds in putting forward women in history as something different, perhaps freakish, and certainly marginalised. Moreover, in examining purportedly masculine areas like the workplace, women are usually measured by male norms. Women who do not work outside the home are not regarded as working at all, and complicated, yet fundamental, issues such as the role of the home as unit of production as well as consumption, are left largely unconsidered. What is more, the census is unreliable as a source for women and work. For example, how can we accurately measure the work role of women who were habitually recorded in censuses as ‘housewives’? Perhaps we can defend the census by saying that while it masked much, it did reveal patterns of work where women could easily be compared with men. In Cleator and Barrow, the presence of flax

74


and jute mills meant that some non-domestic female work patterns were recorded.34 The presence of these factories increased dramatically families’ combined incomes, and although the flax mill in Barrow did not entirely service the demand for women’s work it alleviated some of the disparity between opportunities for men and women which the local middle class blamed for a high turnover in population. Equally, the growth of an iron ore mining colony on Cleator Moor was aided by the fact that flax and jute had been manufactured there for most of the nineteenth century.35 The initial population growth in Cleator, during the period down to 1830, was created by the deployment in the area of the flax mill; conversely, the temporary demise of flax caused the population to wither, before its revival reversed this decline.36 In 1847, just before Cleator Moor’s Irish populace began to burgeon, the flax mill employed about 300 people.37 Four years later, at the time of the census of 1851, 124 women were employed in the mill. In addition, 24 girls were enumerated as being ‘scholars and working at the mill’. In all, 148 (58.5 per cent) of all employed women in Cleator were engaged this way. Also, 28 men were returned as flax dressers, spinners or weavers and seven as flax or jute labourers; 12 boys, like their female counterparts, were included in returns as ‘scholars and working at the mill’. This was clearly a hang-over from the Belfast mills where ‘half-timers’ were still employed in the late nineteenth century.38 In all, then, 195 (37.1 per cent) of the total Irish-born population (525) were employed in textiles. This contrasts with the Irish in Dundee in 1851, for example, where 60 per cent of men were handloom weavers alone.39 Unfortunately, no corresponding figure is available for the total employed in the Cleator mill at the time. If we assume, however, that the total was approximate to that employed in 1847, then somewhere near half of the town’s mill workers were Irish-born. Between 1851 and 1881, the number of female Irish-born workers employed in the mill remained static.40 At the same time, the number of school children employed in a part-time capacity began to change, as did the number of men working in the mill. There was a decline in Irish-born males working there after 1861 and the part-time employment of school children had disappeared by the same date—or at least their enumeration had! In 1861, 38 men and 123 women were employed in the mill; ten years later the corresponding figures were eight men and 128 women; by 1881 the

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Table 3.3: Irish-born employed in the Cleator Flax and Jute Mill as a percentage of total adult Irish-born population

1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

Men

Women

Total

17.9 5.4 0.6 1.5 3.7

47.1 22.5 15.5 10.9 8.0

34.9 12.9 6.4 5.4 5.7

total of men thus employed had grown slightly to 12, though the number of women (111) remained relatively static. In 1891 male employment in the mill had further increased to 30 while women employees numbered a much-reduced 54. Although the figure for women’s employment held up in absolute terms until 1891, and male figure fluctuated across the years, it remains true that there was a significant decline in relative terms (see Table 3.3). Despite the continued Irish presence at the Cleator Moor mill, these workers did not attain the highest-status jobs. Furthermore, while we can see that women dominated this industry, men usually held the better jobs. The majority of women were reelers and carders and a significant proportion were also spinners and weavers. The censuses of 1851 and 1861 revealed no Irish-born mill foremen or overlookers. In the pages of the 1881 returns there were three Irish-born ‘Flax Mill overlookers’, one of whom was female. By 1891, the female workforce was, once again, unrepresented at this level; men, however, had advanced significantly. In addition to a couple of overlookers, two Irish-born men also held important posts as ‘Thread Mill Managers’; moreover, a further one was returned as a foreman flax dresser. While Irish fortunes in the local linen mill were not without fluctuations, the importance of an Irish presence there cannot be denied. If we return to female employment, it is important to point out that a majority of women mill workers were single or widowed, and much the same was the case in other linen centres such as Dundee.41 This factor gave a particular flavour to communal life in Dundee where, on occasions, women assumed dominant roles within the home and young women exercised a certain cultural independence. Women, for example, dominated the trade union movement based

76


in the Dundee mills while, in Barrow, female factory operatives gained a reputation for unruliness, sometimes matching that of their male peers.42 During the town’s general election campaign of 1880, for example, ‘Blackguards, whipper-snappers and mill girls’ were blamed for a spate of street disorder and effigy burning.43 The flax and jute mill on Cleator Moor was clearly very important in providing work opportunities for women. Meanwhile, the need for such a facility did not go unnoticed in Barrow’s commercial circles. Indeed, because of the importance of creating female employment, the flax and jute works was just one of a number of businesses to be adopted during the heady days of the early 1870s. The ever-resourceful James Ramsden, Barrow’s chief industrial architect, was behind the implementation of these plans, his appetite no doubt whetted by local developments in shipping which saw connections opened between Barrow and India via the Suez Canal. Thus, from the early 1870s Barrow merchants were able to import the raw materials which Ramsden needed to challenge the linen centre of Dundee.44 In April 1870, the Barrow Herald reported the progress of the plans for a ‘New Jute Works at Barrow-in-Furness’, claiming that the new works would employ 1,500–2,000 workers, which turned out to be an exaggeration.45 However, the important issue here was not the amount of work available, but the nature of that work, for the flax and jute works, far from ever being able to overshadow Dundee, was simply meant to remedy what the Barrow Herald neatly described as ‘the want which has hitherto been felt of suitable labour for women and children’.46 Ramsden was aware of the issue and understood its effect upon the composition of the local populace.47 Not only did Barrow’s industrialists need more labour than arrived in the town, they also wanted greater population stability to promote further growth. Yet industrial developments in the 1860s ‘afforded very little in the way of employment for other than working class males’.48 The lack of female employment was not alone in discouraging the permanent settlement of labour, but was nevertheless a contributory factor. The 1860s saw rapid population growth, but the volume was artificially bloated by the preponderance of contract construction work. As Ramsden himself pointed out, ‘with the development of the Steel works and the demand for labour, a difficulty was found in attracting and retaining skilled workmen’. He highlighted that this problem too was ‘mainly due to the want of employment for women

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and children’.49 Thus, the flax and jute works was meant to enhance the social composition of the town. The associated outwork also provided for the town’s needs in a manner that was to Ramsden’s liking: in a very short time after the works came into operation an entire change was wrought in the character of the population. Instead of being dependent on single men who were constantly moving, very frequently on the slightest pretext, we obtained steady married men whose families could earn wages from 5s. to 25s. per week, employment being found for 300 or 400 women and children in sewing sacks in their homes . . .50

Unfortunately, the 1871 census enumeration came too early to analyse the immediate impact upon the town of flax and jute. Ramsden’s figures are probably reasonable but the situation had changed by 1881. In that year, only four Irish sack sewers were returned. While the Scots, especially from Dundee, were drawn to Barrow for this mill work, and were the biggest national grouping within the industry, there was also a sizeable contingent of Irishborn included in the 1881 census as mill workers: some 228 in total or 14.5 per cent of all adult Irish-born females. In the same year there were only 18 men and boys returned as being employed in the skilled mill trades, although a further 15 were jute labourers. In all, this number accounted for just one per cent of all Irish-born males of working age. By 1891, the Irish-born presence in the Barrow mill had fallen off considerably.

III These changes in the local economy, including the provision of work for women and children, only slightly modified the narrow nature of Barrow’s industrial base. The town continued to rely on heavy engineering trades which were traditionally the preserve of men. In addition to the local jute works, numerous other enterprises were started during the late 1860s and in the early years of the 1870s. By 1871 the railway syndicate alone was running, building, or had secured the capital investment for six major business concerns: the Barrow Shipbuilding Co., the Flax and Jute Co., the Haematite Steel Co., the Barrow Steam Corn Mill, the Barrow Rolling Mills Co. and the Barrow Patent Linseed Co.51 By 1874, the Furness Railway Company, the shipyard, the steelworks and the

78


jute works employed a reported 8,100 workers. In addition there were an estimated 5,000 engaged in smaller industries and the building trades.52 The impact of these developments was considerable and, coupled with an expansion of the local transport network, encouraged rapid population growth. Between 1871 and 1875 the population of the town virtually doubled from 18,911 to approximately 35,000.53 The years after 1870, which were formative for development in Barrow, also saw changes in Cleator Moor. Although by the 1860s Cleator was well-defined as a mining township, gradually there was only a small suggestion of subtlety in the composition of the local workforce and in the types of work the Irish found there. Communal patterns in Cleator, in terms of settlement and occupation, altered to suggest that the Irish community became somewhat streamlined, while maintaining a firm footing in the town. Unlike in Barrow, where industrial development continued apace, Cleator’s reliance upon ironstone extraction, which had begun in earnest during the 1840s, was maintained beyond 1870. However, Cleator, unlike Barrow, was discouraged from diversification by the development in close proximity of larger centres of industry and commerce, such as Workington. Due to the timing of growth rates, the census of 1871 provides the first opportunity to gain a composite picture of the Barrow population. Even so, this census does not show the shipbuilding presence which was to be the town’s lifeblood, as the yard was not established until later in the year. In Cleator, the enumeration of 1871 illustrates a consolidation of earlier trends, with iron ore maintaining an ascendant position (see Tables 3.4 and 3.5). In the latter town, we can see that, though there were variations within each class (I–VI), the basic occupational structure of the Irish community remained intact. It is possible to note, for example, that the single largest group of workers was again to be found in class IV. For each of the three censuses, over sixty per cent of the adult male population fell into this category, primarily because class IV contained the extraction workers in iron and coal. Although there undoubtedly were skill requirements within areas of class IV work, not least in the pits, we can also see that at no stage did those employed in the skilled trades (class III) ever climb above ten per cent of the total. The second largest grouping was found in the unskilled sector (class V) which occupied between 29.2 per cent (1871) down to 19.8 per cent (1891). This group comprised mostly labourers.

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Table 3.4: The occupational groups of adult Irish-born males in Cleator Moor, 1871–1891 1871

Class I Class II Class III Class IV Class V Class VI Total

1881

1891

Total

%

Total

%

Total

%

2 2 72 810 376 22 1,287

0.7 0.7 5.8 62.9 29.2 1.7 100.0

2 6 121 961 285 36 1,411

0.1 0.4 8.6 68.1 20.2 2.6 100.0

1 15 79 500 160 52 807

0.1 1.9 9.8 62.0 19.8 6.4 100.0

For an explanation of the various classes, see Table 3.2. Table 3.5: The occupational groups of adult Irish-born males in Barrow-in-Furness, 1871–1891 1871 Total Class I Class II Class III Class IV Class V Class VI Total

3 4 68 18 406 9 508

1881

1891

%

Total

%

Total

%

0.6 0.8 13.4 3.6 79.9 1.8 100.0

9 47 671 307 1,488 60 2,582

0.4 1.8 26.0 11.9 57.6 2.3 100.0

– 26 180 92 311 11 620

– 4.2 29.0 14.8 50.2 1.8 100.0

Comparison of the data in Tables 3.4 and 3.5 clearly illustrates that employment patterns in Barrow were different from those in Cleator. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this contrast is evident in the relative importance of class IV work. While this semi-skilled category was the single largest in Cleator, it represented fewer than 15 per cent of the Barrow total. In 1871 semi-skilled occupations accounted for under five per cent of the Barrow Irish-born workforce. The contrast between skill levels in the two communities is similarly stark. Skill requirements in Barrow were, obviously, likely to be greater than in Cleator. As the 1860s and 1870s progressed, the growth of Barrow’s heavy industrial sector further reinforced employers’ needs for craft labour: the opening of the shipyard in the

80


early 1870s was especially important in fostering this requirement. Even before shipbuilding came to Barrow, however, the 1871 census of Barrow enumerated a body of tradesmen which accounted for 13.4 per cent of the total male Irish-born workforce. This percentage was nearly three times greater than the figure (5.8 per cent) for Cleator Moor. Moreover, ten years later the proportion of skilled men among the Barrow Irish-born had climbed still higher, reaching 26 per cent, and by 1891 it had increased still further to 29 per cent. With the shipyard fully operational many of the Irish population had marine skills which were previously absent from the town. While Barrow was growing, and to some extent diversifying, Cleator remained, in essence, a rather primitive iron colony, and this fact was reflected in the composition of the local Irish community. In both 1881 and 1891, the proportion of skilled men among the Cleator Irish-born grew slightly from previous enumerations to 8.6 and 9.8 per cent respectively, but these totals represented only one-third of their Barrow counterparts. There are a number of surprises as far as class V occupations are concerned. Although over 80 per cent of the Irish-born in Britain were day labourers in 1881, the work profile of the Irish in Cleator Moor (and in Barrow after 1871) suggests the Cumbrian Irish were not as unskilled as was the case at the national level. In 1871, when Barrow was still dominated by construction, nearly 80 per cent of the Irish-born males in the town fell into class V, the unskilled category. By 1881, however, this figure had fallen to 57.6 per cent, with the bulk of the difference being made up of the skilled and semi-skilled trades. This decline in the proportion of unskilled among the Irish community further reflected the new and growing role of the local shipyard. By 1891 the census figures show that this trend had continued, with the proportion of class V workers in Barrow falling to a shade over 50 per cent. In Cleator Moor the lack of an unskilled majority among the local Irish was very clear. If Cleator had been a town the size of Barrow, then this fact would have been remarkable. Analysis of class IV occupations in Cleator Moor between 1851 and 1891 shows quite clearly the continued importance of local associations between iron ore and Irish settlement. In 1871 over sixty per cent of Cleator’s Irish-born male population was engaged in Class IV work, with the majority—56.3 per cent of all Irish-born males—employed as iron ore miners. If we add to this figure the

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41 colliers in the 1871 figures, the total percentage of Irish-born miners in Cleator came to 59.4 per cent, or 724 out of an economically-active male Irish-born total of 1,287. In 1881 the proportion of iron ore miners among the Irish-born continued to be high, increasing slightly to 59.7 per cent, whereas the number of coal miners remained almost static at 42 men. Taken together, however, the percentage of all Cleator Irish-born engaged in the pits stood at 62.7, some 842 from a total of 1,411 employed Irish-born males. In keeping with the later nineteenth-century contraction in the iron ore industry, Irish miners in Cleator in 1891 were far less statistically significant. The number of iron ore miners, for example, more than halved to 382, although this still constituted some 47.3 per cent of all adult Irish-born males. A further emphasis of the local importance of iron ore mining is provided by the fact that, after general labourer, the second largest category in class V (unskilled) was ironworks labourer, with third place being assumed by iron ore labourers.54 As we have seen from Table 3.4, however, the Irishborn males of Cleator Moor were not particularly associated with the skilled trades. This was in part due to the limitations of available skilled work in the area, but also because the adaptability of the migrant Irish community made it well-suited for transfer into the abundant mining jobs which Cleator offered. A similar move into fiercely protected skilled trades was altogether a different proposition; perhaps impossible for most first-generation Irish males. Throughout the three censuses after 1870 the Irish-born within class III (skilled) work did not dominate any particular trade. Of the 74 Irish-born in class III occupations in 1871, for example, the three largest groups were tailors (11), shoemakers (10) and beerhousekeepers, skilled jute workers and masons (seven each). In 1881, there were 117 men in class III, with engine drivers (19), skilled jute workers (16), beerhousekeepers (11), shoemakers and blacksmiths (10) being the only ones to reach double figures. In 1891, the pattern was similar, with skilled jute workers accounting for the highest number (23), followed by shoemakers and beerhousekeepers (both nine). Many other skilled trades were represented, but most were only enumerated in ones and twos. Still significant in this category, after a firm footing was established in the 1850s, was the Irish-born beerhousekeeper. In fact, these beerhouse proprietors, enumerated in the census, represent a considerable proportion of the total number of hoteliers and innkeepers

82


listed in the various local trade directories.55 What this means is that while the Irish-born did run some of the better-established hostelries in the town, they tended towards ownership and, therefore, patronage of a network of ‘glorified’ front rooms, the ubiquitous beershops.56 We might also add that the number of hostelries registered in the trade directories was not an accurate measure of total drinking places. In contrast to Cleator Moor, the occupational profile of the Barrow Irish was less clearly delineated. In 1871, when the Barrow economy was still very much dominated by the labouring and construction trades, almost half of all workers (1,962 [46.4 per cent] out of 4,233) were employed as general labourers while a further 558 (13.2 per cent) were employed as carpenters, joiners, masons and bricklayers. This pattern, in which labouring was predominant, was also reflected in the make-up of the local Irishborn community, as 314 (61.8 per cent) out of 508 Irish-born men were returned as general labourers.57 There were also Irishmen engaged in the skilled construction trades, such as masonry, woodworking and the like, but the total figure was small and barely exceeded 20. Within a year, the shipyard joined the steelworks in creating a larger core of skilled trades. It was registered as a company in 1871 and by the following year employed 600 men. By 1874 this figure had risen to around 2,000.58 As we saw from Table 3.5, in 1881 and 1891 the Barrow Irish-born community indeed mirrored wider local developments, with over a quarter of Irish-born males being involved in skilled occupations. The 1881 figures suggest that many of the skilled Irish-born were involved in the shipyard trades. Not least, for example, there were 167 Irishborn boilermakers, fitters, blacksmiths and riveters in 1881, although the total number of joiners and carpenters alone numbered 105. In the 1891 census survey, only the trades of fitter (27), joiner (13), riveter and boilermaker (both 11) reached double figures. It should be clear from this brief survey of 1871–1891 that the Irish were broadly represented in all the various occupations that Barrow had to offer. Not only that, but the Irish-born achieved something approaching parity with the wider community. The Irish-born in Cleator were less reliant upon unskilled occupations than were their Barrow counterparts. The figures for the Irish-born in Barrow were also favourable in a more general sense for, throughout this period, the majority of local businesses were

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dependent upon the exertions of unskilled labour, irrespective of nationality. In Barrow, however, skilled men of all nationalities were drawn into the job market to engage in the metal trades at the steelworks and the shipyard. Not surprisingly, workers from the east coast of Ireland, particularly around Belfast, were soon able to exercise a strong cultural influence over the town: a non-indigenous cultural influence that was only surpassed, perhaps, by the Scots drawn to the area predominantly from Dundee and the towns of the Clyde. If we consider Table 3.6, which examines the occupations of household heads by using W. J. Lowe’s classification of work types, we can see further details of the economic position of the Irishborn.59 The number of Irish-born household heads in the lowestpaid classes of work only fell below 50 per cent in Cleator Moor. The Cleator Moor figures display this trait because of the inclusion of iron ore miners in a higher wage category. Iron miners in Cumbria could expect to earn more than 24s per week, and this put between 33 and 74 per cent of Irish-born heads of household in Cleator Moor into the ‘skilled/good wages’ category (group 3). At the same time as Cleator contained many who were in this better paid work, the town also housed the only statistically significant low-paid unskilled factory workforce. In Barrow, between 12.8 and 33.7 per cent of Irish-born household heads also fell into the higher wage bracket (like these Cleator miners) by virtue of acquiring better paid jobs in the steelworks and shipbuilding. Given the fact that this book goes on to examine sectarian division, it might be useful to speculate as to the likely religious affiliation of Irish-born workers as determined by their occupation. We know from the previous chapter that a significant proportion of the Irish in Cumbria came from Ulster, and it will be seen later that this influenced communal relations in the counties concerned. However, do work patterns support the notion that the Irish-born population of the region was both Catholic and Protestant in composition? Table 3.7 contains a detailed breakdown of occupations in our four towns from 1851 to 1891 which were also enumerated in the Irish census of 1861. This latter survey contained details of the religion of workers in all categories of work in Ireland. There are flaws to this kind of conjecture, the main one being that many of the categories are insensitive to long-run comparison. Nevertheless, these figures suggest that the Irishborn population of Cumbria might have been split 80 per cent to

48.0 17.9 33.7 – 0.5 –

41.3 5.4 50.6 0.1 2.4 0.1

35.3 0.5 62.1 0.2 1.7 0.2

22.5 1.2 73.8 0.1 2.6 –

31.6 3.8 56.2 1.7 6.4 10.2

83.9 – 12.8 1.2 1.8 0.4

66.3 1.2 27.6 1.4 2.3 1.2

60.8 0.5 33.7 2.4 1.8 0.8

Barrow 1871 1881 1891 65.2 0.6 31.0 – – 3.2

79.0 0.7 14.0 0.7 0.7 4.9

85.1 0.7 9.5 – – 4.7

90.4 – 8.3 0.6 – 0.6

87.2 – 10.1 0.8 – 1.9

Workington 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891 56.9 – 31.2 2.3 2.3 7.3

60.4 0.4 30.0 0.9 – 8.3

64.5 – 24.1 1.8 0.6 9.0

70.1 – 26.8 1.0 0.5 1.6

73.3 – 18.5 0.7 – 7.4

Whitehaven 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

The categories used in this table are adapted from Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, pp. 85–86. 1. Unskilled, low-wage (those earning less than 20s per week when in work: tailors, seamstresses, shoemakers, charwomen, laundresses, hawkers, shop assistants, servants, warehousemen, watchmen, carters, messengers, butchers, porters, stokers, firemen, sailors, strikers and various labourers. 2. Unskilled, low-wage factory work: minders, rovers, hecklers, dressers, weavers, spinners, tenters, beamers, carders, dyers, doffers, winders, reelers, grinders, warpers. 3. Skilled, good wages (24s plus per week): joiners, carpenters, smiths, iron moulders, puddlers, bakers, miners, train drivers, mechanics, engineers, teachers, painters, plasterers, coopers, bookbinders, masons, bricklayers, beershopkeepers, contractors, fitters, shipwrights, overlookers, slaters, watchmakers, navvies. 4. Higher status and income: professional positions, shopkeepers, managers, publicans, foremen, superintendents. 5. No occupation, no entry. 6. Other: lodging house keepers, pensioners, salesmen, travellers, artists/musicians, apprentices, clerks, farmers: ‘somewhat ambiguous occupations in which the respectable status enjoyed might not be reflected in wages or steadiness of work’.

1 2 3 4 5 6

Cleator Moor 1851 1861 1871 1881 1891

Table 3.6: Occupations of male Irish-born heads of household in four Cumbrian towns, 1851–1891


agricultural labourer angle iron smith annuitant/own means apprentice baker bar staff blacksmith blacksmith’s labourer* boiler/machine maker boilermaker’s labourer bonnet maker bookbinder bookseller boot and shoemaker botanist brass finisher brazier bricklayer bricklayer’s labourer brickmaker builder builder’s labourer butcher

Description

2 1

4 7

1

9

10 1

1 4

1

1 1

3

2 1

1

3 9

32

Cleator

80

Workington

1 4 1 2

1

2 2 1 26

2 4 12 1 8 2 3

29

Whitehaven

1

1 5 4 7 17

9

7 1 1 1 14 1

1 2

141 1 7 5 19 5 21 3 19 2 2 2 1 54 1 1 6 10 15 18 5 5 4

88 69 39 66 83 88 83 89 32 89 60 48 43 76 33 45 65 77 89 80 62 89 87

12 31 61 34 17 12 17 11 68 11 40 52 57 24 67 55 35 23 11 20 38 11 13

124.08 0.69 2.73 3.3 15.77 4.4 17.43 2.67 6.08 1.78 1.2 0.96 0.43 41.04 0.33 0.45 3.9 7.7 13.35 14.4 3.1 4.45 3.48

16.92 0.31 4.27 1.7 3.23 0.6 3.57 0.33 12.92 0.22 0.8 1.04 0.57 12.96 0.67 0.55 2.1 2.3 1.65 3.6 1.9 0.55 0.52

Likely religious affiliation of each trade (%) Barrow ALL Catholic Non-Catholic Tot Cath Tot Prot

Table 3.7: Occupations and projected religion of the Irish-born in Cumbria, 1851–1891

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cabinet maker cap maker carpenter carter caulker* charwoman chef chemist clerk* clogger clothes peg maker coachbuilder coal miner compositor confectioner contractor cooper coppersmith cotton spinner cotton weaver customs officer dairyman dealer (cattle) dealer (fish)

Description

1

1

1 1 1 1 43 2

7

1 6 8

Workington

9

126 5 2

71

1 1

9

5 2

3 24 1 9 1

3

Whitehaven

2 1

10 6

Cleator

Table 3.7:

2 1

1 1

1

3

1 4

6 1 12 4

2

5 1 15 43 19 20 1 1 12 4 1 4 240 7 3 1 10 1 9 1 2 1 1 1 57 31 40 37 100 74 96 51 62 62 89 65 78 61 48 94 92 94

57 62 76 78 89 43 69 60 63 0 26 4 49 38 38 11 35 22 39 52 8 8 6

43 38 24 22 11

2.85 0.62 11.4 33.54 16.91 0 0.57 0.31 4.8 1.48 1 2.96 230.4 3.57 1.86 0.62 8.9 0.65 7.02 0.61 0.96 0.94 0.92 0.94

2.15 0.38 3.6 9.46 2.09 0 0.43 0.69 7.2 2.52 0 1.04 9.6 3.43 1.14 0.38 1.1 0.35 1.98 0.39 1.04 0.08 0.08 0.06


(continued)


dealer (shoes) dealer (tea) dealer (unspecified) docks labourer* domestic servant draughtsman dressmaker engine driver engine smith engineer farmer farrier fireman fisherman fitter flagger flax dresser flax hackler flax mill manager flax mill overlooker flax mill worker flax spinner flax weaver flour mill worker

Description

3

3 1

2 7 2 6

16 5

8

3

1

4 196 62 1

1 2

1 1

28 2

1 2

31 12

15 2

2 1 3 28 75

Whitehaven

16 2

40

3

Cleator

1 4 9 58

Workington

Table 3.7:

62 18 14 2

1

1 10 1 20 1

16 13 38 2 22 6 1 5

2 2 26 50 211 2 96 22 1 8 3 3 28 3 32 2 17 4 1 4 274 85 15 2 64 69 53 76 81 53 89 69 92 56 52 28 28 45 45 33 74

64 28 88 89 81 43 36 31 47 24 19 47 11 31 8 44 48 72 72 55 55 67 26

36 72 12 11 19 57

1.28 0.56 22.88 44.5 170.91 0.86 0 14.08 0.69 4.24 2.28 2.43 14.84 2.67 22.08 1.84 9.52 2.08 0.28 1.12 123.3 38.25 4.95 1.48

0.72 1.44 3.12 5.5 40.09 1.14 0 7.92 0.31 3.76 0.72 0.57 13.16 0.33 9.92 0.16 7.48 1.92 0.72 2.88 150.7 46.75 10.05 0.52


(continued)

Work 87

foreman french polisher gardener general labourer glazier GP/surgeon grocer grocer’s assistant groom handloom weaver hawker* herbalist holderup (shipyard)* housekeeper innkeeper iron or steel labourer* iron or steel maker iron ore miner ironmonger joiner laundress lighterman lime burner lodging house keeper

Description

21 4 7 13 7 1 1 12 1 9

1

30 5 20 59 554 6 1

8

1

11 4 226 74 1

6

2 1 12 1

10

5 5

3 1

2 1 5 216 3

Whitehaven

4 107

Cleator

2 309

1

Workington

Table 3.7:

1 1

5 143 2 100 23 8 1 22 1

7

1 7 4

331

1

4 1 11 963 3 1 25 10 2 1 21 1 5 205 15 353 169 570 2 35 14 1 1 18

33 28 28 11 32 72 40 40 23 53 10 33 11 17 47 11 43 4 47 40 21 14 17

67 72 72 89 68 28 60 60 77 47 90 67 89 83 53 89 57 96 53 60 79 86 83

2.68 0.72 7.92 857.07 2.04 0.28 15 6 1.54 0.47 18.9 0.67 4.45 170.15 7.95 314.17 96.33 547.2 1.06 21 0 0.79 0.86 14.94

1.32 0.28 3.08 105.93 0.96 0.72 10 4 0.46 0.53 2.1 0.33 0.55 34.85 7.05 38.83 72.67 22.8 0.94 14 0 0.21 0.14 3.06


(continued)


machinist manure merchant marine stores dealer* mariner/sailor mason mason’s labourer matmaker mechanic medical assistant militia miller milliner millwright miner mines labourer* mines superintendent musician/actor/artist nailmaker navvy nipper/errand boy nurse painter paper mill worker pattern maker

Description

1 5 5

2

1 1

1

3 3 10 7 1

Workington

3

6

3 25 1

3

1

9 3 2 1

3 4

8 32

3

1

1

9 3

Whitehaven 1 3 3 35 18 32

Cleator

Table 3.7:

1

9

1

1 3

1 2 2 1

2 1

2 5 6 2

3

4 3 8 43 43 44 1 4 1 1 2 8 2 13 58 2 8 4 1 15 4 19 6 1 68 73 52

32 71 88 48 83 89 86 32 50 44 74 44 46 96 89 0 70 79 84 80 32 27 48

68 29 12 52 17 11 14 68 50 56 26 56 54 4 11 100 30 21 16 20

1.28 2.13 7.04 20.64 35.69 39.16 0.86 1.28 0.5 0.44 1.48 3.52 0.92 12.48 51.62 0 5.6 3.16 0.84 12 0 12.92 4.38 0.52

2.72 0.87 0.96 22.36 7.31 4.84 0.14 2.72 0.5 0.56 0.52 4.48 1.08 0.52 6.38 2 2.4 0.84 0.16 3 0 6.08 1.62 0.48


(continued)

Work 89

pensioner plain sewer* plasterer plasterer’s labourer* platelayer plater plater’s labourer* plumber porter potter Presbyterian minister quarryman rag collector/scavenger railway servant rivet heater rivetter ropemaker saddle maker sawyer seamstress shipwright shipyard labourer* shopkeeper spademaker*

Description

6 1 7

1 3 8

9 1 11 3 1

5

2

1 2

1

1

Cleator

2

Workington

2 2 6 7 4 1 1

3 4 2 1 14 4 22

1

2 10 2 6

Whitehaven

Table 3.7:

2 1 4 121 2

4 6 11

9 10 5 3

4

1

6 10 6 6 7 10 10 8 7 2 1 21 8 41 6 12 2 2 17 9 19 125 5 2 23 31 55 34 11 26 28

66 89 74 72

11 53 27 43 100 18 22 16 11

33 33 20 11 16

77 69 45

89 47 73 57 0 82 78 84 89

67 67 80 89 84

4.02 6.7 4.8 5.34 5.88 0 8.9 3.76 5.11 1.14 0 17.22 6.24 34.44 5.34 0 1.54 1.38 7.65 0 12.54 111.25 3.7 1.44

1.98 3.3 1.2 0.66 1.12 0 1.1 4.24 1.89 0.86 1 3.78 1.76 6.56 0.66 0 0.46 0.62 9.35 0 6.46 13.75 1.3 0.56


(continued)


3 5 13

1 5 1

1

Workington

2

1

7

4

4

Cleator

9 1 4 1 1

3 1 34 1 6 1 1

Whitehaven

1 2

8

1

3

8

4 1 5

5 1 13 6 47 1 16 4 7 13 9 1 4 10 1 1 4 66 74 41 72

57 81 53 94 86 81 68 58 69 89 91 91 34 26 59 28 TOTAL:

43 19 47 6 14 19 32 42 31 11 9 9

2.85 0.81 6.89 5.64 40.42 0.81 10.88 2.32 4.83 11.57 8.19 0.91 0 6.6 0.74 0.41 2.88 3,760.46

2.15 0.19 6.11 0.36 6.58 0.19 5.12 1.68 2.17 1.43 0.81 0.09 0 3.4 0.26 0.59 1.12 924.56


(continued)

Source: Census of Ireland (Religion and Occupations, 1861), in Akenson, Small Differences, pp. 162–80. *These figures are derived from the category ‘labourer unspecified’ as these groups are not recorded.

spinner stocking knitter stoker sweep tailor tanner teacher telegraph worker tinsmith tinsmith’s labourer* tobacco factory labourer tobacconist trapper turner umbrella maker watchmaker watchman

Description

Table 3.7:

Work 91

92


20 per cent between Catholics and Protestants. While this represents a sizeable Protestant population, it probably underestimates the non-Catholic element. It is unlikely that Irish Catholics dominated the iron mining industry in Cumbria as they did Ireland’s general mining sector. It must also be remembered that Table 3.7 excludes iron shipbuilders. This is because the large-scale manufacture of such vessels was not applicable at the time of the 1861 census of Ireland. Thus, if we could add skilled Protestant tradesmen—a number unknowable in precise terms—to the overall figures, it would be reasonable to surmise that the Irish Protestant population of Cumbria was similar to the figure of around 25 per cent found in Scotland.60 These skilled shipyard workers who hailed from Belfast were overwhelmingly Protestant (as, no doubt, were others in the steel industries of Barrow and, later, Workington) and they came to the area in considerable numbers after the 1870s. At the very least we can say that a figure of around 20 per cent is a reasonable estimate of the Cumbrian Protestant-Irish population in the mid-Victorian era and that this group probably grew in the 1870s and 1880s. This chapter has attempted to cover a number of broad areas concerning the work roles of the Barrow and Cleator Moor Irishborn settlers. Particular attention has been focused upon the occupational profile of these communities. Nowhere in Cumbria, it can be argued, were the Irish to be found subsisting in a marginalised street economy, such as was vividly recreated in the surveys of London and the north conducted by Mayhew and Reach.61 Indeed, this research on the Irish-born in west Cumbria perhaps dispels the common images of the Irish as economically marginal by supporting Pooley’s claim that ‘between 17 and 40 per cent of the Irish-born . . . were employed in skilled or higher status employment.62 Furthermore, in terms of their class, it is fair to say that in no Cumbrian town was the Irish-born workforce denied access to whole sectors of the economy, although levels of skill varied between the areas and industries. Nor, however, were these Irish communities in any sense better off than native workers, according to workplace experiences. The best manual workers could hope for in these times was marginal privilege over members of their own class. On the whole, evidence suggests that the Irishborn did not penetrate the higher echelons of the economy, but remained overwhelmingly working class.

Work

93

From this study we have learned that, in Barrow, in the 1860s, the unskilled dominated the labour market. Due to the embryonic nature of the local economy, and the scale of plans for domestic and industrial construction, the town was almost overwhelmed by hordes of navvies and labourers. In the 1870s and 1880s, permanence and skill predominated as the town came to rely on steel manufacture and shipbuilding, and the concomitant call for skill naturally impacted on the Irish community. In Cleator Moor, we have noted, semi-skilled occupations were dominant. For the Irish community, as with their non-Irish counterparts, this meant a heavy reliance on iron ore mining. This dependence grew stronger in the 1860s and held fast until the later 1880s. In Cleator, like in Barrow, the Irish were also drawn to the forging of iron rather than just the extraction of ore. However, the metal trades in Cleator never assumed the pre-eminence enjoyed in Barrow. This and the previous chapter sought to demonstrate the broader, sometimes quantitative, impression of Irish settlement, focusing on questions of where they came from, how they lived and what they did. Having laid something of the socio-economic foundations of Irish life in Cumbria, later chapters are concerned with aspects of popular Irish culture, most especially where that culture came into contact with the host population and tensions emerged.

NOTES 1 F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London, 1985 ed.), p. 123 (first published 1845); Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, Appendix G, Report into the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain, PP (1836), passim, for countless supporting testimonies from such employers. 2 Such views are prominent in the historiography of the Irish in Britain. See, for example, contemporary opinions expressed to Cornewall Lewis in Irish Poor in Great Britain, passim. Ruth Ann Harris, The Nearest Place that Wasn’t Ireland (Ames, Iowa, 1994), pp. 140–62 provides an examination of this perspective on Irish migrants and the industrial revolution in Britain. See also G. Davis, The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914 (Dublin, 1991), pp. 83-123. 3 Irish Poor in Great Britain, p. xxx. 4 Ibid., p. 136. 5 E. H. Hunt, Regional Wage Variations in Britain, 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1973),

94


pp. 286–304; Davis, Irish in Britain, pp. 83–123. For a controversial quantitative revision which plays down the importance of Irish labour in the industrialisation process, see J. Williamson, ‘The impact of the Irish on British labour markets during the industrial revolution’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815-1939 (London, 1989), pp. 134–62. See also D. Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A peculiar tramping people’’: the Irish in Britain, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland (Oxford, 1989), V, I: Ireland under the Union, 1801–70, p. 643. 6 J. P. Kay-Shuttleworth, Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in Cotton Manufacture in England (Manchester, 1832), p. 20. 7 Davis, Irish in Britain, p. 83, delineates the two diametrically opposite positions. 8 E. P. Thompson and E. Yeo (eds), The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle, 1849–1850 (London, 1973 ed.), pp. 426-27, 456; Lynn Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1982), p. 94. 9 Redford, Labour Migration, p. 117; J. E. Williams, ‘Irish in the East Cheshire silk industry’, Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 136 (1986), pp. 99–126; Harris, Nearest Place, p. 150. 10 R. D. Lobban, ‘The Irish community in Greenock in the nineteenth century’, Irish Geography, Vol. 6 (1971), p. 271. 11 There is a rich literature of the navvies, in which the Irish regularly appear. See, for example, J. Handley, The Navvy in Scotland (Cork, 1970); T. Coleman, The Railway Navvies (London, 1965); D. Sullivan, Navvyman (London, 1983); D. Brooke, ‘Railway navvies on the Pennines, 1841-1871’, Journal of Transport History, Vol. 3 (1975–76), pp. 41–53. 12 State of the Irish Poor, p. xxx. 13 Ibid.; J. M. Werly, ‘The Irish in Manchester, 1832–1849’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 18 (1973), p. 352. See also P. Duffy, ‘Carrying the hod: Irish immigrant labour in the Manchester building trades’, North West Labour History, Vol. 16 (1991–92), pp. 36–41. 14 Harris, Nearest Place, p. 159. 15 Robert Sinclair, engine works owner, State of the Irish Poor, p. 141. 16 Barrow Herald, 23 April 1864. 17 R. Colls, Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield (Manchester, 1987), p. 13; Harris, Nearest Place, pp. 156–57. 18 Alexander Guthrie, to State of the Irish Poor, p. 143. 19 R. Colls, Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield, p. 13. 20 Ibid. 21 R. Challinor and B. Ripley, The Miners’ Association: A Trade Union in the Age of the Chartists (London, 1968), pp. 156–57. For Brophy, see Dorothy Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism before 1850’, in idem and J. Epstein (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 (London, 1982), pp. 170–71. 22 J. D. Marshall and J. K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the MidTwentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change (Manchester, 1981), p. 71, states that ‘The money wages of rural Cumbria were . . . among the highest in England between 1861 and 1907’.

Work

95

23 The shorter hours of the collier totalled no more than eight per day in 1877; pay stood at 6s per shift in the 1870s. The favourable position against his country colleague, of course, relied upon full employment: Miners’ Eight Hour Day Departmental Committee, 1907, Cmd. 3486, pp. 38–39, quoted in Marshall and Walton, The Lake Counties, pp. 99–100. 24 27th Report of the Registrar General, quoted in J. D. Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution (Beckermet, 1981 ed.), p. 311. 25 Estimate of a member of the local carpenters’ union. See ibid., Barrow Times, 7 August 1867. 26 The following figures, from Alfred Mault, Secretary of the General Builders’ Association to the Trade Union Commission, were published in Barrow Times, 30 March 1867: Plasterer Bricklayer’s labourer BARROW 7ˆ˚d BARROW 5¯˚d Durham 6ˆ˜d London 5d Chester 5¯˘d Liverpool 4˙˚d Wigan 5ˆ˜d Preston 3ˆ˜d Wakefield 5ˆ˜d Chester 3d Darlington 5¯˚d Shrewsbury 3d Shrewsbury 5¯˚d 27 Barrow Times, 10 August 1867; Marshall, Furness, pp. 311–12. 28 I decided to include mining as a class IV rather than a class V occupation in all tables in this chapter. This was done because of the higher wages available to miners in the region and elsewhere. Mining may have been a dirty and dangerous job, but, compared with general labouring, it was well paid and does not deserve to be in the same class. The system of classification used in this chapter largely follows G. Stedman Jones’s reworking of the Annual Report of the Registrar General 1851. See Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971), Appendix 1, pp. 355–56. Also useful is W. A. Armstrong, ‘The use of information about occupation’, in Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth Century Society, Chapter 6. For an application to Irish occupational information of Armstrong’s method, see J. Herson, ‘Why the Irish went to Stafford’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989), pp. 10, 13. 29 Work on Belfast suggests that keeping pubs and beerhouses was a common Catholic occupation. See A. C. Hepburn, ‘Irish Catholic in Belfast and Glasgow: connections and comparisons’, in S. J. Connolly, R. A. Houston and R. J. Morris (eds), Conflict. Identity and Economic Development: Ireland and Scotland, 1600– 1939 (Preston, 1995), p. 207. 30 P. Mannix and P. Whellan, History, Gazetteer and Directory of Cumberland (1847, repr. Beckermet, 1974). Those establishments were the Forge Hammer (W. Youdall); Hare and Hounds (Matthew Spedding); Little’s Arms (William Fisher); Queen’s Arms (George Nicholson); and Three Tuns (Jane Southward). 31 The ten men were entered in the census as follows: beerhousekeeper and: dealer 1; labourer 1; shoemaker 1; iron ore miner 2; furnaceman 1; grocer 2; iron ore smelter 1; tailor 1. 32 S. Pollard, ‘Town planning in the 19th century: the beginnings of modern

96


Barrow-in-Furness’, Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 68 (1952– 53), pp. 96–97. 33 Marshall, Furness, p. 321. Pollard, ‘Town planning’, pp. 96ff estimates the Barrow population during the 1860s to be 10,000 in 1864, 12,000 in 1865, 16,000 in 1866 and 20,000 in 1867. After this the population dropped back to 18,911 in 1871. 34 These mills produced linen, an important area of work for both women in general and the Irish in particular. There has been a book-length study of such work, W. A. Walker, Juteopolis: Dundee and its Textile Workers, 1885–1923 (Edinburgh, 1979), which examines Britain’s premier linen town. Further reference to Dundee’s textile industry and the Irish there can be found in B. Collins, ‘Irish emigration to Dundee and Paisley during the first half of the nineteenth century’ in J. M. Goldstrom and L. A. Clarkson (eds), Irish Population, Economy and Society (Oxford, 1981), passim. With particular reference to the Irish, see also Davis, Irish in Britain, pp. 108–10. 35 Marshall, ‘Cleator and Cleator Moor: some aspects of their social and urban development in the mid-nineteenth century’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, Vol. 78 (1978), pp. 163–64; C. Caine, Cleator and Cleator Moor, Past and Present (Kendal, 1916), pp. 365–81. 36 The town’s population growth followed this pattern: 1801 (362); 1811 (571); 1821 (818); 1831 (487); 1841 (763). The low 1831 figure was caused by the closure of the mill. Marshall, ‘Cleator and Cleator Moor’, p. 163; T. Bulmer, History, Topography and Directory of Cumberland (Preston, 1901), p. 531. 37 Mannix and Whellan, History, Gazetteer and Directory of Cumberland, p. 319. 38 I am grateful to Tony Hepburn for this observation. 39 Collins, ‘Dundee and Paisley’, p. 208; Davis, Irish in Britain, p. 109. 40 The later trade directories cease to mention developments in flax and jute. See T. Bulmer, History, Topography and Directory of West Cumberland (Preston, 1883), p. 95; idem, Directory, 1901, pp. 531, 534. 41 Collins, ‘Dundee and Paisley’, pp. 210–11; Davis, Irish in Britain, p. 109. 42 Walker, Juteopolis, p. 147; Davis, Irish in Britain, p. 110. 43 Barrow Vulcan, 3 February 1880. The effigy was of the Earl of Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli. The crowd apparently broke the windows of both Liberal and Conservative Clubs. 44 Marshall, Furness, pp. 338–43; F. Barnes, Barrow and District (Barrow, 1967), p. 104. The likelihood of such an eventuality was remote, when one considers the size and importance of the Dundee trade: Walker, Juteopolis, passim. 45 A workforce of 2,000 was the maximum that the firm ever employed. Like most of Barrow’s industrial concerns the Flax and Jute Works represented unfulfilled promise. Barnes, Barrow and District, p. 104. 46 Barrow Herald, 2 April 1870. 47 In successful centres of Irish settlement, like Bradford, work was found for all elements of the migrant family in mills, factories and mines. See Richardson, ‘Bradford’. Dundee was similar in offering this type of occupational balance, though nearly all migrants were employed in the mills. Collins, ‘Dundee and Paisley’. Davis, Irish in Britain, pp. 104, 108.

Work

97

48 M. N. K. Saunders, ‘Migration to nineteenth-century Barrow-in-Furness: an examination of the Census Enumerators’ Handbooks, 1841–1871’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, Vol. 84 (1984), p. 221. The author of this article quite rightly points out the small size of the middle class as well as the shortage of opportunity for working-class women and children. Marshall, Furness, p. 353, puts at 30 the number of men who had real influence in the town. 49 James Ramsden, quoted in Barnes, Barrow and District, p. 103. 50 Ibid. 51 Table illustrating the ‘paid-up capital’ of the ‘railway-associated industries’: Marshall, Furness, p. 342. 52 Pollard, ‘Town planning’, p. 103. The actual breakdown among the mentioned industries was as follows: steelworks 3,500; shipyard 2,000; jute works 1,600; railway 1,000; smaller firms 2,000; large builders 3,000. 53 These transport developments included further additions to the rail network and the inauguration, in 1864, of a steamer service, part-owned by the FR, between Piel Island, Belfast and the Isle of Man. Saunders, ‘Migration’, p. 223. Clearly, this latter development encouraged the direct in-migration of the Irish. However, according to the Duke of Devonshire, the service to Ireland did not pay: quoted in Marshall, Furness, pp. 277, 371. 54 The iron ore labourers are assumed to have been pit labourers as opposed to those unskilled men employed by the haematite ironworks. Between 1871 and 1891, the number and percentage of all workers employed as labourers in the ironworks (a) and the iron ore pits (b) were as follows: (a) % (b) % 1871 146 11.3 51 4.0 1881 85 6.0 103 7.3 1891 26 3.2 19 2.4 As can be seen from these figures, in both 1871 and 1881 the number of men involved in support trades for the extraction and manufacture of iron ore was quite significant. Again, however, the figures for 1891 illustrate the waning fortunes of the local Irish community. 55 In 1847 there were five beersellers listed. In 1883 there were seven. In 1891 the figure was 29. See Mannix and Whellan, Directory, p. 320; Bulmer, Directory, 1883, p. 103; Bulmer, Directory, 1901, pp. 538–39. The disparity between the 1883 and the 1901 figures suggests that the early one is incorrect. Even so, the Irish did number anywhere between one-third and one-half of all licensed beersellers in the town. Of the 29 in the 1901 directory, it can be suggested that between 10 and 15 had Irish names. 56 The keeping of beerhouses was encouraged by the Beerhouse Act, 1830, which ‘permitted virtually any householder who paid a small fee to sell beer on his premises’, J. F. C. Harrison, in The Early Victorians, 1832–51 (London, 1971), p. 71. This act was a free-trade answer to the problems of drunkenness. For more of this aspect of the drink culture see Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (London, 1971), pp. 37–63. 57 Census of England and Wales 1871; Marshall, Furness, pp. 355–56, Table 34,

98


p. 356; F. Leach, Barrow-in-Furness: Its Rise and Progress (Barrow, 1872), pp. 74– 83. The breakdown of the main Barrow occupations returned in the census is as follows: Steel manufacture 256 Bricklayers 124 Iron manufacture 556 Engine drivers and stokers 178 General labourers 1,962 Railway labourers, plate-layers 155 and navvies Engineering and machine 307 Marble masons 145 workers Carpenters and joiners 289 Seamen 261 TOTAL: 4,263 58 Marshall, Furness, pp. 344, 356; Pollard, ‘Town planning’, p. 103; Leach, Barrow, pp. 74–83. 59 The data in Tables 3.5 and 3.6 were derived from an examination of Irishheaded households in the four towns over five censal decades and do not correspond with the total figures for Cleator and Barrow which comprise Tables 3.1–3.4. 60 Graham Walker, ‘The Protestant Irish in Scotland’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 1991), p. 49. This figure for Scotland is a reasonable ‘guesstimate’. 61 Mayhew, London Labour and London Poor, passim. For Reach, see J. Ginswick, Labour and the Poor in England, 1849–1851, Vol. I; see also D. M. MacRaild, ‘Irish immigration and the ‘‘Condition of England’’ question’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 14, No. I (1995), pp. 78–81. 62 Colin Pooley, ‘Segregation or integration? The residential experience of the Irish in mid-Victorian Britain’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in Britain, 1815– 1939 (London, 1989), p. 70. Pooley is not alone in this view. See, for example, R. D. Lobban, ‘The Irish community in Greenock in the nineteenth century’, Irish Geography, Vol. 6 (1971), p. 276.

CHAPTER 4

Catholicism and nationalism When John Denvir, the Liverpool home-rule campaigner, conducted his survey of the Irish in Britain, following the fall of Parnell, he noted three Irish populations in Cumberland. The first was, he claimed, Catholic and committed to the national cause; the second, also Catholic, was opposed to it; while the third he described with venom as ‘Orangemen’. Denvir went on to say: ‘There is no part of Great Britain where the Irish nationalists are better organised’, adding that many Cumbrian Irishmen could be relied upon ‘to give his vote for his country in the ballot box, or do a man’s part in any field wherever the battle of Irish freedom has to be fought out’.1 Denvir was exasperated that the second group of Catholics shunned their nativity or came out after Gladstone’s conversion ‘to proclaim themselves Irishmen, not from any patriotic motive, but that they might stab their country in the back by declaring that, though they were Irishmen, they did not want Home Rule’. Denvir argued that such a move served only to alienate them further, earning ‘from Englishmen even greater contempt than before, as men who are so degraded as to be willing to live in slavery themselves, providing they can still keep their feet on the neck of the ‘‘Papishes’’ ’.2 Denvir’s observations highlight a number of the problems faced by Irish Catholics which are examined in this chapter. Perhaps, though, he laid insufficient stress upon the tensions inherent within Irish Catholic affinities. Not only was their religion the focus of indiscriminate attacks by native Protestants, but the relationship between Catholicism and national politics was far from smooth. The Catholic church hierarchy often perceived the national-political allegiances of the faithful as a source of consternation. From O’Connell to Parnell, no nationalist organiser received support from the church and most drew only opprobrium. This was especially the case when Ribbon and Fenian elements were active. Indeed, evidence suggests that clandestine republicans used Cath-

100


olic community networks to recruit their compatriots and raise funds. This caused such alarm that the church’s opposition to secret and oath-bound societies even led in the 1820s and early 1830s to the denunciation of emerging trade unions.3 That the parish was vulnerable to penetration by what the church regarded as undesirable elements was not lost on the hierarchy. In the 1840s, for example, the church refused to baptise the children of Irish Chartists, withholding the sacraments from those who failed to renounce membership of the Irish Universal Suffrage Union.4 Later, when Fenianism emerged, Cardinal Cullen expressed grave concern, not only for his parishioners, but for the ‘Reverend Brethren’, urging none to fall on ‘the mercy of plotting spies and treacherous informers’.5 The hierarchy, from Rome to Dublin, maintained a stance opposed to secret societies which mixed lofty disdain and rabid denunciation; grass-roots responses, however, were mixed. Most Catholics clearly shied away from putatively dangerous affiliations; nevertheless, there were examples of clerical as well as lay involvement. Not all priests concentrated upon Smilesian self-improvement; nor do all representations of the priest’s role accord with Walker’s writings on the Scottish immigrant experience which portray priests as a conservative force of some power.6 A number of factors, such as the tension between hierarchy and parish, politics and religion, served as a check on Catholic development among migrant communities. As we shall see in this chapter, which focuses upon the many pressures bearing upon Irish Catholics, despite its considerable achievements in the midVictorian years, the church was not always able to match its theologically pre-eminent position in the lives of the Irish with a similar hold on their political expressions.

I During the Victorian period, there was, in the Lake Counties region, a ‘growth in the variety of religious observance and expression’ if not in absolute numbers of communicants.7 Catholicism was foremost among the growing religions of the region, a fact attributable to widespread population movement.8 Although the Catholic mission of St Begh, Whitehaven, dated from 1706, only in the next century did Cumbria’s Catholic population reach its zenith.9

Catholicism and Nationalism

101

Table 4.1: The main Catholic centres of Cumberland in 1851 District

Carlisle Workington Cockermouth Whitehaven

Pop.

Anglican

41,537 23,661 38,510 35,614

8,841 6,753 12,548 11,835

%

Dissent

%

RC

21.3 9,296 22.4 1,130 28.5 4,295 18.2 437 32.6 11,034 28.6 550 33.2 8,088 22.7 637

%

Practising (%)

2.7 1.8 1.4 1.8

46.7 48.5 62.8 58.3

Source: Religious Census, 1851, Table H, pp. cclxvii–ccxciii.

During the French Wars Irish settlement gathered pace and increased greatly after the 1830s. By 1851, as Table 4.1 illustrates, the established Cumberland Catholic centres, like Warwick Bridge and Kendal, had been eclipsed by Carlisle and the towns of the western mining belt. Burgess notes that the needs of these Catholics were not well met: in 1851 there were just ten chapels spread across the district, including one in Ulverston and two in the Kendal ward. Yet their rate of observance was higher than among other groups, with an average of 478 hearers, against the county average of 200, attending Catholic churches.10 By the 1880s, industrial development along the coast, inward migration and further Irish arrival boosted the Cumbrian Roman Catholic population to around 28,000, with clusters of 3,000 to 5,000 found in the important centres of Barrow, Carlisle, Whitehaven and Cleator Moor.11 Yet, in 1891, John Denvir could still complain that his Cumbrian coreligionists were woefully under-resourced as there were only twenty chapels in the district. In a period when religious observance was generally waning, the growth of Barrow heralded a great influx of religions. By the mid1860s, many denominations were present in the town: as early as 1853, Baptists congregated on the sparsely-populated Walney Island, and in 1857 Independents held regular services in a small chapel in Hindpool. In the same year, Wesleyans began worshipping together in Barrow for the first time, while Baptists and Primitive Methodists followed in 1865.12 The nonconformist and Catholic denominations comprised the overwhelming majority of Barrow’s communicants, and modest places of worship developed quickly during these years. The Church of England, to which the town’s most powerful sons adhered, received lavish support from

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the town’s influential men. On 26 September 1878, for example, the Duke of Devonshire donated £12,000 so that four churches, dedicated to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were opened simultaneously. However, ‘It can be said that during the first two decades of Barrow’s growth the ‘‘dissenters’’ made most of the running, and most represented the religious leanings of its people’.13 The Catholic population was swollen by migrants from central Lancashire as well as Irish settlers.14 Yet for nearly ten years the Barrow Catholics made do with the most basic conditions of worship.15 In 1858, Father Jarrett of Ulverston began to conduct mass at 57 Greengate Street, the home of Joseph Walmsley. Later, the congregation transferred to Walmsley’s new premises: first at St James’ Terrace and finally, in 1865, above his paint shop in Newlands Street.16 During these formative years, the new community saw its early efforts at religious unity bolstered by a stream of incoming co-religionists: In February [1863] the Reverend Peter Laverty was transferred by Bishop Goss from the Catholic Institute, Liverpool, to the church of St. Mary, Ulverston . . . [and] at the time of his arrival there were said to be 200 Catholics in Barrow; by the time Laverty had completed his ‘Status Animarum’, at the close of the year 1863, there were nearly 500.17

In 1865, in an effort to meet the growing demand, Fr John Bilsborrow established a mission in Barrow. However, rapid Irish in-migration continued to swell the Catholic population of the town which by 1865–86 numbered 1,300, and made the building of a church all the more urgent. Their needs were met in 1867 when St Mary of Furness was consecrated, in Duke Street.18 Despite the exigencies traditionally associated with movement to Britain, in Cumbria, as elsewhere, ‘the migrant Irish were neither disorganised nor culturally impoverished’.19 Central to their communal renewal were churches like St Mary’s of Furness, physical and symbolic beacons of identity, which provided many migrants with a source of ‘great spiritual comfort’ by transferring a durable cultural identity from Ireland.20 The pennies of Irish settlers played a vital part in reviving Catholic fortunes during the ‘Second Spring’ to levels unknown since the Reformation. With mass Irish settlement, Catholicism assumed an important position in British society, while in Ireland the post-Famine years were marked by a ‘devotional revolution’ during which modernisation, the westward spread of the English language and resurgent ultramontanism resulted in a


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much greater adherence to strict Catholic liturgy. It is clear from cases like that of Barrow, which half of the Catholic church’s ‘double mission’ assumed greater importance: the sheer weight of immigration meant that Catholicism’s role as ‘national church to the Irish poor’ far outweighed its ‘proselytising work’ aimed to convert the ‘well-born and rich’.21 It has been emphasised that immigration to Barrow during the 1860s was often transient in nature, but permanent arrivals provided a firm foundation for the continued growth of Catholicism during the 1870s. Nevertheless, there were a number of problems associated with rapid population growth. During the 1860s, Barrow was ill-prepared for the volume of immigrants’ children which put heavy strains on the local school board. Educational provision was scanty, though the churches played an active role in supplying teaching facilities.22 In 1865 St George’s Church of England School provided educational facilities for 220 children, and the Baptists offered places for another 130. The Barrow trade directory for 1865–86 lists fifteen teachers, but by 1871 this figure had dropped to twelve, even though there were then 8,964 people aged under twenty in the borough.23 Once the church was built (1867), attention was turned towards the welfare of the children of the parish. By 1871, the swollen congregation had raised £1,200 for the purpose of building a Catholic school and on 11 October James Ramsden laid its foundation stone at a site adjacent to St Mary’s church. The press stated that the school building was intended to accommodate 600 children, at an estimated cost of £2,000.24 Rapid population growth in the 1870s furthered the need for schooling provision for local Catholic children. In 1877, the Furness Railway Company provided some of the funds to erect a mixed school ‘among the grim huts’ of Barrow Island.25 This school quickly became the nub of Catholic community life on the island, a popularity which led in 1885 to the planting of a separate church dedicated to St Patrick.26 Between 1880 and 1887 such developments within the local Catholic community were enforced by steady increases in the provision of schooling, marked by a rise in available places from 660 to 1,076.27 By 1887, with two functioning churches—St Mary’s and St Patrick’s—the Barrow Catholic community was well accommodated.28 Although priests complained that fewer than 50 per cent attended church regularly, or took Easter communion, this figure is perhaps a shade above the norm elsewhere in Lancashire and also in Ireland.29

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Moreover, they must have been proud that ‘Catholic churches were the most used buildings belonging to the denominations and recorded full houses each Sunday’.30 This was the case even though local Catholics were overwhelmingly Irish, few of whom were ‘wealthy, scholarly, educated, landed’ or ‘respectable’.31 Similarly, Catholics were at the vanguard of religious development in Cleator Moor.32 These Catholics also built their own church largely from the parishioners’ subscriptions. This financial sacrifice, orchestrated by the ‘unwearied exertions’ of the Rev. W. G. Holden, enabled the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart to be opened in 1853, at a cost of £6,000, with accommodation for 600.33 The parish church of St Leonard, however, was long-established, though requiring reconstruction in 1841 from its previously ‘dilapidated state’. As a result of the general influx of people into Cleator, St Leonard’s was supplemented in 1872 with the building of the parish church of St John.34 Nonconformity also figured prominently in the early years in Cleator—just as it had done in Barrow. In 1862, for example, the Wesleyans matched the Catholics in erecting a ‘Gothic style’ chapel, suitable for 600 worshippers. By the mid-1870s, Catholics were centrally placed in the social composition of both towns. In Barrow, even the municipal authorities, whose responsibility it was to provide final resting places for the growing population, were also aware of the importance of the Catholic presence. The decision to separate the plots by denomination led to tensions. On the one hand, Fr Caffrey indicated his pleasure at what the rapid growth of Barrow’s Catholic population necessitated: A further development of requirements took place in the summer of 1874. The corporation had decided upon discontinuing the use of Dalton Cemetery and laying out a burial ground within the borough. Recognising the proportionate representation of Catholics, a separate section was allotted and a church built and furnished for Catholic use.35

Such a development was likely to be viewed with satisfaction and perhaps even pride by the local Irish Catholic populace. On the other hand, Catholic contentment at the allocation of a distinct Catholic resting place in the new cemetery was not matched elsewhere. Joseph Richardson, the editor of the Barrow Vulcan, saw it as ‘The Worst Form of Sectarianism’, and in a damning leader he thundered: ‘That the bones of a papist cannot rest beside the bones of a Churchman, or of a Dissenter, and vice versa; that in fact there


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should be sectarianism even in the grave, speaks little for our Christianity’.36 Whether this was the ‘worst form of sectarianism’ is questionable, for it hardly compares with the violent acts committed in the name of the English church or the British flag. Yet Richardson’s stance is indicative of attitudes at the time, as it illustrates the kind of moral confrontations in which Catholics and Protestants habitually indulged. For the Irish in Britain, however, the sectarianism of the cemetery was exceeded by the realities of everyday life.

II The cohesion of the Irish communities of west Cumbria was partly shaped by the antipathy of a host population. The intensity of this opposition was considerably increased by the activities of an organisation which grew into prominence in the mid-1860s.37 Fenianism was a movement of ‘deeds, not . . . words’,38 and its complex parochial organisation brought inevitable contact with local Catholic networks. The aim of Fenianism was simply the freedom of Ireland, shaped on a hope, dating to Wolfe Tone, that the politics of Irish nationalism could be imbued with a non-clerical and nonsectarian ideology. The greatest victory of the Fenians was in putting Irish politics back into an ‘England versus Ireland framework’.39 Standing, as they did, upon a revolutionary platform, Fenians did not threaten to free Ireland from the grip of the English: the combined power of the English state, the Irish ruling class and intrinsic sectarianism saw to that. Moreover, the church feared for its congregation, and clerical opposition to the Fenians was an intractable stumbling block to recruitment.40 Even so, during the 1860s the movement, established in Dublin and wellsupported in America, quickly spread to Britain, gaining footholds in the new communities.41 Existing Irish organisations were taken over and used to promote Fenian ideas, to raise money and to sell the Irish People.42 In London in 1863, for example, there were fifteen branches of the National Brotherhood of St Patrick, a front organisation for the Fenians.43 The movement was present among all substantial migrant communities in England and Scotland, and the Irish People was said to have almost destroyed the circulation of the Nation among expatriate Irishmen ‘in many places north and

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south of the Tweed’.44 By 1865, the Brotherhood claimed 80,000 members in the United Kingdom.45 Fenian activities such as the raid on Chester castle, the Manchester rescue and the Clerkenwell bombing invoked sometimes wild reactions.46 On one level a combined sympathy for and fear of Ireland developed, most readily identified in the acceptance, by Gladstone, that something needed to be done for the country. For British public opinion, however, Fenianism fostered a fundamental belief in the ‘innate ingratitude of the Irish’,47 and, in the localities, where English and Irish lived ‘cheek by jowl’, the excitement over Fenianism was intense. In west Cumbria, attitudes combined a sense of outrage at terrorist events with an at times hysterical fear that a local plot might hatch out among the local Irish. Thus, many migrants denounced Fenian violence in strong terms. As O’Day states: Irish repudiation of the [Clerkenwell] explosion was prompt. More than 500 Irish Catholics met at Woolwich to express their abhorrence of Fenian terror. A similar meeting was held at Swansea while in February 1868 more than 22,000 Irish resident in London sent an address to the Queen condemning the outrage and pledging their loyalty to the throne.48

This campaign of terror undermined Cumbrian support for extremist republicanism. ‘Even at Cleator Moor’, Richter claims, ‘which harbored one of England’s most pugnacious and aggressive Irish mobs, Fenianism disappeared.’49 Oblique sympathy, however, did not altogether dissipate. The executions of the three perpetrators of the Manchester rescue, for example, angered the Irish across the world, creating a wave of sympathy throughout Lancashire and elsewhere. This brutality, a measure of the severity of the state’s response, aroused ‘public opinion in Ireland in a way that the Young Ireland and Fenian calls for rebellion had never done’. Many years later the Irish of Manchester still remembered the ‘Martyrs’ with an annual march.50 As a litmus test of local opinion, the press in Barrow was most clearly concerned about the effect Fenianism might have in the town, and forthright appeals were issued to deter the Barrow Irish from Fenianism. Born from a fear of terrorist activity, comments like this from the editor of the Barrow Herald were not uncommon: ‘The madness of their acts is only matched by the ignorance of the dupes’.51 In the aftermath of the raid on Chester castle, the Barrow Times sounded a familiar warning:


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When will men be nice, and think for themselves, instead of being led away by the specious harangues of men who, too lazy to work, make a prey of their fellow men, upon whose credulity they manage to a competency and then leave the poor belated dupes to reap the punishment and suffering which ought to be shared by the ringleaders.52

At the same time, there were bogus reports of Fenians landing at Liverpool, Plymouth and Holyhead. The following month, with St Patrick’s Day fast approaching, the issue of Fenianism was again addressed. One local editor, George Carruthers, who normally acknowledged the worth of national celebrations, changed his mind on hearing that Fenians in Liverpool had chosen 17 March to hold a meeting. Fearing similar plans were afoot in Barrow, Carruthers concluded with an unequivocal warning to the Irish: ‘We . . . strongly advise Irishmen to pause ere they commit acts which must inevitably recoil upon their hands’.53 There is little doubt that in a place like Barrow, in the 1860s, the celebration of St Patrick’s Day did hold some risks. In that decade celebrations had been beer-related, but, by the mid-1870s, local Catholics were holding concerts and balls, with a faction adding a constitutional, political dimension. During the late 1870s, St Patrick’s nights in Barrow were largely controlled by the church, with concerts, balls and religious festivities taking over from the previously drunken displays. Indeed, concern about any form of working-class celebration was older than the edge provided by the Fenian movement, and centred, more often than not, on the generic problem of drink. These dual concerns—drink and Fenianism—were manifest in the Barrow Herald’s coverage of St Patrick’s Day in 1866: ‘Much apprehension was felt in Barrow last Saturday as to the probability of a disturbance, but we are happy to say that all passed over quietly, the only disturbances being the usual Saturday night rows, arising from drunkenness’.54 No sense of Anglo-Irish division was evident in 1867 when 300 to 400 Catholics gathered in force for a ‘Tea Party and Ball’ in the local Assembly Rooms.55 Sometimes, however, emotional outbursts did prevail: as in the case of one Irishman, Michael Langan, who was hauled before magistrates in December 1867 after a drunken display of proFenian sentiment. This is the only court case in Barrow where Fenianism made a splash. The headline of one newspaper sums up the alleged miscreant’s deed: ‘Assault on a Constable by a Fenian

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Sympathiser’. The episode occurred at Nightingale’s beerhouse on 6 December. At 6.30 one evening, PC Roberts: went into Thomas Nightingale’s in Rawlinson-street, Michael Langan was there, and said to me—yes you bloody thing, there might be plenty of people shot or robbed in the street while you are here, I shall shoot some of you constables some time. You hung those Fenians at Manchester did you?56

PC Roberts then added: ‘I asked him what I had to do with that, and said to the landlady she had better put him out, which she did. He then struck me again. I had to get two men to take him up.’57 One magistrate, Revd Graham, then asked the constable why he initially arrested the defendant; another asked if Langan had struck out before being arrested. At this point PC Roberts merely repeated his evidence. The court then heard how the defendant was alleged to have struck the policeman three times. Langan conducted his own defence and questioned Roberts extensively. Such lengthy representations on behalf of the defendants at Barrow magistrates were not a regular occurrence. Revd Graham asked Langan if he had spoken of Fenianism and he claimed not to know. After some of the evidence was reiterated and a further bout of questioning, the bench found Langan guilty and fined him one pound. During the following month the Barrow Times issued a supplement, reporting in detail and under a banner headline the ‘LATE ATROCIOUS OUTRAGE BY FENIANS AT THE HOUSE OF DETENTION, CLERKENWELL’.58 The article also made references to a host of alleged Fenian landings in Britain, the nearest one being at Morecambe. Several months later, the Barrow Advertiser carried a story concerning the ‘Capture of a Supposed Fenian at Keswick’, during the March following the Clerkenwell bombing. The man in question was a 25-year-old called William Perry, alias Jackson and Rutherford, whom police apprehended for vagrancy only to find he was armed with a revolver, shot, a full powder flask and a bullet mould. Before Keswick Magistrates’ Court, Perry gave conflicting evidence: when first questioned he said he had recently returned from America, having obtained the pistol in Boston; later, he claimed to be a native of Northumberland who acquired the gun from an Irishman. The magistrates took a dim view of his varying testimony and ordered him to forfeit his possessions. In addition, they imposed a tough sentence of one month’s imprisonment.59 In west Cumberland the political climate during the later 1860s


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was altogether more heated. Whitehaven’s close trade connections with Dublin aroused the fear that Irish Fenians might use the port as a staging post for more terrorist activities in England, or that the port itself might be singled out for some form of attack. The presence of a substantially Irish Catholic population in Cleator also exacerbated these fears, while Carlisle too contained a wellestablished Irish settlement. In March 1867, as if to enforce broader fears, the Whitehaven News carried a story about a ‘Contemplated Fenian Descent on Carlisle’, which claimed a boy had found a letter containing a threat to attack the castle. ‘Having failed at Chester’, the author attested, ‘the Fenians (or some hoaxer in their name) have turned their eyes upon the stock of arms at Carlisle castle.’60 Public confessions of support for the Fenian movement were not made any more frequently in the Whitehaven and Cleator districts than they were in south Furness. However, the alleged Fenian sympathies of some Irishmen hauled before magistrates cannot have tempered the situation. In January 1867 one such man, John Patterson, dubbed the ‘Harrington Fenian’, was brought before Cumberland Quarter Sessions charged with stealing four heifers of £40 in value. Patterson, a 33 year-old labourer, had ‘attracted much attention on his route from Harrington to Kinieside, by the spear or pike which he carried over his shoulder’.61 When asked about the weapon, Patterson reportedly said he was going to Ireland to fight with it. He was found guilty of theft and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. ‘A Bold ‘‘Fenian’’ at Cleator Moor’ was a similar character. It seems that on the night of Saturday 23 November 1867 John Summers was found by PC Little to be drunk and disorderly and ‘causing a great disturbance on Cleator Moor’. The Whitehaven News reported that Summers ‘said he was a ‘‘Fenian’’ and would fight any Englishman in the place, or the police either’. The defendant admitted being drunk but claimed not to remember anything about the night.62 West Cumbrian concerns over the Fenian threat were intensified in March 1867 by more serious news when it was revealed that Captain John McCafferty, the famed Fenian organiser, had been sighted in Cleator before fleeing for Dublin on board a Whitehaven collier boat. McCafferty, an American Confederate officer during the Civil War, had been in charge of the abortive Chester castle raid earlier in the same month.63 In the aftermath of the Chester

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debacle, Whitehaven police were warned to look out for Fenians who it was feared might try to flee to Ireland on one of the numerous coal ships that embarked for Dublin.64 Superintendent Little spotted what he thought were two suspicious characters boarding a Whitehaven collier, the New Draper, and alerted the Dublin authorities. On 23 February 1867, when the craft approached the harbour the men were seen to disembark to a smaller vessel.65 The police moved in and arrested the two who gave the names William Jackman and John Phillips. The Whitehaven News, in triumphant mood, commented: ‘As the event has proved, Mr. Little was quite right in his surmise as to the character of the men. It has been ascertained that one of them is Captain McCafferty, a well-known Fenian leader, who had the management of the recent raid upon Chester.’66 The press also revealed that McCafferty’s accomplice was John Flood, a Dublin journalist. McCafferty was sentenced to be executed on 12 June 1867, although he was eventually reprieved and imprisoned.67 Meanwhile, a good deal of local excitement developed over this affair: after all, the people of Whitehaven had played a part in the apprehension of a notorious public figure. In March 1867, for example, a rumour emerged that McCafferty had visited the vicinity before and, since his apprehension, fears of a local Fenian uprising began to circulate.68 One paper claimed, ‘when McCafferty was here [in Whitehaven] he paid a flying visit to Cleator Moor and it is stated that since his arrest considerable sums of money have been subscribed amongst the Irish population there, and transmitted to the Sister Isle’.69 Although it was considered unlikely the local Irish populace was sending money to the Fenians in Ireland, the following warning was issued: ‘we hope that our Irish friends in this neighbourhood will see the necessity of holding themselves aloof from ‘‘the brotherhood’’, and remain loyally and peaceably disposed as they have hitherto done’.70 Local magistrates and police were willing to take no chances, and deemed it necessary to enlist a large body of special constables, even though the press was arguing that the ‘Fenian emeute’ was over. The authorities were of the opinion that something was going to happen on the following Sunday, St Patrick’s Day, and, between ten and two o’clock on Friday 16 March 1867, in a display of loyalty, ‘Several Irishmen were present when the oath was administered’ to dozens of newlyenrolled special constables. At the same time, there was a private


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mustering of Volunteers, and munitions held in the local barracks were conveyed elsewhere for safe-keeping. ‘The precautions that have been taken are doubtless prudent’, stated one Whitehaven editor, ‘but we can only hope that they will prove unnecessary.’71 In all, Whitehaven magistrates swore in 400 special constables during the first couple of weeks of March 1867. Moreover, in the following December temperatures were still high, and the authorities enlisted 1,000 specials because the oaths made in the previous March had lapsed.72 Meanwhile, in Ulverston it was reported that ammunition held in the local drill room had been removed to a ‘place of safety’, while demands were made that the police chief, Captain Kennedy, should distribute arms to former members of the corps, ‘who would no doubt know how to use them’.73 The Fenians continued to make the news during the late 1860s, but their impact was never as great as during 1867 and 1868.

III In the 1830s, the Irish of Whitehaven had fostered a Ribbon organisation of which little is known; during the 1860s, however, the migrants of west Cumbria seem to have remained aloof from the Fenian movement.74 The region nurtured no Michael Davitt, and the panic of native opinion during the heady year of 1867 was met by the Irish, with one or two exceptions, with a wall of dignified silence. The 1870s, however, were marked by a much heavier imprint of Irish-Catholic identity, as was attested by the emergence of local Home Rule organisations. This development reflected broader developments, not only in Westminster and Dublin, but also in Irish centres like Liverpool, Glasgow and Tyneside. Under Isaac Butt and later Charles Stewart Parnell, in the 1870s, the position of the Irish Home Rule party was greatly strengthened. In some ways the Irish comprised the first modern British party, developing a strong party machine, with Parnell exercising strong personal control over matters of party discipline. However, the real basis of Irish parliamentary strength lay outside Westminster. In Ireland, the land question captured the hearts and minds of the peasantry, and this popular support was strengthened when in 1879 Parnell harnessed Davitt and Devoy’s Land League to his own constitutional cause. The Irish in America, moreover, through their

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organisation, Clan Na Gael, provided key financial support for these Home Rule campaigns. The years between Fenianism and the demise of Parnell were important ones in shaping the nature of Irish politics: at this time, the parliamentary party was well-disciplined and under strong leadership, and the reform acts of 1867 and 1884 enfranchised significant numbers of Irishmen, giving them a political importance hitherto absent. Mass emigration created the notion of an international community, a Diaspora whose strength, while amorphous and distant, was also very real; and, in Britain, the Irish ‘community was still to a . . . substantial degree one which had been born in Ireland’,75 and was seen by politicians, Irish and English, to be one of considerable potential political clout. In 1878 Parnell believed that, with proper management, the Irish in Britain ‘could hold the balance of power between the two great political parties in Great Britain’. Yet twelve years later, he lamented: ‘it is undoubtedly true that a very large proportion of our strength in this country is wasted and lost’, and in all the years of Home Rule campaigning only one Irish nationalist MP was returned in a British constituency: T. P. O’Connor, in Liverpool’s Scotland division, a seat he held from 1885 until 1929.76 In Cumbria, the history of Irish nationalist organisation is like the wider national dimension: a story of fits and starts, blunted aspirations and little success. During the 1870s the Cumbrian Irish began to organise under the national banner. The path to common expression, however, did not always run smooth: indigenous opposition to Home Rule was widespread, while efforts to marginalise these demands were prevalent. For example, in July 1874, following the comprehensive defeat of one Home Rule motion, the Barrow Vulcan condemned the notion of self-government for Ireland.77 ‘Irishmen’, the paper propounded, ‘like Englishmen and Scotchmen ought to be proud of the honour of sending their full complement of Members to the first representative assembly’: They have Home Rule in Australia and in all the minor colonies. They even have Home Rule in the Isle of Man. Then why not Home Rule for Ireland? Simply because we wish the Emerald Isle to retain the honour of being an integral part of the United Kingdom as distinguished from Colonial Britain.78

This comment was an ironic rebuke for the Irish, an attempt to denigrate the actual political fact of Home Rule, and to make the


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Irish believe that, in being a part of Britain, they were in a position to be envied. Richardson’s outburst also displayed the characteristic self-satisfaction with which Englishmen viewed their country’s role in the world. Exactly when the rapidly increasing Irish communities of Cumbria first formed a political body is not known. The date was probably some time in 1873, for this is when the Irish in most substantial towns were organising around the Home Rule cause.79 In Barrow, the press first made mention of any such development in August 1874, when the Barrow branch of the Home Rule Association (HRA) met in the Town Hall to be addressed by the MP James O’Connor Power.80 This meeting was attended by an audience not entirely comprised of Home Rule supporters. The chairman, Mr J. Lambert, stated that he was not a convert but ‘trusted that he would that night receive some instruction from the gentleman who was about to address them’. In fact, Lambert’s opposition to rising rents and squalid living conditions on Barrow Island at this time was much more significant than his Home Rule allegiances, suggesting a more integrated and practical approach to Irish and British political issues.81 Others, of course, were keener Home Rule supporters, and vehemently opposed the jaundiced views of the press. In August 1874, the Barrow Vulcan contained a letter which challenged the anti-Home Rule stance adopted by the editor—a correspondence that sparked off a typical series of exchanges between the Home Rule and Unionist camps, with the latter marshalled gallantly by Richardson himself. The author, ‘An Irishman’, complained that the case against Home Rule was weak and unfair, especially as the proponents of self-government for Ireland were putting their case in a proper constitutional manner. The writer added: ‘If all the English and Scotch would leave Ireland, Irishmen would have little cause to come [to Britain] and ask any favour, or earn their bread here’.82 Richardson’s return was sharp, simultaneously lambasting the ‘Irishman’, Home Rule and the Irish population of England generally: Ireland for the Irish! England for the Irish! Barrow for the Irish! Anything else for the Irish they think proper to ask for! Such is the tone of a letter signed by ‘An Irishman’, and which appears in another column. The Irish certainly are dear to us, as witness our gaols or workhouses, and if the care exhibited as to their welfare is a proof of the love borne to that

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Culture, Conflict and Migration section which parades occasionally in green and crape, witness the numerous detachments of police and military who wait upon them constantly.83

Richardson also offered the nationalists this rebuke: ‘O tempora! O mores! Paddy! Your cause is a miserably weak one if it will not bear investigation and questioning.’84 Despite the bad press, Irish political organisation in Barrow continued to prosper. In March 1875, the HRA took control of St Patrick’s Day festivities in Barrow, with a well-attended ‘ball and concert’ in the Town Hall.85 This was something of a departure for the Irish. In the space of ten years the community had gone from drunken, and sometimes riotous, celebrations of their patron saint to altogether more sober pastimes. This was not to last. Even diligent organisation by the HRA could not prevent the occasional and farcical degeneration of Irish gatherings such as the drunken and violent behaviour on St Patrick’s Day 1876 that were relayed to magistrates during a hearing against a publican, William Knowles.86 The Home Rule ball got off to a fine start, with alcohol being consumed liberally, but after eleven the mood in the hall changed with an invasion of gatecrashers. Knowles twice appealed to the police, but Superintendent Barker delayed their involvement until after midnight. Mr Fell, the chairman of the bench, asked the superintendent what had been going on that night and, as Barker answered: ‘It was a Home Rule meeting’, the gallery erupted with laughter. When asked for his assessment, the Town Hall Keeper and Market Inspector asserted that proceedings were conducted ‘very badly’. For the defence of Knowles, Mr Jackson said that his client was no more responsible for the events at the Town Hall than was a booth holder at a racecourse to blame for drunkenness at the track. The debacle, the court heard, continued in the streets: two women were seen lying down in a drunken stupor, while one toper lost his footing and fell down the stairs. Barker said that several were incarcerated to sleep it off. In the end Knowles was found guilty and fined five pounds with his licence endorsed. Jackson asserted that the punishment was too severe and he and his client took the matter to an unsuccessful appeal.87 Knowles was unlucky, being the first outside tender to supply alcohol to the Home Rulers for such an occasion. Previously they had supplied such beverages themselves, in contravention of the law. During the same hearing the pianist at the ball, William Hinch, was summoned for assault. It


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was alleged he attacked the band leader, Sibbert Price, because the latter refused to pay him. Price said Hinch drank instead of playing. The magistrates rebuked Hinch for taking the law into his own hands, fining him 1s. One of the organisers, James MacKay, blamed the low entrance fee for the disturbance. At previous events, the Home Rulers had charged 2s 6d, whereas in 1876 this had been reduced to 1s 6d. The chairman of the bench expressed his incredulity at the affair in pointed words which earned a stern reprimand later. He asserted that ‘St Patrick was a most respectable saint’ and ‘I don’t see why they should carry on like that on his day’.88 This remark was met with mirth in the courtroom. Carruthers, the editor of Barrow’s temperance organ, expressed familiar anger and exasperation at the Home Rulers: It was not my pleasure to be present at the Home Rule Ball in the Town Hall, on the evening of St Patrick’s Day, but according to evidence given at the police-court on Monday last, in Mr Knowles’ case, the ball was altogether ‘illigant’ [sic]. The programme announced that singing would take place at intervals by way of variation, but from the evidence of inspector Barlow, superintendent Barker, and others, it would seem that the greatest variation indulged in by the Home Rule admirers of St Patrick (who by-the-by was a most peaceable saint) was the free-fighting which converted the Town-Hall into a thorough Donnybrook fair.

He also offered sombre words for the future of such events: The ball or whatever it was was certainly a most disgraceful gathering and I fancy the authorities will be rather reluctant to grant the use of the hall for another Home Rule Ball, unless the ‘Rulers’ confine themselves to such mild beverages as tea and coffee for refreshment.89

This incident served to confirm the suspicions already held by many opponents of Home Rule. The HRA officials for their part were understandably offended by adverse reactions. While most of the official celebrants were well-behaved, the gatecrashers who indulged in fighting and general ribaldry might not even have been Irish, and certainly were not serious Home Rule supporters. At a subsequent meeting of the HRA, held at the Christadelphian Meeting Rooms, Cavendish Street, the chairman, Mr Wray, proposed a motion that was seconded and carried unanimously: That this branch expresses its regret at the insidious remarks of a gentleman in the position of Mr. Alderman Fell at the magistrates court, Barrow,

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Culture, Conflict and Migration on the character of the Irishmen of this town, and condemn the manner in which that gentleman held them up in public contempt.90

Two years later there were signs that the Barrow HRA was back on a steady course when, in March 1878, the Town Hall was again the venue for the honouring of St Patrick. This time the Barrow Irish had with them Charles Stewart Parnell, MP for Westmeath and rising star of the Home Rule movement. The meeting, chaired by Dr Commins of Liverpool, proved to be a great success; it was well attended and colourfully adorned with banners and flags, eulogising ‘the names of the leaders of the various political movements which from time to time have been made by Irishmen’.91 Parnell’s speech touched on most of the Irish issues of the day— land, imperialism and the Fenian prisoners—and he shared with his Barrow devotees many opinions on the course of politics at the time. Parnell praised the remaining Irish political prisoners, claiming that the work of men like ‘McCarthy, Donovan Rossa, and Davitt’ had forced Gladstone into the disestablishment of the Irish church. The Fenian prisoners were, in fact, a focus for attention during the evening’s proceedings. Following the keynote speech, a motion was moved which said: ‘Be it resolved, that this meeting regards with extreme dissatisfaction the continued incarceration of the Irish political prisoners’. Mr McGough proposed a vote of thanks to Parnell, and ‘in doing so lauded that gentleman for his exertions to restore a parliament to Ireland’. Parnell concluded he had little doubt that the political prisoners would soon be freed. The crowd thoroughly enjoyed the event and ended the gathering ‘standing and waiving [sic] their hats’.92 The early years of Irish organisation in South Furness were not an unqualified success. Attempts to invest Irish Catholics with a sense of purpose, if not crushed, were severely curtailed by the drunkenness of some fellow countrymen and the zealous opposition and unionist sentiments of their opponents, Orangemen and Tory dignitaries alike. The clearest implication of constant, gnawing enmity was the marginalisation of Home Rule: an experience that was doubtless shared around Britain, as it was elsewhere in west Cumbria. In Whitehaven and Cleator Moor the press only fitfully reported political developments among the Irish nationalists, and it seems the Orange unionist power base, which Pelling observed in Edwardian Whitehaven, was also active during this earlier time.93


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Though the Home Rule movement did penetrate the depths of west Cumberland, the activities of the local Orangemen far outweighed these efforts. If anything, the Barrow Irish seemed to have maintained their various nationalist groups with more success than in Whitehaven, where the optimism and growth of the early 1870s soon succumbed to apathy and atrophy. In 1875, new branches of the Home Rule Federation were announced in Bootle and Whitehaven; yet, in 1878, as the Barrow nationalists welcomed Parnell, the Whitehaven branch experienced difficulty reviving the interest of even a small band of local Irishmen, informing the nationalist press that ‘keeping up the committee meetings &c., has been found too irksom [sic]’. However, the correspondent remarked, ‘The members . . . are prepared to act together when necessary’.94 The mood of the Whitehaven Irishmen matched that of the movement generally. In May 1879, the executive of the Home Rule Federation announced that the levy ‘had fallen off to almost nothing’ with debts mounting. ‘Irishmen’, said the Nation, ‘need to show the zeal of advocates of the permissive bills, franchise and land bills, woman’s rights, &c. Yet do they?’95 Although this final question is correctly answered in the negative, the political torpor of early 1879 was a temporary affliction. The Nation’s shaming tactic certainly worked, as subsequent cash donations allowed most debts to be cleared.96 Events, too, conspired in favour of the Irish nationalist movement. The year 1879 marked the abrupt end to a period of post-Famine prosperity in Irish agriculture, with poor harvests, economic distress and political activity conflated in the formation of Davitt and Devoy’s Land League. This organisation completely eclipsed the Home Rule Federation and ushered in a period of frantic local organisation among Britain’s Irish Catholics. Events quickened in 1881 and 1882, with an upsurge in agrarian violence and a revival of the spectre of coercion—a measure to which British governments recoursed time and again in the nineteenth century. This period witnessed a popular mobilisation never before seen across the Irish diaspora, although the triumphal mood following the release of Fenian prisoners evaporated with the arrest of Parnell in late 1881 and his imprisonment in Kilmainham jail. In addition, a salutary lesson to all Home Rulers, from Butt to Redmond, was captured by one item in the Nation in January 1880, which stated over half of the donations to the Land League cause came from America. For a

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time, however, the early 1880s seemed to usher in a new vibrancy and urgency to Britain’s Irish community. In Newcastle, Joseph Cowen’s powerful assault on behalf of Home Rule, coupled with the city’s long radical traditions, created a powerful regional centre of sympathy in which there were Irish successes. Despite the Irish leadership’s ban on local political involvement, for example, in the 1880s Bernard M’Anulty, Newcastle’s most celebrated Irishman, became the first nationalist city councillor.97 The process of canvassing, which had seen O’Connor Power and Parnell visit Barrow in the 1870s, was stepped up considerably during Gladstone’s second ministry with numerous tours and lectures by Irish parliamentary members. At the same time, celebrations of Irish nationality became increasingly prominent, and the involvement of the church seemed to grow. In Barrow, for example, the habit of holding concert balls grew apace in the 1880s and began to attract patronage other than from the Irish.98 In 1881, St Patrick’s Day was celebrated by two hundred people sitting down to tea in the Town Hall, although the ball which followed ‘was much more largely attended’.99 In the following year a similar event was organised under the ‘guiding spirit’ of Fr Caffrey of St Mary’s.100 In 1883, St Patrick’s Night was remembered with a ‘Grand Irish Ballad Concert’.101 In the 1880s, developments in organised nationalism were of a scale wholly absent in the 1870s. In January 1881, for instance, the Whitehaven News reported a meeting in the town of the National Land League of Great Britain that held fortnightly meetings in the Foresters’ Hall, Fox Lane.102 In the same year, the St Patrick’s celebrations in Cleator, organised by Fr Burchall, were held in the St Patrick’s School rooms, with the proceeds promised to teaching staff at the school.103 In Barrow, the HRA was wound up and replaced in March 1882 with the ‘Cowen’ branch of the Land League—a sure tribute to Newcastle radicalism. The first official meeting of this branch was attended by thirty members who raised £13 14s 9d in the quarter from 4 December 1881, £9 of which was forwarded to the central executive of the Land League. The membership included Edward M’Gough, who had been involved in the Home Rule Federation and had proposed the vote of thanks for Parnell in 1878. M’Gough was a local priest, as was one of the branch’s other founders, F. J. O’Neill.104 Just as Irish organisation in Newcastle owed much to the personality of Bernard M’Anulty,


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so the Barrow nationalists were always most prominent with priests at the helm to provide tight organisation and an air of respectability. In the month after the Barrow branch announced itself to the world, so too did a number of others, up and down the region. First, the Carlisle J. E. Redmond branch emerged; then, in May, the Cleator Moor Irish formed the F. H. O’Donnell branch. Later in the year, the Parnell and Davitt branch came into being at Cleator Moor, as did yet another in Workington.105 Barrow’s nationalist community was adversely affected in May 1882 by the murder of the Irish Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, son of the seventh Duke of Devonshire, upon whose soil so many Barrovians lived, in whose shipyard many worked and in whose generously supported churches so many of them worshipped. In Barrow, a war of words raged all summer between Orange and Green communities. While memorials were issued by all sections of the community, Irish priests were keen to defend their flocks. Pointedly, the Barrow Cowen branch was one of the very few branches of the Land League not to use the pages of the Nation to deplore the Phoenix Park episode. While it remained quiet on the issue, thirty or so other branches were contrite. The members in Derby announced: ‘We heartily desire to express our horror and detestation of the crime’, and those in Carlisle unanimously adopted a resolution ‘condemning the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr Burke’.106 In the autumn of 1882, local Home Rulers entered a new phase, with Charles Duffy taking the chair in Barrow. Duffy, an active and thoughtful nationalist, had achieved local fame in the summer months of 1882 with his letters to the local press, stoutly defending his co-religionists from the opprobrium engulfing debates over the Phoenix Park Murders.107 Reports of Cumbrian activities littered the pages of the Nation throughout 1882, but, in 1883, their exertions began to fade again. The local press did not report Home Rule meetings with any regularity, and the Dublin nationalist journals relied for information upon members themselves. All in all, local promotion of the nationalist cause was an isolated business and, while visits from bigwigs usually promoted interest, negative reactions and distance from the centre of events, out-migrations and the apathy of so many Irish Catholics meant that, in Cumbria at least, few of the numerous nationalist organisations up to 1883 lasted much more than twelve months. One exception was the Parnell-Davitt branch of Cleator

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Moor which continued to meet, but failed to make a splash in the press in 1883 and 1884—except at the time of the large-scale riot in the town in July 1884, which is examined in the final chapter.108 Unlike the formal structures of Home Rule, the underpinning idea of nationalism—the consciousness of self-determination—continued to be incubated by the Irish in Cumbria, ready to reappear at the first sign of renewed optimism. Thus, early in 1885, with political problems mounting for Gladstone, new life seems to have been breathed into activities in Cleator Moor, where the Parnell-Davitt branch of the Irish National League (INL) reported regular meetings.109 Their March AGM was attended by four office holders and a committee of twelve.110 The Cleator nationalists were joined by a number of other Cumbrian branches in the late summer of 1885. With a general election looming, Parnell’s vying between Liberals and Conservatives added a certain zest to Irish politics, and in mid-August the Liverpool nationalist leader, John Denvir, made his way to Barrow to help reinvigorate the local movement. The trip resulted in the formation of an INL branch, of whom only Samuel M’Donough seems to have survived from the list of officers running the Cowen branch of the Land League three years earlier.111 This time, however, the local branches received noticeably more direction from the centre, and events themselves imbued participants with a renewed optimism. The Reform Act, for example, fostered a belief that Irishmen might significantly influence the outcome of the general election, leading T. P O’Connor, John Denvir and other prominent nationalists to stress repeatedly the importance of registration. In August 1885, the Cleator Moor Irish claimed things were going well in this regard; in September, Barrow nationalists held two meetings in quick succession in the local Temperance Hall.112 In all, 350 people attended the meeting and thirty enrolled.113 A week later, the Workington Irish formed the J. F. Small branch, collecting £1 7s for membership cards. In October, further recruits joined the various branches. Twenty joined the Barrow branch alone, and invitations to visit were sent out to T. M. Healy and others.114 An upward trend in recruitment continued throughout the autumn, and early in November 1885 the Millom Irishmen, who had no branch of their own, made a donation of £1 10s to their Cleator brethren.115 On 12 November 1885, T. P. O’Connor himself visited the now buoyant Irish nationalists of Barrow, though in a curious turn of events he nearly missed the


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meeting. Having been expected on the 7.55pm train, only his luggage turned up. As the forlorn chairman, Bernard Hughes, rose to address the packed meeting he was handed a telegram from O’Connor which carried a simple, perhaps prophetic, message: ‘Passed Barrow and am coming back’. There were loud cheers and the instantly rejuvenated Hughes offered to warm up the audience with an address on ‘Irish affairs’.116 During 1886, momentum was maintained. In the middle of January, the Whitehaven Irish formed a branch in part of the borough ‘where the Irish hold the balance of power’ with an appeal that ‘All true Irishmen are cordially invited to co-operate in the patriotic wish’.117 Over the next few weeks, the Cleator Moor organisation announced the enlistment of 56 new members, and D. J. Sweeney observed that theirs ‘very shortly . . . might be one of the best branches in the North of England’. Meanwhile, the Workington Irish notched a more modest success, recruiting ten further members.118 In June 1886, Patrick Murphy of Liverpool addressed the Barrow Irishmen on the ‘current political situation’, eliciting ‘loud groans and hisses’ with allusion to W. S. Caine, the town’s Liberal MP who held unionist sympathies. The meetings of the Barrow Irish nationalists at this time seem to have attracted a ‘large presence of ladies [and] a sprinkling of Englishmen’, perhaps as a measure of the growing acceptability of the Home Rule issue in certain circles.119 Throughout 1885 and 1886, the Irish nationalists of Britain, under T. P. O’Connor, continued to plug away at the electoral issues, cajoling Irishmen to register, encouraging them to vote Conservative in 1885, thence back to Liberal in 1886. Yet no other constituency could match Liverpool Scotland, where T. P. O’Connor won on a nationalist ticket; and, in explaining poor performances elsewhere in Britain, Alan O’Day stresses the contemporary exaggeration of the Irish vote, claiming that only in the constituencies of Manchester South West, Leeds East and Cockermouth might the Irish have exerted a critical electoral influence.120 Similarly, others have stressed the effects of ‘franchise factor’ which equated small electorates in many towns with sizeable unskilled and working-class Catholic populations.121 In Barrow, things Irish and national were played out in the background, overshadowed by the petty electoral squabbles of the two candidates, James Ramsden and Henry Schneider, lionised entrepreneurs whose part in the growth of Barrow was, by 1880,

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legend itself. In 1885, Ramsden ran for the Liberals, withdrawing at the last minute to be replaced by David Duncan who defeated Schneider’s Conservative candidacy. Duncan was unseated under tough new corrupt practices legislation, and, in the by-election that followed, W. S. Caine won for the Liberals.122 In the general election in the same year, Caine strengthened both his absolute vote and his majority when he stood on a unionist ticket. However, a true measure of the Irish Catholic vote was the defeat of a Home Rule candidate, Martin Edmunds, in the 1886 by-election. Edmunds must have cut a forlorn figure with his paltry return of fifteen votes. This was perhaps five per cent of the average attendance at Irish National League meetings during the height of the Home Rule crisis. Elsewhere in Cumbria, the redistribution of 1885 saw Cockermouth merged with Workington and Maryport, creating a Liberal-Home Rule bloc which was sufficient to see home Wilfrid Lawson in 1886. Whitehaven, long in the pockets of the Lowthers, went uncontested between 1832 and 1868, and from 1865 to his death in 1891, no candidate, Liberal or otherwise, could unseat G. F. Cavendish-Bentinck, nephew of Lord Lonsdale. Meanwhile, from 1885 Carlisle continued to elect Liberals, ‘Gladstonian or otherwise’, Home Rulers or not.123

IV The Irish priest, it has been argued, had an important social role in the northern industrial parish. He ‘was the only authority to whom the Irish labourers showed any deference’ because he shared their poverty, providing both a link with the old world and a strong symbol of Irishness.124 Lees and Lowe also stressed this sociocultural dimension of the Irish church, likening the growth of new religious networks to a broad-based reforging of Catholic identity in the new communities of Britain.125 Connolly has, though, challenged this emphasis upon the ‘social’, purporting instead that ‘Catholicism was not primarily or simply an agent of modernization, or worse, urbanization, or perhaps even christianization; but will possibly be better understood as gathering its momentum as a holy enterprise’.126 Yet, though we might expect to find respect for the religious aspect of the clerical office, it is the social role that is most impressive. Priests lived among their parishioners and shared


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their frugal way of life, relying upon the same poor co-religionists for contributions to live and work. In the most celebrated cases of commitment, priests risked disease at times of epidemic, with a number—like Fr Billington who died of typhus in York in 1847— paying the ultimate price.127 Examples of the power of this mutual devotion were found by Henry Mayhew in his tours of early Victorian London, and the close involvement of priests and people remained a feature of Manchester life fifty years later, where the aphorism ‘ ‘‘a house-going priest makes a church-going people’’ . . . was taken very seriously’. Typically, Catholics who missed mass in Whitehaven were guaranteed a visit from the priest on the following Tuesday.128 More than any other issue, nationalism made for uneasy relationships between the Church and the people. For this reason, politics and priests became somewhat intertwined in the Victorian years. In both Ireland and Britain the church hierarchy was opposed to the tenets of Irish nationalism and ‘was concerned about the secular and radical ethos of Home Rulers’.129 Yet in the parish, priests did not always share this official stance and it was not uncommon for priests to become embroiled in local nationalist organisations, in Barrow or elsewhere. At various times they risked the wrath of their church for political affiliation; yet, for Orangemen, religion and politics, church and state, were synonymous in a way that Catholicism and nationalism were not. The affinity which emerged in the mid-Victorian period between Irish priests and migrant Catholics was certainly a change from earlier in the century when English priests were at the helm. In Whitehaven, in 1833, for example, the English Catholic priest, Gregory Holden, mediated in a miners’ dispute, helping to conclude the strike as a favour to the employers. For his pains, Holden was granted a tract of land to build a new chapel.130 In Cleator Moor, from 1853 until 1859, the tenure of the same ‘quiet, retiring, devoted’ English priest was notable for the way he subsumed Catholic and Irish interests into those of a wider community by his smooth handling of the ‘Papal Aggression’. Yet, as nationally, the local scene also shifted from this point. Holden’s successor, Fr Williams, was altogether different. He was one of the new breed of priests who ‘delighted in battles with Protestants and . . . became a well-known defender of the Irish Catholics against the strong Orange community’, while Fr Ward,

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who followed Williams, began what was to be a lengthy priestly association with local politics, chairing the local school board and the urban district council in the 1880s and 1890s.131 In Barrow patterns were similar, with the most notable advances marked by the arrival of Irish clerics. As John Burgess asserts: While English priests like John Bilsborrow and James Parkinson were in charge [of St Mary’s] there was relatively little controversy about the Irish and the Catholic community, but the appointment of Irish priests brought into play the public role of men such as Edward Caffery [sic] and William Doyle who seem to have been involved in political activity including school boards and elections for councillors and the constituency.132

Such priests as these never progressed into the ranks of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, in sharp contrast to the fortunes of Bilsborrow, the scion of an old Fylde Catholic family, who went on to become Bishop of Salford from 1892 to 1903.133 Irish priests fared better in the localities—at least with their Irish flock—and, until the arrival of these compatriot priests, the Irish had good reason to see the church in purely devotional terms. In Barrow, as in Scotland and elsewhere, there is little evidence of co-operation between the church and the local Home Rule Association, until Irish priests, like Caffrey, achieved prominence from the late 1870s. After Caffrey arrived, St Patrick’s Day celebrations were often married to the Home Rule cause—a departure from earlier occasions when the Irish were encouraged by priests to maintain their Irishness without necessarily referring to politics. In the mid-1870s, the political affiliations of local Irishmen and their priests burst into life, when Fr O’Mally of Millom and Fr Laverty of Barrow were reported to their superiors. One accuser, W. Gordon, said of O’Mally: ‘I have never met him but from what I learn he is very popular with the Barrow Home Rule Party’; and another, John W. Bewick, claimed these affiliations made the same priest ‘an awkward man to deal with’.134 In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Fr O’Neill chaired the Barrow Land League. This pattern of patronage continued in following years, especially in the person of Fr Caffrey, one of the town’s most active priests, who died in 1899. As a consequence of these tensions between politics and nationalism, Irishmen and their church could drift, or become separated: a fact which is illustrated in 1903, when two Barrow priests were moved from the town after the Bishop of Liverpool heard they were


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dabbling in nationalist politics. The events of this year are worthy of examination, as they provide vital insights into the nature of Catholic relations: not only between priests and people, politics and religion, but also between parish—at its lowest level—and diocese. In March 1903, the Irish Catholics of St Mary’s diocese in Barrow were shocked and angered when two of their priests, Frs Barry and Motherway, were moved from the parish by the Bishop of Liverpool, Dr Whiteside, on the charge that they had become over-involved with local political developments. Barry was additionally admonished for his alleged displays of anti-Englishness. The bishop was upbraided as insensitive and his actions undermined the replacement priest, Fr Miller. These actions also galvanised Irish Catholics’ opposition, which was demonstrated through a number of outlets. The Barrow branch of the United Irish League became involved, and a local Irish Catholic Association (ICA) was inaugurated to fight for reinstatement. Additionally, local Irish parents began to withdraw their children from the local Catholic schools.135 The press was informed and the central Irish national party lent their support, with O’Connor Power visiting the parish. At the same time, an articulate and trenchant war of words was waged between parishioners and hierarchy and repeated invitations were issued so that the priests might visit the town.136 When trouble first broke in early February 1903, with Fr Barry’s removal from his post at St Patrick’s church, Irish Catholics very quickly aired their grievances. The secretary to the ICA issued a warning that the Catholics of the town would never be reunited without Barry’s reinstatement. As the bishop remained tight-lipped over this issue, Barry’s supporters sent a copy of the following resolution to Liverpool: ‘That we the Irish Catholics of Barrow will not pay any money for any religious purpose under the present circumstances and also resolve that a general meeting be held on Sunday 9th inst.’.137 Around the same time, Margaret Prosser made a reasoned appeal to the bishop, imploring him not to go on ignoring the Irish Catholics of Barrow. ‘Please my lord do not drive men and women, your Irish parishioners, to what cannot be undone’, adding ominously, ‘It is already known amongst the Protestants that there is strife amongst us.’138 Meanwhile, Barry refused to take his treatment lightly, telling parishioners that the bishop’s actions left him a ‘stained man’. Fr Miller, his authority compromised, bewailed the whole episode: ‘My dear Lord, you

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could scarcely credit the state of things here since the news of Fr Barry’s removal got abroad’.139 Miller told the bishop that his parishioners regularly held meetings, gathered petitions, justifying their lack of support for the mission ‘until the Bishop shall give a reason for the removal of Fr Barry’. Indeed, Barry did not go without a fight, allegedly using his last opportunity in the pulpit to denigrate his replacement, ‘the ‘‘pauper priest’’—taken from the slums of the town’.140 Miller dismissed Barry’s words as ‘Contemptible talk’, but added: ‘it shows you, my Lord, to what length he went and who is responsible for the present attitude towards myself’.141 Miller also accused the layman and prominent local nationalist, John Gallagher, of leading the rebellion, informing Whiteside that the same man was acting as Barry’s agent in organising a large farewell concert which occurred on 17 February at the Town Hall.142 While the pace of events was clearly rapid, exact timing cannot be ascertained. Certainly, Barry was removed in late February, and Motherway soon after, as this undated, unsigned missive ‘from an Irish Catholic who loves faith and fatherland’ attests: Your obedient children are beginning to fear they can never obtain justice from you. My Lord you have given cause for this mistrust, you who set aside Canon Law by removing Fr Barry. Still another step you take in this trying time and Fr Motherway is removed from amongst us.143

These actions, far from being perceived as the exercise of righteous hierarchical control, were lambasted as ‘Another blow aimed at your Irish children’. Tensions between English and Irish Catholics were further exposed in a rhetorical question: ‘But then I suppose you are simply doing your duty. Is it duty my lord or a sample of English Justice[?]’.144 In a final tirade, the writer left Bishop Whiteside in no doubt as to the depth of feeling in Barrow: Of course you can order all the priests from Barrow (a great pity by the way you cannot order the Irish people away also) but then who would build the churches. It is the hard earned money of the Irish people who build them and our Irish priests are made footballs by you.145

Indeed, one of Fr Miller’s first observations on arrival was of the anti-English feeling that the removal of Barry and Motherway had induced. Wild and excited speeches were made, and Miller felt unable to go to Irish Catholic meetings for fear that he might ‘fan the flames already blazing’.146


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Hidden below the surface of this animosity was the belief that the United Irish League was behind the affair, a fact dismissed by one writer, ‘Fairplay’, who asserted that it was only ‘the Irish Catholics who Protest gustily’. Yet one of the main correspondents in these affairs, Charles Rush, took an active part in Irish political organisation at this time. He was forthright in defence of the Barrow priests, and was still around to chair a welcoming committee for John Redmond who visited Barrow on 13 October 1909. Similarly, Gallagher, who was mentioned above, played an active role in denouncing Orange unionism during the Home Rule agitation of 1893.147 Despite the vituperative campaign on behalf of Barry and Motherway, the Irish people of Barrow slowly reconciled themselves to the loss of their priests. The bishop did not relent, and by late 1903 correspondents had turned to the subject of testimonials for the priests. This in itself presented problems, for neither Motherway nor Barry, it seems, wanted the troubles to simmer on. Motherway’s response to one offer was typical: ‘I shall be most happy to accept your kind testimonial when things are settled, but I cannot visit you while the congregation is divided’. And in an attempt to dampen local tempers, he appealed: ‘For God’s sake try to live at peace and do nothing harmful to religion’.148 Even at this stage, in October 1903, Fr Miller seemed to be out on a limb: he opposed any visit by Motherway for fear that the parish would see it as approval for its behaviour. Motherway accepted this line, and sent a telegram to Rush reiterating his refusal to attend any meeting in Barrow, whether to accept a testimonial or to placate the Barrow Irish. However, this did not stop two ‘married ladies’ from St Mary’s from taking a silver chalice and £30 in gold to Motherway’s new berth at Sacred Heart, Chorley.149 Finally the bishop moderated his position and Fr Barry alone was allowed to receive a testimonial.150 These Irish, then, constantly defended their priests, and amidst all the letters and telegrams to Liverpool, they issued a printed appeal, of some 1,000 words or more, which they addressed to all the priests of the diocese of Liverpool. In this publication, the committee of Irish Catholics were at pains to point out two main things: first, that there had been no politically-involved priests in Barrow since the death of Fr Caffrey; and second, that Fr Barry and his ilk had merely used allusions to ‘faith and fatherland’, and had organised social gatherings, in an attempt to stem leakage from the

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church. The parishioners argued that a steady influx of mainly young Irish males from Belfast and other such towns put pressure on traditional Catholic structures—family, household and parish— with the result that many of the new arrivals found themselves drifting in Protestant circles, almost instantaneously pressured to inter-marry and neglect their church. It was argued that Fr Barry’s belief that ‘an Irishman who forgets his nationality surely forgets his faith’ reflected not a deep-seated passion for nationalist politics, but an understanding of Barrovian life.151 Although Barry stood accused of anti-Englishness, his supporters believed his was a moderating voice in a parish which undoubtedly did contain anti-English sentiment. Barry’s was a mediating role, but a public one, and his fate illustrates some of the tensions of intra-Catholic relations and the beleaguered way Irish Catholics viewed their lot. The true importance of this local episode lies in its measurement of a wider Catholic community experience. It shows, for example, how closely linked priests and people were, and indicates something of how the conflation of beliefs, in nation and faith, sometimes courted controversy. This tale also reveals fragmentary evidence of Irish Catholics’ own perceptions of belonging, for they devoted more energy to preserving the priest’s good name than promoting their nation. Irish priests in Barrow, and elsewhere in the Lake Counties, had long been organising balls and concerts which contained more than a whiff of national pride, and it is easy enough to see how seamless nation and faith could be. While this small episode also hints at reasons for the failure of Irish political organisation in Britain, it is true that the general shortcomings of the Irish vote had wider causes. Just as many Irish working men, like their British counterparts, gained the vote in these years, many did not. Rules regarding residency worked against the transient Irish, and it has been shown that workingclass electorates were often smallest where Catholic population was highest. Many Irish through antipathy, fear, indifference or alienation, simply did not use their votes for the nationalist movement. Whatever the reason, it is true that a majority of the Irish in Britain failed to fall in behind the Home Rule cause. In addition, it seems likely that the single issue of pressure for Home Rule suffered because of a failure to address wider issues of concern to ordinary voters.152 The Irish national movement lost an unknown proportion


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of Irish immigrants—a rich tradition from Feargus O’Connor to Pete Curran—who threw in their lot with wider appeals for social legislation, supported the basic tenets of labour representation, and eschewed the perceived sectarianism of Irish political issues. The violence of certain Irish political traditions was also capable of blunting the Home Rule campaign. No doubt, too, fears of extremism deflected part of the potential support for Irish independence. British newspapers daily relayed stories of Irish agrarian outrage, especially around the time of the Land War, providing irrefutable evidence that Irish political culture was far more volatile than British. Within the constitutional wing, even Parnell maintained for his Irish-American audiences what Conor Cruise O’Brien neatly describes as a ‘vague penumbra of revolution’.153 Irish immigrants, then, had reason enough to ignore Ireland’s political causes. It is clear from this chapter that the Irish nationalist mood of the Cumbrian Irish ebbed and flowed, dictated as it was by events in Ireland and Westminster. Although many hundreds of Irish Catholics passed through the ranks of Cumbria’s various nationalist organisations, the movement was not a success, either organisationally or electorally. The Irish who joined these Home Rule branches were a mixture of educated working men and priests, and a few names crop up time and again. Equally, turnover was high, and their meetings seem mundane and prosaic, dominated by selective readings of a romantic view of history and literature. Moreover, Irish Catholics were torn in a way that Orangemen were not; the latter and their religion were united behind the Unionist cause. In addition, the various nationalist campaigns outlined in this chapter were matched grimly, attritionally, by the rejuvenated Orange Order. Perhaps this threat from Orangemen—their violence and their empathy with indigenous Protestants—aided the leakage from the nationalist campaign which Denvir, whose thought opened this chapter, so contemptuously described? The next chapter considers these parallel developments.

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NOTES 1 J. Denvir, The Irish in Britain (London, 1892), p. 446. 2 Ibid., p. 445. 3 For the secret-society tradition, see John Belchem, ‘ ‘‘Freedom and Friendship to Ireland’’: Ribbonism in early nineteenth-century Liverpool’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 39 (1994), pp. 33–56. For the Church’s attitude, see J. H. Treble, ‘The attitude of the Roman Catholic church towards trade unionism in the north of England’, Northern History, Vol. 5 (1970), pp. 93–113 and G. P. Connolly, ‘The Catholic Church and the first Manchester and Salford trade unions in the age of the Industrial Revolution’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 135 (1985), pp. 125–60. 4 R. O’Higgins, ‘The Irish influence in the Chartist movement’, Past and Present, Vol. 20 (1961), pp. 87–88. O’Connell himself claimed that any Chartist discovered in the Catholic Association was refunded his membership dues and ‘his name struck off the list’. O’Connell made this point to ‘a Dublin jury packed with Orangemen’: A. Boyd, The Rise of the Irish Trade Unions (Dublin, 1985), p. 48. 5 Archbishop Paul Cullen, an address to the clergy of Dublin, 1865, in Ireland and the Holy See: A Retrospective v. 1883, Illegal and Seditious Movements in Ireland contrasted with the Principles of the Catholic Church as shown in the Writings of Cardinal Cullen (Rome, 1883), reprinted in James R. Moore (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, 4 vols (Manchester, 1988), III: Sources, pp. 123–25. 6 W. M. Walker, ‘Irish immigrants in Scotland: their priests, politics and parochial life’, Historical Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1972), pp. 649–67. 7 J. D. Marshall and J. K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the MidTwentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change (Manchester, 1981), p. 153. For example, two religious censuses, conducted by the press in November 1881 and December 1902, show Anglican church attendances had dropped from 30 per cent to 20. West Cumberland Times, 20 December 1902, carries details. See also J. Burgess, ‘Roman Catholics and the Cumbrian Religious Censuses’, Recusant History, Vol. 18 (1981), pp. 372–74, who illustrates that, broadly, Catholic attendances held up relatively well. 8 According to Burgess, ‘Roman Catholics’, p. 372: ‘until the 1790s Irish Catholics were rare in Cumbria’. 9 Denvir, Irish in Britain, p. 443. 10 J. Burgess, ‘Roman Catholics and the Cumbrian Religious Censuses’, p. 373. 11 Ibid., p. 371; idem, ‘A religious history of Cumbria, 1780–1920’ (PhD, University of Sheffield, 1984), p. 241. 12 J. Richardson, Furness Past and Present, 2 vols (Preston, 1880), I: p. 305; J. D. Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution (Beckermet, 1981), p. 331. 13 Marshall, Furness, p. 332. 14 See E. Caffrey, ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, 2 parts, in Catholic Almanack of the Diocese of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1890, 1891); also ‘A short account of the parish of St Mary of Furness’, Centenary Celebrations, 1865-1965: to Mark the Anniversary of St Mary of Furness (Barrow. 1965): copy in BPL. 15 R. Samuel, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Irish poor’, in R. Swift


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and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), p. 271, states that such hardship was not uncommon: ‘The establishment of a new [Catholic] mission was liable to provoke in the local community an outburst of Protestant indignation and Mission rooms were difficult to hire. . .’. 16 Before the move in 1865, many Barrow Catholics, it was claimed, ‘resorted for Mass on Sunday at Ulverston’: Caffrey, ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, I, pp. 120–21. 17 Ibid., p. 120. 18 P. Mannex, History and Trade Directory of Barrow-in-Furness and the Whole of North Lonsdale (Preston, 1876), p. 334; Marshall, Furness, pp. 331–32; Barnes, Barrow and District, pp. 121–22. 19 L. H. Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979), p. 164. 20 W. J. Lowe, Irish in Lancashire: The Making of a Mid-Victorian Community (New York, 1991), p. 109. 21 Samuel, ‘An Irish religion’, in idem (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols (London, 1989), II: Minorities and Outsiders, p. 94. 22 J. D. Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution (Beckermet, 1981 ed.), p. 334. 23 Ibid., p. 333; Mannex, Trade Directory, p. 334. 24 Barrow Herald, 7 October 1871; Caffrey, ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, I, pp. 124–25. 25 Caffrey, ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, II, p. 130; J. F. Barnes, Barrow and District (Barrow, 1967), p. 122. Barrow Catholics benefited from the philanthropy of the town’s ruling elite which contrasts with the picture of Wales, painted by Samuel, ‘Roman Catholic Church’, pp. 271–72, where Protestant prejudice led to an unwillingness to sell land for use by Catholic congregations, as well as ‘occasional malicious damage’ being done to Catholic church property. 26 Caffrey, ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, II; Barnes, Barrow and District, p. 130. 27 Caffrey, ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, II, p. 133. 28 Ibid. shows that together the two churches had 3,433 ‘souls’. Of this total, however, the average weekly attendance at Sunday mass was 1,600; and 1,444 took Easter communion. Caffrey compares these figures with 1880 when there were only slightly fewer ‘souls’ (3,419) but a considerably smaller attendance at Sunday mass (1,230) and only 1,155 Easter communicants. 29 Caffrey, ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, II, p. 133. In Barrow the percentage figures for attendance at Sunday Mass in 1880 and 1887 respectively were 36 per cent and 46.6. Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, p. 109, claims that, during the 1830s, around 40 per cent of Irish Catholics were in regular attendance at mass. For attendances in Ireland, estimated at around 40 per cent, see Emmet Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland 1850–75’, American Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 3 (June 1972), pp. 635ff; D. W. Miller, ‘Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1975), pp. 83ff; W. J. Lowe, ‘The Lancashire Irish and the Catholic Church, 1846-1871: the social dimension’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 10 (1976), p. 130. 30 Burgess, ‘Religious history’, pp. 496–98. 31 Ibid., p. 240.

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32 C. Caine, Cleator and Cleator Moor: Past and Present (Kendal, 1916), p. 292. 33 T. Bulmer, History, Topography and Directory of West Cumberland (Preston, 1883), pp. 99, 533; Marshall, ‘Cleator and Cleator Moor’, p. 169. Between 1851 and 1861, the Irish population of Cleator increased from 525 to 1,438, an increase which included sufficient Catholics to fill the new church. 34 Caine, Cleator and Cleator Moor, pp. 237–82; T. Bulmer, History, Topography and Directory of West Cumberland (Preston, 1901), p. 531. This followed Cleator’s creation as a Peel district. See Bulmer, Directory, 1883, p. 97; Kelly’s Directory of Cumberland (London, 1897), p. 533. 35 Caffrey, ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, II, pp. 127–28. 36 Barrow Vulcan, 18 July 1874. 37 There are a number of specialist works on the Fenians. The best study is probably R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin, 1985), which, as the title suggests, places the Fenian movement into the broader context of social and economic change and of growing political disillusionment. Other good studies are: T. W. Moody (ed.), The Fenian Movement (Dublin and Cork, 1968); Leon O’Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma (London, 1971) and Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1858–1924 (Dublin, 1976). Several general histories put the Fenian movement into the wider context of the development of Irish nationalism. See particularly: J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (London, 1981), pp. 357–62; D. G. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London, 2nd ed. 1991), pp. 176–86; R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1989), esp. pp. 390–99; F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (London, 1973), pp. 125–38. 38 Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, p. 177. 39 Ibid., p. 183. 40 In 1864 Archbishop Cullen, and a number of like-minded clergymen, formed the National Association. With proposals for land reform, denominational education and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, the National Association offered nothing to those who desired Irish independence. Despite its efforts to cut off Fenian support, it was unsuccessful: Beckett, Making of Modern Ireland, p. 360. 41 A first-hand account is available in Denvir, Irish in Britain, pp. 176–262. For a chronological examination of Fenian activities in England, see P. Quinlivan and P. Rose, Fenianism in England, 1865–72: A Sense of Insecurity (London, 1982). This book relies mostly upon secondary sources, but nevertheless provides a sound starting point; see also two works by W. J. Lowe, ‘Lancashire Fenianism, 1864– 71’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 226 (1976), pp. 156–85, and Irish in Lancashire, pp. 189–98. 42 Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 393, stresses the Fenians’ awareness of publicity. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, p. 177, says that the idea of Stephens and the Fenians was to ‘tell’ the people, not ‘educate’ them. 43 Lees, Exiles of Erin, p. 232. 44 Denvir, Irish in Britain, p. 182. The author notes groups of Fenians meeting in various places: London, Yorkshire, throughout Lancashire and parts of Cheshire.


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45 The estimate is Stephens’s. There were more members in America and it has been said there were, perhaps, thousands of supporters among the Irish in the British Army: Lyons, Ireland since the Famine, p. 127; Lees supports these figures, Exiles of Erin, p. 232; Foster, however, regards 50,000 as more likely: Modern Ireland, p. 394. There is, of course, a fundamental difference between members and sympathisers. It is even more difficult to guess at the size of the latter than it is the former. A large percentage of the Irish in Britain probably sympathised with the Fenians. 46 For the moderate Irish in America, two events turned them wholly against the Fenians: two attempted invasions of Canada in 1867 and 1870. R. A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848–80 (Manchester, 1979), pp. 100–01. 47 Quinlivan and Rose, Fenianism, p. 33. 48 Despite such displays, ‘Employers at the London docks’, for example, ‘showed a reluctance to take on Irish labour’: A. O’Day, ‘The political organization of the Irish in Britain, 1867–90’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989), pp. 188–89; S. Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England (Buckingham, 1993), pp. 86, 103 states that some Irish were dismissed by English employers during the Fenian bombing campaigns and the troubles of 1916 and 1920–21. 49 D. C. Richter, Riotous Victorians (Athens, Ohio, 1981), p. 20. 50 Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, p. 184; Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, pp. 84–85. 51 Barrow Herald, 16 February 1867. 52 Barrow Times, 16 February 1867. 53 Barrow Herald, 16 March 1867. 54 Ibid., 24 March 1866. 55 Barrow Times, 9 February 1867. 56 Ibid., 14 December 1866. 57 The full incident appeared under the magistrates’ proceedings column of the Barrow Times, 14 December 1866. 58 Supplement in ibid., 10 January 1868. 59 Barrow Advertiser, 9 March 1868. 60 Whitehaven News, 2 March 1867. 61 Ibid., 3 January 1867. 62 Ibid., 30 November 1867. 63 The raid on Chester Castle was to have been executed on Monday 11 February 1867. For a detailed account of how the final attack never happened see Quinlivan and Rose, Fenians in England, pp. 16–32. 64 Whitehaven News, 2 March 1867. 65 Ibid., 25 March 1867; Quinlivan and Rose, Fenians in England, p. 25. 66 Whitehaven News, 2 March 1867. 67 Ibid., 25 May 1867; Quinlivan and Rose, Fenians in England, pp. 25ff; John Flood was about thirty years old and Wexford-born. John Denvir described him as ‘full of the glorious traditions of ’98’: Irish in Britain, p. 182. 68 Whitehaven News, 16 March 1867. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid.

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71 Ibid., 6 March 1867. 72 Ibid., 21 December 1867. 73 Ulverston Advertiser, quoted by the Whitehaven News, 26 December 1867. 74 Whitehaven Ribbonmen are mentioned in passing in Belchem, ‘ ‘‘Freedom and Friendship to Ireland’’, p. 50. 75 O’Day, ‘Political organization’, p. 187. 76 Parnell speeches reported in the Freeman’s Journal, 22 October 1878 and the Nation, 24 May 1890, quoted in O’Day, ‘Political organization’, pp. 183–84. For O’Connor’s extraordinarily long-lived links with the Liverpool Irish, see L. W. Brady’s excellent study: T. P. O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish (London, 1983). 77 Barrow Vulcan, 4 July 1874. The margin of defeat was 458 votes to 67. The votes were cast on Friday 3 July 1874. 78 Ibid. 79 O’Day, ‘Political organization’, p. 193. 80 Barrow Vulcan, 15 August 1874. 81 Barrow Times, 7 August 1874 contains a report of Lambert’s protest meeting over rent rises on Barrow Island. 82 Barrow Vulcan, 15 August 1874. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Barrow Herald, 20 March 1875. 86 The incidents involved two court cases: the hearing against Knowles as well as an assault by a band member upon the band supplier. The reports of this event continued for several issues of all the town’s newspapers. This account is drawn from the Barrow Herald, 29 March, 1 April 1876; Barrow Pilot, 1 April 1876. 87 The failed appeal was heard at Lancaster Quarter Sessions: Barrow Herald, 1 July 1876. 88 Ibid., 29 March 1876. 89 Barrow Pilot, 1 April 1876. 90 Ibid., 17 June 1876. 91 Full reports of proceedings can be found in the Barrow Herald, 19 March 1878; Whitehaven Guardian, 21 March 1878. 92 Barrow Herald, 19 March 1878. 93 H. Pelling, A Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–1910 (London, 1967), p. 330. 94 Nation, 17 August 1878; O’Day, ‘Political organization’, p. 202. 95 Nation, 10 May 1879. 96 Ibid., 24 May 1879. 97 Ibid., 5 November 1881 mentions ‘councillor’ M’Anulty, though it is not clear just when he was elected. See N. Todd, Joseph Cowen and the Militant Democracy (Whitley Bay, 1991), pp. 137–59, for a summary of Irish politics in 1880s Newcastle. Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, p. 80, states: ‘Members [of the various home rule organisations] . . . were barred from participating in local elections’. 98 Barrow Herald, 19 March 1881. The reason for such a development was the quality of entertainment. On this occasion, however, the event was ‘uninspiringly’ catered for.


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99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 25 March 1882. 101 Ibid., 24 March 1883. 102 Whitehaven News, 5 January 1881. 103 Ibid., 23 March 1882. 104 Nation, 4, 15 March 1882, mentions the names of James King (chair), P. M’Entee, S. M’Donough (auditor, replacing M’Geough), J. Graham and F. Clancey as office-holders. 105 Ibid., 15 April; 20 May; 30 September; 7 October 1882. 106 Ibid., 13, 20 May 1882. 107 For example, ibid., 11, 23 September 1882. 108 See below. 109 See, for example, Nation, 24 January, 7 February, 7 March 1885. 110 Ibid., 7 March 1885. Office-holders: E. M’Convey (President), J. Murphy (Vice-President), M. M’Namee (Treasurer) and J. Kavanagh (Secretary). The Committee: J. M’Mahon, B. M’Call, H. M’Giveron, J. Higgins, B. Groney, D. Kavanagh, R. H. D’Arcy, W. Cromwell, F. King, C. M’Allister, J. Kavanagh and E. Ennis. 111 Ibid., 29 August 1885. The meeting occurred on the fifteenth. Officers: Bernard Hughes (President), Thomas Higgins (Vice-President), Thomas Mooney (Treasurer) and Samuel M’Donough (Honorary Secretary). 112 Ibid., 5 August 1885. 113 Ibid., 12 September 1885. 114 Ibid., 19 September, 3, 10 October 1885. 115 Ibid., 24 October, 7, 14, 23 November 1885, for details of new recruits. 116 Barrow Herald, 14 November 1885. 117 Ibid., 16 January 1886. 118 Ibid., 6 February, 20 March, 29 May 1885. 119 Nation, 26 June 1886. 120 O’Day, ‘Political organization’, p. 186. 121 R. McKibbin, H. C. G. Mattew and J. A. Kay, ‘The ‘‘franchise factor’’ in the rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review, Vol. 91 (1976), pp. 723–53. 122 B. Trescatheric, ‘The parliamentary elections in Barrow-in-Furness, 1885–1886’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, Vol. 84 (1984), pp. 227–37. 123 Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, pp. 109–10. 124 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1986 ed.), pp. 478–80. 125 Lees, Exiles of Erin, pp. 164–212; Lowe, ‘Irish and the Catholic Church’, pp. 129–55; idem, Irish in Lancashire, pp. 109–43. 126 G. P. Connolly, ‘Little brother be at peace: the priest as holy man in the nineteenth-century ghetto’, in W. J. Sheil (ed.), Studies in Church History, Vol. 19: The Church and Healing (Oxford, 1982), p. 191. 127 York Gazette, 2, 9 October 1847, quoted in F. Finnegan, Poverty and Prejudice: A Study of Irish Immigrants in York, 1840–1875 (Cork, 1982), p. 16. 128 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, p. 45. 129 In fact, the Roman Catholic Church was ‘for both social and intellectual

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reasons . . . a conservative institution’: S. Gilley, ‘Catholics and Socialists in Scotland, 1900–1930’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in Britain, 1815–1939, pp. 212–13. See also O’Day, ‘Political organization’, p. 192. 130 Treble, ‘Attitude of the Roman Catholic church’, p. 100; for a reconsideration of these issues, see Connolly, ‘Catholic Church and the first Manchester and Salford trade unions’. 131 These matters are covered in greater depth in Caine, Cleator and Cleator Moor, pp. 292–96. 132 Burgess, ‘Religious history’, p. 498. 133 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, pp. 40, 41, 110. 134 LRO (Preston) RC Ba: letters of W. Gordon, 16 January 1876 and John W. Bewick, 28 January 1876. These letters are part of a valuable collection of material concerning this event of 1903. It is found in a file of Catholic miscellany from St Mary’s of Furness. See [L]ancashire [R]ecords [O]ffice: [R]oman [C]atholic, [Ba]rrow. 135 Ibid. In one letter, it is stated that 200 children were removed from Catholic schools and placed in Protestant facilities: ‘Fairplay to the Bishop of Liverpool’, n.d. 136 LRO RC/Ba contains a series of correspondence concerning this episode. 137 Ibid., resolution to The Right Reverend Thomas Whiteside, Bishop of Liverpool, 6 March 1903. 138 Ibid., Margaret Prosser to Bishop of Liverpool, 2 March 1903. 139 Ibid., Fr Miller to Bishop Whiteside, 15 February 1903. 140 Ibid., 11 March 1903. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., handbill: ‘Father Barry’s Farewell Concert’. 143 Ibid., anonymous to Bishop of Liverpool, n.d. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 146 See below, Chapter 5, pp. 162–64. 147 LRO RC/Ba, Fr Miller to Bishop Whiteside, 15 February 1903. 148 LRO RC/Ba, Fr Motherway to Charles Rush, 3 October 1903. 149 Ibid., telegram from Fr Motherway, 21 October 1903. 150 Ibid., Fr Miller to the Dean, 10 October 1903. 151 Ibid., an appeal to the Irish priests in the Diocese of Liverpool, from the ICA, Barrow. 152 For a discussion of the reasons why the Irish vote was not more effective, see O’Day, ‘Irish political organisation’; McKibbin, Matthew and Kay, ‘Franchise factor’. 153 C. C. O’Brien, Parnell and his Party (Oxford, 1958).

CHAPTER 5

The emergence and identity of Orangeism What was the Orange Institution, but a Protestant Defence Association? Whitehaven Herald, 15 July 1871

Throughout the Victorian period Orangemen upheld conservative, Protestant values with a ‘sacrosanct rigidity’.1 It was this very system of belief, the Revd J. B. McKenzie of Whitehaven argued, that meant Orangemen ‘would defend the principles of the Bible to the utmost of their power to carry out the progress of work which was so auspiciously inaugurated by William of Orange [Applause]’.2 While views like these naturally attracted sympathetic contemporaries, among the English and Scots, the Orange Order also epitomised the tension which existed between Victorian notions of religious liberty and law and order; indeed this presented a dilemma to those who would simultaneously defend the Orangeman’s right to speak but also abhor his promotion of sectarian strife. Sometimes liberal voices like that of the Barrow Herald, which habitually questioned the relevance and rectitude of Orangeism, conceded that the movement was ‘the outcome of a grand epoch in our national history, when Protestant religion gained its first ascendancy over the Romish Church of England’.3 On other occasions, certain expressions of Orange outrage served only to alienate those of a liberal disposition. When in 1880 Orangemen in Barrow expressed fury when the apostate Marquis of Ripon was appointed Viceroy of India, the liberal Barrow Herald issued this damning rebuke: A Catholic and a Dissenter, as Englishmen, have as much right to a civil appointment as have Protestants of the Establishment. Religious bigotry, sooner or later, must depart this life; but now and then we are reminded that some people of seventeenth century ideas are still in the flesh.4

During the later Victorian period, British Orangeism moved away from its plebeian, Ulster roots, and began to assume a position

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on what might be called the constitutional right of the political spectrum. In the 1830s, a motley collection of ultra-Tory aristocrats had used Orangeism as a ‘rough’ pressure group, and had succeeded in arousing such suspicion that the Order was forced to liquidate itself in the face of a damning Select Committee report. But Tory politicians eagerly addressed the annual gatherings in the increasingly populist arena of mid-Victorian politics, and, because of such connections, Orangeism became more respectable. Benjamin Disraeli’s acceptance of honorary membership, conferred at an Orange meeting in Salford in 1872, might be seen as a symbol of these changing fortunes.5 Thus it was that Orangeism became less spontaneous and more structured and, with this development, Orangemen and Tories began speaking in increasingly harmonious tones. From the 1880s, although its anti-Catholic voice was unwavering, the Orange Order in both Ireland and Britain continued to become increasingly and more obviously Tory. The movement’s utility as a lever for working-class votes was not lost on the Tories; nor was its vital role when Home Rule rose to prominence. Nevertheless, this new respectability represented quite a transformation in fortunes, and a sign, perhaps, that since its inception in the tumultuous years of the French Wars, the movement had gradually manoeuvred into the mainstream of British political life. By the 1890s, all but the most myopic (or principled) Tory politicians had realised the utility of popular Orange support. In 1906, Sir Charles Cayzer, the sitting Tory MP for Barrow, was typical in having at least one eye on their voting potential when he exhorted lodgemen in stock fashion to ‘Fear God, honour the King and support the constitution’.6 Given the extremist nature of early Orangeism, it is surprising that the movement became so popular. Yet, it proved its hardiness, and its adaptability, throughout the nineteenth century, spreading consistently to most areas of Irish settlement. The Orange Order, however, was more than just the toy of party Conservatism; it was also very much the measure of a divided Irish immigrant community. This chapter and the next consider in some detail the rise of the Cumbrian Order and its impact as both a British and Irish phenomenon. Here we will in particular examine the emergence of Cumbrian Orangeism, placing its genesis in a national context, while Chapter 6 looks specifically at the forms of sectarian violence, often inspired by Orangemen, which plagued the Irish community.

The Emergence and Identity of Orangeism

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As will be seen, the Orange Order was central in making popular violence both common and serious.

I The Orange Order first emerged in Ireland in 1795, amidst the turmoil of the Armagh troubles. It was a manifestation of the complex economic and sectarian tensions that infected Ulster’s proto-industrial linen industry, and was promoted by land competition between Catholics and Protestants during the turbulent years of the French Revolution.7 In the build up to the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Order spread rapidly as Protestants struggled against the perceived Catholic threat to their livelihoods and to their way of life which was expressed most clearly in the Defender movement. Within a short time, developments merited formal organisation, and in 1797 a Grand Lodge was established.8 In Britain, a number of factors—the vagaries of industrialisation, the revolutionary threat from France and the historic strength of anti-Catholicism—combined to create social tensions conducive to the reception of Orange ideas. The growth of Irish immigration during the late eighteenth century and the presence of British troops and militiamen in the savage suppression of the Irish Rebellion provided channels through which these ideas flowed. Furthermore, the threats arising from Jacobin ideas and the social problems caused by economic change sustained in northern employers a belief that the Orange Order, like earlier Church and King mobs, could be used to divert working-class activities from Luddism and political insurrection and towards patriotic anti-Catholicism.9 As a result, English developments followed quickly those in Ireland. By the late 1790s, the first lodges had emerged in Manchester. Five years later, Orange gatherings were noted in Wigan, Rochdale, Bury and Ashton-under-Lyne, and by 1807 a central body, the English Orange Institution, had come into being.10 During the early years of the century the newly-imported Order continued to spread rapidly throughout areas of industrial development and Irish settlement,11 though in the 1820s there was a change in emphasis as the headquarters switched to London, the centre of a growing ultra-Tory aristocratic affiliation. Despite this shift, the Order remained predominantly a provincial phenomenon,

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still strongest in Manchester and, later, Liverpool; moreover, it was this provincialism that enabled the lodge to survive official liquidation in 1835, following a Select Committee report into its allegedly clandestine activities.12 Increasing Irish immigration to the north of Britain, and the proletarian nature of early Orangeism, seems to have undermined efforts to give the movement a metropolitan base in the 1820s and 1830s. Although the official structure was broken up, Orangeism continued to exist throughout these years in northern England, at the nodal points of Irish migrants’ communal development. Evidence suggests that, even after official dissolution, it continued to thrive in Liverpool, Manchester and the Glasgow area during the 1830s and 1840s where its public displays became a feature of community life.13 Yet, in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, early Orange parades usually attracted dozens, at most hundreds, of participants, thus giving little hint of the explosion in interest which would occur later. During the 1840s, things began to pick up, though estimates for Scotland in 1848 suggest a total membership of only 660; whereas, by the 1860s, a single demonstration in Airdrie, Paisley and Glasgow could attract a figure of that order.14 In Liverpool, in 1843, 2,000 processors celebrated Orange Day; at Newton-le-Willows, in 1845, a similar number followed suit; and in 1849 what was until that point the longest Orange parade in Liverpool’s history led to widespread violence, and one death.15 In 1851, 2,000 marched in Liverpool, though by 1859, when the ‘Twelfth’ was established as a Protestant holiday in the city, the figure had risen to nearer 20,000. These patterns of development can be attributed to increasing Irish immigration on the eve of, and during, the Famine and the innate anti-Catholicism stirred up by the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850.16 They also demonstrate that Orangeism had survived a couple of shaky decades after the Select Committee.17 In Ireland, the Orange threat was taken very seriously. The Party Processions Act (1850) was designed to curb Orange excesses in Ulster; yet there were still riots in 1857 and 1864, prior to the repeal of the act (1870).18 The Orange card thus raised fears in Ulster which, in Victorian Britain, only Liverpool could possibly match. The divergence between the Orange Order in Ireland and England partly reflects the way the two branches had grown apart since the early 1800s. In Ireland the association was persistently


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tainted with an air of insurrection hardly less potent than that of the militant Catholic groups it sought to resist. As a result, the authorities, through numerous restrictions on public processions, sought to suppress Orange activities.19 In England, the Order very quickly internalised a wider, more mainstream Conservative ideology, avowedly defending the principles of the established church and the Tory Party, denouncing Catholicism, popery, ritualism and the growing agitation for Home Rule. Throughout the United Kingdom, Fenianism and Irish nationalism spurred an Orange renaissance in the 1870s, as did the repeal of the Party Processions Act, which had banned such marches during the 1850s and 1860s. More generally, in the north of England the adoption of a central position in English political and religious consciousness made the Orange Order one of the largest and most obvious single expressions of national identity in the mid- to late-Victorian period.

II Throughout northern Britain the impact of urbanisation and industrialisation provided conditions well suited to the influx of Irish, while the nature of the immigrant communities helped to determine the success, or otherwise, with which Orangeism was imported. In the early years, in most key areas where the Order was established, Protestant Irish settlers were—due to residential clustering, if not absolute numbers—a significant minority among their Catholic countrymen.20 This was less the case in Liverpool and Manchester than Glasgow, though from the 1850s, popular Protestant Toryism and Orangeism achieved a standing in the former, spurred on by ‘unhealthy indigenous sources’21—the scale of which was absent elsewhere on the mainland. In Scotland, where up to 25 per cent of the Irish community was Protestant throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the social geography of Orangeism mirrored closely that of the Scottish textile industry. Although it is important not to assume that all Irish Catholics were nationalists, or that all Irish Protestants were Orangemen, these settlement patterns and occupational factors do support three linked explanations of Orange development in Scotland which historians have put forward. First, it is clear that Protestant Irishmen who had been driven from the land by Defenderism, along with the Lancashire and Scottish

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regiments involved in suppressing the United Irish Rebellion, played an important part in establishing the Order north of the border. Secondly, the national basis of membership was maintained when similar patterns of Irish settlement offered continuing support in the period down to 1850. Thirdly, it is also apparent that Scotsborn descendants of these Irish settlers, and further arrivals of Ulster Protestants, meant the Irish community remained at the forefront of the Order in the second half of the nineteenth century. This argument is developed by McFarland and Walker who claim that, during this period, the Scots, distracted by the division of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Light Presbyterianism, and with a general suspicion of pugnacious party loyalties, remained largely aloof from lower-class popular movements like the Order.22 Furthermore, the long Liberal traditions of Glasgow, its development of strong municipal socialism, and the marginal position of immigrants in the city, meant the Irish did not influence Glasgow politics, in the way they did in nineteenth-century Liverpool, until after the Great War. Even then, Orangeism in Scotland smacked of marginalisation, and Irish and Scots-Irish remained its inspiration during the 1920s and 1930s.23 In this sense, Glasgow is not seen merely as an extension of the Ulster political mind.24 Early nineteenth-century Cumbria witnessed little to compare with the spectacular rise of Orangeism elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Even in the region’s principal settlements, Carlisle and the port town of Whitehaven, developments were modest. By 1835, there were five lodges in the lake counties—two each at Carlisle and Whitehaven and one in Kendal—at a time when lodges averaged somewhere near twenty members. Not least in the 1860s, as the Orange revival began to stir elsewhere, the Whitehaven branch constituted a rather limited collection, gathering unassumingly in the local town hall to celebrate the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ with a ‘Tea and Ball’.25 During the 1870s, however, several factors converged to give added weight to Cumbrian Orangeism, principal among which was the increasing pace of Irish immigration to an area of longstanding Irish links. In west Cumberland, it seems, forces similar to those in both Scotland and Liverpool were at work. While immigration to the textile trade in Cumbria is redolent of Scotland, the sectarian dimension of local life, at it strongest before 1914, is more in the Liverpool mould. With Whitehaven being the English port closest to


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Belfast, a proportion of the Irish were probably Protestant from the earliest times, while the importance of the north Cumbrian textile trade encouraged northern Irish immigrants too.26 Although Liverpool Orangeism grew quickly in the 1850s, the boom years in Scotland and Cumbria came after 1870. From this point in time the size of demonstrations increased markedly and outdoor jamborees replaced traditional indoor dinners. In 1872 in Glasgow 32 lodges and 1,500 lodgemen were present on the ‘Twelfth’; in the following year, estimates of the turnout varied between 15,000 and 50,000.27 Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, other Scottish towns—like Kilmarnock, Dumbarton and Port Glasgow—held their own impressive demonstrations with an average attendance of 8,000, and it is estimated that 90,000 Scottish Orangemen celebrated the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ in 1878, with between 14,000 and 15,000 in Glasgow alone.28 While such factors as industrial development and Ulster immigration clearly created a suitable environment for Orangeism to prosper, events surrounding William Murphy’s visit to Whitehaven in April 1871 jolted the west Cumbrian revival into action.29 This, too, must be seen in its broader context, as part of the wider, popular Tory, no-popery movement which gripped Lancashire in the later 1860s, especially in the general election years of 1868 and 1874 when so many seats went to the Conservatives.30 In Whitehaven, the Irish Catholic community met Murphy’s attempts to lecture on the seven sacraments of Rome with a violent outburst, culminating in a wellregimented but riotous assault by 300 Cleator Moor Irish.31 The Protestant lecturer was badly beaten and never fully recovered. Less than twelve months later, in March 1872, he finally succumbed to injuries which Birmingham surgeons attributed to these violent events at Whitehaven.32 Reactions in the area to the Murphy episode were intense and the fabric of the Cumbrian Orange Order underwent something of a transformation in the wake of his beating. In 1871, when Whitehaven’s ‘No Surrender’ lodge (no. 66) held its annual celebrations of the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, a relatively modest 500 ‘brethren of the county district’ were in attendance; thereafter interest spread geographically and grew numerically, extending from the confines of an Irish constituency to draw in indigenous support. Sensing the quickening pace of local developments in mid1872, the Whitehaven Herald claimed the previous eighteen months were marked by growth and ‘new life seems to have been introduced

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to the Order in this part of the country’. The report continued in this vein, commenting on a new departure in the local movement: ‘. . .for the first time we remember the Orange Anniversary was celebrated in Whitehaven by an imposing procession, the brethren parading the streets, in the well-known regalia of orange and purple, and headed by the recently purchased banner’.33 Simultaneously, the appeal of Orangeism spilled out beyond Whitehaven and Cleator, where the feelings against Murphy’s assailants ran deepest, and it is noticeable from press commentaries that the residents of many other local towns and villages began to stir. In February 1872, in the small town of Egremont, 400 members of the local lodge (no. 170) sat down to tea in the local Oddfellows’ Hall;34 and in the following July this lodge, along with two others—Whitehaven, ‘No Surrender’ and ‘Temperance’ (no. 195)—followed the Cleator Moor brass band in a parade to the railway station where they embarked for Workington. Here they met up with two further lodges—the Workington ‘True Blue’ (no. 67) and the Maryport ‘Defender of the Faith’—and the Revd E. E. Walker of Whitehaven and a man named Tate from the Methodist Free Church, Egremont, addressed the crowd.35 Later that night, the Whitehaven lodgemen were joined by those from Cleator Moor for tea at the Whitehaven Oddfellows’ Hall.36 Within several years Cumbrian Orange parades attracted thousands, rather than hundreds, who often gathered together at provincial jamborees from all around the county, and by the late-1870s, most local towns and villages—from Carlisle to Cockermouth and Maryport to Millom—had at least one lodge. Moreover, as Table 5.1 illustrates, a number of towns had multiple lodges, and even small pit villages, such as Frizington, near Cleator, could boast two. In Whitehaven, however, the total ran into double figures, with Workington and Maryport recording five and seven instances respectively. While we can see the obvious and growing importance of Cumbrian Orangeism in these decades, it is not clear what proportion of these lodges was made up of Irish and English Protestants. Liberal opinion in the region dismissed Orangeism as merely the product of Irish sectarianism, and there can be no doubting the partial truth of this. Yet the appeal of the Order stretched beyond an Irish Protestant minority, and sympathetic press accounts confidently asserted that, while the rebirth of the Order was due initially to Irishmen, it drew in non-Irish support too.


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Table 5.1: Orange lodges in Cumbria in the 1870s and 1880s Town

Lodge name

Number

Askam Askam Askam Askam Barrow Barrow Barrow Barrow Barrow

True Blues Blacker’s True Blues Lord Beaconsfield

211, 397, 469 (2 lodges)

Barrow Barrow Barrow Barrow Barrow Barrow Barrow Barrow Bigrigg Moor Carlisle Cleator Moor Cleator Moor Cockermouth Dearham Distington Egremont Frizington Frizington Gosforth Great Clifton Harrington Maryport Maryport Maryport Maryport Maryport Maryport Maryport Parton Seaton

Kennedy’s True Blues Rose of Barrow

The Old Barrow Church Defenders The Rose of Barrow True Blues Blackhurst True Blues Purple Heroes

Earl of Beaconsfield Temperance Lodge St Mark’s Primrose Total Abstinence Rising Star Loyal Purple Lord Beaconsfield Unexpected (Moor Row) Percy Wyndham’s Percy Wyndham Morning Star Rising Star Knox’s Purple Star Rising Sons of Britain True Blues Crimson Banner Defender of the Faith

482 365 593 369 482 578

427 482 539 576 563 424 267 517 455 456 181 421 333, 170 441 214 408 467 403 176 120

Volunteers The Rising Sons of William Senhouse Israel’s True Defenders Cameronian True Blues Rising Sons of William

514 516 409 207, 293, 339, 393 247, 426

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Culture, Conflict and Migration Table 5.1:

(continued)

Town

Lodge name

Number

Scalegill Scalegill St Bees Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Whitehaven Workington Workington Workington

Knox’s True Britons

205, 233 220 430 60, 66, 87 177 180 195 236 245 255 401, 404 233 404 171 215, 201 271

Workington Workington

Heroes No Surrender

Temperance Loyal

Be Just and Fear Not Bentinck’s Loyal

Loyal Sons of Ulster Loyal Victoria King Solomon’s Black Encampment True Blues Sons of Israel/Israel’s True Defenders

77 522 409

Source: most local newspapers carried a colourful account of the ‘Glorious Twelfth’. See particularly Barrow Herald, 14 July 1877, 15 July 1882; Whitehaven Herald, 15 July 1871, 13 July 1872, 19 July 1873, 18 July 1874, 17 July 1875, 15 July 1876, 19 July 1883; Whitehaven Guardian and Whitehaven Herald, 18 July 1878; Whitehaven Free Press and Farmer’s Chronicle, 19 July 1879; Carlisle Express and Examiner, 19 July 1884; Whitehaven Advertiser, 18 July 1885; Whitehaven Advertiser, 16 July 1887; Whitehaven News, 17 July 1890.

In the Furness area, where communal relations were free of direct Murphyite influences, early Orange developments assumed a steadier aspect, though here too the Orangemen drew support from Irish and non-Irish Protestants. Also like their Cumberland brethren, the North Lancashire Orangemen made a splash in the press with their efforts to unite, but in a much more limited way. In July 1872, a local newspaper reported the opening of ‘A New lodge of the Loyal Orange Institution’. The lodge, it was claimed, ‘had been in contemplation for a few weeks past [and] was formally opened on Saturday evening last’ (30 June). The proceedings were orchestrated by Bro. William Sykes, the District Grand Master,


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his deputy, Bro. Lucas, and Bro. George Hindle, ‘Worthy District Secretary, of Preston’. The wording of the article suggests this was not the first local branch, but research has yet to uncover an earlier example. In April 1873, the Barrow Pilot carried a story of a ‘Presentation to an Orangeman’37 who was about to emigrate to New Zealand. The man, Bro. Hugh Graham, was feasted at the Burlington Hotel by his colleagues of the no. 203 branch of the ‘Loyal Orange Lodge of the Institution of Great Britain’. The same issue reported a meeting, at the Junction Hall, of branch no. 403. In December 1873, branch no. 259, ‘Wilson’s True Blues’, was inaugurated at Dalton Congregationalist Hall,38 while events six months later saw the constitution of lodge no. 260 at Barrow.39 By the middle of the decade, the Orange wave had spread to nearby Askam where 200 people attended a meeting of the ‘True Blues’ lodge, at the Wesleyan chapel. In that town alone, four separate lodges were noted in the 1870s and 1880s. Furthermore, by this time Barrow was undoubtedly the region’s Orange centre. With its thirteen lodges, Barrow was a match even for the historic Irish centre of Whitehaven (see Table 5.1). Following the post-Murphy re-awakening, then, the mid-1870s had witnessed a continued momentum towards the development of the Order. In 1874, a crowd of approximately 1,500 attended the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ celebration, a figure which did not include members from Furness.40 The march, too, was more adventurous on this occasion: the procession travelled about five miles, parading from Whitehaven to Cleator Moor and the nearby villages of Bigrigg and Woodend. The press report enthused about the power and prestige of the local lodges of the Order: It is worthy of remark that while Orangeism was almost unheard of in this locality until within the recent period it has emerged into new life and developed so rapidly that the Whitehaven district is now . . . as regards financial contributions to the Grand Lodge—and that, we take, as implying the greatest number of members, the largest district lodge in the world.41

When it is considered that the Liverpool Orange Order could regularly muster crowds of tens of thousands in the 1870s, this last pronouncement must be viewed with some circumspection.42 Yet local Orangemen knew what they were about, and congratulated themselves on a thriving regional operation. Four years after the Murphy incident, one Whitehaven cleric, Revd Cole, a Baptist

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minister, neatly summarised Cumbrian Orangeism when he stated that it ‘represented a principle, a party and a protest . . . the principle of civil and religious liberty, the Protestant Party, and a protest at the murder of William Murphy’.43 Doubtless it was reminders like these, allied to the demographic changes witnessed in the area, which ensured that the appeal of the Cumbrian Orange Order was considerable. For fifteen years from the mid-1870s, the annual ritual of ‘the Twelfth’ continued to draw support from most of the towns and villages around the region, with the task of hosting the proceedings usually, though not exclusively, resting with the larger centres of Whitehaven, Workington and Barrow. During these times, participant lodges mustered an average of around 1,500 to 2,000 for the annual Orange day outing, with large crowds of onlookers lining the route of their marches. A similar number descended on Barrow in 1882, when fifty lodges visited the town from as far afield as Whitehaven and Burnley.44 Occasionally, concern was expressed that interest was falling off, but such ruminations usually prompted a redoubling of efforts. At Askam, the celebrations of 12 July 1877 provided proof enough that the Orange Order was very much in a healthy state as regards membership, with observers numbering the turnout at 5,000 to 6,000, drawn from all over Furness and west Cumberland.45 Beyond its complete monopoly of a nationalist-loyalist language—which appealed to even the most vaguely ‘Protestant’ and ‘British’ of Victorians—attempts to integrate the family considerably strengthened the Orange Order and added weight to its respectable, public dimension.46 The ritual parades of 12 July were outwardly male-dominated affairs, with women and children precluded from marching. The press certainly reported the presence of families at these events, but usually in a peripheral role among the crowd. Typical was the Whitehaven Herald’s observation of the Orange Day crowds: ‘the female sex, too, came out bravely in honour of their day; and children, down to infants in arms, were resplendently attired’.47 The wider ethos of Orangeism, however, suggests something rather less condescending. It is likely, for example, that the Queen Victoria lodge (no. 9), inaugurated in 1873, was representative of the formal female presence within the Orange Order. This lodge boasted 60 members who paid an enrolment fee, reported to be one shilling, and weekly dues of sixpence, which, like the funds of friendly societies, served the


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purpose of paying benefits.48 While these figures were in line with those of similar organisations, they would exclude the poorer part of the working class. What is more, if an older child subscribed to one of the region’s many juvenile lodges, the total family commitment might have been up to three shillings weekly, almost equivalent to the rent of a modest house. Despite the potential expense, children were important to the lodges, just as the lodges were to them, a fact not unknown to the chairman of one meeting, who explained: ‘There were over 200 children gathered there, receiving . . . a good scriptural education; and many of them would, no doubt, rise up to be the good Orangemen of the future’.49 These children, then, received bible teachings in accordance with their parents’ wishes and the wider impress of the Order’s beliefs, and no doubt many of them did grow up to be good Orangemen. These occasional snippets of evidence demonstrate that Orangeism was as much about the members’ genuine associationalism as it was their unquestionable pugnacity. Orangeism was originally a kind of ex-servicemen’s club and benefit society. In 1843, for example, the secretary of the Liverpool Protestant Benevolent Society, Ambrose Byeford, was later to become Deputy Grand Master of the Liverpool Orange Order. Even in the Edwardian years, the Orange lodges of Liverpool remained ‘social centres, and provided funeral and illness insurance benefits, as well as the hope of mixing with potential employers’.50 As McFarland writes, ‘The network of lodges seems to have retained its original informal benevolent functions paralleling the provision of the plethora of benefit and friendly societies in the nineteenth century such as Forresters, Gardeners and Ancient Shepherds’.51 In 1883, Glasgow Ulstermen formed the Glasgow Antrim and Down Benevolent Society, which aimed ‘to cultivate and maintain a friendly intercourse between natives of Antrim and Down in Glasgow and the neighbourhood and raise funds for temporary relief’. In the early twentieth century its name was changed to the Glasgow Ulster Association, but Walker claims that this organisation and others, like the Orange Order and the Protestant Friendly Associations, were crucial to the maintenance of an expatriate Ulster identity in the years to the Second World War.52 As late as 1912, in recognition of the movement’s wider purpose, the Imperial Orange Council in Scotland was trying to standardise the Order’s friendly-society dimension under the terms of the Insurance Act of 1911.53

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III Numbers, of course, tell but part of the story, for despite the interchangeable nature of these terms, the Orange Order and Orangeism were not necessarily the same thing. The Order was effectively the officials and membership of the Orange movement— those who held posts, marched in their bowler hats and sashes, and paid subscriptions to the local branch; whereas Orangeism was a diffuse value-system which struck a chord with a wider audience. Drawn together in the Orange tradition, these Irish migrants and native sympathisers propounded a philosophy that responded to the anxieties of a broad swathe of Victorian society, whose concerns ranged from the protection of the established church, bible Christianity and anti-sacerdotalism to the defence of the union of Britain and Ireland and the promotion of popular Conservatism. With such a permeable and interchangeable value-system, Orangeism was able to give the impression of a much broader popular support than the several thousands who joined the lodges of west Cumbria and paid their regular subscriptions. Paz propounds a view of the Orange Order as a largely working-class movement, stating that ‘throughout the period, 1835–70, middle-class and aristocratic Tories avoided patronising Orange Lodges’.54 This feature also reflects traditions in Ulster. Indeed, from the 1850s in Lancashire there was a distinct widening of the appeal of Orangeism; and Foster does not doubt ‘the development of a mass following’ in Oldham, where, by the mid-1860s, the Order had ‘achieved a fair stranglehold over the colliery labour force’.55 ‘Throughout the mid-Victorian period’, Paz says, ‘Orangeism was marginal, geographical, politically and socially’.56 Indeed, there is a considerable literature on working-class political organisation, in which the Order fleetingly appears, and it is commonly supposed that Paz is right, and that the Orange Order was essentially little more than the ‘proletarian face of Protestantism’.57 This point is made time and again by press observers, as the association of Orangeism and Irishness at once marginalised the movement and distanced liberal Britain from an embarrassment in its midst. Yet closer analysis of the membership suggests there was an active middle-class element associated with the Orange Order. In west Cumbria, the movement was neither purely proletarian nor completely Irish.58 For example, Irish Protestants naturally aligned


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themselves with Liverpool Orangeism, though the majority of participants seem to have been English.59 The usefulness of Orangeism was not lost on disingenuous clerics or Tory politicians, who, while not always members, maintained a looser, affiliate interest in the political direction of the Order. The tensions between perception and reality are not easily resolved, though it will be argued here that the language of Orangeism is best defined more broadly than as a mere expression of Irish sectarianism. Indeed, one leading Orangeman of the 1830s, Colonel William Blennerhasset Fairman, claimed the lodges that he visited in the north of England were more English than Irish.60 Forty years later, a Cumbrian cleric made a similar observation. He was proud, not only of the movement’s overall good fortunes, but also of its broadening appeal. This is how the press reported his words: ‘Orangeism was growing mightily in West Cumberland, not only among those [Irish] from across the sea, but Cumbrians were also beginning to see its principles, and were joining its ranks’.61 One of the central principles of Orangeism was that William III protected the Protestant constitution and saved the principles of bible Christianity from papal domination. The debt to ‘King Billy’ was never forgotten, and formed the centrepiece in each annual celebration of the Glorious Twelfth in Victorian Cumbria. Men like James Kennedy, who was the leading light of Furness Orangeism for twenty years from the 1870s, persistently reminded the Orangemen of their hero’s place. These word are typical: ‘They had met to celebrate the great battle of the Boyne, which was associated with the immortal memory of William III . . . who came over to this country to deliver them from the yoke of Popery’.62 This victory over the Catholic King James was the key historical event for Orangemen. Each year might throw up specific issues to confront them, but an image of William of Orange and his acclaimed deeds went unchanged over time. Each year from the 1870s, in Cumbria as elsewhere, Orangemen donned their Orange lilies and sashes, hoisted their painted banners and marched around the local towns, fife and drum bands playing as members sung the words which recounted William’s deeds and denounced the pope, the priesthood and Catholicism. Throughout the Victorian era and beyond, the sight of these garish and raucous gatherings inspired many emotions. James Connolly’s words captured with great clarity the mixed emotions invoked by the marching season: ‘Viewing the processions

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as a mere league . . . I must confess some parts of it are beautiful, some of it are ludicrous and some of it exceedingly disturbing’.63 It was this public face of Orangeism, the annual procession, that prompted hostile onlookers to comment on the difference between what might be termed ‘rough’ and ‘respectable’ culture, as one Liverpool journalist wrote: Processions, whatever their character, are costly pageants, interesting to childhood and adolescence, but a nuisance or an absurdity to men of sense. Gee-gaws, show trumpery, dazzling colours, bad music and meretricious ornaments captivate the senses of the half-savage, and in any country they will attract a multitude of uneducated sight lovers.64

Although Orange leaders vehemently denied that their ranks were ‘the dregs of society’,65 the provocative public displays of the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ led contemporaries to comment, perhaps too easily, on the Irishness of the rank and file. As the Glasgow Herald’s observation of just one marcher demonstrates: ‘The face is curiously Irish . . . but not all the sombre vicissitudes of navvydom have quenched the Celtic fervour in this old Orangeman’s soul . . . the Orangemen’s walk is essentially the pageant of the proletariat. . .’66 These two assertions, that Orangeism was both workingclass and Irish, are crucial. If the Glasgow Herald was correct, then native onlookers might exculpate themselves from any associated blame by reference to the marginality of the movement. There was a tendency among more moderate sorts of Protestant Britons to distance themselves from Orangeism by reference to its perceived Irishness. One in Barrow, for example, dismissed the movement as a suspicious, foreign body: It is a dangerous exotic, a weed of foreign growth, and a most noxious one; like the Colorado beetle it should be kept out, or crushed as soon as found. The Orange Party may, on occasions, make use of some compliant minister, but it merits the contempt and aversion of every honourable and peace-loving citizen.67

It cannot be denied that Orangeism comprised a significant proportion of Irish, and that its rank and file was overwhelmingly working class. But it was the ribaldry and drunkenness of the annual gatherings in July which shaped these contemptuous views of the Order. From the earliest example of Orange Day violence, in Manchester in 1807,68 the nineteenth century was regularly punctuated by serious communal violence. The antipathetic response to the ‘Papal Aggression’ was particularly acute in this respect, as was


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the heated atmosphere of the years from 1866 to 1872, when Fenianism and the peregrinations of William Murphy proved more than sufficient to light the Orange and Green touch paper in countless towns, from Plymouth to Tynemouth and Wolverhampton to Whitehaven. Although sporadic outbreaks of violence were a feature of many towns in this period, the depth of feeling in Liverpool was most obvious. As one observer noted: ‘The peculiar hatred which Christians feel to Christians . . . burns nowhere so devouringly as it does in our religious town’.69 Liverpool was evidently central in respect of Orange-Green tensions, though it would be quite wrong to dismiss Orangeism elsewhere. While Liverpool nurtured Orangeism in its purest and ugliest form, west Cumbria also harboured Irish and non-Irish communities who often found themselves divided by allegiances to a dead king or a live pope. Indeed, few riots outside Liverpool were as serious as that which gripped Cleator Moor in July 1884, which is examined in the next chapter.70 The press was understandably dismissive of the purpose of the ‘Twelfth’. Liberal journalists across the north would generally have agreed with one Liverpudlian’s assertion that the ‘glorious anniversary’ of the Orangemen could be neatly summarised as ‘much heat, dust, dirt and drink’. The authorities in Britain broadly subscribed to the view that Orange Day was little more than an excuse to drink heavily. Few, however, made the point as wittily as the author of one eye-witness account who noted that in Liverpool, the ‘great festival of St William III’ showed the Orangemen’s special devotion—‘and drunkenness’—because ‘something much stronger than the Boyne water was imbibed’.71 Generally speaking, pleas for sobriety from the Orange platform echoed wider concerns about the drinking habits of the working man, though no amount of Boyne or Liffey water could excuse the depth of feelings shown on such occasions as the ‘Twelfth’. And yet, the view of Orangeism as simply a drunken reaction to Irish Catholicism is somewhat misleading. There is plenty of evidence to show that some Orangemen drank heavily, but the institution on both sides of the border attracted temperance affiliations whose abstinence was announced in their lodge-names, and whose self-professed sober respect for authority was part of a growing desire for respectability among the working class.

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IV The powerful imagery of the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ clearly influenced those who saw the Order as a raucous working-class affair. However, at the same time as we acknowledge the mass appeal of Orangeism, it is important not to play down, or indeed ignore, the very real part played by ‘respectable’ civic grandees and clergymen in the promotion of both the Order and Orange values. One of the most striking features of the mid-Victorian Orange Order in west Cumbria is its clubbable character. The Order, like the tradition of Ulster radicalism whence it originally came, was marked by a ‘close family and economic network’ and ‘professional and clerical membership’.72 However, Orangeism was never obviously or overtly an instrument of rational recreation: throughout these years the stain of drunken and wilful violence remained too evident for that. Moreover, if control and reform of working-class leisure culture was the key aim, the Cumbrian middle class was much more likely to follow Wilfrid Lawson, the local MP, landowner and anti-drink campaigner, into the region’s powerful temperance movement. The world of Orangeism was about a broader, less obvious and at the same time more complete kind of control. For clerics, the simple and direct language of Orangeism was well suited to the preservation of spiritual mores; for middle-class Tories, the temporal world of politics was where they desired Orange influence should be tested. These two sides—the clerical and the lay—were, of course, interchangeable; while the sum of these various parts added up to an expression of identity, centring on a cluster of basic beliefs, which at times totalled something approaching a world view. The scanty evidence available for its activities in this period leads to the conclusion that the Orange Order in Cumbria drew support from across the Protestant spectrum, although Anglicans predominated.73 The Revd Armes, vicar of Cleator Moor, and the Revd F. W. Wickes of Whitehaven represent the most obvious examples of the latter; while any number of nonconformists— Wesleyans, Baptist, Congregationalist and Presbyterians—also lent their support. In 1873, lodgemen at Dalton met in the local Congregationalist school rooms; in 1876 their Askam counterparts, ‘The True Blues’, utilised the Wesleyan chapel for one reported gathering; and, in 1877, the Irish links of the Order, especially


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among the rank and file, were echoed by the leaders who imported a guest speaker from Belfast, the Presbyterian minister, Revd H. Henderson.74 The Revd Armes, one-time worshipful master of both the Cleator Moor and Moor Row lodges, was one of the key players on the Cumbrian Orange scene, making many appearances at the annual celebrations of the Glorious Twelfth. The Revd Wickes and his relationship with Orangeism is more problematical to the historian, as it was for Irish Catholics who challenged the partiality with which he might execute his parallel duties as a magistrate. Wickes, though urged, never joined the Order; even so, he was present at any number of gatherings and his willingness to speak out for the Orange cause did not go unnoticed. Throughout a long career as civic and spiritual leader, Wickes was no stranger to controversy. He had been a major actor in local denunciations of the ‘Papal Aggression’, and, in 1851, George Jacob Holyoake, the secular radical, upbraided him for failing to prosecute the individuals who caused disturbance at the Whitehaven address of James Hughan, a Unitarian street lecturer,75 just as Irish Catholics would question his motives over twenty years later. Much of the important organisational work behind the movement was conducted by local dignitaries like James Kennedy and William Gradwell. Kennedy, a local iron mine owner, described in 1877 as ‘The Master of Barrow’, had his own lodge, ‘Kennedy’s True Blues’, and was a prominent figure in the wider south Furness scene, though little else is known of him. Although Kennedy rarely missed a ‘Glorious Twelfth’ outing in all the years before the mid1890s, Gradwell was altogether a more notable and controversial character. In the 1860s, he and his partner, Andrew Woodhouse, raised a considerable building empire during Barrow’s boom development, and in 1871–72 they employed 750 men—a figure exceeded at the time only by the Barrow haematite steelworks.76 In 1881, Gradwell’s local standing was formally acknowledged when he became Mayor of Barrow. While we have seen that Orangeism was persistently tainted with a reputation as a proletarian movement, there is certainly more than a suggestion that the Orange Order drew a significant part of its support from the more prosperous working class: little-known foot-soldiers who were willing to do the bidding of their clerical and lay superiors. One such man, John Bawden, who was arrested after the 1884 Orange Day riot, we do know something about. He was simultaneously master of Cleator

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Moor lodge, a foreman iron miner and an official of the local Cooperative Society.77 Bawden clearly lacked Gradwell’s clout, but, among men mindful of their job security, his must have been a powerful position.

V Orangeism was prominent in traditional Tory areas, like Whitehaven, as the movement provided a vehicle for harnessing and moulding a growing working-class vote into something solidly Tory. Other writers have suggested, however, that the Order was especially important in traditionally Liberal areas where Tories struggled to control the working-class constituency.78 This seems to have been the case in Barrow. Tories in such towns were quick to realise the power of anti-Catholic Orangeism as a vote winner: not least in Liverpool where the Orange card was played with impunity throughout the century. In the late 1860s and 1870s the spectre of Fenianism and the insidious Catholic threat were effectively mobilised to transform utterly the political culture of Lancashire. In the 1868 election the Liberal ascendancy in the county was overturned, and in 1874 the Tories triumphed comprehensively by 26 seats to seven.79 This turn-around was caused partly by the growing tensions associated with Irish settlement, while the resulting consolidation of working-class Toryism clearly owed something to the activities of the Orange Order. In Cumbria, the imbalance between the two parties was not quite so obvious as it was in Lancashire. However, awareness of anti-Catholic issues, a large immigrant Irish presence and the influence of Orangeism, similarly bolstered a strong unionist vote there. In fact, between 1885 and 1906, across all constituencies in the region, this Orange-Tory-Unionist bloc only once fell below 40 per cent—in Barrow in 1906 when the seat went to the Labour Party.80 Gradwell’s accession to the Barrow Mayoralty in 1881 suggests that by this time he had achieved political clout to match the status of his industrial empire, though he seemed unaware of the division of loyalties that might test an Orange mayor.81 However, the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the new Irish secretary, in 1882 highlighted this dichotomous position. Cavendish, the son of Barrow’s chief landed patron, the seventh Duke of Devonshire, took


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a particular interest in the town’s development and held shares in a number of local enterprises, including the steelworks.82 The Phoenix Park Murders, in fact, provided a real test for OrangeGreen relations in this period. Perhaps, too, they illustrated clearly the differences between Orangeism and Irish nationalism. On the one hand, Orangeism seems to have been fairly well accepted by this point and suffered little from the violence of so many of its adherents; on the other, Irish nationalists struggled hard to shake off the taint of terrorism which so many observers attached to their movement. The contrast in fortunes was at least partly the product of the Orange sympathies of local Tories. At the news of Cavendish’s demise, local feelings ran high, prompting fears of retribution against the local Irish community. Questioning of Gradwell’s even-handedness during these trying times was common among the Irish Catholic community, and the mayor’s decision to ban the local Land Leaguers from the Town Hall, under the pretext that he was defending public order, only hardened his critics’ position. Gradwell justified his action with reference to a petition of support signed by 873 Barrow working men. The riposte of the chairman of the local Land League, Fr Francis J. O’Neill, summed up the anxieties of local Irish Catholics about the seemingly pervasive influence of the Orange Order and the partiality of its leading light: Is it not . . . a fact that the memorial which was presented to the Mayor (who by the way, is a member of the Orangemen’s Church, but I will not say whether this has anything to do with his apparent partiality) in opposition to the recently proposed Land League public meeting was promoted and for the most part signed by Orangemen?83

Certainly, the simultaneous rise of both Orange and Home Rule organisations in the region was hardly coincidental. There is also little doubt that Gradwell used his Orange influence politically and that this action was bound to cause friction between the Orange and Green communities. Press coverage of the period from the early 1880s suggests that, for a number of reasons, religion was again becoming an overtly political issue, both nationally and regionally. At the same time, within Orange ranks, these issues threw up a number of bones of contention between the Church of England and its fellow Protestants, the nonconformists. On many occasions, as the issues of ritualism and secularism achieved some prominence, the language

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from the platform of Cumbrian Orange gatherings implied strongly that churchmen alone could be trusted to uphold the Protestant constitution. Such tensions arose primarily because of perceived and real links between dissent and radical liberalism. There existed in Orange minds a belief that these two forged a natural union, just as did Orangemen and Tories. Yet dissenters themselves had their fears, and looked on in some perplexity on the countless times in the Victorian years when Romanisation allegedly threatened the Church of England. This potential for division within Protestantism, and the selfacclaimed superiority of Orangemen, is most clearly illustrated by the controversy which surrounded the Bradlaugh case, and the attendant moves to modify the Affirmations Act, which came to a head at the end of Gladstone’s second ministry.84 Orangemen hated the thought of creeping secularism almost as much as they hated Roman Catholicism; rather perversely, in fact, it was clearly expected by local Orangemen that Catholic support would be forthcoming in any quest against the perceived spread of atheism. Indeed, the conflict over this issue was presented by Orangemen as a threat to the integrity of church and state, as a battle to preserve cherished assumptions concerning the execution of public duty, and one which came before individual belief or party loyalty. Speaking on an Orange platform in Barrow, in 1884, the local Tory candidate, H. W. Schneider, pronounced clearly his intractable Orange opposition to the merest hint of secularisation, and a local paper reported his comments thus: . . .nothing would ever induce him to vote for a bill that would admit an avowed atheist into Parliament. If they turned him down because he did not vote for . . . [the] Affirmation Bill, he would be very glad to make arrangements to leave England at once, as he should be ashamed to live in it any longer.85

Even in the 1890s, this move away from Protestantism, in general, to the Church of England, in particular, was still an issue. Orangemen saw themselves as beyond reproach; liberals and dissenters they saw as dupes and allies (perhaps unwitting ones) of the Catholics. This is how one contributor to a Cumbrian newspaper saw these tangled relations: The Irish Papist Nationalist never speaks or writes without betraying his hatred of Protestantism . . . and what I want to draw attention to is this, that every tool of Archbishops Walsh and Croke, down from the G.O.M.


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to the secretary of a local habitation of the Fenians, have found that they cannot please the Nonconformist Radical Home Ruler better than by abusing the Orange Society. How strange these English and Scotch Protestants should be so easily gulled . . . Is it not strange that this sort of argument should please any part of the Protestant family[?]86

During the 1880s, the union of Orange and Tory hearts led to a more obviously party-political Orangeism. This was coupled with a growing determination to prevent ‘the ‘‘G.O.M’’ . . . from doing any mischief’.87 By 1884, with the Liberal administration beset by problems at home and abroad, and with local Orangemen relishing reference to the Prime Minister as ‘Grand Old Muddles’,88 the imminent reform of the franchise provides an interesting insight into the type of Toryism of the Orange Order. One prominent Barrow Tory Orangeman, Eli Waddington, saw, in the successful passage of the Franchise Bill, good reason to praise the House of Lords for legislating for the working man. And the Liberal press grew increasingly perturbed as Orangeism and party politics began seemingly to unite. Witness this comment from the Barrow Herald: The Orange demonstration on Saturday last in Barrow . . . very strongly excites the inquiry whether a man can honestly and consistently be an Orangeman without being a thorough Tory . . . What has William III, of ‘great, glorious and universal memory’, to do with the Franchise Bill?89

This was a good question, for in spite of this praise of the Upper House, Orangeism was hardly a bulwark of democracy. At the same time as Waddington commended the House of Lords on passing the Reform Bill, perhaps a truer Orange view of the working man’s vote was exposed by the chairman of the gathering, J. Walsh, who said ‘he would not care if half a dozen Franchise Bills were lost if the national interests were protected’.90 Moreover, Orange speakers invariably spoke against democratic tendencies, such as the Labour Party—especially when a whiff of socialism was about them. Orangemen clearly believed they had more important work than to secure the working man his vote, for some of the most vehement of their religious and political language was reserved for the battle over Home Rule. In this sense, urgency demanded that the home rule question in the 1880s and 1890s should become increasingly more important to the Orange-Tory alliance than a shared, but nebulous, interest in constitution, crown and church. Cumbrian Tories, in uniting with Orangemen over the Home Rule issue, were sounding a clear echo of their peers’ activities in Ulster. Like the

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maverick Randolph Churchill, local Tories were of the view that if the Liberals ‘went for home rule, the Orange card would be the one to play’. Like him, they also prayed ‘Please God it may turn out the ace of trumps and not the two’.91 However, Cumbrian Orangemen, unlike their Ulster peers, were not important enough to be the ace or the two; neither were they the joker in the pack that some contemporaries liked to think. The appeal of their language, particularly over Home Rule, was too widely understood for that. Nobody in their ranks disagreed with the Tory MP for Barrow, Sir Charles Cayzer, who told local Orangemen that ‘Home Rule for Ireland . . . meant the dismemberment of the United Kingdom’.92 Additionally, Orange views of the Union spread beyond the United Kingdom. Home Rule was simply a threat to Empire; this is why, Cayzer argued, ‘Orangemen . . . had always voted solid for the unity and the integrity of this Empire, on which it depended for its peace and prosperity’.93 It was because of this view that, during the heated years after Gladstone’s conversion to the cause in 1886, much energy was expended by Orange-Tories in defiance of the popular will of a growing majority of the Irish people. In mimicry of politics in Ireland, where Home Rule threw differing ideas of Irishness into sharp relief, local battle lines were clearly drawn between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics. Also in common with the awakening Unionism in Ireland at the time, Cumbrian Orangeism leant heavily on analogies between the defence of Ireland in 1798 and a resolve to fight against Home Rule in the 1890s. ‘To these ardent supporters of the constitution’, one Orangeman argued, ‘the safety of Ulster might be confidently entrusted.’94 The activities of the Orange Order in Britain during the 1880s and 1890s must be seen as part of greater events, as expressing deeply entrenched attitudes. Opponents of Home Rule in this period came increasingly to see the issue as a racial struggle fought between Anglo-Saxons and Celts. At the same time, the idea that Home Rule presented a threat to Empire, and economic prosperity, was also woven into the political broadcloth. The fierce debates of 1886 and 1893 deserve detailed treatment themselves, but for now it is fair to say that the tone of these engagements was one of extreme anti-Irish prejudice, in which denial of Irish nationhood and the equation of self-determination with Teutonic, rather than Celtic, peoples came repeatedly to the fore.95 Lord Salisbury’s opposition to Home Rule can be seen in this way,


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questioning fitness to rule, and he remarked in May 1886: ‘You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots for instance’.96 This is the backdrop against which the Orange Order in Britain played its part. In Ireland, of course, it was different. The closeness of Ulster Orangemen to the event, or non-event, of Home Rule serves to lessen somewhat the comparative impression of its English counterpart, as does the immensely strong and growing power-base of the Irish Order and its strong links with British Toryism. It would be wrong, though, to see Orangeism as only important in a purely Irish environment, though it was stronger on that side of St George’s Channel. Equally, it misses the point to ask, as one writer does, ‘what meaning, other than an Irish one, could the Loyal Orangeman’s toast have for mainland Britain?’97 During the Home Rule crisis, the language of ‘margins’ and ‘frontiers’ came to the fore, in both Cumbrian and national contexts, and the differences between Catholic- and Protestant-Irish became clearer than ever they had been. The idea of Ulster as the frontier of British civilisation was explicit in the language of Irish Orange traditions: the unionists alleged protection of the soft underbelly of the United Kingdom and the marginalisation of Irish Catholics were viewed as mutually supporting ideals. All these issues ensconced Cumbrian Orangemen. Additionally, in the heated atmosphere of the 1890s, regional Orangemen parroted the language of social Darwinism employed by the unionist politicians engaged in the fierce parliamentary debate over Home Rule. The language of the Anglo-Saxon versus the Celt trickled down to the grassroots, even entering the debates which occupied countless column inches in local newspapers. The following extracts from the letters of two Barrow Orangemen capture the essence of Britishness to which lodgemen subscribed: In the north of Ireland and part of Leinster . . . the wealth, the moral character, and hence the moral influence of the kingdom might be considered as being concentrated; and as it will ever be, the intelligence of the minor sections of the Irish people overbalances the physical superiority of the other.98 . . . my kinsmen in Ireland have done more by the indomitable energy and industry common to the Anglo-Saxon towards building the British Empire than Irish Celts can ever hope to, even if they were willing, which I emphatically deny.99

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Here we see evidence of the world-view of Orange-Irish unionism. Orangemen were a people planted from Britain in the seventeenth century who never forgot the allegedly superior culture of their antecedents. Captured in these words was an acceptance of the numerical inferiority of Protestant Ireland: because this, after all, added to their heroism. In addition, Orangemen believed their numerical handicap was offset by their redoubtable spirit and by a central role, not merely on British frontiers, but at the vanguard of the empire. Their arguments were not sophisticated, but Orangemen benefited from a myopic view of history and politics which formed an impenetrable shell around their identity. Anything could be stood on its head if it helped Orangemen win an argument. For example, when Irish nationalists claimed Ireland’s island status strengthened the case for independence, Orange critics easily ignored the fact that this very point helped to define the sense of English nationhood evinced in Shakespeare’s ‘Sceptered Isle’. As one Orangeman argued: how does ‘the roar of the Ocean around Ireland’s sea girt shore proclaim her a nation’ . . . is there a nation occupying Walney Island just now and also how many nations are there in America? Shure [sic], the ocean roars around both of them.100

The Orange Order at once intertwined the values of Toryism, a belief in the nation and a pugnacious and unyielding Protestantism; but, as Orangemen claimed to cherish notions of liberty and freedom, some observers dismissed them as nothing more than the hapless flunkies of unscrupulous Tory politicians and evangelising ministers. Still others viewed Orangeism as ‘the bunkum of Ulsteria’; ‘a banditti of marauders, committing massacre in the name of God, exercising despotic powers in the name of liberty’.101 While newspapers commonly acted as vehicles for expressions of exasperation that the lodgemen of the region were permitted to gather ‘into one excitable and undisciplined body—dancing, noisy, insulting, violent, riotous—[to] disturb the peace, provoke ill-feeling, excite strife, and endanger life and destruction of property in the sister island, without a repetition of the same nuisance in lawabiding England’.102 One Irish nationalist, John Gallagher, believed the Orangemen were simply the product of Ulster Protestants’ ‘insensate bigotry and rancorous unreasoning hate’.103 Lodge members tried to deflect such accusations by claiming to uphold


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something sacred and British, but Gallagher simply retorted that, while the Orangeman ‘disguises himself in the lion’s skin, the Barrow nationalists will never mistake the hoarse cry of the Orange donkey for the terrific roar of the kingly brute’.104 The same critic inveighed against the sectarianism of Orangeism but also questioned its historic claim to uphold the liberty of religious freedom. The history of the Order, he averred, ‘is a history of crime. Irishmen who hate Ireland, Christians without a spark of Christian charity.’105 Clearly, for Gallagher, one man’s freedom was another man’s bondage. However, while Irish nationalists were bound to rail against Orangeism, the idea that Orangeism was libertarian also raised alarm amongst indigenous liberal onlookers. Orangemen coveted notions of liberty just as the Victorians themselves upheld the same as a defining feature of their political and cultural life; but the latter also revered law and order. Thus, the paradox of Orange values was not lost on British liberalism. The hostile press was wont to sum up Orangeism as a disgrace to society, the originator of far-reaching political division and sectarian hatred. In Scotland, for example, the Glasgow News described Orangemen as ‘at best a mischievous anachronism alike degrading and disgraceful—a splendid testimony to our perfect freedom but a sad example of the way even freedom can be abused’.106 Liberal newspapers in England saw things with similar clarity, questioning the Orange assumption that they held a monopoly over the protection of Protestantism. The Barrow Herald, for example, insisted: It is difficult . . . to see why Orangemen lay such stress on the principles of civil and religious liberty, when they themselves do not hesitate to deny others . . . Nonconformist Radicals . . . are as anxious as are Orangemen for the maintenance of Protestantism, and in their own way are doing their utmost to promote its interests.107

Despite tensions such as these, and perhaps because of them, Orangeism proved to be remarkably hardy throughout the nineteenth century. During all the years of Victoria’s reign Orangemen believed they held some kind of moral high ground by intertwining, almost imperceptibly, vague notions of civil and religious liberty, anti-Catholicism, bible Christianity, loyalty to the Crown and constitution, and political Toryism. At its roots Orangeism was something Irish, yet its survival and growth in Britain was ensured because it encapsulated an idea beyond sectarianism. Yet sectarian

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it was; one of the clearest measures that Orangeism was alive and well was the violence which accompanied so many of its activities. While this chapter has sought to illustrate that the strength of Orangeism lay in its loyalist-Tory value-system, we will see in the next that communal violence and Orange-Green rivalry still illuminated most clearly the Irish element of Cumbrian life.

NOTES 1 The phrase is Charles Townshend’s, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), p. 246. 2 Barrow Herald, 14 July 1877. 3 Ibid., 19 July 1884. 4 Barrow Herald, 13 July 1880. Ripon was received into Catholic communion in September 1874. See Concise DNB, III, p. 2556. The public denunciation came from William Sykes, a Preston Orangeman of provincial standing, who played an important role in aiding the early developments of Barrow Orangeism. 5 Tom Gallagher, ‘ ‘‘A Tale of Two Cities’’: communal strife in Glasgow and Liverpool’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), p. 116. 6 Barrow Herald, 6 January 1906. 7 The historiography of the Orange Order is relatively sparse, given its importance in the nineteenth century. An excellent analysis of the broad evangelical traditions, of which Orangeism is part, is found in D. Hempton and M. Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London, 1992). For an unashamedly one-sided account of the Orange Order, see R. M. Sibbert, Orangeism in Ireland and throughout the Empire, 2 vols (London, 1939). More balanced is H. Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain, 1795–1836 (London, 1966). See also his ‘The early Orange Order 1795–1870’ and Aiken McClelland, ‘The later Orange Order’, both in T. D. Williams (ed.), Secret Societies in Ireland (Dublin, 1973). Frank Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819–1914 (Manchester, 1988) is the principal study of English Orange traditions. See also his ‘Manchester origins of the Orange Order’, Manchester Region History Review, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1990–91), pp. 12–24. For Scotland, see the trenchant Elaine McFarland, Protestants First: Orangeism in Nineteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990), esp. pp. 30–46, for a broad-based historical survey which is also very strong on theory (see Chapter 2, pp. 17–29). Twentieth-century Scottish Orangeism is analysed by T. Gallagher, Glasgow, the Uneasy Peace: Religious Tensions in Modern Scotland (Manchester, 1987). 8 See D. W. Miller, ‘The Armagh Troubles, 1784–95’, in S. Clark and J. S. Donnelly (eds), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 155–91.


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9 Neal, ‘Manchester origins’, p. 16. 10 Neal, Sectarian Violence, pp. 18–19; Gallagher, Glasgow, p. 24. 11 In 1830 there were four main centres of Orange organisation: Lancashire (77), Yorkshire (36) and Scotland (39) contained 142 out of 230 lodges. See Neal, ‘Manchester origins’, table 2, p. 19. 12 Select Committee Report on Orange Institutions in Great Britain and the Colonies (1835). 13 Neal, Sectarian Violence, pp. 68–70; though Neal calls these the ‘years of decline’: ‘Manchester origins’, pp. 20–21; McFarland, Protestants First, pp. 55–61. 14 McFarland, Protestants First, p. 63. 15 Neal, Sectarian Violence, pp. 70–71, 171. 16 For the texture of this controversy, see W. R. Ralls, ‘The Papal Aggression of 1850: a study in Victorian anti-Catholicism’, Church History, Vol. 43 (1974), reprinted in G. Parsons (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, 4 vols (Manchester, 1991), IV: Interpretations. For a case study of local violence in the wake of the ‘Aggression’, see P. Millward, ‘The Stockport riot of 1852: a study of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City, pp. 207–24. 17 Neal, Sectarian Violence, p. 172. 18 These riots certainly question the claim of one historian that, before 1860, the Orange Order in Belfast was ‘practically moribund’: McClelland, ‘Later Orange Order’, p. 126. 19 In addition to which, Orangeism was affected by the Unlawful Oaths Act, 1823, and the Unlawful Associations Act, 1825. MacFarland, Protestants First, p. 36. 20 Neal, Sectarian Violence; ‘Manchester origins’, p. 13. 21 Gallagher, ‘ ‘‘Tale of Two Cities’’ ’, p. 111. 22 I am indebted for the Scottish details in this paragraph to Elaine McFarland, Protestants First, esp. pp. 47–94, and her ‘ ‘‘A mere Irish faction’’: the Orange institution in nineteenth-century Scotland’, in Ian S. Wood (ed.), Scotland and Ulster (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 71–87; also to Graham Walker, ‘The Protestant Irish in Scotland’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, 1991), pp. 51–55. 23 See Graham Walker, ‘The Orange order in Scotland between the wars’, in International Review of Social History, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1992), pp. 172–206. 24 Gallagher, ‘ ‘‘A Tale of Two Cities’’ ’, pp. 107–29; a fuller exposition of Gallagher’s ideas is found in Glasgow, especially chapters 1–3, for the period before the 1920s. On the Liverpool-Glasgow tradition, see also Joan Smith, ‘Class, skill and sectarianism in Glasgow and Liverpool, 1880–1914’, in R. J. Morris (ed.), Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns (Leicester, 1986), pp. 158–215. 25 Whitehaven Herald, 14 July 1860. 26 It is notoriously difficult to define precisely the Protestant Irish migrant community. See Graham Walker, ‘Irish Protestants’, p. 44. However, using the Orange Order as a vehicle to understand the interaction between English/Scots and Irish Protestants is preferable to regarding Irishness and Catholicism as entirely synonymous.

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27 Glasgow Herald, 16 July 1873, suggested 40,000–50,000; McFarland, Protestants First, p. 71. 28 McFarland, Protestants First, pp. 70–72. 29 See below, pp. 177–79. For Murphy’s short but active career, see W. L. Arnstein, ‘The Murphy Riots: a Victorian dilemma’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1975), pp. 51–71; Donald C. Richter, Riotous Victorians (Athens, Ohio, 1981), pp. 34–49. 30 N. Kirk, ‘Ethnicity, class and popular Toryism, 1850–1870’, in K. Lunn (ed.), Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society, 1870–1914 (Folkestone, 1980), pp. 92–93. For the earlier election, see also J. C. Lowe, ‘The Tory triumph of 1868 in Blackburn and in Lancashire’, Historical Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1973), pp. 733–45. 31 For Murphy’s visit to Whitehaven, see below, pp. 179–83; also, D. M. MacRaild, ‘William Murphy, the Orange Order and communal violence: the Irish in West Cumberland, 1871–84’, in P. Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in Britain, 1840–1950 (Leicester, 1993), esp. pp. 47–52. 32 See, for example, Barrow Times, 14 March 1872. In Glasgow, the development of a robust and continued marching tradition also dates from the early 1870s, this despite earlier, more modest developments: McFarland, Protestants First, p. 70. 33 Whitehaven Herald, 13 July 1872. 34 Ibid., 24 February 1872. 35 Ibid., 13 July 1872. 36 Ibid., 17 July 1872. 37 Barrow Pilot, 26 April 1873. 38 After G. W. Wilson, the lodge’s worshipful master. Barrow Pilot, 13 December 1873. 39 Ibid., 20 June 1874. 40 There is some debate as to the precision of these figures from Whitehaven News, 18 July 1875. The figure reported in the Whitehaven Herald, 18 July 1874, was 1,100 plus ‘the same again in family and friends’. 41 Whitehaven News, 16 July 1874; MacRaild, ‘William Murphy’, p. 53. 42 In 1876, a crowd of between 60,000 and 80,000—‘the biggest Orange turnout in English history’—lined up to cheer on 7,000 to 8,000 processors. Neal, Sectarian Violence, p. 184. Figures for Glasgow in these years reached somewhere in excess of 10,000 and were almost matched in some of the surrounding towns. See McFarland, Protestants First, pp. 70–74, for nineteenth-century Scottish figures. 43 Whitehaven Herald, 17 July 1875. 44 Barrow Herald, 15 July 1882. 45 Ibid., 14 July 1877. 46 Words like ‘True Blues’ and ‘Defenders’ appeared regularly in the names of lodges. Other appellations, like ‘Victoria’, ‘Bentinck’, ‘Earl of Beaconsfield’ and ‘Loyal Sons of Ulster’ tell us something about the political nature of the Order. 47 West Cumberland Guardian and Whitehaven Herald, 18 July 1878. 48 Whitehaven Herald, 15 March 1875. 49 Cumberland Paquet, 15 July 1878.


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50 Neal, Sectarian Violence, p. 52; J. Bohstedt, ‘More than one working class: Protestant and Catholic riots in Edwardian Liverpool’, in J. Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History, 1790–1940 (Liverpool, 1992), p. 207. 51 McFarland, Protestants First, p. 104. 52 Walker, ‘Orange Order in Scotland’, p. 178. 53 McFarland, Protestants First, p. 104. 54 D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, California, 1992), p. 34. This view is supported by other historians including MacFarland. 55 John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974), p. 219. McFarland, Protestants First, argues throughout that the Order in Scotland was overwhelmingly working-class. 56 D. G. Paz, Anti-Catholicism, p. 34. 57 P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980), pp. 256–58; W. J. Lowe, The Irish in MidVictorian Lancashire: The Making of a Working-Class Community (New York, 1989), p. 153. 58 Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, p. 153; N. Kirk, The Growth of Working-Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (Beckenham, 1985), p. 337. Neal’s research on Liverpool illustrates clearly a petty bourgeois attachment to the Order in the first half of the century: Sectarian Violence, p. 71. 59 Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, p. 153. 60 Fairman was appointed Grand Secretary in 1832. See Neal, ‘Manchester origins’, p. 20. This could have been special pleading on his part, though Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, p. 153, supports Fairman’s view. 61 The Revd E. Jump, Whitehaven Herald, 15 July 1876. 62 Barrow Herald, 13 July 1880. 63 Quoted in McFarland, Protestants First, p. 70. 64 Liverpool Mercury, 18 July 1851. 65 Revd J. B. McKenzie speaking to Barrow Orangemen in July 1877. Barrow Herald, 14 July 1877. 66 Glasgow Herald, 11 July 1908; this line is discussed in McFarland, Protestants First, p. 110. 67 ‘An English Protestant’, letter, Barrow Herald, 19 July 1879. 68 Neal, ‘Manchester origins’, p. 15. 69 Porcupine, 10 March 1866, quoted in Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, p. 161. 70 See below, pp. 185–89. Neal, Sectarian Violence, pp. 54–64, 128–33, 158– 67, 196–250; Arnstein, ‘Murphy Riots’; MacRaild, ‘William Murphy’, pp. 47–52, 56–60. For Scotland, see Alan B. Campbell, The Lanarkshire Miners: A Social History of their Trade Unions, 1775-1874 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 178–204. 71 Liverpool Mercury, 13 July 1871 and Catholic Times, 16 July 1870; Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, pp. 160, 162. 72 The term ‘clubbable character’ is from Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, p. 24. Admittedly they are talking about Presbyterian Radicalism, but the image which the term invokes has a wider usefulness. 73 This was also the case in Scotland, where established church ministers

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represented 27 out of 43 clergymen identified on Orange platforms between 1873 and 1900. McFarland, Protestants First, p. 123. 74 Barrow Pilot, 13 December 1873; Whitehaven Herald, 18 July 1874. 75 G. J. Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life, 2 vols (London, 1893), I, p. 246; Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, p. 99. 76 This from a total of 5,250 men employed. See J. D. Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution, table 34, p. 356. 77 Carlisle Express, 26 July 1884. John Bawden died on 18 May 1886. Details from: hand-written notebook entitled ‘Cleator Moor Co-operative’, Carlisle Library local history collection (1B9 CLE339). 78 Lowe, Irish in Lancashire, pp. 153–54. 79 N. Kirk, ‘Ethnicity, class and popular Toryism’, p. 92. 80 H. Pelling, A Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–1910 (London, 1967), tables 29, 35, 36, pp. 275, 323, 332; Marshall and Walton, Lake Counties, table 5.1, p. 111. 81 Gradwell died in office and wore the mayor’s robes for less than a year: Barrow and District Yearbook, 1908 (Barrow, 1908), p. 84, contains a full list of past mayors. 82 Marshall, Furness, p. 253. 83 Barrow News, 1 August 1885. 84 A useful discussion of the broader secular issue is found in Edward Royle, ‘Secularists and Rationalists’, in S. Gilley and W. J. Sheils (eds), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present (London, 1994), pp. 406–22. 85 H. W. Schneider, address to the Orangemen of Barrow. Barrow Herald, 18 July 1885. 86 ‘One of them’, in Barrow Herald, 30 May 1893. In going on to justify Orangeism, this writer states: ‘. . .why was such a body called into existence? . . . [the] only answer can be that if there had been no Papist tyranny there would have been no need of Orange Societies.’ 87 James Kennedy, Master of the Barrow Orangemen, Barrow Herald, 15 July 1882. 88 By T. Fielding of Manchester, Barrow Herald, 18 July 1884. 89 Leader comment, Barrow Herald, 19 July 1884. 90 Barrow Herald, 19 July 1884. 91 In J. Bardon, A History of Ulster (Belfast, 1992), p. 376. 92 Barrow Herald, 4 January 1906. 93 Ibid., 6 January 1906. 94 ‘A Corner Boy’, letter, Barrow Herald, 30 May 1893. 95 A useful introduction to some of these issues is L. P Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (New York, 1968), pp. 98–107. Also see D. G. Boyce, ‘ ‘‘Marginal Britons’’: the Irish’, in R. Colls and P. Dodds (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (London, 1986), esp. pp. 232–39. For a fuller discussion of the ‘race’, ‘class’ and ‘Orange’ questions, see D. M. MacRaild, ‘ ‘‘Principle, Party and Protest’’: the language of Victorian Orangeism in the North of England’, in S. West (ed.), The Victorians and Race (Leicester, 1996), pp. 128–40.


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96 Speech to the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, St James’s Hall, London, quoted in Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, p. 102. 97 R. Colls, ‘Englishness and political culture’, in Colls and Dodds (eds), Englishness, Politics and Culture, p. 40. Colls’s essay is convincing on Irish Orangeism but ignores the British dimension. 98 ‘A Corner Boy’, letter, Barrow Herald, 30 May 1893. 99 Henry Newson, prominent Barrow Orangeman, letter, Barrow Herald, 16 June 1893. 100 ‘A Corner Boy’, letter, Barrow Herald, 30 May 1893. Walney is a small island situated only a couple of hundred yards off the south-western tip of Barrow. It is perhaps seven miles long. 101 F. J. Devlin, letter, Barrow Herald, 10 June 1893. 102 ‘English Protestant’, letter, Barrow Herald, 19 July 1879. 103 John Gallagher lived in Barrow in the 1890s, readily engaging his Orange foe in the letter columns of the local press at this time. Barrow Herald, 16 May 1893. 104 Ibid. 105 Letter in Barrow Herald, 30 May 1893. The letter included the following stanza to summarise Gallagher’s view of Orangeism: The hypocrites of creeds, With the bible on their lips, And the Devil in their deeds. 106 Glasgow News, 27 July 1878; quoted in McFarland, Protestants First, p. 147. 107 Leader comment, Barrow Herald, 13 July 1880.

CHAPTER 6

Sectarian violence and communal division The northern population being more robust in its mental equipment resents priestly dictations, and has a repugnance of this childish and medieval form of religion. Samuel Smith, MP, writing on Catholicism, North-Western Daily Mail, 14 August 1903

‘Violence’, Ian Gilmour argues, ‘appears inseparable from the human condition, though its degree is subject to wild fluctuations.’1 The violence of any society depends upon its culture, history and institutions. These factors, as well as questions of class and ethnicity, were clearly central to the tradition of violence which welcomed Irish settlers in Britain in the last century. Economically, for example, Irish migrants were perceived by the indigenous working class as a threat to native living standards, while their utility to employers allegedly weakened the class project of the emerging industrial proletariat. Culturally, anti-Catholicism set the majority of migrants apart from the host group; at the same time, the conflicting politics of nationalism and unionism strained AngloIrish relations at all levels of society. The Irish and British, drawn together by geography, were separated by centuries of mutual antipathy, and Ireland struggled to maintain a distinct identity in the shadow of its powerful neighbour. In an ironic twist of fate, however, large-scale migration meant that by the 1830s the colony had seemingly turned coloniser, which Carlyle saw as recompense for six centuries of injustice. By any standard measure of ethnic difference—religion, culture, habit, custom, politics—the Irish were seen as different. Each of these factors of difference, moreover, carried the risk of violent repercussions in the new communities. It was a heady brew of politics and religion, interspersed with economic, cultural and social factors, which propagated anti-Irishness in the towns of Victorian Britain. Indeed, as one Irish newspaper in

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1868 commented, ‘Nowhere in England can our countrymen consider themselves safe from English mob violence . . .’.2 The background to this material on Cumbrian violence is provided by the conditions and attitudes of Victorian life which were discussed in Chapter 1. From the cessation of hostilities against Napoleon, native workers expressed increasing unease at the threat posed by Irish workers. From Clydeside and Northumberland to London and Birmingham, where Irish settlers clustered, violent reprisals became endemic. From an early point in the century, Orange versus Green upheaval also spread throughout similar areas. Across Lancashire and central Scotland, and, as Neal and Gallagher have shown, especially on Clydeside and in Liverpool, Orange Day riots became a regular feature of street life. Exacerbated by innate native hostility, anti-Catholicism and tensions over the Home Rule question, violence and the Irish seemingly went hand-in-hand. This chapter is an attempt to describe and explain the previously unknown Cumbrian dimension of what was a key feature of Victorian life.3 Working-class aggression was a key feature of the Irish experience in urban northern Britain—in Cumbria as elsewhere—during the second half of the century. Such violence, Gilley argues, ‘is the means of expression of men who lack any other’, and its study ‘is especially useful to the historian of an otherwise inarticulate working class’.4 This chapter delineates the main types of intra-Irish and anti-Irish violence in later nineteenth-century Cumbria and assesses the deep-seated and divisive nature of host responses to Irish incomers. There is also a more general examination of the frequent outbreaks of Orange-related violence. Four main incidents are examined here: the Barrow anti-Irish riot of 1864, which erupted among navvies building the docks; the disorder which accompanied William Murphy’s lectures in Whitehaven in 1871; the Cleator Moor Orange Day riot of 1884; and finally, the violence and communal disaffection which surrounded the visit of John Kensit’s Wycliffe Preachers to Barrow in 1903. The evidence presented in this chapter reveals both the ugly and inchoate nature of workingclass aggression and the middle-class response to such violence as displayed by the contemporary press. Observers of rough workingclass culture may have declined to use their fists in condemnation of the Irish, but were no less spiteful when displaying nationalistic or class-based prejudices in the written word. As the chapter unfolds

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we will see that anti-Irish violence was not restricted to the immediate post-Famine era. Indeed, one of the central themes of this book has been to demonstrate how stereotyped responses to the emergence of Irish settlements in Britain remained pretty much unreconstructed even down to the Edwardian period.

I In terms of anti-Irish violence, Cumbrian life in the 1840s and 1850s cannot be compared with that in Lancashire. Nevertheless, the towns and villages of the region were not unaccustomed to violence in general, and the Irish presence was growing consistently at that time. Considerable alarm was aroused by the Chartist threat in the 1840s as it was, generally, by the threat of workmen’s combinations.5 Yet levels of actual violence were only noticeably increased when the Irish were thrown into the equation. In 1851, during the turbulence of the ‘Papal Aggression’, for example, an Irish mob prevented James Hughan, a Unitarian street preacher, from delivering an address in Whitehaven. A few months later, when George Jacob Holyoake, the secular radical, came to the town to address the question of popery, he too met with opposition from the local Irish. Writing in his memoirs many years later, Holyoake was scathing about the place. ‘The Irish population were dreaded’, he contended, ‘and their prejudices were known to be above the reach of reason, and the population of Lord Lonsdale’s collieries were no less causes of alarm.’6 The most notorious outburst of Irish-related violence in the early Victorian years, however, was instigated not by residents of one of the region’s towns but by itinerant navvies building the major north-south railways which cut through the Cumbrian landscape. During the 1840s the demands of ‘Railway Mania’ promoted a spiralling growth both in the number of navvying communities throughout Britain and in the animosity among them. By mid-1845 the combined pressures of grim living conditions, hard work and national and regional tensions thrust these colonies to a state ‘near civil war’.7 In early 1846, for example, tensions erupted violently in the north of England and Scotland, and there were serious riots at Penrith and Gorebridge, near Edinburgh. The first involved over 2,000 Englishmen alone, and was started, it was alleged, because an Irish navvy ignored his


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ganger’s order to use a shovel and not his pick.8 The Penrith outbreak was probably the earliest noted instance in which the people of the Lake Counties gained first-hand experience of the violence of the navvies.9 This type of violence commonly flared up with minimal provocation and the protagonists routinely marauded the countryside, burning down the shanties of their adversaries, scattering men, women and children alike. Nor were such events restricted to the 1840s when railway expansion was largest in scale and most important in its social impact. The first of the major riots we examine here was the work of a similar body of men; yet it occurred over twenty years later. In 1864, the majority of the working men of Barrow were engaged either erecting the steelworks or excavating the Devonshire dock. The chief contractor, Thomas Brassey, alone employed 1,500 navvies, among whom the Barrow riot originated.10 Brassey’s contract work had been under way for about four months when the press broke the news of a riot which it thought ‘likely to end in the ignominious flight of poor Paddy from the locality’: For the first time in the annals of Barrow, our town has, during the past few days, been made the theatre of a series of disturbances which may well be looked upon as a disgrace to civilisation. We allude to the expulsion from the town by threats and violence on the part of a lot of ‘roughs’ whom we should be ashamed to call Englishmen, of nearly all the Irish labourers—ready and willing hands—who had come to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.11

According to Marshall, concurring with the stereotyped image of Irish labour, ‘a rumour—probably well enough founded—spread that the Irishmen were to be used for undercutting wages’.12 Contemporary reports, however, denied claims ‘that the Hibernians were working for under wages and . . . that they began to row’.13 The Barrow Herald traced the occurrence to an argument between two men, one from Dumfries and an Irishman called McManus, because the latter had accidentally knocked the other with his wheelbarrow. The Scotsman insisted, with ‘curses loud and deep’, that if all the ‘Mickeys’ in the town did not ‘make themselves scarce’ before the next morning, they would be hunted mercilessly. McManus, who had heard such threats many times before, just ignored them.14 Thereafter, it appears this brief exchange was exacerbated by English workers from the firm of T. C. Hunter, a sub-contractor to Brassey, and that ‘these workers made common cause with others

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working not in the docks, but at the construction site of the new steelworks in Hindpool’.15 In the mid-1860s ‘Hunter’s Navvies’ built a reputation for violent behaviour up and down the Cumberland coast, as well as in Barrow.16 The events of the actual riots are quite confusing; even the Barrow Herald dealt in conjecture rather than analysis. Hunter’s men, it seems, paraded around the various works and construction sites of the town recruiting forces to expel the Irish. The growing crowd, armed with sticks and stones, clashed with police and 130 special constables who had been hastily enrolled.17 Despite the rapid actions of Superintendent Cooper, who sent reinforcements from his station in Ulverston, the police were ‘badly worsted’ before peace was restored.18 On the Tuesday night the rioters stalked the streets until a late hour, battering down the doors of most of the dwellings known to contain Irish lodgers. Eye-witness reports suggest that those intercepted by the crowd were dealt with harshly. This passage is typical: . . . [one group of] the Irish being the weaker party by considerable odds had to take to the indignity of being driven with their picks and spades at their shoulders, and their scanty bundles of clothing on their backs, towards Salthouse Marsh with a yelling crowd at their heels.19

Other incidents in which individuals and small groups of Irish were threatened with death if they did not leave the town were reported that night with some frequency. Another gang of navvies was witnessed running riot in John Street, following a drinking session in the Devonshire Hotel on Hindpool Road, and after turning several others out of their lodgings and hunting them, like . . . hounds after a hare, they directed their steps towards Forshaw-street and from thence towards Fisher-street, headed by a big rough called ‘Charley’, who styled himself the ‘sergeant of the gang’.20

The actions of these rioters clearly had a frightening effect on the local Irish population and ‘a goodly number took the hint’: those who were able to got their money from their employers leaving by the six o’clock train on Wednesday morning, others of their countrymen also leaving quietly by the noon train, while a third batch left by the 2.50pm train on the same day for more comfortable quarters.21

Wednesday began quietly but in the early afternoon an estimated 200 to 300 men visited the brickyards of Woodhouse and Gradwell, with the intention of driving out the Irish labourers who worked


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there. After this, the troublemakers headed for the site of the new steelworks, halting all work, insisting that their brethren should unite against the Irish. They then made off to the ironworks of Hannay and Schneider, scattering all Irish hod-carriers as they went. Here, though, the rioters encountered determined resistance as several ‘heads of department’ persuaded them that they should depart or ‘rue the day they stepped on private soil’.22 During the ensuing melee, the police charged the men and grabbed two of the alleged ringleaders.23 The newspaper commentary suggests resistance began to ebb after this point, and, by Thursday 21 April 1864, some of those involved began to appear before the magistrates in Ulverston. When asked about the affair and its origins, one defendant, Barr, blamed long-standing grievances within the navvying community. He alluded to an incident of ‘some time ago’ described as ‘a great disturbance between the English and the Irish navvies on the Hawick and Carlisle line of the Railway . . . [when] it appeared the Irishmen had the best of it’.24 It seems that the men in Brassey’s employ constantly reminded their Irish colleagues of this incident and promised to exact revenge.25 Barr denied any involvement in the Barrow riot and claimed he had not left work. Two other defendants, ‘stalwart young fellows’, John Casson and John William Johnson, were also brought before the bench accused of threatening two Irishmen, Patrick McManus and John Leonard, insisting they leave the town. Although Barr testified against him, Casson attempted to refute the charge that for three weeks he had threatened Irishmen at the docks. On Thursday evening, following the initial magistrates’ hearing, six more men were apprehended by police when a ‘ganger in endeavouring to protect one of his men, an Irishman, was very roughly handled’. This additional outburst led to the imprisonment of all six defendants: three got two months with hard labour while the others got one month.26 Long-standing acrimony, captured in folk memories of the Penrith Riot of 1846, and a desire to avenge these historic events, seem to have been the driving forces behind the riot. It is inherently clear in the literature that the Irish were perceived as an economic threat by many of their non-Irish contemporaries. This problem, fused to a complex body of cultural and religious antipathy, led to serious disturbances when the railways were laid between Lancaster, the north and the big Scottish cities. It is hard to believe that

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an altercation over a wheelbarrow might initiate a full-scale riot. Few, if any, of the men involved in the Barrow riot in 1864 would have been personally involved in the Penrith Riot of eighteen years earlier. Yet anti-Irish sentiment on the great railway construction projects of the nineteenth century was traditional; it was enshrined in the folklore of these workers and was kept alive within their oral culture. Men like ‘Hunter’s Navvies’ were clearly a part of this violent tradition of the navvying culture and they remembered the legendary flashes of violence which illuminated their historical tradition, for they needed little provocation to fight the Irish. Explanations of the trouble were vague, yet the local evidence and the endemic animosity within the ranks of the navvies do suggest that any accusations of undercutting were wide of the mark. This proposition is enforced by the fact that in Barrow, during the early 1860s, employers often struggled to find adequate manpower. Very often, however, the merest hint of undercutting was enough to excite violence, and navvies were not alone in believing the Irish suppressed wages. In general terms, Brassey’s reputation for good wages militates against such a conclusion, yet despite his reputed preference, when working on foreign projects, for expensive English labour rather than cheap ‘coolies’, it remains possible that he did bring in low-cost labour, direct from Ireland, to contain the spiralling costs of a project on which he apparently lost £45,000 per annum.27 Given the levels of mutual antipathy in the ranks of the period’s roving labour, it is unsurprising that the English and Scots should so readily think ill of their Irish counterparts.28 In the Barrow case, like so many others, the dearth of evidence means the question of undercutting is one which the historian cannot satisfactorily answer. However, the testimony given in court by a local contractor, Andrew J. Woodhouse, suggests that there was a hierarchical division of labour in Barrow, with the Irish at the bottom. Woodhouse made some interesting observations about the nature of the Irish in his own workforce which suggest that they and the English and Scots were not even in competition for the same jobs. The chairman of the bench, John Fell, asked Woodhouse: ‘Had you any Irish working for you?’ To this Woodhouse replied: ‘Yes, there is not an Englishman that will carry a hod, and if the Irish, who are the only persons we can get to do the work, are not allowed to do so my work must stop’.29 Fell responded: ‘Have you any idea how


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this ill-feeling against the Irish labourers originated?’ Woodhouse was not sure, but ended his reply with the words: ‘I don’t think it has been going on very long, but has chiefly originated since Mr. Brassey’s work commenced. If the Irish labourers are to be driven out of the town, the building trade will be at a standstill.’30 The hostilities which spilled over in April 1864 were, for the main part, quite typical of communal relations in this period. However, it was a different form of sectarianism—that engendered by religion and by the pugnacious prejudices of Orangeism—which had the most lasting impact upon Cumbrian life.

II In the generation after the Great Famine, peripatetic Protestant lecturers caused quite a splash by playing upon working-class fears of the Irish, Fenianism and an innate British aversion to Catholicism. The most famous of these was the Irishman William Murphy, described by one writer as ‘a flaming fox sent . . . among the corn’.31 Murphy was born and baptised a Catholic, in Castletown-Conyers, Co. Limerick, in 1834. His father converted secretly to Protestantism and when this was discovered the family fled to Co. Mayo. The elder Murphy became a Protestant lecturer, like his son after him, and was also a colourful figure, continually arousing animosity at his meetings. In later life Murphy maintained that his father was stoned to death by an angry mob at one of his lectures. The young William became a scripture reader, married in 1859, and in the wake of his father’s death, sailed for Liverpool in 1862. From there he walked to London, offering his services as an evangelist. Murphy began his no-popery lecturing career with the Protestant Evangelical Mission and Electoral Union (PEMEU) which aimed to uphold Protestantism by a combination of lectures, sermons, public meetings and the publishing of various tracts and pamphlets. Sales of several million copies of the latter were claimed by 1869. Murphy epitomised this type of religious extremism and carried to all his meetings copies of PEMEU literature, such as the infamous Confessional Unmasked, condemned by two English courts as obscene. Also available at these assemblies was Maria Monk, the most infamous of all anti-Catholic publications.

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Murphy owes his place in history not merely to the content, nature and delivery of his lectures or to his entertainment value and deliberate courting of controversy. The late 1860s were an opportune time for a man like Murphy. Fenianism was a powerful force at this time and it excited an almost hysterical fear and near-pathological hatred of the Irish in Britain, among whom, it was popularly believed, Fenian activists were given protection. This political and religious climate enabled Murphyism to become a populist antiCatholic movement. It encapsulated strains of thought already present in Britain’s deeply anti-Catholic culture. As well as representing widespread working-class Protestant religious ideals, then, ‘Murphyism’, as one historian has said, also ‘reflected the reaction to Fenianism at the grass-roots level’.32 Murphy did not need Fenianism to attract an audience, but he was certainly aided in his efforts to denounce Popery by the awakening fears of a whole stratum of society—working-class Protestants—angered by Irish terrorism. Murphy’s controversial career made him a living legend, a man, in the words of one Cumbrian newspaper, ‘well-known throughout the country as an opponent of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church’.33 The tours of Murphy and his followers highlighted and often isolated Irish Catholics. The meetings, indeed, have been described as ‘reminiscent of Mosley’s marches through London’s East End’.34 After one Murphy riot in Ashton-under-Lyne, T. M. Healy visited the ruins of many Irish houses, declaring later in his memoirs that ‘On a small scale they resembled the devastated regions of France in 1918’.35 Murphy’s oratory, then, served to strengthen the prejudices of the English working class and, to a degree, of Protestants generally. Murphy’s particular influence was to bring an impressive coherence to hitherto inarticulate anti-Irish working-class sentiment. He put Roman Catholicism under acute pressure in the industrial heartlands of the Midlands and Lancashire, exciting audiences and inciting violence wherever he appeared.36 He so incensed groups of Irish immigrants that some did react violently. In 1866, for example, Murphy was attacked by 150 Plymouth Irish, some armed with shillelaghs, from whom he was only saved by a band of marines.37 Murphy believed, fundamentally, that Roman Catholicism was evil, but the Irish were outraged by what they regarded as his blasphemy. The ‘Murphy Riots’ that followed in his wake caused extensive harm to property, people and to communal


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relations in the various towns that his entourage visited. His tours of the Midlands and south-east Lancashire, between 1868 and 1871, sparked off the most serious religious disorder of the whole Victorian period and ‘a whirlwind of destruction was left in his wake’.38 It is significant that the authorities usually blamed Murphy for the trouble that surrounded him. Murphy was seldom prevented from speaking, which serves as a ‘reminder of the intense Victorian commitment both to freedom of speech and the demands of public order’.39 Murphy’s first lecture in Whitehaven was planned for 19 April 1871. Posters and placards announced a series of sessions to discuss ‘. . . the Sacraments of Rome, the Confessional and similar topics’.40 The Whitehaven authorities claimed to have done all they could to prevent the visit. They requested Murphy himself to cancel his sojourn and asked the officials of the Oddfellows’ Hall not to allow its use.41 The Orange organisers refused to comply and Murphy duly came. This first meeting proved to be a standard evening’s work for the lecturer. He received a typically boisterous reception as the audience prepared to hear his views on the Seven Sacraments of Rome. He began by trying to placate the Catholics in the audience, asserting that ‘it isn’t against the person . . . that I am going to speak; it is against the system, because I believe it to be dishonouring God, and ruinous to the souls of men’.42 Murphy then challenged any Catholic to join him on the stage and argue the Papist case ‘not by brickbats and bludgeons’ but by ‘fair arguments’. A militiaman answered this call, leapt up on to the stage, and proceedings began to degenerate. At one point, Murphy declared that ‘unless all Roman Catholic priests, monks, popes and cardinals got married, they could never be saved’.43 The Orange section of the crowd cheered this remark tumultuously and the militiaman retorted: ‘I shall polish him off for that’.44 However, the crowd called ‘Put him out!’, hissing and jeering as the militiaman left the stage. Someone shouted ‘Go on, Murphy lad, open yer mouth!’, and the lecturer managed only a cry of ‘Englishmen’ before ‘he was forced to stop by the hooting of a body of Irish miners’, and ‘feeling that bodily harm might be done him, his supporters escorted him out of the hall’.45 These fears were well founded. During his retreat Murphy was mobbed and his supporters, hearing cries of ‘they’re killing Murphy!’, rallied and a shortlived disturbance ensued, while Murphy and his bodyguard took

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refuge in the hall-keeper’s house. It was several hours before the streets were quiet again.46 Murphy still went ahead with plans for a second performance on the following evening—Thursday 20 April 1871. This time, however, he was met with an organised and altogether more determined attack, which illustrated the strength of the local Irish populace, as well as their fierce independence and their unwillingness to tolerate Murphy’s agitation. A body of Irish miners, numbering between 200 and 300, arrived by train from Cleator Moor and marched with military precision to the Oddfellows’ Hall in search of Murphy.47 The mob discovered Murphy in an ante-room, preparing for the evening’s proceedings. There ensued a rush, in which he was swamped. At Whitehaven Petty Sessions, three weeks later, he briefly gave his account of events: I was knocked down and trampled on, and in consequence of several parties also being knocked down I was fortunately able to get into the street [from the hall]. When I got there, some of the men who came out of the hall set upon me again. I managed to get into the building adjoining the hall, and was again knocked down, and became insensible. I made two attempts to get into the building, but was set upon most savagely each time.48

While in the hall, the mob had tried to throw him over the banister, but having failed in this task, they threw him down the stairs. The attack was brief but vicious and Murphy was badly beaten before Inspector Little and his men could mount a rescue. Projectiles and weapons were later found at the scene, including ‘six large stones, a poker, and a thick stick which had been broken over the unfortunate man’.49 The police were heavily outnumbered and made no effort to thwart the assailants’ departure. As if to emphasise this victory, and ‘Having done their ill work’: . . . the Cleator Moor band lingered not, but at once marched up Lowther-street homewards, followed as far as the castle gate by a crowd of Whitehaven, but molested by none. They went by Corkickle, Harrington and Inkermann Terraces, &c., coolly smoking their pipes, and indulging occasionally in a triumphant hurrah and waving their hats.50

These men were treated to an approving reception when they arrived back in Cleator, but ‘in order to escape the consequences of their conduct’, many declined to join the celebrations, and instead gathered their belongings and fled.51 For weeks after the assault, feelings in the two towns continued


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to run high and, in an effort to deter further trouble, a detachment of militiamen was deployed in Whitehaven. Even the presence of the troops and a strong body of police, however, could not prevent all the incidents which flowed from Murphy’s visit. In the weeks which followed, at least two of the town’s tradesmen suffered ‘threatening demonstrations’ at the hands of ‘the more violent of the Roman Catholic element’ from Cleator Moor. The Irish Catholics believed that these tradesmen shared some responsibility for bringing Murphy to the town. In an attempt to refute this, one of the men concerned, Henry Fitzpatrick, offered a £20 reward to anyone who could prove that he ‘had or has any connection with Mr Murphy whatever’.52 The police displayed particular caution in their attempts to apprehend the culprits. The authorities probably wished to return the town to normal conditions as quickly as possible, and had every reason for a cautious approach, since the slightest miscalculation could have caused an already simmering cauldron to boil over, while Inspector Little had to wait for advice and instruction from the police chief in Carlisle, which caused irritation in the locality.53 Within a week of Murphy’s visit, however, dozens of people had already been questioned and four arrested. These included two iron-ore miners, the brothers Patrick and Dennis Doyle, ‘with whom the police are well acquainted’.54 Dennis Doyle was arrested at the local races, and was found to be carrying a revolver. Less than a week later a further seven men were taken into custody. In Whitehaven a large, angry crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of the detainees as they were brought to the local police station, but a strong police and militia presence kept the crowd in check.55 The assault had left Murphy very weak. He was confined to his bed and constantly watched over by a doctor, his wife and the police; his supporters maintained a vigil outside his lodgings, occasionally singing hymns.56 After a short period of recuperation, Murphy was able to attend the court hearings against his assailants. Even in court, with his head bandaged, Murphy could not pass up the opportunity to expound his religious beliefs. An objection by the defence was overruled, and the anti-papist lecturer discoursed at length about the illegality of ‘nunneries and convents’. In between this outburst, and divulging that his favourite subject for lecture was ‘The Confessional Unmasked’, Murphy identified Patrick Doyle as the man who first struck him. Doyle, his brother

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Dennis, and five other men were committed to the Cumberland Assizes at Carlisle; the other four were released.57 The committed were taken to Carlisle by train, each handcuffed and wearing foot irons. According to one report, the crowd that congregated at the station contained a number of friends of the accused.58 The proceedings passed off without incident, although ‘Great numbers of a low class of Irish followed [the omnibuses] and threatening epithets were freely used, but no serious attempt was made to rescue the prisoners’.59 Within two weeks the men were granted bail, and on Friday 19 May they returned to Cleator Moor. In a report, entitled ‘The Disturbed State of Cleator Moor’, the Whitehaven Herald described their re-appearance on the scene: The reception they met with was of an uproarious character, and the ‘demonstration’, which had been ‘got up for the occasion’, was of the wildest description. Drinking was freely indulged in, and, amongst a great many, the week-end was devoted to celebrating the interim liberation of the accused.60

The police believed that disturbances were being deliberately provoked by hostile Irish Catholic residents still clearly angry about the events surrounding Murphy. The celebrations of the two Doyles and the other accused, however, proved to be shortlived; they had been bailed, but still faced the Assizes. Murphy, whose health remained frail, suffered a physical set-back and illhealth prevented him from attending Carlisle Assizes when the cases were heard.61 At the hearing, three of the men stood charged with ‘feloniously wounding William Murphy with intent to disable’, while all were charged with assault. Two barristers for the defence claimed that Murphy could not be too ill to attend, as placards had been posted saying that he was planning to appear at an Orange demonstration in the town. In the end five of the men received sentences of twelve months’ hard labour and two got three months.62 The imprisonment of Murphy’s assailants, however, did not end the affair. Sporadic outbreaks of violence and assaults on the police continued and at one point the Wesleyan Chapel was stoned by a gang of young Irishmen.63 In the autumn, fresh fears were aroused by the news that the Orangemen of Whitehaven had invited Murphy back. It was heard that Murphy intended to return to give a series of four lectures, between 5 and 8 December 1871. Inspector Little told magistrates


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he was worried about the consequences of Murphy’s return to the area.64 The magistrates appealed to the Home Office, pointing out that they had insufficient police to deal with protracted unrest. Despite the worries of the authorities, Murphy’s visit went ahead. The magistrates immediately ordered him to find sureties of £100 to keep the peace, and in addition two of his assistants were each ordered to find £50.65 At a meeting held in the Oddfellows’ Hall on 3 December 1871, local Orangemen moved a resolution to express ‘thankfulness to Almighty God for his favour to William Murphy in so far restoring him to health as to enable him to come once more to Whitehaven to preach the Gospel’.66 Murphy delivered his four lectures, each only five minutes long, and there appears this time to have been no significant outbreak of violence initiated by either the Orangemen or the Catholics. The return of Murphy did not, however, mark the end the story. Some months later he was in the news again as, in March 1872, news broke that Murphy had died.67 Surgeons, who carried out a post mortem in his adoptive Birmingham, claimed that the causes of death were directly attributable to the events of 20 April of the previous year in Whitehaven. The news was met with outrage by the local Orange Order and prompted a press attack on those Irish miners who were allegedly responsible. One editor claimed that if they had not been told the place of the assault ‘our readers might have imagined that the outrage had been committed by Kaffirs or Maoris, or some other savage tribe’.68 The visit of Murphy had highlighted inter-communal hostilities, while his death helped stimulate a revival of the local Orange Order, which now became an effective forum for collective expression by Protestants, and a vehicle for militant anti-Catholicism.

III The public house was at the heart of working-class community networks, and the local Irish Catholics, whose reputation for drinking was well established, cannot be seen as blameless when violence erupted. Given the nature of the area—the hard work, the heavy drinking, a shortage of police and the pugnacity of the Orangemen—it was inevitable that fighting should occur. The Orange rebirth heightened tensions and further alienated the Irish

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Catholics. The fighting that broke out in Workington in July 1871, for example, was typical in all respects aside from the fact that the recent attack upon Murphy added to its seriousness. One paper described the incident with the following words: An Orangeman, leaving a shop, was asked by a catholic if he wanted his face making all right, having had it swollen in a pub fight the night before. When the Orangeman said yes, the Catholic struck him a severe blow . . . in the course of a few minutes, about a hundred Catholics and Orangemen assembled and a general fight ensued . . . After considerable difficulty, the police succeeded in quelling the riot. Great excitement still prevails in the neighbourhood, and another outbreak is feared.69

Orangemen and Catholics needed little excuse for a fight. Nor did it take long for trifling incidents to escalate out of proportion. The most common of these situations developed on or around the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ when the Catholics often congregated to jostle the marching Orangemen. Such an instance, occurring in July 1876, involved between 1,500 and 1,600 hostile Catholics who met up with the Cleator Moor Orangemen as they returned from a regional gathering at Whitehaven. The crowd, predominantly ‘women and lads’, booed and jeered when the local fife and drum band returned after entertaining their brethren in nearby Frizington. As the band progressed into the town, playing ‘Tommy Make Room for Your Uncle’, ‘. . . they were pelted with stones most unmercifully by the rabble, and had it not been for the prompt action of Inspector Brown and his excellent staff of officers, the consequences might have been somewhat serious’.70 During the years of the Orange revival, the pages of the local press were littered with incidents of fighting and unrest. Most Catholics, it seems, would have supported the sentiments of Mary Jane Kehoe who, after an altercation with an Orange shopkeeper and his family, threatened to ‘pull the Orange heart out the daughter’.71 At the same time, few Orangemen were willing to stand by and take abuse; it might be said they were more likely to be responsible for it. In the eyes of a biased press, however, the Catholics were a mere rabble, while the Orangemen were perceived as determined, organised and provoked. The events of 12 July 1884, however, altered this image. The habitual outbreaks of violence that occurred between the Orange and Green fraternities of west Cumberland reflect to some extent the basic divisions that existed between Catholics and


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Protestants. However, none of their clashes compared in magnitude to the outbreak that occurred on 12 July 1884 at Cleator Moor when the Cumbrian Orangemen decided to hold their annual meeting in that town. The intensity of the violence on this occasion outstripped even the attack made upon William Murphy thirteen years earlier and the height to which feelings ran equalled that achieved in both camps over Murphy. Things might have been a good deal worse if the north Lancashire brethren had turned up as well as their Cumberland counterparts. A reporter explained: ‘Members from Barrow had been invited and had said they could have sent about 2,000 people to the demonstration, but could not attend through want of work’.72 Despite the absence of the South Furness lodges, the choice of Cleator Moor as the venue guaranteed ample excitement. As one paper said: As if to court disturbance the Orangemen in circuit no. 8, Western Province, representing 1800 members including Maryport, Workington, Harrington, Parton, Whitehaven, and other districts, decided they would this year hold their annual demonstration in the stronghold of the [Roman Catholic] enemy.73

There were, then, real dangers for Orangemen in the ‘capital of the mining district’.74 The Carlisle Express added a further reason to fear the choice of venue: ‘The rank and file . . . may not know, but the leaders certainly do that among the Catholic population of Cleator Moor the spirit of toleration is not much cultivated.’75 In the early afternoon of Saturday 12 July, the marchers, accompanied by eight bands, arrived at the station and made their way, past the Catholic chapel, to Wathbrow where a public meeting was convened.76 At this meeting the Revd G. B. Armes said he was shocked to see so many police present. He asserted that ‘Orangemen didn’t need police’.77 Armes also said after the event that he did not know that Orangemen carried revolvers. In fact, the 45 constables on duty arguably were too few. Orange estimates put the size of the crowd at some 800, whereas the Carlisle Patriot claimed there were 1,300 to 1,600 Orangemen present.78 There were also large crowds of onlookers—men, women and children—prompted by nice weather, as well as by the lure of Orangeism. Trouble began when the public meeting drew to a close and the paraders started to make their way back to the station. The atmosphere in the town centre was tense and many shop windows were boarded up. As the procession moved forward the mood became more belligerent and

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a substantial crowd assembled. One reporter expected that the ‘usual epithets’ and the ‘odd customary stone’ might be exchanged, until ‘I noticed that the young men held their coat pockets in a manner that raised the suspicion that the pockets were full of stones. The procession was now 200 yards behind us. . .’79 As the marchers closed in, the first attack was launched, with the police also targeted. Superintendents Thornburrow and Taylor, of Whitehaven and Cockermouth respectively, were singled out ‘because of their grander helmets’, and ‘While the police were diverted a rush was made on the procession’. This attack was maintained until after the Orangemen had reached the station and, in addition, ‘an attempt was made to destroy the banners and drums [of the bands, and] . . . in this the rioters were partially successful’.80 In his report to the Home Secretary, the Chief Constable of Cumberland, J. Dunne, said that the riot had begun after some Catholics had heard that an Orangeman had struck one of the crowd a blow to the face.81 Whether this is correct or not we shall never know, but it is clear that the Orangemen were not blameless. Later revelations show that they came well prepared for trouble. As the affray gathered momentum, many of the marchers added to the seriousness of the situation by drawing revolvers and firing on the crowd. One particular lodge, the Sons of Israel, was singled out for carrying these weapons.82 The majority of the shots fired, however, must have been blanks, otherwise the death toll would have been fearfully high. Mr Ainsworth, a local employer, succeeded in getting the Irish portion of the crowd away from the fracas, but only temporarily. They soon charged again and ‘volley after volley of stones was showered upon the crowd’. Unfortunately for Henry Tumelty, at least one of the shots was not a blank, and he died that afternoon with a bullet-hole through the head. The use of the guns infuriated the crowd and ‘they redoubled their ferocious attacks, and several hand to hand encounters ensued’.83 The Orange fraternity also came armed with other less startling, though potentially lethal, items of weaponry. Among these were swords, sabres and pikes, the latter wielded like quarterstaffs. There were numerous injuries, although, surprisingly, only one fatality from the afternoon’s violence. The rioting ended when the trains pulled out of Cleator Moor with the harassed Orange lodges on board. The contingent of policemen, led by Dunne, nevertheless stayed on duty until early


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on Sunday morning, while a detachment of 91 soldiers of the South Yorkshire Regiment was sent to Carlisle, for rapid despatch to Cleator if needed.84 The police guarded the Moor on the Saturday night to keep the peace as there were threats circulating to ‘do for’ the prominent Orangemen in the town, and many of the latter sought sanctuary in the local school. At the same time, Orangemen claimed that the Catholic ringleaders had been involved in ‘the riot some years ago in Whitehaven, when Murphy, the Orange lecturer, was so seriously injured’.85 This shows something of the nature of prejudice and the rancour that lived in the minds of people in this isolated mining community. Similarly, that the Orange Order should remember and exhume the spirit of Murphy and anti-Murphyism illustrates the longevity of memories on both sides. Fr Burchall, the Roman Catholic priest at Cleator, defended his parishioners, saying: ‘A more scandalous and outrageous affair never took place’, sentiments echoed by Fr Wray, who added: ‘Imagine them playing such tunes as ‘‘Croppies Lie Down’’, ‘‘Come Out if You Dare’’, and ‘‘To Hell with the Pope’’? Armed with swords and pistols, they were simply frantic and it was utterly impossible to restrain the people.’86 The priests complained further at the activities of the Orange Order which, they claimed, goaded Catholics into action. Fr Wray, moreover, was full of woe about the implications of these events for the future, claiming: ‘It has thrown us back at least twenty years as far as feeling is concerned at Cleator Moor’.87 Following the riot, the police tried rapidly to mop up resistance. The list of those arrested illustrates something of the social composition of the Orange Order, which elsewhere in the country has been described as working-class.88 The two groups of arrested men, Catholics and Orangemen, were clearly working-class but came from different occupational groups. Principal among the sixteen arrested was John Bawden, aged 53, who was head of the Cleator Moor Orangemen, a prominent member of the Co-operative Society and a foreman iron-ore miner. Doubtless he was instrumental in recruiting to the ranks men mindful of their job security. He was apprehended for having fired shots and for wielding a sword. All of those apprehended were refused bail. The Orangemen varied in occupation and came from various towns around the Workington and Whitehaven area; among their number were labourers, furnacemen and a pit worker. In contrast, all the Catholics came from

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Cleator and all were miners but for one beerhouse keeper. Early in August, the press reported that four further Cleator iron-ore miners were arrested but, in the end, eleven were set free and the remaining men were sent for trial at the assizes, each being offered bail of £30.89 It is not clear what the majority were charged with, though Bawden, widely accepted as the ringleader, was accused of killing Tumelty. At the Cumberland and Westmorland Assizes, in November 1884, Mr Justice Day Moore directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty against Bawden, because the evidence was conflicting. All the others pleaded guilty.90 The judge regarded the whole episode as a ‘disastrous riot’ and commented that it was the first such case that an English judge had dealt with. In warning the guilty parties and in discharging them, he ordered: ‘Be well conducted men and you will hear no more of the offences of which you have pleaded guilty. Go away and take care to keep the peace in the future.’91 On their return to Whitehaven station, the Orangemen were met by a fife and drum band. A large crowd of between 800 and 900 gathered and marched through the principal streets of the town, the band playing familiar tunes and, according to the Carlisle Express, there was no feeling in the town other than one of elation.92 Meanwhile, feeling on the Moor ran high, and temperatures were raised further by a number of revelations. Local employers, apparently fearful because their miners had easy access to dynamite, threatened to sack all those involved. This caused obvious anger; as did the claim that Dan Hamilton, a police officer present at the Cleator riot, had encouraged the Orangemen gun-wielders: ‘Fire, men, fire and shoot the b———s’.93 This allegation confirmed the already common conviction that the authorities openly sided with the Orangemen. The Catholic fraternity was further incensed by the verdict which was returned by the inquest into the shooting of Henry Tumelty, namely ‘Death by a shot fired from a pistol or a revolver, by a person unknown’.94 Tumelty was exculpated by the press of any involvement in the riot, although this was scant consolation for his family and coreligionists. The young postman had also been a member of the local Parnell-Davitt branch of the Irish National League (INL), a fact which would not have endeared him to the Orange fraternity. The wider public, moreover, may have held this association to imply guilt. At a meeting in the Crown Star Hotel, Cleator Moor, Tumelty’s fellow Home Rulers moved a ‘vote of condolence’ with


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the family of their ‘esteemed fellow-member’.95 At the next meeting, John Kavanagh, the secretary of the local INL branch, urged all Irish Catholics in Cleator to join their ranks. Meanwhile, another INL member also became embroiled in the saga, when Edward Ennis, a miner, was arrested for an alleged assault upon the controversial policeman, Dan Hamilton.96 Ennis claimed to have twenty witnesses who would swear that Hamilton was responsible; Fr Burchall was also of this opinion. Ennis was acquitted by magistrates, however, and the INL passed a resolution of congratulation.97 Bad feeling in the area did not subside with the conclusion of this unsavoury event. The Catholic population was without doubt disillusioned and angered at the fact that Tumelty’s assailant went unpunished. The following year, when the Orangemen of the district met in Cockermouth, events seem to have been continuing in the same vein. Although the occasion passed off without riot, the ‘Orangemen had again recourse to their revolvers’98 and one youth was injured. A special train had been enlisted to convey the Orangemen from Cleator Moor via Frizington to Cockermouth. The train, it appears, was attacked at its point of departure by a large group of youths, aged between fifteen and nineteen. They hurled bricks and stones at the vehicle, and the Orangemen repaid the assault with interest, firing pistol shots. One of the assailants, a lad named McAnulty, was hit by a shot ‘in the thick of the thigh’. On their return to Cleator, the paper reported that the Orangemen were ‘further molested’. It might be possible simply to dismiss what has gone before as an inevitable feature of life where working-class culture was injected with incendiary ingredients like workplace competition, Catholicism or mass Irish immigration. Yet, apart from the case of the Barrow riot of 1864, a significant part was played by characters who were not simply faces in a crowd. Murphy, Bawden and a host of rabble-rousing clerics played a part in events at Whitehaven and Cleator Moor in the 1870s and 1880s. The last of our riots, that which accompanied the Wickliffe Preachers to Barrow in 1903, demonstrates quite clearly the role of professionals in shaping the texture of communal relations, simultaneously measuring the depth of the reservoir of hatred which sustained a dangerous degree of anti-Catholic fervour and popular Protestantism into the twentieth century.

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IV In late July and early August 1903, communal relations in Barrow were ripped apart by the visits, in quick succession, of George Wise, the Protestant firebrand, and four of John Kensit’s Wickliffe Preachers. On 31 July tempers were frayed when Wise’s lecture ‘cut left and right at the Roman Catholics’ who, one paper reported, took exception ‘at the lecturer’s aggravating and irritating diatribes and, possibly wholly unjustified attacks on their religion’.99 Then on 1 August, the working-class Catholics of the town, having been primed by Wise’s invective, welcomed the Kensitites’ attempts to lecture on the threat of Ritualism in the Church of England with two days of rioting. As the missioners began to speak to a large gathering of over 1,000, they were ‘subjected to the most strenuous opposition’. Despite the claims of one of their number that the Wickliffe Preachers ‘were not in any way fighting directly against the Roman Catholic church’, and an emphatic denial that they were associated with Wise, arguments broke out throughout the assembly and ‘a rush was made for the Preachers’.100 Thereafter, ‘blows and kicks were freely given and taken, and sticks were used on the heads and shoulders of any who chanced in the way. . .’101 On the following day, Sunday, the town witnessed a recurrence and the ‘proceedings were, if anything, of a more violent and riotous nature’.102 Again meeting outside the town hall on Cavendish Square, the four young Preachers were surrounded by a group of ‘angry men’ and the police presented the lecturers with a written warning not to ‘cause a disturbance’.103 Seemingly unperturbed, the Wickliffe Preachers continued their preparations, but, as they unfurled their banner, there was a rush of men who purported to be helping the police. The flag, which bore ‘a large picture . . . representing two martyrs burning at the stake’, was seized, torn down and trodden upon with ‘excited cries of exaltation’.104 According to reports, the crowd continued to grow all the while and the police feared a ‘serious disturbance was imminent’.105 Some of those present were alleged to cry: ‘We killed Kensit and will kill you’,106 and police reinforcements were called upon and the officers established a cordon around the Preachers, ‘who had received many blows’.107 One of their number, an Ulster Irishman named Henderson, was set upon and badly beaten, and the police were forced to draw their batons.108 One Preacher’s claim, however, that ‘We


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came to Barrow expecting to find . . . a peaceable audience’, proved to be misplaced; his words, in fact, sounded rather hollow. Henderson, for one, knew what to expect, for he was acclaimed by the Protestant press as a man with ‘considerable experience of Irish Roman Catholics, itinerating in summer and as a Scripture reader in Belfast in winter’.109 The same Protestant newspaper also announced in rather proud tones that the Wickliffe ‘crusade’ had prompted violence in a number of towns, ‘especially in Lancashire where Roman Catholic Irish are to be found in such large numbers’. In Oldham, it was claimed, ‘mob rule all but prevailed’, while in Bolton the Preachers’ supporters regularly clashed with the local United Irish League’.110 Indeed, ‘The threats at Barrow to furnish more Kensit martyrs might not be dismissed therefore as so much Hibernian froth’.111 The Preachers claimed to have many friends in Barrow, which they had heard was ‘the town was a Protestant town’, but they had reckoned without the sizeable Catholic element living around the chosen lecturing place. This was a Catholic population, moreover, whose collective ardour was already high because of internecine wranglings within their own church.112 The police eventually managed to calm the situation and the Wickliffe Preachers were taken away, with only Henderson having been hurt by the rioting crowd. On Tuesday 8 August the missioners were summoned to appear before Barrow magistrates for causing a breach of the peace. As the hearing unfolded, the Protestant backlash became apparent and the atmosphere in the town remained heated for weeks. More was learned during the court hearing about the motives of the Preachers, and reasons for their violent reception became clearer. The town of Barrow, it seems, was witnessing a piece of pure Liverpool-style street theatre. The court heard that the Preachers had been formed in January of the same year by John Alfred Kensit, son of John Kensit who had died in Liverpool at the hands of an Irish Catholic mob.113 The Wickliffe men again explained how they were opposed to Wise’s violent demagoguery, as he was to their anti-ritualist campaign. This is how one newspaper saw Wise and Kensit’s men: For reasons that are apparent to those who have followed the campaigns . . . the two visits were looked upon as having some very close connection. It is, however, necessary to point out here that . . . the Kensitites’ campaign is one more directly associated with ritualism and alleged confessionals in the Church of England, whereas Mr. Wise, as is evident

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Culture, Conflict and Migration from his lectures, was absolutely opposed to the Roman Catholic Church.114

We know that by 1903 there were 30 of these Preachers, and that they held 2,561 meetings in 441 places, distributing 200,000 pamphlets, in that year alone.115 Yet, while Machin calls them ‘young militants’, they were perhaps less rabble-rousing than William Murphy or George Wise.116 It is perhaps ironic, then, that Wise should escape from Barrow unscathed while the Kensitites were molested during scenes which the press referred to as the worst in the town’s history. Wise was, after all, never far from violence during his anti-Catholic career. Ritualism and ‘Popery’ were big issues in the period from 1880 to 1906, and even resulted in a parliamentary commission report into the alleged Romanisation of the established church. It was the public’s appetite for wild stories about Ritualism and Catholic practices that catapulted Kensit and Wise each into the other’s orbit. Both men were Londoners—Wise born in 1855 and Kensit in 1853—and a part of the capital’s thriving evangelical Protestant tradition. In 1888, Wise moved to Liverpool where he found his anti-Catholic project well suited to the flaming passions of Britain’s most sectarian city.117 In 1902, at the height of the ritualism debate, Kensit and his father launched a nationwide tour which eventually led the younger man to Wise’s Liverpool. The atmosphere in Liverpool was electric. Kensit Jnr and his followers regularly clashed with the Catholic Irish, just as Wise had been doing for over a decade. During one outburst, Kensit Jnr was imprisoned and, as Wise tried to re-impose his more plebeian popular Protestant hegemony, Kensit Snr arrived in town to maintain his son’s good work.118 The older Kensit’s plans were cut short, however, when, during the course of a September meeting in Birkenhead, he was struck a fearsome blow with a two pound iron file. He died in hospital on 8 October 1902.119 Competition between Wise and Kensit Jnr, however, continued into 1903 when the latter established a mission in Liverpool. Wise was arrested a number of times in the 1900s and played a major part in the establishment of Liverpool’s independent Protestant Party that was still winning council seats in the post1945 period. Although Wise died in 1917, Kensit continued ‘to champion ultra-Protestantism until the 1940s’.120 While Wise and Kensit represented tensions within popular Protestantism, in truth


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they shared much common ground. More important than their semantic arguments, professed ideological differences and political battles in Liverpool, was the unity of purpose which their visits introduced to both sides of the sectarian divide in Barrow. The magistrates’ court proceedings were conducted with the town shrouded in a sinister atmosphere.121 The first business was to deal with three Irishmen—William Murray, Michael Farrell and Michael Slavin—whose part in the weekend’s violence led them to be bound over in the sum of £5 for six months. Then the four Preachers—Henderson, Simpson, Hodgkinson and Moss—entered the courtroom, each carrying a bible. As they took up their positions, a man named Boomer immediately lodged an objection. ‘As a ratepayer’, he announced’, ‘I object to the Bench’, for, it transpired, one of the magistrates was a Roman Catholic. The Clerk asked Boomer if he had anything to do with the defence and, after a brief exchange, the man was told: ‘sit down, and keep quiet, or you must go outside’. Then the court was adjourned because Kensit’s solicitor had missed the train to Barrow. On resuming, each of the Preachers was handed two telegrams: the first, from Kensit, read: ‘Put your trust in God and keep your powder dry’; the second, from one of their fellow Preachers, a Mr Steel of Liverpool, carried the words: ‘Stand fast, don’t waver. God defends the right.’122 Like Murphy before them, the Wickliffe Preachers clearly utilised all public occasions to expound on their religious vision. Inspector Egan, the officer in charge when the rioting erupted, claimed that the missioners’ lectures contained ‘words . . . of such a character as to create a disturbance’. In response, Henderson denied he vilified Catholics generally, declaring instead that he only opposed the sacraments of mass and confession in the Church of England, for, ‘According to the Book of Common Prayer they had every right to stand up for their Protestant Church, and he, as an Orangeman and a Protestant, wished to be loyal to the King and the nation’.123 These words were met with loud cheers of support from a packed public gallery. The chairman of the bench and his fellow magistrates listened to more of these outpourings before acquitting Henderson and asking the remaining three to agree to be bound over for a year for the sum of £50 with two sureties of £25 each. They refused because this would have prevented them speaking; instead, they elected to go to prison for one month. This act of martyrdom much increased the tension in the town. On the

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following day, Wednesday 5 August, the three were transported to the station en route to Lancaster Gaol. Thousands lined the route, cheering the men, and hymns were sung before the Preachers departed. The train was cheered as it pulled away from the platform.124 Henderson decided to stay in Barrow, working with the bullish Methodist minister, Stanley Parker, to emancipate Moss, Hodgkinson and Simpson. It was also reported that reinforcements of Wickliffe missioners would arrive to maintain the campaign.125 On the same day as the three Preachers were despatched to prison, Henderson and Parker arranged a protest demonstration outside the Town Hall. The crowd was large, with youths climbing railings to improve their view. Henderson’s address to the crowd appealed for their support and the meeting passed a resolution, demanding the release of the Preachers, which was sent to the Home Secretary. Immediately after the public address, a spontaneous parade broke out and Henderson was ‘hoisted shoulder high’ and carried around the town.126 One newspaper editor, reflecting on this occurrence, concluded: ‘the procession which followed the meeting, was, I think, unparalleled in the history of Barrow’.127 However, the same writer added: I am inclined to believe that the wrong methods have been adopted [by the Protestants] in this instance. The instigators and aggressors ought to be the parties arrested and punished; not the harmless and defenceless Preachers. No good is achieved from such outbursts of religious feeling, and in the interests of the town and community at large I hope the police and townspeople will do all they can to avoid a recurrence of these riotous scenes . . .128

Kensit sent a telegram addressed to the ‘Protestants of Barrow’ which read: ‘stand your ground and maintain the Englishman’s birthright of free speech. Remember John Kensit’s words: ‘‘No compromise and no surrender.’’ ’129 Meanwhile, the local newspapers carried an open letter from George Wise, professing his support for the imprisoned missioners: The outrage just committed by the authorities of Barrow on those young men is simply revolting. They are guilty of no offences. Three Wickliffe Preachers sent to prison because the rowdy Papist element of Barrow was determined to stifle ‘free speech’ should be quite enough to cause every true Britisher to think seriously to his liberties. Are these people allowed to assault Protestant workers with impunity?130


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As the town continued to simmer over these events, Stanley Parker kept agitating. One of his first acts was to write to the King, asking him to intervene on behalf of the wronged Preachers. The missive was published by the press. Parker brought to the King’s attention the fact that ‘one of the magistrates is a strong Roman Catholic’.131 On Saturday, a large demonstration was arranged, while on the following Sunday, several newly-arrived Preachers addressed numerous Protestant congregations.132 At this point, most of the Roman Catholics of Barrow were keeping a low profile and, while no further serious violence was registered, two men, Francis Drumm and James M’Cullough, were arrested and charged with disorderly behaviour during one pro-Wickliffe demonstration.133 Meanwhile, on the following Monday, 10 August, the Protestants of the town were elated when a successful appeal was lodged with the magistrates demanding that, because of some legal technicality, the Preachers’ hearing be re-opened.134 Moreover, the second week of activity saw Sir Charles Cayzer, the town’s Conservative MP, throwing his weight behind the campaign to free the three men.135 By the Monday (10 August) a petition for their release, organised by Henderson and Palmer, had collected 20,000 signatories, to which were added a further 8,040 on Tuesday and 5,054 on the day, Wednesday, when news broke that the magistrates had rescinded their decision by liberating the Preachers.136 While Parker was pleased at the work of the Preachers, and expressed delight that Cayzer should publicly support the cause, his most glowing references were saved for the ordinary people of Barrow. ‘They had rallied splendidly to their banner’; the release of the Preachers, he argued, was ‘a people’s victory.’ ‘The people are omnipotent’, he added, ‘if they only knew it.’ In a worrying final sentence, Parker neatly summarised his brand of popular Protestantism: ‘The people’, he announced proudly, ‘can do anything they please’.137 The importance of the Wickliffe Preachers’ campaign, and of the anti-ritualist position in general, lay in its capacity for unification. Although, as Machin says, it was intended to prevent Romanisation of the Church of England, it also ‘resembled older no-popery in its ability to unite in common Protestant resistance many members of the aristocracy and of the middle and working classes’.138 Equally, the heavy involvement of Stanley Parker, the Methodist minister, in the campaign to free the Wickliffe Preachers, and to establish their mission in Barrow, attests to the facilitating role played by clerics in

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harnessing the innate hostilities of the popular Protestant tradition. Parker believed that his duty, and that of the militant Protestant tradition, was to ‘protect children from the terrible evils of the priestcraft’.139 Moreover, he compared the ‘shameless piece of cruelty’ imposed on the imprisoned three with the tribulations of Christ himself! Parker, however, was part of a heritage of likeminded Protestant clerics. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Revd Armes of Cleator Moor had been similar, working both in the pulpit and as an Orange lodgemaster, to mobilise Cumbria’s militant Protestants. In Whitehaven, the Revd Wickes upheld the same tradition for over thirty years from the 1840s; equally, Wickes’s contemporary, Cannon Dalton, was cut from the same cloth; while the Revd Joseph Burns of the town’s Presbyterian Church was ‘a noted anti-papist polemicist’ until his death in 1885.140 There was a real broad-church feel to the popular Orange tradition in north Lancashire and west Cumberland which marginalised Catholics at every turn. It would be erroneous to dismiss popular Protestantism and Orangeism simply as tools to maintain the hegemony of a religious elite or as a wedge driven within the nascent working class. Orangeism was also about maintaining the marginal privilege of an allegedly better sort of working man. The majority of Orangemen were more concerned with evangelical education than with simply breaking Catholic heads. There was an air of ritualistic freemasonry to Orangeism: it was influenced by higher-class organisations and fell victim to the projects of clerics and MPs; but the movement was essentially organised by working men. Overall, Irish-related violence was not simply the product of spontaneous aggression, but was rooted in some deeper meaning.141 This chapter has emphasised the violent aspect of Orangeism, for it was the street activity of the movement, and its annual and ritualistic recital of some vague Williamite tradition, which threw communal tensions into sharpest relief. At the same time, the majority of actors in the street violence of Cumbrian life were neither members of the Orange Order nor of the region’s Irish nationalist groups. The longevity of this tradition of violence, and the regularity with which casual Orange and Green clashes erupted, emphasises that sectarianism was also important outside the main Irish settlements in Britain. Some of these outbursts were so serious, in fact, that they actually influenced the basic size and shape of Orangeism. We will


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never know whether Murphy’s beating really was the single most important factor in the re-emergence of Orangeism in these northwest counties. It seems unlikely, for although the movement burgeoned in the wake of this event, Murphy appeared during the region’s fastest growth period when Irish in-migration was also increasingly significant. What we can say, however, is that the timing of industrialisation, the nature of economic development and a tradition of Ulster Irish settlement conspired to make division and violence an important and probably defining feature of Irish cultural development and communal experience in Cumbria in the three generations written about here. At the same time, something deeper and intrinsically cultural explains the hardiness of entrenched anti-Irishness displayed at each level of local society. This chapter has questioned George Orwell’s claim that ‘The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic’. It also raises the issue of internecine conflict within the Irish communities of northern Britain. When native hostility and intra-Irish division came together, as this chapter shows, the results were often very serious.

NOTES 1 Ian Gilmour, Riots, Risings and Revolutions: Governance and Violence in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1993 ed.), p. 2. 2 The Nation, 6 June 1868; quoted in A. O’Day, ‘Varieties of anti-Irish behaviour in Britain, 1846–1922’, in P. Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in Britain 1840-1950 (Leicester, 1993), p. 26. 3 The historiography of the Irish in Britain is littered with examples of antiIrish and intra-Irish violence (see Chapter 1, pp. 15–18). For the best examples of Orange-Green violence, see F. Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819–1914 (Manchester, 1988) and Ann Bryson, ‘Riotous Liverpool, 1815–1860’, in John Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History, 1790–1940 (Liverpool, 1992). 4 S. Gilley, ‘The Garibaldi Riots of 1862’, Historical Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1973), p. 697. 5 See above, Chapter 3, p. 68. 6 G. J. Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life, 2 vols (London, 1893), I: p. 247. 7 T. Coleman, The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men who Made the Railways (London, 1985), p. 84.

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8 Ibid., p. 86. 9 For details of the violent outbreak in Penrith, 1846, see ibid., pp. 85–91; Westmorland Gazette, 14, 21 and 28 February 1846; J. D. Marshall, ‘Some aspects of the social history of 19th century Cumbria: (II) crime, morals and the countryman’, Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, Vol. 70 (1970), pp. 228–29. 10 S. Pollard, ‘Town planning in the 19th century: the beginnings of modern Barrow-in-Furness’, Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 68 (1952– 53), p. 36; Thomas Brassey and his workforce are covered in R. K. Middlemas, The Master Builders: Thomas Brassey; Sir John Aird; Lord Cowdray; Sir John Norton Griffiths (London, 1963), pp. 53–55; and C. Walker, Thomas Brassey: Railway Builder (London, 1969), pp. 30–32. Arthur Helps, Life and Labours of Mr Brassey, 1850–1870 (London, 1872 ed.) is a hagiography, commissioned by the Brassey family after Thomas’s death. 11 Barrow Herald, 23 April 1864. 12 J. D. Marshall, Furness and the Industrial Revolution (Beckermet, 1981), p. 314. 13 Barrow Herald, 23 April 1864. 14 Ibid. 15 Marshall, Furness, p. 314. 16 A similar eruption occurred in Millom in July 1866 and ‘Hunter’s navvies’ were also implicated there. See PRO HO/45/7855; Alan Harris, ‘Millom: a Victorian new town’, Cumberland and Westmorland Archaeological and Antiquarian Society, Vol. 66 (1966), p. 457; Whitehaven Herald and Barrow Herald, 12 July 1866. 17 Marshall, Furness, p. 314; Barrow Herald, 23 April 1864. 18 Barrow Herald, 23 April 1864. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. This incident is one of the most famous and is referred to in most of the secondary literature: Coleman, Railway Navvies, pp. 83–85; Sullivan, Navvyman (London, 1983), pp. 130–32. The Carlisle Patriot, 27 February 1846, is an oftquoted source with regard to this incident. 25 Sullivan, Navvyman, p. 131. 26 Ibid. 27 Walker, Brassey, pp. 141, 150. 28 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1850–1875 (London, 1985), p. 256. 29 Barrow Herald, 23 April 1864. 30 Ibid. Woodhouse claimed to have about 130 Irish hod carriers in his employ. 31 H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management (Brighton, 1978), p. 304. The Murphy Riots in Cumbria in 1871 and the Cleator Moor Orange Day of 1884 have been discussed more fully in my essay ‘William Murphy, the Orange Order and communal violence: the Irish in West Cumberland, 1871–84’, in P. Panayi


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(ed.), Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1996, 2nd ed.), pp. 44–64. 32 P. Quinlivan and P. Rose, The Fenians in England, 1865–1872 (London, 1982), p. 33. 33 Carlisle Journal, 25 April 1871. 34 Quinlivan and Rose, Fenians in England, p. 33. 35 T. M. Healy, Letters and Leaders of My Day, 2 vols (London, 1928), I, p. 23. 36 R. Swift, ‘ ‘‘Another Stafford street row’’: law, order and the Irish in midVictorian Wolverhampton’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1984), pp. 94–104; W. J. Lowe, The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: The Shaping of a Working-Class Community (New York, 1989), pp. 151–73. 37 Quinlivan and Rose, Fenianism, pp. 34ff; Arnstein, ‘Murphy riots’, pp. 52– 53; Donald C. Richter, Riotous Victorians (Athens, Ohio, 1981), pp. 35–36. 38 T. Gallagher, Glasgow. The Uneasy Peace: Religious Tension in Modern Scotland (Manchester, 1987), p. 26. 39 Richter, Riotous Victorians, p. 24. 40 Carlisle Journal, 25 April 1871. 41 Ibid. 42 Cumberland Paquet, 25 April 1871. 43 Ibid. For example, he was supposed to have told an audience in Chelmsford that ‘Ireland could never be quiet till every Catholic priest was hanged’. Hansard, 192 (1868), 830, 820; Richter, Riotous Victorians, p. 36. 44 Cumberland Paquet, 25 April 1871. 45 Nation, 29 April 1871. 46 Carlisle Journal, 25 April 1871. 47 Ulverston Advertiser, 27 April 1871. The Weekly Register, 29 April 1871, put the number at 300. 48 Barrow Times, 9 May 1871. General accounts of the assault are available in the national, and much of the provincial press. The Times first printed a brief piece on the affair, evidently sent from Whitehaven by telegraph; The Times, 22 April 1871. 49 Carlisle Journal, 25 April 1871. 50 Whitehaven Herald, 25 April 1871. 51 Carlisle Journal, 25 April 1871. 52 Whitehaven Herald, 29 April 1871. 53 See ibid. 54 Whitehaven Herald and Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire Advertiser, 29 April 1871. Henceforth, Whitehaven Herald. 55 Carlisle Journal, 28 April 1871. 56 Ibid., 12 May 1871. 57 The seven miners were James, Patrick and Hugh M’Gee, Thomas and Francis Morgan, James Bilton and Jeremiah Bradyn: Whitehaven Herald, 5 May 1871. Eventually, Bradyn and Morgan were freed. 58 Whitehaven Herald, 13 May 1871. 59 Barrow Times, 10 May 1871. 60 Whitehaven Herald, 27 May 1871. 61 Barrow Times, 18 July 1871.

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62 All of the final seven, who were found guilty of assaulting Murphy, were sentenced to custodial terms with hard labour: James Belton, collier, aged 38 years: three months. Patrick Magee, collier, aged 26 years: three months. James Magee, collier, aged 27 years: twelve months. Hugh Magee, miner, aged 21 years: twelve months. Patrick Murray, aged 35 years: twelve months. Patrick Doyle, miner, aged 23 years: twelve months. Dennis Doyle, miner, aged 20 years: twelve months. 63 Barrow Times, 5 May 1871. 64 CRO Carlisle, CQ/PW/8. 65 One of these assistants was Robert Steele, of the PEMEU. The ‘Surety Recognisances’, which laid out conditions and sums involved, were dated 4 December 1871. CRO Carlisle, CQ/PW/8. 66 Ibid. 67 Barrow Times, 14 March 1872. There is some dispute over the timing and location of death; Hanham, Elections and Party Management, p. 306, for example, states Workington and St Patrick’s Day 1872, whereas Richter, Riotous Victorians, p. 48, and Arnstein, ‘The Murphy Riots’, both point to 12 March and Birmingham. 68 The editor of the Belfast News quoted in the Whitehaven Herald, 6 May 1871. 69 Barrow Times, 18 July 1871. 70 Whitehaven Herald, 19 July 1876. 71 Whitehaven News, 27 July 1882. 72 Ibid., 17 July 1884. 73 Carlisle Express and Examiner, 19 July 1884. 74 Whitehaven News, 17 July 1884. The capital of the mining district which, as has been seen in earlier chapters, was inhabited by a significant proportion of Irish Catholics. 75 Carlisle Express, 17 July 1884. 76 Barrow News, 15 July 1884. 77 Carlisle Express, 19 July 1884. 78 Whitehaven News, 17 July 1884. This estimate is supported by the evidence of Henry Jefferson, JP: CRO Carlisle, CQ/PW/9; Carlisle Patriot, 18 July 1884. 79 Whitehaven News, 17 July 1884. 80 Barrow Herald, 15 July 1884. 81 Whitehaven News, 17 July 1884. 82 Ibid. The ‘Sons of Israel’ came from Workington; Carlisle Patriot, 18 July 1884. 83 Barrow Herald, 15 July 1884; Whitehaven News, 17 July 1884; Carlisle Express, 19 July 1884. 84 Carlisle Patriot, 18 July 1884; Carlisle Express, 19 July 1884. 85 Barrow News, 15 July 1884. 86 Whitehaven News, 17 July 1884. 87 Ibid. 88 Neal, Sectarian Violence, pp. 40, 71–72, 170–71.


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89 Carlisle Express, 2 August 1884. The Secretary of State, the press reported, ordered that the cases against the men should be conducted as a public prosecution. The reason for this was ‘The public interest, and for the maintenance of peace and good order and the protection of life and property’. This news was reported in the Carlisle Express, 16 August 1884. 90 Carlisle Express, 1 November 1884. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Evidence of Eliza Woolaghan, corroborated by Mary Murry. Carlisle Express, 26 July 1884. 94 Carlisle Express, 26 July 1884. It is clear that no one could know exactly who fired the bullet or shot. However, the Catholics quite naturally wanted revenge and were unlikely to see the complexities of charging one of the eight Orangemen with murder. 95 Nation, 19 July 1884. 96 Ibid., 2 August 1884; Carlisle Express, 16 August 1884. 97 Fr Burchall claimed that the ‘men were ready to swear that a certain police constable told the men to fire’, Carlisle Patriot, 18 July 1884. The celebration of Ennis’s home-coming was reported in the Nation, 23 August 1884. 98 Whitehaven Advertiser, 18 July 1885. 99 North-Western Daily Mail, 3 August 1903. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 5 August 1903: evidence from one of the preachers to the magistrates proceedings. 107 Ibid., 3 August 1903. 108 Brief biographical details of the four Wickliffe Preachers were reprinted from The Rock, a ‘Protestant Church newspaper’: North-Western Daily Mail, 14 August 1903. See also ibid., 17 August 1903. The other three were from Bolton, Liverpool and Birkenhead. Moss, the Liverpool man, was secretary of the Wickliffe mission in that city. 109 The Rock, quoted in North-Western Daily Mail, 17 August 1903. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 North-Western Daily Mail, 3 August 1903. For the Catholic parish’s battles with the diocese over the removal of Irish priests, see above. 113 Ibid. For the Wickliffe Preachers, see Neal, Sectarian Violence, pp. 207–08. Context is given in G. I. T. Machin, ‘The last Victorian anti-ritualist campaign, 1895–1906’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Spring 1982), pp. 285–90. 114 North-Western Daily Mail, 3 August 1903. 115 Machin, ‘Anti-ritualist’, p. 285. 116 Ibid.

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117 Neal, Sectarian Violence, p. 200; Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism, p. 191. 118 Neal, Sectarian Violence, pp. 207–13. 119 Ibid., p. 213. 120 Machin, ‘Anti-ritualist’, p. 285. 121 See, for example, Barrow Herald and North-Western Daily Mail, 8 August 1903. 122 Ibid. 123 North-Western Daily Mail, 5 August 1903. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., 6 August 1903. 126 Ibid. 127 Barrow Herald, 8 August 1903. 128 Ibid. 129 North-Western Daily Mail, 6 August 1903. 130 Barrow News, 8 August 1903. 131 For the letter, see Barrow Herald, 8 August 1903. 132 Ibid., 11 August 1903. 133 Ibid. 134 North-Western Daily Mail, 10 August 1903. 135 Ibid., 13 August 1903. 136 Barrow News, 15 August 1903. 137 North-Western Daily Mail, 17 August 1903. 138 Machin, ‘Anti-ritualist’, p. 277. 139 Barrow Herald, 11 August 1903. 140 J. D. Marshall and J. K. Walton, The Lake Counties from 1830 to the MidTwentieth Century: A Study in Regional Change (Manchester, 1981), p. 151. 141 See, for example, John Bohstedt, ‘More than one working-class: Protestant and Catholic riots in Edwardian Liverpool’, in Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour, pp. 173–216.

Conclusions By examining Irish experiences in Cumbria, a previously neglected region which nevertheless had historic attachments to Ireland through trade and proximity, this study has significantly enhanced our understanding of Irish migration. It has revealed much about patterns of settlement and communal development outside the principal receptacles of Irish migrants, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. The Cumbrian dimension has also forced our attentions away from the Famine generations, for the timing of industrialisation and urban growth in the region necessitated analysis of the settlement and development of Irish communities in the later Victorian period, particularly between the 1860s and the early 1900s. Overall, this research prompts a number of interesting observations. We can now point out that there were many important Irish migrant communities outside the great cities which, far from fading quickly after the Famine, actually sustained a strong cultural presence well into the present century. Furthermore, in eschewing the commonly-articulated notion of the Irish community as uniformly Catholic, this study has also brought the hitherto overlooked Protestant dimension of Irish settlement under our gaze. From this broadened chronological and cultural base, we have learned that the tensions which arose between Irishmen over issues such as religion and home rule were as important as native hostility in fostering robust and competing senses of Irishness. What, therefore, can we conclude about these key features of the Irish experience in Britain; and what are the implications of our findings for future research?1 It is to be hoped that this study will be the first of many to examine the continuation of distinctive ethnic enclaves in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for it is clear that other works of regional specialism are still required. We still know too little about Irish migrants’ lives in unfashionable centres of settlement, such as Cumbria. For too long, the label ‘Irish’ has been attached to archetypal settlements, for instance, those in Liverpool and New York, to the exclusion of other important centres where the Irish and a culture of Irishness also made a significant contribution to community life. That is not to say that the great cities of

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industrial Britain should now be ignored; far from it. Rather, it might be suggested from this research that our understanding of the sectarian cultures of Liverpool and Glasgow might be profitably enhanced by comparative analysis of areas, such as Cumbria, which promoted similar trends of settlement and migrant cultural attributes.2 Much of what has been revealed here about sectarian division and Orangeism accords with the examples presented in earlier studies of Liverpool and central and western Scotland.3 In addition, the Irish settlement experience in Cumbria (though particularly in Barrow) might suggest the shipbuilding and engineering industries of the Tyne and Wear—important sectors in the still under-studied north east—could also provide a rich comparative control, particularly for the economic performance and cultural formations of Protestant migrants. North-east England, like west Cumbria, evinced strong Orange traditions with lodges dotted along both banks of the Tyne, though especially around Hebburn and Jarrow. From the 1870s, moreover, in similar fashion to their compatriots in Liverpool, Manchester and Lancashire, the Tyneside and Wearside Irish promoted many branches of the various Home Rule organisations.4 It seems unlikely, therefore, that Cumbria will provide the last word on sectarianism, Orangeism and communal violence outside the traditional centres of Lancashire and central Scotland. In more general terms, this study has also raised a number of questions about the Orange dimension of working-class Toryism; this issue requires further study and would be especially well served by a prosopographical approach to help explain the divergent influences working upon individual Irish settlers. The revelation that John Bawden of Cleator Moor was, simultaneously, an Orangeman, a foreman iron miner and a Co-operative official further implies the value which might be attached to the collectivebiography approach to this little-researched dimension of working-class history.5 The texture of Cumbria’s Irish connection makes the quest to know the activities and impulses of grass-roots Irishmen all the more pressing. This study has not been about great national or international characters, the famous heroes of a growing Diaspora consciousness (for such a thing existed, principally through nationalism, by the 1890s).6 It has been about real people, little people, those who were seemingly nothing at all. How many men like Peter

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Donnelly are lost in the census records of such small towns as Barrow, Cleator, Workington and Whitehaven, let alone in the great cities of Liverpool and Glasgow, New York and Boston? How many of the Irish in Britain—famed for their sectarian culture and proud sense of fraternity and sorority—might have understood the examples of Donnelly’s frustration, loneliness and melancholy disposition with which the first chapter of this book began? What proportion would share his hankering for the homeland, their own Yellow Rock? These are questions we can never answer as so few committed their thoughts to paper. We are fortunate to have Donnelly’s musings because few of his fellow migrants were able to encapsulate their mortal frustrations, as he could, in the communication of a simple but moving desire: to ‘write one poem that will make men gasp to read it’.7 We can never know what the lost Donnellys thought; instead, this study has tried to uncover some of the influences which coloured, sometimes marred, their lives. There were many things which could frustrate and impinge upon these Irish lives; of such forces, native antipathy and sectarian strife were particularly important. It is apt that the final chapter of this book took violence and communal division as organising themes, for division and discord were salient features of Irish migrants’ lives. As we have seen here, the great Atlantic entrepot of Liverpool was not the only place where communal violence habitually gripped the populace; nor was Glasgow, with its close socio-economic ties to Belfast, the only recipient of large-scale Ulster migration. The iron, steel and shipbuilding centres of west Cumbria, benefiting from geographical proximity and well-established trade links with north-east Ireland, also attracted Irish settlers who, from the 1860s at least, were overwhelmingly of Ulster origin. This revelation has important repercussions for the comparative study of Irish settlement north and south of the border. While it has been the norm to focus on Scotland as the principal place of settlement for the Ulster Irish (as indeed was the case), historians will now need to pay more attention to the Ulster settlement (both Catholic and Protestant) in places south of the border. Things have moved on considerably since Lowe argued that ‘Very little is known about Irish Protestants in Lancashire ... because they simply do not emerge from the available sources as distinctive. Some Protestants were probably part of the Catholicdominated Irish community life, but their significance cannot be

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assessed.’8 This assertion does not accord with the Cumbrian dimension, where the ‘Ulsterness’ of Irish settlement shaped many of the important features of communal expression and development with which this book has been concerned. We shall say a little more about these features of Cumbrian Irishness later; for now, let us consider, in greater detail, the findings presented in each of the chapters. This study, as well as examining cultural forms of Irishness, has also presented findings concerning the socio-economic status of Cumbria’s Irish community. The first part denoted important features of the quantitative picture of Irish migration, focusing particularly on origins, settlement patterns and residential experiences. These researches have also enhanced our understanding of Irish communal experiences in a number of ways. The examination of patterns of arrival, settlement and residence (Chapter 2) clearly demonstrated that Irish experiences in later nineteenth-century Cumbria were a curious hybrid of the poverty associated with the period before the Cumbrian Irish were put on the map (particularly during the 1830s and 1840s) and the upward mobility and diffusion that came after it (especially in the big centres, such as Liverpool and Newcastle, most notably for the second and third generations). In this chapter we saw the extent to which settlement influenced Cumbrian social policy (not least in terms of establishing attitudes towards pauperism and the poor laws) in the generation before the 1840s, and how diffuse and well-spread settlement was to be after the hugely disruptive events of the Great Famine. In social terms, we deduced, the Irish in Cumbria were to be found in that ‘curious middle place’ which Fitzpatrick has noticed.9 Those who arrived from the later 1850s were hardly paupers, habitual criminals or seething malcontents; nor, indeed, were they even perceived this way by what was usually a critical and anti-Irish press. On the one hand, the Irish in Cumbria did tend to congregate in the poorer parts of towns, not least in the court dwellings of Whitehaven or in the Barrow Island huts; on the other hand, they were also found in most areas of the towns studied here and were known to join in the campaigns to secure improved living conditions. It became clear, therefore, that these Irish were solidly working-class, and that, while they were over-represented in the poorest living conditions, these were shared with new arrivals of other nationalities. The examination of working-class occupational structure in

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Chapter 3 enforced previous suggestions that the Irish fell into a sort of hybrid socio-economic category. Apart from priests, clerks and the odd customs and excise man, the Irish did not penetrate the middle ranks of society. Even in the socially composite town of Whitehaven, there was hardly an Irish middle class which was worthy of note. In Barrow and Cleator, the Irish were massively proletarian, over-represented as labourers, iron miners and in other dirty or hard trades. However, while the single greatest category throughout Cumbria was that of ‘labourer’ (as it was for the native working class in all of Victorian England), there were important variations on the occupational theme. In the rapid industrialisation of mid-Victorian Cumbria, work opportunities were relatively easy to come by. Within the great work cycle of British shipbuilding, we noted from our Barrow examples that the Irish did crop up in noteworthy proportions as fitters, blacksmiths and riveters. Belfaststyle policies of ethnic exclusion, allied to wider notions of craft control, suggest that these skilled men were Protestants, rather than Catholics. Although craft controls remained strong throughout our period, in the more nebulous area of semi-skilled work—in mining, factory work and certain shipbuilding occupations—there was scope for the Irish to experience socio-economic improvement. These opportunities became more noticeable with the emergence of factory-type work and the related diffusion of notions of skill. Peter Donnelly believed this was still the case in Barrow in the 1920s and 1930s, of which he wrote: ‘Young fellows from the farms of Ireland came over and before the cow-dung was off their boots they were semi-skilled machinists’.10 The second part of this study (Chapters 4 to 6) ploughed the rich territory of expatriate Irish culture. It is here that we learned how widespread key features of Irishness—particularly Orange and Green division—actually were. With the large-scale settlement of these Ulster migrants (Protestants as well as Catholics) came traditions of intolerance, such as Orangeism, which were very much in keeping with the street life and political culture of Belfast. It was here demonstrated how Cumbrian history might have to assume a sort of middle ground—both geographically and culturally—between south Lancashire and central-western Scotland. Cumbria, in fact, seemed to weld bits and pieces from the sectarian history and experience of Belfast, Glasgow and Liverpool, to its own isolated and insular culture, to create a vigorous microcosm of

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Ulster expatriate behaviour. The same kind of development occurred in New York, Philadelphia and wherever else both Protestants and Catholics settled. Orangemen in Cumbria, of course, were much less successful, politically, than were their counterparts in Liverpool. Nor did the region’s Catholic Irish impress themselves upon mainstream Anglo-Irish politics in the way Liverpudlian or Scottish sons of Erin—men like John Denvir or James Connolly —managed to do. Orangeism and Irish nationalism remained rather isolated in Cumbria, like the region itself, but were nevertheless important in numerous local/regional contexts. Orangeism certainly influenced local politics, while Liberal and then Labour candidates who did not speak up for the Home Rule cause were guaranteed a stormy ride. The most important aspect of emigrant Ulster life, though, was seen in the rich street culture that was associated with the strong-arm territorialism and ritual pageantry that crowd the pages of Orange history. King Billy and the Pope, rather than Parnell or Randolph Churchill, were the real, though unwitting, guiding lights of communal relations in Cumbria, and Ulstermen brought with them all the necessary tools for shaping their unique identities in the new communities. Yet still writers prefer to see Irishness as an expatriate identity easily broken down and subordinated to the socio-economic and political imperatives of the wider working class. The idea that Irishness—whether the bullish ultra-loyalism of the Orange brigade or the militant defiance of the Catholic nationalists—might be passed from one generation of migrants to the next, is seen, unconsciously at least, as an affront to the mythical homogeneity of British life. After all, later generations of settlers, unidentifiable by their parents’ brogue, appeared to be prime targets for assimilation or integration. In this way, ethnicity is seen as being of relatively little importance: the Irish, after all, were (and are) a white settler group. As John Rex has argued, ‘The closeness of Irish and British culture has made the incorporation of the Irish into the working-class relatively easy. Usually within three generations Irish families were able to move into core working-class positions and beyond them.’11 Three generations, however, seems a long time for the ‘incorporation’ of such a similar culture. At the same time, class-centred perspectives tend to play down the vitality of ethnic identities. Lynn Lees’s fine study of Irish migrants in London, however, portrays a vibrant and independent Irish culture in which

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‘most migrants held resolutely to their ethnic identity’ well beyond the first generation settlement.12 Indeed evidence presented by Lees, Fielding and others suggests that ethnicity, rather than some lower form of evolution on the route to class consciousness, was actually flexible and all-embracing.13 The position of Irish migrants, and thus of other settler groups, seems to follow Fielding’s argument that it is possible to be both ‘ethnically’ and ‘class’ conscious at the same time. The evidence presented in this book, concerning the settlement, socio-economic and communal life of an overwhelmingly Ulster Irish population, shows very clearly that simple linear models of assimilation or integration are inadequate. At the same time, however, the street battles of the Cumbrian towns and villages captured here might suggest that class solidarity was still some time in coming. In part, this is true. As we saw in Chapter 6, Conservative Unionists in Cumbria did very well out of the Orange card, although, by 1906, there was a Labour MP in Barrow, which Henry Pelling attributes at least partly to a compact between Protestant and Catholic shipyard workers.14 However, nothing is quite that simple. Integration requires the compliance of ‘outsiders’ as well as the desire of ‘insiders’; yet the stereotyped reputation of the Irish in Cumbria, which was born partly out of the peculiarities of their imported Ulsterness, but also from generalised Victorian assumptions about the inadequacy of the Irish character, lived on into the twentieth century. As late as the 1920s, Cumbrians, with half an eye to the post-war troubles in Ireland, were watchful of the Irish among them. Throughout the long nineteenth century, Cumbria only had one resident more famous than Wordsworth and Ruskin: she was Beatrix Potter, a writer not noted for her political musings. For this reason, her comments on the Irish in Barrow in a letter written to her publisher, Fruing and Warne, are all the more striking. Potter provides us with a chilling coda; a sharp reminder of the longeval nature of casual anti-Irishness: I am glad you take a cheerful view of trade in general; and delighted to hear that the old firm of FW&Co is doing well, with a new lease of life. There is not much unemployment about here [Ambleside], but things are very bad at Barrow; and there are Irish there, which is a certain amount risk according to the police.15

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NOTES 1 I would hope this study also echoes some of the key challenges laid before future researchers by established scholars such as Roger Swift. See, for example, his ‘The historiography of the Irish in Britain: some perspectives’, in P. Buckland and J. Belchem (eds), The Irish in British Labour History (Liverpool, 1992) and ‘The historiography of the Irish in Britain’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide (Leicester, 1992), I: The Irish in the New Communities. 2 Recent comparative studies of the Liverpool and Glasgow experiences might provide useful models for integrating Cumbria, Tyneside and other areas into the challenging area of debate where labour history and Irish migration meet sociological theory. See especially: Joan Smith, ‘Class, skill and sectarianism in Glasgow and Liverpool, 1880–1914’, in R. J. Morris (ed.), Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns (Leicester, 1986), pp. 158–215; Tom Gallagher, ‘ ‘‘A tale of two cities’’: communal strife in Glasgow and Liverpool before 1914’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), pp. 107–29; E. McFarland, Protestants First: Orangeism in Nineteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990). 3 For Liverpool, see F. Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experiences, 1819–1914 (Manchester, 1988). Liverpool’s sectarian culture is also considered in W. J. Lowe’s analysis of Lancashire: The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: The Making of a Working-Class Community (New York, 1989), esp. Chapter 6. For Glasgow and the surrounding area of central-western Scotland, see A. B. Campbell, The Lanarkshire Miners: A Social History of their Trade Unions, 1775–1974 (Edinburgh, 1979); McFarland, Protestants First; T. Gallagher, Glasgow: The Uneasy Peace: Religious Tensions in Modern Scotland (Manchester, 1987). 4 A passing glance at the Nation during the period 1873 to 1886 suggests that, in terms of the number of branches, Tyneside—from South and North Shields, in the east, to Winlaton, in the west—was one of the key regions for the various Irish nationalist organisations: Home Rule Federation, Irish National League, etc. 5 Bawden’s case is discussed briefly above. See p. 188. 6 See M. F. Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). 7 Peter Donnelly, The Yellow Rock (London, 1950), p. 216. 8 Lowe, The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire, pp. 2–3. 9 D. Fitzpatrick, ‘ ‘‘A curious middle place’’: the Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London, 1989). 10 Donnelly, Yellow Rock, p. 142. 11 John Rex, ‘Immigrants and British labour’, in K. Lunn (ed.), Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities (Folkestone, 1980), p. 26. 12 Lyn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979), p. 249, but see the conclusions more generally. 13 See, for example, S. Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England (Buckingham, 1993), esp. Chapters 1 and 2. 14 H. Pelling, A Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–1910 (London, 1967), p. 332. 15 Letter from Beatrix Potter (Mrs Heelis) to her publisher Fruing and

Conclusions

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Warne: 4 March 1921, Sawrey, near Ambleside. Thanks to my friend Colin Edgar of the Carlisle News and Star (but then of Barrow’s Evening Mail) for this information.

Select bibliography This book has been written using a wide range of printed and manuscript primary sources, contemporary writings, newspapers and specific regional works. These are fully referenced in the notes which accompany each chapter. The following bibliography seeks to build on the excellent, but now dated, bibliography first included in Swift and Gilley’s The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (1989). A number of important works on the Irish in North America and Australasia are included, but these references are far from exhaustive. Although some of the works cited have been used only in passing during the writing of this book, it is hoped that the inclusion of this substantial bibliography of published secondary material will be useful to new researchers in the field. The following listing is concerned primarily with the nineteenth century; an excellent bibliography of twentieth-century materials can be found in M. J. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity (Aldershot, 1995). The place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated.

Contemporary accounts Anon, ‘The London Irish’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review, Vol. 170 (1901). Barclay, T., Memoirs and Medleys: The Autobiography of a Bottlewasher (Leicester, 1934). Bishop, M. C., ‘The social methods of Roman Catholicism’, Contemporary Review, Vol. 39 (1877). Booth, C., Life and Labour of the People of London, 3 series, 16 vols (1902–03). Bower, F., The Rolling Stonemason (Oxford, 1936). Carlyle, T., Chartism (1839). Denvir, J., The Irish in Britain from the Earliest Times to the Fall and Death of Parnell (1892). Denvir, J., The Life Story of an Old Rebel (Dublin, 1910). Devoy, J., Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York, 1929). Donnelly, Peter, The Yellow Rock (1950). Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Garratt, S., ‘The Irish in London’, Motives for Missions (1852). Healy, T. M., Letters and Leaders of My Day, 2 vols (1928). Heinrick, H., A Survey of the Irish in England (1872). First published in The Nation. Edited with an introduction by A. O’Day (London, 1990). Kay, J. P., The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (Manchester, 1832). Lewis, George Cornewall, Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, Appendix G, Report into the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain, British Parliamentary Papers (1836). Mayhew, H., London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols (1861–62). Mayhew, H. and Binney, J., The Criminal Prisons of London (1862).

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McCaffrey, E., ‘Catholicity in Barrow’, 2 pts, Catholic Family Almanack of the Archdiocese of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1890–91). McGill, P., Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of a Navvy (1914). McNeill, J., ‘Fifty years’ experience of an Irish shoemaker’, St. Crispin: Magazine of the Leather Trades, nos 1 and 2 (May 1869). Morning Chronicle survey of England and Wales which appeared as Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, 1849–1851, 8 vols (1983), edited with an introduction by J. Ginswick. O’Connor, T. P., ‘The Irish in Great Britain’, in F. Laverty (ed.), Irish Heroes in the War (1917). O’Connor, T. P., Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian (1929). Ryan, M. F., Fenian Memories (Dublin, 1946). Select Committee Report on Orange Institutions in Great Britain and the Colonies, British Parliamentary Papers (1835). Thackeray, W. M., The Irish Sketchbook (1843). Todd, W. G., ‘The Irish in England’, Dublin Review, Vol. 41 (1856).

Secondary sources Akenson, D. H., The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal, 1984). Akenson, D. H., Being Had: Historians, Evidence and the Irish in North America (Port Credit, Ontario, 1985). Akenson, D. H., ‘Data: what is known about the Irish in North America’, in O. MacDonagh and W. F. Mandle (eds), Ireland and Irish-Australia. Akenson, D. H., Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Protestants, 1815–1922 (Dublin, 1988). Akenson, D. H., ‘The historiography of Irish in the United States’, in O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World Wide, II: Irish in the New Communities. Arnstein, W. L., ‘The Murphy Riots: a Victorian dilemma’, in Victorian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1975). Arnstein, W. L., Protestants Versus Catholics in Mid-Victorian England: Mr Newdegate and the Nuns (1982). Aspinall, B., ‘The formation of the Catholic community in the West of Scotland’, Innes Review, Vol. 33 (1982). Aspinall, B., ‘The Welfare State within the State: the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Glasgow, 1848–1920’, in W. J. Shiels and D. Wood (eds), Voluntary Religion (Oxford, 1986). Aspinall, B., ‘The Catholic Irish and wealth in Glasgow’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Irish Immigration and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Aspinall, B. and MacCaffrey, J., ‘A comparative view of the Irish in Edinburgh’, in Swift and Gilley (eds), Irish in the Victorian City. Bailey, V. (ed.), Police and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (1981). Barber, Ross, Iron Ore and After: Boom Time, Depression and Survival in a West Cumberland Town, Cleator Moor 1840–1960 (York, 1976). Barber, S., ‘Irish migrant agricultural labourers in nineteenth century Lincolnshire’, Saothar, Vol. 8 (1982).

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Barke, M. and Buswell, R. J., Newcastle’s Changing Map (Newcastle, 1992). Barker, T. C. and Harris, J. R., A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution: St. Helens 1750–1900 (Liverpool, 1954). Barrett, J. R., ‘Why Paddy must drink: the social importance of whiskey in preFamine Ireland’, Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1977). Belchem, J., ‘1848: Feargus O’Connor and the collapse of the mass platform’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience (1982). Belchem, J., ‘English working-class radicalism and the Irish, 1815–1850’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), Irish in the Victorian City. Belchem, J. (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History, 1790–1940 (Liverpool, 1992). Belchem, J., ‘The Year of Revolutions: the political and associational culture of the Irish immigrant community in 1848’, in J. Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour. Belchem, J., ‘The Irish in Britain, United States and Australia: some comparative reflections on labour history’, in P. Buckland and J. Belchem (eds), Irish in British Labour History. Belchem, J., ‘Republican spirit and military science: the ‘‘Irish brigade’’ and IrishAmerican nationalism in 1848’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 24 (1994). Belchem, J., ‘‘‘Freedom and Friendship to Ireland’’: Ribbonism in early nineteenth-century Liverpool’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 39 (1994). Belchem, J., ‘The immigrant alternative: ethnic and sectarian mutuality among the Liverpool Irish during the nineteenth century’, in O. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts (eds), The Duty of Discontent: Essays for Dorothy Thompson (1995). Belchem, J., ‘Nationalism, republicanism and exile: Irish emigrants and the revolutions of 1848’, Past and Present, Vol. 146 (1995). Best, G. F. A., ‘Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain’, in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (1967). Bohstedt, J., ‘More than one working class: Protestant and Catholic riots in Edwardian Liverpool’, in J. Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour. Boyce, D. G., Englishmen and Irish Troubles (1972). Boyce, D. G., ‘‘‘Marginal Britons’’: the Irish’, in Colls and Dodds (ed.), Englishness: Politics and Culture. Boyce, D. G. (ed.), The Revolution in Ireland, 1879–1923 (Dublin, 1988). Boyce, D. G., Nationalism in Ireland (1995, 3rd ed.). Boyce, F., ‘Irish Catholicism in Liverpool: the 1920s and 1930s’, in P. Buckland and J. Belchem (eds), Irish in British Labour History. Brady, L. W., T. P. O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish (1983). Brooke, D., ‘Railway navvies on the Pennines, 1841–1871’, Journal of Transport History, Vol. 3 (1975–76). Brown, T. N., Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890 (Westport, Conn., 1966). Bruce, Steve, No Pope of Rome: Militant Protestantism in Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1985). Bryson, A., ‘Riotous Liverpool, 1815–60’, in J. Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour.

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Buckland, P. and Belchem, J. (eds), Irish in British Labour History (University of Liverpool Conference Proceedings in Irish Studies, no. 1, 1993). Burchell, R. A., The San Francisco Irish, 1848–1880 (Manchester, 1979). Burchell, R. A., ‘The historiography of the American Irish’, Immigrants and Minorities, Vol. 1 (1982). Burgess, J., ‘The Roman Catholics and the Cumbrian religious census’, Recusant History, Vol. 18 (1981). Busteed, M. A., Hodgson, R. I. and Kennedy, T. F., ‘The myth and reality of Irish migrants in mid-Victorian Manchester: a preliminary study’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.) The Irish World-Wide, II: Irish in the New Communities. Cahill, G. A., ‘Irish Catholicism and English Toryism’, Review of Politics, Vol. 19 (1957). Campbell, A. B., The Lanarkshire Miners: A social History of their Trade Unions, 1775–1974 (Edinburgh, 1979). Canavan, B., ‘The Irish in Britain—some stereotypes challenged’, Irish Studies in Britain, Vol. 9 (1986). Canavan, B., ‘Story-tellers and writers: Irish identity in emigrant labourers’ autobiographies, 1870–1970’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World-Wide, III: The Creative Migrant. Champ, J. F., ‘The demographic impact of Irish immigration on Birmingham Catholicism, 1800–1850’, in W. J. Shiels and D. Wood (eds), Studies in Church History (Oxford, 1989), 25: The Church, Ireland and the Irish. Chase, M., ‘The Teesside Irish in the nineteenth century’, in P. Buckland and J. Belchem (eds), Irish in British Labour History. Chase, M., ‘‘‘Dangerous People’’?: the Teesside Irish in the nineteenth century’, Bulletin of North East Labour History, Vol. 28 (1994). Clapham, J. H., An Economic History of Modern Britain, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1926– 38). Clapham, J. H., ‘Irish immigration into Great Britain in the nineteenth century’, Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, Vol. 5 (1933). Clark, D., The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Urban Experience (Philadelphia, 1973). Clark, D., Hibernia America: The Irish and Regional Cultures (Westport, Conn., 1985). Clarke, P. F., Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971). Clarke, S. and Donnelly, J. S., Irish Peasants: Violence and Unrest, 1780–1914 (Manchester, 1983). Coleman, T., The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men who Made the Railways (1965). Collins, B., ‘Irish emigration to Dundee and Paisley during the first half of the nineteenth century’, in J. M. Goldstrom and L. A. Clarkson (eds), Irish Population, Economy and Society: Essays in Honour of the Late K. H. Connell (Oxford, 1981). Collins, B., ‘Proto-industrialization and pre-Famine emigration’, Social History, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1982). Collins, B., ‘The origins of Irish immigration to Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Irish Immigrants and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

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Colls, R., ‘Englishness and the political culture’, in R. Colls and P. Dodds (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture. Colls, R. and Dodds, P. (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (1986). Comerford, R. V., The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society 1848–1882 (Dublin, 1985). Coney, A. P., ‘Mid-nineteenth century Ormskirk: disease, overcrowding and the Irish in a Lancashire market town’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 84 (1989). Connolly, G. P., ‘‘‘Little brother be at peace’’: the priest as Holy Man in the nineteenth century ghetto’, in W. J. Shiels (ed.), Studies in Church History (Oxford, 1982), 19: The Churches and Healing. Connolly, G. P., ‘‘‘With more than ordinary devotion to God’’: the secular missioner of the north in the evangelical age of the English mission’, North West Catholic History, Vol. 10 (1983). Connolly, G. P., ‘The Rev. Mr Peter Kaye: maverick or Englishman?’, North West Catholic History, Vol. 11 (1984). Connolly, G. P., ‘The transubstantiation of myth: towards a new popular history of nineteenth-century Catholicism in England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 35 (1984). Connolly, G. P., ‘Irish and Catholic: myth or reality? Another sort of Irish and the renewal of the clerical profession among Catholics in England, 1791–1918’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), Irish in the Victorian City. Connolly, G. P., ‘The Catholic church and the first Manchester and Salford trade Unions in the age of the Industrial Revolution’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 135 (1985). Cooter, R. J., ‘Lady Londonderry and the Irish Catholics of Seaham Harbour: ‘‘No Popery’’ out of context’, Recusant History, Vol. 13 (1975–76). Cottrell, M., ‘St. Patrick’s Day parades in nineteenth-century Toronto: a study in immigrant adjustment and elite control’, Histoire Sociale, Vol. 25 (1992). Cousens, S. H., ‘The regional pattern of emigration during the Great Famine, 1846–51’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 28 (1960). Cousens, S. H., ‘Emigration and demographic change in Ireland, 1851–61’, Economic History Review, Vol. 14, 2nd series (August 1961–April 1962). Cousens, S. H., ‘The regional variations in emigration during the Great Irish Famine’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 28 (1965). Cullen, L. M., ‘The Irish Diaspora in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in N. Canny (ed.), Europeans on the Move: Studies in European Migration, 1500– 1800 (Oxford, 1994) Curtin, C. et al., ‘Emigration and exile’, in T. Bartlett et al., Irish Studies: A General Introduction (Dublin, 1988). Curtis, L. P., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (New York, 1968). Curtis, L. P., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (1971). Davies, R. S. W., ‘The Liverpool Labour Party and the Liverpool working class, 1900–1939’, Bulletin of the North West Labour History Group, Vol. 6 (1979– 80). Davies, S. J., ‘Class and police in Manchester, 1829–80’, in A. J. Kidd and K. W.

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Roberts (eds), City, Class and Culture: Studies of the Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester (Manchester, 1985). Davis, G., ‘Little Irelands’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), Irish in Britain. Davis, G., The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914 (Dublin, 1991). Davis, G., ‘The Irish in nineteenth century Britain’, Saothar, Vol. 16 (1991). Devine, T. M. (ed.), Irish Immigration and Scottish Society in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1991). Devine, T. M. and Dickson, D. (eds), Ireland and Scotland: Essays in Comparative Economic and Social History (Edinburgh, 1983). Dillon, T., ‘The Irish in Leeds, 1851–1861’, Thoresby Society, miscellany, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1973). Dodds, P., ‘Englishness and the national culture’, in R. Colls and P. Dodds (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture. Dolan, J. P., The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–65 (London and Notre Dame, 1983). Donajgrodzki, A. P., Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1977). Donnelly, J. S., ‘Excess mortality and emigration’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland: V, I. Dowling, C., ‘Irish-American nationalism in Butte, 1900–1916’, Montana (1989). Doyle, D. N., ‘Unestablished Irishmen: new immigrants and industrial America, 1870–1910’, in Dirk Hoeder (ed.), American Labor and Immigration History, 1877–1920s: Recent Research (Urbana and London, 1983). Doyle, D. N., ‘The Irish in North America, 1776–1845’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland: V, I. Doyle, D. N., ‘The Irish in Australia and the United States: some comparisons’, Irish Economic and Social History, Vol. 15 (1989). Doyle, D. N., ‘The Irish as urban pioneers’, Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1991). Doyle, P., ‘The education and training of Roman Catholic priests in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1984). Drudy, P. J. (ed.), The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation and Impact (Cambridge, 1985). Duffy, P., ‘Carrying the hod: Irish immigrant labour in the Manchester building trades’, Bulletin of the North West Labour History Group, Vol. 16 (1991/92). Edwards, Owen Dudley, The Mind of an Activist: James Connolly (Dublin, 1971). Edwards, Owen Dudley, ‘The Catholic press in Scotland since the Restoration of the Hierarchy’, in D. McRoberts (ed.), Modern Scottish Catholicism. Edwards, Owen Dudley, Burke and Hare (1980). Edwards, Owen Dudley, ‘The Irish in Scotland’, in D. Daiches (ed.), A Companion to Scottish Culture (1982). Edwards, Owen Dudley, ‘The Irish priests in North America’, in W. J. Shiels and D. Wood (eds), Studies in Church History (Oxford, 1989), 25: The Church, Ireland and the Irish. Edwards, Owen Dudley, ‘The stage Irish’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish WorldWide, III: The Creative Migrant. Edwards, Owen Dudley and Ransom, B. (eds), James Connolly: Selected Writings (1979).

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Edwards, Owen Dudley and Storey, P. J., ‘The Irish press in Victorian Britain’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), Irish in the Victorian City. Elliot, M., Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (1982). Ellis, P. B., ‘What kind of history does the Irish community need?’, Bulletin of the North West Labour History Group, Vol. 16 (1991/92). Emmons, D. M., The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana and Chicago, 1989). Emmons, D. M., ‘Faction fights: the Irish worlds of Butte, Montana, 1875– 1917’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish World-Wide, II: Irish in the New Communities. Epstein, J. and Thompson, D. (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in WorkingClass Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 (1982). Evans, E., ‘The Scotch-Irish in the New World: an Atlantic heritage’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, Vol. 95 (1965). Evans, N., ‘Immigrants of minorities in Wales, 1840–1990: a comparative perspective’, Llafur, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1991). Feheney, J. M., ‘Delinquency among Irish Catholic children in Victorian London’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 23 (1983). Fielding, S., ‘The Catholic Whit Walk in Manchester and Salford, 1890–1939’, Manchester Region History Review, Vol. 1, No. I (1987). Fielding, S. (ed.), The Church and the People: Catholics and their Church in Britain, 1880–1939 (Warwick Working Papers in Social History, 1988). Fielding, S., ‘Irish politics in Manchester and Salford, 1890–1939’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 33 (1988). Fielding, S., Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880–1939 (Buckingham, 1993). Finnegan, F., Poverty and Prejudice: A Study of Irish Immigrants in York, 1840– 1875 (Cork, 1982). Finnegan, F., ‘The Irish in York’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), Irish in the Victorian City. Fitzgerald, M. E. and King, J. A., The Uncounted Irish in Canada and the United States (Ontario, 1990). Fitzgerald, P., ‘‘‘Like crickets to the crevice of a Brew-house’’: poor Irish migration in England, 1560–1640’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Irish WorldWide, I: Patterns of Migration. Fitzpatrick, D., ‘Irish emigration in the later nineteenth-century’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 22 (1980–81). Fitzpatrick, D., Irish Emigration, 1801–1921 (Dublin, 1984). Fitzpatrick, D., ‘A curious middle place: the Irish in Britain, 1871–1921’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), Irish in Britain. Fitzpatrick, D., ‘Emigration, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland: V, I. Fitzpatrick, D., ‘‘‘A peculiar tramping people’’: the Irish in Britain, 1801–70’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland: V, I. Fitzatrick, D., ‘‘‘That beloved country, that no place else resembles’’: connotations of Irishness in Irish-Australian letters, 1841–1915’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 27 (1991).

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Index ‘Cumbria’ is excluded from the index as it appears throughout A Acts Affirmations 158 Party Processions 20, 140, 141 Sturges Bourne Act (1819) 30 of Union (1801) 11, 14, 18 Ainsworth, Thomas, Cumberland employer 186 Airdrie 140 Akenson, D. H. 14 Albany, USA 6 Allendale, Northumberland 31 America (see USA) Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Saxonism 11, 13, 14, 19 Anti-Catholicism xvi, xvii, 7, 11, 15, 19, 20–21, 139, 140, 156, 163, 170, 171, 178, 189 Anti-Semitism 15 Antrim, Co. 44, 47 Argentina 4 Armagh 1, 44 Armes, G. B., Revd, Cleator Moor 154, 155, 196 Ashton-under-Lyne 139, 178 Askam-in-Furness 147 Australia 4, 112 Ayr 11, 67

B Baptists 101, 103, 154 Barrow Advertiser 108 Barrow Herald 76, 106, 107, 137, 157– 63, 171, 173–77 Barrow-in-Furness xvii, xviii, 1, 2, 12, 27–29, 36, 40, 44–59, 68, 93, 101–08, 113–28, 147–48, 152, 155–63, 171, 173–76, 189–95, 204–09 Barrow Pilot 55, 57, 147

Barrow Times 69, 106, 108 Barrow Vulcan 56, 104, 112, 113 Barry, Fr, Irish Catholic priest, Barrow 125–28 Bawden, John, Cleator Moor Orangeman (1880s) 155–56, 187–88, 204 Beerhousekeepers 81 Belfast 20, 28, 30, 40, 44, 47, 48, 83, 128, 143, 205, 207 ‘Biddy’ xiii Bilsborrow, John, Barrow Catholic priest and later Bishop of Salford 102, 124 Birmingham 13, 143, 171 Bishop Auckland 12, 48 Blackhall, Co. Durham 48 Blacksmiths 65–66, 81, 82 Boilermakers 82 Bolton 191 Bootle, Cumberland 117 Boyne, Battle of 151 Bradford 41 Brassey, Sir Thomas, building magnate 173, 177 Brick Cottages (Huts), Barrow Island 55–58, 206 Bristol 30, 40, 41 Brooklyn, USA 6 Brophy, P. M., Irish Chartist 68 Buddle, John, Co Durham mines agent 67–68 Buffalo, USA 6 Burchall, Fr, Irish Catholic priest, Cleator Moor 118, 187 Burgess, John 101, 124 Burns, J., Whitehaven Presbyterian minister 196 Butt, Isaac, MP 111, 117 Butte, Montana, USA 12 Byford, Ambrose 149

232


C Caffrey, E., Irish Catholic priest, Barrow 104, 118, 124 Canada 6, 19, 20 Canterbury 51 Carlisle 27, 28, 30, 32, 36, 38, 101, 109, 119, 122, 142, 144, 181 Carlisle Express 185, 188 Carlisle Patriot 185 Carlyle, Alexander, Paisley mill owner 64–65 Carlyle, Thomas xiii, 29, 170 Carruthers, George, editor of the Barrow Pilot 52, 55 Castlerea 41 Cavendish, Lord Frederick 119, 156–57 Cavendish-Bentinck, G. F., MP 122 Cavendish Dock, Barrow 55 Cayzer, Sir Charles, MP 138, 160 Celts, Celtic 13, 14, 40, 161 Chemical works Irish in 66 Cheshire xiii Christian, John, Poor Law Guardian 31 ‘Church and King’ xviii, 139 Church of England 101, 103, 157, 158, 190, 195 Churchill, Randolph 160, 208 Clan Na Gael 112 Cleator Moor xvii, xix, 12, 27, 36–38, 40, 44, 48–52, 54, 68–93, 101, 104, 106, 110, 116, 119–21, 123, 144, 145, 147, 153–56, 171, 180– 89, 205, 207 Clerkenwell Bombing (1867) 106, 108 Clyde, River 12, 47, 83 Coal mining 38, 67–68, 70, 81 Cockermouth 121, 122, 144, 145, 186, 189 Coercion 18 Colchester 51 Commins, Dr A., Liverpool MP 116 Confessional Unmasked 177, 181 Connaught 41, 44, 46 Connolly, G. P. 122 Connolly, James 151, 208 Consett, Co. Durham 12

Coopers 65 Cowen, Joseph, MP 118 Cullen, Paul, Cardinal xviii, 100 Curtin, Philip 4 Curwen, John, Cumberland mineowner and Poor Law Guardian 30 D Dalton-in-Furness 32, 147, 154 Darlington 12, 30 Davitt, Michael 111, 117, 119 Defenders 139 Defoe, Daniel 15 Denvir, John, Liverpool nationalist 99, 101, 208 Derby 119 Devonshire, Duke of 102, 119, 156 Devoy, John 111, 117 Dillon, T. 41 Disraeli, B. 138 Dock labourers 66 involvement in rioting 173–77 Donnelly, Peter 1–3, 204–05, 207 ‘Donnybrook Fair’ 18 Dorchester 51 Down, Co. 9, 40, 44, 47, 149 Dublin 30, 41, 44, 100, 105, 109, 110, 111, 119 Duffy, Charles, Barrow Irish nationalist 119 Dumfries 173 Dundee 53, 83 textile industry in 75–76 Dunne, C. J., Chief Constable of Cumberland (1884) 186 Durham, Co. xiii, 1, 12, 48, 67–68 E Edmunds, Martin, home rule candidate, Barrow (1886) 122 Engels, F. xiii, 13, 58, 64 Ethnicity 13 Exile, concept of 9 F Fairman, Colonel W. B., Orangeman (1830s) 151

Index Famine, Great (1845–49) xiv, xv, xvii, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 27–29, 32– 36, 68, 102, 117, 140, 177, 206 Fenians xvi, xviii, 99, 105–12, 117, 118, 141, 156, 177–78 Fermanagh, Co. 44, 46 Fielding, Steve 209 Fitters 82 Fitzpatrick, David 6, 206 Flax and Jute (see textiles) Fleetwood 47 Flood, John, Dublin journalist and Fenian 110 Foster, Roy 5 French/France 5, 16, 139 Frizington, Cumberland 184, 189 Froude, J. A., Anglo-Saxonist writer and historian 14 Furness 27, 30, 35, 109, 116, 148, 185 Furness Railway Company 77, 103 G Gallagher, John, Barrow Irish nationalist 126, 162–63 Galway, Co. 41 Germans 16 Gilley, S. 171 Gilmour, Ian 170 Gladstone, W. E. 99, 120, 122, 158, 159 Glasgow xiv, xv, xviii, xix, 3, 9, 11, 15, 21, 28, 30, 40, 41, 47, 111, 140, 141, 142, 149, 203, 204, 205, 207 Glasgow Antrim and Down Benevolent Fund (1883) 149 Glasgow Herald 152 Glasgow News 163 ‘Glorious Twelfth’ (see Orangeism) Gordon, Michael A. 19 Goschen, G. S. 13 Goss, Bishop of Liverpool 102 Gradwell, William, Barrow Mayor and Orange lodgemaster 155, 156, 157 Greenock 11, 66 H Handley, J. E. xiii Handlin, Oscar 5

233

Harington, Cumberland 109, 185 Healy, T. M., MP 120, 178 Hebburn 204 Hennesey, J. 7 Herson, J. 41 Hibernian societies 10 Holden, G., English Catholic priest, Whitehaven 123 Holyhead 107 Holyoake, G. J., secularist and radical 155, 172 Home Rule xvi, 14, 111–24, 128–29, 157, 159–61, 188, 208 Home Rule Association/Federation of Great Britain 113–18, 124 Hunter, T. C., building contractor 173– 74 I I’Anson, T. F, Whitehaven surgeon 34 Independents 101 Industrial Revolution xiii Irish Catholic Association (ICA) 125 Irish National League (INL) 120–23, 188–89 Irish People 105 Irish Universal Suffrage Union (IUSU) 65, 100 Irishness xiv, 4, 13–15, 55, 65, 113 Iron-ore mining, iron and steel manufacturing xvii, 12, 27, 30, 34, 36, 38, 44, 48, 49, 68–72, 77, 81, 83, 155, 156, 158, 188, 205 J Jackson, J. A. xiii Jarrett, Fr, Ulverston Catholic priest 102 Jarrow 48, 204 Jews 15–16 K Kavanagh, John, secretary, Cleator Moor INL (1884) 189 Kay, J. P. 29, 58, 65 Kendal 30, 101, 142 Kennedy, James, Furness ironmaster and Orangeman 155

234


Kensit, John, anti-Ritualism campaigner 190–92, 194 Kensit, John Jnr 192 Keswick 52, 108 Kildare, Co. 44 ‘Kilkenny Cats’ 18 Kilmainham 117 Kingsley, Charles 14 Knobel, D. T. 13

L Ladies’ Irish Clothing Society (Whitehaven) 33 Lambert, Joseph, 56–57, 58 Lanarkshire 12 Lancashire xiii, xiv, 3, 8, 12, 13, 14, 27, 28, 32, 36, 37, 47, 48, 54, 103, 141, 143, 156, 178, 179, 185, 196, 204, 205, 207 Land League 117, 119, 124, 157 Land War, the 18 Laverty, P., Irish Catholic priest, Barrow 102, 124 Lawson, Wilfrid, MP and temperance crusader 122, 154 Leeds 15, 41, 121 Lees, L. H. 121, 122, 208–09 Leinster 40, 41, 46 Lewis, Sir George Cornewall, 29, 64, 65 Limerick, Co. 177 Liverpool xiii, xiv, xv, xviii–xix, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 18, 21, 27, 28, 30, 33, 35, 40, 41, 47, 57, 102, 107, 111, 116, 120, 121, 124, 127, 140, 141, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 156, 171, 177, 191, 192, 193, 203–07 Living conditions Barrow 52–58 Whitehaven 34, 52, 55 Lonsdale, Lord 34, 122 Lowe, W. J. 27, 83, 122, 205 Loyalist, loyalism (see Orangeism) Luttridge, Walter, Whitehaven Irish merchant 30

M Mc’Anulty, Bernard, Newcastle Irish nationalist 118 McCafferty, John, American Fenian 109–10 McFarland, Elaine 142, 149 McGough, E., Irish Catholic priest, Barrow 116, 118 McKenzie, J. B., Protestant minister, Whitehaven 137 Macclesfield 66 Machin, G. T. I. 195 Malthus, Revd T. R. 31 Manchester xiii, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 30, 35, 48, 57, 66, 106, 108, 121, 123, 140, 141, 152, 204 Maria Monk 177 Marshall, John D. 36, 173 Maryport 29, 40, 44, 122, 185 Massachusetts 7, 12 Mault, Alfred, Employers’ Association 69 Mayhew, Henry 123 Mayo 41, 177 Merthyr Tydfil 51 Methodists, Methodism 67 and miners 67 Primitive 101 Middlesbrough 12, 48, 51 Miller, Fr, Catholic priest, Barrow, 125–27 Miners’ Association 68 Mitchel, John 9 Moor Row, Cumberland 155 Morpeth 12 Motherway, Fr, Irish Catholic priest, Barrow 125–27 Munster 40, 41, 44 Murphy, William xvi, 18, 143, 147, 148, 153, 171, 178, 184, 185, 192 N Napoleonic Wars 5, 8, 10, 16, 17, 29 Nation 105, 117, 119 National Brotherhood of St Patrick 105 Nationalism/nationalists xviii, 99, 105, 117, 119, 123, 125, 141–57

Index Navvies 58 Neal, Frank 8, 27 ‘New Commonwealth’ Immigration xiii New England, USA 7 New York, USA xv, 6, 7, 14, 20, 203, 205, 208 New Zealand 4, 147 Newcastle 12, 30, 118, 206 Newry 40, 44 Newton le Willows 140 ‘No-Popery’ (see anti-Catholicism) Northern Ireland 46 ‘Troubles’ xiii Northumberland xiii, 12, 108, 171 O O’Brien, Conor Cruise 13 O’Connell, D. 99 O’Connor, D. 112 O’Connor, Feargus 129 O’Connor, T. P. 120–21 O’Connor Power, J., MP 113, 118, 125 O’Day, Alan 106, 121 O’Mally, Fr, Irish Catholic priest, Millom 124 O’Neill, F. J., Irish Catholic priest, Barrow 118, 124, 157 Orangeism/Orange Order xvi, xviii– xix, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 99, 117, 123, 129, 137–64, 171, 179– 97, 207–08 Orange Day (‘Glorious Twelfth’ of July) xix, 140, 142, 143, 148, 151, 152–55, 184–89 P ‘Paddy’ xiii, 13, 114 Paisley 11, 65, 140 ‘Papal Aggression’ 17, 18, 123, 140, 155 Parker, Stanley, Methodist minister and anti-Ritualism campaigner, Barrow 194–96 Parnell, C. S. 99, 111, 112, 116, 117, 119 Parton, Cumberland 185 Pauper migrants xvii, 29–33, 35 Paz, D. G. 150

235

Peile, J., Whitehaven mines agent 67– 68 Pelling, Henry 116, 209 Philadelphia xv, 6, 7, 12, 208 Phoenix Park Murders (1882) xvi, 18, 119, 157 Pittsburgh, USA 6 Playfair, Sir Lyon 58 Plymouth 51, 107, 153, 178 Poor Law 30–32, 35 Guardians 31, 35 Popular Toryism (see Tory) Pooley, C. G. 92 Potter, Beatrix 209 Presbyterians 154 Preston 10, 48 Protestant Evangelical Mission and Electoral Union (PEMEU) 177 Protestant Friendly Associations 149 Protestants/Protestantism xiv–xvi, xviii, 14–15, 17–21, 46, 99, 125, 137–63, 177–97, 205 R Ramsden, James, Barrow industrialist 76–77, 121 Rawlinson, Robert, Government Chief Medical Officer of Health 34, 51–52, 58 Redmond, John 117, 119 Reformation 102 Residential patterns (see living standards) Rex, John 208 Ribbonism 10, 11, 99 Richardson, J., editor of Barrow Vulcan and Barrow Herald 52, 104-05, 112–13 Richter, D. C. 106 Riots, xiv, 170–97 Barrow anti-Irish riot (1864) 171, 173–77, 189 Cleator Moor Orange Day Riot (1884) 120, 155, 171, 185–89 Murphy Riots (1866–71) xvi, 18, 178–83 Penrith Riot (1846) 172-73, 175

236


Wickliffe Preachers’ Riot (1903) 190–96 Ripon, Marquis of 137 Riveters 82 Rochdale 139 Rockliff, near Carlisle 30–31 Rome 100, 143 Roscommon 41 Rush, Charles, Barrow nationalist 127 Ruskin, John 209 S St Mary of Furness 102, 103 St Patrick’s Day celebrations of 107, 114–15, 118 Salford 124, 138 Schneider, H. W., Barrow ironmaster 121, 122, 158 ‘Scotch Flats’, Barrow 53 Scotland/Scots xiii, xiv, xvi, 5, 8, 16, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 38, 47, 64, 67, 77, 112, 113, 124, 141–43, 163, 173, 204, 205, 207 ‘Second Spring’ 102 Secularism 157–58 Shipbuilding xvii, 28, 36, 46, 47, 48, 55, 56, 58, 68, 69, 70, 77, 80, 83, 119, 205, 207 Shoemakers 65, 81 Smith, Samuel, MP 170 Smith and Caird, Dundee and Barrow 53 Society of Friends (Quakers) 33 South Yorkshire Regiment 187 Southport 47 Spalpeen 5 Stafford 12, 41 Suez Canal 76 Sugar industry Irish in 66 Sullivan, A. M. 9 Sunderland 48 T Tailors 65, 81 Tanners 65 Taylor, Supt of Police, Cockermouth 186

Tees/Teesside 12, 48 Textile industry 12, 30, 46, 73–77 Thornburrow, Supt of Police, Whitehaven 186 Tone, Theobald Wolfe 105, 119 Tory/Toryism xvi, xviii, xix, 137–39, 141, 157, 158, 159, 163 Tumelty, Henry, Cleator Moor Irish nationalist 188–89 Tyne/Tyneside 12, 36, 111, 204 Tynemouth 153 Tyrone, Co. 46, 111 U Ulster xiii, xvii, 3, 5, 14, 27, 28, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 83, 137, 140, 142, 149, 154, 161, 162, 205, 209 Ultramontane 102 Ulverston 30, 101, 102, 111, 174, 175 United Irish League (UIL) 125, 127, 191 USA 4–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 108, 117 Ushaw College, Co. Durham 1 V Violence anti-Irish 15–18, 170–77 W Waddington, Eli, Barrow Orangeman and Tory, 159 Wages 69, 83–84 undercutting of 64, 65 Wales 12, 17, 40, 41 Walker, Graham 142, 149 Walker, W. A. 100 Walsh, J., Barrow Orangeman 159 Warwick Bridge 101 WASP 20 Wear/Wearside 12, 204 Wexford, Co. 44 Whitehaven xvii, 10, 18, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 44, 46–47, 54, 55, 67, 100, 101, 109–11, 116, 117, 123, 142, 144, 146, 147, 148, 153, 155, 177, 179–89, 196, 205, 207

Index Whitehaven Herald 137, 143 Whitehaven News 109, 110, 118 Whiteside, Bishop of Liverpool 125 Wickes, Revd F. W., Anglican minister and magistrate, Whitehaven 154, 155, 196 Wickliffe Preachers 171, 190–96 ‘Wild Geese’ 4 ‘Wild Milesian’ xiii, 13 Winchester 12, 51 Wise, George, Pastor and ‘no-popery’ demagogue 190, 192, 194 Witton Park, Co. Durham 48 Wolverhampton 11, 153 Wordsworth, William 209

237

Work of Irish in Britain 64–69 of Irish in Cumbria 69–93, 206–07 women’s 73–77 Workington xvii, 27, 30, 31, 39, 40, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 119–22, 144, 146, 148, 185, 205 Wray, Fr, Catholic priest, Cleator Moor 187 Y Yarmouth 51 ‘Yellow Rock’ 1, 205 York 12, 41, 123 Yorkshire xiii, 12, 13, 41

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