6 - Immigration from and via Other Channel Islands

Summary

IT is difficult to disentangle push-factors forcing people out of England and Ireland in the late 1840s from pull-factors exerted by the harbour construction projects in Jersey and Alderney. These structures (known at the time as ‘harbours of refuge’, though they remained solitary breakwaters) were built by English civil engineering contractors Jackson and Bean under the auspices of the Admiralty as part of Britain’s Channel defences. Both were begun in 1847 – that at Braye, Alderney in January; that at St Catherine’s, Jersey in July. Hydrographical problems caused the St Catherine’s project to be abandoned in 1855. Construction work at Braye, however, continued until September 1871, by which time the Alderney project had cost the British Government a total of £1,274,200.

At its height in 1852, the Jersey harbour construction project employed over 350 men. Alderney, in which Island the Government also built thirteen forts and batteries between 1850 and 1858, employed three or four times that number at the peak of construction in the mid-1850s. In August 1856, the Comet reported that, with 700 men engaged on the forts and 1,200 on the breakwater, Alderney’s public works employed a total labourforce of 1,900.

Despite the Government’s express wish to avoid publicity, news of the commencement of the projects appeared in several South-West newspapers in 1847. Word would have spread fast along navvy networks as well as among the general public. Many navvies (not least those made redundant by the collapse of railway building in 1847) probably travelled to the Islands speculatively. Others were specially drafted in by the contractors to carry out preparatory work (reports in the Comet and Chronique de Jersey mention advance parties of 400 and 500 specialist workers sent to Alderney and Jersey respectively).

Alderney

The population of Alderney – just over three square miles in area – more than quadrupled over the breakwater period. It grew from 1,083 in the census of 1841 to a peak of 4,932 in 1861, abating to 2,738 by 1871. The civilian non-native element rose from 182 in 1841 to 2,303 in 1861, dropping back to 718 in 1871. Table 24 (see below) ranks Alderney-resident non-natives in each of these three years according to the relative proportions from the seven main places of origin. The figures in the table represent the percentages comprised by the various cohorts of the total civilian non-native contingent in Alderney.