5 - English and Irish immigration

Summary

English immigration

Origins

WE saw in the previous chapter that Government censuses yielded no information beyond a broad statement of national affiliation for three-quarters of English sojourners in Guernsey over the period 1841–1901. We also saw that the 1830 listing of migrants in St Peter Port, though providing considerable detail on birthplaces, was flawed by its unrepresentativeness. There is, however, another source for nineteenth-century immigrants’ origins: the St Peter Port Constables’ ‘Register of Persons Sent out of the Island’. This, though also problematic, is more promising. The register spans the period 1842–80 and records the deportation from the Island of about ten thousand people: some six thousand named individuals and their four thousand unnamed dependants. English people accounted for about 60 per cent of named individuals. Over three thousand of these English people specified a county of origin, and, in almost as many cases, the name of a parish. The main problem with the register lies in its overrepresentation of the poorest class of migrant (42 per cent of male deportees who stated an occupation described themselves as ‘general labourers’). Nevertheless, there is no reason to believe that the poorest came from areas vastly different from the rest – except, perhaps, for rentiers whose origins tended to be more dispersed; these, however, comprised a relatively small proportion of total migrants.

The general trustworthiness of the removals register is reinforced by the fact that the birthplace data it yields are corroborated by data from the 1830 St Peter Port migrants’ census and enumerators’ books 1851–1901, in which information on county of origin is available for about a quarter of English migrants. Table 21 sets out data on county of origin given for individuals and family heads in the removals register.

All three sources – 1830 listing, enumerators’ books and removals register – contain people from nearly all counties in England, but the same five counties (plus London) occupy the first ranks in each. Devon, the most populous of the five counties, heads the list in all three. The presence of London, as Mark Brayshay and Vivien Pointon observe in relation to Plymouth, is probably as much a reflection of the capital’s massive population as any particular attraction which Guernsey may have held for Londoners.