3 - Population and Migration

Summary

FEW population statistics exist for Guernsey before the nineteenth century. Various estimates have been hazarded, but the earliest actual figures date from 1727, when a count of inhabitants was made in order to assess the amount of grain needed during a food shortage. At that date, the Island’s inhabitants numbered 10,246, of whom 43 per cent lived in St Peter Port. The town’s eighteenth- century success as an entrepôt stimulated population growth. In 1800, an enumeration carried out for Customs Commissioner William Stiles showed that Guernsey’s population had increased by 58 per cent in the seventy-three years since 1727. Inhabitants numbered 16,155, ‘exclusive of sailors in his majesty’s service, privateers, and merchant vessels; also of strangers not permanently settled, who may amount to 2,000 or 3,000’. St Peter Port’s population now stood at 52 per cent of the insular total. The British garrison, swollen in numbers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and based chiefly in town, was not included in the count.

Guernsey did not take part in the two earliest British Government censuses – those of 1801 and 1811 – so there are no further figures until 1814, when William Berry published a set of estimates in his History of the Island of Guernsey. Berry, who provided a series of intriguingly precise-looking figures for each parish and the Island as a whole, put Guernsey’s population, inclusive of sailors and strangers but again not the garrison, at ‘about 21,293’, indicating a rise of some 30 per cent through the Napoleonic period.

A census designed to yield ‘an exact list in each parish of the number of houses; [and] their inhabitants, giving ages and sex’ was commissioned in 1817 by the Guernsey Agricultural Society. This list, however, does not survive, so the next available figures are from the British Government census of 1821. This census, which included strangers but not garrison, put the Island’s population at 20,302, representing a fall of about 5 per cent in the seven years since 1814. Daniel De Lisle Brock characterised the immediate post-war period as one of ‘misery and depopulation’ for Guernsey. As Brock observed, the transformation of Guernsey’s leading merchants into fundholders had deprived many entrepôt workers of a livelihood:

Since the war, the system of funding has become general, and open’d a source of fictitious trading, with so much attractive speculation from one fund to another, that the property before employed in commerce and navigation has in great measure been withdrawn, and invested mostly in the foreign funds, leaving a great proportion of the working classes without significant employment.