Agricultural labourers

Conventional wisdom is that the people who migrated from Ireland to England, Scotland and Wales in the aftermath of the Great Famine were people who made their living as manual workers. Some were agricultural workers, others navvies who worked on some of the largest construction projects being undertaken in those countries while many others went to work in textile factories or as labourers.

Looking at the detail provided by the various census records in the first decades after the Famine, gives a good perspective on whether the Heenan migrants followed the same pattern.

1841 The census lists 30 individuals resident in England on the census night, of whom seven have occupations listed. One was a cutter, one a booker (I’m not sure what that job entails); one woman was a laundress; two people were involved with the law in an unstated capacity, one was a tobacconist and one man was a labourer.

1851 Ten years later and at a time when migration was in full flow, there were 29 individuals resident in England at the time of the 1851 census. Of these 14 people recorded an occupation. Those show a weighting towards manual work but a greater range of occupations:

Hawker (draper): 1
Solicitor’s clerk: 2
Cotton mill worker: 3
Smith: 1
Gardener: 1
Mine labourer: 1
Domestic servant/general servant: 4
Tobacconist:1

1861 Come the 1861 census and more manual workers are evident. Hawkers are also more noticeable – this was very much a subsistence form of occupation with the peddlars earning barely enough to buy food and lodging. Domestic service is also noticeable, an occupation that was primarily followed by single people.

Cotton mill worker: 2
Retail (tailor, tobacconist, draper): 3
Dressmaker: 1
Hawker: 3
Police:1
Domestic servant/general servant: 7
Joiner: 1
Labourer:9
Newsagent: 1
Many works?? 1
Clerical (railways, solicitors
Mariner: 1
Sawyer: 1
Washerwoman: 1

I suspect that the number of labourers in all these years is significantly under-reported however because, by the very nature of construction projects like canals, docks and railways, the workers were itinerant. They often built temporary homes at the site of the construction and so would be easy to overlook by the census enumerators.

The other remarkable thing is that over the course of thirty years there is no evidence of agricultural working. Not a single agricultural labourer. I find that hard to accept. Maybe like the construction workers they were too hard to pin down to one location and be given a census form.

When I get to the next batch of records – from the 1870s to the end of the nineteenth century it will be interesting to see if any of them come to light.