A Hostile Welcome to Glasgow 1855

Glasgow’s Broomielaw in the nineteenth century. Note the mixture of sail and steamships and the teeming wharfside (permission: Glasgow City Archives)

An extract from Walfrid: A Life of Faith, Community and Football by Michael Connolly

The annals of the poor are not often recorded. They do not own property and, if literate, their letters are generally not handed down through family. The child, Andrew Kerins travelling in the company of his friend Bart McGettrick – and most probably a number of dozens of other souls, refugees from famine and hopelessness – arrived in Scotland’s largest city likely cold, hungry, tired and vulnerable. There is no way of knowing where and when they dismbarked in this foreign city and who, if anyone, would be on the Broomielaw wharfside to meet them. Light tonnage steamships at that time would sail up river into the centre of the city. They would deposit their cargo, first human then cattle before re-loading with Lanarkshire coal for the return journey. Having spent up to twenty-four hours below decks, the modern reader can only speculate on the state of the human cargo.

The boys may have been forewarned to ‘clear the dockside as soon as you can’ for fear of crime and the risk of kidnap for child labour. They may have had a scribbled address of a family or church contact who might provide shelter and safety for a few nights at least. As refugees they were entering a land that was in some respects a classic ‘hostile environment’.

Stereotypical hostility in British newspapers towards the Irish during the famine crisis stoked native fears of arriving Irish immigrants. One report stated that, ‘If some restraint be not imposed on the Irish immigration into this country, we will soon be reduced to the condition of the miserable beings who fly to our shores’. Davis argues this was symptomatic of dominant xenophobic views on the part of the British establishment, and contemporary reportage ‘exemplifies how a tragedy can be interpreted to fit predisposed prejudice, in which everything is explained in terms of the moral degeneracy of the Irish’.1

Bernard Aspinwall, in a famous article titled ‘Children of the Dead End’ discusses the ‘shock of an alien culture’ which met the young Kerins on arrival in heavily industrialised Glasgow, described as the ‘Second City of the Empire’ at the height of the Industrial Revolution but nonetheless featuring abject urban poverty, especially in the places where Irish Catholics could afford to settle.

Life in the Scotland of the mid-nineteenth century at the height of the Industrial Revolution was considered ‘competitive, unprotected, brutal and, for many, vile’. For much of the urban working class, life was routinely abject. Prostitution, drink and disease went unchecked and Scots had an average life expectancy of around 40 years. The 1842 Reports on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Scotland recorded housing ‘of the lowest grade consisting of only of one small apartment, always ill-ventilated. . . densely peopled. . . and damp.’2 Immigrants from rural Scotland and from Ireland would join this miserable ladder on the bottom rung.

The narrative of Andrew Kerins’ individual experience helps to breathe life into a larger phenomenon of outmigration from Ireland to Britain that was accelerating by the mid-point of the nineteenth century, with unprecedented numbers fleeing the horrors of famine. And of course, as well as the unprecendented numbers of Irish, mixed in with Highland and Lowland clearances from the land to the urban centres, there was another obstructive factor in the arrival process. Religion presented an obstacle which may astonish the modern reader in a secular age. Until well into the twentieth century, with some remants still evident in contemporary Scottish society, religious belief was the cornerstone of behaviour at every level in employment practices, housing and social life. ‘No Catholics or Irish need apply’ was common currency in Scotland well into the twentieth century.

The Reformation, dated from 1560, and reputed to have been led by John Knox against the then Catholic Stuart monarchy, introduced a brand of reformed, Protestant beliefs based heavily on the precepts of the Swiss theologian, John Calvin. It was a dramatic shift from the beliefs of the Roman Church and life in Scotland and other European countries would never be the same. The change came with an attitude of contempt for what had gone before and anti-Catholicism was rife.

In Scotland, the Presbyterian version of Protestantism ‘was not just a state religion but, for more that three centuries, defined the Scots to one another and to the rest of the world’.3 An indicator of the prevalence of anti-Catholicism in post-Reformation Scotland long before the Irish immigration are the rarely quoted statistics from the 1790s when there were no more than 39 Catholics living in Glasgow. At this time in the city there were 43 anti-Catholic societies [Devine notes 60 anti-Catholic societies in 1791].4

Anti-Irish sentiment – particularly targeting Irish Catholics – was prevalent and enduring in post-Reformation Scotland, culminating in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland’s approval of an infamous 1923 report. Titled ‘The Menace of the Irish Race to Our Scottish Nationality’, the extraordinary text describes in negative racial terms ‘alarm and anxiety’ prompted by ‘the incursion into Scotland of a large Irish Roman Catholic population’. Laying the blame for crime, drunkenness and vice principally at the feet of Catholics of Irish origin in Scotland, the report suggests deportation to the Irish Free State as one possible solution to protecting ‘the destruction of the unity and homogeneity’ of Scotland’s population. In 2002, the Church of Scotland issued an apology, expressing regret for endorsing the report some seventy-nine years prior.