Messy history .......... Part One Migration

I remember being taught that we were a static society and that it was not till quite recently that people moved much beyond the comfort of their birth place.

It was vision that conjured up generations who rarely travelled more than a few miles and whose distant horizons were limited by the nearby market town.

Wars, rumours of wars and tales of distant places were by and large fitted in at the edges of daily lives. America, Australia and the doings of peoples in Russia and other places were secondary to worrying about the weather, getting the harvest in and ensuring there was fuel for the fire, food for the table and enough work for the year ahead.

But bit by bit this has been challenged. Here in Chorlton in the opening decades of the 19th century the lanes and roads would have been full of the accents of people born in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as well as from most of the regions of England.

My friend Lois has likewise discovered that some of her family were regularly making the long sea journey to and from Australia and New Zealand on business during the same period.

And my father’s family slowly moved from the west of Scotland in the 1800s ever southward first across Scotland then into the northern reaches of England before finally washing up in the late 1920s in London.

This was no stay at home society and as ever it was driven by economic need. The same need was the motive for my partner’s parents to move from Naples to Cambridge before returning to Italy and settling just north of Milan.

These migrations were not the conventionally described moves from rural backwaters to the cities, whether it was to feed the new industrial centres of 19th century Britain or the economic miracle of Italy in the 1950s.

In their search for work people were moving from one rural area to another and again in the case of Chorlton moving out of Manchester to work here in the township.


Some at least of these migrants were not the wealthy looking for a retirement home in the leafy lanes south of the big city, but tradesmen with an eye to an opportunity, and domestic servants recruited because they were strangers and less likely to pass on the secret doings of their employers to family in the district. Finally there were the agricultural labourers who had been born when Chorlton on Medlock and Hulme were still rural but were now uncomfortable with places which were rapidly being transformed by factories, mills, and houses.

So the simple neat school history of my youth is increasingly no more. This I like, after all history is messy and the past does not always do what you want or expect.
Picture; Naples 1961, the day Rosa collected her passport from the Balzano collection