The Do It Yourself Guide to Emigrating to Canada in 1871 with a reflection on Home Children

I doubt that many people have heard of the Cow Cross Mission or its reports on emigration to Canada and the United States.

It was a temperance mission hall in White Horse Alley which ran off Cow Cross Street in London.

The alley has long gone but it is possible to walk along Cow Cross Street which is just outside the old City of
London.

It is a narrow twisty thoroughfare and back in 1871 was flanked by Farringdon Railway Station, the Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Market and a warren of small streets and lanes.  Just the sort of place you would find a mission hall and a temperance one at that.

The mission organised the emigration of people to Canada, and the 1871 report contains a wealth of detail.

Here are a list of the occupations of the men who went, the ships they travelled out on and vast amount of useful information about “routes, distances, and rates of passage from Quebec” onward across Canada and the US, “with names and addresses of working men in 320 cities and towns,” as well as “Hints on Economic House Building.”

It was a must then and I rather think it will be a wonderful source to trawl through, which I will set myself to do over the coming days.

Of course these were adults freely choosing to go unlike the majority of Home Children but I think this is an interesting read given that it is part of that overarching belief that new lives could be forged in the new countries of the old empire.

And however much many of us question the appropriateness of sending young people out to Canada and Australia migration was the thing.

The Poor Law Commissioners of the 1840s had seen that migrating families from the depressed rural south of England to the new northern industrial cities was a way of easing social tensions and offering employment.

When this failed the vast open spaces of Canada and Australia were an obvious choice.

And more so given the growing conviction amongst some that industrialization was a brutalizing process and that a return to a preindustrial means of production had merit.

Added to which the new emerging areas of the empire could only be developed by “migration from the home country and by shipping off some of the growing population we might well ease those tensions caused by poverty, exploitation and seasonal trade slumps which brought unemployment and political and social demands for change.

Pictures; from the report of Cow Cross Mission, 1871,

Emigration to Canada and the United States, Cow Cross Mission, 1871, http://archive.org/stream/cihm_05871/cihm_05871_djvu.txt