Testimonies of Transition E-Book

Marjory Harper

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 570

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Marjory Harper explores the motives and experiences of migrants, settlers and returners by focusing on the personal testimonies of the two million men, women and children who left Scotland in the 20th century.

Leseprobe

MARJORY HARPER is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen, and Visiting Professor at the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands. Her book Adventurers and Exiles won the Saltire Society Award for the Scottish History Book of the Year in 2004, and Scotland No More? was shortlisted for the same Saltire Society Award and won the University of Guelph’s Frank Watson Prize. Her current teaching responsibilities focus on directing the University of Aberdeen’s innovative online Masters Programme in Scottish Heritage, which was launched in September 2017, and she is involved in an ongoing oral history research project, as well as research into health and migration.

By the same author:

Adventurers and Exiles, Profile, 2003

Scotland No More?, Luath Press, 2012

To Andrew

First published 2018

ISBN: 978-1-912147-31-1

The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps produced in a low energy, low emissions manner from renewable forests.

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Printed in the uk by Bell & Bain Ltd., Glasgow

Typeset in 11 point Sabon by Main Point Books, Edinburgh

© Marjory Harper 2018

Contents

Acknowledgements

1 Listening to Emigrants:

Evaluating Personal Testimony

2 Pulling Up the Roots:

The Smorgasbord of Decision-making

3 Persuasion and Propaganda:

Official Interventions and Reactions

4 Making the Transition:

Leaving, Travelling, and Arriving

5 Building New Lives:

Impressions and Experiences

6 Migrant Identities:

Retention, Reconfiguration and Abandonment

7 Reverse Migration:

Resettling and Reconnecting

8 Postscript:

Commemorations, Mirror Images and Reflections

Appendix 1: Table of Interviewees

Appendix 2: Interviews from Other Collections

Select Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

THIS BOOK HAS been a labour of love. It has taken me to three continents, reuniting me with old friends and introducing me to a host of new ones. Where personal visits were not possible, the ever-advancing wonders of technology allowed me to engage in many enlightening conversations with people whom I have not yet been able to meet.

Wherever I have gone, I have been received with warmth, hospitality and encouragement. In Australia, I am immensely grateful to Rob and Jane Linn, Kirstie Moar, and Graham Hannaford, for their hospitality, practical support, and wise insights, which allowed me to make best use of my time in Adelaide, Toowoomba and Canberra respectively. An invitation from Flinders University to participate in a seminar in honour of my friend and colleague, Eric Richards, generously provided the initial opportunity to go to Australia, and at that very happy gathering in 2015 I engaged with colleagues from across the world. Thanks to the Board of Trustees of Newstead House, Brisbane, and Kirstie Moar, I was able to deliver a public lecture in Brisbane, which in turn led me to a number of new interviewees. In Canberra, the staff of the Oral History and Folklore Section at the National Library of Australia kindly invited me to give a public lecture on oral testimony and emigration, and devoted a day to discussing my project with me and showing me around the library. I am particularly grateful to Marian Hanley, Kevin Bradley, Shelly Grant and Margy Burn for their interest and support. Thanks are also due to the National Library of Australia for permission to quote from two of their oral history collections in this book.

In 2010, a kind invitation from Angela McCarthy of the University of Otago, and a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, enabled me to visit Dunedin, where in the course of a week I met several new friends, and conducted a number of interviews. As well as the interviewees, I am particularly grateful to Denise Montgomery, Kathy Petrie, and Jill Harland for their continuing friendship and support. Elsewhere in New Zealand, I am indebted to Megan Hutching for granting me access to the documentation associated with her oral history study, Long Journey for Sevenpence.

During many visits to Canada, I have benefited from long-standing connections with the Scottish Studies Centre at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and the Scottish Studies Centre at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. As well as providing me with opportunities to share my research through public lectures, seminars and workshops, my involvement with these Centres has allowed me to identify and meet a number of interviewees. I am also grateful to Maureen and the late Ray Eagle of Vancouver for their hospitality and for putting me in touch with a number of interviewees in and around that city. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, I received invaluable assistance from the staff of the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, where oral historians Steve Schwinghamer and Sinisa Obradovic have provided me with helpful statistical information. Elsewhere in Canada, Georgina Taylor initially alerted me to the riches of the Saskatchewan Archives Board’s pioneer questionnaires, and in Ottawa I continue to enjoy frequent discussions about oral history with Marilyn Barber of Carleton University. In the United States, during a visit to New York City in 2013 I enjoyed the hospitality of Camilla Hellman and Alan Bain of the American-Scottish Foundation. In the south-west USA, the wisdom and encouragement of Margaret Connell Szasz and the late Ferenc Szasz, both of the University of New Mexico, have been of incalculable benefit to me for more than two decades.

Back in Scotland, I am indebted to my former Head of School at the University of Aberdeen, John Morrison, for allowing me to pursue my research and writing agenda unhindered. My colleague Andrew Dilley supplied me with helpful references to material in the National Archives of Australia, and Ted Ranson regularly alerts me to relevant snippets from the archives of the American and Canadian press. Archivist Angus Johnson from Shetland Archives has drawn my attention to numerous articles about emigrants in the Shetland Times. Jim Hunter, Professor Emeritus of the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands, is a constant source of support, as is the current Director, David Worthington, and indeed all the staff at the Centre, with which I am privileged to maintain a connection. In Edinburgh, I am grateful to the staff of the Edinburgh Theological Seminary for providing, once at very short notice, a comfortable and quiet venue in which to conduct interviews, and to Ewen Cameron of the University of Edinburgh for similar assistance.

Three individuals – Lauren Brancaz, Kirstie Moar, and Kirk Reid – have rendered huge assistance in compiling meticulous written summaries of a number of interviews, and Kirstie also undertook four interviews on my behalf in Queensland. A grant from the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen generously funded the preparation of the summaries undertaken by Kirk and Lauren.

My especial thanks go to the interviewees themselves, who have given generously of their time in telling me of their experiences as emigrants, sojourners and returners. In meeting these individuals, and recording their testimony, I have been richly rewarded. Not only have I been able to compile a rich databank of evidence and insights: I have made many lasting friendships, not least with those whom I have met on more than one occasion. As I have been deploying their testimony to illustrate the themes of this book, their accents, idioms, enthusiasms – and occasionally their sorrows – have resonated through almost every page. This book has only come to fruition because of their interest and encouragement, and I thank them profoundly for their involvement in that collaborative effort. I hope they have enjoyed the experience even half as much as I have.

CHAPTER 1

Listening to Emigrants:1 Evaluating Personal Testimony

Introducing the evidence

‘I HAVE NOT regretted, even for two minutes, that I came here.’ Murdo MacIver’s ringing endorsement of his decision to settle in Vancouver in 1953 contrasts starkly with the painful experiences of his fellow Hebridean, Ena Macdonald, who emigrated to Australia a decade later. ‘I was homesick before I even went,’ she recalled. ‘It was crazy, absolutely crazy. I should never have gone.’2

Personal testimony provides a powerful lens through which to view the complex and often contradictory saga of Scottish emigration. Not only does it offer multiple narratives of the motives, expectations and experiences of successive generations of individuals and families: it can also be used to explore broader issues about the cultural and political spirit of the age, as well as the socio-economic context that triggered tidal waves and trickles of emigration. By adding participants’ voices to top-down, policy-based studies, personal testimony combines solid academic credentials with popular appeal, by demonstrating – through individuals like Murdo and Ena – the practical impact of principles and procedures on the lives of real people, with whose sentiments we can readily identify.

Since the 1980s we have seen the ever-expanding public celebration of Scotland’s global heritage. New York’s Tartan Day, organised in 1982 as a one-off event, has been absorbed into Scotland Week, North America’s ‘annual celebration of all things Scottish’.3 Australia and New Zealand followed suit in 1989 with International Tartan Day, and in 2006 the Scottish Argentine Society inaugurated a Tartan Day parade in Buenos Aires.4 The Scottish government climbed on the bandwagon in 2009 with the first ‘Year of Homecoming’, repeated in 2014, although Shetland had seen the commercial potential of wooing homecoming tourists as early as 1960, when it organised its first ‘hamefarin’ celebration.5 As these events demonstrate, Scotland’s history cannot be separated from the saga of its diaspora: the millions of emigrants who in various ways implanted aspects of their Scottish identity in the lands where they settled or sojourned. And at the heart of that dispersal lie stories of human adventure, achievement and adversity, experiences which are best expressed in the participants’ own words. Some of their stories emerge in the ensuing narrative, which draws, first and foremost, on an extensive collection of interviews to explore aspirations and decision-making processes; recruitment strategies; physical transitions; adjustment and integration in home, school, workplace and community; dealing with adversity; attitudes to Scottish identity; and experiences of ‘homecoming’. The oral evidence is taken from an ongoing interviewing project, entitled ‘Emigrant Voices’, which documents Scottish emigration in the 20th and early 21st centuries through my recorded conversations with over 100 individuals over more than 15 years.

In order to contextualise the interviewees’ relatively recent experiences, their opinions and recollections are blended and compared with emigrant testimony taken from other collections, earlier periods, and different genres. AJP Taylor may have dismissed oral history as nothing more than ‘old men drooling about their youth’,6 but since he made that notorious pronouncement in 1972, oral testimony has become a well-established analytical tool, skilfully wielded in the hands of pioneers like Paul Thompson, Rob Perks, Alistair Thomson and Alessandro Portelli, and enthusiastically adopted by armies of amateur researchers.7 As Portelli has pointed out, the innovative elements of oral sources include the collaboration involved in dialogue, where ‘the historian’s agenda must meet the agenda of the narrator’; illumination of the relationship between events themselves and their significance within the lives of the narrators; and a foregrounding of the role of ‘memory, narrative, subjectivity [and] dialogue’ in historical analysis.8

In 1999 Alistair Thomson reviewed the scholarship with specific reference to migration, which he claimed was ‘one of the most important themes of oral history research’.9 As well as giving access to the complex ‘internal worlds’ of the participants, interviews with migrants demonstrated the dynamic relationship between memory and identity at different stages in the lives of individuals, families and communities.10 Since Thomson’s article appeared a few more historians have deployed oral testimony in studies of emigration to the Antipodes and North America, using either their own recordings, or existing published collections of interviews.11 Some of the examples that are used in this book to amplify the study or expand its chronology are taken from well-known archival collections in the United States, Canada and Australia, but the treasure hunt also extended to more obscure materials lodged in state or provincial repositories, heritage societies and local libraries. These recordings have been consulted in situ, purchased, or accessed online. The Ellis Island Oral History Project, initiated in 1973, has recorded the recollections of almost 1,900 of the 12 million individuals (including around 600,000 Scots) who passed through the portals of the United States’ main immigrant processing station in New York harbour between 1892 and 1954. The interviews document the origins, motives, journeys, arrival and settlement of the immigrants. Across the border in Nova Scotia, the Canadian Museum of Immigration in Halifax has, since 2000, assembled a growing collection of interviews with immigrants (currently over 900 individuals from over 80 countries), many of whom entered the country through the portals of Pier 21 between 1928 and 1971. It includes 26 interviews with Scots.12 On the other side of Canada, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Scottish Studies in Vancouver hosts ‘Scottish Voices from the West’, an ongoing oral history archive, inaugurated in 2003, that includes four of the individuals featured in the ‘Emigrant Voices’ collection. Australian material has been sourced from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History and Folklore Division, specifically from the recent ‘Scots in Australia’ pilot oral history project.13 Recourse has also been made to an older collection, the New South Wales Bicentennial Oral History Project, which interviewed 200 people – including Scots – about their recollections of the period 1900–1930.14 That venture was triggered by the concern of the Ethnic Affairs Commission of New South Wales that ‘the experiences of large numbers of migrants who had come to Australia’ – albeit mainly those from non-English-speaking backgrounds – were not being recorded and preserved and therefore ‘would not be reflected in writing about and understanding modern Australia.’15

The preservation of oral testimony in its raw form, and our ability to savour its orality, became possible with the invention of the reel-to-reel tape recorder. The concept of an oral history archive was pioneered by Allan Nevins, an American historian and journalist, who in 1948 established the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, New York. Nevins, however, did not value the orality of his interviews with elite businessmen and politicians: his objective was to transcribe the recordings into typed manuscripts for the use of researchers, without necessarily preserving the interviews themselves.16 It was some time before oral history was institutionalised, first in the United States, where the Oral History Association was formed in 1967. Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand followed suit by inaugurating similar national organisations in 1973, 1974, 1978 and 1986 respectively,17 but in 1973 TC Smout was pessimistic about the future of oral history in Scotland. Speaking in Edinburgh at the inaugural conference of the British Oral History Society, he singled out the neglect of emigrant testimony as a particularly glaring historiographical omission which had wider implications. Seven years earlier Gordon Donaldson’s pioneering book, The Scots Overseas,18 had turned the spotlight on the significance of the Scottish diaspora, and Smout’s plea was for more attention to be paid to the (literal) voices of ordinary emigrants, in the context of his general concern to promote social history:

Large Scottish emigrant colonies exist abroad, some of them Gaelic speaking – but attempts to record their oral history are scarcely afloat, and little effort seems to have been made to discover in a systematic way whether or not foreigners are doing the job for us in countries where the diaspora live [sic]. A very good case indeed could be made out for substantial backing for all these ventures, but unless Scotland is prepared to enter the fray and approach with zestful leadership and well thought-out projects, Scottish oral history… will be left behind [and] the whole study of history in Scotland will suffer again.19

Scotland did indeed enter the fray, though not immediately, and not specifically in pursuit of emigrants’ stories. Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, established in 1951, already had a sound archive, which included material from the diaspora, but its emphasis was on oral traditions, rather than oral history. It was only in the 1990s that dedicated oral history projects were inaugurated, with the establishment of Strathclyde University’s Oral History Centre, followed by ‘Lives in the Oil Industry’, a joint venture between the British Library’s National Life Story Collection and the University of Aberdeen. These Scottish developments were part of a wider international pattern of increased activity, which simultaneously reflected and stimulated the acceptance of oral testimony as a scholarly methodology. The availability of more sophisticated, less intrusive, technologies (cassettes and then digital recorders) also gave rise – sometimes haphazardly – to numerous community ventures, as well as private collections compiled by individual researchers.

As portable equipment and interaction with other disciplines expanded the scope of field work, so the objectives of the interview and the techniques of the interviewer have also changed. In particular, Nevins’ elitist approach has been replaced by an emphasis on ordinary life histories whose content is steered by the story-teller, rather than the interviewer. The rigid questionnaires which framed – and constrained – interviews conducted by the first generation of oral historians have given way to semi-structured, more fluid agendas which allow the interviewing project’s particular themes to be woven into a broader tapestry of whole life stories. The significance of orality has also been recognised in a way that was not the case in the early days of practitioners like Nevins, when it was common practice, particularly in the US, to destroy the audio tapes once the interviews had been transcribed.20

It is perhaps not surprising that questionnaires were frequently deployed by early oral historians, for – in terms of eliciting personal testimony – the questionnaire was the predecessor of the interview. During the Depression, it was used in the United States, when more than 6,000 writers were recruited by the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project, to interview over 10,000 ordinary Americans about their everyday lives.21 The questionnaire had a particularly long pedigree in Scotland. In the 1790s Sir John Sinclair badgered the country’s 938 parish ministers to answer 160 questions about past and present life in their parishes, information which he then used to compile his renowned 21-volume Statistical Account of Scotland. Sinclair’s survey set a pattern of questionnaire-based statistical investigation and reporting that in the following centuries was adopted or adapted by generations of royal commissions and select committees. Rooted in the oral or written evidence or traditions of witnesses, some of these reports turned the spotlight on the causes and consequences of emigration, while their methodology reflects the filtering of personal testimony and memory through a mediator’s pen.22

Written questionnaires were also used to elicit reflections from emigrants once they had reached their destinations, and two such collections occasionally play a walk-on, comparative role in this book. During the 1950s the Saskatchewan Archives Board commissioned a major survey of pioneers whose memories stretched back to the 1870s. A set of 11 questionnaires sought information on reasons for emigrating, housing, health, diet, religion, education, recreation, farming, folklore, local government, and Christmas from settlers who had come to the prairies between 1878 and 1914. Each questionnaire comprised a minimum of 40 questions, and the survey elicited over 3,500 replies.23 Four decades later, and on another continent, approximately 280 questionnaires were collected by Megan Hutching as part of her preparatory research for an oral history of post-war assisted immigration to New Zealand, and the collection was donated to the National Library of New Zealand in 2006.24

If oral history is still a relatively ‘new kid on the block’25 and responses to questionnaires are limited by the prescriptive format of many such surveys, there is another source of personal testimony that offers both chronological spread and huge breadth of content. Emigrant letters have been around for as long as there has been emigration. They have been preserved by recipients at both ends of the process, have been pored over by scholars, and are injected into this book from time to time in order to strengthen the comparative roots in which the analysis of oral testimony is embedded. Until the coming of the telephone, and in the absence of personal visits, the exchange of letters was the only means of transmitting information between emigrants and their homeland. They retained their dominance until the invention of the internet, for international telephone calls were expensive, and generally made only at times of crisis or celebration. Letters, however, were a common and expected form of regular communication, so any delay or cessation in their delivery was likely to cause disappointment, and sometimes consternation or alarm.26 James Adam, an emigrant who was sent back to Scotland as a recruitment agent for the New Zealand government in the 1850s, wrote of having met ‘an aged mother [who] requested a prayer on behalf of a careless son in New Zealand who had never written to his sorrowing mother’.27 Adam’s guidebook advised every emigrant to write home once a month, but some wrote weekly or even more frequently, and these missives were eagerly anticipated. In their study based on the oral testimony of English settlers in Canada since 1945, Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson highlight the importance of frequent air letters, many of which were retained in family archives.28 Annie MacRitchie, who emigrated from the Isle of Lewis to Detroit in 1953, has preserved several boxes of correspondence that she both received and sent, and still remembers the thrill of receiving news from home:

Every day I wrote, and every day I got plenty of mail from my parents, my sister – my sisters – my brother, all our relatives, and all my friends. So every day… my treat was looking forward to the mail man.29

The foundations for such regular communication had been laid during the previous century, when mass emigration, coupled with an expanding international business traffic, gave rise to modern postal systems that in turn encouraged further epistolary exchanges.30 It is impossible either to identify the full extent of emigrant correspondence, or to calculate the percentage that survives, but in 1885 the New Zealand Post Office and Telegraph Department estimated that almost 1.1 million letters had left the country for Britain and Ireland that year, equivalent to five letters for every UK-born resident, or about a letter a month for each household.31 ‘Immigrant letters’, David Gerber asserts, are ‘probably the largest single body of the writing of ordinary people to which historians have access’,32 and they provide a powerful lens through which to scrutinise individuals’ attitudes and emotions, as well as their actions and experiences. At the same time they can illuminate broader trends about the spirit of the age, and the circumstances that triggered emigration as a generic movement, rather than simply being the outcome of multitudes of individual decisions.

Private letters were generally conversations between correspondents who knew each other. Even if the exchange was sometimes sporadic, and only one side of the dialogue has been passed down, they can offer a different, more contemporary, and more intimate insight into emigration than the retrospective, semi-public and perhaps more guarded reflections of interviewees who are conversing with strangers. Of course, letters had multiple purposes, and not all were neutral or personal missives. Some correspondents had a self-conscious agenda to vindicate their decision or publicise their experiences. ‘You will show this letter to as many of our friends as possible’, was John Mackie’s instruction when he wrote from South Australia’s Clare Valley to his brother in Aberdeenshire in 1851. He suggested that ‘perhaps the best way’ to spread the good news that he was ‘living and liking the Antipodes well’ would be to publish his lengthy letter in the regional newspaper, a suggestion which was duly followed.33 Letters from overseas might also be passed around the emigrants’ home communities, sometimes with the deliberate objective of stimulating further emigration. Some went further, and enclosed a remittance or prepaid ticket. Recruitment letters were didactic compositions, similar in style and content to the masses of published guidebooks, which themselves relied heavily on anthologies of emigrant correspondence to spread their evangelistic message. In other cases letters were simply diaristic descriptions of daily life, close cousins of the journals kept by emigrants in transit or (less commonly) after they had reached their destination. A handful of such diaries completes the supporting cast of written sources that help us listen more effectively to the emigrant voices that take centre stage in this study.

Evaluating emigrant testimony

We can only listen effectively if we are aware of bias, which in turn requires some knowledge of context. Whether we are hearing or reading, we have to ask: who is speaking or writing, to whom, when, where, and why? A diary was, in David Gerber’s words, essentially ‘a dialogue with oneself’, even if reconfigured into letter form for transmission to the homeland.34 Diarists ranged from the utterly self-absorbed to individuals who engaged reflectively with their companions and surroundings. Unlike the retrospective testimony found in memoirs and most interviews, these texts can shed a useful light on the immediate reactions of emigrants to the situations in which they found themselves, most commonly in the early stages of transition.

Emigrant correspondence is a popular and multi-layered source, which has to be handled with particular care. The sheer volume and varied provenance of emigrant letters, as well as their vast range of objectives, constituencies and styles, defy categorisation. Since letters generally tell a story, usually in an accessible way, they are attractive to researchers and readers, who may use them simply to illustrate particular projects while neglecting to probe the generic significance of the medium or the value of theoretical perspectives. We must also read between the lines in order to detect how the attitudes and emotions expressed in letters, as well as their actual structure, were shaped by the interaction of factors such as the writers’ gender, age, education, and family and cultural background.35 The reasons for self-censorship and silence have to be taken into account, as does the transmission of misleading information, either deliberately or inadvertently, as correspondents underplayed or overstated problems and achievements. As Mary Chamberlain discovered, Barbadian immigrants to the UK after the war did not want to upset families who had loaned them money for the journey by admitting that their image of the welcoming ‘mother county’ had been shattered by the realities of racial discrimination and menial work.36

These influences are subtle and often more difficult to detect than the obvious propaganda in published collections of correspondence that were commissioned, selected and subsidised by charitable emigration societies (with a view to fund-raising for specific groups) or government agencies (in order to trigger a further outflow of targeted categories).37 Editorial intrusion also affected the selection of letters that appeared in newspapers, the emphasis on encouragement or warning being dictated by the publication’s attitude to emigration. Anthologies compiled by genealogists or local historians have their own agendas. Yet even without editorial filtering, and despite their ubiquity, letters can never fully represent the emigrant experience. Correspondence which found its way into the contemporary public domain was generally written by articulate individuals who had a case to make and were aware of the power of the pen.38 But only a small minority of emigrants belonged to an educated elite. Some were excluded from letter-writing because they were illiterate, others by the cost of postage. Still others had no need or desire to maintain ties with their homeland – for instance, if an entire family or community had emigrated, or if the emigrant deliberately wanted to close the door on an earlier chapter of their life. Some were too busy to write, or did not want to report disappointment or failure. Very few maintained a consistent correspondence across their lifetime, the tendency being to write most frequently in the early years of settlement. The long-term survival of letters was dependent mainly on a deliberate decision by the recipients, and those which dealt with crucial business interests, family landmarks or inheritance issues were most likely to be retained. Moreover, coverage is often asymmetrical, since letters written by emigrants to the homeland seem to have a better survival record than those which were sent in the opposite direction.

Problems of bias and selection are not confined to letter-writers. Illiterate emigrants did not keep diaries, nor did they return questionnaires. The standardised structure of a questionnaire may generate consistent responses which can be quantified and compared, but at the expense of detailed reflection.39 Open-ended discussion is difficult to achieve in a reactive, perhaps impersonal format which requires answers to be given to questions which are dictated solely by the questioner. Yet not all questionnaires are rigid and impersonal, and the semi-structured interview guide which is used by many oral historians encourages both interviewer and interviewee to give shape to their discussion and jog memories without imposing a straitjacket on the interview.

That is not to say the gathering of oral evidence through interviews is uncontentious: far from it. Although AJP Taylor’s dismissal of oral history has been discredited, the methodology is subject to the same challenges of bias and selectivity as written testimony, as well as the charge that interviewers and users fail to apply the rigorous rules of historical scholarship to the analysis of what people say, as opposed to what they write. Verbal evidence, like correspondence or questionnaires, confronts us with a collection of individuals whose initial identification may reflect the contacts of the project organiser, the circles in which the interviewer moves, the choice of advertising medium, or the power of personal persuasion. Those individuals within the initial group who respond positively to an invitation to be interviewed impose another level of self-selection and bias through their willingness to speak about (and generally validate) their experiences, and possibly by recruiting others of similar background through a snowball mechanism. The interviewing procedure itself is subject to the potentially distorting presence of the interviewer, whose preoccupations and questions can dictate the discussion, promoting or ignoring certain themes. On the other hand, non-intervention can produce an unfocused, tangled, narrative, or a monologue of unrelated and highly subjective anecdotes which cannot be analysed meaningfully. It is an unstable, variable medium, for the changing relationship between interviewer and interviewee means that the same question, asked at different stages in the conversation, may well elicit a different answer, perhaps once the participants have relaxed in each other’s company.

The unreliability, instability and selectivity of memory have also been the target of critics who – invoking Taylor’s image of ‘old men drooling’ – highlight the impact of old age and the passage of time on personal and collective recollections, as well as the subtle pressure to conform to a dominant version of a past event or experience.40 In the context of Highland emigration, for instance, this might mean that a decision which at time of leaving was articulated as a straightforward quest for betterment was subsequently reinterpreted as an enforced exile, to match both the prevailing historiography and a context in which victimhood had become a desirable, and frequently expressed, attribute. Critics also cite the tendency to telescope two or more events into a single memory, or to claim personal recollection of incidents, particularly from childhood, which had only been experienced vicariously, through parents or newspapers. We must therefore evaluate processes of forgetting as well as remembering, whether events have been erased from individuals’ minds deliberately or inadvertently, by collective myth-making, painful recollections, or simply the passage of time.41

Even those who advocate oral history do not all sing from the same song sheet. Collective interviews, whether they involve only two people, or a much larger group, can stimulate interaction, raise new topics for discussion, challenge interpretations, and correct mistakes. On the other hand, apart from being technically more challenging, the group (or dominant voices within it) can create a pressure to conform to a single narrative, and, in such a public forum, the nuanced, thoughtful and specific responses that are engendered by an atmosphere of privacy may give way to bland generalisations. Other discussions concern the strengths and weaknesses of video rather than audio recording; and the ways in which to use memory aids such as photographs, maps and letters. It is the processing of evidence, however, that has generated most debate. Arguments about the merits of transcriptions and summaries reflect different definitions of oral history and its objectives. Those who simply use oral testimony as an adjunct to documentary sources often favour full transcription, which allows evidence to be scrutinised on paper, without any requirement to listen to the actual voices of the interviewees. Others, however, emphasise the importance of the source per se, particularly its aurality, and are more concerned with the archival value of the material than with the uses to which it is put. Transcriptions, it is argued, alter the source fundamentally. As Portelli has pointed out, the filter of language is crucial: ‘The transcript turns aural objects into visual ones, which inevitably implies changes and interpretation.’42 To rely on a written transcription also deprives the researcher of the intonations, irregularities and rhythms that are integral to the spoken word, and which cannot be reproduced in written form. Neither Murdo MacIver’s enthusiasm, nor Ena Macdonald’s anguish, can be conveyed adequately without listening to their voices. It is only by hearing the voices, too, that we can begin to appreciate disparities in the retention or loss of accent, even among individuals who emigrated at a similar age, in the same era. In practical terms, the pedagogical case for aurality – for the importance of hearing the evidence – has also been reinforced in recent years by the way in which the digital revolution has made the spoken word available (and searchable) at the click of a computer mouse.

Many of the challenges raised by critics of oral history can be addressed by applying the same rules of structural rigour, corroboration and internal consistency as when using documentary sources. Additional requirements for an interviewer include meticulous preparation; the patience to listen; the skill to intervene judiciously in order to ensure thematic coherence without imposing their own voice or agenda; the avoidance of overly complex or leading questions; and a recognition of the interviewees’ interests, sensitivities and silences. As Gould Colman commented more than half a century ago: ‘The interviewer is researcher, audience, and avenue to posterity.’43 Rapport is the key to a fruitful discussion, but the participants must simultaneously balance the intimacy of a personal dialogue with an awareness that the conversation will also become public property for future researchers. This may raise ethical issues relating to confidentiality or even defamation.

Some particular characteristics of oral testimony that have been denounced as weaknesses can be seen, paradoxically, as strengths. Interviews do not have to be rigidly restrictive or formlessly flexible. Nor does the presence of the interviewer, armed with an outline interview guide and an open mind, necessarily intrude on the process or distort the product unhelpfully. In an ideal scenario, a dynamic conversation develops between interviewer and interviewee, leading to a product which is the shared outcome of their interaction. Unlike written documents, which are static, the content of an interview is shaped by the organic relationship of questions and answers, corrections and clarifications, and perhaps by the location in which the interview takes place. This makes oral testimony a much more nuanced source than simply a verbal record of the past, and also means that an interview, even under identical conditions, ‘is never the same twice’.44

The subjectivity, inconsistency and diversity of memory can be used to our advantage. Memories are constructed and reconstructed not simply by the lapse of time and the onset of old age, but by the political, cultural and personal context in which recollections are invoked and interpreted. Memories also shape – and are shaped by – perceptions of identity, perhaps especially among emigrants who have had to transplant or reconstruct their identities. Memory is therefore not ‘a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings’.45 By conforming to a dominant community memory, family legend or national meta-narrative, interviewees reflect and reinforce that orthodoxy, and revisit their past experiences through the lens of present attitudes and circumstances. Conversely, those who do not recognise or accept the dominant collective narrative may either remain silent or articulate ‘oppositional memories’, which also remind historians of the dynamism, complexity and interactivity of the phenomenon of remembering.46 The particular memories invoked, and the way in which policies, processes and procedures are interpreted – including factual inaccuracies and ambiguities – can therefore be important constituents in developing a more nuanced insight into interviewees’ understandings of the events in which they had participated.

Interrogating the evidence: the core issues

Such perspectives provide invisible theoretical scaffolding for the conversations which populate this book, and the blending of autobiography and history that lie at its core. The first interview was recorded in 1994, but it was in 2005 that the project got underway with a view to ultimate publication of its findings. Material from the collection was first published in 2012 in a general study of 20th century Scottish emigration, Scotland No More?, the final chapter of which dipped a toe into oral evidence to amplify themes that had been scrutinised from documentary sources in earlier chapters.47Testimonies of Transition has been written in order to give those 38 individuals, and subsequent interviewees, a specific forum for the detailed articulation and analysis of motives, attitudes and experiences that received only passing coverage in the previous study. Although there is inevitably some overlap, interview extracts quoted in Scotland No More? have only been reused when such repetition has been deemed necessary for context and understanding.

The databank of oral testimony (which continues to be built up) contains, at time of writing, 91 interviews with 106 individuals, 49 men and 57 women. The conversations were conducted face-to-face or by telephone or Skype in Scotland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, intermittently over 23 years, but primarily since 2005. The average length of interview was one hour, though some were as short as 30 minutes, and occasionally a conversation lasted for more than three hours. Of the participants, 88 had left Scotland to live overseas, and a further five were born abroad. Thirty-seven interviewees had either returned to Scotland after living overseas, or (in the case of the five born abroad) had come back during childhood. The oldest participant was aged 100, and the youngest was 26. Of the emigrants, 75 had left Scotland as adults, and 17 as children.48 The majority of adult emigrants had been married when they left Scotland: 21 of the men and 25 of the women.

Most interviews were one-to-one conversations, but on 13 occasions a husband and wife participated together, on one occasion two sisters-in-law, and on one occasion a mother and daughter. Two nonagenarian mothers and their sons were also interviewed together,49 and on another occasion three siblings shared their childhood memories of Canada between the wars.50 Four other participants spoke vicariously about the emigration of family members, and one interviewee had come in the opposite direction, as an immigrant into Scotland. Five participants (three individuals and one couple) were interviewed twice, and one individual – the late Murdo MacIver – was interviewed on three separate occasions. As ambiguities or further questions emerged during the writing of this book, a number of original interviewees were contacted for follow-up information by email, letter or telephone, and a handful of new participants supplied information by phone or email, rather than in a formal interview.51

The emphasis is, not surprisingly, on the post-war decades, but two individuals, both now deceased, left Scotland in the 1920s. Only three interviewees requested anonymity, one man being given a pseudonym and the other individuals being referred to simply by their initials. In all but those cases the participants are identified by their real names. Women who changed their names when they married are referred to in the text by whatever surname they used at the time of the events discussed in their testimony. For both pedagogical and practical reasons, the geographical emphasis is on North America and the Antipodes. These were the regions which attracted most Scottish emigrants in earlier centuries, and which have continued to dominate the exodus.52 Since North America and the Antipodes are also the locations on which most studies of the Scottish diaspora have focused, modern oral reflections can also be compared relatively easily with older written testimony. For the same reasons, it has been possible to tap into networks of scholars, family history societies and Scottish associations in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and thereby to identify interviewees. Other parts of the Scottish diaspora are represented however, in a handful of interviews from South America, Africa, and Asia, as well as in conversations with Scots who returned to their homeland after sojourning in these and other locations. Thirteen interviews with Scots in England have so far been confined only to those who went to the identifiably Scottish enclave of Corby, and have not been included in this study.

Interviewees are recruited through various mechanisms. Some have answered advertisements in family history society publications; others have responded to appeals made during evening classes, public lectures or conferences held in different parts of Scotland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Sometimes direct contact is made with Scottish organisations overseas or with individuals who have come to notice through exhibitions, newspaper articles, radio or television features. As with the actual decision to emigrate, the recruitment of interviewees also owes much to the snowball effect of word-of-mouth encouragement from participants. Potential interviewees are sent an explanatory letter, along with a permissions form to cover copyright clearance, deposit and subsequent use of the interview and related material. As far as possible, meetings are held in a location chosen by the interviewee, often their own home, but in 15 cases, practical difficulties associated with distance and time have required a phone conversation, and two later interviews were conducted using Skype. Remote conversations are less than ideal, both in terms of the recording’s technical quality (particularly in the early days), and because the participants do not generally have an opportunity to develop the rapport that comes from a face-to-face dialogue.

The content of the discussion is framed, but not dictated, by an interview guide, which encourages participants to root their emigration experiences within the context of whole life narratives. The thematic pattern (which is replicated in the book’s chapter structure) is a familiar one in migration studies.53 Basic biographical questions are followed – for those who emigrated as adults – by enquiries about their upbringing, education, accommodation, employment, standard of living, travel history, and social life in Scotland. The circumstances surrounding their emigration are then explored in some detail. Questions include the triggers for leaving Scotland; the key sources of information and persuasion; the choice of destination; the significance of the Commonwealth and/or the role of subsidised emigration in deciding where to go; the nature and extent of prior knowledge about the chosen location; the process of making application and travel arrangements; the length of time between conception of the idea and implementation of the decision; and the attitude of parents, children, friends and workmates. Two interviews with recruitment agents – an elusive category – approach the issues of reaching and effecting a decision from the perspective of the advocate or sponsor, rather than the client.

The next set of questions moves the narrative on to the interviewees’ physical relocation, probing the emotions of those leaving and staying, as well as practical details of the journey. The spotlight then shifts to the new country, with questions about first impressions, employment, housing, education, living standards, climate, and social life. The objective here is to elicit information both about practical matters and the conjunction or disparity between the interviewees’ expectations and experiences. The discussion subsequently shifts from habits, processes and procedures to explore more cerebral issues relating to adaptation, integration and assimilation, with particular reference to homesickness, interpersonal relationships and cultural attitudes. That in turn opens up the important but elusive field of identities or identifications, those interests and attitudes which might be transferred or transformed in the course of emigration and settlement. Such issues can be explored partly through specific questions about letters and phone calls; or about the emigrants’ involvement with Scottish clubs, societies and informal networks – the so-called ‘associational culture’ that has attracted a lot of scholarly interest in recent years.54 A different, more open-ended approach enquires about definitions of ‘home’, probes interviewees’ views on their ethnicity, and asks whether they would describe their emigration as transplantation or uprooting. Finally, the spotlight is trained once more on Scotland, in order to explore the motives and experiences of emigrants who have returned to their homeland, either permanently, recurrently, or just once. The expectations and feelings of their overseas-born families are also woven into this section, especially in terms of their perceptions of identity.

The actual discussions, of course, do not follow such a prescribed format, but range back and forth across these – and many other – topics. In the course of the project it became evident that it is not only emigrants’ memories that are reshaped by the political and cultural context in which the conversation takes place. In recent years discussions about personal identities and images of Scotland have embraced the emigrants’ perceptions of their homeland against the backdrop of an upsurge in nationalist sentiment, especially the referendum of September 2014 and (to a lesser extent) Brexit. Interviewees’ attitudes towards Scottish independence have now become a key part of many conversations, injecting a unique element into a study which in all other respects does not support a case for Scottish exceptionalism: in general, the experiences of Scottish emigrants seem to echo those of their counterparts from other parts of Britain whose testimony has been analysed in other recent studies.55

Further themes which are not addressed explicitly in discussion, but emerge from subsequent analysis of the interviews, include the appearance of family patterns: what Alistair Thomson has called the ‘intergenerational dynamics of migration’.56 For example, Calum Murray from Shader in the Isle of Lewis was one emigrant who followed very clearly in the footsteps of his father, who before the First World War had travelled between Canada and the Hebrides, working on grain elevators in Ontario and British Columbia. In due course Calum too became a long-distance transatlantic commuter, spending 30 summers from the early 1950s freighting grain on the Great Lakes.57 What has not emerged so far from any of the interviews, however, is the intergenerational tension noted by Janis Wilton among emigrants to Australia.58 There are also very few examples of spousal disagreement about the decision to emigrate or where to go. Those silences do not necessarily indicate the absence of tensions: as interviewer, I was sometimes unwilling to ask potentially intrusive questions, and most interviewees would probably not volunteer such information unprompted. Two other themes that are not addressed through specific questions, but develop organically from some of the discussions are the significance of gender and emigrants’ relations with indigenous people. A deliberate characteristic of the collection is that it tells the stories of ordinary individuals and families, not the high-profile, much scrutinised emigrants such as children who were so controversially despatched overseas by orphanages.

In quoting the interviewees’ testimony, their words have been reproduced as they were spoken, though generally with the omission of interjections and filled pauses such as ‘you know’ and ‘er’. There has been minimal grammatical intervention, but where words have been added or deleted in order to enhance fluency and comprehension, the insertions have been enclosed in square brackets, and the deletions indicated by ellipses. Non-spoken communications such as laughter, tears, or significant pauses have also been identified by inserting these words within square brackets. When interviewees have laid particular stress upon a certain word, this has been indicated by the use of italics.

The hundreds of hours of conversations that have taken place can be heard as well as read. Once all the material has been processed, the digital recordings will be deposited in the audio collections of the Special Libraries and Archives at the University of Aberdeen, along with summaries, or – in the case of seven interviews – full transcriptions.59 Listening is just as important as reading, since the reproduction of narratives on the printed page gives only a partial glimpse into the richness of the source. In analysing and quoting from interviewees’ recollections, it is almost impossible to convey the cadences and emotions of the spoken word that resonated through every conversation, and which for me are the most powerful legacy of the project. Yet, even without the auditory dimension, the interviews offer a vibrant mosaic of autobiographical and historical insights, and it is to these conversations – contextualised by other sources – that we now turn in seeking to chart, evaluate and comprehend the persistent phenomenon of Scottish emigration in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

CHAPTER 2

Pulling up the Roots: The Smorgasbord of Decision-making

‘ABROAD WAS WHERE it all happened’ was the optimistic perception that in 1954 propelled Ian Skinner into a career in shipping management which took him to Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and ultimately back to Scotland. More negatively, ‘disappointment [in the workplace] and the fact that I couldn’t get decent housing’ persuaded Easton Vance to exchange Motherwell for Vancouver in 1956, the year that Scots supplied 13.1 per cent of Britain’s emigrants.1

The multi-hued tapestry of influences that triggered and shaped the decision to leave Scotland is firmly woven into the testimony of interviewees. Their recollections echo the sentiments which were articulated by earlier generations of emigrants – explicitly in response to official investigations or publishers’ overtures, and implicitly in correspondence with family and friends. This chapter identifies and analyses various categories of catalysts that shaped the initial decision, choice of destination, and particular pattern of migration. As well as giving voice to the concerns and ambitions of different generations of interviewees, it also draws on written testimony from much earlier periods to provide a wider comparative context within which to understand continuities and changes in the complex process of reaching the decision to emigrate. While the basic question that frames the chapter is whether emigration was triggered by austerity, despair and necessity, or prosperity, ambition and choice, examples from the experiences of real individuals inject vital nuances and human dilemmas into that simplistic theoretical dichotomy.

Yet we cannot always take assertions at face value. The caveats that apply to the reliability of personal testimony in general have particular resonance when we evaluate statements about the reasons for emigrating. In retrospective accounts, the temptation to make the motive match the subsequent experience may unwittingly colour memories whose sharpness has faded with the passage of time. Long residence in a country or ethnic community with a dominant narrative of settlement may also shape retrospective explanations of motives, especially if the history of emigration is contentious. Emigrants who wrote letters for distribution around their home communities, or for wider dissemination through the press described and defended their decisions with a carefully crafted self-consciousness. Those whose views were solicited by contemporary policy-makers, later investigators or recruitment agents generally said what was expected of them, responding to leading questions or presenting formulaic comparisons of conditions in homeland and hostland. Testimony that was published in guidebooks or the fund-raising pamphlets of emigration societies was also carefully selected and edited to achieve the maximum impact – and income.

Most interviewees, however, had no obvious axe to grind or advocacy to pursue, and some had very clear recollections of the circumstances that had led them to emigrate. From their wide-ranging and varied testimony it is possible to identify several recurring preoccupations. The clearest thematic shift in attitude from earlier generations is that in most narratives the glass had become more explicitly half full rather than half empty. Emigrants were proactively grasping opportunities overseas, not fleeing from destitution or despair. Although some were frustrated with limited opportunities in Scotland, few felt that staying was the economic equivalent of drinking in the last chance saloon. Many were seeking career advancement, in both trades and professions, but there was – not surprisingly – a marked absence of the farming ambitions that had once dominated emigration rhetoric. As gender roles became less defined, and the employment market expanded, there was also an increasing similarity in the aspirations of male and female emigrants. Perhaps it is a reflection of creeping globalisation and ease of travel that the long-standing perception of emigration as a momentous, life-changing decision was not generally articulated by interviewees. While some fitted it into a wider pattern of career mobility, others regarded it as an extended but temporary holiday or an experiment which could easily be reversed if expectations were not met.

Voices from different constituencies populate the following analysis of overlapping influences. We hear first from those who, having emigrated as children, could only reflect vicariously on decisions made by their parents. Among those who planned and implemented their own decisions the triggers to be highlighted include: the dislocating impact of war and austerity; the pursuit of advancement or adventure in work and leisure; and family traditions of mobility or existing overseas support networks. The vital role of sponsorship and professional canvassing is addressed in Chapter 3, which juxtaposes emigrants’ recollections with some rare testimony from the other side of the recruitment desk.

Vicarious decision-making: the recollections of child emigrants

Those who emigrated as children speak only in a minor key in this chapter. They did not play an active part in the decision to leave, and their opinions about their parents’ motives are filtered second-hand accounts rather than personal recollections. It is also difficult to offer a wider chronological context for a child’s eye view of why their families emigrated. As well as it being unusual for letters to raise issues that would have been discussed prior to departure, the Victorian concept that children should be seen and not heard extended into the realm of emigrant correspondence. We have few letters or diaries written by children, the main exception being the formulaic compositions that appeared in the promotional magazines of child emigration societies.

Children may not have played an active part in the decision to emigrate, but their well-being and prospects often had a considerable influence over that decision. The desire to offer them a better future – cited by several interviewees – echoed the common aspiration of parents in every era. In 1774 William Gordon from Sutherland told a government enquiry that he ‘was induced to emigrate for the greater benefit of his children’ as a consequence of high rents, cattle losses, and the encouragement of two other sons in North Carolina.2 In Victorian and Edwardian times the emigrants’ goal was frequently to bequeath to the next generation economic security and social status (deemed impossible in Scotland) through the inheritance of a freehold farm, especially in the apparently boundless and empty lands of the Empire. It was an aspiration that propelled numerous settlers to the Canadian prairies at the turn of the century, when federal government propaganda fuelled confidence in the ‘last best West’. Mrs AH Padgham (née Gray) was one of the 67 Scottish pioneers who offered testimony to the Saskatchewan Archives Board in the 1950s. She had arrived in the province in a family party in 1906, at the age of 17. Her father, she recalled, had decided to leave Edinburgh partly because ‘there would be more opportunities for a large family in this new country’, coupled with the encouragement of his eldest son, who had taken up homesteading near Battleford a year earlier.3

Similar sentiments were evident in the inter-war period, when land-hungry Hebridean emigrants contrasted their poverty at home with promises of opportunity in Canada. Although interviewee Morag MacLeod did not have ‘a clue’ why her parents took their seven children to Alberta in 1923, ‘because my father dealt with that’, she probably reflected the subsequent family narrative in her comment that ‘there was nothing there in Benbecula for the family, for the boys’.4 That negative sentiment was confirmed by her own impression of the island during a visit in the 1990s. On the other side of the border, some of the Scots interviewed by the Ellis Island oral historians suggested – albeit not explicitly – that the betterment of the next generation had played a part in their parents’ decision to leave the uncertain economic environment of inter-war Scotland. Nine-year-old Helen Baxter from South Queensferry emigrated to Indiana in the same year that Morag went to Alberta. Her father had gone on ahead, to a job in the steel mill at Gary, where there was ‘a regular Scotch colony… a bunch of people who came like my father did, and we did, for a better life’. The following year John Will’s father brought the family from Cupar to California, when John was seven.

The primary reason for emigrating was lousy economic conditions and it didn’t look like very much opportunity for his kids, and he brought us all here… to a place where we had opportunity.

When ten-year-old Anne Reilly from Paisley arrived in 1928 with her parents and younger brother, she attributed the decision to her mother, who was fulfilling a youthful dream of coming to ‘the land of opportunity’, as well as re-joining her five other children and two siblings, who were already in the United States.5 Among my own more recent interviewees, several who emigrated to New Zealand as children after the war acknowledged that parental concern for their future had been one ingredient among many deciding factors. Cathy Donald was ten when she and her parents left Burntisland for Dunedin in 1953. She recalled:

My father had two aims. He wanted me to be educated, which for someone who was really quite chauvinist, that was a huge thing for him, but he believed in education that he hadn’t got. He didn’t see that I would get to university in Scotland. Ten years later it might have been different, I think, but I probably would have ended up as a secretary, or in a bank or something – slightly better than being in a factory. And the other thing was that housing was a difficulty. Because we had this little extra box room and only one child – it was a council flat – they said, ‘We’re not going to rehouse you, because you’ve got enough space.’ I shudder to think what it would have been like as a teenager.6

A year later Morag Callander’s parents took their three daughters from Glasgow to Australia, when Morag was four. She believed the decision was made partly on health grounds, ‘because I was asthmatic as a baby; possibly because of the assisted passage that was available; and also possibly because I think they thought there was a bit more of a future than what was available in Scotland.’7

A similar cocktail of reasons led Brian Coutts’ parents to emigrate from Edinburgh to Dunedin with their two sons in 1955. Brian’s father had