As the nation transformed between 1760 and 1914, large numbers of immigrants settled in Scotland. Several hundred thousand came from Ireland and England. Smaller but still significant groups arrived from India, the British colonies and dependencies, the German and Italian states, and the Russian Empire. The 1911 Census recorded the presence in Scotland of almost four hundred thousand persons born outside the country—about 9 per cent of the total population (Table 26.1).1
No comprehensive study has been made of the history of immigrants and their descendants in Scotland. Some groups have been research subjects, mostly at local and regional level. However, English migrants, people from India, British colonies and dependencies, Africans, and Americans have largely escaped the attention of histor-ians.2 Few studies have made comparisons, involving different groups or contrasting developments in Scotland with what happened elsewhere, which would enable us to determine what were typically Scottish phenomena. This chapter therefore advances an approach that compares experiences of immigrants. It deals with four of the largest groups in the main settlement area before and during the First World War: the Irish, Germans, Russians, and Italians in central Scotland.3
Table 26.1 Census figures on persons present in Scotland in 1911 who were born outside Scotland
The Irish, subject of James Handley’s pioneering studies, complemented by Brenda Collins and Martin Mitchell,4 had been traditional migrants in Scotland, but they settled here in large numbers during the nineteenth century, notably in the 1840s—the Famine period—when the migratory swell turned into a wave. The Irish-born population of Scotland as recorded by the Census increased from 126,321 in 1841 to 207,367 persons in 1851 (from 4.8 to 7.1 per cent of the total population). By 1881 the figure had risen to 218,745 (5.9 per cent of the total and generally growing population) (Table 26.2).
Three-quarters of the Irish went to the west of central Scotland, foremost Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire (where in 1841 they already formed 13.1 and 13.2 per cent of the total population). By 1851, 59,801 Irish-born persons, or 28.8 per cent of all the Irish-born in Scotland, constituted 18.2 per cent of the total population of Glasgow. Some nearby towns had smaller, but relatively large and often fluctuating Irish settlements. Proportionally the largest Irish population was recorded in Port Glasgow; in 1881, 30.1 per cent of the 10,872 residents of its Parliamentary Burgh were born in Ireland. Elsewhere, numerous Irish settled in Dundee and West and Mid Lothian. In 1851, 14,889 Irish-born persons formed 18.9 per cent of the population of Dundee. During the same year the recorded Irish-born figure in Edinburgh and Leith peaked at 12,514, representing 6.5 per cent of the total population. Between 1861 and 1901 increasingly more Irish males than females came to Scotland, notably men aged twenty and over. However, local gender ratios varied. Dundee had about five Irishwomen for every three Irishmen in 1881.
Table 26.2 Census figures on Irish-born persons present in Scotland, 1841–1911
The three groups of foreign immigrants, studied by scholars such as Kenneth Collins, Terri Colpi, Stefan Manz, Ellen O’Donnell, and me,5 were much smaller (Table 26.3). In 1841, 1,303 Germans formed the largest group. It grew to 3,232 in 1901 but declined to 2,362 persons ten years later. By that time, the Russians had overtaken the Germans as the largest group with 11,032 persons, while there were 4,594 Italians in Scotland—both groups arrived largely after 1891. Most of these migrants formed part of a large population movement, which eventually took millions of people away from Continental Europe. Underlying the mass migration were the pressures of fast-growing populations and the apparently better economic prospects in the West. Persecution was an additional motive for Jews among the Russians and Germans. Jews formed a very large group among the people from the Russian Empire in Scotland, and they did so to a lesser extent among the Germans. During the period under review a large area of Poland and the Baltic countries were part of the Russian Empire. Another large group of people recorded by the Census as Russians was formed by non-Jewish Lithuanians. In Scotland, Germans, Russians, and Italians were concentrated in Lanarkshire, notably Glasgow (on the eve of the First World War more than 1 per cent of the city’s residents had a foreign nationality), but individual migrants and families settled in towns across Scotland.6
Table 26.3 Census figures on German, Russian, and Italian-born persons present in Scotland, 1861–1911
To review immigrant experiences, this chapter is divided in sections. The first deals with the Irish and has three subdivisions: the Irish in general, Irish Catholics, and Irish Protestants. While their large numbers warrant separate treatment of the Irish, the other migrants are grouped together in the second section. The final section compares their experiences. To make this comparison, aspects of the integration of immigrants into Scottish society are examined. Integration of immigrants is usually a long-term, nonlinear and multifaceted process.7 Within the scope of this chapter, it is impossible to review the entire process. Instead, the appraisal is limited to two aspects of integration: the reactions of the native population to the newcomers, and the participation of immigrants in the wider economy and politics.
The background of the migrants affected attitudes of native Scots towards Irish immigrants, and feelings changed over time. From the end of the eighteenth century, observers complained about Irish beggars. The minister of the Established Church of Scotland in Newton-upon-Ayr wrote in his contribution to the first Statistical Account of Scotland (1791) that 930 of its 1,689 inhabitants originated outside the parish, including 60 born in Ireland, adding: ‘It is suspected, that many more of the inhabitants have been born in Ireland … several of them being unwilling to tell the place of their birth, being poor, and afraid of being turned out of the town’.8 However, several employers were said to welcome Irish workers. In 1836 William Dixon told the Select Committee on the State of the Irish Poor that Irish miners were ‘fully more obedient and tractable’ than Scottish colliers.9
Anti-Irish attitudes hardened during the period of the Famine when the influx of Irish migrants coincided with the economic depression of 1847–8 in Scotland and local outbreaks of cholera in 1848. On 11 June 1847 the Glasgow Herald stated ‘the streets of Glasgow are at present literally swarming with vagrants from the sister Kingdom’. It was believed they spread disease. Another aspect of their image was their unruliness, especially under the influence of alcohol. Reports about quarrelsome Irish navvies, Irish participation in violent labour disputes, and troubles between Irish religious factions reinforced this perception.10
In some middle-class eyes the presence of Irish immigrants had prejudicial effects on Scottish morality. From early on, the Irish were associated with petty theft and resetting. This was extended to other crimes. The Scotsman wrote on 27 December 1828 that the revelations about the body-snatchers Burke and Hare ‘will strengthen the Scottish prejudices against the natives of the Emerald Isle’, and stated ‘that as there are more ignorance, degradation and misery in Ireland than in Scotland, the Irish are likely to fall more easily into the habit of committing crime’. Later it was feared that the native population would be infected by Irish vice. The 1871 Census reported ‘an invasion … of the Irish race’ that had created a ‘body of labourers of the lowest class with scarcely any education’, who ‘do not seem to have improved by residence among us’, concluding it was ‘quite certain that the native Scot who has associated with them has most certainly deteriorated’.11
During the first decades of the nineteenth century the Irish also gained a reputation as strike-breakers in mining disputes. Some Scottish working-class leaders regarded the immigrants as competitors who depressed wages and working conditions. The negative perception persisted in the 1880s when the future Labour leader Keir Hardie said the Irish miner had ‘a big shovel, a strong back and a weak brain’, came straight from ‘a peat bog or tattie field’, and produced ‘coal enough for a man and a half’.12 Here Hardie also referred to another aspect of the stereotype of the begging, disease-ridden, drunken, and violent Paddy, namely his stupidity.
As Mitchell has pointed out, anti-Irish bias was tempered by the participation of immigrants in trade-union and political activity. After their involvement in early weavers’ unions, Irishmen formed the driving force behind the Glasgow Cotton Spinners Association and represented textile workers on the local trades’ committees of the 1820s and 1830s. They took part in the radical United Scotsmen, Chartist, and Suffrage movements of the 1790s, 1830s, and 1840s. Later, Irish workers were prominent in the rank and file of organizations such as the Lanarkshire Miners Union and the National Iron and Steelworkers Union. They formed independent associations such as the United Labourers in the 1850s, but increasingly these unions were absorbed into the general labour movement. By 1892 the United Labourers had been re-established as the National Labourers Union, the largest subscriber to the Glasgow Trades Council. Irishmen also represented other trades such as tailors and cabinetmakers.13
In terms of occupations, economic participation followed distinctive patterns. From the end of the eighteenth century, Irish seasonal migrants worked as harvesters in the developing Scottish agriculture or as labourers in the booming construction sector, where they built canals, docks, and railways. Many early migrants were weavers and textile workers. They left the struggling, often farm-based industry in north-east Ireland, meeting the fluctuating but generally rising demand for labour in the newly mechanized textile industries of Scotland. Dundee’s textile industry drew in many women from south Ulster with experience in producing linen. Mining and iron manufacture too attracted the Irish. During the second half of the nineteenth century the rapid and massive industrial expansion in west-central Scotland provided new employment opportunities, for example in docks and shipyards along the Clyde. The earlier noted urban concentration of the Irish in the west of central Scotland and the varying gender ratio can be partly explained by the rise of local industries. Relatively few Irish established themselves as hawkers and shopkeepers.
The new Scottish economy offered chances for social mobility from casual work towards skilled jobs, but progress was disrupted by prolonged economic slumps, which caused unemployment and loss of status. In 1911 the Census recorded 88,809 Irish-born males in Scotland with an occupation (out of a total of 99,992 Irish-born men), of whom 24,813 were engaged in the manufacture of iron and other metals, 11,909 in mining, 6,019 in general labour, 4,963 in building, 3,492 in road transport, 3,071 in railway service, 2,985 in docks services, and 2,924 in local-government services. There were also 884 navvies. Apart from in the building industry, they were over-represented in all these sectors; Irish-born males constituted 17 per cent of all general labourers in Scotland. They were under-represented in agriculture and fishery, civil and post office services, the legal and medical professions, teaching, and commerce.
The 1911 Census also recorded 15,459 Irish-born females in Scotland with an occupation (out of a total of 74,723 Irish-born women), of whom 5,604 were engaged in domestic service, 2,794 in textile manufacture, and 1,923 in the making and selling of clothing. They were over-represented in domestic service, but slightly under-represented in textile manufacture. Smaller numbers of Irish-born women were recorded in clerical professions and services, medical services, and teaching, where they were over-represented, but they were behind in civil and post office services, art, music and drama, commerce, and agriculture.14 The Census did not separately list occupations of immigrant descendants born in Britain. Nevertheless, these figures give an impression of a mainly working-class group, concentrated in some industries, often in unskilled or unpopular occupations, but moving into other areas such as railway and local government services, which apart from sanitary work also offered more desirable jobs in public transport.
Negative attitudes towards Irish Catholics in Scotland were fed by existing religious intolerance that flared up at the end of the eighteenth century as steps were taken towards the emancipation of Catholics in the United Kingdom. The emotions were reignited just before the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1851 and Scotland in 1878, and fuelled by the animosity between Protestants and Catholics that immigrants brought over from Ireland. On 15 January 1849 the Edinburgh newspaper The Witness wrote in an editorial that Catholicism was ‘the author of Ireland’s ruin’:
Popery lays an arrest on [the] mind, and is a complete barrier to social progress and happiness. … Wherever we find swarms of priests, we find, too, swarms of beggars. … Wherever we meet the shrining priest, there we are sure to meet the thief and the murderer in his wake. … In short, where Popery flourishes, nothing else can; for it is a moral vampire, which sucks the blood of nations …
The paper predicted calamitous results if the rise of Catholicism in Britain remained unchecked. The Witness represented extreme anti-Catholic tendencies among a minority of Protestants in Scotland during the Famine influx, but similar feelings were expressed in mainstream churches, where they lasted well into the twentieth century.
Occasionally, negative attitudes towards Irish Catholics were expressed violently. In 1850 the native population of Dunfermline drove Irish residents out of their town after drunken Irish navvies picked a fight with locals. Sporadically, riots broke out when religious factions clashed, often involving both Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. In 1835 Protestants marched through the streets of Airdrie and wrecked a Catholic chapel, school, and houses. Twelve years later Catholics routed a Protestant march. In 1851 religious groups clashed in Greenock when Catholics protested against Protestant preachers speaking publicly about the dangers of growing Catholicism. Although occasional violence between Irish factions continued, clashes with the native population diminished in the later years of the nineteenth century.15
The hostility reinforced an Irish Catholic sense of communal identity, and the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland became an integrating force for Irish Catholics. With increasingly more immigrant clergy—in 1902 John Maguire became the first archbishop in Scotland from Irish descent—the Church created institutions that guided people from the cradle to the grave and strengthened ethnic cohesiveness in the face of prejudice. In addition, Irish Catholics set up mutual-benefit societies such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (originally Hibernian Funeral Society, formed in 1836). This also resulted in segregation, but Bernard Aspinwall and Mitchell have argued that Catholic isolation should not be overestimated. Irish Catholics shared workplace, trade union, and political experiences with Irish Protestants and natives. Although often concentrated in specific areas and neighbourhoods, they lived next to people of other denominations, and intermarriage blurred the distinctions between Protestants and Catholics and between native and immigrant groups.16
Participation by descendants of Irish Catholics in the wider society was also influenced by Scottish education. Since 1816 Catholics in Scotland had been building their voluntary schools, outside the main system that was dominated by Protestants. Catholic schools often lagged behind in terms of resources, quality of buildings, and teacher numbers. However, by the turn of the century priests had improved teaching. After 1918, with their incorporation into the public system, Catholic schools became better resourced. Catholic children increasingly made use of bursary competitions and scholarships. The career of the eminent Catholic author and historian Denis Brogan, born in Glasgow in 1900, was an example of what could be achieved.
Although the number of pupils at Catholic schools rose from some forty-seven thousand in 1883 to about eighty-five thousand in 1908, many Catholic children went to general institutions because of the limited number of places at Catholic schools, the lack of Catholic schools in their neighbourhood, parental choice or indifference. On the eve of the First World War public-school children in Scotland generally enjoyed a wide choice of subjects, modern buildings, good equipment, new education methods, and able teachers. Scotland compared favourably with other countries in the relatively open structure of its educational hierarchy, with marginally more opportunities for upward social mobility. Some descendants of Irish immigrants profited from the limited openings that public education offered. However, their numbers remained small—people like Brogan were an exception and Irish Catholic upward mobility remained notoriously slow until the final quarter of the twentieth century.17
At the end of the nineteenth century, individual Irish Catholics began participating in Scottish politics. Earlier, Irishmen had been elected on local police, parish, and school boards, but now they entered county and municipal councils. One of the first elections of an Irish Catholic occurred in 1890 when John Torley was selected as county councillor in Dumbarton. Seven years later Patrick O’Hare became the first Irish Catholic town councillor in Glasgow. In 1912 the Catholic Socialist John Wheatley won a Glasgow council seat, followed a year later by Patrick Dollan (in 1938 Dollan became the first Lord Provost in Glasgow of Irish descent). In national politics Irish Catholics were not elected in Scotland until 1922 when Wheatley captured the Glasgow Shettleston parliamentary seat for Labour (in 1924 he became Minister of Health).
Before the First World War the Irish electorate in Scotland remained small; immigrants generally lacked the required qualifications. Nevertheless, Irish issues played a role in local and national elections. The general upsurge in Irish nationalism during the second half of the nineteenth century affected Irish immigrants in Scotland and their descendants. In 1870 this took the form of the Irish Home Rule movement. It included organizations such as the Glasgow Home Rule Association (founded in 1871) and local branches of the Irish National League of Great Britain (1883). The Home Rulers supported or opposed election candidates, depending on their position on the Irish question. This brought them into an alliance with the Liberals who introduced Home Rule bills. Labour also won Irish support. However, John McCaffrey and Elaine McFarland have contended that electors did not necessarily vote according to their ethnic origins, and it would be incorrect to assume that an ‘Irish vote’ went automatically to a specific candidate or party.18
McFarland and Ian Meredith have calculated that during the middle decades of the nineteenth century up to a quarter of the Irish immigrants in Scotland were Protestant, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians. By 1914 this proportion had risen to about a third.19 What differentiated Irish Protestants from Irish Catholics was their prominence in skilled jobs, while they suffered less from negative attitudes in the native population and had fewer incentives to develop a separate group identity. However, these differences should not be pressed too far.
Traditionally, Ulstermen came to work and study in Scotland. At the end of the eighteenth century, Irish Protestants provided instruction in the Scottish linen industry. At the same time, one in ten students at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh was Irish, most of them Protestant. When, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Scotland’s industries attracted Irish workers, some large employers such as Bairds allocated skilled jobs and apprenticeships to Scottish and Irish Protestants, with unskilled positions going to Catholics. Later, skilled Protestant workers were recruited in Ireland for employment in the shipbuilding industry on the Clyde, culminating in the establishment of the Harland & Wolff shipyard at Govan in 1912, for which the firm brought over a large contingent of its Belfast workforce.
The outcome was that among the Irish male immigrants relatively more Protestants than Catholics held skilled positions. However, there was considerable diversity in the Irish Protestant workforce. During the 1880s a majority of the Irish Protestant workers in Greenock were general labourers employed in the port. Case studies by John Foster, Muir Houston, Chris Madigan, and Graham Walker have indicated that most immigrants remained poor despite working hard all their life. They shared the deprivation with native Scots. Irish immigrants made up one-fifth to a quarter of all the applicants in Glasgow Poor Law records between 1867 and 1899, with Catholics only just outnumbering Protestants.20
A few Irishmen were very successful. They included Thomas Lipton, the son of Protestant working-class immigrants, who after 1871 applied American marketing techniques to build his grocery empire. Another Irish entrepreneur was John Ferguson. By 1860 this Protestant Ulsterman had settled in Glasgow, where he conducted a wholesale stationery and printers’ business. However, as McFarland has described, it was his political career that made Ferguson stand out. He became one of the leaders of the Irish Home Rule movement. As a Home Ruler, Ferguson aligned himself with the Liberal and the Labour parties. He was an Honorary Vice President of the Scottish Parliamentary Labour Party, formed in 1888. In 1893 Ferguson was elected as a Liberal candidate on the Glasgow Town Council. But his interests went beyond the Home Rule issue. Three years after his election, Ferguson became a pivotal figure in the Workers’ Municipal Electors Committee, formed under the auspices of the Glasgow Trades Council by local branches of organizations such as the Independent Labour Party and the Irish National League to campaign for Labour candidates on issues such as housing and working conditions.21
Ferguson was unrepresentative of the Irish Protestants in Scotland. Eric Kaufmann and McFarland22 have demonstrated that many Protestants opposed Home Rule and a large number of them joined the Orange lodges. The Orange Order had been set up in Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century to defend Protestants against aggression from secret Catholic societies. Irish weavers introduced the order in Scotland. In Glasgow a lodge was formed in 1813. The movement grew during the second half of the nineteenth century, with the influx of Irish Protestant workers. At the end of the century, the main Orange organization in Scotland—the Loyal Orange Institution—had some twenty-five thousand members, of whom eight thousand lived in Glasgow.
The lodges had a bad reputation in the Scottish middle classes, who associated the Orangemen with violence and drunkenness and regarded their struggle as an alien import. Nevertheless, Orangemen were instrumental in the formation of the Glasgow Working Men’s Conservative Association in 1865. They were involved in canvassing and served as constituency officials in working-class districts, but no Irish Protestants stood as Tory candidates before 1914. In general, the Orange lodges in Scotland served as reference points for Protestant immigrants in their new country at times of economic problems and social dislocation. Membership became a family tradition. The lodges shaped their members’ identity and provided status for their office-bearers, helping them participate in the wider society.
German migration to Scotland followed a tradition of continental merchants operating in Scottish towns since the Middle Ages. As the Scottish economy expanded, the country attracted German manufacturers and brokers as well as engineers and clerks. Family ties often facilitated entry into the local economy and job market. Numerous retailers followed, including tailors, hairdressers, bakers, and butchers, who catered for the developing taste in the growing urban middle classes for luxury clothing, coiffure, and food. By 1911 many Scottish towns had a local German shopkeeper, and the German Oberkellner (head waiter) was a recognized figure in restaurants. German females mainly worked as servants and teachers.
In commerce, several Germans led the way. Among them was the chemicals broker Paul Rottenburg, who arrived in Glasgow as a twenty-one-year-old in the 1860s and became President of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce in 1896. In his obituary of 4 February 1929 the Glasgow Herald praised Rottenburg as ‘one of the most devoted and loyal of citizens’. Manz has shown that other Germans played leading roles too. An outstanding individual was Otto Ernst Philippi of thread-maker J. & P. Coats in Paisley. He helped bring about new management techniques and cartels in British clothing. In 1864 Henry Dubs founded his Glasgow ironworks, which by 1900 was the second largest locomotive producer in Britain. The Scottish demand for light beer, an alternative to heavy ale, was met by J. & R. Tennent in Glasgow, a British firm, which bought an entire brewery in Augsburg, had it shipped over, and brought in German brewers to produce what became popularly known as ‘lager’.23
Despite having been well respected, during the First World War, German immigrants were interned, deported, and repatriated. They also became targets of violence when on 7 May 1915 a German submarine sank the Lusitania, a passenger ship that had been built by John Brown & Co. Ltd. in Clydebank. The major disturbances in Scotland took place in smaller towns such as Greenock, where on 12 May 1915 bottles were thrown through the windows of a naturalized German hairdresser. The following night a crowd of several hundred persons gathered outside the grocer’s shop of another naturalized German. His windows were smashed and a young man attempted to burst in the door with a clothes pole. The police dispersed the crowd but later that night could not prevent rioters attacking the licensed premises of a German woman. As a result of the deportation, repatriation, and violence, the German communities in Scotland were virtually destroyed.24
Among the Germans and Russians were many Jews, notably adherents of Orthodox Judaism. In 1914 some seven thousand Jews resided in Glasgow and about one thousand in Edinburgh. Many early Jewish settlers in Scotland were retailers and small manufacturers. One of the most successful Jewish entrepreneurs was Benjamin Simons. His wholesale fruit-trading company, established during the 1840s in Glasgow, profited from a combination of growing incomes that stimulated the demand for fruit, new cold-storage technology, and the availability of cheaper and faster means of transport. The Jewish occupational structure changed dramatically with the influx of Russian Jews towards the end of the nineteenth century. The newcomers concentrated on the clothing, furniture, and tobacco trades, where thousands of men and women operated as low-paid workers, with smaller numbers of independent workshop owners and retailers. A relatively high number of Jewish men—over three hundred in 1911—were occupied in hawking and Jews formed a large percentage of the total number of hawkers in Scotland.25
Through Jewish welfare the early settlers helped newcomers and unemployed workers gain an independent status, for example as a workshop owner or hawker. In addition, Jews created a network of mutual-benefit societies. Occupational change was achieved as Jews rose into the Scottish professions. This resulted partly from the participation of almost all Jewish children in general Scottish education. Relatively many Jewish children profited from the available openings. This created a high number of Jewish university students during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in Medicine, where, as Kenneth Collins has illustrated, they continued a lineage of Jewish students coming to Scotland that was established in the early eighteenth century.26
The native attitudes towards Jews were ambivalent. There was admiration for successful individuals. On 29 December 1880 the popular Glasgow weekly The Bailie paid homage to Benjamin Simons: ‘Fruit is no longer a luxury to our city [thanks to] a gentleman … living unobtrusively among us [who built up] this industry, which gives a new means of livelihood to thousands.’ However, Jews were also stereotyped as cunning scoundrels. This prejudice acquired a sinister dimension. In 1909 Oscar Slater, a German Jew, was wrongly convicted for the brutal murder of Glasgow spinster Marion Gilchrist—mostly because it was assumed he was a violent pimp.27 The Edinburgh Evening News commented on 7 May 1909: ‘The trial has cast a lurid light on the dark places of our great cities, in which such wretches [Slater and his associates] ply their calling. It shows a brood of alien vampires, lost to conscience, crawling in black depths at the basement of civilised society.’ Despite this language, which was unusual and extreme in a Scottish context, Jews in Scotland were not subjected to large-scale violence until 1947, when events in Palestine sparked anti-Jewish riots in Glasgow.28
The Jewish responses to prejudice were generally subdued. The establishment sought the unobtrusiveness that The Bailie had ascribed to Benjamin Simons. During the Slater trial Jewish leaders decided to remain silent. When one of their ministers joined a campaign in support of Slater, they reprimanded him, but the rebuke took place behind closed doors ‘in order not to attract further attention’.29 However, the Jews also established the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council, an umbrella organization that appealed successfully to the authorities on behalf of the Jews among the German internees during the First World War.
Individual Jews got involved in local politics and trade-union activity. In 1883 Michael Simons, son and successor of Benjamin Simons, won a seat on the Glasgow Town Council, beating Reverend Robert Thomson, one of the founders of the Scottish Protestant Alliance. According to the Jewish Chronicle, Thomson went to the poll with the cry of ‘No Jews and no Jesuits’. In reply, Simons stated that appeals were made to ‘base prejudices … quite unworthy of this enlightened age’. He claimed ‘to be able to take, and … was justified in taking as deep an interest in the welfare and progress of this city as any member of the community’.30 Simons was the first Glasgow councillor of immigrant descent. The most outstanding Jewish trade unionist was Emmanuel Shinwell, initially a representative of the Jewish tailors on the Glasgow Trades Council. In 1910 he was appointed as Vice President of the Council (in 1922 Shinwell became MP for West Lothian and in 1924 he was appointed as Secretary for Mines).
From the 1870s Scottish coal- and iron-masters recruited young men from Poland and the Baltic lands for unskilled work in pits and blast furnaces. Some of the men brought their families. According to Tom Devine and Kenneth Lunn, by 1914 nearly eight thousand of what came to be regarded as Lithuanians lived in Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, Fife, and West Lothian.31 The first reaction of native and Irish workers to the influx of Lithuanians was one of hostility, as the newcomers were accused of accepting work at low wages and poor working conditions. This negative view persisted. In 1905 Father Charles Webb, a priest in Carfin, Lanarkshire, wrote that his flock regarded Lithuanian incomers as a threat to their livelihood: ‘[The Lithuanians] are looked upon with but little favour by the Irish people here, from a work point of view.’32 These views were formed against the background of agitation across Britain that was mainly directed towards Russian Jews but also affected groups such as the Lithuanians, resulting in the Aliens Act of 1905, the first major legal attempt to stem foreign migration to the United Kingdom.
Tensions were somewhat defused as Lithuanians joined trade unions and participated in industrial actions such as the national miners’ strike of 1912. The Catholic Church also extended its mission to these immigrants. In 1899 Reverend Vincent Warnagaris, based at St John the Evangelist in Glasgow, helped establish the Lithuanian Co-operative Society Sandara (Harmony). The Lithuanians were often Catholic, but some left the faith, while others combined religiousness with Socialism. Individually, Lithuanians were not active in Scottish politics before 1914. Instead, they formed their own organizations such as the Bellshill branch of the Marxist Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (1903).33
The First World War had repercussions for the entire Russian population of Scotland, but Lithuanians suffered most. Under the Anglo-Russian Military Convention of March 1917, male Russian nationals in Britain aged between eighteen and forty-one were compelled to join the British Army or return to Russia for military service. Many Russian immigrants were eligible for military duty or repatriation. The Glasgow Jewish Representative Council took up the case for the Jews among the Russians, but the Lithuanians lacked a similar organization. About one thousand of the eligible Lithuanian men chose to return to Russia. Only a third of them came back to Scotland after the war.34 According to the Glasgow Herald of 12 March 1920, some six hundred dependants of the men who had decided to go back to Russia were forcefully repatriated.
Before the nineteenth century, individual Italians worked in Scotland as bankers, merchants, artists, musicians, and priests. Between 1790 and 1820 skilled artisans arrived, followed by small numbers of political refugees and itinerant craftsmen. They were overwhelmed by new arrivals after the 1880s. Many Italians went into hawking, often selling figurines, while others made a living as wandering musicians or sold chestnuts and ice cream from barrows. Smaller numbers worked in mining and transport. At the turn of the twentieth century, Italians began making a transition to catering, shopkeeping, and hairdressing.
Terri Colpi has portrayed Leopold Giuliani as one of the outstanding Italian businessmen in Scotland. Giuliani settled in Glasgow in the 1880s and less than twenty years later he owned sixty catering shops. He brought in boys and young men from Italy to work in his establishments. They often subsequently left to start their own business. This group specialized in confectionery, ice-cream making, and fish frying. Many Italian women worked in the small establishments, which were usually family-owned. They often cooperated, for example to buy supplies in bulk. In 1911 there were hundreds of Italian enterprises in this industry in Scotland, which employed almost two thousand Italian immigrants.35 In the age of the temperance movement the Italian café became a respectable Scottish institution as it catered, unlike public houses, for women and children.
Not everyone regarded the Italians as respectable. Speaking to the Glasgow Municipal Commission on the Housing of the Poor (1902–4), Matthew Gilmour, a long-serving house factor, said Italians (and Jews) had created places that had ‘become hot-beds of gambling and everything else that is bad’.36 Almost fifteen years later, the Town Clerk of Glasgow, J. Lindsay, wrote to the Scottish Office about applications for licences for refreshment shops from aliens, whom he called an ‘undesirable class’ to run such shops because he associated them with Sunday trading, the sale of alcohol, gambling, and bad language.37 Despite such sentiments Italians were spared large-scale violence until Italy declared war on Britain in 1940, after which rioters attacked Italians and their businesses in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Gourock, and Greenock.38
The examination of immigrant experiences raises several questions. This section aims to answer two of them: Why did the Italians and Jews for so long escape the violence that befell the Irish and Germans? And why were Germans, Jews, and Italians remarkable in terms of business success and social mobility?
Throughout the nineteenth century the Irish suffered from negative stereotypes, which portrayed them as stupid, poor, diseased, drunken, violent, and criminal. Towards the end of the century and later on Jews and Italians were also associated with disease and crime, but in general Scottish hostility towards these two groups appeared to be more guarded. Stereotyping was sporadically accompanied by violence. Catholic immigrants were also victims of religious bigotry, which notably affected the Irish at the time of the Famine influx and re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England. However, much of the anti-Catholic violence came from Irish Protestants, who themselves fell prey to maltreatment by Scots and Irish Catholics.
In contrast to the Irish, the Germans were well respected, but they suffered from wartime hostility. The demise of the German community was caused by a combination of numerical decline, government policy, and anti-German attitudes, which were extensions of existing anti-alien bias. The ability of the Germans to counter official measures, prejudice, and violence was hampered by a lack of political influence. Lithuanians also lacked political power, which contributed to their suffering during and shortly after the First World War. Jews were less severely affected by official measures and bigotry. They were more organized, and in Michael Simons the Jews had an influential leader who could present their case to the authorities. In addition, Jews and Italians were able to contribute to the war effort, which gave them a shared feeling of destination with the wider population and improved their reputation.
With the exception of the anti-German riots in 1915, hostile reactions to immigrants were related to the increasing size of the immigrant populations. When the Irish came to Scotland during the period of the Famine, coinciding with a Scottish economic recession and local outbreaks of disease, their influx was considered a danger to Scottish society and anti-Irish violence increased. When Russian immigration rose sharply at the end of the nineteenth century, a similarly perceived menace contributed to the anti-alien agitation. This suggests that hostility was caused by fear about unusually large influxes of people or anger about external events. However, as I have argued elsewhere,39 hostile reactions to immigrants at the turn of the century were also expressions of feelings of uncertainty in the native population about general changes in Scottish society. So it was a combination of factors rather than a single factor that unleashed hatred.
The native population was also concerned about the participation of immigrants in the economy. The Irish were seen as strike-breakers and competitors in the labour market, a perception that also affected Lithuanians and, to a lesser extent, Jews. Germans and Italians were not perceived as a labour threat. However, the growing Scottish economy was able to absorb all groups. Through trade union and political activity, specialization in specific trades and occupations, or by filling vacancies in the labour market that were vital to the economy but unpopular with Scottish workers, immigrants could avoid or overcome competition with the native population, which somewhat eased the tension between Scots and immigrants. So in turn, attitudes about immigrants helped determine their participation in the wider economy. Irish and Lithuanian Catholics fell foul of discrimination in the labour market. The biased allocation of apprenticeships for skilled work hampered Irish Catholic social mobility. German, Jewish, and Italian successes in business resulted from reliance on kinship ties and specialization in niche trades and markets, as well as from traditional activities and roles in commerce and industry. That Jews were socially more mobile than other groups was mainly due to the participation of almost all Jewish children in public education, the Jewish tradition of learning, their communal welfare system, and the self-help groups that assisted individuals and families.
Conclusions from this comparison can only have a provisional character. More work remains to be done. As stated earlier, many groups have not yet been studied, research has often had a limited local or regional character, and few historians have attempted a comparison of immigrant experiences. A major omission in historical study concerns the English migrants in Scotland before the final decades of the twentieth century. When this oversight is corrected, it would also be useful to compare experiences of the English in Scotland at the end of the twentieth century with those of earlier generations and other groups. To identify specifically Scottish aspects of immigrant history, this comparative approach should also adopt a cross-border character, contrasting Scottish developments and events with what occurred in other locations, within the United Kingdom as well as abroad.
Despite the gaps in our knowledge, we can conclude that on the whole modern Scotland was able to integrate immigrants, but with temporary problems caused by sudden and large rises in the number of newcomers, events during the First World War, and factors such as anxiety about the direction of general developments in Scottish society. Some groups and individuals fared better than others because of specific qualities, circumstances, or coincidence. In general, immigrants had a powerful and complex impact on the development of the changing Scottish society. They contributed to Scotland’s population growth, making up some of the losses arising from emigration. The migrants added to the membership of religious congregations, including the Protestant churches, but more notably the Catholic Church in Scotland. Meanwhile, their settlement increased bigotry and pressures on all newcomers to conform to the Scottish norm, which in itself contributed to shaping Catholicism and Judaism in Scotland.
An abundant supply of labour was crucial to Scotland’s industrial success. The migrants strengthened the Scottish labour force with manpower, skills, and experience, which aided the modernization of the transport system and the mechanization of industrial production that contributed to making Scotland one of the most advanced industrial nations on the eve of the First World War. As immigrants were prepared to work for wages and in conditions that native Scots often found unacceptable, employers were able to keep production costs down, which may also help explain why a large section of the population of one the most prosperous countries in the world remained desperately poor. Meanwhile, enterprising individuals played their part in the international success of the Scottish economy through their introduction or use of new production methods, management techniques, or general business models. They assisted in changing the distribution, wholesale, and retail trades. They also catered for new tastes and introduced new products. Finally, they lent a hand to trade unionism, and in politics they supported the Liberals, played a role in the Conservative Party, and aided Labour in achieving its electoral breakthrough.
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