On a summer’s morning in late July, exactly three months before the Ticonderoga dropped anchor off the little beach to the south of Melbourne, Mrs Smith stood by a small dock on the Mersey River and turned to check Mr Smith’s dress and bearing with the fastidious eye of a woman conscious of her husband’s place in the world. She needn’t have worried—William was as well turned out as ever, and as keen as any man upon whom fortune had smiled to make a good impression. Having just a few months previously been suddenly elevated from his position among the humble ranks of J.S. De Wolf & Company’s shipping clerks to become Superintendent of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission’s most recent embarkation depot at Birkenhead, he was well aware of the opportunity he and his wife had been handed. For her own part, Ann had been appointed depot matron, and was as determined as her husband to fill her role to the letter.
Even as they stood gazing expectantly across the river, they could make out the ferry now steaming slowly towards them from the sprawl of Liverpool a kilometre or so away on the far bank. On board they knew there was a full load of men, women and even entire families—all of whom, in a few days, would undertake the most momentous and perilous journey of their lives, from which they would be unlikely ever to return. It was also by far the largest contingent of passengers they had been called upon to accommodate during their brief time running the depot, and important eyes would be observing their efforts. Besides, the brief few days these people were about to spend in their care would be the last impressions they would ever have of the Smith’s homeland.
This ferry load was not the first to arrive. Over the past few days, other emigrants had checked in from all parts of Britain. Some 140 Englishmen and women from Somerset and Cornwall had arrived by train and were already well settled, and several boatloads of Irish had also turned up, having made a rough crossing over the Irish Sea to Holyhead in open-decked packet steamers, then travelled by train to Liverpool. This ferry was rather special, though, carrying as it did the first of the 643 individuals who would comprise by far the largest single group of passengers for the voyage. These people were making the longest and saddest journey of all—from the remote and mysterious Scottish Highlands.
The depot itself was an impressive facility, comprising two main buildings, one recently converted to accommodate up to 400 emigrants, the other as a storage area for their luggage. Living and dining quarters, washing facilities, a cook house, a sick room and several offices had been installed, as had a small Church of England chapel. Anyone standing inside would have been impressed by its sweeping sense of space and grand 21-foot ceilings. Twin rows of cast-iron pillars supported a second floor, which itself boasted further 14-foot ceilings and a timbered roof. Everywhere was well illuminated, with two rows of generous skylights. Large rows of dining tables and benches had been assembled in orderly rows, each grouped according to the areas from which the various passengers had come. The lower walls were three feet thick and whitewashed.
Outside the front door was a large forecourt, which led to the dock, and close by could be found a railway turntable and track spur connected to the main line, from which every part of Britain could be reached by train. To the amazement of some, gas heating had been installed, and there was even hot and cold running water. It was undoubtedly the largest and most impressive building most of the travellers had ever seen.
Birkenhead was the fourth, last and most important of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission’s embarkation depots, established for those leaving Britain by government-assisted passage. Others had been set up at the ports of Plymouth, Southampton and Deptford near London, but these had largely been adapted from private boarding houses and were relatively small in nature. Birkenhead was the first properly planned and truly dedicated facility.1
Birkenhead had, however, been built for another purpose entirely: it was originally meant to be a series of warehouses, but the buildings were never used for that purpose. Like much of the recent infrastructure along the Birkenhead side of the Mersey River, they had been constructed as part of the town’s push to carve out for itself a piece of the massive shipping trade currently passing through Liverpool—then the busiest port in Britain. The Birkenhead Dock Commissioners’ ambitions were indeed lofty. Having declared that they were ready to take on their Goliath neighbour across the water, they began, in the 1840s, to lobby heavily for dock construction rights, planned a grand renovation of the city centre and even commenced a large-scale expansion of Birkenhead’s local Wallasey Pool, a stretch of tidal water into which the local Wallasey Creek ran before emptying into the Mersey River. This modest backwater, it was proposed, was to be engineered into a large complex of inland harbours with the somewhat grandiose title ‘The Great Float’, and would be the keystone in Birkenhead’s revival.
However, it all came to nought. The hard men of Liverpool’s docking and shipping trade were never going to tolerate a rival—however nascent—directly across the river, and proceeded to throw every conceivable obstruction in the way of the ambitious men of Birkenhead—who admittedly, for their part, were doing a fine job of muddling it all up on their own. A litany of engineering failures and financial mismanagement threw the town firmly into reverse, as confirmed in the 1851 census, which revealed that Birkenhead’s population had gone backwards from around 40,000 in 1846–47 to just over 24,000 in 1851. The grand designs for the revival of the town centre were quietly shelved.
Having failed to take on the shipping trade, Birkenhead was thrown a lifeline in the form of emigration. By the late 1840s, one of Britain’s chief exports—besides textiles, machinery and the many other innovations of the Industrial Revolution—was people, and Birkenhead was set to take advantage of a human exodus.
From the mid-1840s, Britain was farewelling more than 200,000 people each year for North America2 in what has been described as an unregulated ‘free enterprise free-for-all’, with the bulk of those leaving from Liverpool.3 In this sprawling, labyrinthine port town, desperate and unworldly travellers faced an array of villains well-honed in exploiting their vulnerability. Ship brokers, or ‘recruiters’, who speculated in berths and received a commission for every one they filled, hired runners (known also in Dickensian fashion as ‘crimps’, ‘touts’ and even ‘man-catchers’) who literally manhandled arriving passengers from railway stations or the harbour side. Quickly hustled into makeshift offices, they were often cajoled or threatened into handing over their precious funds to secure a berth, sight unseen. When eventually on board the ship, they would often find that the vessel and its conditions in no way matched the brokers’ promises. If there was a delay of days or weeks before their departure, other runners would force people into one of the city’s many hundreds of dubious lodging houses, around which an entire industry had sprouted. People were forced physically: ‘They pull them by the collar, take their arms and, generally speaking, the runners who were successful enough to lay hold of the boxes are pretty sure of carrying the passenger with them’.4 Thus isolated, they became prey to unscrupulous landlords charging exorbitant fees for tiny, sub-standard rooms, often already over-booked by other unsuspecting families. Stories of poor but innocent country folk being abused in this way led to strident articles in the press, and growing government embarrassment.
As the numbers of people passing through Liverpool to their respective vessels increased, so did the city’s reputation as a sinkhole of disease and crime. To the government, this huge port city was becoming a liability, a victim of its own success. Added to this was the port authority’s rigid insistence that no lights or fires be lit on board a ship while in port—for reasons of fire risk—under any circumstances. This prevented emigrants from boarding their designated vessel in an early and orderly fashion, instead being forced into a mad rush on the day of their departure when hundreds of passengers and their luggage bolted to settle into their ship during daylight hours, with not even a warm meal or cup of tea to welcome them.
Eventually, two respected Liverpool shipping companies, J.S. De Wolf & Company and Barton & Brown, wishing to expand into the emigrant trade, became fed up with Liverpool’s intransigence on the shipboard fire rule and began to ask the government about the possibility of embarking government-assisted passengers from the Birkenhead side of the Mersey. Birkenhead jumped at the overture. Yes, its spokesmen declared, the lighting of fires and lights on board docked or harboured vessels would present no problem, and they could also boast a number of new buildings ably suited for conversion to a safe and well-run emigrant depot. They also threw in free use of a warehouse behind the depot in Cathcart Street, as well as very attractive terms for the moving of cargo.
The timing was perfect. Liverpool had become a headache for the government, so Birkenhead was given the go-ahead to convert its warehouses and begin operating as the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission’s brand new Birkenhead depot for government-assisted emigrants. Staff were sourced, with J.S. De Wolf & Company recommending one of its clerks and his wife, William and Ann Smith, to run it. Liverpool was furious, but its protestations were ignored and, with the paint barely dry, Birkenhead’s first intake of migrants arrived in January 1852.