12 
In which Sarah Harding and her family grow fat eating plenty of good food in Waipawa, Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand (29 July 1874)
How hunger drove the explosion of European emigration in the nineteenth century
Sarah Harding’s mother arrived at John and Mary Pinfold’s run-down cottage on a July morning in 1874 just as the family had finished their paltry breakfast of tea-kettle broth: ‘bread in the breakfast pot with hot water poured on it’.1 The previous November, Sarah, her husband Ted and their five children had packed up their few belongings and left their home village of Taynton in Oxfordshire to seek a better life on the other side of the world. Now that they were established in their new home in Waipawa, on New Zealand’s North Island, Sarah had written to her mother with news of how they were getting on. She instructed her to show the letter to her friends and specially asked after John Pinfold. ‘Tell him,’ she wrote, that here ‘there is no sitting under the hedge knawing [sic] a piece of bread and an onion, and talking over the bad times… I can’t remember the time when I felt so strong and well; I suppose it is having plenty to eat of good substantial food, for we do have plenty of good food–beef, mutton and pork. I must tell you the children are getting quite fat, and so is Ted.’2
It is not difficult to imagine the effect of such words on the Pinfolds. John had been laid off by his employer, and the family were struggling. Sarah’s letter must have conjured images of their own family gathered round a table piled high with roast and boiled meats, their children growing fat in a far-off land. ‘You know we did not have enough in the old country, we could not have it and pay for it,’ Sarah had written, describing the Pinfolds’ present situation. ‘There is no fear of that here.’ Ted Harding and his elder son Frank had found construction work on a rail line, and if the weather stayed fine, Ted hoped to earn £13 that month. ‘Don’t you think that is better than working at home for two pounds sixteen shillings?’ Sarah asked.3
A cottage and farm buildings of the kind the Pinfolds would have inhabited.
The Hardings and the Pinfolds belonged to the group of rural labourers that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, paid the price of increasing agricultural efficiency. Enclosure had only just reached their part of Oxfordshire. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the extensive tracts of waste ground in the local forest of Wychwood had still provided the villagers of Taynton with a place to graze horses, sheep and cattle. But in 1856, the local landowners, the Churchill family, cleared the forest, subdivided the land into seven new farms and rented them out to tenant farmers. For the first few years the farmers had plenty of work to offer the villagers, grubbing out tree roots and breast-ploughing the land so that it could be brought under cultivation.4 But by the early 1870s, they were no longer needed; as a result, the local wage had dropped to 8–11s. a week and unemployment was a persistent problem.5
Already on 13s. a week a labourer could not cover the cost of his rent, food, clothes and shoes, and maybe a few pennies for his children’s school fees. Food had to be bought on credit and the family were restricted to a diet of ‘potatoes, dry bread, greens, and herbs, kettle broth, and tea which was coloured water… a bit of bacon for the man now and then, but fresh meat… like Christmas, [only] once a year’.6 The outspoken hedger and Methodist preacher Joseph Arch pointed out that this did not make for a strong and healthy family but rather for ‘poor blood and poor bones and poor flesh’.7 The Reverend Sidney Godolphin Osborne thought it a wonder the rural poor were able to live at all on their paltry diet.8 William Cobbett, who travelled the country to investigate the condition of rural England, felt ashamed of his fat horse and full belly when confronted with poor faces of ‘nothing but skin and bone’.9 A contemporary scribbled in the margin of his copy of Cobbett’s Cottage Economy, ‘Homes have ceased in England and that is why we emigrate.’10
In the winter of 1870–1, labourers in the village of ‘Hungry Harbury’ in Warwickshire asked Joseph Arch to speak to a gathering about forming a labourers’ union. Winter was the worst time of year for the rural poor, when there was little work and many had to fall back on parish relief funds to feed their families, or ended in the workhouse. Looking down from his upturned pig-killing stool on their ‘faces gaunt with hunger and pinched with want’, Arch felt as though he were addressing ‘the children of Israel waiting for someone to lead them out of the land of Egypt’.11 As a result of the meeting, the labourers formed the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers’ Union, with the aim of securing for the rural workers an increase in their wages, ‘adequate food, decent homes… a secure stake in the land, and the right to be treated with full respect as free men’.12 These were hardly outrageous demands, given that on the back of their labour most farmers had yearly incomes of hundreds, and the landlords thousands, of pounds. Ted Harding was a founding member of the Taynton branch of the new union and John Pinfold became its secretary. The man who led them and thousands of hungry labourers ‘out of Egypt’, however, was not Joseph Arch but C. R. Carter, an emigration agent who had been commissioned to recruit more than 2,000 able-bodied men to work as navvies on the construction of railways in New Zealand.13
In July 1872, Carter was invited by the union to Shipton under Wychwood to give a speech about the opportunities open to a hard-working man in New Zealand. Many came direct from the harvest fields to listen to him while others in the audience were out of work; the local farmer had just dismissed six of his twenty-five labourers for joining the union. Embittered by their treatment, they would have been ripe for recruitment and Carter selected ten men and their families straight away. Among them was George Smith, a 31-year-old farm labourer with a wife and three children who was also an active unionist.14
The Smith family sailed on the Chile in September 1872 for the new bush settlements in Hawke’s Bay, on New Zealand’s North Island. Less than a year later, George Smith wrote to his friends back home and John Pinfold published the letter in the Labourers’ Union Chronicle in September 1873. Food and the chances New Zealand offered for those who were willing to work featured strongly in the letter. Smith described ‘the first rate dinner… [of] fresh beef, young potatoes and carrots’ they had on the day they arrived. He wrote that he was just about to buy a cow and his wife had her fowls. The family lived in a two-roomed cottage with a garden and he owned a horse, which was unthinkable in England, where horseback was the gentry’s means of transport. Work was plentiful, so that ‘I have no anxiety now about how I am to get food and clothing for myself and children.’ Whereas in England his family had considered a pig’s cheek or a bit of bacon a ‘fine thing’, in New Zealand he bought half and sometimes a whole sheep at a time, 80 or 90 lb of beef as well as whole legs of mutton for just 6d. ‘We used to be told that the beef and mutton of this country were not so good as at home; come and try them’, he urged his friends. ‘I assure you you will find out your mistake.’15
A year later, Carter visited the Wychwood area again, this time recruiting directly for the New Zealand government, which was offering assisted passages to would-be emigrants. On 4 November 1873, he spoke at Milton under Wychwood, only a few miles from Taynton. Between 500 and 600 people from all over the area listened to him speaking for nearly two hours. It was at this meeting that Ted and Sarah Harding resolved to follow the Smiths and signed up to sail on the Inverene on 22 November. When they arrived at Hawke’s Bay, they stayed with George and Maria Smith for the first few weeks while their own cottage was constructed. In the letter she wrote home to her mother in July 1874, Sarah reported that George was doing well and was now the proud owner of two horses, two cows, two calves and between sixty and seventy fowls.16 Emigration had allowed them to move back in time to the rural world destroyed by enclosure in England. Sarah Harding was adamant that the move to New Zealand ‘was the best thing we [have] ever done for ourselves and children’.17
Only a minority of those who streamed out of Europe in the nineteenth century were seeking religious or political freedom. Some, like the Irish, were fleeing famine. Potato blight affected a large part of Europe in the 1840s, but in Ireland, over-reliance on the potato for food meant that both the plant and the poor were decimated. Between 1846 and 1850, a million Irish died of starvation and another million joined the economic migrants drawn to the New World by the promise of a good life.18 But even for those who were not fleeing starvation, what the abstract notion of a ‘good life’ meant in concrete terms was that they would have enough to eat. Poles described emigration as a quest for food: ‘za chlebem’ (to emigrate) literally meant ‘to bread’.19 Britons and Germans too spoke of emigrating in order to ‘put food on the table’.20 British game laws prevented labourers even from knocking a rabbit on the head. But in the New World, ‘a man is at liberty to do as he pleases’, wrote Thomas Goodwin in triumph from Illinois. ‘I can go with my gun, and shoot what I like, and no one says where are you going? No game laws here!’21 This access to abundant wild animals, John Worsfold assured his parents from Hamilton in Canada, meant that in the New World ‘there is little danger of starving’.22
Emigrants’ letters abound with lists of prices for foodstuffs, and read aloud to friends and family, passed around communities and published in newspapers, they spread the word that working men in the colonies could afford the best joints of meat and ate as much suet in a fortnight as they would normally have eaten in six months. Boasts that after a working day of only eight rather than twelve hours labourers could afford to ‘go to the shop, and get a bag of sugar, and half-chest of tea, and pay for it ready money’ would have aroused envy among those left behind at home, who scrimped along buying pennyworths of tea and sugar on credit.23 Sarah Harding’s letter must have helped to make up the minds of the Pinfolds, who were struggling on the lock-out pay John had been allocated by the district union. On 20 November, John and Mary too sailed for Hawke’s Bay, with their five children, who they no doubt hoped would soon be as fat as the small Hardings.24
The Hardings, the Smiths and the Pinfolds were part of a nineteenth-century explosion in European migration. Millions moved within the Continent itself, streaming into the cities looking for work. But often the cities were stepping stones to the wider world. For every nine people who migrated within Europe, one person left the Continent. Between 1815 and 1930, this amounted to an outward migration of around 50 million people.25 The majority of these emigrants went to the United States. The rest gave rise to prosperous settler societies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, with a smaller number settling in East Africa and the newly independent South American republics.
In Britain, the outward flow of emigrants was given a kick-start by a government keen to foster a strong British presence and loyalty to the Crown in its empire after the loss of the American colonies. It drew on the pool of the dissatisfied and dispossessed who were suffering from what one artisan evocatively called the ‘Great Damp in trade’ when the Napoleonic Wars were followed by an economic recession.26 The ranks of the rural unemployed were swelled by 200,000 demobilised soldiers and sailors, all competing for fewer jobs.27 The government recruited 4,000 Britons to emigrate to the Cape of Good Hope, and 2,000 Scottish farmers and labourers were dispatched to what was left of Britain’s North American empire in Upper Canada.28
The Cape of Good Hope scheme attracted a great deal of interest from young men who felt they had ‘no prospect of securing a start in life in the Cape of Despair, in this our Native land’.29 In October 1819, Jeremiah Goldswain, a 17-year-old pit-sawyer from Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire, was caught up in the scheme when he joined a crowd gathered around William Wait, a wine merchant who had come down from London to drum up takers for what was essentially an indentured labour scheme. Jeremiah was enthused by the offer of a free passage and provisions, half an acre of land and a supply of wheat seed in return for six years’ labour on Wait’s land grant. His family were dismayed. He was his mother’s only child and she must have feared what would happen to her in old age without her son to care for her. She protested that he was a ‘very undutiful son’ and that he would be killed by wild beasts. But he replied that it was ‘better for me to leave my native home and go where I could do better than stopping there [sic] as I had got but little work to do and had no prospect of getting any more’.30 Rather than hanging around the village waiting for trade to pick up, he resolved to emigrate, and against his mother’s vehemently expressed wishes he left home on Boxing Day, never to return.
Peace had created a dismal economic climate in the English countryside, but it did make the seas safer. Now that Britain had crushed not only the French, but also the Dutch and Spanish navies, piracy was virtually eliminated from the world’s oceans. This brought down insurance costs and, correspondingly, the cost of transporting freight. The volume of world trade increased substantially.31 Timber, wool, hides and whale products flowed into Britain, but many of the ships sailing out to collect these goods were virtually empty. The shipping interest brought pressure to bear on the government to lift restrictions on the number of paying passengers that merchant ships were allowed to accommodate. Consequently, the number of passenger berths to foreign destinations multiplied.32 Isaac Stephenson, an Irishman of Scottish ancestry and the fifth of a flax-farming family’s seventeen children, joined the steady stream of Irish and Scottish settlers who made their way across the Atlantic Ocean. Having gone to Londonderry to look for work, he was attracted by the prospect of the New World and bought himself a passage on a timber ship sailing for New Brunswick. Straight off the ship, he found work looking after the lumbering operations of loyalist grandees along the Oromocto River. Thirty years later, he was established as an independent logging contractor supplying masts to the Royal Navy.33
By the 1830s, 55,000 migrants had left the British Isles, with the majority coming from the depressed agricultural counties in the south and south-east.34 Between 1850 and 1854, another two million Irish swelled their ranks. The government used the famine to effect a programme of eviction and land clearance. From 1847, the only way for the starving to receive relief was if they entered the workhouse, and if they did so, they were forced to relinquish their land to the government, who tore down their cabins and consolidated their plots into larger holdings. One witness described how he appeared ‘to be tracking the course of an invading army’ as he travelled through County Clare in the wake of the ‘levellers’.35 By 1858, about one tenth of Irish land had been placed under new ownership. As the dispossessed fled to the United States, the government achieved its aim of ridding the Irish countryside of the surplus population of potato-eating cottiers.
In the 1840s, Britain’s industrial workers began to make up the majority of the 250,000 a year who decided to emigrate.36 The introduction of steamships in the 1860s brought down the cost of passage so that emigration was now affordable for increasing numbers of people further down the social scale.37 While in the cities real wages were higher than in the countryside and the opportunities to find work were expanding, living standards could hardly be described as idyllic. Urban emigrants sought a better life than the one they led in the slums, with their damp, overcrowded terraces, shared toilets and overflowing drains. Although he struggled to make a living on his farm in Wisconsin, Edwin Bottomley was glad to have escaped the harsh drudgery of English industrial life. ‘Thank God’, he wrote, ‘I have not to rouse my children at the sound of a bell from their beds and Drag them through the pelting storm of a Dark winters morning to earn a small pittance at a factory. O thank god such is not the case with us.’38
For the potters who left Staffordshire with the Potters’ Emigration Society, the colonies promised the chance of escaping the minute division of labour that characterised modern manufacture.39 If the emigrating agricultural labourers wished to recapture the lost rural world before enclosure, the craftsmen sought to go back in time to the proto-industrial world when the skilled artisan was master of all the stages of production. In the Staffordshire potteries, master potters had been replaced with slip-makers, throwers, flat pressers, kiln loaders, painters and glazers–each repetitively performing only one task in a production line. This increased efficiency and reduced labour costs, as unskilled and semi-skilled workers could be paid less.40 In mid-century America, by contrast, it was still possible to achieve the old ideal of setting oneself up as an independent craftsman, as Samuel Walker did in Utica, where he had his own pot works.41 English hand-loom weavers likewise took refuge from industrialisation in New England and Philadelphia.42 However, as America also industrialised after the civil war, and the American pottery and textile industries became increasingly mechanised, English emigrants were no longer able to recapture the old ways. From then on they were attracted by the fact that wages were higher in the United States rather than by the dream of working independence.43
In the New World, British emigrants were able to realise the modest aims that the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union had for its members: adequate homes, food, respect, and a stake in the land. Emigrant homes were often basic: a photograph of the Hardings’ homestead shows a sturdy single-storey clapboard house with a veranda and a chimney.44 If not luxurious, it was certainly better than the much-patched cob-and-thatch cottage they had left behind in England. James Randall, who also came out to work on the New Zealand railways, acknowledged that ‘there is not the comfort here as regards feather beds’. But he thought this was beside the point when it was possible to go out and catch a pig in the bush any time he wanted pork, and wages were such that ‘a working man here can spend more in comforts than he can earn in England’.45
Conditions were often rough in the early years. Laurence Kennaway, who helped to set up one of the first sheep runs near Canterbury on New Zealand’s South Island in the 1850s, recalled the ‘granulous and nobby’ puddings and bread the shepherds were forced to subsist on, as the only equipment they possessed for grinding wheat into flour was a coffee mill. He felt that the ‘decrease in quality was [not] quite made up for by the increase of novelty’.46 Still, it was a far cry from the ‘growy bread’ many labourers were reduced to eating back home in the 1840s, made out of the residue left after the bran had been separated from the wheat flour. These ‘crammings’ produced a heavy, doughy loaf that could be pulled in ‘long strings out of your mouth’.47 Once established, however, settlers were quickly able to improve on the paltry meals they were used to at home. Using mixtures of warm water, bran, salt, hops, sugar, and potato peelings to replace yeast, they were able to make leavened bread. Inventive settlers in Ohio added yeast, milk and a generous helping of butter to dumplings made with flour, lard, water and salt, known as doughboys, and dropped them into hot fat rather than boiling water. Dusted with sugar, they were transformed into doughnuts.48 For a Swedish immigrant who was served doughnuts and coffee when she arrived at America’s emigrant processing depot on Ellis Island, this delicious fatty, sugary concoction affirmed to her that she had at last reached the land of plenty.49
‘Ulrich’s bakery’. Pioneer settlers went to great lengths to make proper leavened bread. This man baked bread for the gum diggers on the Ahipara gum fields north of Auckland, New Zealand. Pioneer farmers struggling to break in their land would spend the winters here digging for kauri gum. They sold it to raise cash to support their families and pay for farm improvements.
On the farms in the wooded zone of Texas, a slice of buttered bread or some cheese and crackers–a whole supper for a tired English textile worker–was considered a mere ‘snack’.50 Meat was the food most emigrants had longed for in Britain. Joseph Arch stated that it was ‘the ambition and glory of every loving father… to sit at his own table… with a good joint of meat’, and when he travelled to Canada to assess the prospects for emigrating Britons, he saw ‘plenty of great lumps of beef in working-men’s houses’.51 In the New World, where widespread pastoral farming produced plentiful supplies of beef and mutton, it was considered the norm to eat meat for breakfast, dinner and supper. Edward Dale recalled that everyone in the Texas of his boyhood in the 1880s ‘demanded three square meals’ a day, all including meat.52 On New Zealand’s sheep stations, mutton chops, mutton curry or mutton and mushrooms, made with tender steaks off a leg, were the standard breakfast fare. For dinner, a joint of mutton and vegetables was the norm, and supper again featured mutton ‘cooked in some form of entrée’.53 George Hancox, a farm labourer from Tysoe in Warwickshire, thought it ‘enough to make a man dance’ to come home after a hard day’s work building New Zealand’s railways to find ‘two legs of mutton in the boiler for our supper’.54
As Sarah Harding wrote, there was no sitting down under a hedge in the cold to eat their dinner for farm labourers in New Zealand. ‘The “boss” is with us working, and sits down and smokes his pipe and chats like yourself. There is no bowing and scraping here’, wrote John Traves, a 38-year-old farm labourer, to his sister in Lincolnshire.55 The genteel immigrant Lady Barker noted that some people objected to the ‘independence of manner’ exhibited by the New Zealand settlers, but found that she liked ‘to see the upright gait, the well-fed, healthy look, the decent clothes (even if no one touches his hat to you), instead of the half-starved, depressed appearance, and too often cringing servility of the mass of our English population’.56 Freedom from the fear of the workhouse was liberating, as was the fact that it was not necessary to be forever pulling one’s cap to a social superior. ‘In this country are no Lords, nor Dukes, nor Counts, nor Marquises, nor Earls, nor Royal Family to support nor no King’, rejoiced Joseph Hollingworth in a letter from America to his aunt and uncle in Huddersfield.57
It was the dream of many emigrants to earn enough money in their new country to buy their own farm. The ideal of the hardy colonial yeoman farmer pioneered by the New Englanders in the seventeenth century was still alive among Britain’s nineteenth-century migrants. New Zealand’s emigration literature was full of tales of the emigrant hero who subdued the wilderness and earned himself a bucolic idyll through hard work and perseverance.58 Talking to pioneer farmers in the prairie province of Alberta, the missionary Burgon Bickersteth found the same spirit at work among Canadian settlers. The homesteaders he spoke to were ‘always talking of what the country will be–what a fine farm his homestead will one day become’. He believed that many of the emigrants would have been less enthusiastic if they had been able to buy ‘a ready-made farm… It is the actual conquering and taming of the land which has a peculiar attraction… The seeing of acre after acre gradually reclaimed from the bush and brought under cultivation constitutes the real fascination of pioneer farming.’59
The emigrants from the Wychwood area of Oxfordshire achieved in New Zealand the last of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union’s aims that it found so difficult to realise for its members at home: secure access to the land. Hawke’s Bay in 1870 was an isolated settlement only recently purchased from its indigenous Maori owners. The railway the navvies were contracted to build was intended to link it to the west-coast port of Foxton. George Smith, the first of the Wychwood labourers to emigrate, found work constructing the Great South Road running parallel to the railway.60 As we have seen, on his daily wage of 6s. he was able to rent a house with a garden, keep a horse and a cow, eat well, and clothe his children. Ted Harding, who followed him out the next year, found work constructing the railway. Sarah’s letter home mentioned that he was hoping to get some land ‘before the summer is over’.61 The settlement’s administration was keen to convert the navvies into settled colonists and was selling plots of bush land on easy terms of credit. When John Pinfold arrived, he found employment on a new government project, clearing bush land for the planned settlement of Woodville.62 All three men joined the Woodville Small Farm Association in April 1876 and each was allotted a 150-acre plot of land. The following year, a Hawke’s Bay Herald reporter visited the settlement, which now had a hotel, two stores, a butcher and a carpenter, as well as a boot-and shoemaker. The farmers had already burnt off most of the bush and felled the trees and were beginning to fence off the land. Cattle wandered among the tree stumps, and here and there a settler had managed to sow a field of wheat or oats. They were beginning to erect comfortable houses in place of their temporary huts. The next year they had clubbed together to build a school for the sixty school-age children, and four years later they had built a church.63
Not all emigration stories had quite such happy endings, and not all the emigrants ended up in such idyllic rural settings. Many of them found work in the burgeoning towns and cities of the New World. Jeremiah Goldswain became a farmer in the Albany district of South Africa. Frequent stock raids and conflict with the Xhosa over the land meant that the farm was never particularly successful but he also built up a lucrative ox-carting business transporting supplies.64 Like the farm labourers of Wychwood he left unemployment, hunger and humiliation behind. In the settler colonies the emigrants were able to eat meat three times a day, including beef steaks for breakfast; own their own homes and land; ride and hunt; plant an orchard; and doff their cap to no one. Throughout the nineteenth century, European emigrants extended the world’s arable fields and productive pastures by somewhere between 1.5 and 2 billion acres.65 This was to have a profound impact on agricultural production, and laid the foundations for the new global food regime that emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.