The Irish Catholic immigration that left its indelible mark on mid-nineteenth-century Merseyside played a less obvious part in the development of Victorian western Scotland. In Liverpool, Irish Catholics changed the character of that city by weight of permanent numbers. In Lanarkshire, they were scattered throughout the county. Back in 1813, Alex Cameron – the Scottish Vicar Apostolic – had missed the Durham meeting at which the issue of a government veto on the appointment of bishops was discussed. His note of apology illustrates the strain that was imposed on delicate constitutions by the haphazard distribution of souls which it was their duty to save: ‘I had been called to Glasgow and Paisley to administer confirmation and, had the state of my health permitted, it was my intention to visit a large district on that coast where a great number of poor Catholics, generally Irish, are dispersed without a priest.’1 Fifty years on, the problem had not changed. In Lanarkshire, Catholics were scattered throughout the county and, even after the arrival of Irish labour which followed the Great Hunger, the new arrivals were often only temporary immigrants who returned home after harvest was in, a stretch of canal dug or a branch railway line laid.
Immigration into Lanarkshire had begun with an influx of Highland Scots – many of them worshippers in a semi-pagan Church which had hardly been touched by the Reformation. The first major movement had come in 1792 when, at the invitation of cotton manufacturers, six hundred Catholics moved from Glengarry to Glasgow.2 They outnumbered the local Catholics by a ratio of ten to one. For, according to the Church, the Glasgow Catholic community – which in 1778 had consisted of twenty secret communicants – had only increased to sixty by 1791. By the turn of the century, Catholic harvesters were coming south each autumn and, long before the Great Hunger forced millions of migrants to leave Ireland, the advent of cheap steamboat travel had enabled thousands of Irishmen to look for a better life abroad. In 1820 there were 10,000 Catholics living in Glasgow. By 1831 the number has risen to 27,000. John Murdoch, Coadjutor of the Western District of Scotland, put the figure in Glasgow and its surrounding villages at 44,000 in 1836.3 The two estimates are inconsistent with each other, but there was agreement about one feature of the increase in the Catholic population: the Irish who brought it about were almost invariably dirt-poor.
Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century was home to the gospel of self-help. In consequence the Irish paupers – despite the enterprise they had shown in making the journey east – were often regarded as victims of their own folly. John Murdoch openly regretted that there was ‘nothing like a Catholic aristocracy in Glasgow’ and estimated, with obvious disdain, that amongst the Irish immigrants there was ‘hardly a handful fit to take houses in the west end’ of the city.4 It was already the home to respectable, prosperous and native-born Catholics – so many that St Andrew’s Church (now a cathedral) thought it necessary to appoint ‘seat minders to segregate the rich from the poor’. Faced with such inconveniences, Murdoch found little consolation in the effort and initiative shown by those Irish Catholics who thought of the Clyde ports as a staging post in their journey to the promised land of America. ‘By and by,’ he predicted, ‘we will be left with a congregation of beggars.’
The transient nature of the new immigrants to Scotland created a special problem for their Church. On Merseyside the immigrants came to stay, and men with families are more likely than men living alone to attend Mass. Unaccompanied men, who came to Lanarkshire because they had heard that there was a pit shaft to be sunk or a canal lock to be cut, returned home when the job was done. So the demand for priests, and the subscriptions that support churches, ebbed and flowed. Barely a year after its construction the Chapelhall Mission in Lanarkshire was on the point of collapse. The recession caused the closure of the Calderbank ironworks in which most of its worshippers worked. At the same time the mission that had been established at Girvan in 1810 lost so many parishioners that it was on the point of closure and was saved only by donations from a new class of wealthy benefactors.5 Self-made men were beginning to replace the old nobility as the principal patrons of the Catholic Church. But it was not always clear how their generosity could be employed to best advantage. The diaspora that followed the Great Hunger ended the ebb and flow of migrants, and the arrival of the Irish poor – with neither the wish nor the ability to return home – ended the month-by-month fluctuation in the number of Masses that needed to be said on a Sunday. But it created another problem for the West of Scotland Catholic Church. It was overwhelmed by the numbers to which it had to minister.
There is no reliable estimate of how many Irish Catholic immigrants settled in Scotland during the years that followed the famine. But calculations of increases in individual towns leave no doubt that the overall figure was immense. In Dundee the Irish-born population rose from 5,000 in 1841 to 15,000 ten years later.6 The linen and jute factories were a particular attraction to men who had worked in the same trades at home in South Ulster. But Dundee was not as accessible as Glasgow, where jobs existed, or were thought to exist, for men whose sole skill was in the use of picks and shovels.
In its account of the years in which ‘the Catholic population of Scotland, particularly Glasgow, increased very rapidly’, Propaganda Fide described the tension between indigenous and incoming worshippers with admirable delicacy: ‘A certain cleavage arose between the two elements … the native Scotch who had remained faithful to their religion through the years of persecution with their own clergy and the Irish immigrants with Irish priests.’ And it went on to explain, with commendable sympathy, the reason why the ‘cleavage’ had occurred. ‘Differing so much as they did in background and temperament, it is not surprising that jealousy between the two groups should arise, and this does not imply any serious fault on either side but plenty of misunderstanding.’7
The misunderstandings resulted in a series of ‘proposals’ – which often read like demands – for changes in the governance of the Catholic Church in Scotland. The first step towards securing and maintaining a fragile peace was the installation, as Vicar Apostolic, of Monsignor Charles Eyre, a member of the Derbyshire family who had been loyal, and often dangerously overt, Catholics since the Reformation. Eyre was wealthy and well connected. His father was a director of the London and South Western Railway Company, but the way in which he approached his job was more important than his pedigree. He believed in the obligation of the Church to involve itself in the life of the city. So he encouraged greater Catholic participation in both Glasgow’s own social institutions – the St Vincent de Paul Society and the League of the Cross temperance guild – and the numerous good causes that served every denomination, most notably the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. More important still, he was not only an Englishman – which, in itself, might have made him unacceptable. He was the sort of Englishman who stood above the fray and was therefore assumed to favour neither the Scots nor the Irish.
On March 4th 1878 the recently elected pope, Leo XIII, announced the restoration of the Scottish Hierarchy. The news was greeted with far less triumphalism than had been displayed during the celebration of the ‘second English spring’ in 1850. But the congregation of the Glasgow archdiocese marked the occasion with the gift of a landau to the unequivocally English Archbishop Eyre. It was meant as a tribute to the distance he covered in the service of the Church. Far more important than the cost of the gift was the fact that both Irish and native Scots contributed. The lowly laymen were far less conscious than their clergy of the conflict between the two races. Scottish Catholics were happy to receive Communion from Irish priests.
Father Charles Grant, the first priest to be ordained in Glasgow since the Reformation, had taken Holy Orders in 1829 and since then – apart from a couple of Protestant converts – the churches had been staffed largely by elderly Irish priests who had been recruited before the influx of Irish labour. The priests who came, or would have come, with the immigrants were neither welcomed nor trusted by their Scottish counterparts. They were suspected of fomenting rebellion against the episcopate and of spreading the Fenian doctrine that violence against the English oppressors was an essential ingredient of the campaign for Irish independence. John Murdoch, who could be relied upon to reveal what other Vicars Apostolic thought but were wise enough not to say, complained, ‘I have a great deal of unqualified and unsteady priests.’8 Whether or not that was so, Murdoch should have realised how important it was to provide the new Glaswegians with priests who understood them. It had long been accepted in the Scottish Catholic Church that ‘the Irish must be treated in a different manner from our Scots people or they will never be helped on the way to salvation’.9 But that understanding did not lead to the active recruitment of Irish priests.
Even before the Irish exodus was at its height, there were not enough priests in western Scotland to perform even basic pastoral duties for native Scots. In 1836 in Glasgow there were four priests – one to every 9,000 or 10,000 Catholics.10 Between them they served St Andrew’s in the centre of the city, St Mary’s in Abercrombie Street south of the Clyde and various temporary Mass stations in the surrounding villages. The consequent neglect was reflected in the attendance at Sunday Mass. John Murdoch calculated that, during the 1840s, there were rather more than 12,000 regular worshippers – 35 per cent of the Catholic population – in the area. Since very few of them attended Mass on every Sunday, the attendance on an average Sunday was about 18 per cent of the possible congregation. In Belfast, the average attendance was 43.1 per cent.
There is no doubt that the Irish abroad – particularly men who had left the sobering effect of wives and children behind – were less conscientious churchgoers than the Irish at home. But the absence of priests, whose mere presence would have reminded miscreants of their religious responsibilities, certainly contributed to the malaise. In the absence of Irish recruits to the priesthood, all that the Church could do was spread its limited resources as widely as possible. So outside Glasgow, St Andrews and Aberdeen, peripatetic priests – who earned £40 a year while Presbyterian ministers earned £10011 – served Mass stations that were set up in different places at different times. The pennies of the poor could not finance new buildings. But a number of wealthy patrons – inspired, and in some cases converted, by the fervour of the Oxford Movement – contributed to extensions and improvements to existing churches. The restoration at Girvan was made possible by the gift of bricks, land and lime from the Duc de Coigny. Princess Marie of Baden bought a new altar for the church at Hamilton. At Glenfinnan, Father MacDonald – an unusually wealthy priest – paid for Pugin to design one of his neo-Gothic masterpieces.12 Robert Monteith imported ten tons of religious sculpture into Lanarkshire to decorate aisles and altars. But, apart from the occasional benevolence, Scotland’s most densely populated region did not receive the patronage that other areas enjoyed. In 1840 only five Catholic churches served all Lanarkshire. But – thanks to the pennies of the poor – by the turn of the century there were fifty-four churches, eighteen of which had been, or were about to be, extended to meet the increase in the size of congregations. During the intervening sixty years more had happened to the Scottish Catholic Church than simply a titanic growth in number. The Irish immigrants – unwanted and beleaguered – had begun to assert their independent and distinct identity. Crucial to that process was the proud affirmation of their own brand of Catholicism.
The Irish immigrants had changed the Catholic Church in Scotland, and the Catholic Church in Scotland had changed the Irish immigrants. One Ayrshire priest noticed, with a combination of impatience and admiration, that ‘the Irish will not come out on Sunday and go to chapel unless they can be clothed like and appear like natives. They will not go in ragged clothes as they went in Ireland.’13 In part the pride in race and religion was manifest in the espousal – and sometimes even the practice – of the respectable virtues that were more often associated with Scottish Nonconformity than with Irish Catholicism. Sermons argued that respect in this life and salvation in the next required thrift, sobriety and industry. Drinking, gambling and dancing were all discouraged, and sometimes condemned. Father Mathew, a Catholic priest, administered the pledge of total abstinence to an ecumenical rally on Glasgow Green, which the local press estimated was 40,000 strong.
The notion that life for the poor might be made better by political changes in the social order was replaced by the advocacy of self-help as the sure and certain path to prosperity. That led to a new urgency to increase the extent and improve the quality of available education. The Church had always seen Catholic education as a protection against contamination by heretical ideas. In nineteenth-century Scotland it became a way of enabling Catholics to obtain the jobs and houses that had once been the sole preserve of heretics.
Catholic education – limited in both quality and quantity – had been available in Scotland since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1830 there were five Catholic day schools in Glasgow attended by 1,400 pupils who paid a fee of a penny a week. But more than twice as many children of school age were enrolled in the city’s eleven Sunday Schools.14 By 1851 the number of Catholic day-school pupils had increased to 3,436. The Sunday School attendance had increased to 4,950. So there were still 1,500 young Catholics who were without a school place. But the increase in the number of places was matched by an improvement in the quality of teaching. Both trends were destined to continue. Much credit was due to religious Orders who had opened schools in the city. First among them were the Sisters of Mercy. They were closely followed by Franciscan nuns.
The religious Orders did not act alone. The records of the tenure of James Gillis – appointed Vicar Apostolic of Scotland’s Eastern District in 1857 – listed the variety of benefactors, including Palmerston’s government, to which the Catholic Church in Edinburgh was indebted. The official record set out the achievement and gave thanks for the benefactors who had made it possible:
During the summer of 1858 [Gillis] was much occupied in making extensive alterations to the former chapel in Lothian Street which he converted into two schools for the girls of the Congregation of St Patrick’s. This he was enabled to effect chiefly by means of a considerable amount of money which he had obtained from the Privy Council Committee on Education. On completion of these alterations the Schools were placed under the care of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, a colony of which order had been invited from Limerick to found a house in Edinburgh. [The Order was indebted] to the large hearted bounty of a charitable Lady in this community [for] the beautiful convent which it now possesses in Lauriston Gardens and which was erected in 1859 under the superintendence of a gentleman to whom she had intrusted the entire management. Some years previously, Bishop Gillis [then Coadjutor of the Eastern District] had placed the other schools in better locations so as to improve their condition and increase their numbers. They were set out in connection with the system of Primary Education established by Act of Parliament and were made subject to the annual visit of a Catholic Inspector appointed by the Government. He had also, in 1858, secured a property in Potten Row on which to build an Infant School and had received from a benevolent lady a considerable sum to help him in that undertaking.15
It was, however, the Jesuits who staffed and ran the first school to provide anything other than the most basic elementary education. Strangely for that Order, rather than leading the charge, it followed on behind the initiative of lay priests. Fathers Forbes and Belaney – both Irish, and one a convert – bought a disused Protestant church and convinced Father James Johnson, the Jesuit Provincial, that it could be used to meet a long-felt need. Glasgow could offer ‘no education fitting boys for any employment above those which kept them where their fathers were when they came out of Ireland in a state of starvation. Hence as a body the Church here is nothing, while numerically it is a quarter of this great city. The want of clergy lies at the root of all our endeavours, blighting them as soon as they set forth.’ John Murdoch – the stern, unbending Coadjuter of Scotland’s Western District – was affronted by the impertinence of the proposal and terrified at the thought of Irish labourers’ sons being prepared by Jesuits to lead the Catholic Church in Scotland. But the initiative was irresistibly attractive in the parishes.
The notion of a great Jesuit-led drive towards a place in a Catholic school for every Catholic boy enjoyed the support of a number of Scotsmen who were wealthy enough to make the dream a reality. Most of them were motivated by the fear that, without proper teaching, young Catholics would drift away from the Church. But the Monteith family saw the patronage of a teaching community as, at least in part, atoning for the sin that had stigmatised the family for three hundred years. They had grown prosperous on land which had been stolen from the Church during the Reformation. They first gave a house in Lanark to Franciscan nuns. The experiment failed and the nuns moved to Glasgow. Irish Dominicans were asked to take their place, but the invitation was declined. French Dominicans and Rosminians followed suit. Even the Jesuits thought Lanark a hopeless cause, though they did agree to open a mission in Glasgow. Eventually the Irish Vincentians agreed to staff a church in Lanark, on the understanding that the Monteiths met whatever costs were not met by the parishioners’ pennies. Even John Murdoch was reconciled to the initiative by the assurance that the community would always include one English-speaking priest. Monteith’s welcome to the Rosminians was less than fulsome. ‘There can be no field more important or more rewarding than Scotland. But the priests who come should be thoroughly good and well equipped men. Pray observe what the bishop says about national prejudices.’16 Even the Jesuits at St Aloysius – a new church in Charlotte Street – obeyed the stern injunction to pay careful respect to the Scottishness of Scotland.
So an increasing number of Catholic children received a Catholic education. But the number of potential pupils still exceeded the number of Catholic school places. Therefore a combination of necessity and native pragmatism forced the Church to accept that, for some Scottish Catholic children, the alternative to education in state schools was no education at all. ‘Catholics in parts of Scotland were so scattered that attendances at mixed or neutral schools was almost inevitable.’17 But the acceptance of that inconvenient truth required special vigilance, and special measures, to protect young Catholics from the malign influence of heretics, some of whom were making a great effort to encourage apostasy. In late-nineteenth-century Scotland there were still men of influence who – motivated by the combination of racism and bigotry – did all they could to limit the opportunities of the Irish Catholic poor. As late as 1893 (twenty years after the introduction of theoretically free elementary education) Glasgow schools still charged fees. Then the Glasgow School Board was admonished by the Sheriff’s Court and instructed to obey the law.
Growing numbers and increasing confidence encouraged the Catholic Church in Scotland to feel, and behave, like a community with obligations to provide its members with more than Mass on Sundays and feast days. The Church set up a network of clubs and societies. All of them were Catholic in name and constitution, and most of them were part of long-standing national or international organisations. But their establishment and expansion in Scotland gave Catholicism a social dimension that increased its strength and durability.
Some of the foundations were for Catholics who wanted to know more about Catholicism. The Children of Mary, the Christian Doctrine Society and the Society of Our Lady of Mount Carmel gave theologically inclined laymen an opportunity to study and understand doctrine and dogma. Less spiritually inclined Catholics could attend the St John’s literary and temperance society or the St Margaret’s debating society, where the discussions usually concerned the Catholic social obligation. The League of St Sebastian encouraged the belief that the Pope should enjoy temporal as well as spiritual authority. Other organisations – the Catholic Commercial Association and the Catholic Teachers’ Club – brought together Catholic concerns and encouraged the confidence that comes with numbers. But the most important development was the creation of societies with a social dimension.
St Mary’s, Glasgow, had sponsored a society for the care of the poor since the beginning of the nineteenth century, but its work was extended across the city by the St Vincent de Paul Society which, by 1854, had seven branches in western Scotland. A Catholic Orphan Institution was established. So was a reformatory, an industry and a rescue home in the care of the Nuns of the Good Shepherd. The Catholic Young Men’s Society provided respectable and uplifting ways of passing leisure time – a reading room for when it rained and country walks in more suitable weather. Recreational outings to the coast were arranged. Bands were assembled. And football clubs were founded. Glasgow Celtic and Edinburgh Hibernians both emerged from the Catholic Young Men’s Society, and members of their supporters’ clubs were required to join the League of the Cross temperance society. Archbishop Eyre contributed to the appeal that preceded Celtic’s foundation and became the club’s first patron.
The habit of coming together in groups united by a common interest, and the feeling of security which that provided, was bound to lead to the formation of some sort of Catholic political alignment. The one surprise about its emergence is the time it took for Catholics – still, after emancipation, the victims of prejudice and discrimination – to take a serious interest in politics. An attempt had been made, in 1844, to found an organisation that would defend the interests of the Catholic working class. It evolved – without attracting much support or winning any notable victories – first into the Association of St Margaret, then the Catholic Defence Association and then the Catholic Union. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, the defining feature of religious politics in western Scotland was not the way in which the Catholic habit of forming clubs was extended into the battles between and within the parties. It was the age-old campaign to ensure that Catholic children received a Catholic education.