From a large and chaotic office—in fact, a rented private house at 8 Park Street Westminster—the Board recruited several former Royal Navy officers as agents situated across the country and in Ireland, and went to work directing the funds generated from the respective colonies to bringing people to their particular part of the Empire. This naval influence would permeate much of the Board’s practices, particularly in the running of its emigrant embarkation depots, which were organised along similar lines to ships at sea.
The notion of the Board’s assisted, or in some instances such as with the Highland Scots, free passage out of poverty appealed to a great many destitute or near-destitute Britons, and by 1848 a staff of 30 was processing 46,000 letters a year. According to a contemporary account, the Board’s office was always a flurry of human activity, with hundreds of people every day showing up at its doors for a chance at a new beginning:
It is of no use pretending not to know where Park Street Westminster is… Follow the stream of fustian jackets, corduroy trousers and smock-frocks, keep in the rear of the chattering excited parties of half-shaven mechanics, slatternly females and slip-shod children. They are all moving in one direction which, if we can but get at it through the crowd, is the much-sought office of the Commissioner of Land and Emigration.[2]
Although catering to the needs of many parts of the British Empire, the Board’s primary interest focused on Australia. During the 1840s, it advertised widely across Britain for agricultural labourers to travel to New South Wales and Victoria, primarily to service the ever-expanding Australian wool clip. Initially, the demand was sluggish, with Canada and the colonies of South Africa proving more popular destinations—not to mention America, which—as it was no longer part of the British Empire—did not interest the Board.
Australia’s reputation as an emigrant destination took a further hit when a speculative land bubble burst spectacularly in the 1840s, leading to a severe economic depression that hit land and wool prices hard, forcing some squatters unable to either feed or sell their sheep to boil them down for tallow-making. By the late 1840s, assisted passage to Australia was suspended altogether and the Board’s future looked bleak. All this would turn around, however, with the discovery of gold.
Wakefield continued his life in tumultuous fashion, eventually playing a leading role in the founding of the convict-free colony of South Australia (a port town and a main street of Adelaide still today bear his name), and finally New Zealand, where he ended his days—a difficult and controversial figure to the last. While playing no direct role in the running of the Board itself, it was undoubtedly a product of Wakefield’s determination and vision. For 37 years, it pursued its stated aim of ‘assist[ing] in the removal thither of emigrants from this country’,[3] winding down only in 1877 when the various colonial governments began to develop emigration schemes of their own.
Whatever people may have thought of Wakefield personally, it was difficult to dispute his passionate observations that, approaching the halfway point of the nineteenth century, not all Britain’s subjects were enjoying the fruits of her imperial prosperity, particularly those classes not empowered by either wealth or title.
In London in the summer of 1851, the Great Exhibition attracted an average daily audience of just over 42,000 people, all gasping in awe as they gazed up to the soaring glass roof of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. Just over half a kilometre long, this engineering wonder was built entirely of glass and cast iron to nominally display the industrial products of 44 countries around the world, but was in fact primarily a propaganda exercise to show off the might of imperial Britain. Indeed, the past several decades of the nineteenth century had seen extraordinary developments in British society. Avoiding the expenditure in manpower and material of a major war, this small island was on its way to acquiring the largest and most wide-reaching political and economic empire in history.
In recent years, the railway system and public omnibuses had opened up the country to people hitherto confined to the boundaries of their local parish, often presenting them with their first glimpse of the sea. The telegraph and the penny post allowed affordable communication from any part of the country to another, and cheap, mass-produced items adorned the mantelpieces of the affluent homes of the new merchant and industrial classes.[4]
As hordes of ordinary Britons filed into the Crystal Palace—in all, a full third of the country’s entire population would visit the Great Exhibition over its six months’ duration—they could, for perhaps the only time in their lives, rub shoulders with the rich and powerful. Here, under the glass, all stood equally enthralled by the tens of thousands of items—large and small—heralding the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. People could inspect machines that made envelopes, and others that automatically compiled votes. They could observe a demonstration of cotton being produced from the bud to the final product, and gaze at the largest diamond of that, or any other, age: the legendary Koh-i-noor. They could marvel at the first forays of photography in Mathew Brady’s newly invented daguerreotypes and inspect exquisite gold, silver and enamel artefacts from the Empire’s undisputed jewel, India.
The dazzling technologies of the Great Exhibition ushered in improvements barely dreamed of a decade earlier: for the first time, glass became available for household windows;[5] soap—previously a hand-made luxury—was now turned out in factories, although it was heavily taxed. Washable cotton underwear became cheap and went some way towards lifting standards of hygiene, as did the instigation of flushing toilets—another wonder of the modern age debuted in the Great Exhibition. But change was slow, and long before such benefits of industrialisation could begin to filter down to the masses, life for Britain’s poor—particularly her agricultural poor—would become drastically worse.
Swelled to beyond their capacity by agrarian workers whose traditional ways of life had been obliterated by the factory and the machine age, Britain’s cities were devolving into the nightmares of Charles Dickens’ descriptions: filthy, diseased, crime-ridden cesspits of despair, fuelled by an ever-increasing ocean of the unemployed.
Despite the myriad innovations of the age, such basics as reliable clean water remained out of reach for millions. In London, the only source was the Thames, already used as an open sewer, but likewise in towns and villages across the country, the nation’s poor were compelled to queue at their local pump and haul water of uncertain quality over long distances and often up flights of rickety stairs.[6] Although average life expectancy was slowly and gradually increasing, in mid-century it was still hovering somewhere around the mid-forties, a statistic swelled by high levels of infant mortality, which had actually increased in the 1850s to a staggering 41 per cent of children not surviving their first five years. Churchyards, the traditional place of burials, began to run out of space, forcing the government to pass the Burial Act in 1852 giving local authorities the power to establish and run public cemeteries for the first time.
3
M. Kruithof, 2002,
6
R. Haines, 2003,