Scotland No More?: Emigration from Scotland in the Twentieth Century by Marjory Harper

Author:Marjory Harper [Harper, Marjory]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Migration, immigration & emigration
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
Published: 2013-12-20T05:00:00+00:00

Spreading the Word

‘Wish you were here?’ On 7 January 2012 an advertisement with that heading took up two-thirds of a page in The Scotsman. ‘Make it happen with an exciting new online emigration portal’, the strapline urged readers, pointing them to a website that outlined opportunities in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain and the USA, and urged them to pay £8 for advance tickets for spring ‘emigration shows’ in Glasgow or London. Stripped of the European locations and the high-tech format, the advertisement could have been plucked from the 1950s or ’60s, even down to the assertion that ‘Australia, Canada and New Zealand are still desperately seeking skilled people’.72

Organised recruitment had been part of the migration business since the days of pilgrimage and crusade, but developed an increasingly prominent profile in the half century before the First World War. As host countries gained more control over their immigration policies, battalions of professional agents swarmed across the British Isles and Europe, competing with each other in singing the praises of their particular country, province or state through a variety of written, oral and visual media. Policy and funding were dictated in their homelands, but their day-to-day activities were generally overseen by a head office in London, presided over by an Agent-General or (later) a High Commissioner, who also had wider responsibilities for the promotion of trade and industry and the conduct of diplomatic relations. While Australia and New Zealand maintained a centralised structure, liaising with a nationwide network of 2,000 employment exchanges in advertising, interviewing and initial selection, Canada preferred some devolution of responsibility, stationing agents at regional headquarters in strategic cities across the country and collaborating with part-time ticket offices in arranging their lecturing itineraries and in booking the passages of recruits.

As we saw in Chapter 2, these structures and practices continued into the inter-war era, although by the early 1930s tighter budgets and falling demand had led to the closure of most of Canada’s regional offices, as well as New Zealand’s London-based Department of Immigration. Agents had always set a premium on personal appearances, especially in remote rural areas, but from the early 20th century they had been able to illustrate their lectures with an increasing array of lantern slides: by 1912 New Zealand, for example, had a stock of about 3,000 such visual aids, which were constantly on loan during the key winter lecturing season. By the 1920s still images could be supplemented by newsreels and other movie films. Sponsored by government immigration departments as well as transportation companies like the CPR and Cunard, they depicted migrants in training, departure and transit, and at work and play, and were shown in cinemas as well as village halls. The British – especially the Scots – were avid film-goers: by 1938 there were 4,967 cinemas in Britain, and during the 1930s Glasgow had the most cinemas per head of population in Europe.73 Since the late 1920s the Imperial Institute had also been building up a substantial slide

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