On this day … 4 July 1863

The Preston Chronicle carried a report headlined ‘The Distress and the Emigration Question’. The distress was the result of the shutdown of the town’s cotton mills since the start of the American Civil War two years earlier, which had cut off the main supply of cotton for Lancashire.

Emigration to the colonies was one of the solutions suggested for the starving mill workers and their families. Emigration was being considered ever more urgently throughout Lancashire because, as the meeting was told, donations to relieve the distress were drying up.

The idea frightened the mill owners, who saw themselves being short of workers when trade recovered. And fewer workers would bring demands for higher wages.

The Chronicle carried a report from the Times which quoted a Mr Baker, presumably one of the Lancashire mill owners:

‘… emigration is not desirable. The manufacturers, as a body, “are against it,” and it does seem, in Mr Baker’s opinion, “anomalous at the same moment to be inquiring everywhere for cotton, and stimulating its growth by every effort, and to be emigrating the hands that are to spin it when it arrives”.’

This was jam tomorrow as far as the workers were concerned, as was made clear by the main speaker at the meeting, Thomas Banks, secretary of the Spinners and Minders’ Association. He told the meeting that:

‘… the liberality of the community – of the people of England and other places – had been munificent during the past two years of distress; but that their benevolence, there was reason to believe, was almost exhausted; and that a proper supply of cotton from America could not be expected for a long time …’

Other sources of cotton, including India and Egypt, had been explored, but they could come nowhere near being able to supply the quantity of cotton needed. The future facing Preston’s mill workers was dire, ‘The only means they had at their command, or were likely to have, to better their condition, was emigration (Applause) … ‘

The following resolution proposed by a Mr Raby was passed unanimously:

‘That, taking into consideration the extreme sufferings of the factory operatives, the uncertainty of obtaining remunerative employment, and the constant recurrence of panics to which the cotton trade is subject through over-production, this meeting pledges itself to carry out a comprehensive scheme of emigration to such of Her Majesty’s colonies where substantial wages can be obtained.’

Mr Raby argued that

‘… it was the duty of working men to look after themselves; that nobody else would do that for them; and that at present they would be looking after themselves to the best possible advantage by emigrating from a place where there was no work, to one where plenty of employment followed by good wages, could be obtained. He recommended Canada as a fit place to go.’

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The best and most sympathetic account of the sufferings of the Preston mill workers is Edwin Waugh’s