‘No Irish’ policy in Preston’s 19th-century mills

A report by James Phillips Kay, an assistant poor law commissioner, on migration to the cotton districts of Lancashire, published in the first annual report of the Poor Law Commissioners for England and Wales in 1835, contains observations on the employment of Irish migrants in the county’s cotton mills, including two in Preston.

The information supplied to Kay about Preston makes clear that the town’s major cotton trade employer, Horrocks, Miller and Co, was operating a ‘No Irish’ policy in its mills as early as 1825.

James Kay, who later became Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, public health reformer, of Gawthorpe Hall, Burnley, provides a sobering illustration of the anti-Irish prejudice that was so prevalent in nineteenth-century Britain, even among the more enlightened social reformers. In searching for the reasons for the appalling conditions in which the urban poor lived, Kay reached the following conclusion:

‘Believing that these evils could not be “the necessary results of the commercial system”, Kay found other explanations by blaming the poor (especially the Irish) for bringing about their own demoralization.’ This conclusion was reached in a pamphlet Kay wrote a few years before his report to the poor law commissioners. That earlier view on the Irish is reinforced in his observations and comments in the later report, as, for example, in the following, in which his protestation of sincerity rings hollow:

‘With the deepest and most sincere commiseration of the sufferings of that gallant but degraded race, I cannot but consider the extent to which the immigration of Irish has proceeded in the cotton district an evil, as far as the manners, habits, and domestic comfort of the people are concerned … The English are more steady, cleanly, skilful labourers, and are more faithful in the fulfilment of contracts made between master and servant.’

The Preston evidence

Kay relies heavily for the shaping of his views on a Mr Taylor of Preston:

‘Mr. Taylor, of Preston, when connected with the firm of Messrs. Horrocks, Miller, and Co., (having to make an inquiry, in preparation for giving evidence before a Committee of the House of Commons,) about ten years ago, discovered that the preference of English labour had been so decided in their firm, that though they had received numerous applications, they had not a single Irishman in their employ, among 1,300 workmen. They have now 1,600 workmen, but since the date of the inquiry alluded to, they have seen no reason to change their system, and they have still no Irish in their factory.

‘I was informed by the same gentleman, that Messrs. Swainson, Birley, and Co., having about ten years ago erected an immense establishment, requiring not less than 1,500 “hands,” encouraged a large immigration of Irish. Since that period they have found it much to their interest to reduce the number of Irish, and to supply their place with English.’

Kay concludes:

‘For skilled labour, the English are universally preferred, and after them the Scotch … This preference is justified in a great degree by that apathy of character, which is a characteristic of those who feel few of the wants of civilized life, and who, therefore, being contented with meagre fare, and narrow dwellings, acknowledge but slightly the stimulus of emulation or of hope; in whose apprehension the brutal sloth of the savage resembles the placid contentment of the instructed artisan.’

The sources, links and the full 1,000-word extract from Kay’s report