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  The dark vessel came to a halt. Only then could some movement be detected on the deck—just a few figures, moving listlessly, without pace or conviction. Then from the cathead, the clack-clacking of the capstan could be heard as the anchor chain was released. The rigging, they saw, looked untidy—even haphazard. The entire vessel in fact, belying the quality of its construction, had a certain neglected appearance. Then, with a gasp, Sullivan pointed to the top of the mainmast, where a small square of yellow just caught a murmur of breeze. In a moment of horror, they recognised the dreaded ‘Yellow Jack’, the signal for other ships to stay well clear. This ship was carrying disease.

  2

  Birkenhead

  On a summer’s morning in late July, exactly three months before the Ticonderoga dropped anchor off the little beach to the south of Melbourne, Mrs Smith stood by a small dock on the Mersey River and turned to check Mr Smith’s dress and bearing with the fastidious eye of a woman conscious of her husband’s place in the world. She needn’t have worried—William was as well turned out as ever, and as keen as any man upon whom fortune had smiled to make a good impression. Having just a few months previously been suddenly elevated from his position among the humble ranks of J.S. De Wolf & Company’s shipping clerks to become Superintendent of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission’s most recent embarkation depot at Birkenhead, he was well aware of the opportunity he and his wife had been handed. For her own part, Ann had been appointed depot matron, and was as determined as her husband to fill her role to the letter.

  Even as they stood gazing expectantly across the river, they could make out the ferry now steaming slowly towards them from the sprawl of Liverpool a kilometre or so away on the far bank. On board they knew there was a full load of men, women and even entire families—all of whom, in a few days, would undertake the most momentous and perilous journey of their lives, from which they would be unlikely ever to return. It was also by far the largest contingent of passengers they had been called upon to accommodate during their brief time running the depot, and important eyes would be observing their efforts. Besides, the brief few days these people were about to spend in their care would be the last impressions they would ever have of the Smith’s homeland.

  This ferry load was not the first to arrive. Over the past few days, other emigrants had checked in from all parts of Britain. Some 140 Englishmen and women from Somerset and Cornwall had arrived by train and were already well settled, and several boatloads of Irish had also turned up, having made a rough crossing over the Irish Sea to Holyhead in open-decked packet steamers, then travelled by train to Liverpool. This ferry was rather special, though, carrying as it did the first of the 643 individuals who would comprise by far the largest single group of passengers for the voyage. These people were making the longest and saddest journey of all—from the remote and mysterious Scottish Highlands.

  The depot itself was an impressive facility, comprising two main buildings, one recently converted to accommodate up to 400 emigrants, the other as a storage area for their luggage. Living and dining quarters, washing facilities, a cook house, a sick room and several offices had been installed, as had a small Church of England chapel. Anyone standing inside would have been impressed by its sweeping sense of space and grand 21-foot ceilings. Twin rows of cast-iron pillars supported a second floor, which itself boasted further 14-foot ceilings and a timbered roof. Everywhere was well illuminated, with two rows of generous skylights. Large rows of dining tables and benches had been assembled in orderly rows, each grouped according to the areas from which the various passengers had come. The lower walls were three feet thick and whitewashed.

  Outside the front door was a large forecourt, which led to the dock, and close by could be found a railway turntable and track spur connected to the main line, from which every part of Britain could be reached by train. To the amazement of some, gas heating had been installed, and there was even hot and cold running water. It was undoubtedly the largest and most impressive building most of the travellers had ever seen.

  Birkenhead was the fourth, last and most important of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission’s embarkation depots, established for those leaving Britain by government-assisted passage. Others had been set up at the ports of Plymouth, Southampton and Deptford near London, but these had largely been adapted from private boarding houses and were relatively small in nature. Birkenhead was the first properly planned and truly dedicated facility.1

  Birkenhead had, however, been built for another purpose entirely: it was originally meant to be a series of warehouses, but the buildings were never used for that purpose. Like much of the recent infrastructure along the Birkenhead side of the Mersey River, they had been constructed as part of the town’s push to carve out for itself a piece of the massive shipping trade currently passing through Liverpool—then the busiest port in Britain. The Birkenhead Dock Commissioners’ ambitions were indeed lofty. Having declared that they were ready to take on their Goliath neighbour across the water, they began, in the 1840s, to lobby heavily for dock construction rights, planned a grand renovation of the city centre and even commenced a large-scale expansion of Birkenhead’s local Wallasey Pool, a stretch of tidal water into which the local Wallasey Creek ran before emptying into the Mersey River. This modest backwater, it was proposed, was to be engineered into a large complex of inland harbours with the somewhat grandiose title ‘The Great Float’, and would be the keystone in Birkenhead’s revival.

  However, it all came to nought. The hard men of Liverpool’s docking and shipping trade were never going to tolerate a rival—however nascent—directly across the river, and proceeded to throw every conceivable obstruction in the way of the ambitious men of Birkenhead—who admittedly, for their part, were doing a fine job of muddling it all up on their own. A litany of engineering failures and financial mismanagement threw the town firmly into reverse, as confirmed in the 1851 census, which revealed that Birkenhead’s population had gone backwards from around 40,000 in 1846–47 to just over 24,000 in 1851. The grand designs for the revival of the town centre were quietly shelved.

  Having failed to take on the shipping trade, Birkenhead was thrown a lifeline in the form of emigration. By the late 1840s, one of Britain’s chief exports—besides textiles, machinery and the many other innovations of the Industrial Revolution—was people, and Birkenhead was set to take advantage of a human exodus.

  From the mid-1840s, Britain was farewelling more than 200,000 people each year for North America2 in what has been described as an unregulated ‘free enterprise free-for-all’, with the bulk of those leaving from Liverpool.3 In this sprawling, labyrinthine port town, desperate and unworldly travellers faced an array of villains well-honed in exploiting their vulnerability. Ship brokers, or ‘recruiters’, who speculated in berths and received a commission for every one they filled, hired runners (known also in Dickensian fashion as ‘crimps’, ‘touts’ and even ‘man-catchers’) who literally manhandled arriving passengers from railway stations or the harbour side. Quickly hustled into makeshift offices, they were often cajoled or threatened into handing over their precious funds to secure a berth, sight unseen. When eventually on board the ship, they would often find that the vessel and its conditions in no way matched the brokers’ promises. If there was a delay of days or weeks before their departure, other runners would force people into one of the city’s many hundreds of dubious lodging houses, around which an entire industry had sprouted. People were forced physically: ‘They pull them by the collar, take their arms and, generally speaking, the runners who were successful enough to lay hold of the boxes are pretty sure of carrying the passenger with them’.4 Thus isolated, they became prey to unscrupulous landlords charging exorbitant fees for tiny, sub-standard rooms, often already over-booked by other unsuspecting families. Stories of poor but innocent country folk being abused in this way led to strident articles in the press, and growing government embarrassment.

  As the numbers of people passing
through Liverpool to their respective vessels increased, so did the city’s reputation as a sinkhole of disease and crime. To the government, this huge port city was becoming a liability, a victim of its own success. Added to this was the port authority’s rigid insistence that no lights or fires be lit on board a ship while in port—for reasons of fire risk—under any circumstances. This prevented emigrants from boarding their designated vessel in an early and orderly fashion, instead being forced into a mad rush on the day of their departure when hundreds of passengers and their luggage bolted to settle into their ship during daylight hours, with not even a warm meal or cup of tea to welcome them.

  Eventually, two respected Liverpool shipping companies, J.S. De Wolf & Company and Barton & Brown, wishing to expand into the emigrant trade, became fed up with Liverpool’s intransigence on the shipboard fire rule and began to ask the government about the possibility of embarking government-assisted passengers from the Birkenhead side of the Mersey. Birkenhead jumped at the overture. Yes, its spokesmen declared, the lighting of fires and lights on board docked or harboured vessels would present no problem, and they could also boast a number of new buildings ably suited for conversion to a safe and well-run emigrant depot. They also threw in free use of a warehouse behind the depot in Cathcart Street, as well as very attractive terms for the moving of cargo.

  The timing was perfect. Liverpool had become a headache for the government, so Birkenhead was given the go-ahead to convert its warehouses and begin operating as the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission’s brand new Birkenhead depot for government-assisted emigrants. Staff were sourced, with J.S. De Wolf & Company recommending one of its clerks and his wife, William and Ann Smith, to run it. Liverpool was furious, but its protestations were ignored and, with the paint barely dry, Birkenhead’s first intake of migrants arrived in January 1852.

  3

  Wakefield and ‘the Board’

  I herewith transmit to you a Commission, under the Royal Sign Manual, constituting you to be Commissioners for the sale of the waste lands of the Crown throughout the British Colonies and for applying the proceeds of such sales towards the removal thither of emigrants from this country.

  With these words on 14 January 1840, Her Majesty’s Colonial Secretary, Lord John Russell, signed a series of documents bringing into life one of the world’s earliest official institutions dedicated specifically to social relief, the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission—more simply known via a hang-on to one of its earlier incarnations as simply ‘the Board’. Whatever the nomenclature, the need for such a body had long seemed evident to a series of progressive thinkers both inside and outside the British Parliament. One of these was the dynamic, though bizarre, figure of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. As a former diplomat and government official, Wakefield had married well, but when his recently deceased wife’s funds proved insufficient to fuel his considerable ambitions, he staged an extraordinary abduction of one Ellen Turner, a fifteen-year-old heiress he had never met, from her school by means of a forged note to the effect that her parents were ill and required her immediate presence. He then spirited her to Gretna Green; there, under duress, the girl agreed to marry him under the no-questions-asked Scottish marriage laws of the day. Her outraged family eventually annulled the marriage and dragged Wakefield to court, where he was sentenced to three years in Newgate Prison. It was here, imbuing himself in the writings of classical theorists and economists such as Adam Smith, that he underwent something of a transformation, renounced his roguish behaviour and found his true calling.

  Wakefield’s observations of his fellow prisoners, as well the reasons for their incarceration, led him to believe that the induced but benevolent removal of Britain’s poor to her territories would be to the considerable benefit of both parties. The theory became a cause for which he was to advocate vociferously for the rest of his life. Economic development, believed Wakefield, relied on a balance between land, capital and labour. In both Britain and the colonies, for opposite reasons, this balance was out of kilter. Britain suffered from an excess of labourers—some of whom he had himself encountered in prison—and Australia from such a shortage that her businesses and industries were unable to be properly developed. If some of those now living in poverty in Britain could be given a new chance at life in Australia, many would be kept out of prison, and the situation of both countries improved.

  His colourful past notwithstanding, the notoriously persuasive Wakefield managed to excite several more respectable figures about his theories, who became known as the Colonial Reformers or even ‘Wakefieldians’. He managed to reinvent himself as an expert on all matters pertaining to the colonies, and in the mid-1830s attached himself to the Earl of Durham, the Governor-General of Canada, to whom he became an unofficial adviser. Meanwhile, the British establishment—and particularly the prime minister of the day, Lord Melbourne—continued to detest Wakefield, and successfully prevented him from realising his dream of entering parliament.

  The power of his personality nonetheless remained undiminished, and Wakefield became a master manipulator from behind the scenes of British and colonial political life. Almost everyone who met him commented on the power of his charisma, and in later life a political foe was to declare that ‘the only security against Wakefield was to hate him intensely’.1

  Undeterred, Wakefield presented his scheme to various Australian colonial governments, convincing them to cease their practice of giving away grants of unused Crown land to new settlers, and to instead sell them at auction to the highest bidder. The funds thus raised, he proposed, would provide the monetary engine to assist scores of impoverished but otherwise respectable British emigrants to make a one-way journey to Australia, where they were sorely needed. Such a complex and global operation needed to be run by a single organisation, and Wakefield and others lobbied hard for the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission to be established. He also managed to negotiate the reduction of the cost of an assisted passage to Australia from £30 to £18, and the British government advanced the figure of £10,000 against future land sales in the Australian colonies to assist some of its desperate population to get there.

  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.