Notes for This Talk

‘Migration from Swaledale during collapse of the nineteenth-century lead mines’ Chain migration Slide 1 Thank you for listening to this 10 minute talk on the migration from Swaledale during the collapse of the nineteenth-century lead mines. The main focus of this talk is chain migration, by which I mean loosely the migration of family members in the footsteps of those who have gone before. Slide 2 Swaledale is the most northerly and remote of the Yorkshire Pennine Dales. Today it is a sparsely populated landscape. There is little human presence. Sheep are more numerous than people. This solitude was not always the case, however, and the scars of Victorian lead mining are a visible reminder of a past age of intense activity. The valley then was a turmoil of heavy industry. The scar of Swinergill mine is seen in this slide on the daleside in the centre of the image. Slide 3 Swaledale includes several townships within four districts, namely sparsely populated Muker in the uppermost westerly part of the dale, Melbecks, Arkengarthdale, and Reeth, the eastern lower part of the dale. The townships of Muker, Gunnerside, Reeth, Grinton and Arkle Town lie in the valley bottom along the course of the River Swale and its tributary Arkle Beck. Slide 4 Extensive exploration of the mineral resources of the dale before the Victorian era had uncovered a rich lead-mining field by the middle of the eighteenth century. Most of the potentially lucrative veins lay in an east-west complex on the north side of the Swale. The Beldi Hill and Swinnergill mines lay in Muker, the Lownathwaite and Blakethwaite mines straddled the border of Muker and Melbecks, the Old Gang Mine in Melbecks, and the largest mining area lay in Arkengarthdale. Within these mining areas the slide shows the major levels or veins of lead ore and the sites of the smelt mills. The expansion and prosperity in mining which marked the latter half of the 18C was already showing signs of decline in the 19th. Population had increased at a great rate and it was difficult for all the men to find employment. A series of bad harvests between 1789 and 1802 started a vicious spiral of prices and deterioration of diet which was continued by wars over much of Europe. Prices of lead rose towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, fell in a post-war depression, but recovered thereafter to reach a peak in 1825. However, all the lead-mining areas of Britain suffered a prolonged depression beginning with the general trade slump of 1826. Trade recovered in the dale in 1827, but the price of lead continued to fall. A major cause of the decline was competition in the market from lead exported from Spain. The depression lifted to an extent in the 1830s in the Swaledale mines when they were managed effectively by a small group of local investors. However, the terminal collapse of the industry set in when the main seams of lead in the major mines became exhausted in the late 1870s. The demise was a slow process, picking off districts and townships selectively. The mines in Muker failed early, the Old Gang mine in Melbecks between 1871 and 1891, and the Arkengarthdale mines between 1881 and 1901. The mines were finally abandoned at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The population trends in Swaledale reflect the dale's reliance upon the lead mining industry. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the greatest growth in population occurred in townships with a substantial lead industry; similarly, the most severe losses in the second half of the century occurred in those townships where the lead industry had been most influential. The population changes thus varied considerably between townships. Slide 5 The graph in slide 5 shows the decline in size of the population and the decline in the number of surnames in the population taken from the census data between 1841 and 1901. The solid line and the left vertical axis show the population size, and the dotted line and the right vertical axis show the number of surnames. The maximum population of Swaledale was 7480 people in 1821, representing at that time a growth in numbers of about 30% since the beginning of the century. The development of lead mining had stimulated rapid in-migration. The decline in numbers after mid-century was continuous and severe. Muker lost a quarter of its population in the 1850s, and Melbecks and Arkengarthdale over a half between 1871 and the turn of the century. The entire dale suffered severe difficulties following the near total collapse of its lead industry towards the end of the nineteenth century, when a large proportion of the population left the dale. The number of surnames in the population also tended to fall, from 368 in 1841 to 276 in 1901. There was some growth in the number of people and in the number of surnames in the 1870s, but the number of surnames was lower at the end of the period than at the beginning. There was thus a net loss of groups of people with the same surname over the period. Slide 6 The rate of decline of the population was faster than the rate of decline in number of surnames. In other words, there were fewer people in the dale at the end of the period with a relatively larger number of surnames than at the beginning. The average size of groups of people with the same surname was smaller at the end of the period than at the beginning. In other words, progressively larger groups of people with the same surname left the dale in the 2nd half of the century. Had family members followed each other in steps of chain migration? Slide 7 This slide shows the decline in the number of household heads between 1841 and 1901 in the 5 largest surname groups. These groups are Alderson, Harker, Metcalfe, Peacock and Raw. The number of household heads fell by around a half in each group. For example, the number of household heads called Alderson was 80 in the census of 1841, and this fell to 45 by 1901, a drop of 35 heads (or 44%). Slide 8 Where did these migrants go? Out-migration from the Yorkshire mines in the economic depression of the 1820s was predominantly to Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Burnley area of Lancashire attracted a substantial influx, with work in the coal mines and textile mills. This table shows the destinations of one Swaledale family, the descendants of Thomas Alderson of Muker, highlighted in the red circle top left. This is a complicated table, but all we need to see is the names of all the family members in the uncoloured boxes on the left (children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of Thomas Alderson), their places of birth, and their addresses in the censuses across the second half of the 19C. Green implies birthplace or residence in Swaledale, and brown in Burnley. The descendants of Thomas Alderson either weathered the economic decline and remained in Swaledale, or settled and had families in Burnley and nowhere else. The migrants to Burnley worked almost entirely in the cotton mills. Slide 9 Here we have a map of the mill town of Burnley as surveyed in 1890, and the nearby small town of Brierfield a mile or so to the north. Slide 10 We complete this microstudy of migration from Swaledale with a look at the destinations of the descendants of one couple, and suggest that these people followed each other in chains of migration. Slide 10 shows the primary addresses of these migrants, by which I mean those addresses at which migrant households all arrived around the same time together by the 1861 census. Three households lived in the same neighbourhood in Brierfield. Slide 11 Slide 11 shows the secondary addresses of these descendants, by which I mean those addresses occupied by households in censuses subsequent to their initial arrival in Brierfield. Four households remained in Brierfield, but the majority of descendants of Thomas Alderson (11 addresses) moved south to Burnley to live near each other in the terraces around cotton mills. Slide 12 Thank you for listening to my talk. Perhaps people migrated somewhat like sheep. My email address appears at the bottom, and should anybody wish to get in touch with me, I’d be delighted to hear from you. * Phil Batman [email protected] May 2021 .

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