Durham E-Theses The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle c.1840-1880. Cooter, Roger How to cite: Cooter, Roger (1972) The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle c.1840-1880., Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1907/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk THE IRISH IN COUNTY DURHAM AND NEWCASTLE c.1840-1880 Roger James Cooter Submitted for the M.A. Degree in the University of Durham, 21 July, 1972 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 0-3 ABSTRACT The thesis explores the largely neglected Irish population of County Durham and Newcastle in the period of their heaviest immigration. After noting the extent of the Irish community an examination is made of their social conditions, their influence upon the Catholic Church, the reaction to their Catholicism from the host community, their place within the labour force of the north east and, finally, their political emergence. It is found that while the Irish themselves were scarcely different from their countrymen elsewhere in England after 1840, the place they assumed within the larger society was considerably more propitious relative to those other regions of Irish settlement. It is argued that the area's peculiar social, religious, economic and political composition in the period was responsible for the unique position of the Irish--that these factors, collectively, engendered a high degree of toleration. The conclusion is drawn that the scarcity of 19th-century material on the Irish in the north east and, hence, their historical neglect is attributable to the minimal amount of hostility they provoked among the indigenous population. Contents Preface Acknowledgements Abreviations Chapter I The Extent of the Irish Population II Living Conditions and Social Place 23 i conditions of living: piggeries to coal pits 24 ii social life: drink, secret societies and the church 38 iii local attitudes and reactions 50 III The Irish and the Catholic Church _62 i the expansion of missions ) 63 ii church burdens: finance and the pauper pence 73 iii church burdens: leakage and the priesthood 85 iv the irish priest: faith and nation 97 v faith renewed: symbols of confidence 103 IV The Irish and Anti-Catholicism 108 i no-popery: aspects natiOhaI and local 109 ii no-popery: perspectives 116 iii no-popery: the evangelical failure 125 iv the state of local faith 141 v lady londonderry and the irish catholics of seaham harbour 156 V Occupations, Industrial Place and Labour Relations 167 i allocation of irish labour 168 ii workers and wages 179 iii threats to english labour: local realities 186 iv the irishman as 'blackleg': the myth of '44 193 v union involvement and the strike at ushaw moor 207 Chapter VI Politics and the Irish: Awakening and Reception 220 i background: poverty and the confessional 221 ii fenianism: the public, the irish 229 iii .post-fenian politicisation 245 iv regional politics: the place of the irish cause 256 v the state of toleration 266 Conclusion 269 Appendix I Churches and Missions in Co. Durham and Newcastle to c.1880 271 II-VIII Diocesan Statistics 1847-1882 273-280 Bibliography 282 A: Primary Sources 282 B: Contemporary Sources 287 C: Secondary Sources 293 Maps and Tables Maps: 1-4 Percentage and Density of Irish-born Population in England and Wales, 1841, 1861 9 5 Catholic Churches and Missions of Co. Durham and Newcastle, 1846 71 6 Catholic Churches and Missions of Co. Durham and Newcastle, 1876 72 7 Distribution of Roman Catholics in England, 1851 144 8 Marriages in Roman Catholic Churches, 1851 144 9 Roman Catholics in Co. Durham and Newcastle, 1851 145 Tables: 1 Population of Durham and Newcastle, 1841-1881 4 2 Immigrant Population 5 3 Irish-born Population 6 4 Distribution of Irish in Co. Durham, 1851-1861 10 5 Approximate Growth of Irish Population 17 6 Estimated Catholic Population of Durham and Newcastle 69 7 Easter Communicants in Co. Durham and Newcastle 86 8 Places of Worship and Seating Accomodation in Durham and Newcastle 142 9 Relative Position of Church of England 147 Preface Innocuous beginnings have a way of progressing into rather unexpected ends. This study unpretentiously set out to chart the record of the Irish in the north east of England as a further chapter in the general history of the Irish immigrants in 19th- century England. Considering that the Victorian history of the north east is largely unwritten and that the place or influence 1 of the area's Irish had been neglected, the project seemed a promising and worthwhile endeavour in a fairly virgin field. A cursory survey of north-eastern material--largely from the annals of the miners' unions--convinced me that the Irish had definitely been of some importance in the area and that their role had probably been overlooked in the rush to explore the greater Victorian themes in northern, if not north-eastern history. The first task, therefore, was to provide a statistical backdrop: to reveal the extent of the Irish population and to compare this to Irish populations elsewhere in England. This was a tedious arithmetic job with precedents more in demography than in social history. The results, however, clearly substan- tiated that the Irish had indeed composed a numerically signif- icant substratum of the society and that the north east was roughly the fourth most important area in England for Irish immigration. The study thus undertook to deliniate the life and livelihood of these immigrants and to assess their impact on the host population. 1. J.H. Treble's The Place of the Irish Catholics in the Social Life of the North of England, 1829-51, unpublished Ph.D Thesis, (Leeds, 1969), includes only a minimal amount of information on the north east. Though Dr. Treble covers a very large area containing many Irish communities, his cursory coverage of the north east is axiomatic of the great majority of works in which the I nortl) of England' generally excludes the north east. ii The first part of this job was not easy. Government Blue Books which contain myriad insights on other Irish centres have very little information on the north east. General histories usually have little to say of the Irish immigrants, less to say on the north east and nothing at all to say on the Irish in the north east. The same is true for most works on English Catholicism. Randomly combing the pages of the local press for a forty-year period and finding few articles on the Irish was eminently frustrating and, at first, a great disappointment. Current work on the labour history of the north east, while reinforcing the belief that the Irish were an important sector of the workforce, was not very helpful in leading to specific involvement, areas of Irish/other tnan the well-known use of Irish 'blacklegs' in the miners' strike of 1844. Some valuable information in the Londonderry Papers on the strike of '44 as well as on the Irish Catholics in Seaham Harbour was an encouraging find. And the Catholic Tablet, which intermittently had a correspondent in Newcastle, also proffered a good deal of information. Two collections of Catholic papers at Ushaw College and Seminary,1 a collection of cuttings and miscellany at the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, 2 some of the records of the Durham Miners' Association and several volumes of transcriptions available in the Catholic Diocesan Archives, eventually brought together enough information to make the study 1. Crowe Collection of Pastorals, Circulars and Miscellanea; Ushaw Collection of Pastorals and Circulars of the Vicars Apostolic and Bishops of the Northern Division and Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. 2. J.G. Bell Collection. feasible. From these and many lesser sources--none of which dealt exclusively with the Irish in the north east'—it was possible to compose something of a historical collage, the value of the scattered details and fragmentary items emerging only when they had been pieced together. The second aspect of the study, dealing with the relations between the Irish and the larger society, proved to be consider- ably more enigmatic. There was a great temptation to promote the Irish, to grind a rather juvenile axe to the effect that the importance of the Irish in the area had been foolishly over- looked. Quite unconsciously I began to give them a significance in the eyes of society that was increasingly divorced from reality. But at the bottom of the morass of collected details lay the uncomfortable truth that the Irish were seldom an issue of any local importance. A wide reading of contemporary lit- erature, history, private letters and newspapers verifies that the area's Irish were almost an invisible minority.