Non-natives as a percentage of country parish populations, 1841–1901

IN the previous chapters we have chiefly taken an immigrant perspective. In order to analyse the impact of immigration on insular society, we must now turn our attention to the host community. The first part of this chapter contains an exploration of the social, political and religious make-up of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Guernsey. St Peter Port will be analysed separately from the country parishes as regards the first two categories, but religion will be considered on an all-Island basis. Having thus sketched out a picture of local society, the second part of the chapter then marshals a variety of evidence – official and personal correspondence, States and newspaper reports – to build up an image of inter-communal attitudes and relationships at the social and political level.

St Peter Port

Society

Reference to social groups known as the ‘Sixties’ and the ‘Forties’ was a commonplace of Victorian writing on Guernsey. The Island, and St Peter Port in particular, was deemed by outside observers to be obsessed with class distinctions. These labels, dating from the opening of St Peter Port’s Assembly Rooms in the late eighteenth century, stemmed from the number of families originally assigned to each group. The Sixties corresponded to the leading mercantile families at the apex of St Peter Port (and hence insular) society; the Forties to a group they regarded as their social inferiors, whom they excluded from the Rooms.

The Sixties, who derived their status largely from fortunes made in eighteenth-century shipowning and maritime trade, were essentially dominated by indigenous families (De Saumarez, Dobrée, De Havilland, Brock, Maingy, De Lisle, Priaulx, Carey, Le Marchant, Andros and others) but the core stock of prestigious names had been augmented during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by successful French refugees (Jeremie, De La Condamine, Utermarck), by garrison officers finding wives amongst the well-to-do (McCrea, Lacey, Gore), and by businessmen washed in on the tide of prosperity who judiciously intermarried with the elite (MacCulloch, Bell, Chepmell). From the 1820s, these were joined by an influx of British rentiers, those of which who could ‘afford to give parties’ were ‘put on the list of the Sixties’. Since most of the old merchant families were by now also rentiers, the top stratum of St Peter Port society was, for several decades post-Waterloo, largely a leisured one.

WE have now examined the collective social and political attitudes of both migrants and locals to their counterparts on the other side of the divide. To what extent was that divide a structural feature of insular society at personal and individual level? Was it so tangible as to impede a merging of populations? Two of the most important indicators of assimilation available to historians are the degree of residential segregation between a migrant population and its hosts, and the amount of inter-marriage across the two communities. The following analysis uses quantitative data from census returns and marriage registers in order to form an objective assessment of integration and assimilation. These sources are analysed at aggregate level to yield information on structural trends which would have been inaccessible to contemporaries but which cast an explanatory light on their attitudes. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the ethnic and demographic make-up of St Peter Port and the country parishes as manifest in Victorian censuses.

Ethnicity and demography

St Peter Port

The parish of St Peter Port comprises just ten per cent of Guernsey’s land area but contains its only town. For a twenty-year period between 1831 and 1851, it accommodated as much as 57 per cent of Guernsey’s total population, the proportion declining slowly thereafter to 43 per cent in 1911. For the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the parish accommodated substantially greater numbers of females than males. In 1851, for example, there were just 74 civilian males for every 100 females. This imbalance was due to a combination of factors: sex-specific emigration; the prevalence of seafaring as a male occupation; the presence of a sizeable cohort of female rentiers and large numbers of female domestics. The population of St Peter Port was also a very youthful population: in 1851, 41 per cent of St Peter Port parishioners were under 20. It was not, however, a homogeneous population, for it was composed of three broad groupings with differing ethnic and demographic characteristics.

The first and smallest group consisted of people born in Guernsey parishes other than St Peter Port, who, in 1851, comprised just 8 per cent of the town’s population. This seems surprising, not only because the population of St Peter Port was at its nineteenth-century peak in 1851, but, because in the previous century, movement to the town from country parishes had been considerable.

Origins

WE saw in the previous chapter that Guernsey’s population rose by nearly 20 per cent between 1821 and 1831, and that this was partly due to immigration. Responding to the influx, the Royal Court gave orders for two special enumerations in 1827 and 1830, principally to ascertain details of non-natives. Both enumerations were Island-wide, but complete returns survive for neither. For the 1827 census, which listed the names and addresses of both migrants and natives, returns are available for St Peter Port, St Martins, the Vale, St Peters and the Forest. For the 1830 census, which focused exclusively on non-natives, details survive only for St Peter Port and are not fully representative, since only adult men were enumerated, and incomers from higher social strata were excluded. Nevertheless, the 1830 census collected a comprehensive range of information on respondents, including (crucially, for our purposes) respondents’ birthplaces, and a valuable document profiling 1,039 male migrants to St Peter Port in 1830 survives. Analysis of the 1830 enumeration shows that 76 per cent of town-based respondents had come from England, with a further 10 per cent from France, and 9 per cent from Ireland. Of the English subgroup, nearly three-quarters hailed from the south-western counties of Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, with a smaller contingent from Hampshire.

This provides us with a starting-point for our analysis, but, to extend our information, we must look to later British Government censuses. These required respondents to provide data on their origins from 1841. However, enumerators’ books for 1841 specifically are disappointing. In this year, respondents were required only to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as to whether they were born in Guernsey, and, if not, to state if they were born in ‘England’, ‘Scotland’, ‘Ireland’ or ‘Foreign Parts’. Neither was there space for natives of Channel Islands other than Guernsey to specify where they were from, and, although some did identify their Island of origin, it is possible that others went unidentified.

Matters did, however, improve after 1851, from which point censuses appear accurately to record Channel Islanders under their respective Islands, and to specify the precise national origin of the non-British. Natives of the British Isles nevertheless continued by and large to be recorded simply as nationals of their respective countries.

HOW, then, did Guernsey come to this pass? More specifically, to what extent were immigrants responsible for nineteenth-century cultural change, and to what extent was their contribution merely ‘a single facet of a deeper socioeconomic development’?

The Island had indeed come a long way since 1814, when William Berry had described a society where ‘the old Norman French’ was ‘generally spoken by all ranks’, and ‘economical’ urban merchants co-existed with country-dwellers ‘shut out from agricultural communication with the rest of the world’.

In the space of a century, the countryside had moved away from subsistence farming, and all ten of Guernsey’s parishes had become tied into the modern economy. St Peter Port, no longer the economic trail-blazer, had found a new raison d’être servicing the business and consumer needs of its hinterland. The other nine parishes, in a reversal of traditional roles, had become the primary source of insular revenue.

Within the 150 years since the 1760s, a large landless class dependent on wage labour had grown up within St Peter Port, spread to the quarrying parishes, and now played an increasingly important role in other parishes. Immigrants had formed the basis of this class. These immigrants had contributed to the economy in many ways. Artisans had provided craft skills in short supply locally. Retailers and small businessmen had provided commercial know-how and capital inputs. Unskilled workers had fulfilled a particular need in ensuring cheapness and continuity of labour supply at times when natives were loath to occupy this economic niche themselves.

Despite considerable emigration, Guernsey’s population had more than doubled in a century. Growth was maintained, in part, by a constant influx of youthful new immigrants, and it was given an additional fillip by the freedom of such migrants from the economic and social constraints which had traditionally held the local population in check. This demographic growth both mirrored and supported economic development.

Notwithstanding the benefits they brought, the reception immigrants met with was not one of unalloyed welcome. Insular legal and administrative structures were slow in responding to the need for labour mobility which came as part of the Island’s increasing integration with the wider world.

Occupational sectors ranked by the relative levels of participation in them by Guernsey-based non-native males, censuses 1851–1901

FEW population statistics exist for Guernsey before the nineteenth century. Various estimates have been hazarded, but the earliest actual figures date from 1727, when a count of inhabitants was made in order to assess the amount of grain needed during a food shortage. At that date, the Island’s inhabitants numbered 10,246, of whom 43 per cent lived in St Peter Port. The town’s eighteenth- century success as an entrepôt stimulated population growth. In 1800, an enumeration carried out for Customs Commissioner William Stiles showed that Guernsey’s population had increased by 58 per cent in the seventy-three years since 1727. Inhabitants numbered 16,155, ‘exclusive of sailors in his majesty’s service, privateers, and merchant vessels; also of strangers not permanently settled, who may amount to 2,000 or 3,000’. St Peter Port’s population now stood at 52 per cent of the insular total. The British garrison, swollen in numbers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and based chiefly in town, was not included in the count.

Guernsey did not take part in the two earliest British Government censuses – those of 1801 and 1811 – so there are no further figures until 1814, when William Berry published a set of estimates in his History of the Island of Guernsey. Berry, who provided a series of intriguingly precise-looking figures for each parish and the Island as a whole, put Guernsey’s population, inclusive of sailors and strangers but again not the garrison, at ‘about 21,293’, indicating a rise of some 30 per cent through the Napoleonic period.

A census designed to yield ‘an exact list in each parish of the number of houses; [and] their inhabitants, giving ages and sex’ was commissioned in 1817 by the Guernsey Agricultural Society. This list, however, does not survive, so the next available figures are from the British Government census of 1821. This census, which included strangers but not garrison, put the Island’s population at 20,302, representing a fall of about 5 per cent in the seven years since 1814. Daniel De Lisle Brock characterised the immediate post-war period as one of ‘misery and depopulation’ for Guernsey. As Brock observed, the transformation of Guernsey’s leading merchants into fundholders had deprived many entrepôt workers of a livelihood:

This book has been adapted from a Ph.D. thesis which I completed in 2005. I was not originally trained as a historian but as a linguist, and I developed an interest in local history through an attempt to research my own genealogy, beginning in the mid-1990s. I am a Guernseywoman born and bred. Both my parents were born in Guernsey. Both my grandfathers were born in Guernsey, and, although I knew that my grandmothers came from elsewhere, I firmly expected, when I started my research, that I would unearth long taproots of local descent anchoring at least part of my family to insular soil. I was astonished to discover, however, that the earliest of my Guernsey-based antecedents had arrived in the Island no earlier than 1828, and that my maternal ancestors were ultimately all French and paternal ancestors all English. I had no ‘native’ blood at all. Just French and English migrants whose arrivals in Guernsey were interspersed throughout the nineteenth century.

I was curious to find out who these people were and why they had come to the Island. As a means of securing the time and resources to look into these matters systematically, I decided in the autumn of 2000 to submit a Ph.D. research proposal to Professor (then Doctor) Keith Snell of Leicester University. This was not done without diffidence, since I had not studied history beyond ‘O’ level and had been away from academia for more than a decade and a half. To my delight, Professor Snell showed considerable enthusiasm for my project and, even more surprising, belief in my abilities to carry it out.

On beginning my research, I was soon struck by the parallels between nineteenth-century developments and those we are witnessing in our own time. Twenty-first-century civil registers are not unlike Victorian civil registers: bristling with names new to the Island. Guernsey today is more cosmopolitan than ever before. What further changes can we anticipate as the Island becomes increasingly integrated, economically and ethnically, into the wider global scene? Our political autonomy remains, but what about our cultural identity? It was in search of perspectives on current conundrums as well as a wish to understand the past that I pursued my research over the next few years.

BY the early nineteenth century, the Channel Islands had owed political allegiance to the English Crown for six hundred years. Anterior to this, the Islands had shared a history with north-west France. Untouched by the Saxon invasions to which England was subject from the fifth century, the Islands were inhabited during the latter half of the first millennium by a predominantly Gallo-Roman population living in subordination to the Frankish monarchy. At some time during the tenth century, the Islands and adjacent Cotentin peninsula were absorbed into the territory of the Dukes of Normandy. The Dukes’ conquest of England in 1066 did not alter the status of the Islands, which remained part of Normandy on the same basis as the Cotentin. In 1204, however, the destinies of insular and mainland Normandy diverged, when John, King of England and Duke of Normandy, lost the continental portion of his Duchy to the French King Philip Augustus. The Islands assumed new strategic value as stepping-stones between England, Brittany and English monarchs’ remaining continental possessions, and John and his successors contrived by various means to prevent Islanders following mainland kin into the French camp. An important way in which insular sympathy was won and held lay in the decision of post-1204 monarchs to respect the Islands’ law and institutions, and to allow them to govern themselves, albeit under royal supervision.

After a period of instability, the Islands were in 1259 recognised by the Treaty of Paris as part of Henry III of England’s continental territories. Five years previously, Henry had granted them to his son (the future Edward I) ‘in such manner that the said lands … may never be separated from the Crown … but that they should remain to the Kings of England in their entirety for ever’. The Islands henceforth remained possessions of the English Crown, but were never incorporated into the Kingdom of England (or, later, the United Kingdom).

Although Henry III had surrendered the title ‘Duke of Normandy’ by the 1259 Treaty, it was essentially in this capacity – respecting insular usage and law – that he and his heirs continued to rule the Islands. Later monarchs from Edward III to Charles II issued Charters formally guaranteeing Islanders’ customs and privileges, and granting them further privileges.

Legislation – General

DESPITE Guernsey’s small size, it is – and was in the nineteenth century – very much a polity in its own right. It was judicially and administratively separate from the United Kingdom, and made its own laws in response to local needs. These laws differed materially from those in force across the Channel, as, in countless respects, they also did from those of its sister-Island, Jersey. Centuries of comparative isolation had made Guernsey a self-contained, rather inwardlooking society, where strangers were conspicuous. Over the centuries, contacts with outsiders, such as they were, had resulted in a substantial corpus of stranger legislation in the form of Ordinances of the Royal Court. A minority of these Ordinances, which survive from the early sixteenth century, relate explicitly to ‘étrangers non sujets de Sa Majesté’. Some refer unambiguously to ‘tous étrangers natifs hors de cette île’. In most stranger legislation, however, the term ‘étranger’ is undefined. Unless the context demonstrates otherwise, one must therefore assume that such Ordinances applied by default to all outsiders of whatever nationality.

Three categories of stranger legislation may be distinguished. The first and most numerous group consists of emergency measures (most of them shortlived), made ‘upon some crisis of war, or scarcity, or other exigency of the moment’. The basic function of such measures was to restrict the entry of strangers, and supervise their activities once in the Island. A plethora of such Ordinances between 1793 and 1807 sprang from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Most of these involved the collection and listing of strangers’ names, and were not dissimilar from laws passed in England at this time, nor indeed from laws passed in France. Such Ordinances continued to be issued throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in response to crises abroad. The final nineteenth-century Ordinance of this type was that of 1 May 1848, the last of a series in that year framed to deal with the anticipated influx from the French revolution of February 1848.

The second, more broadly based, category consists of laws governing a multiplicity of everyday business in which non-natives were routinely distinguished from natives, and subjected to certain disabilities.

the word diaspora (greek for “scattering”) designates the members of a nation or ethnic group who live outside their nation's original territory. Sooner or later most nations generate a diaspora, though smaller communities tend to blend into their surroundings and lose their distinctive identity. A Jewish Diaspora has existed since the Babylonian Exile, if not earlier; in fact, since early in the Common Era, a majority of world Jewry has lived outside the Land of Israel. No history of the Jews or of Judaism is complete without an examination of this ancient widespread phenomenon.

When the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, they displaced its entire population and settled the land with foreigners who had similarly been removed from their homes. The ultimate fate of these Israelite exiles has never been determined. They probably mingled with the peoples of the territories where they were settled and lost their national identity (this was the Assyrians' purpose), though some may have wandered back and merged into the surviving kingdom of the tribe of Judah.

The fate of the Babylonian exiles of 597 and 586 was different. The first set of transfers took place about ten years before the final defeat. This earlier group of exiled leaders naturally stayed in touch with their homeland, because Judah remained an independent if subjugated kingdom. In this way a pattern was created that the second, larger exile group could simply continue.

in 104 bce, the hasmonaean high priest john hyrcanus was succeeded by his son Judah Aristoboulus; after only one year, Judah himself died and was succeeded by his brother Alexander Jannaeus. One of these brothers – it is not clear which – began using the title “king of Judaea.” The kingdom lasted only a brief while – it was abolished under Roman occupation in the year 63 BCE – but these years represent a crucial interval in the history of Judaism.

The Maccabean state began insecurely. Over the 130's BCE, King Antiochus VII sat on the Seleucid throne. The last vigorous king of that dynasty, he barely missed reconquering the newly independent Judaea: Antiochus briefly reasserted royal authority over the territory but was unable to sustain his control. After that, the Jewish territory slowly expanded until finally (and briefly) the Kingdom of Judaea became a regional power in its own right, capable of influencing events throughout the region, sometimes even the royal domains of Syria and Egypt themselves.

That growth was propelled by an increasingly aggressive military policy. The Maccabean brothers, starting with Judah himself, had occasionally expelled the previous inhabitants of a border region and replaced them with Jews: the resolution installing Simon as high priest had specifically praised him and his brother Jonathan for this accomplishment.