Economic Life

The common perception in the colonial period was that English farmers had a difficult time adjusting to pioneer agriculture, coming as they did from a country where the land had been tilled for the better part of a millennium. “The Yorkshire immigrants near Toronto, the Sussex settlers and the Cumberland men achieved notable success, and were described in favourable terms by writers wishing to encourage British immigration,” Jean Burnet writes. “But this was only after early years of hardship.” The Scots and Irish were felt to adapt more easily to frontier conditions because many had been used to a lower standard of living at home, but both Irish and Scottish Catholics developed undeserved reputations for not progressing beyond subsistence. Some rural areas of English settlement evolved quickly into prosperous regions. The Devon/Cornwall settlement on the western Lake Ontario shore began to be heavily settled only in the 1830s and was still drawing immigrants by the time it had become one of the province’s prime wheat-producing areas a mere twenty years later. It did better than the Protestant Irish settlements in eastern Ontario that had begun nearly a generation earlier, but its success may have been due less to its English character than to climatic advantages and proximity to lakeshore ports.

Burnet has noted that upper-class immigrants were quite alike and that writers tended not to distinguish them by origin because rank was more important than country, or indeed religion, in securing them position and standing. Many nonetheless were English. From the earliest days of the colonies, émigré officials from England as well as members of elite English families in the older colonies filled official positions and set themselves up in the countryside as landed gentlemen and magistrates or, in Lower Canada, as seigneurs. Their ranks were swelled after the Napoleonic Wars by an influx of military officers on half pay who had retired in such numbers that all could not successfully reintegrate into civilian society at their accustomed social level. They were joined by clergy such as the Reverend George Hallen of Rushock in Worcestershire. Despairing of providing for his eleven children on a curate’s stipend, Hallen took advantage of the need for clerics to serve the rising overseas population. Economically he was middle class but he came from the ranks of the gentry, and his brothers, retired from the army, were strong Tories in their home area. Other gentry migrants were merchants following the conventional route to social mobility and political acceptance by abandoning commerce and entering the ranks of landed society. Such was the aim of Hamnett Pinhey, a London importer who made his fortune by the age of thirty-five and counted on becoming a much more important man in the colonies than he ever could at home. As it turned out, Pinhey established the shell of an English estate on the Ottawa River but survived on imported capital.

In the early 1830s some of this class were prompted to come by signs that the old political system in England, which had been dominated by landed interests, was coming to an end. William Farmer, a Shropshire gentleman, was convinced that the 1832 Reform Bill marked the initiation of a dangerous democratic era and he departed England with a party of working families, ready to populate an Old World estate in the new land. Despite having relatives in the Colonial Office who should have warned him, he found that he had to rent land from wealthy Americans in the Gatineau valley, and in the end his family moved to Ancaster.

The best-known members of the gentry class are the ones who, after settling in Upper Canada, wrote about their experiences for an audience back home, such as the Stricklands at Lakefield (Samuel and his sisters Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill), Mary Gapper, later O’Brien, and her half-pay brothers at Thornhill, and John and Anne Langton at Sturgeon Lake. Most sought out rural clusters of like-minded people, of which there were many in the Canadas, and most aimed to farm and to obtain local appointments. Their social backgrounds, education, and letters of introduction often provided an entrée into positions of local authority, and the “Family Compact” in York lamented the necessity of appointing Americans or uneducated people to the magistracy in townships where they were absent. But the desired offices were assured only if they held the proper Tory political opinions and settled in areas in which a long-established local elite was not already firmly entrenched.

The heyday of this gentry class of immigrant was the period before the Rebellions of 1837–38. The advent of responsible government a decade later confirmed that local appointive positions would bring with them nothing like the status and power they had previously conferred. The gentry’s strength had never reposed in elective office; only some 30 of the 283 Upper Canadian assemblymen were born in England. A third of them were Reformers, mostly merchants and farmers. The Conservatives were mainly lawyers and retired military officers, the former enjoying the advantages of training at the Inns of Court and the decision of many Scottish lawyers to stay at home, the latter experimenting with farming as a “first, unfamiliar occupation.” The vast majority of English assembly members were Anglican, as opposed to a third of the whole contingent. Because of their minority status, there were no complaints of English “takeovers or cabals.”

Despite the advantages the gentry derived from imported capital, some, such as the Moodies, experienced years of hardship before becoming comfortably established. Many found that their ideas of agriculture, often book-learned, did not suit the realities of the frontier. A small and poor local population and rudimentary transportation facilities provided no ready outlet for specialized crops, and purebred animals ate up feed, housing, and attention while less informed farmers did well with hardy little beasts that foraged in the woods and yielded both milk and meat in moderate quantities. John Prince, the English-born assemblyman for Essex County, concluded, “A capitalist had better throw his money over Blackfriar Bridge than bring it here and embark it in farming operations.” Thus, the gentry families often wasted their initial advantages and by mid-century many of them were being overtaken economically and politically by prosperous farmers who had risen from beneath them.

British North America’s country gentry retained their social standing in the long term only by leaving the land and entering the urban professions, especially the law where the English had always been over-represented. By the 1850s the sons of the most successful of the post1815 wave of modest immigrants were also entering the professions, and in such numbers that they were being denounced for adopting American materialist values and turning their backs upon the honest labour of their parents. There was little room in the upper ranks of Canadian society for new aspirants from overseas, at least until the opening of the west in the 1870s. Cultured immigrants of the 1850s, such as bankrupt Gloucestershire newspaper editor F.W. Harmer, had to be supported by loans from “home” to buy partially cleared farms; Harmer’s education eventually won him the modest position and salary of a township clerk. Clergy continued to come, but, by soon after mid-century, even the majority of them had been born and trained in the colonies.

In the countryside the new class of prosperous farmers came to dominate the elected local councils, though the persistence of deference in some areas allowed the second generation of the rural gentry a status that outlasted their grip on higher offices. Like many of Toronto’s Family Compact, some maintained their class standing and influence at a local level, with only the more vocal such as George Taylor Denison making much of an impact on wider public awareness. The bloodlines of livestock they imported, too, became increasingly important by mid-century as railway and steamship communications opened American and eventually British markets to new Canadian exports, and the practices advocated by the gentlemen’s county agricultural societies became more relevant to the general run of farmers.

The first wave of upper-class immigrants had consisted mostly of the families of half-pay military officers, disgruntled reactionaries, and commercial men hoping to enter landed society at a higher rank than they could achieve at home. The second wave, which arrived between the late 1870s and World War I, was different. First and foremost, perhaps, the second wave was bifurcated by gender. Instead of consisting of families, the movement was mostly of young single men and “distressed gentlewomen,” some widows but mostly daughters of the educated middle classes. The women were for the most part downwardly mobile, while the men were at least anticipating upward movement. It does not appear that many of them found one another in Canada. Gentlemen immigrants continued to be distinguished by social background, behaviour, and especially education (often in England’s “public” schools). Some, coming from an industrialized country in which the professions were overcrowded, hoped to maintain or enhance their social and economic position. Others were drawn by adventurous tales of the prairie west and the Rockies.

Though estimates are rough and the official statistics combine those commercially employed with professional men and gentlemen, it is clear that young gentlemen increasingly migrated to Canada much more than to any other destination. Some 18 percent of Britain’s 45,000 higher-class emigrants came to Canada in the last quarter of the century, and by the eve of World War I the proportion had risen to 40 percent as their movement to the United States and Australasia declined. Among English adult-male immigrants, the proportion who were gentlemen and professionals is estimated to have risen from 8 percent in the 1850s to 15 percent two decades later and to more than a quarter of the total by the end of the century.

They were drawn mostly by prairie ranches and areas such as British Columbia’s Okanagan valley; even the Duke of Windsor owned a western ranch. Though some were remittance men, assisted out of England by embarrassed families, others were like Claude Gardiner; familiar with horses and accustomed to an outdoor life, he worked as a ranch hand to learn the practices of the country before embarking his capital on the purchase of a ranch specializing in purebred shorthorns. Unfortunately, the acceptance of men such as Gardiner was made more difficult by the poor reputation the remittance men helped give Englishmen in general.

The distressed gentlewomen were a demographic by-product of male military service and emigration. Census enumerations by the mid-nineteenth century were making clear that Britain had a surplus of females over males, and the surplus rose from 650,000 in 1851 to 1.3 million in 1911 despite efforts to encourage women to move to the colonies. The thwarting of traditional expectations of marriage was most serious for the growing ranks of middle-class women who had no expectation of wage labour. Many of the educated endured genteel poverty rather than accept work beneath their station, while others swelled the ranks of educated governesses or succumbed to prostitution. Reformers demanded that office work, the professions, and higher education be opened to women, but suggestions that they emigrate to remedy the well-known shortfall of women in new settlements ran up against a number of constraints. Chief among them was the incongruity of supply and demand: the need in Canada was not for educated middle-class women but for domestic servants and farm wives. Feminist reformers opposed the idea of emigration as a safety-valve, claiming that it merely distracted attention from the need to remedy social problems in Britain, and they resisted perpetuating female dependency by making the gentlewomen a reservoir of wives and mothers.

Nonetheless, such women began to emigrate in appreciable numbers by the 1880s as transatlantic and internal transportation became swift and less burdensome and as many of the worst aspects of Canadian frontier isolation were attenuated. A number of societies were established to ensure the safety of parties of single women by providing matrons and hostels, and some set up training schools in England to teach domestic and farm skills. Similar institutions, such as Vancouver Island’s Haliburton College for Gentlewomen, soon began to appear in Canada. Still, only in British Columbia, where established English families appreciated respectable “lady-helps,” were such women reasonably assured that their background would be valued. Elsewhere they had to accept a period of hard life before becoming established, though in the end few remained unmarried more than a year or two.

Numbers are almost impossible to ascertain, but the largest organization, the British Women’s Emigration Association, assisted about 1,100 women it defined as “middle-class,” “ladies,” or “educated” to go to Canada between 1906 and 1914, a figure that represented about a fifth of the total number of women supported by this body. Such organizations increasingly found that trained typists, clerks, and nurses from the ranks of the lower middle class were better able to fill Canadian demand than distressed gentlewomen, and so they were compelled to become placement agencies for these women. That said, many thousands of distressed gentlewomen were believed to have emigrated without the help of private agencies.

The upper-class immigrants had a significant impact on Canada. The most successful of the men, whose overall numbers were greater than those of the women, came with capital to invest in industry and agriculture, formed a pool of educated civil servants and teachers, and were prominent in establishing artistic and athletic associations, sport and hunt clubs, and literary organizations. It has been suggested that gentlemen immigrants helped distinguish the tone of the Canadian west from that of the American one. Yet, unlike the half-pay officers and social aspirants of the early nineteenth century, most of the gentlemen migrants of subsequent years were probably more interested in adapting to the country than in imposing an imported social and power structure upon it. Another hypothesis maintains that gentlewomen immigrants, even if they numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds of thousands, contributed disproportionately to western appreciation of education and social mobility, to public debate on social and political issues, and to suffragist agitation, though the self-help groups that had assisted their departure were for the most part markedly anti-feminist. Despite the hardships, for many the experience of Canada was a liberating one since it allowed them to abandon the economic, psychological, and intellectual constraints that had marked their lives in England.

As for the general population, a study of Hamilton in the mid-nineteenth century concluded that being English-born and Anglican “went hand in hand with power, privilege, and occupational opportunity,” an idea that has been echoed by many others. A study of the 1871 census concluded that the English-origin, Anglican population was “something like an establishment” everywhere, but this conclusion may be refined significantly. While the English seem to have been prominent among country storekeepers and millowners as well as among country doctors, they were as unlikely to farm (though this was still the largest category) as Irish Catholics. In the cities they trailed the Scots and Irish Protestants in the ranks of merchants, manufacturers, professionals, and white-collar workers. An analysis of the country’s industrial elite during the 1880s supports the same conclusion, for the English were poorly represented among the captains of industry. Eighty-five percent of the latter were Canadian-born, while, among the immigrants, Scots led the field (20 percent), followed by Americans (12 percent), Irish (7 percent, 5 percent being from Ulster), and, finally, the English, who, at 6 percent, were slightly ahead of the Germans (4 percent). In Canadian cities in 1871, the English (by descent) led other ethnic groups in skilled and semi-skilled work. They were least likely, apart from the Scots and the Germans, to be general labourers, however.

Such an occupational distribution makes sense when viewed in the context of the comparatively late arrival of most English vis-à-vis the Scots and the Irish. The English arrived at a late stage of the country’s rural-settlement phase, but they were able to take a hand in establishing the networks of merchants, processors, and service personnel that developed in prosperous agricultural regions during the railway era after mid-century. In the cities, the earlier Scots and Protestant Irish had assumed roles of economic leadership by the time the English began coming in larger numbers. The government emigrant agents complained repeatedly in this period that English professionals and white-collar workers were trying to penetrate job markets already dominated by the sons of wealthy Canadian farmers, and that English industrial workers brought skills that were too specialized for the Canadian economy, which was still at an early stage of industrial evolution. It therefore makes sense that the English were overrepresented in skilled and semi-skilled work and tended not to occupy the ranks of day labourers. Still, the English were not much below the Irish Protestants and Scots in the higher categories, and not so far below them in the lower categories as the Catholic ethnic groups were. The difference is only one of degree, which may possibly be explained by the somewhat later arrival of many.

This explanation seems to fit for Ontario, but in the Maritimes fishing and forestry appear to have increased English representation in the semi-skilled and labouring categories, though they still could not come close to rivalling the Irish of all faiths. There, the industrial leaders were almost universally Canadian-born, with those of Scots ancestry most prominent. Exceptionally, the English were much more likely to be merchants or professionals in Quebec, where these two categories accounted for more than a fifth of the employed English population, and where they were also most likely to hold white-collar jobs. English domination of the Quebec economy was a complaint from the conquest until after the Quiet Revolution. All in all, then, while English capital and labour both occupied a central place during the early twentieth century, English entrepreneurship did not. There also is little evidence to support the view that Canadian industrialization resulted from the importation of British mechanical skills.

With regard to the English who came during the great wave at the turn of the century, there was much fear at the time that they would fail miserably because so many arrived unprepared for Canadian conditions and hard work. As well, the English developed a reputation for not seeking advice from those more accustomed to the country. A common language was shared up to a point, but the English learned that they had to articulate clearly to be understood. Conscious of their “otherness,” they tended to do more flag-waving and churchgoing after they arrived. Men outnumbered women but only by three to two; among many other ethnic groups, women were a much scarcer commodity. Family was therefore an important social institution both among urban working-class English and among rural English, and the significance of chain migration rose as the numbers coming to Canada increased. They tended to marry endogamously at first, with three-quarters of English women, the scarcer sex, marrying countrymen in a pre– World War I Winnipeg sample; this proportion was 10 percent higher than that of the English men who married English women. Fewer than half of those at higher income levels married within the circle, however. English hostels and boarding houses, social evenings, and familiar institutions helped to bolster confidence, but the English institutional net was much weaker in the countryside, where the English were not settled in blocks, and the result was either isolation or integration.

English neighbourhoods developed in cities, and though many were working class the word ghetto seems inappropriate. What is most remarkable is that a number of these “Little Britains” were not downtown in traditional immigrant areas but rather beyond the streetcar lines and outside city limits, where by-laws were lax and taxes low. Financier Wilfred Dinnick had north Toronto’s Lawrence Park Estates laid out in 1909 along “strictly class lines” and marketed for the rich. The streets were named for English seaside resorts and followed natural contours, but little was built before the war. More immediately successful was North Earlscourt, Dinnick’s pragmatic blue-collar suburb beyond the city limits. The streets were named for Yorkshire dales, Lancashire towns, and Devon parishes, but Dinnick offered lots to working families for low monthly instalments and appealed to the English immigrant’s urge to escape tenancy. (The local Methodist church organized separate social nights for Tyneside, Yorkshire, London, and Lancashire immigrants, as well as for Scottish, Irish, and Welsh residents.) Such suburbs began as shantytowns where a new arrival might roof over a basement with tin until he could afford to build above ground. Houses were added to and reconstructed as the immigrants’ means improved. Visitors described the neatness that came even to these humble and eclectic dwellings with pride of ownership.

Urban reformers, for their part, tended to treat such neighbourhoods with benign silence, both because of their own ethnic favouritism and because of the suburbs’ semi-rural isolation; instead, they concentrated on the more noticeable problems of the Italian and Jewish ghettoes downtown. The suburbs near the railway repair shops in west-end Winnipeg and Transcona were really pan-British neighbourhoods, though some subdivisions that developed quickly were entirely English; one street was inhabited entirely by families from Leicester.

It is difficult to judge whether the “home children” – those brought over from England to serve as domestic and farm workers – were successful in Canada. Most children dropped all contact with the sponsoring agencies when their terms of indenture expired. The data for the largest organization, Barnardo’s, shows that the girls left the countryside for wage work in the big cities rather than for more domestic service. Some entered nursing or went to business school, both of which had low admission requirements; few became teachers, deterred by the cost, educational requirements, and close supervision. Most worked as hotel maids or in textile plants. By their mid-twenties most married, but scarcely any married farmers. Only 8 percent of the boys grew up to make a living from the land; it was beyond their means and their inclination. Most turned to factory work in towns and smaller cities, particularly in tariff-protected secondary industry, or worked for railways or electric companies as labourers, foremen, and craftsmen. In this sense they collectively succeeded beyond their best expectations in Britain, but at a cost for many of social isolation more damaging than life in a carefully managed institution. The British reformers were in the long term unsuccessful in weaning these children of the streets away from city life.

Until well into the twentieth century, Canadian growth and development were sustained by immigration and by British capital, with investment flowing into railway and municipal debentures, bonds, mining stock, Alberta cattle ranches, Okanagan orchards, prairie townsites, and suburban real estate. The impact of British labour was not as spectacular but still significant. In the 1920s British immigrants stood out in certain skilled industries such as iron- and steel-making and construction. Thirty percent of metalworkers were British machinists, boilermakers, diesetters, and so on, trades that were highly developed in Britain; a quarter of construction workers were also British-born. British women were prominent as textile factory operatives but 40 percent were in domestic service, an occupation Canadian women shunned. Fewer British immigrants were working in agriculture than had come to Canada with that intention, being displaced from farming by the disappearance of new homestead lands and from farm labour by mechanization (after the Depression the adoption of the combine harvester forestalled the necessity of restarting the harvest trains).

The British, and especially the children of British manual workers, were also over-represented in the white-collar sector (20 percent as opposed to 7 percent who arrived with that intention). Some of these held clerical positions but many were menial service employees such as servants, waiters, janitors, watchmen, and elevator operators, roles that were formerly the preserve of blacks and poor Irish. The ranks of the urban unskilled were also being enlarged by the influx of disillusioned immigrants from the countryside and by the sliding down the social slope of skilled and semi-skilled workers unable to maintain their standing. Thus the urban British, who in the years after 1880 had lost their dominance of unskilled labour in the face of European and, in Montreal, French-Canadian competition but had gone on to a pre-eminent role in skilled industry during the late 1890s and early 1900s, were again slipping into the ranks of the unskilled, a slide facilitated by the economic difficulties of the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1931 the Canadian-born exceeded the British in farming, farm labour, and extractive industries, while the British were highly over-represented in factory work and skilled and clerical occupations and slightly over-represented in police and, at the far end of the social scale, professional employment. Following World War II, as Canada gradually opened its doors to southern European and eventually Third World immigration, the English were replaced in domestic service and the construction trades in a process of ethnic succession. Partly as a result of pro-British propaganda during the war, the British began to be preferred for responsible positions and rose rapidly up the social ladder.