Irish migration to Britain famine years: the other emigration

Irish migration to Britain famine records make one point plainly: for much of the 1840s and 1850s the crossing to England and Scotland was larger and closer than the voyage to America that dominates popular memory. Liverpool alone took in roughly 296,000 Irish arrivals in 1847 by police count, and by 1851 more than 700,000 Irish-born people were living in Britain.

Many never meant to stay. Seasonal harvest work had drawn Irish labourers across the Irish Sea for decades before the blight arrived, and the census counted them wherever they happened to be on the single night it was taken.

Why Britain, not America

A ticket on a Liverpool steamer cost a fraction of a transatlantic passage, and the crossing from Dublin or Sligo took a day rather than five or six weeks. For a family that could raise only a few shillings, or for a labourer who needed to be back in time for spring planting, Britain was the migration that fitted the money and the calendar. It was also familiar ground. Generations of Irish harvesters already knew the roads to the farms of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and the Lothians, so the famine did not invent this route so much as flood an existing one.

That existing route is the part of the story easiest to lose. The movement to Britain in the 1850s was not a single famine exodus but two overlapping patterns: permanent settlement in industrial cities, and a much older pattern of seasonal, circular labour that predated 1845 by half a century. A family could send one son on the long transatlantic crossing to Boston or New York while a second went, as his father and grandfather had, to work an English summer and come home for the winter rent.

For genealogists this distinction matters. A great-great-grandfather who appears in an English census but never in an American passenger list was not necessarily planning to stay; he may simply have been counted on the wrong night of a journey he had made a dozen times before, and the records that would show his pattern of travel rarely survive.

The spalpeen tradition before the famine

Long before the potato failed, small farmers and cottiers from the west of Ireland travelled to England and Scotland each summer as spalpeens, from the Irish spailpín, an itinerant or seasonal farmworker. The historian Barbara M. Kerr traced this traffic back to the late eighteenth century in her 1943 study for Irish Historical Studies, showing how it grew as Ireland’s population climbed from around 2.8 million in 1785 to 8.2 million by 1841, squeezing families onto ever smaller mountain and coastal holdings that a summer’s wages in England helped to keep.

By 1827 the pattern was so entrenched that a witness before a parliamentary inquiry warned that any fall in the numbers travelling to England each year would raise the risk of starvation at home, according to Kerr’s research. Men left for the hay and corn harvests, working their way through Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the English midlands before turning for home with wages that could clear a year’s rent. Women joined the seasonal gangs too, particularly for the potato harvest in Scotland, a form of work later folk-remembered as tattie hoking. The folklorist Anne O’Dowd documented this tradition in detail in her 1991 study Spalpeens and Tattie Hokers, tracing its persistence from the pre-famine decades into the twentieth century.

Black ‘47 and the Liverpool crossing

The famine changed the scale, not the direction, of this older movement. Liverpool was already the main port of embarkation for Irish traffic to Britain and onward to America, and in 1847, the year known in Ireland as Black ‘47, it absorbed a wave of arrivals that overwhelmed the city. Police records for the first eleven months of that year counted close to 300,000 Irish landing at Liverpool. A significant share went on to book transatlantic passage, but a large number, estimated at around 120,000, arrived with nothing and stayed, unable to afford to go further.

The city’s workhouses, lodging houses and vagrant wards filled beyond capacity. Thousands more were caught in the towns between Liverpool and Manchester: an estimated 20,000 Irish people passed nights in the vagrancy wards of Prescot and Warrington in 1847 alone, unable to afford lodgings and unwilling to turn back. Soup kitchens in Liverpool were feeding more than 20,000 Irish people a day in January 1847. A typhus epidemic, popularly and unfairly labelled “Irish fever,” spread through the crowded courts and cellars where new arrivals sheltered, and Poor Law authorities were treating more than 8,000 typhus cases a week at the crisis’s peak. Liverpool’s medical officer of the period described the city, in a phrase later widely quoted, as the hospital and cemetery of Ireland.

Those figures are worth setting against each other rather than reading in isolation. Of the roughly 300,000 who came ashore in 1847, about two in five got no further than the town they landed in. The soup kitchens feeding more than 20,000 people a day that January were serving a number equal to roughly one in six of everyone who would end up staying. And the 20,000 counted in the vagrancy wards of Prescot and Warrington were people who had already given up on Liverpool and were walking inland with no money for a bed. The crisis was not one arrival point but a corridor.

Removal under the Poor Law

Not every arrival was allowed to stay. Under settlement and removal law, English and Scottish parishes could ship destitute Irish migrants back to Ireland if they had not established a legal settlement locally, and Liverpool used this power heavily during the famine years. More than 47,000 Irish people were removed from Liverpool alone between 1847 and 1851, with a further 3,500 removed from Manchester over the same period. Removal meant a second, involuntary crossing for people who had already made one desperate journey, often back to a townland with no work and no food waiting.

The threat of removal shaped how migrants behaved once they landed. Families who could find any form of work tried to establish themselves quickly enough to avoid falling under the Poor Law’s reach, which pushed many towards the casual, low-paid labour of the docks, building sites, and textile mills rather than any settled trade. Establishing a legal settlement generally required a period of continuous residence or rent-paying tenancy, so newly arrived families had a direct incentive to take whatever housing and work they could find at once, rather than waiting for something better, which further crowded the cheapest lodging districts of Liverpool and the other port cities.

Irish migration to Britain famine: the scale by 1851

For those who stayed, the 1850s were a decade of building Irish Britain rather than passing through it. By the 1851 census, more than 20 per cent of Liverpool’s population had been born in Ireland. Across England and Wales the census recorded close to 520,000 Irish-born residents, and Scotland, drawing heavily on migrants from Ulster and Connacht through Glasgow and the Clyde ports, recorded a further 207,000, for a combined Irish-born population in Britain approaching three quarters of a million. Bradford, too, had the highest proportion of Irish-born residents of any Yorkshire town by 1851, a sign of how far the settlement reached beyond the port cities themselves.

Glasgow, Manchester, Bradford, and the mining and mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire each developed distinct Irish quarters, often clustered around the cheapest housing near docks, canals and factories. Family histories collected for Ireland’s famine commemoration programme trace individual journeys along these same routes: a Castlebar-born woman named Catherine Cooper is recorded travelling first to Glasgow and then to Liverpool in the following decade, part of the wider circulation between Scotland’s ports and England’s that characterised so much of this migration.

This settlement ran alongside the seasonal migration that never stopped. County Mayo remained one of the heaviest sources of harvest labourers travelling to Britain through the 1850s, a pattern rooted in the same shortage of land and cash income that pushed other family members onto ships bound for Boston or New York. A son might sail for America while a brother went for the summer to an English farm and came home again, two branches of the same household strategy for surviving on too little ground. For families researching this period, the pattern of a Mayo household is explored further in this history of emigration from County Mayo, and the money that seasonal and permanent migrants alike sent back is covered in this account of emigrant remittances.

What historians cannot know

The movement to Britain, seasonal and permanent alike, is harder to measure than transatlantic emigration, and historians are honest about the gaps. Ships crossing to America kept passenger manifests that survive in archives on both sides of the ocean; the short Irish Sea steamer crossing to Liverpool or Glasgow generally did not, so there is no equivalent register of who travelled, how often, or whether a given crossing was meant to be permanent. A labourer counted in an English census one year might have crossed back and forth several times before or after, and census returns cannot show intention: they record where someone was on a single night, not why they had come or whether they meant to stay.

The precise annual numbers of seasonal harvesters in the 1850s specifically, as distinct from the well-documented later nineteenth century, are also less exact than the headline famine-year arrival figures, because contemporary counts were kept inconsistently and often only at the ports rather than along the inland roads migrants walked to reach the farms that hired them. What survives most clearly is the scale of the crisis years and the shape of the settlement that followed, rather than a complete year-by-year account of everyone who crossed and returned.

A migration in the shadow of the Atlantic crossing

Irish migration to Britain in the famine decade deserves to be read on its own terms rather than as a lesser version of the voyage to America. It was cheaper, closer, older, and in some ways more continuous, built on a seasonal labour circuit that Irish families had relied on since before the blight and that many kept using long after 1851. The story of Irish Britain in this period is not one dramatic crossing but thousands of shorter ones, repeated year after year, by people balancing a small farm at home against wages earned in a Yorkshire hayfield or a Liverpool warehouse.

Readers tracing their own family’s path through this period, whether it ran to Boston, to Liverpool, or to both in turn, can read the sample letter that opens this project’s own account of the decade.

Sources and further reading

• Barbara M. Kerr, “Irish Seasonal Migration to Great Britain, 1800-38,” Irish Historical Studies, vol. 3, no. 12 (September 1943), pp. 365 to 380.
• Anne O’Dowd, Spalpeens and Tattie Hokers: History and Folklore of the Irish Migratory Agricultural Worker in Ireland and Britain (Irish Academic Press, 1991), as discussed by researcher Sara Goek.
• RTE History, “A strange environment indeed: the Famine Irish in England,” rte.ie, 2021.
• Great Famine Voices Roadshow, “Liverpool” collection notes, Ireland’s famine commemoration programme, greatfaminevoices.ie.
• Wikipedia contributors, “Irish people in Great Britain,” for the 1851 Liverpool population share, cross-checked against genealogical census summaries from Findmypast and Genes Reunited.
• The Conversation, “Who picked British fruit and veg before migrant workers?”, University of Exeter research feature, 2016.