Genealogy Chat

A number of my ancestors , all of them agricultural workers, moved up to Tyneside, particularly Gateshead, to work in industries such as the railway, in the 1870's.Was the state of agriculture in East Anglia so bad at this time? Has anyone else noticed this in their tree?
Lynda

Google search results seem to indicate that there was an 'Agricultural depression in England, 1873-96', which might explain the ag lab migration.

eg

The Song of the Emigrant ship
www.foxearth.org.uk/Emigration2.html
As in Ireland, the collapse of the agricultural economy brought about by cheap ... The 1870's and 1880's saw extensive rural depopulation as people migrated to .... When the wars ended and the depression took hold, East Anglian agriculture ...

******
William Paddison: Marsh Farmer and
Survivor of the Agricultural Depression,
1873-96
By LINDA CRUST

".......land value rose until 1875
when it reached its peak of £IOO an acre.
Paddison wrote in his History of Sotlaby that
when, 'both land and food was excessively
high and an agricultural labourer's wage
was extremely low, even under these conditions,
working men contrived to save
enough money to buy a bit of land and
sometimes build a house ... It was true
that during the agricultural depression
many of the mortgages claimed both land
and houses,............."

An interesting topic!

My maternal ancestors were mostly ag. labs in Hertfordshire and they also started working on the railways, gradually moving closer to London, eventually ending up in Peckham.

I do know that farming in East Anglia, and Suffolk in particular, was in a depressed state from the 1870s as more and more farms used machinery instead of men. A lot of Suffolk men used to work part of the year on the farms in Suffolk and part of the year at the breweries in Burton on Trent.

Thankyou for your replies. I have just looked at some websites , particularly "the song of the emigrant ship" -very interesting.
Until I started to research my family tree, my family had no idea of our East Anglian roots -thought we were just Geordies! Strangely, I now live in Norfolk, so I've come back to my roots.
LYNDA

Some of my ancestors from Wiltshire ended up in South Wales for the same reason.
I vaguely remember that one of the episodes of Who do you think you are? had a sima;ar thing. There used to be agents who got people to the newly industrialed areas. May have been the Jemery Paxman programme.

Andy

Some of my Suffollk ag labs left the land to make the agricultural machinery that threw them off the land!!

Just read this thread, had the same thought as you Andy, re WDYTYR and Jeremy Paxman.

People were "encouraged" to move to industrial areas rather than recieve parish relief.
Very hard times. Families sometimes split up, as children too young to work were sometimes left behind.
I remember this episode as being very sad.

EDIT I think that JP's family may have come from Suffolk.

Hii,

My ancestors were from the Suffolk/Cambridgeshire border, almost all working as agriculural labourers. Many spent long periods in the local workhouse, and I estimate about 40% of the younger ones left in the late 19th cent, either for London or for Manchester to work in the cotton industry.

Life must have been very difficult indeed.

Terence Parr