Irish migration to Lancashire

[Viktoria]

Both Angel meadow and Chorlton on Medlock were known as "Little Ireland".
The pubs reflected the numbers, in A.M.there was "The Exile of Erin"and just across Oldham Road was "The Shamrock".
Irish Row was just in Collyhurst.
There were St.Chad`s ,St. Malachy`s, St. Patrick`s, St, Michael`s, Corpus Christie . Catholic Churches ,all within a relatively short distance of each other.
                                                                                  Viktoria.

[sallyyorks]

And don't forget all the Irish travellers who still move around Lancashire today

Irish travellers didn't come to England in any numbers until the 1960s

"It also seems to me that this was the case with the Fylde area and round Blackburn/Pendle, as these areas don't have much history of Irish migration either?"

Not quite true, the Wesham area has quite a large RC population which has been attributed to the Irish when they came in to help build the railway. Possibly as Lancaster was 'main line' workers moved on to another area.

There has always been a large English Catholic population in Lancashire and 70% of all the "navvies" who built the canals and railways were English. Irish immigrant labour also contributed partly in the building the M62 motorway.
It cannot be assumed that all Catholics in England are Irish , especially in a recusant county like Lancashire (and parts of Yorkshire)
There was 3 main waves of immigration. After the potato famine late 1840s to early 1850s, the late 1800s to early 1900s and after WW2 in the 1950s-60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recusancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navvy

At roughly the time of the Irish famine, mill workers in Lancashire were going on strike for better pay.
The poor Irish were willing to work for the low wages the English workers were trying to get increased.Obviously mill owners would employ the Irish to undermine the strikers.
 When you consider the state of the little one room "cabins"which were home to people and animals alike, and poor as they were the land agents on the landowner`s orders had the roof
stripped off in one of the hardest winters, the slums of places like Angel Meadow and Chorlton on Medlock would not seem so bad to Irish immigrants.
I have recently read Asenath Nicholson`s book about the famine and as the rootschatter who recommended it said it is a three boxes of tissues read.
Sad to say the influx of people willing to work for the low wages the English were trying to get increased caused bitter resentment which lasts to this day although many people have no idea why.
They carry on the resentment started over170 years ago without knowing the history behind it all.
Understandable at the time but  people were so poor,English and Irish alike.
Some people today in this country are truly poor but many are bad managers and consider necessary what others consider luxuries.
As my Mum used to say, ""They don`t know they are born".
                                                                                       Viktoria.

There was a wave of mill strikes in Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1842 but this was at least 5 years before the famine. Many English families also lived in one room slums and sometimes with animals, even in the industrial towns and cities. There are accounts of this in the Sanitation Reports.  In fact before the famine, Irish soldiers were taller and often in better health than their English army comrades who came from the English town and city slums
I strongly disagree with your comments about "resentment". Contrary to what some would have us believe, the Irish immigrants and the English lived side by side mostly peacefully and they lived in the same streets (including Angel Meadows) and they worked for the same wages. They intermarried often, they joined trade unions together, fought for better workers rights together. A good example of this is the Chartists. One of the most popular, if not the most popular, chartist leaders in the north of England was an Irish man, Feargus O'Connor.

[sallyyorks]

Chances are, this will sound a bit too general a question. But, does anybody know if there are any books or other resources which go into detail on which Lancashire (in the historic sense) towns and cities took in the most Irish, and to this day still have a lot of people of Irish descent? Maybe even something like an old survey of where the most Irish settled. If not that, just any info people have on Lancashire towns or cities that a lot of Irish went to.

It goes without saying that Liverpool and its surrounding towns, Widnes, Salford, Manchester and maybe Heywood(?) have a lot. Beyond that though, I get a mixture of answers from different places. Some, for example, say Warrington, Chorley or Stalybridge took in a lot, and then nowhere else suggests this at all. Sometimes it seems like every Lancashire town there is tries to make some claim for having a big Irish population!

Thanks!

This is just a guess from me and I do not include Liverpool in this because Liverpool is a port and so  has a different history to the rest of Lancashire. In a city like Manchester I would put the Irish born (including NI) population in the 1850s at about 14%, in the mill towns it was probably quite a bit lower. Some of these might have emigrated further abroad from there later. But this is just my guess. As another poster has pointed out, you can check this on the census.
There was also some later immigration at around 1900 and also after WW2.
Many Irish people also emigrated to the USA, Canada and Australia/New Zealand

[Blue70]

It wasn't really a case of taking the Irish in, the Irish could go wherever they wanted and did so in order to find work and make a life for themselves. They were migrants not immigrants so they did not go through any sort of immigration process and their movements between Britain and Ireland are not recorded (unfortunately for us descendants). Liverpool and the rest of Lancashire were booming in the mid 19th century so could provide work for the Irish and there were good transport links for the Irish.

There have been Irish people in Lancashire for hundreds of years. Leland mentions Irish merchants in Liverpool in the 1500s selling yarn to Manchester men. Irishmen fought in the English Civil War they were at the siege of Liverpool in 1644. Liverpool and Lancashire were important for the Normans who settled in Ireland in the Middle Ages. Further back Irish people came here with the Vikings who were expelled from Ireland.

The census records will tell you about Irish-born people in Lancashire so try to find census related books or profiles. I only have some census stats for Liverpool so here's some from around the time of peak migration in the 19th century unfortunately they only record the Irish-born so the Irish community at the time would be much bigger as that would include the children of Irish people. The real peak could be said to be missed here it would have been c1847:-

1841 Census
Total Pop: 286,656
Irish-born Pop: 49,639
Irish-born as %: 17.3

1851 Census
Total Pop: 375,955
Irish-born Pop: 83,813
Irish-born as %: 22.3

1861 Census
Total Pop: 443,938
Irish-born Pop: 83,949
Irish-born as %: 18.9

1871 Census
Total Pop: 493,405
Irish-born Pop: 76,761
Irish-born as %: 15.5


Blue

[Blue70]

I did a profile of the Liverpool street my paternal grandfather was born in based on the 1901 Census and local Liverpool records:-

Total number of residents: 554

Residents from an Irish background: 95.12%

Residents born in Ireland: 52.70%

Residents who were Roman Catholic: 89.89%


Blue

[BashLad]

Irish scab labour had a large role in the preston lock out of 1853. To such point that the strikebreakers were called knobsticks (euphemism for the shillelagh). This particular strike greatly influenced the background setting to Gaskell's North and South.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/prestonian/pic/lock-out.jpg

The Irish population in Preston grew from 1,703- 3.4% in 1841 to 5,122  -7.4% in 1851 to 6,974-8.4% in 1861.

Incidentally my three grandparents born in lancashire all have some irish ancestry leaving me something on the order of 7/64ths irish. 

[ScouseBoy]

It was not solely  Irish migration to Lancashire.

There was migration to Lancashire from other counties in England as well as from North Wales.

[BashLad]

At the risk of being controversial you could also look at Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England and see what it says about the Irish in Manchester and again in his later letters to Marx.

It's not very politically correct however in the 21st century which is a tad ironic.

[Viktoria]

I feel somewhat vindicated.
I don`t now how old you are sallyyorks or where you have  lived but my information partly  comes from my parents who were born in 1896, and  their parents born  in 1866.Only 20 years after the time when many poor Irish people left Ireland hoping for a better life., and who settled in the areas where my family lived all those years ago.They told  my parents of the animosity toward the Irish by people who themselves were very poor.I too have read parts of Engels` work in my interest in Angel Meadow.
There was also the differences in the religions. The Whit walks in Manchester were very sectarian and quite a lot of ill feeling was shown on Whit  Monday when the Church of England walks took place and then again on Whit Friday when it was  the Roman Catholic walks.I am old enough to remember that, not by the walkers themselves but usually by people standing outside the various pubs en- route. Catholics towards protestants on Whit Monday and vice-versa on Whit Friday.
Many Catholics were of course Irish.
My grandfather was bandmaster for St. Catherine`s Collyhurst which was an Orange church with an Orange Lodge. He  actually worshipped at St.John`s The Evangelist .Oldham Road.He was not an Orangeman.Just the Church bandmaster.He also worked for Harland`s Funeral Directors and often drove the horse drawn hearse so was very well known; He had dreadful scars on his face from the many times he was attacked on his way home from band practice.
At this time he lived in Reather St and had to pass St. Patrick`s---------.
I hasten to add that I have always been sympathetic towards Irish people, my secondary school taught us of the absentee English landlords and their ruthless land agents so at a young age despite granddad`s tribulations I could see things could have been managed a lot kinder to say the least.
I recommend to you Asenath Nicholson`s book about the famine,it is as a Rootschatter said " a three boxes of tissues read" .
Viktoria.