The Harps in Old Fitzroy

The Migration Story of William and Eliza Joyce

Eliza Joyce nee Belcher, 1828-1900.

Reconstructing a migration story more than 170 years old is an exercise in patience, data collection and with no personal accounts available, some imagination. With some passenger lists and a marriage certificate, how William Joyce of Cork and Eliza Belcher of Queen's County left Ireland and came to meet and marry in Melbourne in 1852, can be briefly sketched in a few lines. But discovering their reasons for travelling so far requires consideration of factors beyond the individual. What were the living conditions of my third-great-grandparents that “pushed” their respective families abroad? What was it about Melbourne, a new colony on the other side of the world that made it such an attractive “pull”? Was their move a success or should they have stayed where they were?

Based on historian's accounts of two countries experiencing a decade wrought by poverty and famine in one, and opportunity and expansion in the other, combined with an understanding of the “push-pull” factors involved, an educated guess may be made. The Joyces and Belchers were leaving behind a crowded country facing severe unemployment, poverty and famine, while looking forward to a growing colony begging for workers, rich in produce and with room to grow.

Nineteen year old labourer William Joyce, from the city of Cork in the Republic of Ireland, sailed out of that city on the ship Mary Nixon in 1841, bound for Melbourne in Australia. William was leaving a city that since the beginning of the nineteenth century had seen epidemics, population explosion and the collapse of its textile industry. Successive potato crop failures were also beginning to take their toll. In 1817 and 1818 a worldwide typhus epidemic had caused the serious illness of 1,500,00 people in Ireland and killed an estimated 65,000. Another epidemic in 1832 and 1833, this time cholera, killed 50,000. Both diseases thrive in poor sanitation and are spread through intense social contact. Given Cork's status as a major port city, the impact of these epidemics on the city's population was severe. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, prices for agricultural produce slumped as Cork Harbour no longer played host to and so no longer provisioned, the British Royal Navy. Legislative changes in 1824 had exposed the previously protected Irish industries to competition from English manufacturers. These factors combined to drive up unemployment and devastate textile industries and by the 1830s just a third of landless labourers were in regular employment.

The Irish population had also doubled to reach 8 million. Thus with the subdivision of land, Ireland had less land available to feed more people, and little industry to absorb the surplus population. Finally in 1845, the successive failures since 1815 of Ireland's staple subsistence crop, the potato, saw an already weakened population succumb to widespread famine. Although William had left Ireland by the time the worst of the famine hit, he and his family had witnessed steadily worsening conditions, and so their decision to leave did not come too soon. 

Eight years later, in 1849 the twenty-one-year-old house servant Eliza Belcher departed Liverpool aboard the Courier, with her sister Sarah, her brother John and his wife Eliza. Like the Joyces before them, the Belchers were also bound for Melbourne, having presumably immigrated internally to Liverpool[1] from their hometown of Mountrath, in Queens County. It is reasonable to assume that by the time she left, Mountrath was no longer the town "so improved" as proudly declared in an 1824 town directory.[2] With a population of 4700 and a manufacturing industry of worsted yarn and cotton spinning, the town would have been just as hard hit by the economic conditions of the time as Cork was. The potato famine in 1845-1849 devastated the county and by 1853 many of the poorest had either emigrated or died. Between them, William and Eliza’s families appeared to have reason to leave Ireland when they did and little to stay.

Passenger lists record William and Eliza’s as assisted passengers with “callings” of labourer and house maid. An assisted passage scheme began in the colony of NSW in 1831, whereby land sales paid passage for poor migrants to sail to Australia. It was the hope of the colonial government that such a scheme would build a workforce of skilled labourers to sustain a rapidly growing population. Another scheme introduced after 1837 paid shipping agents bounties for the selection and transportation of immigrant labourers. The increased market for factory produced textiles and the expanded demand for grains created a need for agricultural workers. Thus, for shipping agents to be eligible for any bounty, migrants had to be agricultural labourers, shepherds, carpenters or domestic servants. Whether or not passengers were actually skilled in the callings attributed to them is debatable, given the overriding power of bounties for bodies. For example, while William and his brother John were both listed as labourers, they immediately became bakers upon their arrival.

When William arrived in 1841, Melbourne had been on the British Empire map for just six years. It was little more than a village with more than 50 inns but less than 770 built houses. William travelled with his parents John and Ann Joyce, brother John and sister Hannah, and on arrival joined his brother John in becoming a baker. Given Melbourne’s annual rate of increase averaged a startlingly high 16% between 1851 and 1861, providing bread to the masses seems a wise business decision. Indeed William was still listed as a baker on his eldest son’s wedding certificate forty years later, so it was also clearly a job for life. 

During the eight-year gap between William’s arrival and Eliza’s, Melbourne had expanded rapidly. By 1849 a further 3,304 houses had been erected, and Queen Victoria had officially declared Melbourne a city. 29,000 people lived in the city, almost 40% of the total Victorian population. During the three years of William and Eliza’s (presumed) courtship, a quarter of Victoria was burned by the Black Thursday fires; it was declared its own colony with Melbourne as its capital city and gold was discovered in Clunes. Melbourne’s services to a mostly pastoral colony were a vital component of farmers and miners getting their product to the consumer. City-based services such as manufacturing, warehouses, docks, transport and their attendant support structures ensured employment in those industries. The creation of local produce for the local market gave further stimulation to urban growth. As noted previously, a baker could hardly be out of work in such circumstances. William and Eliza were married at St Peter’s Church of England in East Melbourne on November 1852 and took up residence at 322 Napier Street in North Fitzroy.

While much of Victoria’s population moved to rural areas to work in primary industries, William and Eliza remained in Fitzroy for the rest of their lives. Anthony Trollope, a nineteenth-century novelist and traveller noted in 1871 that “there is perhaps no town in the world where the ordinary working man can do better for himself and family than he can in Melbourne.” During their lifetimes William and Eliza saw Fitzroy become an industrial suburb of labourers, factory hands and tradesman who lived close to their places of work. In terms of status Fitzroy was certainly lower on the scale than the Eastern suburbs across the river, but was at least still above Collingwood, both literally and socially. 

Collingwood residents were likely to suffer the delights of sewage seeping from the cesspits from homes further up the hill of Johnson Street. Having become home to migrants of many nationalities, colonial Melbourne was by no means a multicultural society. Immigration involves a process that includes both assimilation and alienation, whereby an immigrant can form an increasing attachment to their new society while at the same time becoming estranged from their former. For a society to avoid the negative adjustment problems associated with alienation, it must encourage multiculturalism in the form of ethnicities understanding their own and each other's cultures while also allowing individuals and groups to hold onto their uniqueness.

Charles Joyce was proprietor of The Fitzroy Club Hotel 1905-1908.
The pub was at 382 Brunswick Street, eastside just north of Rose Street.
Today the building is occupied by Sheila Vintage Clothing.
Image: Fitzroy Historical Society. http://www.fitzroyhistorysociety.org.au/ 

This was certainly not the case in the second half of nineteenth century Melbourne. William and Eliza arrived in a society in the process of displacing its original occupants and laying the foundation of a White Australia immigration policy that would favour white Europeans such as themselves. While Catholic Irish were cut off from the Australian majority, William and Eliza were Protestant and may not have been so isolated. The alienation William and Eliza may have felt upon arrivals is difficult to gauge but given the creation of Irish societies and regular social events held it can be assumed that was general community support available. Drinking appears to have been a key aspect of this assimilation process – a newspaper report of the couple’s youngest son Charles providing entertainment a Queenstown sporting event suggests some drink may have been involved. 

Newspaper report of Charles Joyce's prosecution
for offensive language to a policeman. Age, 06 Jun 1907.
Trove  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article198602813

How well William and Eliza assimilated into life in working class Fitzroy, compared to having remained in Ireland, can only be speculated. However, Irish female immigrants were known to write to their families back home telling them that “there is everything out here to make you comfortable.” Add to this the average life expectancy of a newborn boy in Australia was 47.2 years and a newborn girl 50.8 years. This was significantly higher than the average in Ireland at the time. The couple had eight children and they both lived until their 70s. Their eldest son Jack became a founder of the Collingwood Football Club and Charles was a proprietor of some notoriety of a Brunswick Street pub in Fitzroy. So all told, it is reasonable to suppose that the William and Eliza settled into Fitzroy well, and created a life that would not have been possible had they remained in Ireland.

Another newspaper report of Charles' prosecution,
this time for licensing breaches Argus 31 Jan 1907
Trove http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article10612750

People make decisions to leave when they are pushed by circumstances adverse enough to warrant trying to succeed elsewhere. When the lure of that elsewhere betokens health and wealth not possible at home, it is unsurprising that the Joyces and the Belchers left Ireland when they did. In Fitzroy, they may not have found significant wealth but William was in work for most of his life and they certainly lived longer than the average Irish labourer and housemaid, for the times. They lived long enough to see their children living close by, be married, employed locally and have children of their own. William died aged 70 in the family home on Napier Street in 1889. Eliza died in the home of her son George at 160 Johnston Street, Fitzroy in 1900 by which time Melbourne was the world’s 22^nd largest city. There have been working-class descendants of William and Eliza Joyce living in Fitzroy and surrounding suburbs ever since.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] During the nineteenth-century European migrants would first go to nearby cities and from there, abroad. Irish workers often went first to Belfast and Dublin but much larger numbers went to Liverpool. P. Manning, Migration in world history. (New York: Routledge. 2005) p.151

[2] Queen’s County, now Laois, is bordered by a ring of counties that had a rate of migration to Melbourne between 1839 and 1842 up to six times the United Kingdom average. Oddly though, Queen’s County remained an island within this ring, of migration at a rate of just 1-2 times the UK average. Broome, Arriving. 1984 p.51

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