Changing face of emigration and whole fresh start overseas

By BRIAN COURTNEY
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PATTERNS of emigration from Portadown and the rest of Northern Ireland have changed significantly over the past 50-odd years.

When I began my reporting career in the early 1950s, there was still very heavy emigration to Canada. One of my first assignments was to the railway station and interview some of the Portadown folk then leaving for Toronto and the Prairies.
I had been under the impression there would be a few people in the railway station - perhaps half-a-dozen. Imagine my surprise to find the platform packed with probably over 100.
There were a number of families, some of them from Portadown and others from the rural areas adjacent to the town.
Portadown’s linen industry was then going into sharp decline and many of the redundant workers were heading for Toronto where there was an abundance of jobs.
All else failing, an Ulster emigrant was guaranteed a job in one of the great stores owned by Ballymena-born Timothy Eaton. Many Portadown people have cause to be grateful to Eaton’s for having given them their first start in Canada.
Alas, the Eaton stores no longer exist, having been swallowed up by amalgamation into even greater business empires.
But, as I discovered on a visit to Toronto a year ago, there is a statue to Eaton in the Timothy Eaton Centre, and he is remembered as a great Canadian.
There were also many attractive opportunities in the Prairie provinces. Indeed, the majority of those in the railway station that winter afternoon in 1954 were people from the farming stock going off to Edmonton or Calgary to seek jobs on the farms.
That tradition of emigrating to Canada had begun over a century earlier. There had been heavy emigration from Portadown and County Armagh to the Dominion from the early 1800s.
It was interrupted by the two World Wars, but in the immediate post-war years emigration was booming again and it continued until the late 1950s. Then the pattern changed.
From the late 1950s on, Australia tended to get the majority of Ulster families. The £10 assisted passage scheme was a huge attraction, along with the sunny weather.
Down the years since, I have interviewed many Portadown ‘exiles’ who left for Canada and Australia in the 50s and 60s. Almost without exception they have commented on how the standard of living in Portadown and Northern Ireland has changed beyond recognition.
“There is hardly anything in Toronto these days that you don’t have back home,” a former County Armagh man told me at a social function in Brampton a year ago.
He pointed to the fact that when he left for Canada in the 1950s, post-war food rationing continued in the UK.
“Housing was sub-standard in many cases, too, and many dwellings - including my own - had outside toilets. And, of course, central heating was unheard of.
“We didn’t have television in Northern Ireland when I left for Canada. Few people in our street owned a car, clothes were drab and things like fridges and spin dryers were something you heard about on the radio or read about.
“Now, when I go back to Northern Ireland on family visits, I’m amazed at how the standard of living has improved. So I’m not surprised by the fact that few Ulster people emigrate nowadays to Canada or Australia,” he said.
It’s an interesting thought, and while there are still individuals who emigrate to Canada, Australia and other overseas countries, significantly fewer families make that decision.
But back in the 1950s and 60s, the ‘Portadown Times’ and ‘Portadown News’ regularly carried photographs and stories of families who were leaving for a new life in the Dominions.
In those post-war years, Canada and Australia were delighted to attract as many British families as possible. But recession, and the tendency to encourage emigration from European countries like Italy and Greece, led to smaller numbers of UK families going to the Dominions.
Of course, there are still many people leaving Northern Ireland for what they see as better job opportunities. But these days it is mainland Britain - especially London and the south of England - which tends to attract them.
Young people in particular, leave Northern Ireland in droves to further their education in mainland universities.
While many come home upon completion of their education, a significant number put down roots across the water.
Back in the 1960s when locals left here to go to England, it was mostly in the Midlands, where the then-booming British car industry was snapping up workers.
I was set me off on this emigration theme by a photograph which appeared in the local paper 50 years ago. It showed six young men, all of whom had recently emigrated to Australia, and they had met up for a ‘Portadown re-union’ in Brisbane.
They were Lindsay Conn, (Scotch Street), Victor Wortley, (Drumnahuncheon), Bob Johnston and Bill Johnston (Gilford Road), Tommy Wilson (Annakera) and Thomas Conn (Scotch Street).
It proves the point; in 1954 Australia was overtaking Canada as the most popular emigration country for Portadown people, and Ulster folk generally.