Welsh Journals

with those who went to Shrewsbury and Liverpool. Not surprisingly, they found that the Welsh of the Teesside town displayed characteristics which were clearly a product of their geographical isolation. The fact that they had come to service a particular industry meant that their experience differed from that of the more diverse communities of Shrewsbury and Liverpool, where the more conventional rural-to-nearby-urban-centre pattern of movement was predomi- nant. The Welsh of Teesside moved to the area in family groups, came almost exclusively from the iron-smelting districts of south Wales, and on arrival tended to be more self-contained, disposed to live closely together and mix less with the host community than Welsh migrants to the other urban centres studied.3 Based on census enumerators' returns, this study perhaps confirms what was already suspected about the origins of the Teesside Welsh commu- nity, and further studies based on census data have tended to reinforce earlier impressionistic assumptions. An earlier study established that the Welsh-born population of Middlesbrough grew from 1 to 5 per cent of the town's total population between the censuses of 1851 and 1861.4 Pooley and Doherty calculate the size of the Welsh-born population of Middlesbrough in 1871 to be 956, which would mean that the first-generation Welsh residents of Middles- brough constituted between 2.5 and 3 per cent of the total population of the town. This suggests that the era of primary, large-scale Welsh migration to Middlesbrough, and the other iron-smelting districts of the north-east, occurred in the 1851-71 period. The occupational exclusivity of this process is well indicated by a number of other observations. The iron industry of Teesside flourished after the discovery of large quantities of ore in the hills to the south and east of Middlesbrough. It is quite evident that Welsh migrants took little or no part in the expansion of the ironstone mining and quarrying work-force. In 1861 only 1.2 per cent of the Cleveland ironstone mining work-force were of Welsh origin, whilst the figure for Middlesbrough ironworkers was 42 per cent. A segregation analysis of the Welsh-born population of Middlesbrough in 1851 and 1871 confirms the 3C. G. Pooley and J. Doherty, 'The Longitudinal Study of Migration: Welsh Migration to English Towns in the Nineteenth Century', in C. G. Pooley and I. D. Whyte, Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration (London, 1991), pp. 152-68. 4 T. Gwynne and M. Sill, 'Welsh Immigration into Middlesbrough in the Mid-Nineteenth Century', Bulletin of the Cleveland and Teesside Local History Society, No. 31 (1976), p. 19. 5 Pooley and Doherty, op.cit., p. 151. D. Ward, 'Vulcan, Apollo and the Infant Hercules: The Welsh Element in the Development of the Middles- brough and Teesside Community, c. 1850-1936' (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Teesside, 1994), p. 14-15. B- J. D. Harrison, 'Ironmasters and Ironworkers', in C. A. Hempstead (ed.), Cleveland Iron and Steel: Background and Nineteenth Century History (Middlesbrough, 1979), p. 238.