Some of our relatives departed the continent of Europe via Liverpool, England. We don’t always know how they traveled from Russia or Poland to England but this information gives some insight on what they may have endured during the journey. While the information below describes the early history of Hull it remained a transit point until 1914.

By the 1880s migrants arriving at Leith, Harwich, Hull, Grimsby, London, Newcastle and West Hartlepool were able to travel from the port of arrival to the port of embarkation with relative ease and speed. At each stage in the evolution of European transmigration, as the number of migrants increased, so did the efficiency with which the rail network handled them.

After 1866, as a preventative measure brought about by the outbreak of cholera in most of the European ports the railway company, the North Eastern Railway, agreed to transport those migrants arriving at the Victoria Dock by rail, rather than being allowed to pass through the town on foot as they had done previously. Those arriving via the Humber dock increasingly remained onboard ship until shortly before the time their train was due to depart. Although these were only small measures, they helped to alleviate some of the risks posed both to the emigrants and to the inhabitants of Hull alike – by preventing the emigrants from coming into contact with unscrupulous racketeers who preyed on travel weary migrants and halting the spread of disease between the migrants and the inhabitants of Hull.

 

 

 

 

“The Emigrant Waiting Room of the North Eastern Railway Company at the Hull Paragon Railway Station. The waiting room was built for the Scandinavian transmigrants who passed through Hull in 1871 and then extended in 1882. [Photograph copyright of the Nicholas Evans Collection, © 2000]”.

Most of the emigrants entering Hull travelled via the Paragon Railway Station and from there travelled to Liverpool via Leeds, Huddersfield and Stalybridge (just outside Manchester). The train tickets were part of a package that included the steamship ticket to Hull, a train ticket to Liverpool and then the steamship ticket to their final destination – mainly America. Sometimes so many emigrants arrived at one time that there would be up to 17 carriages being pulled by one steam engine. All the baggage was stored in the rear 4 carriages, with the passengers filling the carriages nearer the front of the train. The trains took precedence over all other train services because of their length and usually left Hull on a Monday morning around 11.00 a.m., arriving in Liverpool between 2.00 and 3.00 p.m.

Because of the risks to the town’s health from the large numbers of European migrants passing through the port, the North Eastern Railway Company built a waiting room near Hull Paragon Railway Station in 1871. This waiting room had facilities for the emigrants to meet the ticket agents, wash, use the toilet and take shelter from the weather. At no time throughout the age of mass migration did the authorities in Hull provide purpose built emigrant lodging houses for the migrants. Although 20 emigrant lodging houses were given licenses by the Town Council in 1877 alone, the emigrant lodging houses differed from other common lodging houses only by their description and size (the emigrant lodging houses licensed after 1877 holding between 20 and 80 people at a time). Most emigrants only stayed in these lodging houses when necessary and most arrived in and departed from Hull within 24 hours. Although the majority of emigrants were only in Hull for a short period of time, the emigrant waiting room at Paragon Railway Station was doubled in size in 1881 due to the numbers of transmigrants passing through the town. The extension provided a separate waiting room for the women and children and more extensive toilet and washing facilities than had initially been provided.

 

Immigration restriction in the US and a note about Baron de Hirsch’s extraordinary organizations

Source: Patricia Klindienst Guilford, CT USA

A few notes about immigration restriction in the US and a note about the Baron de Hirsch’s extraordinary organizations across the world? It might help people understand how drastically immigration to the US changed in the 1920s.

As direct immigration to the US became more and more difficult, immigrants found other ways to gain entry: via Canada, via South America, etc. The information below is to help us understand the political context that informed the motives of immigrants choosing “other Americas” over the US in this period.

It’s important to bear in mind that the era of open immigration to the US ended with passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which imposed strict quotas intended to stem the tide of Eastern and Southern European immigration. It closed the Golden Door well before 1930, a date mentioned by some of your responders.

The Johnson-Reed Act is in part why so many American immigrant families of Eastern European descent lost great numbers of kin and friends in the Holocaust: they could not get them out.

Here is an excerpt from “History Matters: The US Survey Course on the Web,” a special section on US immigration quota laws which makes plain how racially motivated the Johnson-Reed Act was.

“Who Was Shut Out?: Immigration Quotas, 1925?1927”

“In response to growing public opinion against the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the years following World War I, Congress passed first the Quota Act of 1921 then the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act). Initially, the 1924 law imposed a total quota on immigration of 165,000, less than 20 percent of the pre-World War I average. It based ceilings on the number of immigrants from any particular nation on the percentage of each nationality recorded in the 1890 census, a blatant effort to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, which mostly occurred after that date. In the first decade of the 20th century, an average of 200,000 Italians had entered the United States each year. With the 1924 Act, the annual quota for Italians was set at less than 4,000. This table shows the annual immigration quotas under the 1924 Immigration Act.”

You can view the table of quota-per-country imposed in 1924 here: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5078

Johnson-Reed was not the first attempt to radically restrict open immigration. In 1882 Congress passed America’s first racially motivated immigration law, The Chinese Exclusion Act. With the first wave of Eastern European Jews following the assassination of Czar Alexander the II in 1881, and the expulsions of Jews from major cities in Czarist Russia in 1891, which sent a second wave of Jewish immigrants to the US, the anti-immigration movement in the US led by Henry Cabot Lodge began to focus on the exclusion of Jews. Lodge was already publishing impassioned arguments for excluding Eastern European Jews in 1891, in direct response to the Baron de Hirsch announcing his plan to remove all five million Jews from Russia and settle them in New World democracies on agricultural colonies. Both men published in The North American Review, a leading American journal filled with discussions of immigration, the situation of Jews in Russia, and other highly charged issues, like race in America, in this period.

The immigration restriction movement culminated in successive victories for the right wing Republican nativists, who finally triumphed in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act.

On the History Matters web site you can see that the annual quota for Russia beginning in 1924 was 2,248 and the quota for Romania, which by 1924 included Bessarabia, was only 603. By way of contrast, the annual quota for Germany was 51,227, and for Great Britain, 34,007.

Quotas were broken down by the month, so if your family tried to reach the US in the latter part of the year, the quota for the month and even the year could already have been filled. That meant deportation. To stop steamship companies from taking advantage of immigrants hoping to beat the quotas, the US began to impose stiff fines on shipping companies, who were fined if they brought in over-quota emigrants in steerage. They were also charged with the expense of taking the unwanted immigrants back to Europe. The heart break (and later, the tragedy) of this exclusionist attitude towards Eastern (Jewish) and Southern (Italian) immigrants, who were considered members of the “darker races” who would pollute the mythical Anglo Saxon bloodline of “native” America, is part of the story for millions of Americans whose families were split apart, never to be reunited–the lucky ones in the New World, the unlucky ones left behind to endure the horrors of World War II.

The History Matters site includes excerpts from Congressional debates on immigration restriction. These offer a sobering lesson. All during the decades of mass migration of Eastern European Jews to the US, Jewish philanthropic organizations made extraordinary efforts to influence Congress, to help immigrants at every stage of migration, and protect those threatened with deportation. It is a noble and inspiring story.

The Baron de Hirsch Fund (in the US and Canada) is distinct from the Baron de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association (with headquarters in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, and agricultural colonies in Canada, South America, South Africa, etc.) precisely because the German Jews who were the Baron’s contacts in the US knew his plan to resettle millions of Russian Jews in agricultural colonies in New World democracies, a plan he announced to the world in 1891, would not be tolerated in the US. Nothing that encouraged emigration could be part of the Baron’s American organization. Thus, a Fund for the “Americanization” of Jewish immigrants was established in New York City in 1891. Woodbine, NJ, founded in 1891, the best known agricultural colony for Russian Jews in the US, was directly supported by the Fund, not the JCA.

For the story of the Funds’ creation, its purpose, its broad reach (including failures as well as successes), see Samuel Joseph’s “History of the Baron De Hirsch Fund: Americanisation of the Jewish Immigrant.” Written in the 1930s, as every effort was being made to help German Jews get out of Nazi Germany, it is poignant and illuminating reading.

You can read the Baron’s essay, “My Views on Philanthropy” on the web site dedicated to the history of the Woodbine Colony: http://www.thesam.org/philanthropy.htm.

You can find the Baron’s companion essay, “Refuge for Russian Jews,” also published in 1891, here: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Forum-1891aug-00627

You can read Lodge’s 1891 essay, “Lynch Law and Unrestricted Immigration,” which uses the story of the lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans to argue for immigration restriction, including his alarm at the Baron’s plan to bring millions of desperate Russian Jews to the US, here: http://www.unz.org/Pub/NorthAmericanRev-1891may-00602)

For original archival sources on Henry Cabot Lodge and the Immigration Restriction League, see the Harvard University Library Open Collections web site: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/restrictionleague.html

I hope this information will be helpful to others trying to understand what their families were dealing with as they struggled to understand changing US immigration law and bring family members over to join them.

 AND . . . this illustrates the impact of the 1924 Reed-Johnson Act:
Source: From a JewishGen Bessarabia SIG email digest: January 16, 2013

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 stayed in effect until 1965. When my mother wanted to leave Canada in 1960 for the United States, she had to wait years for approval from the USA because permission was still based on the small Polish quota in the Act and she was a Canadian citizen born in what was then Poland (Belarus today). Yet at that time, I was able to enter the US within months of applying because of an open quota between Canada and the US because I was born in Canada.

 

Trains and Shelters and Ships

This links to a 15 page academic discussion titled trains-shelters-ships discussing Jewish imigrantion and how and why this migration went through Great Britain. © Aubrey Newman