Bridging Boundaries in British Migration History: In Memoriam Eric Richards

This memorial book honours the legacy of Eric Richards’s work in an interplay of academic essays and personal accounts of Eric Richards. Following the Eric Richards methodology, it combines micro- and macro-perspectives of British migration history and covers topics such as Scottish and Irish diasporas, religious, labour and wartime migrations.

Eric Richards was an international leading historian of British migration history and a pioneer at exploring small- and large-scale migrations. His last public intervention, given in Amiens, France, in September 2018, opens the book. It is preceded by a tribute from David Fitzpatrick and Ngaire Naffine’s eulogy. This book brings together renowned scholars of British migration history. The book combines local and global migrations as well as economic and social aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century British migration history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785275197

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Bridging Boundaries in British Migration History

Bridging Boundaries in British Migration History

In Memoriam Eric Richards

Edited by Marie Ruiz

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2020 Marie Ruiz editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946120

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-517-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-517-8 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

To all who knew and admired Eric Richards

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Eric Richards: A Personal Tribute

David Fitzpatrick

Eulogy for Eric

Ngaire Naffine

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1 Eric Richards, Positionality and Migration History

Marie Ruiz

Chapter 2 Emigration at Extremes

Eric Richards

PART I MACRO-HISTORY OF MIGRATION

Chapter 3 The Distinctive Scottish Diaspora

John M. MacKenzie

Chapter 4 Religion and Convict Emigration: The Probation System in Australia

Hilary M. Carey

Chapter 5 Cypriot Emigration, 1820s–1930s: Economic Motivations within Local and Global Migration Patterns

Andrekos Varnava

Chapter 6 British Colonial Migration in the Nineteenth Century: The Short Route

Bernard Porter

PART II MICRO-HISTORY OF MIGRATION

Chapter 7 A Controversial Scottish Pioneer in New Zealand: James MacAndrew and the Identity of Otago

Marjory Harper

Chapter 8 ‘Empire Made Me?’ English Lower-Middle-Class Migrants and Expatriates, 1860–1930

A. James Hammerton

Chapter 9 Irish Immigrants and the Middle Class in Colonial New Zealand, 1890–1910

Jim McAloon

Chapter 10 ‘We Shall Have a Fine Holiday’: Imperial Sentiment, Unemployment and the 1928 Miner-Harvester Scheme to Canada

Kent Fedorowich

Notes on Contributors

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1.1 Eric Stapleton Richards (1940–2018)

6.1 Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), The Last of England (1855)

Tables

5.1 Population growth, 1881–1921

5.2 Employment and unemployment numbers, 1891–1921

5.3 Entries and departures, 1931–38

5.4 Population growth, 1921–60

9.1 Birthplace, Cyclopedia biographies

9.2 Cyclopedia and census birthplace compared: Named groups only

9.3 Irish province of birth percentages

9.4 New Zealand residence of Cyclopedia Irish-born

9.5 Occupations of the Irish-born as recorded in Cyclopedia

9.6 Occupations, Ulster and the rest of Ireland

9.7 Estate valuations, sample of Cyclopedia , £ in 1950 values

9.8 Place of birth: Average and median wealth

10.1 Number of applicants

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks go to all the contributors to this volume who have enthusiastically accepted to pay tribute to Eric Richards and to honour his legacy in British migration history. We share fond memories of the conference held in Amiens in September 2018 (‘Colonial and Wartime Migration, 1815–1914’) where most papers were presented, along with Eric’s keynote presentation.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Ngaire Naffine for sharing her eulogy with us in this volume, for providing the photograph of Eric inserted in introduction and for having Eric’s last paper formatted for publication. This leads me to extend my thanks to Robert Fitzsimons for undertaking the formatting of Eric’s keynote talk at the Amiens conference.

My deepest thanks go to David Fitzpatrick who wrote a very touching foreword to this volume in the very last weeks of his life, while he was fighting against illness. This demonstration of true friendship is invaluable. His legacy will stand the test of time, as will Eric’s.

Additionally, I owe a great deal of thanks to the Université de Picardie Jules Verne for funding the index of this volume, and to Mélanie Torrent for reading the introduction before final submission. I would also like to thank the Glasgow Museum for granting me reduced licence fees and copyright permission to use The Last of the Clan by Thomas Faed as cover image for this volume.

In memory of Eric, all royalties from this memorial volume will be donated to the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

ERIC RICHARDS

A PERSONAL TRIBUTE

David Fitzpatrick

Readers of this collection of scholarly studies on migration do not need to be told of Eric’s unsurpassed mastery of the widely neglected English diaspora, his seemingly effortless intellectual sweep, or his adroitness in juxtaposing general findings with telling individual narratives. These qualities were all evident at the conference in his honour that gave rise to this book, followed so soon by his shocking and sudden death in London. I could not attend, being gravely ill myself, but was later able to watch the proceedings on video. I imagined that I was there with Eric and exchanging glances with him in the lecture room, along with so many of his friends and mine. It never occurred to me that September that it would be my lot to bid Eric farewell.

We were friends and collaborators for over 30 years, brought together by our obsessive desire to make sense of ‘mass’ migration and find some way of sifting through that mass and recovering its individuality, with all the consequent quirks and aberrations. We were particularly interested in looking at unfamiliar sub-strands to set beside the trans-Atlantic diaspora, and (along with Richard Reid) initiated a series of slim volumes entitled Visible Immigrants to uncover neglected sources for migration to Australia. This required me (I was far from reluctant) to make many brief visits to the Australian National University (ANU) and Flinders University so that we could plan and execute our next moves in the struggle for scholarly enlightenment. The small workshops generating that series have continued intermittently and did much to revive interest in the field.

We began with the thorny challenge of emigrant letters, so rich individually yet so hazardous to use as the basis of generalizations about the migratory experience. Eric was a devotee of Charlotte Erickson’s classic Invisible Immigrants, which stood alone for so long in British diaspora studies in its incisive use of personal testimony. We amassed vast quantities of letters through appeals in Australia, abstracting and transcribing many of them during my longest spell at the ANU in 1990–91. Eric was always the sceptic, I the optimist intent on converting a non-sample into a sample by some magic formula. That dynamic never disappeared and, I think, was stimulating for both of us in our separate studies. Eric convinced Cornell University Press that they should publish our twin studies of the letters of Irish and English emigrants in Australia, but in the event only mine came to fruition. The usable Irish sources were just about manageable, but the vastly greater correspondence confronting Eric defied even his formidable powers of organization. But, being Eric, he found countless ways to use many of these letters to powerful illustrative effect.

In later years, I drifted away from migration studies, but we continued to meet regularly in Adelaide and at conferences. Quite recently, as I embarked on a study of return migration to Ireland, our active interests reconverged. Many excessively scholarly friendships would long since have withered, but that never happened if your friend was Eric Richards, as his countless devoted friends in many countries know. This was partly because of his extraordinary tenderness and consideration, his boundless but discreet curiosity and retentiveness, and his ability – never fully masked by the sceptical tone and raised eyebrow – to touch the heart. In our case, as in many others, that involved trying to arrange tennis whenever we met. Though always urbane and immensely enjoyable, these contests were not devoid of competitiveness (perhaps more overt than in our academic work). In tennis too, we had contrasting styles, each unconventional: he was all arms and legs and adept at sallies and interceptions, while I plugged away in back court trying to outmanoeuvre him. Eric did not like losing, and seldom did against me. But on a couple of occasions when I was injured, his response was sweet and sure as he procured an ice-pack or rushed me to a university medical centre. Apart from genuine compassion, he wanted me fully restored for further combat at the first possible moment.

From the very start, our friendship had another dimension, which has become ever more important to me over the years. Ngaire Naffine has been Eric’s besotted and beloved partner and wife throughout that period, a connection not destructible by death. Within our friendship triangle, one of the enduring bonds between Ngaire and myself was and remains music, especially through mini-recitals in which I accompanied her flute performances of Telemann or Bach (she had more eclectic interests and helped me to broaden my musical range). When we played in the evening in their beautiful home in Brighton by the sea, Eric would allow us to warm up before slipping into the music room, where he would sit quietly, respond courteously and observe attentively. My visits to Brighton, more frequent over the past five years or so, were among my happiest experiences. However low I might be feeling on arrival, I would leave restored and full of hope. Both Eric and Ngaire have enhanced my life and the lives of all who have known them.

And so, my dear friend, farewell.

EULOGY FOR ERIC

Ngaire Naffine

Eric died as he lived – with simplicity, style and without fuss – in London, just off the train from Paris, and a brilliant working holiday in France.

After a shared pastrami sandwich, half a pint of beer and while reading the paper in one of our favourite Bloomsbury haunts, Freddies Bar of William Goodenough College, Eric’s great light went out in just a minute. I lost the love of my life and the world lost a remarkable man.

I met Eric almost exactly 40 years ago in Sydney when I was giving my first conference paper on women and crime, and Eric was one of a small number of new men attending this mainly female gathering.

Eric’s inimitable chat-up line, from the audience, was ‘Do you have any empirical evidence for your argument?’ Already a theorist, the truth was I had very little.

By the next day, I had fallen in love with this fascinating man who offered such a big and wonderful world of thought and feeling and sheer fun, but who saw the need for solid footnotes.

Eric had an agile mind and body, and a big heart. He had an endless humane curiosity. He was interested in everyone and the fine details of their lives – what made them tick; where they had come from; what moved them to leave home; and why they were now talking to Eric, say in a taxi or a restaurant or anywhere at all.

And this intense interest in people was reflected in his prodigious and elegant scholarship that helped to explain the lives, motivations and movements of so many finely drawn individuals and then of the millions, and even billions, as they roamed across the planet.

Eric’s last very fine paper, in Amiens, northern France, was on small and big history, a typically large subject. He believed in work of great scale, but never lost sight of the human being. In his little cabin at the bottom of our garden, Eric was explaining the world.

In the many long and eloquent tributes that came tumbling in, Eric was described over and again as a gentleman, a distinguished scholar, as humble, as a dedicated sportsman and as simply a lovely man, an encourager of others.

And this was my experience of him too. He was my great mentor and love and lover, a kind and thoughtful man, and a feminist who believed in the equality and dignity of all. Every day we laughed, sparred, consumed good food and inferior wine. He was a scintillating companion, never boring.

Eric was also engaged in the lives of many others in whom he took a great interest and nurtured. So many of the letters I received said this. He often collaborated; he read, reviewed and commented; and he had enormous projects on the go.

Eric was a subversive and original thinker. Over the years, I attended many of his papers, and always I discovered more about the workings of his fascinating mind.

Eric was also an excellent and experimental cook. Any gift of fruit would be rapidly transformed and bottled. Just one of Eric’s many legacies is a great supply of cumquat marmalade.

I would like to quote from Adam Stephenson who wrote to me after Eric’s death. He said:

You won’t remember me, but even so, I thought you might like to know of the impression made by your husband on a member of the audience at the conference in Amiens two weeks ago. Eric seemed to me both the deepest and the simplest person there, the wisest of our gifted panelists, justly the keynote speaker. Right at the end of his life, he was able to make the neurones fizz, touch the heart and inflect the thinking of at least one person there, as no doubt he had done of many before. A gift.

Eric’s next speaking engagement was to be at the Sorbonne, an invitation he received soon after the Amiens conference. Eric was definitely on his way to promotion.

Eric passed on his great heart and courage and character to daughters Cindy, who died tragically young; to Lou and to Sally; and also to the grandchildren Stephanie and Bodie.

We will all miss him terribly. He left too quickly and too soon, as he would no doubt agree, but in the thick of things.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

ERIC RICHARDS, POSITIONALITY AND MIGRATION HISTORY

Marie Ruiz

Humanity seems always to have been a mobile species, from its earliest African origins through to its long-term stretchings to the end of the earth. And now we seem more mobile than ever, forever dislocating and relocating within and between countries. Mobility seems like a defining trait of the species, a constant and perpetual shifting of people through each succeeding generation – behaviour so general that it may need no history, an endless predictable seamless spreading of people in all directions. Mobility seems like a non-variable in human affairs, twirling apparently without restraint.

Eric Richards¹

Introduction

When I invited Eric Richards to speak in Amiens, France, in September 2018, little did I know that one year later I would be writing an introduction to a memorial volume in his honour.

Few historians have been as influential as Eric in British migration history. Between the onset of his career in 1970 and 2018, he published over 140 articles and book chapters, edited at least 10 volumes and completed 12 monographs, which is an impressive total. His canonical groundbreaking Britannia’s Children (2004) has become a bible for historians of the British Empire.

When we met in Paris in the Fall of 2017, I was co-editing a volume on migration crises to which Eric was contributing with one chapter, titled ‘Migrants in Crisis in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. That day, we walked around the Latin quarter and discussed the book. As a freshly graduated associate professor, I was impressed by this commanding figure of British migration history, yet he quickly made me comfortable and we engaged in a very enjoyable discussion challenging ideas and conceptions of migration. As he was exploring the roots of the Anglosphere, he was very interested in visiting our anglophone studies departments in France and learning about our use of the term ‘anglophone’ – in an academic system that is very different from English-speaking universities.

Figure 1.1 Eric Stapleton Richards (1940–2018). Courtesy of Ngaire Naffine.

Although I had never met him before, he had already made a great impression on me not only through his remarkable work but also by generously agreeing to write an endorsement for my first book’s cover (as did James Hammerton, who read the whole manuscript before publication and provided precious advice). Eric was certainly a scholar with an impressive knowledge and critical mind, and he was also curious, always eager to challenge viewpoints and approaches. He has been described as a role model for early-career historians of migration, which he certainly was, never failing to gently support and inspire young scholars. Undoubtedly a brilliant mind, he is also remembered for his kindness, gentle and encouraging approach to scholarship. He was one of the most renowned and respected figures of the history of the British Empire, not only because of the quality of his work but also because of his uncontested personal qualities. A most praised element of his personality was his humbleness. I remember telling him how important his work was for the advancement of research in migration history, to which he humbly replied, ‘I am only an unknown Australian historian.’

As we moved through the city of Paris that day in September 2017, we decided to organize a conference in France the following year and to invite speakers fascinated by experiences of migration. The ‘Colonial and Wartime Migration (1815–1918)’ conference, whose videos are now available online,² took place in Amiens on 13–14 September 2018. Eric was obviously the keynote speaker, and he gave an outstanding presentation on small- and large-scale migrations, revealing the links between the history of migration from St Kilda and major mass migration movements. He thus showed how small and large migrations inform each other in an interplay of structural forces, as well as a variety of common migration patterns. This memorial volume gathers chapters from the Amiens conference talks.

Eric Richards’s Positionality

Eric was intrigued by the migrants’ reasons for departure, their motivations and choices of destinations, as well as the mysteries of their personal and communal stories in their new world. His knowledge production as a historian of migration was undoubtedly impacted by his personal history and background – his positionality, which Paula Moya defines as the interplay of factors that determine our knowledge production: ‘How our identities predispose us to see or not see; listen to or not listen to; read or not read; cite or not cite; concern ourselves or not concern ourselves with specific Other peoples, issues, and societal dynamics.’³

Eric was born in 1940 in North Wales, and experiences of migration ran in the family early on. His grandfather was a farmer drawn from his agricultural environment to the closest town, as a consequence of declining agricultural activity and economic pressures. We learn from his last book, The Genesis of International Mass Migration (2018), that his grandparents were farmers in Wales until the 1930s–40s. A large family of five and eight children on each side, Eric already had uncles and relatives across the Anglosphere by the First World War. Family holdings, such as a farm near Wrexham, were lost in the Great Depression, which initiated the family’s urban relocation.⁴ So, economic pressure moved his family from rural Wales to the largest town, Wrexham, and then to England, Shropshire; and this personal experience of economic migration undoubtedly yielded his fascination for migration processes, as well as his interest in the Highland Clearances.⁵ This familial pattern of migration was later transmitted to Eric’s own daughters ‘dispersed’ on three continents, a dispersal exemplary of the British people’s scattering off the land, according to him.⁶

Before turning to migration history, Eric studied economic history at Nottingham University, a first-generation college student. His passion led him to a PhD on the Sutherland family in the Midlands and Scotland, later to be published under the title The Leviathan of Wealth, his first book in 1973⁷ (as well as an earlier article from 1970 in Scottish Historical Review).⁸ In 1963, he obtained a tutorship in economics at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, and migrated as a Ten Pound Pom. After a temporary return to Europe (Scotland), Eric settled for good in Adelaide in 1971 – he was thus a ‘boomerang’ migrant as the Australians would say.

Reflecting on historians’ positionality in books edited by Philip Payton and Pat Hudson,⁹ Eric wrote essays that allow us to explore his own personal history of migration today, a task that he was himself engaged in with migrants’ letters and testimonies. ‘There was a distinct exodus to Australia of which I was a part, leaving for Adelaide as a graduate in 1962,’¹⁰ he wrote in 2001. In this autobiographical essay, Eric came back to his adolescence and described himself as an ‘adolescent economic determinist […] already seduced by Marx, Tawney and the New Statesman. I seemed to know that economic forces ruled the world.’¹¹ This was how Eric was naturally drawn to social and economic history from a very young age. According to him, ‘to understand and influence the world, Economic History was clearly the most important field to explore.’¹² The first in his family to attend university, he was thus given access to the keys to unlock the mysteries of his own family history, the impact of industrialization on farming communities having led his family to experience rural exodus, displacement and uprootedness. According to Moya, ‘scholarly production is structured by an unacknowledged logic of identity.’¹³ In 2001, he confided:

In 1940 only 5% of the British workforce was left in agriculture. Out of generations of small farmers and agricultural labourers in North Wales, my own father and mother had taken the path from the cottage and village to the local town (Wrexham) as part of this great historical disjunction and transition. I was conscious of being virtually the last to depart the land at the end of one of the critical processes in Economic History.¹⁴

This ‘agrarian transition’ found echo with the impact of industrialization on the Highland Clearances, which he was drawn to investigate from an economic angle once in Australia and then as a return migrant back in Britain with a position at the University of Stirling in 1967. Back again in Adelaide and at Flinders University in 1971, Eric set up to apply his training in economic history to social history. His natural curiosity and generosity were going to lead him to explore compelling aspects of social history, such as minorities and aboriginality,¹⁵ or feminism and the role of women in the Industrial Revolution.¹⁶

Progressively unveiling the consequences of economic progress on social concerns led him to the biography of Patrick Sellar, an architect of massive Highlands evictions in the 1810s. Eric was mostly interested in the social consequences of economic and societal engineering processes and changes brought about by industrialization and landlordism. Not only drawn to the history of aristocracy and its impact on social economic matters, he also published on history from below,¹⁷ and called for a re-evaluation and redefinition of the polysemic term ‘progress’, which he undertook as early as 1971 with an article published in Scottish Studies¹⁸ and later with Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances: Homicide, Evictions and the Price of Progress (1999). He could thus partly decipher the mysteries of mass migration. In 2001, he wrote:

My own work at present is given special meaning by the underlying and still mysterious connections between rural displacement, the demographic upsurge of the late eighteenth century, and the phenomenon of mass migration, especially in its international dimensions.¹⁹

In keeping with his deep interest for small and large migration histories, he added that ‘having collected hundreds of individual accounts of emigrants from the British Isles, the trick is now to relate them to the wider structures of change.’²⁰ An estimated 1.6 million immigrants reached Australia in the nineteenth century,²¹ a figure that may explain Eric’s curiosity and wish to understand the reasons why – a century before he did so – European migrants decided to move to Australia. For him, the Australian case was exemplary of global migration trends in the long nineteenth century.²²

Eric simply summarized his experience of migration as that of

an ordinary specimen, my own migratory career brought me from a farm labourer’s cottage in deepest rural wartime North Wales eventually to an Australian university in the 1960s, with much mobilities between times.²³

An academicus mobilis²⁴ himself, as he called ultra-mobile academics, he clearly experienced and documented his own study object, and this was his positionality.

As a true academic and personal passion, migration even came to be of interest to Eric when his daughter was treated at the Epilepsy Center of the Austin Hospital in Melbourne in November 2007. This very personal story Eric shared with his readers in the preface to Destination Australia (2008).²⁵ As it happens, the whole medical team seemed to have been gathered as a perfect case study for a migration scholar. Beyond their reputed medical expertise, those distinguished specialists indeed ran the gamut of modern Australia’s multiculturalism, with practitioners from eastern Europe, Hungary, Pacific Islands, Greece, China, Zambia, Nigeria, England, and there was even a Highland Scot and an Irishman to complete this interesting multitude, with patients from New Zealand, Germany and Italy. In such a context, Eric both stood as a concerned father and a fascinated migration scholar.

His own daughters were exemplary modern mobile Australians, as one came from Ireland and the other one from New Zealand. He described his eldest daughter as a ‘true hero’, whose re-migration to Australia was almost prevented because of her condition, but who successfully defeated migration restrictions because she was Adelaide-born in the first place. Eric concluded by stressing the transformations in Australian society since 1901 – marked by the beginning of the White Australia policy – when such a multicultural scene would have been inconceivable. Later in the book, he described Australia in 1906 as ‘British Australia monocultural and monolingual’.²⁶

This very personal story, which Eric humbly shared with his readers, also accounts for his positionality as a migration historian. At the 2015 Eric Richards Symposium, he spoke of ‘Emigrants and Historians,’²⁷ which he both was, as most of us are in the field. Memorial volumes are invitations to reflect on positionality – how we position ourselves within our field of study and our work – yet, more broadly, as human beings interacting with men and women we get to admire not only for their work but also for themselves. As such, our position as academics and our work are greatly influenced by our background, identity, personal choices and the friendships we make. Writing history often comes from our own history, but in this memorial volume, our writing of history mainly comes from our relationship to Eric.

Academic Friendships

Eric was professor of history at Flinders University from 1971 to 2012, when he retired. A remarkable academic, he was also a very kind and gentle man whose friendships led to outstanding partnerships and writings. In 2017, the first ‘Eric Richards Symposium in British and Australasian History’ was organized in his honour at Flinders University by Andrekos Varnava. It gathered historians of the British Empire, among which were friends and contributors to this volume such as David Fitzpatrick, James Hammerton and Marjory Harper. Eric’s academic friendships were also sealed on the tennis court with Andrekos Varnava and David Fitzpatrick, among others.

Such partnerships led to co-authored writings such as the ‘Visible Immigrants’ series that welcomed collaborative works with friends and colleagues like David Fitzpatrick and James Hammerton. Eric was indeed fascinated by migration processes, what prompted departures, as well as the peopling of receiving lands, and the series was meant to unveil the significance of mass migration processes as well as individual lives to make visible invisible migrants. This collaborative effort culminated in the publication of seven co-authored books in the series.²⁸ As such, his fascination for oral testimonies also led Eric Richards to exchange ideas and co-edit a volume with James Hammerton in 2002 (Speaking to Immigrants: Oral Testimony and the History of Australian Migration).

In this introduction, I want to take the opportunity to pay tribute to another esteemed scholar of migration, David Fitzpatrick (1948–2019). The story of these two scholars is also a story of academic and personal friendship like those which make our field and our job enviable. Eric and David met in the late 1980s and later worked together on the ‘Visible Immigrants’ series. As military historian Jane Leonard, David’s widow, recently told me: ‘Their relationship involved a lot of banter, good food, wine, music and tennis. David loved the camaraderie as well as the intellectual buzz of those Visible Immigrants workshops.’ David was often described as the most influential Irish historian of his generation, which he certainly was, as he is also remembered for producing provocative works on Irish history. A Melbourne-born Irish-Australian, he graduated from Melbourne University in 1969 and then completed a remarkable PhD thesis marked by masterful use of statistical tools at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1974. This he published as early as 1977 (Politics and Irish Life 1913–21: Provincial Experiences of War and Revolution). Between 1975 and 1979, David held postdoctoral research fellowships at Nuffield College, Oxford, and at Melbourne University. This ‘boomerang’ migrant returned permanently to Europe in 1979 when appointed to a lectureship in modern Irish history at Trinity College Dublin, until he retired in 2015. His work betrayed his deep insight into emotional narratives of Irish history. As such, he widened the scope of Irish historiography.

Eric was fascinated by migrant letters, as was David. Oceans of Consolation. Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (1994) was a groundbreaking attempt at bringing to life nineteenth-century Irish migrants, at revealing their patterns of migration through the study of their correspondence but, above all, at listening to the voices of migrants in a display of empathy that makes the best historians. In 1995, he took the task further and allowed RTÉ radio listeners to have access to oralized migrant letters with the broadcast of dramatized excerpts from letters extracted from Oceans of Consolation introduced by David and read by actors from the precise counties where the emigrants originated, thus pushing the attention to detail to the utmost level of realism with the migrants’ local accents. David’s work on migration was grounded in thorough and meticulous analyses of Irish migration processes. Oceans of Consolation not only dipped into the migrants’ personal lives but also unveiled the structural forces that uprooted so many Irishwomen and men in such a short period of time in the nineteenth century – mostly around the Great Famine. Eric and David