METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Occupation has been described as ‘one of the most complex indicators used in social science’ because it is ‘multi-dimensional, often ambiguous in meaning, and capable of being coded into an infinite number of categories and subcategories.’12 Appendix 5.1, which underpins the present chapter, begins with an outline of the methodological and classification issues taken into consideration with regard to migrant occupation. This is followed by a detailing of the classification scheme used for the present study, which has been applied to migrant occupations for the NZSG and PNZ datasets, as well as to the results of the 1878 New Zealand Census.13 Especially ambiguous

11

Tanja Bueltmann, “‘Where the measureless ocean between us will roar”: Scottish emigration to New Zealand, personal correspondence and epistolary practices, c1850-1920’, Immigrants & Minorities, Vol.26, No.3, 2008, pp.242-265, p.251

12

Margo Conk, The United States Census and Labor Force Change: A History of Occupation Statistics, 1870-1940, in Robert Berkhofer (ed.), Studies in American History and Culture, 1978, p.21, quoted in Erik Olssen and Maureen Hickey, Class and Occupation: The New Zealand Reality, Dunedin, 2005, p.30

13

Part VII, Tables I, III, VI, VIII, IX and X, 1878 Census of New Zealand, pp.279, 280, 283-4, 287-8, 289-95, and 297-307. References to New Zealand Census occupation data throughout this chapter refers to these tables.

occupations have been annotated to demonstrate the inherent difficulties in interpreting historical occupational descriptions.

Even after migrant occupations have been classified, preparing an occupational profile of the migrant group from the available data remains difficult, with many migrants holding several occupations over their lifetimes, as in the case of Angus Cameron. In addition, within many occupations the versatility exhibited by the early settlers cannot be fully conveyed under a single occupational title. Olssen and Hickey note, for example, instances of hospital matrons whose jobs also entailed work as ‘cooks, laundresses, charwomen, dispensers, anaesthetists, gardeners, and clerks’.14 Furthermore, analysis of the occupations of the migrants can only be based upon a ‘snapshot’ of the migrants’ occupational experiences at a single point in time, otherwise the analysis becomes unwieldy and results highly suspect. The NZSG record for Angus Cameron records his occupation in New Zealand as ‘settler, policeman, shepherd’, and he has consequently been recorded in the database as having been of independent means in his primary occupation, in the ‘armed forces 2’ category of public service for occupation 2, and as ‘farm workers 1’ for his third occupation.15 Yet, as the case study presented clearly shows, this is an inadequate summary of Cameron’s employment history; the snapshot of his employment fails to capture the accuracy or the richness of his occupational experiences.

The ‘snapshot’ of migrant occupations in the PNZ dataset is likely to have been of the occupation engaged in immediately prior to death.16 This is important, as it tends to skew the results towards senior positions within occupational ‘sectors’. The agriculture sector provides a useful example. The proportion of males in the PNZ dataset involved in agriculture in New Zealand is just 25.29 per cent, somewhat lower than might be expected based on previous research. In the 1878 Census of New Zealand 35.11 per cent of the male population was employed in agriculture, and analyses of migrant backgrounds carried out by Phillips and Hearn, and earlier by McClean, suggest that Scots were more likely than their English contemporaries to be

14

Pat Sargison, ‘“Essentially a woman’s work”: A history of general nursing in New Zealand, 1830- 1930’, PhD Thesis, University of Otago, 2001, pp.70-71; and R. Wright St Clair, Caring for People: Wanganui Hospital Board, 1885-1985, Wanganui, 1987, p.29; cited in Olssen and Hickey, Class and Occupation, p.61

15

NZSG database, migrant 00850. See Appendix 5.1 for discussion of ‘settler’ as an occupation.

16

occupied in agriculture.17 Phillips and Hearn note that 30.7 per cent of Scots migrants arriving in Otago between 1840 and 1850 were engaged in agriculture, as were 73.9 per cent of those assisted migrants going to Canterbury and 42.9 per cent of those assisted to New Zealand between 1871 and 1888.18 As there were more migrants to New Zealand from England than from Scotland, it should be anticipated that the proportion of the population of New Zealand involved in agriculture in the 1878 Census would be lower than the proportion of Scots agriculturally employed in Scotland. This low proportion of migrants involved in agriculture in the PNZ dataset means that the proportion recorded as being involved in all other ‘sectors’ is higher than expected. Indeed it is potentially created by this higher proportion recorded as belonging to other sectors. A probable reason is the use of death certificates as a source. Some migrants who had been engaged in agriculture earlier in their lives may have been recorded as ‘settler’ or ‘gentleman’ on their death certificates, having ‘retired’ some years before death.

However, this snapshot effect is not simply an issue for data samples created retrospectively, but also influences census data collection. The date on which the census was taken obviously affects how many were enumerated in seasonal fields of work, respondents giving their occupation as that in which they were currently employed rather than summarising for the enumerator all occupations in which they had been employed during the previous year. This immediate distortion is exacerbated by the fact that during the period studied respondents were asked to record one occupation only on census forms. As Fairburn notes, ‘it was customary in nineteenth- century New Zealand to call a man by one occupational name only, irrespective of how many livelihoods he possessed.’19 Unlike Britain, which experienced increasing

17

Rosalind McClean, ‘Scottish Emigrants to New Zealand, 1840-1880: Motives, Means and Background’, PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1990, p.311; Tables 11 and 17, Phillips and Hearn, Settlers, pp.88 and 113

18

English and Welsh migrants of agriculture background arriving with the New Zealand Company are recorded as being 36.1 per cent of migrants (a higher figure than that noted for Scots above, because this figure is of New Zealand Company migrants generally and the Scots figure is for those going to Otago alone), those assisted to Canterbury just 45.9 per cent and those assisted between 1871 and 1888 just 34.5 per cent. Another consideration regarding these figures is the likely recording of occupations that migrants knew the colony required – if an assisted passage was offered to agricultural labourers but not to blacksmiths, for example, the migrant may have claimed the sought occupation. This would undoubtedly increase the proportion of ‘labourers’ and ‘domestic servants’ recorded in a sample of ship lists. Table 18, Phillips and Hearn, Settlers, p.113; p.88

19

Olssen and Hickey, Class and Occupation, pp.37 and 72; Miles Fairburn, ‘Social mobility and opportunity in nineteenth-century New Zealand’, NZJH, Vol.13, No.1, April, 1979, pp.43-64, p.44. The pitfalls of occupational enumeration in the census are elaborated upon in detail in chapter 2 of

occupational specialisation during this time, employment in New Zealand required a high degree of versatility. In 1867 New Zealand’s Registrar-General observed that the workforce was filled ‘with a ‘great number’ of jacks-of-all-trades’, and it was not only seasonal agricultural labourers who held more than one job over the course of a year – ‘Members of Parliament, Magistrates… persons following combined professional or commercial and agricultural pursuits’ were all examples of people likely to have more than one occupation.’20 As early as 1858 the Registrar-General noted that ‘the calling entered in the Census Schedule is not always that in which the person is most habitually engaged or from which he principally derives his maintenance’.21 It is highly probable that Angus Cameron would have been enumerated as postmaster at the 1861 Census, this being, if not his primary occupation, at least that with the highest income.22 If such was the case, a shepherd, a drover, a store keeper and a liquor licensee (the other occupations embraced by Angus at the time) were, consequently, excluded from the census enumeration in that year. It is in this respect that the NZSG data is strongest in comparison to census data and the PNZ dataset, providing additional information about the migrants’ occupations, even when not lending itself to statistical analysis.

Another respect in which the NZSG data is especially strong in comparison to the PNZ dataset is with regard to female employment patterns. Because the source of the PNZ data is death certificates, and because for the most part the occupation recorded was that held immediately prior to death, the majority of females in the PNZ data (over 99 per cent) have no occupation listed. The NZSG data sheds more light on female occupations. Of the 2,915 females in the NZSG database, 1,279 have an ‘occupation’ recorded. While 632 of these fall within the ‘other’ sector, including wives, mothers, housewives and other dependants, 647 female migrants have occupations that lend themselves to analysis. Consequently, there are instances in the present chapter where the occupational data for male and female migrants is considered separately. For the most part, however, male and female migrant occupational data has been jointly analysed. Conclusions may be drawn from the

Class and Occupation. See also Fairburn, ‘Social mobility and opportunity in nineteenth-century New Zealand’, pp.44-45.

20

Olssen and Hickey, Class and Occupation, p.37; Fairburn, ‘Social mobility and opportunity’, p.44.

21

Fairburn, ‘Social mobility and opportunity’, p.45.

22

Which occupation Angus recorded at the census cannot be checked, the individual schedules having been destroyed, only the published calculations being now available.

separated male and female results as to whether, for example, most of the migrants recorded in the combined tables as being engaged in domestic service were male or female. In most cases throughout the chapter tables and figures relating to migrant occupations exclude those recorded as ‘other’, ‘indefinable due to lack of information’ and ‘unknown’. Migrants occupations were not ‘unknown’ or ‘indefinable’ in their own lifetimes, and including ‘other’ only skews the figures towards dependants without revealing anything useful about the composition of the occupations of the workforce. Therefore it must be borne in mind when reading tables that when the analysis is exclusive of ‘other’, ‘unknown’ and ‘indefinable’ it is primarily, but not solely, of male migrants.

One further consideration regarding methodology is that the occupational profile of the migrants is heavily dependant on the accuracy of the recording of occupations in the original sources (and subsequently). The difference between a baker and a banker is great in real terms, but not in written form, just as millers and miners are only a smudge apart in ink. The profile presented in this study is based on the available evidence. Other data sources will be needed to create a more complete profile of the migrants.

OVERVIEW

One of the primary hypotheses running throughout the present investigation relates to change over time – did the occupational make-up of the migrants alter between periods of arrival? The preceding chapters have presented evidence that suggests there were changes in other aspects of the profile of the migrants over time. However, there are strong indications that the changes were not radical but actually relatively subtle, and that these subtle changes were dependant upon factors in Scotland and in New Zealand, such as internal migration and the deliberate recruitment of particular categories of migrants at various points of time. The occupational composition of the migrants has proven no exception. Figure 5.1, below, illustrates the occupational sector composition of male NZSG migrants in their New Zealand occupations by period of arrival.

Figure 5.1

Employment subsequent to emigration to New Zealand: proportion of male migrants in each sector, by period of arrival

Source: NZSG Data, 1840-1920

Although Figure 5.1 sets out only the occupations of the Scottish-born males in the NZSG data, the changing sectoral shares reflect the shift within New Zealand from an early settler society, with agriculture the cornerstone, to an increasingly industrialised and increasingly urban society from the 1870s through to the early twentieth century.23 While the general trend in Figure 5.1 within the agricultural sector is a decline in numbers, there is a consistent trend towards increase within the manufacturing, dealing, and especially building, sectors.24 Among Scots males in the NZSG dataset arriving in New Zealand pre-1852, 59.06 per cent were involved in agriculture at some point in their lives. This decreased to 53.48 per cent between 1853 and 1870, and yet again for those arriving between 1871 and 1886 (32.31 per cent).

23

Good general overviews of the economic development of New Zealand include: J.B. Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making: a Survey of Economic and Social Development, London, 1930, (see, especially, chapter one, ‘The main periods of development’, for the broad trends); J.B. Condliffe and W.T.G. Airey, A Short History of New Zealand, Auckland, 1954, (especially section three); W.J. Gardner, ‘A colonial economy’ in Geoffrey Rice (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand, Auckland, 1992; Tom Brooking, ‘Economic transformation’, in Geoffrey Rice (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand, Second Edition, Auckland, 1992, pp.230-253; and Jim McAloon, ‘The New Zealand economy, 1792- 1914’, in Giselle Byrnes (ed.), The New Oxford History of New Zealand, Melbourne, 2009, pp.197-218

24

These figures, for males, are calculated excluding ‘other’ for reasons mentioned below. Note, the spike in Figure 5.1 for those employed in public service in the period 1887-1900 is probably an aberration caused by the small sample sizes for that period.

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Pre-1852 1853-1870 1871-1886 1887-1900 1901-1920 Period of Arrival % Labouring Transport Building Mining

Public Service, etc Manufacturing Dealing Domestic Service Agricultural

Between 1901 and 1920 agriculture represented only 28.72 per cent of occupations recorded among these male migrants.25

As the above analysis is based on a sub-sample of migrants in the NZSG dataset, with only one occupation recorded on the NZSG registration forms, it is possible that the apparent decline in agriculture over the eight decades is indicative of migrants holding more than one occupation during their lives in New Zealand, with the contributors of the information recording only the wage-earning forms of employment rather than ‘farming’. For some farming may have been a way of life as much as an occupation. Moreover, as the colony grew many migrants were forced to find other employment in addition to farming. This proposition is not supported, however, by analysis of those with more than one occupation recorded on the registration forms; just seventy-six males in the sample arriving between 1901 and 1920 had two or more occupations recorded for their New Zealand years, compared to 128 with two or more occupations among those arriving pre-1852, 520 arriving between 1852 and 1870 and 232 arriving between 1871 and 1886. Only seventeen of the seventy-six with two or more occupations arriving 1901-1920 had an agricultural occupation as their second occupation, suggesting that this was not the primary reason for the decline in the number of migrants involved in agriculture over time.

A more likely explanation lies in the unusually rapid transformation of New Zealand from a primarily agricultural society with a scattering of urban centres to an increasingly urban and industrial society, albeit one still heavily dependant on primary production. In the early twentieth century agriculture was still very important – 28.72 per cent is still a considerable proportion of the occupied male population.26 While the

25

Hawke notes that ‘the labour force in farming [in New Zealand, according to the census] shows much less ‘relative decline’ than it does in most of the richer counties of the world, a result readily understood in terms of the comparative advantage of New Zealand in the international economy, and the absence of any technical or social reasons for seeking employment opportunities in other activities’ and that ‘the relative decline of farming as a source of employment, a feature of the developed countries in general, really begins only in the early twentieth century’. G.R. Hawke, ‘Disaggregation of the New Zealand labour force, 1871-1936’, VUW Working Papers in Economic History, 79/1, January, 1979, p.22. However his analysis for this working paper begins with the 1874 Census; as the analysis discussed here shows, the NZSG data corroborates his findings after that date. This very high proportion of Scots involved in agriculture in the first two periods discussed here, though, may prove to be a Scottish peculiarity; certainly recent work examining the occupations of Wellington’s Irish immigrants indicates that, as was the case among Irish immigrants to other parts of the world, New Zealand’s Irish were much less inclined towards agriculture than were the Scots.; Gerard Horn, forthcoming PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.

26

Much has been written regarding the economic and social development of New Zealand over this period. As well as general histories of New Zealand such as William Pember Reeves, The Long White Cloud, London, 1924; James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders From

proportion of Scots migrants employed in agriculture in New Zealand decreased by 30.34 per cent between the pre-1852 period and 1901-1920, no one other sector accounted for the decline, though the building sector was significant. The increase in those involved in manufacturing between these two periods of arrival was just 5.58 per cent (from 10.53 per cent of those arriving pre-1852 to 16.41 per cent of early twentieth century migrants), and the difference between the two periods of arrival of migrants employed in the dealing sector in New Zealand was just 4.56 per cent. While the building sector accounts for just 4.68 per cent of NZSG male migrants New Zealand occupations among those arriving pre-1852, 17.95 per cent of those arriving between 1901 and 1920 were engaged in that sector. This is a reflection of the relatively rapid urbanisation of New Zealand society over the eighty years examined and consequent demand for construction. Patterson, for instance, notes the amount of housing available in Wellington more than doubled over the course of the 1870s, ‘houses… being let before even piles were placed in the ground’, and that this demand continued into the twentieth century.27

A change in the occupational patterns of female Scots migrants over time also indicates the shift in New Zealand from a rurally oriented settler society to one increasingly urban. Figure 5.2 illustrates the occupational sector composition of female NZSG migrants in their New Zealand occupations by period of arrival.

Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, Auckland, 1996; Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand, Auckland, 2000; James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders From the 1880s to the Year 2000, Auckland, 2001; and Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, Auckland, 2003 (as well as Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making, Condliffe and Airey, A Short History of New Zealand, Brooking, ‘Economic transformations’, and McAloon, ‘The New Zealand economy 1792-1914’, noted earlier), that provide the reader with a good general background as to the basic phases of development, many other works cover more specific aspects of this development. See, for example, C.G.F. Simkin, The Instability of a Dependent Economy: Economic Fluctuations in New Zealand, 1840-1914, London, 1951; G.R. Hawke, The Making of New Zealand: An Economic History, Cambridge, 1985; Margaret Nell Galt, ‘Wealth and income in New Zealand c.1870 to c.1939’, PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1985; H.G. Philpott, A History of the New Zealand Dairy Industry, 1840-1935, Wellington, 1937; G.J.R. Linge, ‘Manufacturing in New Zealand: four years in a century of growth’, in R.F. Watters (ed.), Land and Society in New Zealand: Essays in Historical Geography, Wellington, 1965; and Muriel F. Lloyd Prichard, An Economic History of New Zealand to 1939, Auckland, 1970, among others.