Yorkshire Settlers in New Brunswick

This paper is based on a keynote address delivered as part of a conference dedicated to the eighteenth-century Yorkshire settlers in New Brunswick, held at Mount Allison University, Sackville, in August 2000. It was published in Paul A. Bogaard, ed., Yorkshire Emigrants to Canada: Papers from the Yorkshire 2000 Conference (Sackville, New Brunswick, 2012). I am grateful to Dr Paul Bogaard for agreeing to the web-publication of my paper. Copies of the collected papers are still available (October 2016).
 

 


BUILT IN STONE:

NEW BRUNSWICK

FROM GOVERNMENT HOUSE

1862


On the last day of December 1862, the aristocratic young governor of New Brunswick, Arthur Hamilton Gordon, sat down to pen a confidential review of his province. It was written in deepest confidence and, as he admitted, in deepest gloom, for it painted a devastating portrait of a colony that had, in his opinion, gone steadily backwards in the eight decades since it had been carved out of nearby Nova Scotia in 1784. Gordon was customarily vehement in the expression of his opinions, and the views of this 33-year-old bachelor need not to be taken as gospel. He had spent just over a year in New Brunswick, and his perspective had been influenced by a recent visit to Canada, where he had encountered "astounding" prosperity. Privately, he had written that

the abundant evidences of wealth, prosperity and progress which everywhere meet the eye are very agreeable after the dead-alive, poverty-stricken aspect of nine-tenths of New Brunswick.1

Gordon elaborated this comparison in his confidential despatch, painting a grim picture of a colony that, if it was going anywhere at all, seemed to be heading downwards. One vivid image captured it all: in New Brunswick, Gordon wrote, "a stone house or public building is a sure mark of an earlier period". In London, the despatch was read with unusual attention by the staff of the Colonial Office. Their world-view, like that of Gordon himself, was far removed from that of the average New Brunswick settler. Civil servant Arthur Blackwood, who praised the despatch as "excellent, & interesting", was the son of an admiral who had been at Nelson's side on the Victory at Trafalgar. The Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, pronounced it "one of the ablest and most remarkable despatches I have received for a long time". There is no doubt that the image of building in stone had hit home hard. Senior civil servant Frederick Elliot, cousin of the Earl of Minto, was not surprised by "the usual evils of a highly democratic society" but even he was shocked by Gordon's picture of "highly retrograde" development. "Buildings becoming less instead of more substantial" he exclaimed;" some settlements actually abandoned."2

I shall return to Gordon's despatch, and to the attitudes it reflected, but it may be useful to reinforce the image that he so vividly invoked by associating it with two buildings well known in New Brunswick. The first is Government House in Fredericton, built around 1828. It is easy to picture the solitary and complex young governor, as Gordon indeed wrote of himself not long afterwards, "in my great empty house, looking over white desolate tracts of snow". He was addicted to violent exercise, and found the New Brunswick winters, as he found so many other colonial experiences, exceptionally frustrating. Perhaps, as he gazed from the windows of Government House, he had in mind Keillor House at Dorchester, built around 1813, preserving the name of a Yorkshire family and today a museum commemorating that settler experience. Gordon was right enough about those two structures, an official building and a family home, both built in stone, reflecting the architectural style of eighteenth-century England and each of them dating from the early years of the colony.

At this point, let me bring in a third comfortable, eighteenth-century house, and tell a story that has been made familiar by Bernard Bailyn's Voyagers to the West.3 Newby Hall is a four-square Georgian mansion located a few miles from the ancient town of Ripon in the English county of Yorkshire. In the 1760s it was inherited by another privileged young man, William Weddell, who decided to crown his studies at Cambridge by undertaking the Grand Tour of Europe. Wealthy young gentlemen who visited Italy were often seeking a far livelier education than could be found in the country's art galleries, but Weddell was a high-minded exception. Not only did he admire the pictures and statues, but he dipped into his purse to make extensive purchases for a private collection of his own. He bought so much that, on his return, it was necessary to add a special gallery to Newby Hall just to house the statues that he had brought home. To finance his building programme, Weddell dived still deeper into the pockets of his tenants by raising their rents. Some of them sailed off to Nova Scotia to settle in the back country of the Chignecto peninsula, much of which was included after 1784 in New Brunswick.

As it happens, William Weddell did not live to a ripe old age to enjoy his collection of statuary. On an unusually hot day in 1792, at the age of 39, he sought relief at his London house by plunging into a bath of cold water, and died of a heart attack.4 Our sympathies are perhaps muted and, in any case, Bailyn's account shows that he was not the only Yorkshire landowner whose desire to build in stone was matched by the hardness of his heart. The Bulmers were driven to Nova Scotia by the demands of Beilby Thompson of Escrick for higher rent. It is ironic that their own bid for economic freedom set them on the path to become slaveowners, as Barry Cahill relates on pages XX-XX. William Blinkhorn decamped from Hovingham, where the Worsleys were building in lavish style. Perhaps they were trying to catch up with their neighbours, the Howards, who had earlier commissioned Vanburgh to erect the splendid mansion of Castle Howard, setting for the television series Brideshead Revisited.

There is surely enough here to qualify Arthur Gordon's equation of stone-built houses with disinterest and probity. But, in challenging his value judgement, I do not wish to imply that the Yorkshire settlers were simply driven by a miserly refusal to meet their share of the costs of modernity. It is too easy to slip into the easy cultural stereotype that sees Yorkshire folk as people who are careful with their money. A a local rhyme puts it:

Hear all, see all, say nowt;

Eat all, sup all, pay nowt.5

There were other motives that led the Coates and Metcalf and Pipes families to Nova Scotia. And some of them looked back with nostalgia on the old land. "In my mind, I oftimes visit Rillington", Luke Harrison wrote to a cousin in his home village, thirty years after he had left. A century and a half later, the family of Mount Allison University President George J. Trueman still preserved the folk memory of an old farmhouse - stone-built of course - in Yorkshire's Cleveland Hills.6

The truth is that remarkably little is known about the Yorkshire settlers, especially in comparison with other and similar founding groups in the Maritimes. Thus any preliminary overview must be regarded as, at best, hypothesis and, at worst, guesswork and gossip. It is probable that, historiographically speaking, the Yorkshire settlers are simply waiting to be discovered. The Oxford English Dictionary did not catch up with the existence of the term "Acadian" until the twentieth century: if the francophone communities of the Maritimes were not exactly hidden from history, they were certainly invisible to lexicographers. It was not until the publication of Les Acadiens Des Maritimes in 1980 that there was a readily accessible overview of the their experience. The Americans who settled Nova Scotia in the 1760s were vaguely referred to as "pre-Loyalists" until 1988 when a ground-breaking academic conference taught us to call them "Planters".7

None the less, it is surprising that the Yorkshire contribution is so much less well-known that of near-contemporary arrivals such as the Foreign Protestants in Lunenburg, or the Pictou Scots.8 Above all, of course, they have been swamped in the pages of the history books by the Loyalists who arrived in a tidal wave a decade later. Consult the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entries for the dominant mid-nineteenth century politicians and time and again it is a Loyalist heritage that is stressed. From the Bay of Fundy hinterland, Samuel Leonard Tilley, Charles Fisher and Albert J Smith are New Brunswick examples; from Halifax the enduring figure of Joseph Howe. The Planter tradition produced two Prime Ministers of Canada, Charles Tupper and Robert Borden. By comparison, the impact of the Yorkshire settlers seems almost negligible. Few of the first generation arrivals commemorated in the DCB, and even William Black and Charles Dixon seem overshadowed by New England contemporaries like Henry Alline and Amos Botsford. We can make at least an indirect claim upon one of the Fathers of Confederation, Jonathan McCully from Colchester County in Nova Scotia, whose mother was a Yorkshire Pipes. Assessing the balance between paternal and maternal inheritance is always a matter for fine judgement. McCully's biographer tells us that he was driven by "poverty, ambition and determination, reinforced by a love of work and fidelity to duty", characteristics which he might equally have derived from his Ulster Protestant father. "He led a frugal life," we are also told, "and was close and exacting in money and business matters". Contemporaries regarded him as mean, but it was rather the case that McCully "always insisted on receiving to the full whatever he deemed himself entitled to, and invariably sought the fullest measure of protection for financial risks".8 Pejorative stereotype might brand McCully as very much the typical Yorkshireman, but such simplistic prejudice is surely shattered by the reflection that one of the most public-spirited Maritime dynasties, the Stansfields, was founded by a Yorkshireman. True, Charles Stanfield acted with predictable canniness when he tried to pipe steam from a nearby laundry to heat his Truro home, but in reality his triumphant career only throws into further relief the obscurity of the Chignecto settlers. The family that raised its own fighting unit in World War One (known as Stanfield's Unshrinkables) arrived in the region almost a century later, and hailed from Bradford in the manufacturing district of west Yorkshire, far from the rural recruiting grounds of the pioneer Yorkshire colonists.9

On the basis of a outline picture of those early Yorkshire settlers, what inferences can we make about them? How should we situate them in time and place? On what basis should we seek to assess their contribution to their new land? The band of time is precise and indeed narrow. The Yorkshire settlers came in the years immediately following 1772. According to J.B. Brebner, they came in eleven shiploads, on vessels with distinctively eighteenth-century names: The Two Friends, the Duke of York, the Lovely Nelly, the Albion and the William and Mary. Brebner thought they totalled "well over one thousand".10 Graeme Wynn opts for "approximately" one thousand; G.A. Rawlyk for "more than 750".11 The outbreak of the American war in 1775 - the Yorkshire settlers were pillaged during the rebel attack on Fort Cumberland - would seem not merely to have interrupted the emigration but to have halted it altogether. Bailyn gives some evidence of family reunion in the first few years but it does not appear that there was any continuing large-scale chain migration from the homeland. In this, the Yorkshire experience seems markedly to differ from that of the nearby and exactly contemporary Pictou Scots. Even more intriguingly. Bruce Elliott (pages XX-XX) suggests that there may have been a delayed action second wave of migration, one that tried to sputter into life after 1815, following not one but two wars.

We can also locate the Yorkshire settlers precisely in terms of place, both of origin and destination. Yorkshire is England's largest county, covering six thousand square miles, almost three times the size of Prince Edward Island, getting on for one-quarter the area of New Brunswick. Traditionally - indeed, until the local government so-called "reforms" of 1974 - it was divided into three "Ridings", North, East and West, each of the size of an average English county. The term "riding" originally meant "one-third", but in Ireland and in Upper Canada, it was adapted to refer to any internal division of a county. Since one of the most basic reasons for dividing a county was to provide additional elected representation in the Assembly, the term acquired the specific meaning of a parliamentary constituency in Canadian English. The three Ridings of Yorkshire are not only different from each other but each is also large enough to include much internal diversity. The North Riding embraces hill and dale country. The East Riding is mainly agricultural and low-lying, while in the West Riding the fast-flowing rivers and narrow valleys of the Pennines were already the basis of a flourishing water-powered textile industry. Yet even these descriptions are massive simplifications. The lush farming country of the Vale of York, for instance, sprawls into each of the three Ridings.

Yet both outsiders and natives feel that certain characteristics are shared by, and unique to Yorkshire people. The marshlands of the Humber estuary are very different from the hill farms of Wensleydale but all Yorkshire people are fiercely proud of their county. The Yorkshire cricket club continued to insist that all its players should have been born within the county long after all its rivals had given up on home-grown talent. In popular mythology, Yorkshire weather is as grim as Yorkshire people and places, although its famous inclemency is shared with its neighbour and equally damp rival, Lancashire. Juliana Horatia Ewing, wife of an army officer stationed in New Brunswick during the 1860s, hailed from Ecclesfield, near Sheffield which, her editors remark, "has the hard, cold, limited charm of a village devoted to the manufacture of nails, files, and forks". Her letters home appeal to stereotype. In the Fall of 1868, she contrasted Fredericton's "glorious autumn weather" with "the fogs of dear old Yorkshire". (The early settlers presumably felt at home in the mists of the Chignecto isthmus, even though they did not like the mosquitoes.) Yorkshire folk prided themselves on being practical and hard-working. When Juliana Ewing heard that Bishop Medley's wife required no fewer than three volunteer female helpers to lay on tea for the cathedral choir, her response was "they're not Yorkshire women then!".12

The clannish Yorkshire identity of seems to be reflected in the fact that the settlers of 1772-75 were so overwhelmingly drawn from a single county, even if it was a large one, and they tended to come mainly from the North and East Ridings. Perhaps this reflects the way in which the Methodist circuits operated, but in a group as large as one thousand people, one might have expected to have found fringe participants from Lincolnshire, or County Durham or even the heathendom of Lancashire.13 Roger Woodhouse (page XX-XX) gives us a partial exception in the Durham family of Colpitts, but even they had strong Yorkshire connections. The apparent sense of Yorkshire solidarity in the personnel of the migration makes it all the more curious that this movement of people lasted for such a short period, and was not resumed when peace returned to North America after 1783.

The concentration on North and East Riding origins points by inference to one other important quality in the migration. These were people determined to live as farmers and (unlike the poorer but more persistent Scots migrants), many of them had the means to establish themselves in the new land. As June Hall demonstrates (pages XX-XX), for the north of England the late eighteenth century was a crucial moment in the history of industrialisation. If, like so many other countryfolk in eighteenth-century England, they were simply people driven off the land, there were plenty of alternatives to overseas emigration available within rapidly urbanising Britain. For instance, Charles Dixon sailed for Nova Scotia in 1772 from Liverpool, on the west coast. To get there from his home in North Yorkshire, he probably travelled by way of Leeds and Manchester, rising industrial towns which could easily have absorbed his talents - all the more so since he had been apprenticed as a bricklayer and recently employed in running a paper-making factory. On his arrival in the colony, Dixon made his priorities clear. He purchased 2,500 acres at Sackville and began to exploit the cattle-raising potential of the Tantramar marshes.14

Emigration was always something of a lottery, not just in outcome but also in destination. Twenty years earlier, the Yorkshire emigrants might have headed for the Carolinas or the frontiers of Pennsylvania. In later decades, Australia or Upper Canada might have beckoned, not to mention Ohio or Illinois, or they might have helped found the English-speaking white settler community at the Cape. They came to Nova Scotia largely because Michael Francklin, the colony's habitually insolvent merchant prince, needed people to realise his investments in land. Francklin, in turn, has been assumed to have capitalised on his contacts with Robert Monckton, the army officer who had governed Nova Scotia in the 1760s and to whom, in mis-spelt form, Moncton New Brunswick owes its name. Monckton was a Yorkshireman and related to the Dukes of Rutland, improving - that is to say, extortionate - landlords in the county. We can be reasonably precise, too, about the Yorkshire settlers' destinations within Nova Scotia. There are indications of Yorkshire settlers in the Annapolis valley. In 1776 a Yorkshire club met in Halifax, but that was probably a garrison enterprise.15 Most Yorkshire settlers ended up on or near the Chignecto isthmus, where Monckton had commanded troops and ousted the French from Fort Beauséjour, and Francklin had secured his land grants.

That Chignecto context deserves a few words, since it embodies one of the great enigmas of Canadian history. The great historian, G.M. Trevelyan, once called 1848, Europe's year of revolutions, the historical turning point at which history failed to turn. Similarly, the Chignecto isthmus is the pivot on which - at least after the fall of Fort Beauséjour in 1755 - Canadian history has somehow failed to swing. New Brunswick, Chignecto's hinterland, has been the cross-roads of conflicting axes and pressures, alternatively north-south continental and east-west transcontinental. In the nineteenth century, it was in many ways the most American of provinces, the only part of what is now Canada to experiment with full-scale Prohibition and certainly the sole province in which a local politician had the nerve to put his own picture on a postage stamp.16 Yet in 1867, New Brunswick became the keystone province of an east-west Confederation that aimed to expand to the Pacific ocean. In the twentieth century, it proved itself to be the most Canadian province, indeed the only one to make itself constitutionally bilingual.

Somehow, even though the route of the Intercolonial railway was bound to run through Chignecto (where else could it go?), the region was lukewarm in seizing its destiny. True in 1867, Cumberland County was the sole Nova Scotia riding to return pro-Confederation candidates, but even that result was primarily a tribute to the local ascendancy of Charles Tupper. By contrast, while other New Brunswickers voted for Confederation in 1866, Westmorland was one of a handful of counties that stubbornly returned Antis. Albert J. Smith, the Lion of Westmorland, was profoundly ambiguous in his response to British North American nationhood.17 Chignecto's muted historical role is not simply the product of the rival pressures of the region's potential to develop either east-west or north-south. It was also caught within a more localised ambiguity that has consistently undermined Maritime solidarity, the rivalry between Saint John and Halifax. It is easy enough nowadays to forget that, at least until the great Saint John fire of 1877, there were two cities vying to become the regional capital of the Maritimes. The first substantial railway to be constructed in the provinces was not one that capitalised on the potential role of Halifax as the front door to central Canada, but rather Saint John's line to Shediac, in effect designed to by-pass the inconvenient obstacle of the isthmus by tapping direct into the Gulf. The subsequent decline of Saint John also helps to explain the non-appearance of one major project that could have underlined the pivotal role of Chignecto. Successive Welland canals were driven through the porous limestone ridge of the Niagara escarpment because a water route to Lakes Erie was perceived to be in the interests of both Toronto and Montreal. But despite the longtime agitation of the project, ships never sailed across the marshes from Amherst to Baie Verte, largely because such a canal would have enlarged the orbit of Saint John at the expense of Halifax.18

The settlers arrived not simply at a particular place - Chignecto - but at a precise moment in time, the early 1770s. That specific moment has made it possible to tell the Yorkshire story without much reference to two other founding communities who were in temporary eclipse or permanent decline. Most of the Acadians had been driven from Chignecto in 1756; by 1772 many were returning to the Maritime region, but not to their original farms. The newcomers benefited from Acadian pioneer work and Yorkshire settlers evidently quickly became expert in handling the aboîteau. Since most of them hailed from upland Yorkshire, it is unlikely (although Graeme Wynn argues to the contrary)19 that they had previously encountered the large-scale drainage engineering works necessary for the farming of the Fundy marshes. By 1772, another founding people was well on the way to marginalisation. To the Miqmaq, the swathe of land from Cumberland to Kent possessed a common geographical identity, Sigenigteoag, which European-imposed boundaries would soon disrupt. Their ability to control their territory had been badly dented when the British ousted the French in 1755 and put an end to the Aboriginal strategy of exploiting European divisions.20 None the less, Miqmaq and Maliseet remained in the area in 1772 - some of them joined Jonathan Eddy's attack on Fort Cumberland in 1776 - and it would be useful to know how far their attempts to maintain a traditional hunting economy brought them into conflict with the new arrivals from the north of England. Nor should we forget a third founding community, the Blacks, whose presence alongside the Yorkshire settlers was to some extent symbiotic, if distinctly involuntary.

The precise location of the settlers in place and time can be linked to other characteristics and historical implications. Many of the Yorkshire settlers were Methodists, caught up in the brushfire movement of personal salvation led by John Wesley which was particularly strong in the county. (The Yorkshire Quakers, discussed by Allen Robertson {pages XX-XX) were few in number and seem to have formed an entirely separate migration.) But in 1772, "Methodist" was still a nickname not a denomination. Unlike the Baptists and Quakers and Congregationalists of the seventeenth century, Wesley's followers still operated inside, or at least alongside, the official Church of England. Wesley himself stressed obedience to the established order, and it has been argued that his movement was a dynamic but essentially conservative outlet for otherwise revolutionary pressures. Hence the first generation of Yorkshire Wesleyans on Chignecto did not share the potentially republican religious philosophies that permeated the Protestantism of their New England neighbours.21 After 1784, William Black was to lead them more closely into alliance with the Methodist Episcopal Church of the new United States, not least because, as Shirley Dobson and Marilyn Whiteley demonstrate on pages XX-XX, XX-XX, Methodist organisation could not be sustained through unreliable long-distance links with England. In 1776, however, when Jonathan Eddy attacked Fort Cumberland, their primary loyalty remained to the British Crown.

Does this mean that for one brief but vivid moment in 1776, the Yorkshire settlers helped sway the fate of the northern half of the continent by helping to resist the American attack on Fort Cumberland - that, momentarily, Chignecto was indeed the pivot of North American history? This is certainly the moral implicit in the exciting tale told by Ernest A. Clarke on pages XX-XX. On balance, and with reluctance, I have to confess that I am not persuaded. The Yorkshire presence was an element in the local balance of power on the Chignecto isthmus but, even without them, it is unlikely that Eddy's ragbag mini-army would have overcome the British regular garrison. American military tactics throughout the War of Independence emphasised tactical withdrawal rather than dramatic strikes, especially those that leap-frogged hundreds of miles ahead of supplies and reinforcements. Even if Eddy had managed to grab Fort Cumberland in 1776, it is hardly likely that he could have held it. Peninsular Nova Scotia, after all, comes very close to the classic definition of an island, a piece of land entirely surrounded by the British Navy. Far from being key players at a crucial moment, the Yorkshire settlers were unlucky that the lottery of migration gave them a ringside seat that they could hardly have welcomed. Ironically, in the longer term the symbolic relationship may have operated in reverse. As Barbara Schmeisser demonstrates (pages XX-XX), in preserving Fort Cumberland, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board has actively revived the Yorkshire tradition: the people may not have saved the Fort, but the Fort has rescued the memory of the people.

In 1775, as the Yorkshire settlers were beginning to realise that it was not only mosquitoes that had the potential to make their new home unpleasant, the great orator Edmund Burke pleaded with the House of Commons to draw back from its confrontation with the American colonists. "I do not know," he famously remarked, "the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people."22 While we recognise that the twentieth century has given us grim confirmation of the folly against which Burke warned, we still slip into the supposedly benign form of racism that attributes positive qualities to entire communities, praising the people of this country or this region or that religion for their good humour or musical talent or intellectual creativity. A commemorative conference may be forgiven a tendency to celebrate, and it would be useful to suggest some ground-rules of assessment.

In the case of the first generation of Yorkshire settlers, it does seem legitimate to speak of shared and praiseworthy qualities, simply because the group seems to have been, to a considerable extent, self-selected: Yorkshire and agricultural, Methodist and loyal to Britain, hard-working and dedicated to material success. But through how many subsequent generations is it reasonable to continue to speak of Yorkshire settlers, to identify specific Yorkshire qualities and assess their contribution to Canadian life? It is an issue that bedevils scholarly consideration of better-known communities such as the Scots and the Irish in North America. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the descendant, through both his parents, of Irish Catholic immigrants, but what sense did it make to tag the Harvard-educated millionaire as an "Irish-American"? Equally, the conundrum that was William Lyon Mackenzie King was impeccably Scots in his ethnicity, but the mystery of Canada's longest-serving prime minister is hardly solved by giving him a hyphenated label. Few twentieth-century North Americans can claim such uncomplicated ancestry. As generation succeeds generation, so intermarriage gives people a range of potential identities. Because we embrace sometimes simplistic slogans in the attempt to define Canadian uniqueness, we have too eagerly persuaded ourselves that Canada is a mosaic in contrast the melting pot of the United States. If there is such a thing as a Canadian host community, it is by now an amalgam of many different ingredients, from Yorkshire to the Ukraine. Even the Canadian census has abandoned the sterile pursuit of classifying people according to the first male ancestor to arrive in the country. The most we are entitled to conclude is that a continuing Yorkshire contribution survives to the extent that people believe in its existence. Thus beliefs grounded in the imagination have an indirect validity. They may be local and folkloric, as affectionately portrayed by Helen Petchey in her invocation of Dorchester (pages XX-XX) or they may be essentially fictive, as embodied in the novels of Will R. Bird and analysed (pages XX-XX) by Gwendolyn Davies.

These reservations, of course, do not prevent us from pursuing the Yorkshire thread as far and as enthusiastically as we can through the pages of Canadian history. One doubt we can firmly put aside, and that is the suspicion that the Yorkshire settlers were too few to make a long-term impact in their new home country. Many of the formative populations of Canada were small. Most people are familiar with the statistic of a francophone population of 60,000-65,000 that was forcibly added to the British empire as a result of the Conquest of New France in 1759-63, a population that has flowered into six million French-speaking people in Quebec today. Of course the Quebec community has also absorbed outsiders but its demographers rightly insist that the francophone population of their province would have been even larger, perhaps by several million, had it not been for out-migration and assimilation.

Indeed, the miracle of la survivance is even more striking when we take account of the fact that there was little immigration to the St Lawrence valley in the eighteenth century, and that from 1673 the inflow of women from France averaged just three females each year. Indeed, the latest calculation of the metropolitan French contribution to the peopling of Quebec, la population fondatrice, is just 8,527.23 A memorable example is that of Pierre Tremblay, who arrived in 1647, married ten years later and fathered four sons. When the three-hundredth anniversary of his marriage was celebrated in 1957, there were 60,000 North Americans bearing the Tremblay surname.24 And, of course, since surnames usually descend through the male line, the total number of Tremblay descendants must run into hundreds of thousands. As George Redmonds demonstrates (pages XX-XX), we can learn a great deal from the study of surnames.

The same tale may be told on a smaller but perhaps even more astonishing scale here in Acadie. The survival of a francophone community in Quebec has much to do with safety in (growing) numbers within a physically compact territorial jurisdiction. None of these elements can account for the fact that around one-third of a million Maritimers speak French as their first language today. The first Acadian census, back in 1671, counted around 400 people and we can tell from the repetition of certain surnames - the Maillets and LeBlancs and Robidoux - that a large part of the modern Acadian community descends from a small cohort of pioneers. Acadie had to endure the disaster of the Deportation in 1756, but the Acadian returned, like a swallow to his nest. By the late eighteenth century there were about 7,000 of them in the Maritimes: they out-numbered the Yorkshire settlers, but they hardly overwhelmed them.25

The Acadians and the Québécois remain identifiable communities because they retain their mother tongue. The descendants of Nova Scotia's Foreign Protestants - about fourteen hundred of them were dumped at Lunenberg in 1754 - have gradually lost theirs, but German surnames survive as a reminder of their origins.26 The Black communities of the Maritimes remain a visible minority, even though their founding numbers were also small.27 Yorkshire immigration to Nova Scotia in that founding decade was probably about equal to the inflow from Scotland: the Hector brought just 179 Highlanders to Pictou on its famous voyage of 1773. Nova Scotia today trades heavily on its Scottish identity because the Scots not only continued to come but made a point of preserving the bagpipe and the ceilidh and (in some cases) the Gaelic. 28 By contrast, New Brunswick has made little touristic use of its Yorkshire heritage, presumably because Yorkshire immigration proved to be a relatively transient phenomenon.

So we return to our basic conundrum: why did the original community, so vigorous and determined in its cultural characteristics, apparently fail to leave a major long-term mark in the Maritimes? Even Mount Allison University, perhaps the greatest monument to Canadian Methodism, apparently owes its location in Sackville to the fact that the town was conveniently central for Wesleyans throughout the region. Charles Frederick Allison was an Ulsterman by descent, although he was married to a Trueman.29 Ironically, it was probably those same positive qualities, the input which we would expect to have carved them, in stone, into the history of the region, that explains their subsequent invisibility. English in speech, assertive in Protestant worship, fervent in their Loyalism, determined to make good: these Yorkshire characteristics were shared by those two larger and near-contemporary influxes of people to the Maritimes already noted. By the middle of the 1760s, at least 5,000 "Planters" had arrived in peninsular Nova Scotia, and they were followed in 1784 by the tsunami of perhaps 35,000 Loyalist refugees.30 The latter did not all remain, but enough of them stayed to shape the tone of New Brunswick life for a century to come. We should bear in mind that both the Planters and the Loyalists were already North Americans. Incomers rather than immigrants in the usual sense, they already knew all about the politics and social organisation of colonial life. In effect, they hit the ground running, not needing the generation of transition that was the hallmark of most newcomers from across the ocean. Maritime Loyalism, in short, seems to have blanketed and absorbed its Yorkshire cousins, and the children and grandchildren of the Chignecto settlers may even have welcomed their assimilation.

Yet one thousand people arriving between 1772 and 1775 must have begotten a far larger number of descendants today. If the population with Yorkshire genes doubled every thirty years from 1780, there would be 128,000 of them today. Assume a trebling, and the numbers would exceed three-quarters of a million. Of course, generations do not succeed each other in neat statistical patterns. William Blinkhorn brought four young children with him when he arrived in 1774. Six more were born on the Chignecto isthmus before his exhausted wife went to her grave, but Blinkhorn married again and there was one more child from the second marriage before his death in 1813.31 The eldest Blinkhorn children could have been parents while the youngest was still at school. We can make some estimates on the basis of Canada's two francophone communities: the Québécois have grown one hundred-fold in numbers since 1760, the Acadians have multiplied fifty times since 1800. Furthermore, the Acadian example should remind us that out of any large number of people of Maritime descent, a very large proportion will not be living in the region today. If there are fifty times as many French-speaking people in the Maritimes as in 1800, notwithstanding the massive outflow of Acadians to the Boston States, then we can be reasonably confident in guessing 100,000 and perhaps as many as a quarter of a million people of Yorkshire descent across North America today. But, alas, we must abandon the dream that somewhere in the interior of Westmorland County, anthropologists might one day stumble upon a pure Yorkshire community, still addressing one another as "thee" and "thou", stereotypically wearing clogs and serving pudding with their daily meal to reduce consumption of meat. If there are thousands of Yorkshire-Canadians and Yorkshire-Americans alive today, their significance lies not in their distinctiveness but in their absorption to the mainstream of North America. Many are probably not even aware of a descent that perhaps jostles with those more assertive ancestries, such as Scots, Irish, Loyalist or French. If we are to assess the longer-term contribution of the Yorkshire settlers, we must seek it within the larger history of the New Brunswick into which they so quickly blended.

And so I return to the irritable young governor staring with studied disapproval from the windows of Government House in Fredericton on New Year's Eve of 1862 over a province that he did not much like. In the pages of Canadian history, there is a profound duality of attitude towards the governors who came over from Britain, a duality that is all the more influential for being largely unspoken. One stereotype sees them as members of the innermost circle of the British establishment, men whose first call upon returning "home" would be to drop in for sherry with the great statesman, W.E. Gladstone, and catch up on the latest inside gossip of Westminster politics.32 The other views them as chinless ne'er-do-wells, offshoots of the British upper classes packed off to a job in the colonies, because they were too fatuous even for the low standards of an effete aristocracy. Few governors came close to conforming to either of these stereotypes. Most were able men (usually supported by impressively dogged womenfolk) who were either short of cash or who lacked the influence necessary to secure appointments in Britain appropriate to their talents. Hence few of them were either friends of Gladstone or puppies of the aristocracy. Arthur Gordon was highly unusual in being both.33

In fact, in the two decades before Confederation, The British empire was represented in New Brunswick by three successive governors who combined considerable ability with close links to the heart of social and political power. Sir Edmund Head, who reigned from 1848 to 1854, was a former Oxford don, authority on European painting and close friend of a senior Whig party politician, George Cornewall Lewis. Head became a senior civil servant in a government agency, the Poor Law Commission, that proved to be so efficient - not a common characteristic of government in his day, and definitely not a popular one - that it was abolished. Compensation took the form of appointment to New Brunswick. His manner was frigid: years later, when Head was appointed to run the Hudson's Bay Company, usually thought of as presiding over a sub-Arctic wasteland, the Nova Scotian tribune Joseph Howe predicted that he would "chill it to death". D.G.G. Kerr rightly calls him "the scholarly governor".34 In New Brunswick, he contemplated editing Aristotle's Politics, in the hope that this Greek classic would throw light upon the twin problems of slavery and federal government that threatened the United States. Instead, he wrote a book on the future tense of the verb "to be", which even he described as "very dull".35 Head thought that "the most striking defect" of New Brunswick public life was "the want of honest & efficient public opinion in money transactions". He kept a close eye on local politicians "& they know by experience that they cannot play tricks". In his opinion, "the presence of an English gentleman acting as Governor" provided "a wholesome check" on the corrupt tendencies of local politicians.36

Head concluded that "it would be difficult to find a worse specimen of a Colonial Legislature than the one I am blessed with".37 Towards the end of his term confessed himself "very much provoked" by what he regarded as their "utter ignorance of the proper sphere for legislation". New Brunswick's elected representatives were attempting to deal with the problem of widespread over-indulgence in alcohol by legislating it out of existence. Head was delighted when his prediction that the Temperance Act of 1853 would multiply "unlicensed & unregenerate grog-shops by twenty" was borne out by events.38 It was left to his successor, John Henry Manners Sutton, to deal with the chaos caused by the more stringent law that imposed full Prohibition on the province in 1856.39

If Head was part of Britain's intellectual aristocracy, Manners Sutton came from the very heart of social and political eminence. He was a descendant of the Duke of Rutland, the rack-renting landlord of eighteenth-century Yorkshire. His grandfather had been Archbishop of Canterbury, the senior bishopric in the Anglican Church. His father had served as Speaker of the House of Commons, making him England's First Commoner, and was seen as a possible compromise prime minister during the crisis over parliamentary reform in 1831-32. Manners Sutton himself had entered politics, but his career had been halted by his inability to keep a seat in parliament. New Brunswick was very much a backwater, and his distaste is clear from his surviving private correspondence - which, incidentally, his ministers demanded the right to censor.40 Unlike Head, who had manipulated the rival personalities of local politics, Manners Sutton found himself faced with a coherent political party, the Liberals or "Smashers" (not so-called from any attractive features), who were organised around the campaign for Prohibition. The governor did manage to out-manoeuvre his ministers and force the repeal of the law against drink. Ironically, the result of this was merely to strengthen his tormentors. Like Alberta's Social Credit party in a later era, the Smashers held on to power partly because their enemies had done them the favour of liberating them from the incubus of their most eccentric policy.

Manners Sutton condemned a growing feature of New Brunswick public life, the politics of the pork barrel.41 The Maritimes were facing the new technological challenge of railway building. In New Brunswick, the response of the politicians was not so much to build a few main-line railways as to promise to construct branch lines in every single riding. The process reached its apogee in 1864 with the passage of the "Lobster Act", so-called because it pledged taxpayers' money in support of as many railway lines as a lobster had claws.42 It was this endemic localism that especially irritated Arthur Gordon, who arrived early in 1861 to take over from Manners Sutton.

Two formative influences shaped the young Gordon. The first was that he was born right at the heart of British politics. His father, the Earl of Aberdeen, was twice foreign secretary and from 1852 to 1855 held the highest office of all, Prime Minister of Great Britain and ruler of its mighty empire. Secondly, Gordon's upbringing had been unusually sheltered, helping to make him a precious, selfish, priggish person. He was the youngest child of his father's second marriage, and entered the world in 1829 just as Lord Aberdeen buried the last of the children of his first marriage. The second Lady Aberdeen died when Arthur was a small boy, and he himself was judged too sickly to be sent away to school.43 An exasperated British cabinet minister later regretted that "he has not acquired more experience from the rubs & kicks which we usually acquire either at public schools, or in fighting our way up in early life".44 Instead, Gordon was reared by his father. But Lord Aberdeen, like so many aristocrats, was incapable of showing the love he undoubtedly felt. Young Arthur was in awe of his father, and always referred to him, even in his own private diary, as "His Lordship". The human product was a young man who was wilful, petulant and emotionally stunted. Shortly before leaving for New Brunswick, Gordon fell in love with Gladstone's daughter, Agnes. Astonishingly, he persuaded Mrs Gladstone to ask Agnes if she would marry him, but Agnes understandably recoiled from the thought.45 "Outing" the living is an invasion of privacy, and outing the dead is equally distasteful. However, there is at least a possibility that Gordon was gay or bisexual, and that his acerbic attitude to the world was a product of an inability to come to terms with his own sexuality in a repressive era.46

Notwithstanding their emotional blocks, father and son were very close. In 1852, Gordon had left Cambridge University, where his nickname in the Union debating society was "Alexis Gorgon", and was toying with the idea of becoming a clergyman: High Church rituals appealed to his gloomy sense of the theatrical.47 Suddenly, his father acceded to the highest office in the land at the head of a coalition government. In 1846, the Conservative party had fractured into two factions over the question of free trade. In the split, Lord Aberdeen had followed his friend Sir Robert Peel, but Peel was killed in a riding accident four years later. Since Britain's liberal elite could not govern on its own, the logic of politics pointed to an alliance of free-trade forces of Whigs and Peelites. Lord Aberdeen seemed the ideal compromise leader, since he was an elder statesman who had devoted most of his career to foreign policy which placed him above the hurly-burly of domestic controversy.48

The nearest equivalent in modern Canadian politics, and it is only an approximation, would be a coalition between Grits and Red Tories. No doubt they would share similar political philosophies but we can imagine the difficulties of overcoming entrenched personal animosities. So it was with Lord Aberdeen's coalition cabinet. Matters were not helped when the ministry drifted into a war with Russia that revealed, in the disasters of the Crimean campaign, the startling inefficiency of almost every branch of the British government.49

For young Gordon, it was an exciting time. In the snake-pit of coalition politics, Lord Aberdeen needed a confidant, someone he could trust implicitly. Son Arthur filled the bill, and took the unofficial role of his father's private secretary.50 In 1854 he entered the House of Commons thanks to a by-election in the Yorkshire town of Beverley. It was not simply that a great political career was in prospect. In the headstrong imagination of Arthur Gordon, majestic political eminence had already arrived. There is little doubt that he saw himself not just as private secretary but as a sort of Assistant Prime Minister. Later, in New Brunswick, he conducted himself not so much as a servant of the Empire but rather as an autonomous Viceroy. Certainly he resented instructions from politicians in London who, in his opinion, had been his subordinates in the days of the Aberdeen coalition.51 Sad to relate, the dream crumbled in 1855, when Lord Aberdeen's government broke up and his small band of supporters went into limbo. Arthur Gordon did not even defend his seat at the general election of 1857. For him, as for Manners Sutton, New Brunswick was a very small prize indeed.52

Like his predecessors, Gordon had a low opinion of New Brunswick politics and politicians. "As a rule", he assured Gladstone, "to be a member of the Assembly is a proof that a man is uneducated and is not a gentleman."53 Alas, there was much to be said for his point of his view. Charles Fisher had been caught using ministerial office to help himself to public lands. "In most countries, such conduct would have excluded him from public life for a long period if not for ever", Gordon wrote gloomily, but in New Brunswick there was "a defective moral sense which leads people to consider such proceedings as 'smartness', not as crime". Fisher was regarded "as a victim, rather than as a culprit". The Duke of Newcastle was sympathetic, but he gently advised Gordon to accept Fisher back in office as the price of responsible government, even though Newcastle regarded Fisher as "one of the worst public men in the British North American provinces".54 That was written before the capital of the Empire encountered Albert J. Smith who, in the Missaguash affair, pushed through legislation that blatantly favoured a client of his own legal practice. Gordon over-ruled his minister, and Newcastle added a frigid rebuke. Smith hit back in a public letter, bluntly telling the Duke that: "I am responsible ... to the Legislature and people of the Province, and not to you."55

To Gordon, that was precisely the problem. "Public opinion there is really none."56 Where members of the British parliament saw themselves as trustees for the welfare of the whole Empire, the legislators of New Brunswick were animated by a desire to protect local interests. "The different counties hate each other", he reported, illustrating the spirit of localism with the story of the member for Charlotte County, in the far south-west of New Brunswick. "When a bill's before this house I always whats it going to do for Charlotte. I ain't got anything to do with the Province - I sits here for Charlotte". If proposed legislation would benefit New Brunswick as a whole but harm the interests of his county, "then says I, 'I go in for Charlotte'" - and vice versa. Only one topic seemed to bring everybody together: "they all unite in hating & abusing Halifax, but it does not appear to me that they have any strong feeling ... as New Brunswickers".57

Worst of all was the open corruption of provincial elections. Gordon was shocked when G.L. Hatheway joked at an official Government House dinner that his York County voters had cost him a guinea apiece, implying that he had better quality supporters than a cabinet colleague who had purchased support in a cheaper riding for a mere three and sixpence a head. (At the time, New Brunswick had not gone over to dollars and cents: some people felt that guineas and shillings were more British.) Even an unsuccessful candidate might spend as much as one thousand pounds, clear proof that election to the legislature was a good investment for money.58

The New Brunswick that was viewed with such disfavour from the windows of Government House was at least in part the province inherited from the original Yorkshire settlers. William Blinkhorn had died in 1813, Charles Dixon two years later, William Black in 1834. New Brunswick in 1862 was barely a generation away from these pioneers. But if the gubernatorial verdict was bleak, it should not be regarded as totally conclusive. True, it was another hundred years before the politics of the pork barrel arrived in Britain. In 1966, the government of Yorkshireman Harold Wilson held office thanks to a wafer-thin three-seat majority in the House of Commons when it had to defend a highly marginal seat in a Yorkshire by-election, at Hull North. During the campaign, the government promised to build a bridge across the Humber estuary, almost certainly the first time such a blatant bribe had been made for a specific electoral purpose.59 When the Humber Bridge was completed, fifteen years later, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It links the outer Hull suburb of Anlaby to the small Lincolnshire community of Barton-upon-Humber and, as the rest of Britain ossifies into gridlock, it does not carry a great deal of traffic. However, it is not necessary to be ideologically left-wing to recognise that, in turning their backs upon the pork-barrel, British politicians like Arthur Gordon were not as disinterested as they liked to pretend. They represented a class, an upper class mainly composed of landowners. If they were too proud to dirty their hands grubbing for local advantage, it was partly because the interests of landowners were much the same in Scotland or Yorkshire or Ireland.

Denunciations of the corruption of New Brunswick public life should also be put into perspective. Manners Sutton became a colonial governor because his political career in Britain was halted by failure to hold on to a seat in parliament. He was first elected in 1839 for the borough of Cambridge. The campaign was dirty, and he was unseated for bribery. It was, of course, the convention that a gentleman did not bribe voters himself, but there were certain constituencies in which votes were bought and sold so openly that it would beggar belief to claim that a candidate did not know what was being done on his behalf. At Cambridge, it was accepted practice to secure doubtful supporters by paying them fancy wages for such responsible services as carrying party banners, and it was well known that many voters simply sold their votes. It was a Cambridge voter of 1839, not some New Brunswick settler ignorant of the true spirit of parliamentary government, who insisted that "it was very immaterial to a poor man which way he voted, for Whigs and Tories were both a bad lot".60 Cambridge elections became so controversial that a full-scale Royal Commission was established to lift the lid on them in 1853. It was then that a witness explained that Manners Sutton had been a popular candidate because, as an undergraduate at the University, he had made many friends in the town. This was a perverse interpretation of town-gown relations, but presumably it explained why the Manners Sutton camp provided lavish entertainment to so many Cambridge voters. Despite being penalised for bribery, he got in again for Cambridge in 1841, but lost the seat six years later in an election campaign that astonished observers for the absence of corruption.61 We should draw a veil over any causal relationship.

If there was a bad odour from Cambridge, Beverley was notoriously an electoral cesspool.62 Gordon had an easy ride into Parliament in 1854, perhaps because Beverley voters saw the potential advantages in having the prime minister's son as their local representative. There was a rival candidate and Gordon feared the contest, explaining to Gladstone that "as I am determined to spend no money I fear I shall probably be beaten".63 It is likely that somebody handed out cash on Gordon's behalf. An official enquiry in 1868 concluded that "the system of corruption and bribery has been going on time out of mind" in the town, and that it was "impossible to arrest or counteract it". Even more remarkable, in 1857 a Yorkshire textile manufacturer called Henry Edwards actually began to buy up the whole town in order to be elected as its MP. Gordon sensibly abandoned the seat.64

A decade later, the novelist Anthony Trollope was the unsuccessful Liberal candidate in the borough's final election: so great was the scandal on this occasion that Beverley was deprived of its right to return members of parliament at all. The Beverley election campaign, "the most wretched fortnight of my manhood", forms an angry chapter in Trollope's Autobiography. In language remarkably similar to Gordon's diatribes against colonial democracy, Trollope raged against his subjection "to a bitter tyranny from grinding vulgar tyrants" - by which he meant his supporters. They cared not a jot for his political ideas and laughed in his face when he announced that he would not countenance bribery. His campaign manager asked him for a cheque for £400, and Trollope noted with cold sarcasm that his costs came to just that total sum. The subsequent enquiry estimated that 800 of Beverley's voters were open to corruption and that 600 of them could be proved to have given or received bribes in recent elections - and Beverley was not a large town. "It had come to pass that political cleanliness was odious to the citizens", Trollope concluded.65 No doubt Arthur Gordon was above such practices, and it is a tribute either to his large principles or his small purse that he abandoned the seat without a fight in 1857. All the same, Gordon's denunciations of New Brunswick politics can be read in a different light once we take account of his own political antecedence. For someone who had represented Beverley to condemn the corruption of New Brunswick politics does sound remarkably like the pot abusing the pigmentation of the kettle.

The Yorkshire town of Beverley brings us full circle to the image of stone buildings that so vividly symbolised Gordon's condemnations of New Brunswick. The association between moral worth and building in stone came naturally to the young governor. His family home, Haddo House in the north-east of Scotland, was grim and rectangular. When Gordon's father had inherited the estate, he had found his tenantry living in squalid cabins. His son proudly related that on almost 900 farms, Lord Aberdeen had built "a comfortable and substantial, if remarkably ugly, house and farm buildings of granite".66 For Gordon, it came naturally to equate stone with integrity, granite with eternity. But in evaluating the extent to which his value-judgements applied to New Brusnwick, we should surely ask: why, in a province covered in trees, should settlers be expected to build in anything other than timber? True, buildings constructed from stone proved to be durable. The Macdonald Farm on the New Brunswick north shore was one of the few structures to survive the great Miramichi fire of 1825; the Bell Inn at Dorchester remains a tourist attraction to this day. Stone represented probity and security: hence in 1826, the Bank of New Brunswick chose to build a stone structure in downtown Saint John.67 In other instances, the use of stone seems to have symbolised a determination to resist adaptation to locality. In Fredericton, Government House and the military barracks were intended to symbolise the visible presence and permanence of the British Empire. Gordon was not alone in likening the original Arts Block of the University to a barracks:68 here stone construction was a way of signalling that King's College intended to impose the uncompromising irrelevance of an Oxford-style classical curriculum upon a pioneer province. Bishop Medley expressed the rigidity of external inspiration even more directly by building a cathedral copied from the Anglican church in a Norfolk village.

On what basis, then, should we assess the long-term contribution of an immigrant community? If we are to praise those who uphold their values and maintain their way of life in a new country, then we should be driven to regarding as Canada's most successful immigrants the Hutterites of the prairies, who not only practise the religion they brought from Europe, but continue to speak their sixteenth-century language while refusing to adopt modern dress. At the other extreme, to vaunt assimilation as the touchstone of long-term achievement is to award the prize to invisibility. From the study of material culture, James Snowdon (pages XX-XX) places the Yorkshire settlers firmly in the latter camp: the first generation remained wedded to the artefacts they had brought with them, but their successors proved remarkably flexible in adaptation. In a landmark article on Maritime vernacular architecture, Peter Ennals and Deryck Holdsworth argued that the adherence of Yorkshire immigrants and Pictou Scots to homeland traditions of building - in stone of course - forms part of "a strongly persistent conservative strain" in regional architecture. But they also noted that "these building traditions quickly gave way" to cheaper and more technically convenient timber construction.69 In this collection (pages XX-XX), they elaborate their analysis, adding the intriguing suggestion that even by the time of the building of Keilor House, in 1813, stone construction represented a nostalgic attempt to recapture a vanishing sense of Yorkshire tradition.

The rapid integration of the Yorkshire settlers, indeed their virtual invisibility within modern Canada - these are qualities that might prompt doubters to wonder why they should be disinterred and remembered at all. There is in fact one further aspect of the Yorkshire settlement of the 1770s that merits celebration, an aspect that is directly related to their absorption into the mainstream. Phillip Buckner has recently made us appreciate the extent to which, demographically speaking, British North America before 1815 was very doubtfully "British" indeed.70 Most of its founding settler populations were drawn from France or from the American colonies, seasoned with specific groups drawn from Germany, Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. The label "English-Canadian" is of course primarily a linguistic definition, while "Scots-Canadian" implies a geographical point of reference. English-speaking settlers had already reached the Maritimes, from the American colonies and from Ulster, and Scots merchants had begun to infiltrate French Canada a decade earlier. There had long been overwintering settlers from England's West Country in Newfoundland. Yet in a very particular sense, the Yorkshire settlers were the first English Canadians: that is, they were the first substantial group to arrive in mainland Canada from England itself. Thus they were not simply the pioneers of Helen Petchey's Dorchester but in a larger sense, one of the symbolic founding groups of the English Canada of today. It is no wonder that they have merged into their own creation.
 
 
ENDNOTES

1. Ottawa, National Archives of Canada [NAC], Newcastle Papers, reel A-309, Gordon to Newcastle, private, 12 September 1862.

2. London, Public Record Office [PRO], CO 188/137, Gordon to Newcastle, confidential, 31 December 1862, fos 341-365, esp. fo. 356, and Minutes at fos 365-366; Fredericton, University of New Brunswick [UNB], Stanmore Papers, Reel 3, Gordon to Wilberforce (copy), early 1865.

3. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1966), esp. pp. 374-390, 406-429.

4. Nicholas Pevsner, The Buildings of England; Yorkshire, The West Riding (Harmondsworth, 1959), pp. 375-376 for Newby Hall; J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses: Part II from 1752 to 1900, vol. 6 (Cambridge, 1954), p. 393 for Weddell.

5. I owe this to the late G.N. Sanderson.

6. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, pp. 411, 422.

7. Jean Daigle, rédacteur, Les Acadiens des Maritimes: Etudes thématiques (Moncton, 1980); Margaret Conrad, ed., They Planted Well: New England Planters in Maritime Canada (Fredericton 1988); Conrad, ed., Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in Planter Nova Scotia (Fredericton, 1991).

8. Winthrop P. Bell, The "Foreign Protestants" and the Settlement of Nova Scotia (Sackville, 1990 ed. L.D. McCann); Donald MacKay, Scotland Farewell: The People of the Hector (Toronto, 1980). See also J.M. Bumsted, "Scottish Emigration to the Maritimes 1770-1815: A New look at an Old Theme", Acadiensis, 10 (1981), pp. 65-85.

9. N.H. Meagher, "The Life of Hon. Jonathan McCully 1809-1877", Nova Scotia Historical Society Collections, 21 (1927), pp. 73-114, esp. pp. 73, 76-77. Geoffrey Stevens, Stanfield (Toronto, 1973), p. 15. Yorkshire surnames also seem to be absent for a study of the local business elite a century after the migration: Dean Jobb, "Sackville Promotes a Railway: The Politics of the New Brunswick and Prince Edward Railway 1872-1886", in Larry McCann, ed., People and Place: Studies of Small Town Life in the Maritimes (Fredericton, 1987), pp.31-58.

10. J.B. Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia (Toronto, 1969 ed. W.S. MacNutt), p. 101. The ships are named in Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, pp. 384, 406-408, 414-415.

11. Graeme Wynn, "Pre-Loyalist Nova Scotia", Historical Atlas of Canada, I, Plate 31; George A. Rawlyk, Nova Scotia's Massachusetts: A Study in Massachusetts-Nova Scotian Relations 1630 to 1784 (Montreal, 1978), p. 222. See also the estimate of "about 1,000" settlers from Yorkshire in C.B. Fergusson, "Pre-Revolutionary Settlements in Nova Scotia", Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, 36 (1970), pp. 5-22.

12. M.H. Blom and T.H. Blom, eds, Canada Home: Juliana Horatia Ewing's Fredericton Letters 1867-1869 (Vancouver, 1983), pp. ix, 195, 130.

13. For the origins of the settlers within Yorkshire, see maps in Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, pp. 375, 382. George Redmonds (pp. XX-XX) argues that surnames are mostly characteristic of the North Riding.

14. For Charles Dixon, see Dictionary of Canadian Biography [DCB], 5, pp. 257-258.

15. Brebner, Neutral Yankees, pp. 143, 174.

16. W.S. MacNutt, New Brunswick A History: 1784-1867 (Toronto, 1984 ed.), p. 373.

17. Carl Wallace, "Albert J. Smith, Confederation and Reaction in New Brunswick 1852-1882", Canadian Historical Review, 44 (1963), pp. 285-312.

18. Nicolas Landry, "Transport et régionalisme en contexte préindustriel: le projet du canal de la baie Verte, 1820-1870", Acadiensis, 24 (1994), pp. 59-87.

19. Graeme Wynn, "Late Eighteenth-Century Agriculture on the Bay of Fundy Marshlands", Acadiensis, 8 (1979), pp. 80-89, esp. p. 87.

20. For Sigenigteoag, see L.F.S. Upton, Micmacs and Colonists: Indian-White Relations in the Maritimes, 1713-1867 (Vancouver, 1979), p. 8. Chignecto Micmac remained a political factor at least until 1778, p. 76.

21. Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London, 1974 ed.); DCB, 6, pp. 62-68 for William Black.

22. Burke's speech of 22 March 1775 is widely reprinted, e.g. in P.McKevitt, ed., Edmund Burke: Speeches and Letters on American Affairs (London, 1908 ed.), pp. 76-141.

23. Hubert Charbonneau and Normand Robert, "The French Origins of the Canadian Population, 1608-1759", Historical Atlas of Canada, I, Plate 45.

24. R.D. Francis, R. Jones and D.B. Smith, Origins: Canadian History to Confederation (Toronto, 1972 ed.), p. 87.

25. Muriel K. Roy, "Peuplement et croissance démographique en Acadie", in Daigle, réd., Les Acadiens des Maritimes, pp. 135-151.

26. Bell argued in 1961 that although the German language was "completely forgotten in Lunenburg County", it had left "traces in peculiarities of the English spoken" (Bell, ed. McCann, Foreign Protestants, pp. 585-586). German surnames also survive in the region.

27. The first Blacks in the Maritimes are usually associated with the Loyalists, e.g. James W. St G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870 (Toronto 1992 ed.) and see the "Forum" debate in Acadiensis, 29 (1999), pp. 76-105 between Walker and Barry Cahill. There were Blacks at Amherst by 1770, and at least one slave within the later boundaries of New Brunswick by 1767. Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: a History (Montreal, 1997 ed.), pp. 27-28.

28. Ian MacKay, "Tartanism Triumphant: The Construction of Scottishness in Nova Scotia, 1933-1954", Acadiensis, 21 (1992), pp. 5-47.

29. DCB, 8, pp. 15-16 for Charles Francis Allison.

30. Examples of scholarly attention to the arrival of the Loyalists include Neil MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil the Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia 1783-1791 (Kingston and Montreal, 1986) and D.G. Bell, Early Loyalist Saint John: The Origins of New Brunswick Politics 1783-1786 (Fredericton, 1986). For the question of commemoration, see M. Barkley, "The Loyalist Tradition in New Brunswick", Acadiensis, 4 (1975), pp. 3-45.

31. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, p. 407.

32. Sir Edmund Head reported that he was regarded as "a kind of prophet" in Fredericton when, on the basis of his political connections in London, he predicted that Lord Aberdeen would become Prime Minister as a result of the political crisis of December 1852. National Library of Wales [NLW], Harpton Court Collection [HCC], C/1523, Head to Lewis, 24 January 1853.

33. J.K. Chapman, The Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon: First Lord Stanmore 1829-1912 (Toronto, 1964); Paul Knaplund, ed., The Gladstone-Gordon Correspondence, 1851-1896 (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 51, part 4, Philadelphia, 1961).

34. D.G.G. Kerr, Sir Edmund Head: A Scholarly Governor (Toronto, 1954).

35. Kerr, Sir Edmund Head, pp. 84, 115.

36. NLW, HCC, C/1516, Head to Lewis, 2 March 1850; Alice R. Stewart, "Sir Edmund Head's Memorandum of 1857 on Maritime Union: A Lost Confederation Document", Canadian Historical Review, 26 (1945), pp. 406-419, esp. p. 414.

37. NLW, HCC, C/1521, Head to Lewis, 4 June 1851. The extensive quotations from this private correspondence in Kerr's biography do point up by contrast the tendency to omit Head's sharper comments on local politics.

38. NLW, HCC, C/1532, Head to Lewis, 4 April 1854.

39. J.K. Chapman, "The Mid-Nineteenth Century Temperance Movements in New Brunswick and Maine", Canadian Historical Review, 35 (1954), pp. 43-60.

40. Peter B. Waite, "The Fall and Rise of the Smashers, 1856-1857: Some Private Letters of Manners-Sutton", Acadiensis, 2 (1972), pp. 65-70. At Confederation, Manners Sutton insisted that his confidential despatches be moved from Fredericton to the custody of the Governor-General. ("Double-barrelled" surnames were becoming common among the British upper classes in the mid-nineteenth century, but were not generally hyphenated until much later. Thus Arthur Hamilton Gordon's son was George Hamilton-Gordon.)

41. Waite, "The Fall and Rise of the Smashers", p. 67.

42. MacNutt, New Brunswick A History, p. 413.

43. Chapman, Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, pp. 3-4.

44. NAC, Monck Papers, Reel A-755, Cardwell to Monck, private, 29 July 1865.

45. Knaplund, ed., Gladstone-Gordon Correspondence, pp. 7, 38.

46. Gordon's marriage in 1865 to Charlotte Shaw-Lefevre was presumably arranged during his visit "home" in 1864, but the fact that the engagement was kept very quiet until the last minute suggests at the very least a long-range courtship. At the age of 16, Gordon apparently formed a romantic attachment to his nephew, but this was perhaps a passing teenage phase. The nephew, who remained a close friend, became Earl de Grey who attempted to browbeat Sir John A. Macdonald into concessions during negotiations for the Treaty of Washington. Chapman, Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, p. 4; D.G. Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Old Chieftain (Toronto, 1955), pp. 83-100.

47. "John Smith" [J.D. Lewis], Sketches of Cantabs (London, 1849), pp. 39-41; Chapman, Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, pp.7-10.

48. J.B. Conacher, The Aberdeen Coalition 1852-1855: A Study in Mid-Nineteenth Century Party Politics (London, 1968); Conacher, The Peelites and the Party System (London, 1972).

49. Olive Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics During the Crimean War (London, 1967).

50. Chapman, Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, pp.10-11. For Gordon's role as his father's assistant, Conacher, Aberdeen Coalition, pp. 358-359, 531-533, 548.

51. Gordon complained that Cardwell "never forgets that the relative positions of master and man have not always been what they are now". Chapman, Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, p. 36.

52. Gordon grumbled that he was "the only joint in that short tail which has been permanently dislocated!" UNB, Stanmore Papers, Reel 4, Gordon to Wilberforce, 8 November 1864.

53. Gordon to Gladstone, January 1864, in Knaplund, ed., Gladstone-Gordon Correspondence, p. 42 and quoted Chapman, Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, p. 42.

54. PRO, CO 188/137, Gordon to Newcastle, confidential, 31 December 1862, fo. 345.

55. DCB, 11, p. 829.

56. PRO, CO 188/137, Gordon to Newcastle, confidential, 31 December 1862, fo. 361.

57. UNB, Stanmore Papers, Reel 3, Gordon to Monck, copy, 8 May 1862 and Knaplund, ed., Gladstone-Gordon Correspondence, pp. 42-43, also quoted Chapman, Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, p. 26.

58. PRO, CO 188/137, Gordon to Newcastle, confidential, 31 December 1862, fo. 344, identified as Hatheway in Knaplund, ed., Gladstone-Gordon Correspondence, p. 41.

59. A cabinet minister was given the task of claiming that the bridge formed part of a pre-planned regional strategy and was not "a last-minute bribe". Richard Crossman, The Crossman Diaries: Selections from the Diaries of a Cabinet Minister 1964-1970 (London, 1979, ed. Anthony Howard), p. 158.

60. N. Gash, Politics in Age of Peel (Hassocks, Sussex, 1977 ed.), p. 152.

61. The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: 3, The City and University of Cambridge (ed. J.P.C. Roach, London, 1959), pp. 75-76.

62. According to a contemporary electoral handbook, Beverley voters "chiefly obeyed the moneyed interest". H.J. Hanham, ed., Electoral Facts from 1832 to 1853 Impartially Stated (Hassocks, Sussex, 1972), p. 28.

63. Gordon to Gladstone, 27 July 1854, in Knaplund, ed., Gladstone-Gordon Correspondence, p. 16.

64. H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (Hassocks, Sussex, 1978 ed.), pp. 265-266; Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (New Haven, 1915), p. 388.

65. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (London 1962, ed. J.B. Priestley), pp. 236-239 (chapter 16).

66. Arthur Gordon, The Earl of Aberdeen (London, 1893), p. 109.

67. T.W. Acheson, Saint John: The Making of a Colonial Urban Community (Toronto 1985), facing p. 16.

68. UNB, Stanmore Papers, Reel 4, Diary, 4 November 1861.

69. Peter Ennals and Deryck Holdsworth, "Vernacular Architecture and the Cultural Landscape of the Maritime Provinces: A Reconnaissance", Acadiensis, 10 (1981), pp. 86-106.

70. Phillip A. Buckner, English Canada - The Founding Generations: British Migration to British North America 1815-1865 (London, Canada House Lecture, no. 53, 1993). Dr Buckner reminds me that the founders of Halifax in 1749 included elements from the cosmopolitan population of London.