Coalminer’s Grand-daughter Part 1 – A UK Migration Story from Norfolk to Yorkshire

14 MINUTE READ

 Not all migration is across international borders or across the seas. The history of the British Isles is full of personal stories of individuals and families travelling across the landscape in search of a better life. In the days before modern travel, moving from one part of the country to another would have been as difficult and daunting as cross continents. cross-cultural author Yang-May Ooi talks to Rachel* about the experiences of her grandfather who migrated from Norfolk to Yorkshire at the dawn of the 20th century. [This story first appeared on MetroWild and has been slightly edited for Belonging Across Cultures.]

Coalminer’s Grand-daughter Part 1 – A Migrant in Yorkshire

World events led my family to migrate from China to Malaya (as it then was) and later, further afield to North America, Australia and here to the UK. Those world events were inextricably linked to landscape, climate and nature – the Opium Wars, bad harvests, the international trade in tea. My family is not unique, millions of people throughout history have migrated or been displaced by forces beyond their control, some human-driven, some ecological.

I am fascinated by the history of ordinary lives. Each family bears within it experiences down the generations of trauma and joy, failure and success, despair and hope. We are the sum of all those experiences, whether expressed in the stories passed down to us by our parents or our parents’ parents – or silently borne within our hearts. And even if we do not tell our stories out loud, they are still there inside us – and we pass them on to the generations to come through what we say, what we do and how we are in the world and through what we value, or fear. 

Not from Around Here

Whatever your ethnicity or other variable, we are all from somewhere. Sometimes, it’s here, where you and I might be meeting for the first time and having a chat. Other times, it’s somewhere else. You may have moved here for work or for love. Or even you might have been born here and lived here all your life, your parents or grandparents or even older ancestors might have originally been from somewhere else. 

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For most “native” Brits who might be able to trace their lineage back to Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Norman or other very early origins, I have often found that their family – or their “people” – have come from somewhere else in the UK other than where they are living now. And even in those identities of Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Norman and so on, we see that those ancestors themselves would have come from distant lands across the seas!

Stories and Connection

As part of my fascination with Belonging Across Cultures, I am always on the look out for family stories from different people, whether “native” to the UK or otherwise. My aim is that in each one, we will see a fresh strand of connection between all of us – and how the landscapes of our lives are interwoven with our very human need for belonging, and vice versa.

The first of these personal histories was told to me by my friend Rachel*. She lives in Oxfordshire and I got to know her not long after I moved from London to Oxford. In one of our many lively conversations, she was telling me about how she loved going back to Yorkshire and how much she loved the landscape there. She has a lovely melodious voice and speaks with a Yorkshire accent. I asked her to tell me more about where she was from. And I made the assumption that her family were from Yorkshire.

Not so, it turns out. 

Read on… 

Desperate Times

Rachel’s grandfather was born in Norfolk and grew up there. He was an agricultural labourer and had a strong Norfolk accent. After the First World War, when he was a young man, work was scarce in Norfolk and so, in search of employment, he moved to the coal mines in Yorkshire.

In those days, leaving your home and family to find work across the country would have been almost as challenging as crossing the world in our time. With travel options limited to steam train, horse, carriage, bicycle or foot, the distances we take for granted now zooming across the British landscape in our cars or high-speed trains, would have been daunting and costly. Especially for a manual labourer without employment. 

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However, like many Chinese migrants to Malaya or America in the 19th century, Rachel’s grandfather already had some family in Yorkshire – which is presumably how he heard about opportunities for work in the coal mines there. Back in the days before Whatsapp or cheap phone calls or even job centres and other infrastructures for finding work, word of mouth and letters home would have been the main way of hearing about opportunities. 

A Stranger in His Own Country

Across the divide of landscape as much as the divide of oceans (and air travel today), cultural differences between counties would have been as pronounced as they would have been for my ancestors or for other migrants in our time. And language, dialects and accents, too.

Rachel says, “He faced prejudice and violence because the local people in Yorkshire thought he was an interloper, even though he was still an Englishman. To them, he had a funny way of speaking.”

You may be of the same nation, still an Englishman, but where someone is perceived as an interloper, whether he’s from Norfolk or whether he’s from the Sahara, whether a hundred years ago or now, there can be suspicion and fear. 

Proud and Driven

Rachel’s grandfather stayed on where the work was and married a local Yorkshire woman. They had one child, Rachel’s father. As he grew up, this boy identified with the place of his birth, Yorkshire, and would have spoken like the other children around him ie. with a Yorkshire accent. Once an adult, he saw himself as a Yorkshireman.

“The past is woven into us,” Rachel says. Her sense is that her family never forgot that feeling of being an interloper, of not quite belonging. At the same time, the family had a drive to seek out better opportunities, to work hard and stick at it no matter how tough the situation, in order to build a good life. 

These two drivers played out in her grandfather’s life as an outsider in Yorkshire, working in the gruelling mines. They also drove her father. 

The Importance of Good English

“Dad was a bright boy and he read a lot. He left school at 14 years old. He was a bobbin boy in a local textile factory. But he always wanted to improve himself, he had that drive, and he was self-educated after that age. 

“He modulated his tone. He never said the t’ sound.” She means the truncated “t” sound for “the” that we may be familiar with from stereotypical portrayals of Yorkshire folk.

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Rachel and her brother never used the t’ either. “We were told off at home, if we started to do that.” 

Both her parents spoke standard English, but with a Yorkshire accent. The family did not drop their “H’s” either. It was important to her parents that they all spoke “good English”.

Education, Education, Education

After the war, the government created jobs through opening up the civil service. “That gave massive opportunities for people who didn’t have a proper education. He hadn’t been given the opportunities before that point,” Rachel says.

Rachel’s father got a job in the civil service in Barnsley. Undoubtedly, his determination to keep learning despite leaving school at a young age was a positive factor in taking advantage of this opportunity. Speaking good standard English rather than dialect, in Britain’s ingrained class system, also elevated him beyond the manual working class and offered him the chance to fit in in the clerical setting of his new career. 

“Eventually he became the manager of the Harrogate office. He did very well for himself, because he was personable and quite a clever chap.”

The drive to belong and the drive to keep improving have woven down into Rachel’s generation. 

A New Generation of Migrants

Rachel and her brother are the first of their family to go to university. 

Her brother trained as an engineer and moved to America for better opportunities. He became the president of an engineering company and has now made his home over the water, creating a new US branch of the family. 

These days, it is not uncommon for people to move to another country initially for work especially if there are greater opportunities to do exceptionally well and soar in one’s career. And like generations before, many people stay on in their newfound homeland. This decision is perhaps easier in our time as relatively cheap air travel means it is not as hard as it used to be to stay connected to family back home from across the oceans. But such a choice means that you will always be an outsider in some way in a country not your own. 

For your children, however, that country that is not your own, will be their homeland. For Rachel’s brother, his children will grow up American, they will feel American and they will no doubt be proudly American – as his dad, the son of a Norfolk man came to be proudly a Yorkshireman. 

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Rachel herself came “down South” to Reading University where she gained a degree in food technology. She has since lived in the Thames Valley region, working in the food industry at an executive level in product development and building a comfortable and happy life.

She has made a home here in the South, with a long term marriage and strong friendships but sometimes feels that she does not quite belong. It is her voice that marks her out as different, her Yorkshire accent amongst English speakers of the South East of England. Despite this feeling of being an interloper, she is nonetheless proudly a Yorkshirewoman, and feels a strong sense of belonging when she goes back to the county of her childhood, because they all sound like her there. She sometimes thinks about moving back to Yorkshire, the county of her birth and a place where she feels the comfort of belonging – and yet, her friends are here, her life is here. And yet, her home is here.

Chinese and English Families Are Not So Different

This story of an English family is not so different from the story of my Chinese-Malaysian family. Nor so different from many other families’ stories all over the world. 

There is the drive to survive, to overcome the desperate situation that you find yourself in. For my great-grandmother, she ran away from an abusive marriage on her  tiny bound feet in 19th century China and somehow made her way to Malaya on a junk. Jan’s grandfather chose to work in the harsh coal mines of Yorkshire because there is no farm work beneath the beautiful open sky of Norfolk. 

Then there is the tenacity to stick it out despite the hardships. My great-great-grandfather in his turn left a famine- and war- torn China as an indentured labourer but managed to work out his indenture and was even able to save enough money to buy his own bullock cart and land. Rachel’s grandfather went down into the mine year after year despite initial abuse and violence from men who considered him an interloper. 

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And finally, there is the will to better yourself in whatever way you can. Education was the key for both our families in our rise from the labouring class to middle-class professionals. Rachel’s father may have left school at 14 but had the drive to self-educate and rise beyond manual work. She and her brother went to university and have succeeded in their work and life. In my family, previous generations were labourers or blue collar workers. Then, my grandfathers on both sides were able to finish their education at the highest level and become doctors, my father went to Cambridge. 

As Rachel says, “Clever people who were at the right place or can see opportunities can enhance their families.”

The Fear of Not Belonging Remains – Stay Tuned for Coalminer’s Grand-daughter Part 2…

The feeling of being an interloper may, however, still lurk inside us down the generations, as I have touched on in Jan’s feeling of being an outsider down South. That is also a feeling that I have had, too, being a Chinese-Malaysian who has made the UK my homeland.

I do not think it is uncommon when we may have made our home somewhere else from where we grew up. Our sense of not belonging may be marked by how we look – our race, our ethnicity, the way we dress – or how we behave, or how we speak. And class, too, can differentiate us from those around us – and also from those we have left behind, especially if we have  moved up, or sometimes down, a class. 

I will explore further that feeling of being an outsider in Part 2 of Rachel’s story, coming up in the next few weeks.

In the meantime…

What is the Story of Your Family?

Where did your family originally come from? Whether you are English or Chinese or of another heritage, when this question is asked with a desire for human connection, it can open us all to the courage, tenacity and drive of previous generations. 

What drove your forebears, what grit can you see in their story? What was the role of education across the generations? How did their love and sacrifice for their children and their children’s children reveal themselves?

Are you living now somewhere else from where you were born? Are you also a new migrant like Rachel and her brother? What would you be ready to do to make a good life for yourself and your children?

As ever, I would love to hear from you if you would like to share your story here on Belonging Across Cultures. If you prefer, we can anonymise it as I have done with Rachel and her family. Drop me a line and we can have a chat – if your story is the right fit for Belonging Across Cultures, I can then write it up as a feature story. You can message me via the Contact page. 

Or just talk amongst your family. What stories do they have? What do they think about all this? Do you still have time to record the stories from the older generation – grandparents, great-aunties and the like? What would you like your children and the next generations to know about your life and the lives of your parents and grandparents? 

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*Not her real  name

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Ref: yrks

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