Free Thinking

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The ideas shaping our lives today - with leading artists and thinkers in extended interview and debate.

Free Thinking: Emigration

Emigration

BBC Radio 4 - Free Thinking, Emigration

Laurence Scott finds out about 'Bad Bridgets', bush-ranger history and 'Home Children'.

Poet Liz Berry's great aunt was taken from the Black Country to Novia Scotia after being orphaned. The Bad Bridgets podcast tracks many 19th-century Irish women travellers to the USA.

In 1908 twelve-year-old orphan Eliza Showell was sent from Birmingham to Nova Scotia  as a ‘Home Child’ to work in domestic service. In 1891 eighteen-year-old Marion Canning not long arrived in New York City from County Leitrim went ‘up the Bowery to have some supper with a gentleman friend’, and ended up sentenced to seven years in prison. In 1827 Bolton born bricklayer turned burglar Ralph Entwistle arrived in Sydney with 187 other convicts; three years later he sparked the ‘Bathurst Rebellion’.

Laurence Scott explores these and other emigration stories with Eliza Showell’s great niece Black Country poet Liz Berry, Leanne McCormick and Elaine Farrell presenters of the Bad Bridget podcast which tells the stories of crime poverty and survival experienced by the thousands of 19th-century Irish women who saw their American Dream become a nightmare, banditry historian Meg Foster who has written about the history of bushrangers – symbols of Australian identity with roots in English highway robbery, and sociologist Michaela Benson who studies the extent and evolution of emigration from the UK today.

Producer: Ruth Thomson 

Liz Berry's The Home Child is out now.  More than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa as part of the child migration scheme which operated between 1869 and the 1970s. 
You can hear her discussing Black Country history and speech patterns with Matthew Sweet in a previous episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001bzm5 

Dr Meg Foster is at Newnham College, Cambridge and is the author of Boundary Crossers: the hidden history of Australia's other bushrangers.

https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/podcasts/bad-bridget/ is an AHRC funded project led by Leanne McCormick (Ulster University) and Elaine Farrell (Queen’s University Belfast) focuses on the sexually deviant woman, the bad mother and the criminal Irish woman in Boston, New York and Toronto. A book has just been published Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women

Michaela Benson is Professor in Public Sociology at the University of Lancaster.
 

Producer in Salford: Ruth Thomson

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