Push or Pull

Why did they come?

My friend Tom is writing his family history and has sent us the first chapter to read. It is about the first couple in his family to make the journey from the United Kingdom to New Zealand.

This sort of project always raises the question: why did they make the decision to carry out this amazing change? Was it push? or was it pull?

Tom goes in to the details of why his ancestors left Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century; anyone who has heard of the Potato Famine will have an idea about it.

I have been fascinated by the questions for many years and have tried to give some of the background in my own family history (see earlier posts). But Tom's work has made me think again: did I give enough weight to the Pull factors.

Because in the Gaze family story, the Push factors were there. A young man with a growing family and working in a family business where he was a younger brother and therefore not likely ever to own much of the enterprise, looks for better prospects somewhere else.

Charles Gaze had already looked at the possibility of securing army contracts for his saddlery skills in the Crimean War Theatre. Both that and the Indian "Mutiny" were over by the late 1850s. Land Wars in New Zealand were top of the headlines, so that's where Charles set out for, arriving in Auckland the week the first shots were fired at Waitara.

He got a contract to make haversacks for the army at Otahuhu, so his plan was spot on! He was obviously prepared to look anywhere, so if we had not ended up in New Zealand, we might have grown up in Russia or Turkey or India!

On the other hand my great-great-grandfather, Joshua Robinson, came partly on Pull factors with a much more romantic flavour. He had grown up on the story of Robinson Crusoe and was dreaming of life on an idyllic spot like his hero. At the same time, like many in his era, he had been filled with the desire to help the less fortunate races who lived in less civilised places. 

But there was a more realistic factor too: he met a man in a cafe in London in 1841 who wanted to recruit him, an experienced builder, to set up a sawmill near Auckland. So he managed to overcome his wife's reluctance and they set out before the first organised settler groups for the new colony.

Another great-great, John Bigelow, could have made a living anywhere in the world: he was a shipbuilder in a small fishing village on the northern coast of Nova Scotia. Why he chose to come here out of the rest of the world I can't fathom. 

But his brother-in-law, who had the money, and owned the ship he had built for the voyage, wanted to come this way (perhaps because of gold-rush stories) so in 1860 to the Tasman coasts they came. The ship itself was wrecked a few hundred metres from here a few weeks later.

Robert Goodwin from Northamptonshire, whose daughter married my grandfather, came a generation later. He grew up in a community strongly independent in politics and religion, with a democratic tradition. The progress towards real effective democracy was taking too long for Robert. 

He worked as a slater, building and fixing roofs for the wealthy owners of manor houses. His grandfather had lived through the enclosures, where the wealthy landowners had turned their tenant farmers off the land, and fenced the land for sheep-farming. So there was plenty of Push Factor in his case.

But I have never heard anything about the reasons why he chose New Zealand, although I used to hear my grandmother talk about the voyage out when she was sixteen. He made a real mistake, because no slate rooves existed, except one, in Auckland. He managed OK as a plasterer making ornate ceilings.

So that is perhaps the next project for me.

Meanwhile, we'll wait expectantly for Tom's chapters as they arrive!