THE ENIGMATIC MR DELVIN
Published in Issue 4 (July/August 2023), Letters, Volume 31
Above: Our ‘Gutter Children’ by George Cruikshank (1869), a reference to the campaign for the emigration of children to Canada, later supported by Charles Ramsey Devlin, a Canadian Liberal politician born in Quebec of Irish parents, who in 1903 was elected Irish Parliamentary Party MP for Galway Borough. (British Museum)
Sir,—I may be able to identify ‘the enigmatic “Mr Delvin, Ireland”’ who is cited in Fiona Fitzsimons’s article on ‘Home Children—an Irish perspective, 1860s to 1922’ (HI 34.3, May/June 2023) as having brokered in 1899 the emigration to Canada of ‘a group of young women with a median age of nineteen’.
Charles Ramsey Devlin (1858–1914), a Canadian Liberal politician born in Quebec of Irish parents, came to Ireland in 1897 as an official Canadian trade representative. His duties included running an extensive publicity campaign aimed at recruiting potential settlers for the Canadian prairies. (At this time the Canadian government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier was trying to settle the West by recruiting immigrants from northern and eastern Europe.)
Devlin’s activities were somewhat controversial given nationalist hostility to emigration, and became more controversial in 1903 when he was elected to the House of Commons for Galway Borough and assumed a senior role in the United Irish League. The election of an Irish-Canadian as an Irish Parliamentary Party MP was not unique (Edward Blake, a former leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, was MP for South Longford 1892–1907), but the elevation of a promoter of emigration aroused considerable criticism from commentators such as Arthur Griffith and D.P. Moran, who noted that, although Devlin had officially resigned as Canadian trade representative, he seemed to have retained some connection with the emigrant campaign. (Moran and Griffith also suggested that the plots of land offered to emigrants would prove considerably less attractive than they seemed in the advertisements, and enquired whether such features of the Canadian prairies as wolves and snow blizzards featured on the maps.) Devlin resigned his Galway seat and returned to Canada in 1906 to take up a seat in the Canadian parliament, remaining active in national and Quebec politics until his death.
If ‘Mr Delvin’ was C.R. Devlin, this might explain why the compilers of the Canadian card index identified him only by his last name, since he would have had regular dealings with them. Perhaps a fuller search of the cards may reveal other references to him.—Yours etc.,
PATRICK MAUME
Dictionary of Irish Biography
