I saw this earlier today on FindMyPast – The History of Long Haul Travel From Britain & Ireland: https://blog.findmypast.com/this-history-of-long-haul-travel-from-britain-ireland-1890-1960-2639219393.html.
To celebrate the start of the summer holiday season, we have used our collection of Passenger Lists Leaving UK to analyse the history of long haul travel out of Britain and Ireland between 1890 and 1960, a period of major global change.
The Data
Passenger Lists Leaving UK 1890-1960 consists of more than 24 million transcripts and images of original documents held at the National Archives covering long-haul voyages to destinations outside Britain and Europe. While countries such as Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and USA feature strongly, all continents are covered including passengers on ships sailing to all parts of Asia, the Caribbean, South America, West Africa, and even to remote oceanic destinations such as South Georgia Island.
Explore our collection of passenger lists leaving the UK
These voyages often called en route at additional ports, including those in Europe, and any passengers disembarking at these stops are included. Voyages from all British (English, Welsh and Scottish) ports, from all Irish ports before partition in 1921 and all Northern Irish ports after partition, are also covered.
Travel Visualized
By analyzing the details captured by these records (departure port, destination port, date of travel, gender and occupation) we have been able to shed new light on how typical voyages changed over time. View our newly created travel infographic to find out more:
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View the infographic in detail
Global events and their impact
One thing that immediately leaps out is the incredible impact the World Wars had on international travel. While this may come as no surprise, the extent to which passenger numbers decreased is certainly striking.
As the “New World” continued to develop rapidly, larger numbers of British & Irish people began seeking better lives overseas. Records show that travel rates climbed throughout the early 1900s before peaking in 1913 with over 757,000 passengers departing.
This trend began to reverse dramatically the following year with the outbreak of the Great War. By 1916 the number of passengers departing from British and Irish ports had decreased six fold to 113,508. The flowing year this number dropped even further to around 45,000 and by 1918, only 38,864 passengers were recorded, nearly a 20 fold decrease over just five years.
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With war finally at an end, travel rates exploded in 1919 with over 247,000 departures. This number steadily increased throughout the roaring 20s before peaking in 1927.
By the 1930s, a combination of the Great Depression and the birth of commercial air travel meant that despite a gradual increase, departure rates never quite reached the same levels of the early 1910s.
As global tensions rose throughout the 1930s, the number of departures began to decrease again rapidly in 1938. As with the First World War, the Second World War put a virtual stop on overseas civilian travel as German U boats patrolled the Channel and North Atlantic. After significant yearly drops, departures fell to just over 10,000 in 1944, the lowest rate in the six decades covered by these records.
After Germany and her allies were defeated in 1945, the number of passengers leaving Britain and Ireland by sea once again rose sharply but, by the mid 1950s, commercial air travel was here to stay.
Britain’s busiest ports
Analysis of the data has also revealed how after decades of topping the charts, Liverpool was suddenly overtaken as the top port of departure following the Second World War. Between 1890 and 1930, Liverpool’s position as the UK’s busiest port went unchallenged with more than twice the number departures recorded by its nearest competitors. This was not to last as “The Second City of the British Empire” was overtaken by Southampton in the 1940s and London in the 1950s.
This marked the dramatic decline of over century of travel out of the city as, between 1830 and 1930, just under a quarter of the 40 million passengers who left Europe for the New World sailed from Liverpool, then the largest emigration port in the world.
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Ups Downs Family History 