1919-39 Migration from Wales

For much of the nineteenth century, and up until the beginning of the Great War in 1914, Wales had attracted thousands of immigrants. However, the post-war depression of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s reduced the flow of immigrants to a trickle. Within a few short years pre-war immigration had turned into post-war migration on a massive scale. The reasons for this are not hard to understand, whilst there was incredibly high unemployment in Wales this was less so in other areas like the English Midlands and South-East. So people went in search for jobs and opportunity which could not be found at home - where dependence on the staple industries which were failing rapidly was crippling the local economy.

It has been estimated that 440,000 people left Wales between 1921 and 1938. The majority, some 85 per cent, left the south Wales valleys of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. To take one example, by 1933 a quarter of the population of Pembroke Dock, some 3,500 people, had migrated, leaving a town in which (by 1937) 55 per cent were listed as unemployed.

During the 1920s and 1930s a large number of Welsh and northern English people left Britain altogether. For many of them, the United States of America was seen as a land of opportunity. It had glittering cities such as New York…