St Andrew's Societies: Charity and Fellowship Abroad

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Foundation dates come from the societies' own records. Several societies claim to be "the oldest" in their regions, depending on definitions and continuous existence.

Helping their own

established Scottish emigrants often arrived poor, and before modern welfare systems, mutual aid societies were vital. St Andrew's societies collected subscriptions from members and gave relief to Scots in distress, paid for burials, helped widows and orphans, and assisted new arrivals to find work.

established The historian Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), gives examples of what that meant in practice. In 1841 a handout from the St Andrew's Society of Montreal saved a party of 229 Lewis emigrants from starvation and got them to the Eastern Townships, where they later founded a prosperous community at Lingwick and Winslow. In 1849 destitute North Uist emigrants landed at Hamilton were sent into the interior at the expense of the Hamilton and Toronto societies. In 1873 the Saint John society in New Brunswick piped ashore some 700 north-east Scots bound for the "Scotch Colony"; within a year it was granting them $100 after sickness and unemployment hit the unprepared settlement. Some societies even paid to send home Scots who had fallen on particularly hard times.

established Charity also flowed back to Scotland and outwards to the wider community. In 1863 the Guelph St Andrew's Society sent £20 to the Lord Provost of Glasgow for unemployed cotton workers. The Vancouver St Andrew's and Caledonian Society, founded in 1886, gave the takings of its 1893 tug-of-war with the St George's Society to the city's poor, and in 1909 helped sponsor a ward in Vancouver General Hospital. Mutual insurance was another form: the Order of Scottish Clans, founded in St Louis in 1878, had branches such as Clan Gordon No. 12 in Barre, Vermont (1884), which supported disabled members and widows of Scottish granite workers.

Charleston, Philadelphia and New York

established The St Andrew's Society of Charleston was founded in 1729 by Scottish merchants in South Carolina. The Philadelphia society followed in 1747 and the New York society in 1756. Their members included prominent merchants and public figures.

established Charleston's society was not the first Scottish society in North America. Harper names the Scots' Charitable Society of Boston, founded in 1657, as the oldest, and the Halifax society of 1768 as the oldest in Canada. The anthropologist Celeste Ray, in her chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), notes that many of the Boston society's first beneficiaries were Scottish soldiers captured by Cromwell's army at Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651) and shipped to New England, Virginia and the West Indies as indentured servants. Citing the historian Rowland Berthoff, she adds that it kept a Scottish-born membership longer than any other society: in the late 1970s three-quarters of its members were still born in Scotland.

established Ray lists the early foundations in order: Charleston (1729), Savannah (about 1737), Philadelphia (1747), New York (1756), Alexandria, Virginia (about 1760), Halifax (1768), Saint John, New Brunswick (1798), Albany (1803), Baltimore (1806) and Buffalo (1843). Savannah's history shows how politics could interrupt them. The historian David Dobson, cited by Ray, records that the club went into abeyance in 1740 when leading members left for South Carolina, was refounded as a society in 1764 and faded again in 1782 because of its Loyalism. Some sources date it to 1750, but the society's seal bears 1737. Philadelphia also had the Scots Thistle Society, founded in 1796, and its St Andrew's Society's records are now held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

established By 2003 there were at least seventy-two St Andrew's societies in the United States, linked through the Association of St Andrew Societies, one of the nine national bodies in the Scottish Coalition that promoted Tartan Day. The largest and most highly organised, Ray notes, is the Illinois St Andrew Society in Chicago, founded in 1845, whose open membership policy is unusual.

Around the world

established St Andrew's societies and Caledonian societies spread wherever Scots settled, in Canada, the Caribbean, India, China, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. They became hubs of Scottish social life, organising dances, Burns suppers and Highland games.

established The pace varied. Sydney had a St Andrew's Club in the 1820s, but Caledonian societies appeared elsewhere in Australia, mainly Victoria, only from the 1850s, and were in almost every Australian colony by the 1890s. In New Zealand, Harper notes, they did not really take off until the 1890s, as settlers concentrated on building a new country. By 1905 South Africa had over forty Highland and Caledonian societies and a monthly journal, The South African Scot. Some societies were based on a home district: the Fraserburgh Society of Winnipeg, founded in 1911, soon widened into the Aberdeenshire, Kincardineshire and Banffshire Association.

shared Harper argues that many of these were élite clubs rather than mass organisations. In Canada, some Highland societies run by prosperous Scots, Lowlanders among them, promoted an image of Highland settlers built on military loyalty and deference, with bagpipes, plaids and banners, rather than memories of poverty and clearance. Unlike Irish societies, she suggests, Scottish societies rarely became political pressure groups.

Who joined

shared Because each society is autonomous, with no overarching authority, its character follows its town. Ray describes an unspoken hierarchy among Scottish-American organisations, with the St Andrew's society usually at the top, followed by the Caledonian society (which in some places is the more exclusive), then local Scottish societies and Burns clubs, with clan societies the largest and most open. Where a St Andrew's society draws on the local elite of bank presidents, judges and other professionals, it often admits men only, and its members may or may not own a kilt or care much about their ancestry; Ray suggests some value the social standing of membership more than Scottish heritage. In Birmingham, Alabama, she addressed an all-male society at a dinner where she was the only woman present. Societies of this kind are the least likely to share members with clan societies.

established The calendar reflects the difference. Ray notes that St Andrew's societies tend to mark 30 November with a formal dinner, while local Scottish societies more often celebrate with a ceilidh or country dancing. The historian Edward J. Cowan, in his chapter of the same book, quotes typical stated aims: relief of needy Scots and their families, fostering "a love of Scotland, its history, literature and customs", comradeship among members and, in some cases, the encouragement of Scottish athletic games.

Rise and fall in the United States

established The historian T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), gives the scale of Scottish associational life in the United States. Between the 1850s and the First World War Scottish immigrants founded over 1,200 local societies. The St Andrew's societies were the long-established and prestigious core, devoted to charity and good causes and useful for networking among the immigrant elite; local areas of Scotland had societies of their own. The Order of Scottish Clans followed in 1878 and its women's counterpart, the Daughters of Scotia, in 1895. Ray, drawing on Berthoff, explains that the Order's "clans" were lodges based on residence in America, not on descent: members took Highland clan names and tartans without claiming kinship, and commemorated medieval victories such as Largs and Bannockburn rather than Jacobite defeats. The Order had about 250 lodges at its height and about 160, with 16,000 members, by the First World War. The Daughters of Scotia formed a Grand Lodge in 1899 and admitted female relatives of members, women born in Scotland and women married to Scotsmen. Burns suppers were already well established by the centenary of 1859, when sixty-one were held across the country and New York's drew close to three thousand people. By 1900 there were over a hundred Burns clubs, and by 1920 Highland or Caledonian games were held in around 120 places. A Scottish press grew up alongside, but the most successful paper, the Scottish-American Journal (1857–1919), had only 15,000 subscribers.

shared Devine agrees with Harper that these were not political organisations. Their office-bearers came from the small Scottish middle class in banking, accountancy, insurance and the drapery trade, and their aims were cultural and sentimental, unlike the Catholic Irish associations that combined ethnic, religious and political solidarity. He also suspects that, for all their visibility, they attracted no more than a minority even of first-generation immigrants. That would explain their collapse from the 1920s, despite a new wave of more than 160,000 Scottish emigrants to the United States in that decade. The Caledonian games dwindled to about two dozen by the mid-1960s, the Scottish papers closed and the Order of Scottish Clans faded, but the older St Andrew's societies survived.

shared Historians disagree about how long Scottish identity lasted abroad. David Armitage called Scots "invisible ethnics" who were eager to assimilate, and Eric Richards argued that ethnic origins faded quickly in Australia. John MacKenzie, writing on South Africa, set out to overturn that view. Devine judges that MacKenzie has the better of the argument at least for the first generation, pointing to a rich culture of Burns clubs, Caledonian societies, Masonic lodges and Highland games, perhaps stronger than that of any other group except the Irish.

St Andrew's Day

established Most societies held an annual dinner on or near 30 November, St Andrew's Day, with toasts, speeches, pipers and haggis. These dinners remain important events in many cities.

established Harper describes St Andrew's Day balls on 30 November and Burns Night dinners on 25 January as the two highlights of the expatriate social calendar. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1800 the St Andrew's Day ball drew over 200 guests, with toasts to "The Immortal memory of St. Andrew" and "Land of Cakes" and Scotch reels in a side room. In Sydney in 1823 the minister John Dunmore Lang answered an invitation from the St Andrew's Club in verse, asking members "every year in hot November" to remember the saint.

Today

established Many societies still exist. With less need for emergency relief, many now fund scholarships for students to study in Scotland or for students of Scottish descent, and promote Scottish culture. Some have taken up newer causes: the St Andrew's Society of Baltimore declared April 1999 a Scottish-American History and Heritage Month, the month of Tartan Day. Societies of the same kind exist far beyond the old diaspora, from Dubai to Bangkok and Hong Kong.

• The Charleston society was founded in 1729.
• The Scots Box in London dates from 1611.
• St Andrew's Day is 30 November.
• Many societies now fund scholarships.
• Societies spread from America to Asia and Australasia.
• Boston's Scots' Charitable Society dates from 1657, seventy-two years before Charleston's.
• In 1893 the Vancouver society played a tug-of-war against the St George's Society for charity.
• Scottish immigrants founded over 1,200 local societies in the United States between the 1850s and 1914.
• Many of the Boston society's first beneficiaries were Scottish prisoners of war sent to New England by Cromwell.
• In the late 1970s three-quarters of the Boston society's members were still Scottish-born.
• The "clans" of the Order of Scottish Clans were lodges, open to members whatever their surname.

• Myth: Charleston's society is the oldest Scottish society in the Americas. It is generally regarded as the oldest St Andrew's society there, but the Scots' Charitable Society of Boston (1657) is older, and Halifax (1768) is the oldest in Canada. Several societies claim to be "the oldest" in their regions, depending on definitions and continuous existence.
• Myth: Membership was open to all Scots. Membership was often for the prosperous, and the poor were more often recipients than members. Ray notes that élite societies often admit men only, while others, such as Chicago's, have open membership.
• Disputed: How representative the societies were. Marjory Harper describes many as élite clubs, some promoting a sanitised, loyal and martial image of Highland emigration. T. M. Devine suspects they attracted no more than a minority even of first-generation immigrants.
• Disputed: When the Savannah society was founded. Some sources date it to 1750, but the society's seal bears 1737.