ABSTRACT

The 1930s witnessed unprecedented long-distance internal migration to the South and Midlands from depressed industrial areas in northern England, Wales, and Scotland. Government encouraged and assisted migration, under its 'industrial transference' programme of taking workers to the work. The regional incidence of out-migration was strongly influenced by unemployment differentials and industrial structure. While the advent of 'industrial transference' is generally dated from 1927, government-assisted internal migration had been in operation since the end of the First World War. In 1929 the Ministry of Labour widened the coverage of transference to include the iron and steel and shipbuilding industries. Employers in rapidly growing industrial centres actively lobbied their local authorities to recruit juveniles via the transference initiative. Just as the industrial revolution had witnessed a switch in the focus of new industrial development to new areas, drawing on a 'reserve army' of labour from outside the core industrial workforce, similar processes influenced industrial location patterns in interwar Britain.