Welcome to another instalment in this slightly-less-occasional-than-it-used-to-be series of nuggets from my research into Britain’s Hispanic communities. Earlier this month I shared how Ancestry’s Freemason Membership Registers helped me to uncover an otherwise obscure network of Spanish merchants in London. Today, I want to introduce you to some of the resources I used to track down another group of London Spaniards, who actually turned out to be Catalans, who actually turned out to be … well, read on to find out!
What was my starting point?
Cork cutters! Reviewing census returns for Spanish-born London residents in 1861, I came across a cluster of households in Whitechapel whose male residents all gave their birthplace as ‘Spain’ and their profession as ‘cork cutter’. They were scattered across seven households, a mixture of married couples with children, and pairs of single male boarders.
Click on the purple house icons below to read about each household:
Note: the profession of all adult males is cork cutter; unless otherwise stated, birthplace is ‘Spain’
Having put all this together I was curious. How did these cork cutters and their families come to be in London? Where had they come from? And more importantly …
… what exactly is a cork cutter?
A cork cutter (Spanish: taponero) was a skilled labourer employed in the production of ‘tapones’ or cork stoppers. Taponeros were employed in small workshops of perhaps ten men, producing rough corks which were then sent to specialist cork merchant-manufacturers either in Spain or abroad, who finished the products in their own factories and then sold them on to clients. In the 19th century, the Spanish cork trade had two main centres: western Andalusia and Girona in Catalunya, so it seemed likely that our cork cutters were from one of these areas.
When did they come to London?
Everyone arriving in 19th-century Britain from overseas had to come by ship, so I began my search with Ancestry’s England: Alien Arrivals, 1810-1811, 1826-1869. This dataset, provided in association with the National Archives, includes Home Office and Customs forms designed to record ‘aliens’ or non-British citizens arriving at English ports. Of course, not all records have survived and not all have been digitised, but coverage of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s is fairly good, so I was hopeful.
In this case, the search gods were smiling. I put in the first name and BOOM! Up popped a list of ‘Aliens’ landing at the port of London aboard the steamer Seine from Boulogne on 25 April 1855. And it included not one ‘taponero’, not two taponeros, but TEN Spanish-born taponeros, travelling with a ‘comerciante corchos’ (cork merchant). Even better, on cross-checking the names with the names from the 1861 census, six of them matched. At this point, I may have let out a tiny woop.
Aliens List. ‘Seine’. Arriving Port of London. 25 April 1855. The National Archives, London, England. HO3/78.
England, Alien Arrivals, 1810-1811, 1826-1869. www.ancestry.co.uk : 26 May 2023.
So, who were they?
In order to establish who exactly I was looking at, I first had to establish the name/s they were known by. British record-keepers are notoriously bad at dealing with unfamiliar foreign names, which can appear differently in every record. This is also complicated by varying levels of literacy, and in the case of this group – like many other Spaniards – by the fact that they lived and worked between Spanish and another language. Indeed, when I compared the 1855 passenger list with the 1861 census, only one name – Juan GORDIS – appeared identically on both. What happened to the others?
- Juan CAMPS was recorded on the census with the French version of his first name, Jean CAMPS. Perhaps our enumerator spoke French but not Spanish or Catalan?
- I like to think the man recorded as Matin BUFILL in 1855 had learned enough English by 1861 to ensure his name was correctly recorded on the census as Martin BOFILL.
- Pedro BOCH (the only one of the group to marry an English woman) anglicised his first name: Peter BOSCH.
- Another man went from the Catalan version of his first name in 1855 to the anglicised version in 1861, and also went from a phonetic spelling to a standardised spelling of his surname: Jaume JISPER became James GISPERT.
- My favourite example, and the one that made me happiest when I cracked it, was when the mysterious Redish SILVERDOR from the census turned out on the passenger list to be the much less weird Salvador RAURICH.
The group’s surnames (Bofill, Bosch, Camps, Ferrer, Girbal, Gispert, Lluy, Raurich) are distinctively Catalan – some of those letter combinations just don’t exist in Castilian Spanish. A great tool for placing Spanish first names and surnames is the widget provided by Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística or National Statistics Institute (https://www.ine.es/widgets/nombApell/index.shtml). You just enter the name (‘nombre’) or surname (‘apellido’) and as long as there are at least 20 examples in the country, the widget will show you which province(s) they are recorded in.
For example, here are the results for Bofill (L) and Gispert (R):
Spot any similarities? Yep, both surnames are almost exclusively limited to the Catalan provinces, with the strongest density in the province of Girona at the NE tip of Spain.
Where did they come from?
The maps don’t lie! Our cork cutters were all from the province of Girona (Gerona in Castilian Spanish). I was especially lucky with this case study, as many Municipal and other records for the province of Girona are available on Familysearch. Not all are indexed, but you can look at original birth, marriage and death registrations, passports (for internal travel!) and some censuses.
Cross-checking data from the passenger list, censuses, and English and Spanish parish and civil records, I learned that the group of taponeros who arrived in London aboard the Seine were all aged between 23 and 34 and all from the small towns of Palafrugell and Sant Feliu de Guíxols. This makes perfect sense, as Palafrugell and Sant Feliu were important centres of the Catalan cork trade. Indeed, Palafrugell today is home to Catalunya’s Museu del Suro (Cork Museum).
Why did they come to London?
London had well-established links with Palafrugell through the cork merchant Pedro Jubert, who may well have played a part in bringing the taponeros to the city (tho’ I’m still looking for evidence of the connection…).[1] London’s longstanding place as an important marketplace for cork only intensified with the expansion of the wine trade and technological advances in the use of cork-based materials, such as the development of cork-backed linoleum in 1855.
The Post Office London Directory for 1861 (the year our cork cutters first appear on the census) lists 91 businesses under ‘cork cutters, merchants and manufacturers’, including three of our Catalans. Two were working from home: John CAMPS, cork cutter, of 23 Goodman’s Yard, and Juan GORDIS, cork cutter, of 124 Royal Mint St. The third, José BOFILL, had taken a bigger step, entering into partnership with Frenchman Bernard Paupie, as Paupie & Bofill, cork importers, of 17 St Dunstan’s Hill. Our cork cutters had arrived in London just in time to take advantage of the city’s rapidly-growing cork manufacturing sector.
What happened to them?
Not all of the taponeros found London hospitable. Some, such as Martin and Victoria Girbal, Martin’s brother Manuel and his wife Gertrudis, and the Gordis and Ferrer families returned to Sant Feliu within a few years. Others migrated onwards, such as Martin and Catalina (Kate) Bofill, who left London for Melbourne in January 1862 alongside Salvador Raurich.[2] The Bofills remained in the Australian state of Victoria for the rest of their lives, but Raurich stayed less than two years, returning to London in December 1863.[3]
The taponeros who remained in London almost all left the skilled work of cork cutting behind to set up their own merchant houses, with varying degrees of longevity. The only one to maintain a dual identity as both merchant and manufacturer was Juan Calzada Bosch, who returned to Spain in 1872 after a bankruptcy, following his friends Juan and Josefina Camps to Seville. After returning from Australia, Salvador Raurich ran a successful cork import house until his early death in 1873. The most successful were José (Joseph) Bofill and Jaume (James) Gispert, who both made their lives permanently in London at the head of their respective cork importing businesses. They even joined the Freemasons, registering at the Royal Jubilee Lodge on 2 March 1874.
Bofill and Gispert became visible senior figures in a booming cork merchant community that provided ideal business opportunities for ambitious young Catalans. Through the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, many young men from Palafrugell, Sant Feliu and neighbouring towns made their way to London to try their fortune. In 1873 two of them, 18-year-old José Roura y Vilaret and 22-year-old Francis Forgas, set up Roura & Forgas, a cork import business that later diversified into many fields and onto many continents, surviving for more than a century until it was finally wound up in 1987.[4] The winding-up of Roura & Forgas marked the end of a story that had begun 132 years earlier in 1855 when the Seine landed at London Docks with her cabin full of Catalan cork cutters.
[1] Rosa Ros and Pere Sala, ‘Redes comerciales y desarrollo industrial en la manufactura corchera catalana antes de 1914. El ejemplo de Genís y Cía,’ Revista de Historia Industrial 56 (2014): 49-80 (59).
[2] 21 Jan. 1862. Leaving London aboard the Lincolnshire for Melbourne: Martin and Kate BOFILL; Salvador and Annie RAURICH.
[3] 2 Dec. 1863. Leaving Melbourne aboard the Sussex for London: S RAURICH. Arrived 14/15 March 1864.
[4] ‘Roura & Forgas Limited,’ The London Gazette, 30 Oct. 1987: 13459.
Hispanic Britain, or, an Anglo-Spanish Miscellany 