"Running away to Spain" late 1920s - passports ?

[kob3203]

We're trying to verify a story that one of my Irish grandfather's sisters ran away to Spain. She was born in 1906, and married in Co.Cork in early 1931, but we know nothing else about her. Our initial assumption is that if the story's true it would probably have been some time in the mid to late 1920s.

The Wikipedia 'Irish Passport' article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_passport says that
the Irish government issued its first passports to the general public on 3 April 1924 but that, until January 1930, many Irish Free State citizens also had to obtain British passports.

Was it compulsory to have a passport in the late 1920s ?

Is there any way to check Irish and/or British passport applications made during the late 1920s ?

[Rena]

The National Archives at Kew have a webpage describing  how to look for outward bound emigrants on this url

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/emigration/

One of those links takes you to this webpage - and "Outward Passenger Lists":-

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/emigration/

Good luck

[Girl Guide]

Is she likely to have gone direct to Spain from Ireland or via the UK?  If via the UK you could check the passenger list on Find My Past's travel and migration list.

[Elwyn Soutter]

If this was in the 1920s, I think it’s likely that your ancestor had a British passport. However my recollection (having worked in that area at one time) is that UK passport records were normally only kept for 11 years, and then routinely destroyed.

Until the 1940s it was pretty easy to get a British passport. You didn’t even need to produce a birth certificate when applying.  So, provided she was 21 or over, your ancestor shouldn’t have had too much trouble getting a passport if she had wanted to.

A passport was required for travel to Europe but the controls weren’t very strict, and there were all sorts of ways of circumventing them. At various times there were “no passport day excursion trips”. A day trip to France with no passport required.  Once in France you could obviously just slip away.  So that’s another possibility.

Passenger lists have never routinely been compiled for journeys between the UK and France, or Ireland and France/Spain. I think you may struggle to find a record of this lady’s reported journey.

[Gone.]

If your grandfather's sister did have a UK passport, then the National Archives at Kew have a register of passports issued:
http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C7911

Unfortunately, the registers for the years you are researching are not online and the only way you can search for a name is by going there.

Just to add a little to Elwyn’s point above about getting to France without a passport:
During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), many British volunteers without passports bought weekend return tickets from London Victoria to Paris (for which no passport was needed) and then met up with a Communist Party representative in Paris who would arrange the next part of their journey to Spain.

It appears that the real problem was getting back into the UK without a passport.

[kob3203]

Thanks everybody for the responses so far.

Rena/Girl Guide: With the lady in question returning (if it's true that she ran away)  to Ireland to get married, it doesn't strike me that her running away would be 'emigration'. I would have thought that emigration would require some official paperwork, and 'running away' doesn't seem to fit. Also, on the TNA page that Rena linked to, section 4.1 'Outward passenger lists, 1890-1960' mentions that the outward passenger lists on findmypast.co.uk are for passengers leaving by ship from UK and Irish ports and travelling to places outside Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, including the USA, Canada, India, New Zealand and Australia. So I doubt I'll have any luck there.
Several months ago I tried searching various passenger lists and got the distinct impression that there were no (or very few) records of anybody travelling to Europe, so that might be the reason. Elwyn Soutter's comment about the lack of passenger lists supports that too.

Elwyn Soutter: One of our lines of inquiry involves somebody who was rather good at circumventing rules, so there may be no passport.
A couple of questions spring to mind regarding your comments:
1 - If you didn't have to produce a birth certificate, then how would the authorities know you were actually over 21 ?
2 - Was a single woman even allowed to obtain a UK passport at that time ? I've read somewhere that in the early days of passports wives were just a footnote on their husbands passport (I didn't note the URL, but I think that may have been the USA). Apparently it wasn't until July 1928 that women aged 21+ were finally allowed to vote in the UK ( https://www.bl.uk/votes-for-women/articles/womens-suffrage-timeline )

Ramsin: With me in SE Asia, and the COVID-related restrictions at TNA I can't imagine being able to get at those records, even by proxy,  for maybe another year or so.
When I first heard the 'running away to Spain' story several years ago my first thought was that it might actually be something to do with the Spanish Civil War. But we now have a more probable theory.

So I now think it's quite unlikely that we'll find any passport record or passenger list mention of her, even if she did everything according to the rules. And I doubt that she did things according to the rules.

Does anybody know whether there are any Spanish records that might be worth looking at ? Our current theory tells us where in Spain she might have gone.

[Elwyn Soutter]

There is an article on genguide.co.uk about passports. It states:

"it was not until 1947 that birth certs were required for new applicants to prove British Nationality".

https://www.genguide.co.uk/source/passport-applications-licences-including-scotland/

Pre 1947 the applicant still had to get someone appropriate to countersign the application to confirm that they knew you for the relevant period of time and the information was accurate. That would make it harder, but not impossible to use false information.  It was presumably because people did attempt to get passports with false information that led to the introduction of the requirement to produce a birth certificate.


Yes a single woman could have a passport at that time, in the UK anyway. I can’t speak for all countries.  In the 1930s a single woman could also get an Irish Free State passport. I know because I have seen two or three, belonging to folk who hung on to them long after they had expired. I don’t know about pre 1930. (Pre 1930 because of British Government objections many countries didn’t recognise Irish Free State passports, or if they did they required a visa. So it was easier -  though vastly annoying to the average Irish born person - just to get a British passport). Anyone born in what is now the Republic of Ireland, pre 1.1.1949, still can get a British Passport.

It was normal for a husband & wife to both be on the same passport (along with any children) but it wasn’t mandatory.  That’s possibly where the idea of the wife being a footnote may come from.   With a joint passport, she could only travel if her husband were also travelling. Likewise the children could only travel if the father was travelling.  That arrangement saved the family money (today individual passports are required which is far more expensive). But it meant that the wife couldn’t travel without her husband.  It used to lead to all sorts of difficulties if anyone was taken ill abroad or unable to return to the UK for some other reason. Lots of panic stricken phone calls to the nearest British Consulate in the middle of the night, to get an emergency passport.  Before that type of shared passport was abolished, the rules changed so that the wife could be the lead person and then in that situation, it was the husband who couldn’t travel without her.  Although it was obviously sexist and patronizing for the wife to only be able to travel with her husband, the reality was that most people only went abroad very occasionally and then usually in family groups, so they saved money. Few objected to that.