According to the oral history of our family, my great-grandfather on my father’s side was a remittance man from England. Remittance men were the ne’er-do-well sons of well-to-do families who were banished to the colonies so not to further disgrace their kin-folk. They were sent a regular remittance to live on and this was maintained as long as they never set foot again in the old country.
My great-grandfather’s Achilles’ heel apparently was the demon drink and the final straw came when as a young man he had a night out with a friend who was a Lord, the eldest son of an Earl, whereby they both drank more than was prudent and attempted to walk back to their respective London homes in the snow. Not far from the hostelry where they had imbibed they fell over and stayed comatose all night while the snow all but buried their personages. In the morning they were dug out; the Lord was dead, but he had fallen last, and on top, and the warmth of his body had kept my great-grandfather alive.
As claimed in the family narrative, my great-great-grandfather was the biggest shareholder in the Times of London and desperate to keep the sordid story out of the paper sent my great-grandfather to the antipodes with a modest annual remittance to allow him to maintain his viability. Well anyway that’s how the story goes as told to me by my maiden aunts as I sat at their feet as a child and it may have got embellished over time.
My great-grandfather was by all accounts a big man in every sense of the word. Big in stature - he was six foot five - big on generosity and a big appetite for fun, frivolity and gambling which inferred he hadn’t learnt any lessons from his shameful conduct in Britain.
It also meant that very little of the remittance reached my great-grandmother, who struggled to raise a large family.
Now if you thought remittance men were a relic from the past, you couldn’t be more wrong. Today’s remittance men are the migrant workers who send money home to their families. In this case the situation is reversed. There is no disgrace involved and the money goes back from the colonies to the home countries.
People in the first-world societies rely more and more on migrant workers to do the menial tasks they feel they’ve outgrown. You can see this in the army of all-night office cleaners who descend on the streets of downtown Wellington late in the evening. They are almost always Pacific Islanders.
Their extended family members will be grateful for whatever help they can get from the leftovers of their meagre wages when it is remitted home.
We found out recently when their devastating storm caused us to focus on the Philippines that there are 40,000 Filipinos skilled and unskilled living in this country, apparently here on work visas to do the tasks that New Zealand’s unemployed seem unwilling or unable to do.
The Philippines is famous for sending its citizens out into the world to toil; 9.5 million of them live outside the country. I read where remittance payments sent home to the Philippines totalled $US21 billion in 2011, but it is thought that officially recorded remittances are only a fraction of the real figure.
This must be a great boost for the Philippine economy, but I’m intrigued to know just how it is accounted for in its country of origin.
We were taught at school that governments had to keep a tight rein on the money supply. To overprint money - though apparently an attractive option for the Greens - would cause inflation of the kind that occurred in the Weimer Republic in Germany and led to Hitler’s rise to power and the eventual advent of the Second World War.
But if billions of dollars are being sent overseas by migrant workers worldwide, how can the money supply be kept track of?
All of this revenue transfer is ably abetted by the international banking system that now moves money from one country to another at the push of a computer keyboard button. Just how governments account for this money and why it doesn’t disrupt their balance of payments disciplines is an abiding mystery.
Of course these days little printed paper money is involved. In our near cashless society the banks are said to be awash with ersatz money which they lend out on credit cards at rates that a few decades ago were the sole preserve of charlatans, usurers and loan sharks. The world banking system, as we witnessed in 2008, is now so convoluted that surely no-one would know how to untangle it.
My great-grandfather came from simpler times. I guess his money arrived by boat and the pound sterling would have been eagerly changed into local currency and then just as eagerly received by the local brewers.
But I must go now; my offspring have called a family meeting. Something about shipping me to England and sending me money to stay there.
I haven’t a clue what they’re on about.
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