BE-ME and Wolverhampton

Wolverhampton is a living monument to the diverse peoples that have shaped the city for over 1000 years.

In 985 King Aethelred granted Lady Wulfrana the title to Heantune, or ‘high town’ as a testament to the Saxon noblewoman’s bravery in battle with invading Danish Vikings and as a tribute to her popularity among local peasants. Wulfrana’s Heantune flourished as a centre of trade and religious worship through the fall of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman Conquest. A fine for unlicensed marketing laid on the people of “Wulfrun Heanton” by King Henry II in 1180 suggests Wolverhampton’s trade had developed substantially by the 12th century. In 1258 King Henry III officially recognised the city’s economic and clerical prominence by granting the Dean of Wolverhampton the charter to both a weekly market and an annual fair in celebration of the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul.

Wool dominated trade in Wolverhampton from the Middle Ages to the 16th century and left its legacy in local landmarks and civic contributions. The streets of Wolverhampton, such as Blossoms Fold, Townwell Fold and Mitre Fold, bear the mark of the wool trade today. Proceeds from this trade supported the city’s growth and contributed to the refurbishment of St. Peter’s Church and the construction of Wolverhampton Grammar School in 1512. Despite its size and importance, Wolverhampton’s wool trade diminished under increased royal regulation. A bout of plague and a serious fire in the town centre helped usher the wool trade from Wolverhampton in the 16th century.

The Industrial Revolution revitalized Wolverhampton’s economy and changed the shape of the city. Coal and iron production dates to the 15th century in the Wolverhampton area and proved vital to the city’s industrial growth in the 18th century. Major developments in transportation, particularly the completion of the Birmingham-Wolverhampton Canal in 1770, increased demand for Wolverhampton’s industrial products and helped transform the city’s light industries of small iron, metal and enamel works into major production outfits. Development of the railroad, including the construction of two new railway stations in the 19th century, sealed Wolverhampton’s place at the centre of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

These same canals and railways conducted thousands of newcomers to the city, many from surrounding rural areas, others from as far away as Wales and Ireland, to fill the increasing need for industrial labour brought about by the growing demand for Wolverhampton’s industrial products. These channels of labour and industry linked Wolverhampton to the rest of Britain and the world beyond, while the millions who came to the city in the 19th century changed the shape and dynamic of Wolverhampton to lay the foundations for the city of today.

Wolverhampton’s population expanded substantially in the 19th century. Although Wolverhampton, like cities across Britain, had experienced influxes of diverse peoples and changes in its population before the Industrial Revolution, the scale of 19th century migration and its role in Wolverhampton’s development differentiate the arrival of mostly Irish, Welsh and Jewish settlers from the population shifts of previous generations. What is more, the patterns of settlement and community development laid out by these newcomers in the nineteenth century bear similarities to conditions in Wolverhampton today that help place BE-ME’s work in historical context.

The Irish held the largest percentage of the thousands who migrated to Wolverhampton in the 19th century. Irish migration to Wolverhampton accelerated in the early 19th century and peaked during the Irish Potato Famine, the effects of which were evident in cities across Britain, including Wolverhampton. When the famine eased in 1851, over ten percent of the city’s population was Irish-born. Drawn by the employment and housing opportunities Wolverhampton’s industrial expansion offered, Irish migrants faced open discrimination and many challenges of cultural difference, particularly in language and religion. Settlers countered hostility and met these challenges by building a strong community in which they could converse in native languages and worship freely with one another.

Religion proved a particularly volatile aspect of Irish settlement. As in many other industrial cities in Britain, Wolverhampton’s Roman Catholic population increased substantially in the 19th century to reflect the influx of Irish migrants. Between 1830 and 1866, Wolverhampton’s Catholic community quadrupled in size while the city’s overall population only doubled. Anti-Catholic sentiments in Wolverhampton flared in the 1850s and 1860s and resulted in a series of raids on the predominately Irish Caribee Island section of the city. In the face of such violence, the Roman Catholic Church in Wolverhampton built five Roman Catholic day schools and three new parishes, the last of these St Patrick’s in Caribee Island.

Irish migration to Wolverhampton in the 19th century offers a paradigm for understanding later migration patterns. The Irish who came to Wolverhampton in search of employment and housing were often unskilled in trade and limited in financial resources. They found work in the city’s industries and shelter in the lowest grade of housing. High density Irish neighbourhoods, or “ghettos,” quickly developed in particular areas of the city as the dual forces of economic and social discrimination drove newcomers to settle in these compact quarters. Within the cramped and often abysmal conditions of these ghettos, Irish settlers countered discrimination by building a community on shared language, religion and culture. By the close of the 19th century, the fruits of their labour were evident in a host of new Irish societies, Catholic churches and schools.

The Irish were not alone. Driven from home by a severe depression, the Welsh found work in Wolverhampton’s mining, steel and iron industries. Wolverhampton’s Jewish community also dates to the early nineteenth century. The consecration of a Jewish burial ground in 1848 and the construction of two synagogues in the 1850s give a clear indication of the growing Jewish presence within the city in the 19th century. The Jewish community in Wolverhampton grew stronger towards the twentieth century as millions of Jews escaped the Russian pogroms of the 1880s.

Irish, Welsh and Jewish people came to Wolverhampton in the 19th century in search of financial and domestic security. They found employment in the city’s industries and settled in the city’s cheapest housing. Faced with discrimination and isolation, individuals bonded together in communities based on shared language, religion and cultural practices. These communities developed in the workplace in the form of workers’ unions and took shape across the city in pockets such as Caribee Island.

Wolverhampton continued to grow through the 20th century, buoyed by booming industrial production and new settlers drawn by the economic opportunities the city presented. New industries like Sunbeam, Villiers motorcycles, Goodyear Tyres and Guy Lorries and Buses kept the city in step with technological advances. These industries also put a high proportion of the city’s people employed in well-paid and secure jobs.

Yet Wolverhampton and its relationship to the outside world changed considerably in the 20th century. Two world wars and the global economic and population shifts that followed bore their effects on Wolverhampton and its industrial era economic and social structures. The city’s position as a leader of industrial production placed it at the centre of current events.

The onset of World War I had a great impact on Wolverhampton: local industries reconfigured to meet war-time production standards and many residents came forward to offer respite to some of the 250,000 Belgian refugees pouring into Britain. Hostels for the Belgians opened across Wolverhampton and the Black Country and local schools welcomed Belgian children. With the close of the war, most of the Belgian refugees returned home.

World War II had a deeper and more lasting impact on the city. As in World War I, the city’s industrial outfits had to meet the need for military supplies, including rubber materials, military transport and ammunition. Dutch, Polish, South African and American troops stationed in Britain brought the war and their own cultures to Wolverhampton. The circumstances under which they were stationed in Britain meant these soldiers faced little of the discrimination and outright hostility faced by Irish, Welsh and Jewish migrants of the 19th century. However, as in the ghettos that had developed across Wolverhampton in the 19th century, the close quarters of military bases confined and maintained religious and cultural practices of the troops stationed within them.

Dutch troops, for example, came to Wolverhampton in the spring of 1941 and built a thriving community around their base in Wrottesley Park. While stationed in Wolverhampton, the Dutch troops received visits from their exiled royal family and communicated through their own newspaper De Bromtol. Wolverhampton Town Hall held the Dutch crown jewels for the duration of the war.

Troops and refugees from Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic states who joined the Dutch troops in Wolverhampton during the war faced difficult decisions at the war’s end. War-time romances and families combined with shifting political alliances across Europe to place many at cross-roads between old and new worlds. Those who chose to settle in Wolverhampton planted permanent roots in churches and social clubs. Post-war migrants from Hungary wary of changing political conditions and settlers from Italy in search of economic stability also built their own communities in Wolverhampton.

The post-war years saw great political and economic changes across the globe. The ideological clash of capitalist and communist nations settled into a Cold War race for technological and military supremacy that led to major innovations in industrial production and significant changes to global economic activities. Independence movements dismantled European empires and gave rise to new nations in Africa and Asia.

In Britain, a post-war labour shortage set sights oversees. The 1948 Nationality Act provided a solution to the shortage by tearing down the divisive barriers of Empire and opening the nation’s borders to the colonies. Clearly, Britain was no stranger to immigration in 1948. The British Empire was built on trade. The same channels that ferried goods and services over the world were travelled by sailors, merchants and adventurers looking for new opportunities abroad. These channels of migration were officially sanctioned in the Nationality Act.

On 22 June 1948 nearly 500 Jamaican men disembarked the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in Essex. Familiar with Britain from service in the armed forces, these men spread across the country in search of steady pay and a place to live. Over the past 50 years, the men aboard the Windrush have come to symbolize the dawn of a new Britain. In the wake of Windrush, thousands journeyed from the Caribbean to Britain in pursuit of steady work and good education. Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus dislocated in the partition of India in 1947 joined the wave of Commonwealth migrants to Britain. From 1948 to the restrictions on immigration laid out by the 1961 Commonwealth Bill, Caribbeans and South Asians came in the thousands to lay the foundations of modern Britain.

Wolverhampton was not isolated from the great events of the post-war era. Indeed, the city’s strong industrial roots placed it at the centre of post-war development. People from the Caribbean and South Asia came to Wolverhampton in the thousands in search of work and affordable housing, two areas in which social and economic discrimination carried great significance. Concentrated black and South Asian communities appeared across the city. New social societies and worker organisations developed alongside these communities.

Migration from South Asia to Britain grew gradually in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s. Upon arrival in Britain, immigrants from different regions in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh dispersed across the country. Most of the men settling in Wolverhampton came from India, although today’s census reflects the arrival of settlers from Bangladesh and Pakistan, as well. This first generation of South Asian men to make their way to cities like Wolverhampton was predominately male. Most came from agricultural backgrounds, grew up in extended patriarchal families and benefited from the financial sponsorship of family back home.

The Dudley Road and Blakenhall areas of the city held the heaviest concentration of South Asian settlement in Wolverhampton. Like the Irish in the 19th century, settlers from South Asia overcame difficulties of language and cultural difference by building their own communities. New churches, temples, shops and cinemas marked the growth of these communities. Newspapers in Hindi and Punjabi fostered political development in Britain while preserving cultural ties to places and people left behind.

The institutional development within these communities, however, was matched by the forces of racism and discrimination outside their boundaries. The limited resources of most settlers combined with the prejudice of estate agents to leave settlers with few housing opportunities. Most settlers concentrated in areas with cheaper, below-standard housing. Although these intense living conditions allowed for the cultural development of Wolverhampton’s South Asian communities, they also resulted in a concentration of poverty among the area’s newest and least advantaged residents.

South Asian migrants faced many institutional barriers outside these communities, as well. Language and cultural differences in the workplace and in schools set a formidable challenge for new settlers and the City of Wolverhampton to overcome together. These obstacles were met with varying degrees of efficiency. Grove Primary School, for example, established a Language Centre for non-English speaking children and included a turban as part of the school uniform. Many schools and employers were not so accommodating, however. In 1965 a dispute erupted at the Transport Department over the right of male Sikh employees to wear turbans and beards. The dispute lasted over two years engaged politicians, labour organisers and religious leaders from Wolverhampton to London to the Punjab.

Exhibiting a migration pattern similar to that of South Asians, migrants from the different countries of the Caribbean dispersed across the Britain’s industrial centres. As migration reached its peak in the late-1950s and 1960s, large pockets of distinct black Caribbean communities developed in different cities. Wolverhampton, for example, attracted large numbers of settlers from the Mandeville region of Jamaica, as well as Barbados and Grenada.

Like the first generation of Asian settlers, the first blacks to arrive in Wolverhampton from the Caribbean were predominately male, many with strong ties to Britain through education, employment and military service. Many of these men considered their stay in Wolverhampton temporary as one part of a five-year plan to build financial security for their families back home. These plans often disintegrated under low wages, high cost of living and changing circumstances back home. As new legislation brought increasing restrictions on Caribbean migration, many men sent home for their wives, children and extended family.

Migration from the Caribbean peaked in the late-1950s and early 1960s in response to this impending legislation. As more and more settlers came to Wolverhampton, black Caribbean neighbourhoods began to take shape at the junction of Waterloo and Staveley Roads. Evangelical churches and stores specialising in West Indian produce marked the development of Wolverhampton’s black communities. New arrivals from the Caribbean found work in Wolverhampton’s industries and at the Transport Department as bus drivers and mechanics. Women put qualifications earned in the Caribbean to work in Wolverhampton’s hospitals and medical facilities.

As BE-ME respondents reveal, life in Wolverhampton for black and Asian newcomers was not settled. Shifting economic and political conditions of the late-1950s and 1960s combined with outright racism to result in open hostility towards non-white communities. Social paranoia surrounding the dangers of immigration was piqued by politicians capitalising on the fears of white constituents. In 1968 Wolverhampton M.P. Enoch Powell marked etched these paranoid fears in history when he likened British immigration policies to the seeds of racial war. Black and Asian individuals and communities across Britain fought injustice every day and at every level – politically, socially and economically.

BE-ME

The city today reflects the shifting tides of migration across the world. Organisations such as BE-ME and its consortium members carry forward the work of these first generations.

Our archives concentrate on the post-war period in Wolverhampton. Respondents from Asia and the Caribbean give a detailed record of their journeys from homelands to new home towns and the variety of experiences they encountered upon arrival. BE-ME works to link every century of Wolverhampton’s history together and to preserve the role of black and Asian peoples within that history.