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Skinner Street in Wolverhampton
© Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies
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Wolverhampton and the Irish |
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Work
In the years 1845-50, the potato crop in Ireland rotted away, leaving the dependent population to . According to the 1841 census the population prior to Ireland’s Potato Famine was just 8.2 million, from this around 1 million died due to famine and a further million emigrated to either mainland Britain or the United States. Those who chose England flocked to the burgeoning industrial centres in search of employment. Wolverhampton was one such place, where work being undertaken in creating and improving the transport infrastructure meant that there were plenty of employment opportunities for the Irish immigrants. 
Stafford Street in 1880
© Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies |
By 1851, one in eight people in Wolverhampton were Irish, over 6,000 Irish out of the total population of 49,985. The majority of the immigrant Irish in Wolverhampton were unskilled and flooded the manual labour market. In his study of Victorian anti-Papal feeling, E .R . Norman describes how this depression in the labour-market fuelled anti-Irish feeling amongst Wolverhampton’s working class, "English working-men did not discriminate between unskilled Irishmen and their religion".
The Irish workers were subject to large amounts of prejudice, as frequently affects many immigrant populations. This discrimination however was based solely on their religion, and anti-Catholic feeling became rife. This affected not only the new immigrant workers, but also Catholics who had lived peacefully in the city for many years.
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