Heritage and Cultural RootsFrank SharmanCautionary note: this article is about the population of Wolverhampton and how we all got here. It therefore includes references to race and colour. My views, opinions and prejudices are roughly to the effect that we are all Wulfrunians now, whether by our own birth here, the birth of our ancestors here or because, like me, we have been settled here for long enough to have chosen to adopt the town (whether some of the longer standing inhabitants think the town has adopted us or not!). I am uncomfortably aware that some people like to treat information about people of different origins as grounds for making unwarranted distinctions between peoples. But I cannot see what I can do about it here. I can only say that you should object to people who talk in terms of "us" (the whites) and "them" (everyone else) - or vice versa. It is not a case of "us" and "them"; we are all "us". Note also: this article is illustrated throughout by photos of local religious buildings. They are here as symbols as much as anything else. By no means all immigrants to Wolverhampton had, and by no means all have retained, connections with the major religion of their country of origin. So, for example, not everyone from the Caribbean attended a church established by their fellows; many did not attend a religious institution at all; many attended existing churches. Nor do any of these religions attempt to confine their congregations to those hwo, or whose ancestors, have any particular origin. But the buildings stand as a distinctive part of the built heritage]. Today Wolverhampton is, as it has been for centuries, a town of immigrants. How many people living in Wolverhampton today have four grandparents born in Wolverhampton - or three, or even two? We have no figures for the population of Wolverhampton in its earliest times but we can suppose that the population slowly increased up until the Black Death when, like the population of the rest of the country, it was dramatically reduced. Thereafter it would have slowly increased again. This increase in population would have been largely due to natural increase, though doubtless there would have been some immigration from surrounding parts. The population of England was not as geographically static as we sometimes think. People did move from their villages, to other villages or to towns and cities. The movement was largely that of younger people and was usually confined to moving no more than 20 to 25 miles from the place of origin. However, large centres such as London attracted people from further away. Even a radius of 25 miles from Wolverhampton provides a catchment area with a very large population and, as a market town and a centre of the wool trade, Wolverhampton would have attracted at least its fair share of such immigrants. Movement was often by people of the lowest and highest classes - the lowest seeking work and the highest moving around their estates and inter-marrying at a distance. Wolverhampton, like most towns, would have had "core families", usually families "of the middling sort", who stayed in the same town for centuries, often inter-marrying amongst themselves and, between them, running the place. I do not know of any analysis of core families in Wolverhampton but the Levesons and the Gowers might be good candidates. Population figures for the earlier part of Wolverhampton's history are not available. However Marie Rowlands notes that: "Wolverhampton in 1666 returned 305 chargeable houses for Hearth Tax and there were probably a further 200 not chargeable. These were concentrated in an area of about 200 acres." I think this would give a minimum population of 2,000. Rowlands also notes that: "In Wolverhampton in 1673 only 543 houses were listed as paying hearth tax or as exempt. By 1750 the town had 1,440 and by 1780 there were 2,270." The Wolverhampton Archives provide the following population table. The earliest figures in this table have been deduced from other information (such as maps); the later come from national censuses.
The major increase in population started as Wolverhampton started to become industrialized and continued steadily from there on. It used to be thought that the great increase in the size of towns during the industrial revolution was fuelled by immigration from the countryside, caused by enclosure. But there turns out to be no evidence for this being a general trend. Amongst other things, the population of the countryside was no smaller after enclosure than it had been before. The increase in the size of towns was largely due to natural increase. We do not have much evidence about the people from overseas who settled in Wolverhampton. The country as a whole had an open door policy under which almost anyone was welcome to come and settle. Sometimes they came because we wanted their skills: Flemish weavers were encouraged to come in the early fourteenth century and helped establish new fabric industries; the Dutch came, not just with William of Orange, but earlier than that to drain the Fens and other parts. Neither of these groups seem to have been noted in Wolverhampton; nor have the many other groups, mainly of political and religious refugees, such as the Huguenots, who came to England in succeeding centuries. The first identifiable influx into Wolverhampton was during the nineteenth century when large number of Irish immigrants arrived. It is usually said that these were people who had come to England to build the canals and later the railways; as canals and railways reached Wolverhampton, so the Irish found the place and stayed. There appears to be no rigorous evidence of this, though in some cases it must have been true. It seems likely that a lot of the Irish just arrived here straight from Ireland or via some such entry port as Liverpool. Immigration from Ireland into England as a whole started to increase noticeably after the Act of Union 1801 and even more during the Irish Famines of the 1840s. They were mostly Catholic and would have found many Catholics already in Wolverhampton. But while religion might have joined them, class put them apart. The working class immigrants did not feel welcome at the middle class churches of the established residents and for that reason, as well as to avoid overcrowding, new Catholic churches, such as St Patrick's, were built nearer the immigrants' areas. These new Irish Catholic working class immigrants were met with much prejudice. Many Welsh people also came, many arriving in the 19th century during depressions in the mining or iron and steel industry in Wales. Then many of them came to work on the building of the Great Western Railway. There was a Welsh Presbyterian Chapel in one room in Brickkiln Street by 1854 and the Welsh were numerous enough to build a chapel in St. George's Parade in 1860. Then a new chapel was built, in 1908, on Bath Road.
The Welsh Church, Bath Road After 1926, when there was further depression in the South Wales coal fields, another wave arrived as Wolverhampton, although affected by the Depression, was not as badly hit as many places. The Ring Road came through the Bath Road Chapel and it was demolished in 1966. The compensation received from the borough council included land in St. Mark's Road on which a new church, called Saron, was built and opened in 1968.
Eglwys Gymraeg: the Welsh Church The Russian pogroms of the 1880s caused many Jews to come to England. Jewish people reached Wolverhampton towards the end of the century, in large enough numbers to warrant their building themselves a synagogue, albeit a small one. They also established a cemetery, which survives though no longer in use, off what is now the Birmingham New Road. The community seems to have become well integrated but it was never large. After the Second World War Jewish people seem to have either become merged into the rest of the population and to have lost their religious identity or to have moved away. The community became so small that it could not longer be sustained and it was difficult to raise the adult male quorum needed for transacting synagogue business. The synagogue closed.
The Synagogue, Fryer Street The lives of immigrants followed a pattern which can be followed in towns and cities throughout the world. Being poor they settled in the poorest areas. The first comers from another country or area thus formed an identifiable group which later immigrants from the same country or area would wish to join, to share the mutual support of family, friends or, at least, people of the same roots and culture. Thus what were later called ghettoes formed. The Carribbee area of Wolverhampton, off Stafford Street, formed one well known such area, the residents being almost exclusively of Irish origin. These ghettoes gradually break up, as the more successful immigrants move out into more favoured areas, in which they are usually more widely dispersed than in the ghettoes, though still somewhat aggregated. The less successful are, nevertheless, more established and better off than new waves of immigrants; they start to move out of the ghetto areas, leaving them to the new comers, and themselves move into whatever previously favoured areas have come far enough down in the world to be available to them. In the third stage these dispersals continue until the immigrants become fully part of the general population and largely indistinguishable from them.
Shree Krishan Mandir There appear to be no noticeable groups of immigrants from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the inter-war period, when many people, mostly but not exclusively Jews, left Germany. After the war, the world being a smaller place than it was, the economic difference between countries being more obvious and totalitarian regimes providing repression on a much improved basis, immigrants arrived from all over. Some prominent groups in Wolverhampton were the Poles and the Italians, though there seems to have been a good scattering of other Europeans too, notably Ukrainians. It would be interesting to investigate the reasons why these groups came to England and, in particular, why some of them came to Wolverhampton. The Italians may well have been part of a large influx from that country, in the 1950s, caused by chronic unemployment in Italy and job vacancies here. There had, of course, be occasional immigrants from Italy before and those who set up the traditional ice cream businesses are still fondly remembered by older people. Many of the women who came in the 1950s were employed at Courtaulds. They built themselves a church - a tin tabernacle - in Gorsebrook Road in 1961; it is known as the Italian Pentecostal Evangelical Church. This building demolished in 2006 in preparation for the building of a more substantial church on the site. This new church does not represent an enlarging or strengthening of the Italian community. In fact Pastor Giuseppe Sacco is quoted (E&S, 24 July 2006) as saying: "There used to be a strong Italian community in Wolverhampton but there are not so many left now, so we try to keep the link and say together". The Poles may well have been made up in part of Polish people who came here immediately before and during the war when Germany occupied their own country and in (probably a greater) part of members of the Polish armed forces which were here after the war ended and who were unable or unwilling to return to a totalitarian regime. In this respect they may contrast with the Dutch, who were stationed in and around Wolverhampton in large numbers during the war - to the extent that the Dutch crown jewels were stored, throughout the war, in Wolverhampton's Town Hall (now the Magistrates' Courts); and the gold of the Dutch Treasury is said to have been stored at Wrotteseley House. Very few of them seem to have remained here - they had a democratic and free economy to go back to and to rebuild.
The Polish Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity, Stafford Road Another group which preferred to stay here after WW2 were the Ukrainians. Many of these were Catholics and they are still well represented in Wolverhampton by the Ukranian Catholic Church of St. Volodymyr and Olha, in Merridale Street West.
Particular Ukrainian Catholic Church of Saints Volodymyr
and Olha, Merridale Street. The next wave were the Afro-Caribbeans. It seems that most of those who came to Wolverhampton came from Jamaica. These arrivals established many churches, mainly in the independent evangelical tradition. Much more information about all this would be welcome.
The Church of God of Prophecy They were not, of course, the first people of African origin to appear in Wolverhampton. There are scattered references to black people in Wolverhampton in much earlier times; and that probably means that there were more than one or two, since most of them would probably not have been noted in the records which survive.
Wolverhampton Central Mosque, Waterloo Road At much the same time came people from the Indian sub-continent. The figures seem to show that those who ended up in Wolverhampton came mainly from India, mostly from the Punjab and the Gujerat, with very many Sikhs amongst them. There were relatively few from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Amongst these incomers were Bhuddists, mainly from the Punjab.
The Bhuddist Vihara, Wolverhampton. The Bhuddists (of all national origins) have a vihara in Upper Zoar Street. It is run by the Dr. Ambedkar Memorial Committee of Great Britain. Dr. Ambedkar (1891 - 1956) was a lawyer and a politician. He was the leader of the Dalits (the untouchables, the outcastes) in India and achieved for them legal emancipation - even if social emancipation has still not come about. He was, in practice, the sole author of the Indian constitution, which in many ways reflects his training a a British lawyer. He visited this country frequently, for political and legal occasions, but used the opportunity to scour the book shops, sending hundreds of volumes back to India, where had to build an annexe to his house to hold them all. Born and bred a Hindu he converted to Bhuddism, at least in part to make the point that Bhuddism did not recognise caste but Hinduism did. He died within a few months of his conversion but leaving behind his book "Bhudda and His Kharma". The vihara contains a museum of the life of Dr. Ambedkar, containing many artefacts belonging to him, which were bequeathed to the Wolverhampton bhuddists by Dr. Ambedkar's personal secretary who had inherited them direct from Dr. Ambedkar.
Severe restrictions on immigration started in 1962 and later legislation, in 1968, 1971 and 1982, closed the door still tighter. These Acts took a distinction between those who had one or more grandparents born in this country and others. This bit of whitewash did not do much to disguise the fact that the legislation was taking a distinction between black and white. The 1991 Census figures show the country of birth of Wolverhampton's residents. They take a distinction between those from the "old commonwealth" and those from the "new Commonwealth" - which is almost honest about what it really means. But they also list other countries in Europe and the Rest of the World. I have put these figures on a separate page. 1991 seems to me to a be a bit late to get the full flavour of this century's immigration into Wolverhampton. A study of earlier censuses and even a phone book surname study might be more interesting than the 1991 figures. The great number of religious groups in Wolverhampton gives some indication of the many origins and cultures of our people. In the opening years of the new century Wolverhampton has been one of the places where the new waves of economic migrants, political refugees and "illegal immigrants" arrived in large numbers. From Eastern Europe and many other parts, many of them will not stay, but some will and will add further diversity even to Wulfrunians' diverse origins.
Guru Nanak Sikh Temple, Duncan Street The writer of this note is not able to comment usefully on the history of race relations in Wolverhampton. That is something else that could do with researching. Suffice it to say that he strongly suspects that Wolverhampton is making better progress towards a multi-cultural society than a lot of other places he prefers not to name. He likes to think that, since the time Roman Catholics found a relatively safe haven in Wolverhampton in the seventeenth and later centuries, Wulfrunians, being mostly immigrants themselves, have shown a pretty good degree of tolerance to others. To this tolerance Giffard House stands as a good monument. These days many of us travel abroad and, in doing so, compare our culture with other's, hoping to take from it whatever elements we feel would improve our own lives and culture. Immigration brings other cultures to us and we have to hope that they remain distinctive for long enough for those already here to be able to get the benefit of what those cultures offer. What is of more interest now is the argument that people's heritage lies not only in their immediate and current surroundings but also in their own cultural roots. Some individuals will feel this heritage more strongly than others and, as generations pass, the heritage of the cultural roots becomes less strongly felt. But it still seems that the heritage of Wulfrunians can be seen to lie not just here but in Ireland, Wales, Poland, Italy, Jamaica, the sub-Continent and many other places.
The children's wall, Peace Green |
