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Wolverhampton and the Irish |
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Law and disorder
In relation to Wolverhampton’s population, the Irish community were disproportionately accused, and found guilty, of criminal offences. In the mid-1850s around one fifth of those in the custody of Wolverhampton Police were Irish.
The ‘Irish Rows’ of the late 1840s were a culmination of the Irish-police violence. They were a series of civil disorders between the police and the Irish residents of Stafford Street. In May 1848, the intervention of a policeman into a disturbance prompted an attack by the some members of the Irish community. A riotous situation developed and troops were called upon to restore calm. These clashes became a frequent event, and were reported in the Wolverhampton Chronicle with ever increasing glee.
Broad Street 1870: Formerly known as Canal Street was one of the main roads that passed through Caribee Island.
© Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies |
As suggested above, the poverty and pub culture encouraged criminality and public disorder. However, the other factor suggested by historian Roger Swift was the newly established police force. Police forces were a relatively new invention of Victorian England. Following the establishment of London’s Metropolitan Police force in 1830, towns and cities across the country were given permission to create their own . In 1849, the Wolverhampton Borough Police Force was created to improve law and order in the town.
By the mid-1850s, the Wolverhampton police were keen to prove their own efficiency. Public opinion of the Irish was low, making them an easy and popular target, and they were grouped in one area, making intimidation and aggressive policing possible. In his essay Another Stafford Street Row, Roger Swift argues that these anti-police disturbances must be recognised as "the product of a clash between the police drive to assert its authority in the town and the growing Irish presence which constitutes an obstacle to that drive".
However, later disturbances between the authorities and the town’s Irish had a different cause: religion.
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