Telling family stories

As part of my research I will inevitably have to tell you some family histories. I say have to - it's a vital, fascinating and relevant part of my research. But have you ever had someone try to tell you their family history? I'm guilty of this, because my own family history is really interesting - to …

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Black Country Irish: Wednesbury

The town of Wednesbury was home to probably the most significant Irish population in the Black Country, after Wolverhampton. The nationalist journalist Hugh Heinrick reckoned that in 1872 there was at least 3,000 in the Irish community (based on his own definition of Irishness, in which one Irish voter probably equates to about 7 Irish men, …

Legitimate concerns?

There's been a lot said in the last few days about migrants - how they should be listed and categorised, how people's "legitimate concerns" over influxes of labour should be heard, how funding should be changed so we don't have to invite so many, say, doctors to work here. I am not a migrant in …

Black Country Irish: Wolverhampton, 1851

I'm starting my series on the Irish in the 19th century Black Country by looking at Wolverhampton. This is familiar ground for me, or at least should be - so I'm broadening my normal hyper-local view of Carribee Island out to look at some quantitative data on Wolverhampton as a whole. My hope is that this will …

Coming over here, taking our jobs…

Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns. The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways... He is the sorest evil this  country has to strive with. So wrote the great crusading reformer Thomas Carlyle in 1839. Heroes of the Left like Friedrich Engels were little better: True, the …

The Other immigrants of Carribee Island: Wolverhampton’s Jewish community 1

My PhD research focuses on a small section of Wolverhampton town centre in the nineteenth century that was well-known - perhaps notorious, even - for it's substantial Irish immigrant population. "Carribee Island" and the "Stafford Street district" became by-words when any sort of unrest occurred amongst Wolverhampton's Irish. My cursory go at statistics so far …

“Slums” of the Black Country: The Mambles, Dudley

I've had a wonderful time speaking on my research at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Archives recently - I've met tons of new people, heard anecdotes and stories and generally had a ball. I was discussing Carribee Island, a site of extremely poor housing, poverty and job insecurity, criminality (perceived, at least) and a very dense …

Genuine asylum seekers or economic migrants?

If I were to write about large groups of desperately poor families travelling long distances by unsafe boat or on foot, risking their own and their families' lives fleeing poverty and disaster in their own land, trying to settle either in the country they first set foot in or using that country as a stepping stone to …

First as tragedy, then as farce

History can be a depressing mistress sometimes. Most people will be familiar with an expression attributed to Marx, that history repeats itself "the first as tragedy, the second as farce." In fact, Marx was quoting Hegel and referring specifically to "great world-historic facts and personages, but it's still held to be true. Even Slavoj Zizek says so, …

We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history

It's a bit un-nuanced to simply say "history repeats itself". I'd be arguing with Marc Bloch ("it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical") and Jacques Ellul ("any philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual") for a start, …