I’ve been sifting through microfilm in a local archive, looking for material for a book on Irish migration. The book is a sequence of illustrations and texts based on interviews, conversations and workshops with people of Irish origin. The Irish famine brought to Wolverhampton thousands of migrants from Ireland, in particular from Mayo, Sligo and Roscommon. In 1851, one person in eight in Wolverhampton were from Ireland and by 1871 this had risen to one in 5.6. They lived primarily in an area called Caribee Island, also sometimes referred to as Irishtown or Little Rome. An Inspector for the Board of Health described it as “a collection of the most squalid looking houses on the north side of Stafford Street inhabited by the lowest class of Irish. A passage about 100 yards in length and about 3 or 4 wide leads into the heart of this loathsome neighbourhood.” (Wolverhampton Chronicle, 7th February, 1849). The Chief Constable, Gilbert Hogg, reported to a local committee that he was “compelled to have as many as 20 men parading the streets with cutlasses to assert the supremacy of law.”

The Chronicle reflected popular opinion and prejudices of these times, generally disapproving of these migrants, regularly running articles such as this, from April 1841:

No less strange that true – An Irish woman, the newly made widow of a man named Williams, attended the obsequies of her deceased husband who was an overlooker of the scavengers in the town on Tuesday, the tenth instant, and on the twelfth instant (only two days afterwards) she was again united in the bonds of wedlock to a young man about twenty years of age, the bride herself being about forty. We may exclaim in the language of Hamlet “Frailty they name is woman” and also conceive with the philosophic Dane that ‘the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.’

In the mid-19th century around a quarter of people in police custody in Wolverhampton were Irish – rather like in New York City, where the high percentage of arrests of Irish men and women led to the police to nickname the vehicle that transported their arrests  the ‘paddy wagon’. Though rising crime could not be entirely the fault of migrants – of course, young people also were a problem. The Chronicle of April 1841 reported the case of Samuel Daniels, aged 13, and Joseph Walton, aged 9, who had broken into the house of Peter Harris and stolen a knife. They were each sentenced to be “well privately whipped, and to be imprisoned for three months.”

When not worrying about the depravity of Irishtown, residents of Wolverhampton could look forward to the visit of the self-styled Wizard of the West to the Star and Garter Hotel: “The enlightenment of modern times seems completely to have deprived magic and witchcraft of their terrors, and to have converted spectacles and doings which would have filled our ancestors with astonishment and awe into pleasing amusements: at least so we can judge from the strong desire manifested by all classes to witness the amazing magic of the Wizard of the West, which seems to confound space and time, and to set Nature’s laws at complete defiance.”

In 1841, three years before my Great Grandfather Mark Quigley was born in Kings County, the first census recording the names of the British population was undertaken. Robert Peel, who founded the first Metropolitan Police force in London, became Prime Minister. The island of Hong Kong was occupied by British troops. In Afghanistan, in the middle of winter, the British army garrison of 4000 soldiers, accompanied by three times as many women, children and camp-followers evacuated Kabul. Of the whole army, only one man reached India,  and he was an Irish surgeon called William Brydon.

Views of contemporary Ireland can be found at this web site: thatsireland.com

He told me it was supposed to be a great trip but it clearly didn’t turn
out as he planned.

He said: Don’t ever mention the word ‘trip’ to me. We drove down all the way here from Wolverhampton, 24 hours overnight. A lot of interesting places caught my eye on the way but we didn’t stop. I didn’t get much sleep in the van and we got here by lunch time Friday. We’d got an apartment in the centre of town. Krakow looked all right to me. We had a walk round and found a pizza place. They didn’t seem to want to serve us so we found another one where it was sort of Middle-Eastern themed. The barmaids were dressed as belly dancers and they had vodka and apple flavoured hookah pipes. In the town square there were some naked English guys on a stag night. I didn’t want to look too closely. They soon got arrested. There’s a lot of English here, getting drunk on the cheap beer and vodka. So were we.

Yes, I understand, I said, it’s to be expected. Don’t mention piołunówka to me. It’s a killer.

Have you noticed, he said, how there’s a lot of bars in basements here? In this particular one, I think the barmaids were in hot pants. I’d lost my friends by this point. No, I don’t know how I ended up there. Anyway, I tripped up the stairs on the way out and impaled myself somehow right under my chin. Fortunately, there was an ambulance in the square dealing with more drunk tourists in football shirts. Some paramedics patched me up and put a big plaster around my head. I was covered in blood. I was bleeding like a stuck pig. It’s looks pretty bad doesn’t it? I probably look like that medieval trumpeter up in the church tower, that one who got shot through the neck with an arrow by the Tatar hordes. Or maybe the Scorpio killer in the first Dirty Harry movie? What do you think? A policeman kept asking me if I knew where I was going, very polite, not at all like a Clint Eastwood cop. I did know where I was going. It was the only thing I could remember, where we were staying. I staggered back there. My new clothes are ruined. The blood stains will never come out. Sunday was a blur. I need to drink less. If I come to Krakow again, I would refrain from alcohol.

He paused, looked me in the eye, then said: I could be lying…

I had to agree with him – he did look like a stuck pig. (I have worked in a hospital and my Mother was a nurse and I never actually seen a stuck pig, but this is how I imagine it to be.)

We talked about how the English love to drink in excess. They are binge drinkers par excellence. And of course, the government wants to intervene – with new surveys suggesting that the UK now has one of the highest rates of youth drunkenness across Europe, with 24% of 15-year-olds saying they have been drunk 10 times or more in the past year. Per-capita consumption of alcohol in the UK has doubled since the late 1950s, while in other European countries it has halved. (My non-British partner thinks this is because other countries don’t bother to actually spend time and energy on surveys - she believes that the British, along with Americans, are obsessed with surveying themselves.) Add to this health department figures which tell us that around 70% of attendances at Accident and Emergency departments between midnight and 5 am on weekends are alcohol-related. The Reverend Peter Swales from the British National Temperance League compares it with “the dark Victorian times where you could get drunk for a penny and dead for tuppence.” Or before… in the mid-18th century, thanks to an influx of cheap gin, London had 17,000 ‘gin-houses’ in the 1750’s. During the Napoleonic Wars, British soldiers were issued half a pint of rum or two pints of wine a day as basic rations. The Duke of Wellington called his troops “the scum of the earth… men who have enlisted for drink.” Cultural commentator Jeremy Clarkson is against any kind of state meddling. In a recent column for the Sunday Times he wrote: “The BBC says that if you drink too much your brain stem will break and you will die. The British government tells us that if a man drinks more than two small glasses of white wine a day he will catch chlamydia from the barmaid in the pub garden after closing time. Rubbish. If a man drinks more than two small glasses of white wine every day it’s the barman he needs to worry about.” His concern was not “the people who drink for fun, but the people who drink to live.”

With the increasing cost of wheat and barley products, we can expect to see an increase in the basic price of food and drink. Consumers appear to be fighting back. The Sunday Times also reports that Italians are threatening a pasta protest, the French government fearing baguette rage, while Mexicans take to the streets over the price of tortillas. We can surely expect an outbreak of alcohol anger in the UK. And more English tourists on a drink related weekend in cheap and cheerful Krakow. Then a Polish Clint Eastwood will suggest a zero tolerance clampdown. Nazdrovie!