caribbee island

[Jenny Williams]

Thank you for letting me come as a visitor yesterday. I had never heard of this area previously. I shall do some more searching now! Jenny

[geoffwilliams]

Although I wasn't at your meeting, I was interested in finding out more about this notorious part of Victorian Wolverhampton.  In a report on Wolverhampton in “The Builder” of August 1872 a writer notes “the most odious court system, countless courts of the most unhealthy and objectionable character…with middens full, stinking and confined, and deadly”.

The writer points out what to us must seem surprising, that is the close proximity in which the well-off lived to areas of utter squalor; he ends on an ominous note:

“In Peel Street and its neighbourhood and in what is called Caribee Island, the condition of things is frightful: if the latter were really the settlement of a tribe of wild Indians, it would be an object of wonder to the civilized upper classes of Wolverhampton. These are places which fight against the general salubrity of the town, and out of which will one day come some frightful epidemic to dispel the security at present indulged in, and rouse to salutary action”.

I was also interested to find out that many of the Irish families from Caribee Island moved to Manchester.

Geoff