The featured image is Canal Street, Wolverhampton, taken in the 19th century. One of the houses in this street was the home of the Turner family and the birthplace of Jane Turner, the future Mrs Jane ‘Jenny’ Taylor.
Jane’s father was Charles Turner, born in Wolverhampton in 1828. When he was an adult he became a canal boatman, like his father Thomas before him.
Boatmen were an important part of England’s industrial development in the 19th century. An extensive system of canals had been built to take raw material to the mills and factories and to bring finished goods to market. Boatmen guided barges full of material along the canals, often living on board their vessels or in houses nearby. The Turners lived in a house in the aptly named Canal Street which led down to the Wolverhampton Canal.
Canal Street was on the edge of an area known as Carribee or Carribee Island, an area of poor housing and labouring populations, many of the people there being Irish immigrants who had fled from the Irish famine. You can see the housing in the photograph at the top of this post, which was taken in 1878. These cottages are now gone, replaced by a timberyard.1 The historian Simon Briercliffe has done research in the area and he answered my questions about whether Canal Street was part of Carribee and whether the Turners might have been immigrant Irish.
You’re quite right that Canal Street was on the edge of Carribee Island – both sides of the street were home to plenty of Irish families particularly following the famine in the late 1840s, through to the 1880s when much of the street was demolished. However, areas like this were very rarely homogenous, and in particular the Irish were more likely to live in courts and alleys behind the main streets, rather than on main streets themselves. It was a very diverse neighbourhood for the time – there were Jewish families from Eastern Europe on Canal Street and Berry Street, and others from around the world passing through.
I think it’s fair to say that although they weren’t living in the worst housing available, if the Turners lived on Canal Street they were probably fairly poor. I can’t see them on the 1851 census from just the name, but their jobs will give an indication of their livelihoods, and if you have a house number I can give you a rough idea of what their home might have been like. Virtually all the other Turners in the area were English, mostly from Wolverhampton or nearby. Irish immigration is really only evident from the 1830s in small numbers, and was boosted dramatically by the famine – therefore, if Charles and Maria were born in Wolverhampton and were of an age to be married in 1851, I think the likelihood of them being of Irish origin is very small indeed.
Simon Briercliffe email, 29th of May 2022
The railway came to Wolverhampton in the middle of the 19th century and it competed with the canal trade. Goods and passengers could be taken by rail more quickly than they could by canal boat, so boatmen saw their jobs threatened. Charles Turner adapted to this change and joined the railway, where he worked until 1856, when he went to New Zealand.
Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Simon Briercliffe for information about Canal Street. See his blog at https://uptheossroad.wordpress.com/tag/carribee-island/
Notes
1 The Old Racecourse and Canal Street (historywebsite.co.uk)
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