The North

by Paul Morley

  85.4

  Liverpool, surreal. Liverpool, sardonic. Liverpool, battered dignity. Liverpool, flotsam of maritime memory. Liverpool, never quite what it was because everything it does changes what it does. Liverpool, the home of Liverpool. Liverpool, welcoming the world. Liverpool, cutting-edge, keeping pace, dropping anchor. Liverpool, lost. Liverpool, as spontaneous as life itself. Liverpool, born. Liverpool, going to sea. Liverpool, set in its ways, at the end of the line, at the beginning of time, with its back to the land, its feet in the water, its head in the clouds, its heart on its sleeve, hearts in its mouth. Liverpool, its being so cheerful that keeps us going. Liverpool, the first city to rock in Britain. Liverpool, boring people to tears. Liverpool, singing for its supper. Liverpool, a long memory for those who aimed kicks when it was down. Liverpool, eagles become seagulls. Liverpool, working. Liverpool, dreaming. Liverpool, a terminus for down and outs. Liverpool, corrupt. Liverpool, uncompromising. Liverpool, playfulness turned into art, and philosophy, and business. Liverpool, a relatively small provincial city plus hinterland with associated metaphysical space as defined by dramatic moments in history, emotional occasions and general restlessness. Liverpool, the rest of the world rubbing off. Liverpool, occupation hard knocks.

  Liverpool in the seventeenth century, on the River Mersey, newly built in brick and stone, handsome paved streets, fashionable and well-dressed people, a large fine town, London in miniature. Liverpool, spirit, spirited, spiritual.

  ‘This commercial intercourse of the inhabitants, induces a general harmony and sociability, unclouded by those ceremonies and distinctions that are met with in more polished life; hence the freedom and animation which the town has always been observed to possess.’ William Moss, Georgian Liverpool, 1797.

  Also in 1797 the Reverend William Bagshaw Stevens: ‘throughout this large-built town every brick is cemented to its fellow brick by the blood and sweat of Negroes’. The first known slave ship here was the Liverpool Merchant, which took 220 African slaves to Barbados in 1699. In 1768 the Liverpool Chronicle advertises the sale of a ‘fine Negroe boy, of about 4 foot 5 inches high. Of a sober, humane, intractable disposition, eleven or twelve years of age, talks English very well, and can dress hair in a tolerable way.’ By the 1790s Liverpool ships carry 80 per cent of the British slave trade – over 40 per cent of the European trade. The Liverpool Triangle saw ships from the port take Cheshire salt, Lancashire coal, textiles, Staffordshire pottery and Birmingham metal to west Africa, exchange the goods for slaves and sail to the West Indies, where the human cargo was traded for sugar, spices and rum which was then taken back to Liverpool.

  Defending the slave trade in Parliament in 1806, Liverpool’s MP, General Bonastre Tarleton, himself from a slave-owning family, describes with pride Liverpool’s rise ‘to become the second place in wealth and population in the British Empire’. During the same debate William Roscoe and William Wilberforce, on behalf of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, are adamant that ‘nothing short of an entire and immediate abolition will satisfy’. The vote results in the abolition of slavery in Britain the following year. The last British slaver, Kitty Amelia, under Captain Hugh Crow, a one-eyed Manxman, leaves Liverpool in July 1807. Cotton saves the day. Eight new docks are built in Liverpool between 1815 and 1835.

  William Gladstone was born on 29 December 1809 – the same year as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Tennyson – in Rodney Street, Liverpool. Gladstone was the fourth son and the fifth of six children. His father had ‘half commoner blood, robust, energetic merchant and magnate drive’, his mother a sympathetic, progressive, semi-poetic sensibility. His father owned mines in Wales, factories in Lancashire and sugar plantations in Jamaica. He went to Eton in 1821, Oxford afterwards. His links with his hometown were not strong, but it is said he retained traces of his accent, and claimed that he ‘backed the masses against the classes’.

  Queen Victoria described Gladstone as a ‘half-mad firebrand’ and complained he always addressed her as though she were a public meeting, but to a large part of the British working classes he was the Grand Old Man, the people’s William. Four times prime minister, at fifty-eight, seventy, seventy-six and eighty-two, sitting in the House of Commons for sixty-three years, Disraeli’s chief opponent, Gladstone provoked strong reactions. ‘Oxford on the surface,’ said Walter Bagehot, writer and constitutional expert, ‘but Liverpool underneath.’ There are two statues of Gladstone in Manchester, for supporting two issues crucial to the city’s development – free trade and political reform. Holmes and Watson’s bulldog was named Gladstone, and the name was given to a style of large briefcase hinging open on metal frames.

  In 1810 75,000 people were packed into one square mile of Liverpool streets and fever-haunted alleys. The pressure on city-centre housing for dock and factory workers, who needed to live close to their work, was counterpointed by the fine houses of the better off, which were built on the outskirts in places like Crosby, Sefton and, into the twentieth century, on the Wirral. In the late eighteenth century the Wirral was a wild region with a total population of about 6,000. Most of the people worked on the land as agricultural labourers.

  Liverpool in 1820 has more breweries than any other British port, a gin shop or alehouse to every forty inhabitants.

  Liverpool, Victorian overcrowding, malnutrition, filth and disease. Liverpool was the most densely populated town in England. Mortality was unparalleled – one in every 25 people died of fever in one year. Following the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, the city was obliged to tackle the problem of the 1,200 thieves under the age of fifteen and 3,600 prostitutes in the town. The corpses that accumulate overnight in the docks and alleys are collected in the death house and there each day a crowd can be found gazing upon the nameless dead. Liverpool, genius. Liverpool, the archetype of the modern secular city. Liverpool, the approach to unknown worlds. Liverpool, Herman Melville, 1839, genuinely comparing its docks with the Great Wall of China and the pyramids of the pharaohs, ‘In the evening, especially when the sailors are gathered in great numbers, these streets present a most singular spectacle, the entire population of the vicinity being seemingly turned into them. Hand organs and fiddles, plied by strolling musicians, mix with the songs of the seamen, the babble of women and children and the whining of beggars. From the various boarding houses proceed the noises of revelry.’

  In 1845, of the Irish fleeing to America from the Great Famine 90 per cent pass through Liverpool. Those who never make the boat, flinching from the gruelling, often fatal voyage, or those fleeced by the infamous local ‘land-pirates’ are called ‘the scum left by the tide of migration between Europe and the continent of America’. Melville: ‘. . . of all seaports in the world, Liverpool, perhaps, most abounds in all the variety of land-sharks, land-rats, and other vermin, which make the hapless mariner their prey. In the shape of landlords, bar-keepers, clothiers, crimps, and boarding house loungers, the land-sharks devour him, limb by limb’. Liverpool becomes known as the hospital and cemetery of Ireland.

  A more positive side of the Irish presence was noticed in 1760 as Liverpool pulled ahead of Bristol as a port: ‘This great increase in commerce is owing to the spirit and indefatigable industry of the inhabitants, the majority of whom are either native Irish, or of Irish descent: a fresh proof that the Hibernians thrive best when transplanted. They engage in trade as battle, with little or no spirit at home, but with unparalleled gallantry abroad.’ By the late nineteenth century the Irish presence is nearly 200,000 strong, belonging in neither their old home but loving its memory, nor their new home, there but not there, yet, but falling in love with its potential, struggling against adversity, willing to tackle any task, Micks on the make in Mersey, developing the underdog persecuted patois that is the precursor of Scouse.

  Dublin is not far from Liverpool, wrote Anthony Burgess, ‘and Catholic Lancashire has allowed the indigenous form of its culture to be influenced, and sometimes swamped, by Ireland. More th
an that, Anglo-Saxon Catholic blood has been much mixed with Irish . . .’

  85.5

  In 1846 William Duncan (usually known as Doctor Duncan) was appointed Britain’s first medical officer of health and began a programme of improvements to Liverpool’s water supply, drainage and living conditions.

  A new dock was officially opened on 30 July 1846 by Prince Albert. The wood used to build warehouses had made fires a big problem. The Albert Dock was the first enclosed, non-combustible dock warehouse complex in the world, and the first structure in Britain to be built entirely of cast iron, brick and stone. It gained another first in 1848, when the world’s first hydraulic warehouse hoists were installed.

  In Chapter 4 of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, written in 1845 and 1846 at the beginning of the Great Potato Famine and set during the years of slave trading about fifty years before, gentleman farmer Mr Earnshaw walks sixty miles from his home on the remote treeless Yorkshire Moors to Liverpool on business. He finds a dark-skinned orphaned boy ‘starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool’. The boy has no place to live, speaks ‘gibberish’ that nobody can understand, and might have been abandoned by a foreign visitor. His identity as an ambiguous racial ‘other’ has left him with nothing to belong to; he represents the mongrel, the irregular black, ‘dark almost as if it came from the devil’, a cause of considerable nervousness among Victorians. Later in the book he will be referred to as beast, savage, lunatic and demon.

  Earnshaw pities him, and after following the law of the time and asking after ‘its owner’, brings the boy from Liverpool to Wuthering Heights, into the Earnshaw home. He decides to adopt him and bring him up with his own children, the beautiful Catherine and her truculent brother Hindley. Cathy is intrigued by the boy, who is given the name Heathcliff, the name of a son who had died in childhood. Even as his lover, Cathy describes Heathcliff as an ‘unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone’. Liverpool was the only place, the only space – where life itself is an ongoing experiment in fusion and diffusion – that Emily Brontë could send Earnshaw to find a child with this dangerous, glamorous mixture of the unknown, untamed, tough, satanic, unpredictable and possibly noble.

  In his autobiographical 1849 novel, Redburn, the quintessential nineteenth-century Liverpool novel, written by an outsider, on the route to Joyce’s Dublin, ‘all climes and countries embrace’, voyaging towards Moby Dick, Herman Melville relates how it was in Liverpool that he first saw black sailors walking arm in arm with white women, and remarks how much the black Americans loved the city because they felt a freedom there that they did not have at home. It is said that it in this book Melville presents the notion that Liverpool was named in honour of an extinct creature called the Liver Bird.

  As we sailed ahead the river contracted. The day came and soon passing two lofty landmarks on the Lancashire shore, we rapidly drew near the town, and at last, came to anchor in the stream. Looking shoreward, I beheld lofty ranges of dingy warehouses, which seemed very deficient in the elements of the marvellous; and bore a most unexpected resemblance to the warehouses along South-street in New York. There was nothing strange; nothing extraordinary about them. There they stood; a row of calm and collected warehouses; very good and substantial edifices, doubtless, and admirably adapted to the ends had in view by the builders; but plain, matter of fact warehouses, never the less, and that was all that could be said of them. To be sure, I did not expect every house in Liverpool must be a Leaning Tower of Pisa, or a Strasburg Cathedral; but yet these edifices I must confess were a sad and bitter disappointment to me. But it was different with Larry the whaleman; who to my surprise, looking about him delighted, exclaimed, ‘Why, this ’ere is a considerable place – I’m dummed if it ain’t quite a place – Why them ’ere houses is considerable houses. It beats the coast of Afriky, all hollow; nothing like this in Madagasky, I tell you – I’m dummed, boys, if Liverpool ain’t a city!’

  85.6

  Liverpool, under an ambiguous rainy heaven. Nathaniel Hawthorne was installed as the United States consul in Liverpool in the 1840s. Living on the Birkenhead side of the river, he wrote in his diary that the parlour window gave him a pretty good idea of the nautical business of Liverpool:

  . . . the constant objects being the little black steamers, puffing unquietly along . . . sometimes towing a long string of boats from Runcorn or otherwhere up the river, laden with goods; – and sometimes gallanting in or out of a tall ship . . . Now and then, after a blow sea, a vessel comes in with her masts broken short off in the midst, and marks of rough handling about the hull. Once a week comes a Cunard steamer, with its red funnel pipe whitened by the salt spray; and firing off some cannon to announce her arrival, she moors to a large iron buoy in the middle of the river . . . Immediately comes puffing towards her a little mail-steamer, to take away her mail bags, and such of the passengers as choose to land; and for several hours afterwards, the Cunarder liner lies with smoke and steam coming out of her, as she were smoking her pipe after some toilsome passage across the Atlantic.

  ‘Liverpool contains a multitude of inhabited cellars, close and damp, with not drain nor any convenience . . . Some time ago I visited a poor woman in distress, the wife of a labouring man; she had been confined only a few days, and herself and infant were lying on straw in a vault . . . with a clay floor impervious to water. There was no light or ventilation and the air was dreadful. I had to walk on bricks across the floor to reach her bedside, as the floor itself was flooded with stagnant water.’ Report of the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of Large Towns and Populous Districts, 1845.

  85.7

  Liverpool trade and commerce as described in Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of England, 1848:

  The most remarkable feature in the history of Liverpool is, the extraordinary rapidity with which it has risen into importance. Among the causes which have produced its elevation to a rank but partially inferior to that of the metropolis, are, its situation on the shore of a noble river which expands into a wide estuary; its proximity to the Irish coast; its central position with respect to the United Kingdom; its intimate connection with the principal manufacturing districts, and with every part of the kingdom, by rivers, canals, and railroads; and the persevering industry and enterprising spirit of its inhabitants.

  For the collection of customs, &c., due to the crown, Liverpool was anciently a member of the port of Chester; but, as is evident from records belonging to the corporation, it was an independent port as early as the year 1335, though for some centuries it made but little progress. The commerce may be divided into several distinct branches. The trade with Ireland appears to have been established, or greatly promoted, by the settlement here of a few mercantile families from that country, about the middle of the sixteenth century; at that time, only fifteen vessels, of the aggregate burthen of 259 tons, belonged to the port, whereas Liverpool now imports of Irish produce alone an amount equal in value to several millions annually. Another principal branch is the trade with the United States. The chief article of commerce in respect of that country, is cotton, which indeed may be considered as the staple of the town; Manchester and the other cotton manufacturing districts are supplied from the port with the raw material, and manufactured cotton goods form more than half of the entire exports of Liverpool . . . The United States also send hither tobacco, rice, dyewares, and numerous other varieties of American produce.

  John Milne, born in Liverpool in 1850, was a man alive with energy and enthusiasm with a passion for earthquakes. At the age of thirteen he entered Liverpool Collegiate Institute, where he won many prizes, one of which was a sum of money which he used to fund a trip to the Lake District. He lived in Rochdale, then moved to Japan, working there as a geologist and mining engineer for twenty years. He pioneered modern seismology, and invented the seismograph for recording movement in the earth. In 1898, with W. K. Burton, he published the classic textbook
Earthquakes and Other Earth Movements. In this he correctly argued that earthquakes occurred along fault lines in the earth’s crust. He set up his research centre for seismic research, the leading establishment for earthquake studies in the world, near Newport on the Isle of Wight. A Newport local said of Milne, ‘He always spoke with a quiet Lancastrian accent, which fascinated us lads, as did his nicotine-stained, bushy moustache with a gap burned in it by numerous cigarettes.’

  Charles Dickens’s first public reading in Liverpool, at the Philharmonic Hall, was in 1858. He sailed to America from Liverpool on at least two occasions, visited the docks and spent a night with the local police to aid his research in writing The Uncommercial Traveller. His time in Liverpool must have been very dear to him: ‘Liverpool lies in my heart next only to London.’

  85.8

  A prophecy in Recollections of Old Liverpool, 1863, an anonymous author recalling the mid-eighteenth century: ‘Could we draw aside the thick veil that hides the future from us, we might perhaps behold our great seaport swelling into a metropolis, in size and importance, its suburbs creeping out to an undreamed-of distance from its centre; or we might, reversing the picture, behold Liverpool by some unthought-of calamity, some fatal, unforeseen mischance, some concatenation of calamities, dwindled down to its former insignificance, its docks shipless, its warehouses in ruins, its streets moss-grown . . . Under which of these two fates will Liverpool find its lot some centuries hence; which of these two pictures will it then present?’