Simon Hughes - There She Goes: Liverpool, A City on Its Own. The Long Decade: 1979-1993

There She Goes

Liverpool, a City on its Own

The Long Decade: 1979-1993

There She Goes

Liverpool, a City on its Own

The Long Decade: 1979-1993

BY SIMON HUGHES

First published as a hardback by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2019.

First Edition

deCoubertin Books, 46B Jamaica Street, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool, L1 0AF.

www.decoubertin.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-909245-91-4

Copyright Simon Hughes, 2019

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In memory of Etta and Jo, whose wartime stories introduced me to this citys history.

THE CASA IS AN OLD SEA MERCHANTS HOUSE ON LIVERPOOLS HOPE Street, where there are vast Catholic and Protestant cathedrals at each end. The citys wealth is illustrated here, its entire existence succinctly explained in the Georgian Quarter up on its rise and looking down into the centre and the docks beyond, where the real money was made and labourers, not knowing whether theyd be working from one day to the next, lived in squalor.

Looking down, Tony Nelson, thought, was a deliberate emotional decision by the powers that controlled the whole of Liverpool. Nelson saw Liverpools emergence as the most significant maritime port in the British empire differently to the majority of historians, whose focus had reliably been taken by the enormous provision towards the capitalist economic cycle rather than the consequences of a fairer redistribution.

Nelson had been a docker, though he was now the landlord of the Casa, more of a social club than a bar; a place born out of one of the longest and most heroic industrial struggles in the twentieth century, the 850-day dockers dispute. It had raised a million pounds a year, providing a lifeline for people in need of help, the latest of whom had been Stephen Smith, a 64-year-old whose weight had dropped to six stone because of a range of health problems but was still denied benefits and told to find a job. When his story became public, it was Nelson and the Casa who came first to Smiths aid.

At the Merseyside Maritime Museum, there are walls filled with recollections which reflect what Liverpool used to be like. Ships filled the river, waiting their turn to gain access to fully packed berths, one quote reads. The dock road was once again a daily confusion of traffic, while quays and warehouses were full to bursting with haphazard piles of crated, bundled, bagged and baled cargo.

The regions of the world were still sea-laned to Liverpool, was another explanation. Within hailing distance of the Liver Building were small ships to Paris via Rouen, and a mere ten-minute walk took in ships of varying sizes loading for Limerick, Barcelona, New Orleans, Demerara, Lagos and Manaus It was impossible to exaggerate how much the city of Liverpool was a sea port.

History was illustrated on the walls of the Casa too. There was a framed plaque with all of the names of the Merseyside volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. There was a photograph of Robbie Fowler whose support of the dockers strike, which ran between 1995 and 1997, coincided with his advent as a legendary goalscorer for Liverpool FC. There was also a glass case of pins donated by seafarers, demonstrating the multitude of shipping companies that once operated out of Liverpool.

In the corner of the lounge area beneath Let It Be sounding from the jukebox was a group of smartly-dressed bearded men, warmed by their duffle coats and leaning into one another in a sort of conspiratorial manner. They look like sailors and their presence confirmed that while in Liverpool there is religion, politics, football and music, the heart and lungs of the city was in the docks: the space where workers spent the most time, talked about the most and where the experience and personality of both its men and women was ultimately defined.

Liverpool had been one of the richest cities in the British Empire, producing more wealthy families in the nineteenth century than any other urban area outside London. Its golden era was between 1880 and 1899, when it was estimated that Liverpool produced as many millionaires as Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, Tyneside and East Anglia combined. Over a longer period, 1804 to 1914, Merseyside produced almost twice as many millionaires as Manchester, and this showed just how lucrative shipping was compared to manufacturing. In the writing of this book, I would meet Michael Heseltine, a member of Margaret Thatchers Conservative government who tried for Liverpool when it was at its lowest economically and nobody else within his party bothered. Heseltine spoke endearingly about the grandeur of Liverpools buildings and other civic monuments, erected because of the endowment of its business people. The painting by Atkinson Grimshaw from 1887 showed Liverpool as it was widely viewed in its peak: a centre of trade, with tall men walking the streets dressed in elegant Victorian tailcoats; horses and carriages tapping and rolling across the oily cobbled dock streets, washed by seawater; bright lights in the shop fronts attracting customers and wine merchants inducing high-spiritedness.

Contrary to Heseltines impression, Hugh Shimmin, the Tory radical, questioned intent, describing philanthropy in 1861 as a fashionable amusement. If an old wealthy family of Liverpool donated funds for a new hospital or school it wasnt because they cared about the shocking levels of poverty that existed. It was because, he wrote, it brought them into passing contact with this Bishop or that Earl.

Liverpools elites were more autocratic than philanthropic. Sir William Brown, who donated a free library as well as a museum to the city, was a millionaire cotton broker who sacked a footman for taking sympathy on a beggar by giving him a plate of food. Meanwhile, the public parks were not really public at all; owned exclusively used by the carriage-owning classes who lived in grand residences close-by.

Hugh Farrie was a journalist at the Liverpool Daily Post. In 1899, the city had made more money than ever yet the gulf between the rich and the poor was stark. Farries reporting described a district around Scotland Road, which led north from the city centre towards Anfield and Walton. The area was, he wrote, dirty, tumble-down, and as unhealthy as any part of squalid Europe, despite its location less than a mile away from Liverpools banks, cafes and commerce. On Dale Street, there was wealth and ambition of busy, happy men, all bent on winning some prize in the world. He depicted a glorious place of ship windows, of gossiping politicians lounging on the steps, of carriages rattling past the Conservative Club. Yet walk a few paces from this bright and cheering scene, he concluded, and you will find gathered upon the very edge of it a deep fringe of suffering, helpless, hopeless poverty.