by Paul Morley
Liverpool, 1880: Queen Victoria grants the town the right to call itself a city.
Liverpool, 1886: the Mersey Railway Tunnel, the first to pass under the river, links Liverpool with the developing town of Birkenhead and the Wirral peninsula. The mammoth task takes approximately six years with the main tunnel excavated with picks, shovels and explosives. The tunnel will soon carry over ten million passengers a year. However, many people still use the ferry, disliking the smoke and fumes of the railway.
Liverpool, the Irish impulse to perform, the Welsh need to sing, the sailors’ shanties, the movement of the mighty river, the roar of the sea, the rhythm of the wind, the beat of the factory. Liverpool, the slope by the creek. Liverpool, on the threshold of the invisible. Liverpool, pulling itself up by its bootlaces. Liverpool, a frenzy of activity. Liverpool, nothing lasts for ever. Liverpool, welcome to the real world. Liverpool, Penny Lane, moldy moldy man, a cellar full of noise, more popular than Jesus, blah blah blarney, the centre of making it up as you go along. Liverpool, fuck right off. Liverpool, it really is a fantastic game. Liverpool, the centre of somewhere, if not everything, where something happens, most of the time, leading to something else, only in Liverpool. Liverpool, made up. Liverpool, you couldn’t make it up. Liverpool, ban the bomb. Liverpool, gateway to the empire, leaving for America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Liverpool, arriving from Africa, from the Indies, from places without names, Jews, Africans, Asians, the Irish, the Chinese. Liverpool, a direct steamer connection with China, trading tea, cotton and silk, Chinese seamen jumping ship in the mid-1800s, settling around Pitt Street, Cleveland Square and Frederick Street, forming the first Chinatown in Europe, setting up shops, cafés and boarding houses for Chinese sailors passing through a strange town with alien ways and customs, spreading inland by the First World War. Liverpool City Council concerned over Chinese marrying English women, gambling and opium consumption. Liverpool’s chief constable, however, expresses the view that the resident Chinese are a ‘quiet, inoffensive and industrious people’. Chinese-speakers add a further layer of molten mutable tone and tang to the local accent.
Liverpool, the end of the road. Liverpool, offering hope to millions passing through on their way to America. Liverpool, the world in a city. At the end of the nineteenth century Liverpool concerns own one third of British ships, and one seventh of the world’s registered merchant tonnage. One in ten of the world’s ships visits the port. The great shipping lines such as Cunard and White Star, owners of super-ships such as Mauritania, Lusitania, Aquitania and Titanic, are Liverpool companies. Liverpool, motivated by progressives, inspired by the classical and Renaissance past, constructing public buildings that would not look out of place in Venice, Florence or Athens. Liverpool, 1901: for eighteen months chaotic Welsh adventurer, proto-hippy, post-Impressionist Augustus John teaches at the progressive art school established by the university in 1895 – ‘I became more rebellious in Liverpool’ – long hair, gold earrings, flamboyant clothes, Gypsy mind, later painter of Dylan Thomas, T. E. Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, Tallulah Bankhead, Thomas Hardy. Liverpool, never the same again.
Liverpool, 1902. James Nuttall took his two sons Edmund and James into partnership trading under the name Edmund Nuttall & Company. In 1904 James Senior died and the business was carried on and rapidly developed by Edmund, a contractor down to his fingertips with a flair for assessing the price of a job and the right way to carry it out. In 1908 they built the Royal Liver Building, the first reinforced-concrete ‘sky-scraper’ in Britain, 300 feet high to the top of the Liver Birds. Liverpool, a combination of ancient empire, classically inspired buildings, cornices, attics, mouldings, pediments, rustication, granite columns, built to British empire standards as the empire began to expire, and high-speed lifts, techniques and steel frames derived from contemporary American architecture, in which a new empire mentality was materialising, one Liverpool fancied itself capable of keeping up with because it fancied it had set it in motion. Several buildings have a distinctive American quality. Oriel Chambers (1864) is the most revolutionary and a frank, stripped-down expression of function and technology; it anticipated by twenty years the modernist commercial buildings of Chicago and New York, and was the world’s first metal-framed, glass-curtain-walled building. India Buildings (1924–31) is typical of North American architecture of the 1920s; it includes a central barrel-vaulted arcade, another American feature. Barclays Bank (1927–32) is similarly monumental and American. The Adelphi Hotel was a grand building for transatlantic travellers; its exterior and interior reflected the wealth of the city.
The first railway in Britain to convert from steam to electric operation was the Mersey Railway in 1903 when they electrified the line from the city centre to Birkenhead, solving the problems of the choking atmosphere caused by the steam trains in the tunnel under the river.Liverpool, cultural ambitions. The University of Liverpool was created in 1903, absorbing an earlier college. The immense Anglican cathedral was started the same year. It took until 1974 to complete. It is the largest Anglican building in the world and the fifth largest cathedral of any denomination. Its length is 600 feet compared with 510 for St Paul’s in London and 715 for St Peter’s in Rome. Liverpool, the city at its peak.
Malcolm Lowry – who also went by the name of Malcolm Boden Lowry – was born on 28 July 1909 in New Brighton, a dormitory town on the tip of the Wirral, where his father was a wealthy cotton broker with Methodist affiliations, who fox-hunted. His Merseyside youth informed his writing, and Liverpool, which he described as ‘that terrible city whose main street is the ocean’, continued to hold tremendous significance for him. He was a restless spirit, ‘a small boy chased by furies’, an alcoholic by thirteen, who wanted to write and not follow his three older brothers into the family business. At the age of eighteen he set sail from Liverpool – ‘ran away to sea’ – as a deckhand on a freighter bound for Yokohama. Liverpool, the sailor the real king; everybody in Liverpool loves a sailor.
Liverpool, Frank Hornby, the man who created Meccano (first called Mechanics Made Easy, patented in 1901, appearing in Liverpool toy shops the same year), Dinky Toys and Hornby model railways. Liverpool, small patches of wasted wasteland in the shape of President de Gaulle. Liverpool, beat. Liverpool, speaking in tongues. In 1907 Walter Dixon Scott wrote that Liverpool was ‘Quite frankly an almost pure product of the nineteenth century, a place empty of memorials, a mere jungle of modern civic apparatus. Its people are people who have been precipitately gathered together from north, from south, from overseas, by a sudden impetuous call. Its houses are houses not merely of recent birth but pioneer houses, planted instantly upon what, so brief a while ago, was unflawed meadowland and marsh. Both socially and architecturally it becomes, in large measure, a city without ancestors.’
The first branch of Woolworth’s in England opens in 1909 in Church Street. Liverpool, the summer of 1911, gripped by mass social unrest and strike action which peaks in August, when troops are dispatched to deal with protesters on the streets and a warship is stationed in the Mersey. The extreme measures taken by the home secretary, Winston Churchill, which resulted in violent clashes and a number of deaths, have led some historians to conclude that events in Liverpool during 1911 were the nearest the UK has come to a revolution.
Liverpool, Arthur Wynne, inventor of the crossword, his two passions in life, music and puzzles. He was able to use this latter interest to earn his living when he accepted the editorship of the fun section of the Sunday newspaper New York World. It was on 21 December 1913, when he was pressed to fill a space on a page that the printers were in a hurry to lock up, that he thought of reviving the acrostic word game, which dates from at least Roman times. He constructed a hollow diamond-shaped grid of interlocking words and dubbed his creation a word-cross. It was clear from the start, from the volume of letters sent in by readers, that Wynne’s word-crosses were popular. He did not benefit financially from the many newspapers that used the syndication service as he never patent
ed the concept which brought so much pleasure and frustration to so many.
The start of the First World War in 1914 saw the beginning of the decline in Liverpool’s fortunes. The passenger liners moved to Southampton, which had better tidal conditions, but were themselves later superseded by air travel, and Liverpool’s substantial banking and insurance businesses moved to London as part of the general concentration of the nation’s business elite in the capital.
‘Scouser’ creeps into general use around Scotland Road after the First World War, by 1945 leapfrogging ‘Dicky Sam’ – imitation Yank slang, someone born and bred in Liverpool, within the sound of the bells of St Nicholas, the waterfront parish church? – and ‘wacker’ or ‘whacker’ – from ‘wack’, army slang for goods or provisions – as the main signifying badge for locals who belong to some touchy alternative nation.
On 19 September 1934 the Beatles’ future manager and mentor, Brian Epstein, was born in suburban Liverpool, in the same street as Gladstone. His father Harry called his mother Queenie because her name Malka is Hebrew for ‘queen’. Next to the furniture store that the Epstein family owned was the North End Road Music Stores. The Epsteins later expanded and took over NEMS. He recalled being ‘ragged, nagged and bullied’ for his homosexuality and dropped out of school at the age of sixteen. Liverpool, the great unwashed. Liverpool, people passing through, sticking around, passing it on, keeping it to themselves, sharing it out. Liverpool, Knotty Ash. Liverpool, the summer of love. Liverpool, no scented breeze. Liverpool, the full-bodied whine of self-pity. Liverpool, 1931, population 855, 688. Liverpool, step inside, love.
Liverpool, Scotland Road. Scotty by the docks, the first port of call for desperate Irish emigrants fleeing the ravages of the Great Famine in the 1840s. Scotland Road is located in the heart of Liverpool and runs along what was once the old coach route to the north from the town centre. It became a turnpike road in the 1760s, as the road to Preston via Walton and Burscough. The first through service by coach from London started in 1861. Entry into Liverpool was along the Prescot Road, which had become a turnpike and been improved from its former status as a packhorse route, when it would have been totally unusable by stagecoaches. The ‘Flying Machine’ made its journey in two to three days; fare two shillings and sixpence, outside passengers and children on laps half price. Some time after this stagecoaches took this road north through Lancaster and Kendal up to Scotland, giving Scotland Road its name.
Between the years of 1880 and 1912 a steady flow of Italian immigrants arrived in Liverpool. By 1913 it was estimated there were in excess of 400 Italian-born residents of the tiny cluster of streets which had affectionately become known as Little Italy. By the 1920s the inhabitants of this close-knit community had become an integral part of the city. Many earned their living as musicians, hotel workers, knife sharpeners and street entertainers, although it was in ice-cream-making that several families distinguished themselves. Others opened fish and chip shops throughout the city, and as a result of their enterprises the Santangeli, Gianelli, Podesta, Chiappe and Fusco families became part of the folklore of Liverpool. Scotland Road’s Little Italy was also renowned for the many outstanding boxers developed in the amateur boxing clubs of the neighbourhood. One such was Dom Valente, who topped the bill at Madison Square Gardens.
In the early twentieth century the number of pubs in the Scotland Road area peaked at approximately 224, with 65 actually on Scotland Road. By 1960 the number had reduced to 111 in the area and 41 on the road. Liverpool, according to J. B. Priestley in 1933: ‘Neon lighting and flashing signs. Cinemas, theatres, dance halls, grill rooms, boxing matches, cocktail bars, all in full glittering swing. The Adelphi Hotel had dressed up for the evening, was playing waltzes, and for the time being did not care a fig about the lost Atlantic trade.’ Liverpool was not at its best when Priestley arrived in the city that autumn, but nor did the author want to find the city at its best. Liverpool he found imposing and dark, ‘like a city in a rather gloomy Victorian novel’. It was foggy, the streets slippery and a little dangerous. He found tenements where ‘the open doorways gave out the reek of unwashed humanity’.
The opening of the Queensway Tunnel in 1934 was a key moment in the modern history of Liverpool. Named in honour of Queen Mary, the tunnel (or ‘wonder tube’ as it was described in a newsreel item on the event) connected King’s Square in Birkenhead with Old Haymarket in Liverpool, and at the time of opening was the longest underwater tunnel in the world. It was hailed as one of the world’s great engineering triumphs and was Britain’s biggest single municipal enterprise ever. More than 1.2 million tons of rock, gravel and clay were excavated, some of it used to build Otterspool Promenade. Of the 1,700 men who worked on the tunnel during the nine years of its construction, seventeen were killed. The King and Queen went on to open a new central library in Birkenhead, the original Carnegie Library having been chosen as the final site of the Birkenhead entrance to the tunnel. At the opening the King said, ‘Who can reflect without awe that the will and power of man which in our own time have created the noble bridges of the Thames, the Forth, the Hudson and Sydney Harbour, can drive also tunnels such as this, wherein many streams of wheeled traffic may run in light and safety below the depth and turbulence of a tidal water bearing the ships of the world.’ In the days that followed, the tunnel turned into something of a tourist attraction, with crowds watching the steady flow of traffic between Liverpool and Birkenhead.
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Liverpool, hit hard by German bombers on the nights of 20, 21 and 22 December 1940 with 622 people killed and 777 injured. Liverpool, one of the most heavily blitzed cities outside London, the docks destroyed, but the Luftwaffe’s success hidden from the Germans. Anti-U-boat measures were controlled from Liverpool, from the basement of Derby House. Previously this work had been done in Plymouth. Liverpool, the son of a bookmaker, Jimmy Tarbuck was born on 6 February 1940. ‘My dad was a very jolly, funny guy who enjoyed the company of professional comedians. He’d been to school with a famous comic called Ted Ray.’ He left school at fifteen and started work as a garage mechanic but was sacked from this and many subsequent jobs for ‘fooling around’. Liverpool, John Lennon was born to the sound of Hitler’s bombs in Liverpool on the night of 9 October 1940. His mother Julia gave him the middle name Winston as a tribute to Prime Minister Churchill. His father Alfred, a ship’s steward, was at sea at the time of the birth and was to spend most of the war years away, either at sea or AWOL.
‘I was bored on 9 of Octover 1940 when, I believe, the Nasties were still booming us led by Madalf Heatlump (Who only had one). Anyway they didn’t get me. I attended to varicous schools in Liddypol. And still didn’t pass-much to my Auntie’s supplies. As a member of the most publified Beatles my and (P, G, and R’s) records might seem funnier to some of you than this book, but as far as I’m conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderfoul larf I’ve ever ready.
‘God help and breed you all.’ John Lennon.
Liverpool, James Paul McCartney was born in Liverpool’s Walton Hospital on 18 June 1942. His father Jim worked in the cotton trade and played trumpet and piano in jazz and ragtime bands; his mother Mary worked as a midwife. Young Tarbuck attended the same school as John Lennon, Dovedale Primary, from 1946 to 1951. George Harrison was there two years later. Tarbuck later remembered John as unusual and belligerent. Pete Shotton remembers Tarbuck throttled Lennon with his school scarf for ‘looking at him funny’ and was pacified only when Shotton explained that John looked at everyone that way because of his short-sightedness.
John Brophy’s 1946 novel City of Departures is set in Liverpool at the end of the Second World War. His protagonist Charles Thorneycroft is returning home after artistic success in the metropolis and reflecting that if he had stayed in his native city he would have become a ‘local painter’, deriving most of his income from formal portraits of aldermen, ship owners and cotton brokers. Describing his city, Thorneycroft recalls that there was hardly ever a
day without wind and that, too, spoke of the sea and the port. ‘The city air was fresh, it blew perpetually strong or mild off the sea and the river, and channelled its gusty way through every street. It ought to be a healthy air, and it had the tang of health, the odour of tidal salt water, edged with smells from mud flat and sand hills and shores strewn with seaweed. But it was not healthy. It was laden with smoke and soot and grease, and with smells from tanneries, breweries, oil-cake factories, margarine factories, smells from the engine rooms of ships, from dockyards, from thousands of warehouses where every sort of cargo was stored.’
Walking through the city streets, noticing the grime, dinginess and unrepaired bomb damage, Thorneycroft is depressed by the contrast between what he sees and his boyhood memories of a proud thriving place. But once on the street he rediscovers Liverpool’s urgency: ‘Here where the ships sailed in and unloaded, loaded again and sailed out once more to all the oceans of the world, here was visible all around him a continuing magnificence. Here was no sign of lethargy or despondent regrets for the prosperities of the past. Here Liverpool was laying claim with a brawny fist to its own important place in the world.’
Liverpool, destruction and dislocation, places no longer existing, some houses and streets apparently moved somewhere else. Liverpool, in transit. Liverpool, on the hoof. Liverpool, the spaces of the city shifted, the physical replaced by the psychical. Liverpool, the satanic quality of Lime Street station. Liverpool, shipping in decline, the port now at the wrong end of the country. After the war Liverpool City Council decided that a clean start was needed. Along with the bombed houses, huge parts of the old Victorian city were bulldozed and thousands of families moved out of the city to live in new council estates at Kirkby, Speke and Skelmersdale. Liverpool, car factories built for the redundant dockers. From 1946 John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi (Mary Smith) and Uncle George in their house, Mendips, at 251 Menlove Avenue, Liverpool, after his mother had handed over care of her son to them. John was based here from age six to twenty-four. Liverpool, post-war sailors bringing American 45-rpm blues, jazz, proto-rock-and-roll, country and western records into the city, the dirty seeds of the Mersey Sound planted in the minds of successful and not so successful eleven-plus kids. Liverpool FC winning the first post-war First Division championship.