Cities of Empire
Page 45
In Liverpool, each dock had its job: the Old Dock (opened in 1715) for the West India and Africa trade; the Salthouse Dock (1740s) for the corn and timber business; St George’s Dock (1771) as an alternative for the Caribbean merchants; King’s Dock (1788) for American and Baltic concerns; Queen’s Dock (1799) for the Greenland fishery. The flotilla of vessels lining the quayside, the army of dockers loading and unloading made for a remarkable scene. ‘All kinds of hardware, railway supplies, iron in all shapes, of all kinds and sizes, sheet, wire, bar, spring etc.; bales, boxes, casks, wines, spirits, ales, for India, Madagascar, Asia, Persia, the Continent and America,’ marvelled a visiting New Yorker. ‘Thousands of men are here measuring packages, invoicing goods, shipping merchandise; the tramp of horses, songs of stevedores, and shouts of sailors make a very Babel of industry.’14 Then came Canada Dock, Princes Dock, Clarence Dock, Stanley Dock and – fully revitalized today – the elegant Albert Dock of 1847, designed by the great dock engineer Jesse Hartley. ‘For sheer punch there is little in the early commercial architecture of Europe to emulate it,’ was Pevsner’s judgement on the sublime utility of Albert Dock. Its confident mix of austere classicism and brick functionalism – a product of Liverpool’s commercial self-image, confident enough of its urban civilization to echo the architecture of ancient Greek city-states, combined with practical demands for fire-proof warehousing – underscored the city’s transition to a mercantile-industrial metropolis.15
The busy dockscape also pointed to another part of Liverpool’s make-up. ‘Unlike the dwellers in most English towns, all of us in Liverpool are, to a great extent, citizens of the world,’ explained the Liverpool Critic of 1877, ‘for everything around us tells us of far-off countries and foreign ways, and in our midst are constantly natives of so many distant lands that we insensibly imbibe and learn to practice peculiarities not British.’16 Ramsay Muir spoke of Liverpool’s ‘amazingly polyglot and cosmopolitan population’ as the product of its port economy. ‘The Liverpool citizen, therefore, from youth upwards, is familiar with the shipping of the world,’ concurred the chairman of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. The daily sight of cotton bales from America, wool from New Zealand, canned meats from Argentina and raw sugar from the West Indies ‘develops that cosmopolitan atmosphere and interest which distinguishes the Liverpool citizen from the inhabitants of other commercial towns’.17 In contrast to the introverted textile communities of Oldham or Bradford, Liverpool was a world city, the ‘New York of Europe’, whose wharfs and piers were a melting-pot of peoples, products and cultures.
The initial ingredients for multicultural Liverpool came from across the UK itself. ‘She is the meeting place of the Four Kingdoms,’ boasted Ramsay Muir, ‘with more Welsh citizens than any Welsh town but Cardiff, more Irish citizens than any Irish town but Dublin and Belfast, more Scottish citizens than any but some three or four of the great towns of Scotland.’18 By far the largest foreign contingent in the city was poor Irish migrants. Poverty and immiseration caused by successive years of potato blight had been exacerbated by reactionary land policies to produce the Great Famine of 1845–52. As the death toll escalated, those who could emigrate caught the so-called ‘coffin ships’ for New York, Glasgow and Liverpool – entering through the gates of Clarence Dock for a scarcely less destitute life in the cellars and workhouses of Everton and Vauxhall. Such was the mid-Victorian influx that, by 1851, over 22 per cent of Liverpool residents (some 83,000) were Irish-born, leading some to describe the city as the capital of Ireland in England, ‘a piece cut off from the old sod itself’. By the early years of the twentieth century, the number of Liverpool Irish and Catholics, regarded as synonymous terms at the time, was calculated at up to 200,000: roughly one-third of the population.19 Accompanying the Irish immigrants was a relatively substantial African and West Indian community, drawn initially from freed black slaves (often the mixed-race sons and daughters of Caribbean plantation owners) and discharged, loyalist soldiers from the American War of Independence, whose numbers were then augmented by the typical port population of sailors, chefs, stewards and dockers. This was the means of entry for the Liberian Kru migrants, but also the Chinese community centred around Cornwallis Street and Lascars from the Indian subcontinent. ‘Most of my early life was spent on Brick Street, a street of abominably overcrowded shacks,’ remembered Liverpool resident Pat O’Mara, on growing up near Queen’s Dock. ‘Negroes, Chinese, Mulattoes, Filipinos, almost every nationality under the sun, most of them with white wives and large half-caste families, were our neighbours, each laying claim to a certain street.’20
Such exceptional multiculturalism meant that, as early as the 1830s, Liverpool could begin to exchange its blood-soaked slave trading reputation for a more benign ‘world city’ image. ‘In Liverpool indeed the Negro steps with a prouder pace, and lifts his head like a man; for here, no such exaggerated feeling exists in respect to him, as in America,’ remarked young Wellingborough Redburn, the semi-autobiographical hero of Herman Melville’s novel Redburn (1849). ‘Three or four times, I encountered our black steward, dressed very handsomely, and walking arm in arm with a good-looking English woman. In New York, such a couple would have been mobbed in three minutes; and the steward would have been lucky to escape with his whole limbs.’ As a result, ‘the black cooks and stewards of American ships are very much attached to the place and like to make voyages to it’.21 None of this multicultural balm prevented Liverpool from supporting the slave-owning South, whose cotton bales were such an important source of revenue, against the Yankees in the American Civil War of the 1860s. The Confederates poured resources, spies and propaganda into Merseyside, while Laird Brothers built the cruise ship CSS Alabama, deployed to break the blockade of Southern ports. ‘We are southern almost to a man,’ was the succinct verdict of one Liverpudlian merchant.22
Finally, there were the Liverpool immigrants who just got off at the wrong stop – the thousands of migrants from central Europe and Russia who thought they had reached New York, but instead found themselves in Merseyside. Some 12 million passengers passed through Liverpool between 1825 and 1913 and quite a few of them literally missed the departing boat, adding their own ethnic contribution to this powerfully diasporic city.
Victorian Liverpool was thus a cosmopolitan commercial emporium; a peaceful, free-trading gateway, building ‘innumerable ties of friendship and interest, amongst nations formerly hostile and rival’; a second Tyre, Venice or Athens. It was ‘beside the docks, that the citizen of Liverpool can best feel the opulent romance of his city, and the miracle of transformation which has been wrought since the not distant days when, where the docks now stand, the untainted tides of the Mersey raced past a cluster of mud hovels amid fields and untilled pastures’.23 Yet beyond the docks there were ever grander urban testaments to the fruits of free trade, cultural exchange and commerce. In front of the Old Dock, a colossal, neo-classical Custom House rose up, paid for with the tributes of trade (sadly bombed beyond repair during the Second World War and demolished). And then, in 1854, Harvey Lonsdale Elmes’s St George’s Hall, the pinnacle of Liverpool’s Classical Revival, was opened, a vast civic temple whose Minton tile-decorated interior sought to recreate the Roman Baths of Caracalla. Saved from demolition in the 1960s, its enormous, brooding, classical triumphalism catches your breath even today as you step out of Liverpool Lime Street Station into the blustery Scouse air. It was, rightly, hailed at the time as ‘a design at the head of our public buildings, and worthy to take rank with those of the purest age of Grecian art’.24 Even better, it was untainted by the crimes of the past. ‘There is no drawback to damp the ardour of enthusiastic admiration: these stones, at least, are not cemented with the blood of negroes; these ornaments and decorations are not insulting trophies to grinding oppression,’ glowed an 1855 guide to Liverpool. ‘The fountain of wealth expended in erecting this pile was unpolluted; it is a temple erected to the genius of Commerce – bartering fairly, justly, freely.’25 And yet in the hall’
s encircling friezes could still be seen a depiction of ‘Commerce and the Arts Bearing Tribute to Britannia’, at the centre of which appeared a kneeling African slave. Old habits evidently died hard.
QUEEN OF THE MERSEY
By the early 1900s, however, the call of Empire had crowded out free and just commerce. In the succeeding half-century, Liverpool’s urban identity perceptibly shifted from the global to the colonial, as she draped herself ever more fulsomely within the folds of a popular imperialism and its economic advantages. Increasingly, official Liverpool imagined herself less as a free-trading city of commerce and more as the premier ocean port of the British Empire. All the tributes of Britain’s formal as well as informal empire (those ‘spheres of influence’ which stretched into markets in Argentina, Brazil, China and parts of Africa) came pouring into the Mersey’s wharfs and docks, with manufactured goods produced from the factories and mills of northern England then shipped out again. Unsurprisingly, Joseph Chamberlain’s vision of imperial federation was a popular cause in the council chambers and club rooms of Liverpool. The advent of steam in the 1830s, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the beginning of liner traffic across the Atlantic only extended the city’s reach. The Cunard Company started a weekly service to New York and fortnightly to Boston in the 1860s, and the White Star Line’s third-class compartments became the major exporter of hundreds of thousands of European emigrants to America. Steaming off in the other direction were the three great transporters of the Ocean Steam Ship Company, Agamemnon, Ajax and Achilles (christened in honour of Homer, the supreme author of global odysseys), each capable of carrying 3,000 tons. This trio were the core of the great Liverpool shipping tycoon Alfred Holt’s Blue Funnel Line, whose imperial routes dominated the import of China tea, Malay tin and Australian wool. ‘We considered Bombay and Calcutta, but finally settled on China mainly because tea was a very nice thing to carry,’ as Holt disarmingly put it.26 His ships returned to dock with hundreds of Chinese seafarers, who helped to add to Pitt Street and Cornwallis Street’s emergent ‘China Town’.* Buoyed by a healthy balance sheet, Holt’s group purchased wharfage facilities in Hong Kong and office complexes in Singapore, before entering the growing West African market by buying up the Elder Dempster shipping line, whose steamers returned from Zambia, Liberia, Guyana and the Cameroons laden with mahogany, coffee, rubber, palm oil and ginger – all to be unloaded in the Toxteth dock.27
It was no accident that one of the largest shareholders in the Ocean Steam Ship Company was another Liverpudlian, Lord Leverhulme, whose soap and cosmetics business, Lever Brothers, was heavily dependent upon West African palm oil extracted from the British protectorate of Nigeria (as well as King Leopold’s Belgian Congo). The lines of Vim household cleaner, of Lux and Pears soap, pouring out of the factories of Lever’s ‘Port Sunlight’ model village bound Liverpool and the Wirral peninsula ever closer to the rhythms of colonial trade. The Red Book of West Africa was Liverpool’s in-house directory of those many merchants running operations in and out of the four British colonies of Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, and by the early 1900s the African Section of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce was one of the city’s most powerful lobby groups. Soap production was just one of a number of new businesses growing up around the Liverpool import trade: close by there were cigarette makers rolling tobacco leaf imported from South Africa; mills grinding Canadian grain and Indian rice; and sugar refineries, like Tate & Lyle, refining West Indian cane for the biscuit business.28 A successful industrial eco-system flourished around the dockyards, turning raw materials from the Empire into manufactured goods.
But Liverpool was ultimately a place of exchange and evaluation, rather than a manufacturing economy. In the 1870s, a visiting clergyman paid a call on the Liverpool Exchange and watched in awe:
a crowd of merchants and brokers swarming and humming like a hive of bees on the floor of the vast area below. All around the enormous hall were desks or screens or easels or huge slates covered with the latest telegrams, notices of London stock and share lists, cargoes, freights, sales, outward and homeward bound ships, times of sailing, state of wind and weather, barometer readings.29
W. T. Pike similarly thought the Exchange ‘a wonderful scene of business activity’ with its ‘vast transactions by metal merchants and wool brokers, leather brokers, and representatives of every branch of home and foreign trade’.30 This was the Liverpool of underwriting, exchanges, insurance and banking; a financial centre of ship-owners, traders, commodity-brokers, insurers, processors and bankers that could give the City of London a run for her money. Tom Best, a docker working for the Lancashire Cotton Corporation, recalled:
a Jewish guy in Liverpool, he used to trade in futures, in cotton that hadn’t even grown then. He made a million in a day, and lost a million in a day. You bought bales at a certain price [before the cotton was grown] and if the crop was good, you were quids in, and if the crop was bad, well, you took a chance.
If the cotton bales were damaged, ‘An insurance claim would be made. Insurance was another big business in Liverpool. Everything was insured.’31 At the social apex of this shipping and insurance economy were the super-wealthy Rathbones and Roscoes, the shipping magnate Booths and Holts, who combined to ensure Liverpool easily outclassed Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow or Leeds in its making of millionaires. The forces of imperial finance capital which so enriched Melbourne were equally evident in endowing the shipping and banking dynasties of Liverpool.
So, the port of Liverpool entered the twentieth century full of vigour, replete with the trade of an empire whose boundaries were stretching ever further across Africa and South-east Asia. On Merseyside, there were precious few fears of Gibbonian decline and fall. ‘At the end of her seventh century as a chartered borough, Liverpool finds herself amongst the three or fourth greatest ports of the world,’ as one history put it in 1907. ‘She conducts one-third of the export trade, and one-fourth of the import trade, of the United Kingdom. She owns one-third of the total shipping of the kingdom, and one-seventh of the total registered shipping of the world.’32 Contrary to the warnings of Chamberlain and Churchill, there was no evidence ‘of either degeneracy or stagnation to be seen here. There are, on the contrary, abundant signs of illimitable expansiveness and invincible virility, not alone in trade and profit making, but in learning, culture, and all the arts of human progress and civilization,’ wrote Pike.33 The socialist writer and activist George Garrett, growing up by the Salthouse Dock in the early 1900s, remembered the trade and prosperity. ‘Everywhere, ships; more steam than sail, charging the air with smoke and noise. Coal barges, trawlers, small coasters, ocean liners and cargo boats. Tramps of all nationalities, represented by the flags that flew at every stern, but all outnumbered by the Red Ensign, which fluttering from most of the flagstaffs, indicated Britain’s far-flung trade.’34
For local journalist Michael O’Mahoney Liverpool was nothing less than a ‘threshold to the ends of earth’ and the confidence was there for all to see in the skyscrapers now going up along Liverpool’s Pier Head. On the site of the 1770s George Dock were erected ‘Three Graces’, the iconic emblems of twentieth-century Liverpool and the city’s answer to the fifth-century Athenian beauties of Aglaia, Euphrosyne and Thalia. First came the domed, Baroque, almost Saracenic headquarters of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (1903–7); then the towering Royal Liver Building (1908–11), built for the Royal Liver Assurance group and crowned by a statue of two liver birds, the cormorant-like symbol of Liverpool’s connection with the sea, with seaweed in beak; and, to complete the trio, the stone, palazzo-style Cunard Building (1914). Today, the Three Graces stand horribly mutilated by a growing array of ugly additions to this once majestic waterfront, but in their day they symbolized the global ambition of this home-grown colonial city. Pevsner had it right: ‘They represent the great Edwardian Imperial optimism and might indeed stand at Durban or Hong Kong, just as naturally as at Liverpool.’35
Alongside the architecture, the working and the middle classes of Liverpool embraced a public culture of imperial optimism. True, there were strands of radical anti-colonialism in support of the Fenian movement in Ireland and the Pan-African Congress, but majority opinion was more inclined to celebrate the relief of Mafeking than sympathize with liberation struggles. ‘The city became increasingly identified with imperial and international affairs,’ wrote W. T. Pike. The veterans returning from colonial conflicts in the Crimea, the Indian Mutiny and the Boer War paraded through the streets. ‘Livingstone, H. M. Stanley, and other peaceful explorers and pioneers of civilization in savage lands, were entertained and cheered in their undertakings by the cordial sympathy of Liverpool citizens.’36 There were West India Associations and East India Associations, there was the Royal Empire Society Liverpool and the Orange Order Lodges (with their unshakeable support for British rule in Ireland). There was the Empire Theatre and the world-famous Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to assist those seafarers and salesmen who picked up something nasty in Niger. Meanwhile, the civic calendar became dominated by a multiplying array of colonial-themed events, exhibitions and festivals. In 1886 Liverpool hosted the International Exhibition of Navigation, Travelling, Commerce and Manufacture, opened by Queen Victoria herself, complete with an Indian village, dwarf elephants, dancing girls and commemorations of heroic British conquests. The first Colonial Products Exhibition also came to Liverpool in 1903 to celebrate the Empire as the ‘wonder, admiration and envy of the whole civilised world’. The slightly less successful Liverpool Exhibition of 1913 gave rise to Orange Order demonstrations against Irish Home Rule. There were pageants based on the 1877 Delhi durbar and Trafalgar Day (21 October) parades around the Nelson Monument.37