Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  The high point of this urban-imperial culture was the annual celebration of Empire Day on 24 May. Inaugurated in Canada in the late 1880s as Victoria Day and celebrated widely across the White Dominions, it made its way to Britain in 1904, where, in the north of England, it was often elided with the Whitsun festivities. Promoted relentlessly by the Earl of Meath, a Conservative peer and ardent imperialist in both England and Ireland, it was a day of loyal, royal demonstrations to give thanks for the blessings of an overseas empire and the racial superiority of the British, and to indoctrinate the next generation in its values of duty and sacrifice. ‘In the forenoon the head teachers addressed the children upon the true significance of patriotism and Imperialism,’ reported the Liverpool Daily Post of the wartime festivities of May 1915. ‘The scholars rendered patriotic songs and the National Anthem of the Allies, and saluted the Union Jack.’ At the Arnot Street Council School in Walton, its 2,500 pupils paraded through the playground before listening to an address by Archdeacon Spooner on ‘the extent of the British Empire, its purpose, and the personal responsibility of each unit, whether man, woman, or child’, for its future. At the Lister Drive Council School, 400 children processed around the main hall carrying a flag, before then forming ‘tableaux representative of the Allies and our Colonial kith and kin’.38 The sons of Melbourne, dying for the Empire in the eastern Mediterranean, were at least being thought about in the schools of Liverpool and Birkenhead.

  As seen in Chapter 8, the First World War only served to strengthen the ties of Empire. The contribution of troops from all corners of the Empire was taken as evidence of the unshakeable bond of colonial kith and kin, while the additions of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Palestine and other African territories to Britain’s dominion at the Versailles peace talks expanded the Empire to its geographical peak. After 1918, the British Empire covered a quarter of the world’s territory and incorporated nearly a quarter of the world’s population: here, at last, was the Empire of the never-setting sun. And, at home, the official forces of colonial propaganda, led by the Empire Marketing Board and the Imperial Economic Committee, escalated their promotion of the merits of Empire to the British people. There were Empire exhibitions at Glasgow and Wembley; booklets, pamphlets and postcards extolling the merits of colonialism; documentary films on the Empire’s achievements abroad; imperial-themed posters for the London Underground; and lecture tours organized through networks of Rotary Clubs and Women’s Institutes. For all the fears of decline and fall, and the superseding of Anglo-Saxon civilization, popular imperialism proved a powerful current in British interwar culture. From the popularity of Elgar’s compositions and A. C. Benson’s lyrics (‘Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set; / God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet’) to the poetry of Rudyard Kipling; from the heroism of T. E. Lawrence to the adventures of John Buchan; from stamps to imperial recipe books, the virtues of Empire were the product of artistic celebration, commercial endorsements and relentless official propaganda.39

  Liverpool was immersed in this culture of colonialism – not least because the economics of Empire continued to prove highly lucrative for the city, with business actually accelerating in the interwar years. In the 1930s imperial trade topped 50 per cent of Liverpool’s total, overtaking commerce with the United States and Latin America. As the Empire prospered, so did Liverpool. And as if any further proof were needed of Liverpool as an imperial city, there stepped forth, fresh from his exploits in New Delhi, the great architect of Empire, Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens himself.

  ‘I went to Liverpool and arrived just before lunch,’ Lutyens recalled of his interview with Richard Downey, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Liverpool. ‘I was shown into a large dull-gloomed room, and waited, feeling nervous and rather shy, till in came His Grace – a red biretta on his head and a voluminous sash round his ample waist … His pectoral Cross swung towards me, and the first words he said were, “Will you have a cocktail?”’40 And with that, Lutyens was commissioned to build ‘a cathedral in our time’. Twice as large as St Paul’s in London and with a dome wider than that of St Peter’s in Rome, Liverpool’s Roman Catholic cathedral would be Merseyside’s answer to New Delhi’s Viceroy’s House. But even more complicated: all the layered geometry of Lutyens’s War Memorial Arch in New Delhi and his Thiepval memorial to the missing of the Somme were to be brought together in a space of cumulative, brilliant mathematical sophistication. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson thought the cathedral plans ‘an architectural creation of the highest order, perhaps the latest and supreme attempt to embrace Rome, Byzantium, the Romanesque and the Renaissance in one triumphal and triumphant synthesis’.41 There were apses, and chapels, and narthexes, and a 155-metre dome, and a transept with double aisles, and pretty much anything else Lutyens could gut from St Paul’s and St Peter’s and then mould into one. It was set to be a monument of mixed imperial meaning: an obvious affirmation of the might and power of Liverpool, Gateway of Empire, but also a tribute to those hundreds of thousands of Irish migrants who brought their faith and made their lives there. Unfortunately, it was never built: the foundation stones were laid on Whit Monday 1933, and work on the crypt and foundations continued until 1941, at which point wartime exigencies took over. Lutyens himself died in 1944, surrounded, it is said, by his drawings of Liverpool Cathedral. In 1953 the scheme was cancelled, and whilst the city’s Anglican Cathedral, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, would come to rise above the skyline, Roman Catholic Liverpool was eventually given a cathedral of ungainly modernist design in the shape of an upturned funnel by Sir Frederick Gibberd, unkindly derided by Scouse wags as ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’.

  If the construction of Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House was a monument to British imperial hubris in India, the failure to build Lutyens’s cathedral in Britain was just as ominous a sign for the future of Liverpool. For after the initial post-First World War boom on the back of growing imperial markets, by the mid-1930s the first whispers of decline swirled through the quays and docks of Merseyside. Liverpool oversaw some 31 per cent of all UK trade in the years prior to the First World War. By 1938, this had dropped to 20.8 per cent, whilst London (on the back of a rapidly growing, light-industrial economy in the south-east) had rocketed to 38.1 per cent.42 The declining competitiveness of the traditional exports of northern England was beginning to affect shipping through the Mersey docks, while competition between the London docks, which had spare capacity, meant the capital’s handling costs undercut Liverpool. The adamantine place of Liverpool in the British import trade was beginning to look more fragile.

  In 1907, the municipal historian and Liverpool patriot Ramsay Muir had mulled on the future prospects of his beloved city. ‘Will travellers come to Liverpool in the spirit in which we may go to Carthage, to view the inexpressive relics of a people that pursued gain with remorseless energy, and then were blotted out?’ he asked. ‘Or will they come in the spirit in which we still visit Athens or Florence, to see the real city, a city whose very atmosphere enriched the lives of all its citizens, a city which, for that reason, the world can never allow itself to forget?’ The playwright and essayist J. B. Priestley had an answer. Visiting Liverpool on his English Journey of 1934, he found a city with neither the romance of Carthage nor the prosperous energy of Athens or Florence. ‘The centre is imposing, dignified and darkish, like a city in a rather gloomy Victorian novel,’ he wrote. It was a city for whom Empire now seemed more of a burden than a lifeforce. ‘Here, emphatically, was the English seaport second only to London. The very weight of the stone emphasised that fact … We arrived at the edge of the Mersey, and below us was a long mud-bank … I have rarely seen anything more spectral and melancholy.’ For all the antics of the Empire Marketing Board, Priestley regarded the glories of Empire, like Nineveh and Tyre, belonging to history. ‘Here, a hundred years ago, the comfortable Liverpool merchants lived, going in and out of these charming doorways and beneath these fine old fanlights, thinking about their cargoes o
f cotton and tobacco from New Orleans and of rum and sugar from Jamaica … Liverpool must have been a town worth loitering in then.’ But like the White Star Line’s most infamous vessel of all, RMS Titanic, the city seemed oblivious to its imminent peril. The cinemas, theatres, dance halls, grill-rooms, boxing matches and cocktail bars were all in full swing, blissfully ignoring the approaching catastrophe. ‘The Adelphi Hotel had dressed for the evening, was playing waltzes, and for the time being did not care a fig about the lost Atlantic traffic.’43

  DECLINE AND FALL

  The Second World War was the iceberg on which Liverpool, like the rest of the British Empire, would founder. The war’s economic and strategic effects would scythe through the imperial cities of Britain – though not immediately. In the long run, the outcome of the fight against Hitler was the systematic dismemberment of the British Empire, under American pressure and domestic financial duress. But in the midst of battle, the Allied effort was celebrated in part as another glorious display of imperial cooperation. For all the iconography of May 1940, our finest hour and Britain standing alone against the forces of continental Fascism, the war also revealed the continuing, global potency of ‘Britannic Nationalism’. All those Empire Days paid off as another generation of Australian, West Indian, Canadian, South African, New Zealand and Indian servicemen and -women laid down their lives in the service of the mother country. In his Christmas Day broadcast of 1941, King George VI spoke of ‘one great family … the family of the British Commonwealth and Empire’.44

  In Liverpool, the aftermath of war proved the benefits of Commonwealth and Empire to the city’s economy. Demand which had been suppressed, but had not disappeared, during wartime burst on to the global economy in the late 1940s and ’50s, and the docks boomed again. The intangible whiff of decline which Priestley had picked up in 1934 could now be downgraded to a minor, interwar hiccup in Liverpool’s story of ever-ascending progress. Once more, ships lined the Mersey, the warehouses were bursting, and the quaysides bustling. New markets in Latin and South America offered growing opportunities for the port, as did the emerging cargo trade with independent Pakistan, India and even Egypt. The traditional trade connections to West Africa managed the transition out of Empire, with cocoa, nuts, palm oil and fruit carried into Liverpool on the newly established Black Star Line. The shipping trade was certainly helped by the British government’s determination to ensure that those countries within the Sterling Area – including Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – had their dollar spending capped and prioritized the purchase of sterling goods.* As a result, colonial and postcolonial trade flourished as Britain used what remained of the overseas empire to refloat its war-shattered economy. In July 1965 the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board announced that the previous financial year had witnessed a record 28.5 million tons of cargo pass through Liverpool. On the back of the boom, the city diversified into light manufacturing, with industrial estates at Speke, inward investment by Kodak and expanding car production lines for Ford, Leyland and Standard Triumph.45 Low unemployment, high wages and a baby-boom saw the city foster a world-famous popular culture in its theatres, comedians, footballers, designers and musicians. By the early 1960s, the ‘Mersey sound’ or ‘Merseybeat’ boasted an estimated 400 groups, all trying to make a name for themselves on the stage of the Cavern and Iron Door clubs. And here was an irony of history: the British city that had done more than any other to undermine African culture by ferrying millions of slaves across the Atlantic now had its own culture transformed on the back of a transplanted African-American musical tradition. The R&B and Blues revolution of black America, of Ray Charles and Chuck Berry, made its way back across the sea lanes, carried by the ‘Cunard Yanks’ working the Liverpool–New York line, to inspire the songs of Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Remo Four and, of course, the Beatles. Even then, Liverpool remained a city of the Atlantic and the Empire, with its music inspired by slave descendants and its Swinging Sixties prosperity sitting on the infrastructure of the old colonial system.

  Even with the advent of Indian and then Burmese independence in 1948, there was still little sense in swinging Liverpool that the end of Empire was imminent. British politicians might subtly have dropped the talk of colonies for the more consensual-sounding Commonwealth (now transformed from its pre-war identity as a White Dominion club into a more multiracial entity), but there remained a strong political conviction of the moral virtue and strategic necessity of Empire. Indeed, a renewed commitment to the bonds of Empire could be seen in the 1948 British Nationality Act, which gave all citizens of the Empire the right to live and work in the United Kingdom. In the eyes of the mother country all subjects of the Crown were equal – and soon enough the SS Empire Windrush, en route from Australia to England, dropped anchor at Kingston, Jamaica to pick up its 493 Caribbean passengers destined to dock at Tilbury in Essex in June 1948 (the dockyard from which Queen Elizabeth I had rallied her troops on the eve of the Spanish Armada in 1588). The Empire Windrush’s transatlantic voyage was followed later that year by the docking of SS Orbita with its 108 Caribbean migrants and SS Reina del Pacifico with its thirty-nine Jamaicans in Liverpool herself.

  During the 1950s, in the wake of India and Burma, numerous other colonies would gain independence. Ghana and Nigeria, Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados would, in the colonial mind-set of the day, be guided by British colonial officials towards autonomy, with ensuing membership of the Commonwealth the mark of their maturity. Even in the act of granting independence, Britain still regarded itself as a colonial power. The fiasco of the 1956 Suez Invasion of Egypt might reveal the dependency of the British military on US approval, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan might tell the South African parliament in 1960 of the ‘wind of change’ blowing through the Continent, yet Britain remained convinced that some kind of colonial world-system, run through Whitehall, remained a viable possibility. There was a great deal of talk of ‘managed withdrawals’ and maintaining ‘British connections’ with former colonies under the tutelage of Westminster-style parliaments, the rule of law, embedded intelligence services and helpful trade contacts.

  But the allure of liberty was altogether too powerful. Between 1945 and 1965 the number of people living under British colonial rule shrank from 700 million to 5 million, and the pace of decolonization accelerated with every passing year. With twenty-six countries gaining their independence from the British, an entire empire melted away within a generation. It was no wonder that mandarins in the Colonial Office, which once held sway over palm and pine across the globe, now fretted that their great department of state was being reduced to a ministry of ‘rocks and islands’, with little more than Gibraltar, Diego Garcia and the Falkland Islands to its name.46

  The reality was that a decreasingly competitive British economy could no longer fund the military and organizational overheads of Empire. Britain’s national debt levels and declining overseas income – in the face of Japanese, American and revived German competition – steadily crippled its economic capacity to act as a great power. As the pound sterling declined in value, its attractiveness as a reserve currency for Commonwealth countries similarly ebbed. Freer trade, the reduction in exchange controls and the increased attractiveness of the dollar all served to undermine the importance of the sterling area and, with it, some of the last advantages of Empire. Between 1950 and 1970, Britain’s share of world exports dropped from 25 per cent to 8 per cent, and the amount of world trade denominated in sterling fell from 50 per cent to more like 20 per cent. For all the martial rhetoric, military adventurism and talk of colonial leadership, Britain no longer had the financial muscle to sustain its imperial ambition. What was more, the nature of global trade was changing: in place of the old model of shipping in raw materials to Liverpool and Glasgow, and turning out finished goods from Manchester and Clydeside, Britain’s ‘never had it so good’ homeowners started to import consumer durables from America and Japan. After the initial postwar trade surge, the connection to smaller, less c
ompetitive and poorer Commonwealth markets began to crumble. Trade liberalization and the reviving markets of Western Europe came at the expense of traditional commercial ties to Britain’s colonies.47

  When the Empire did finally and conclusively capitulate, the consequences for a colonial city like Liverpool were catastrophic. The move away from a British economy based around raw material extraction on the edges of Empire and manufacturing production at the core – with the import-export business that all entailed – signalled a killer-blow to the shipping, storage, insurance, finance and trading activities of Merseyside. The port of Liverpool had been made by Empire, and as decolonization gathered pace, it was apparent it would be unmade by the end of Empire, just as rapidly and messily as those final years of imperial retreat. The bloody chaos of Kenya, Cyprus and Rhodesia found a domestic echo in the political and economic destruction of Liverpool.

  The foreign consulates in Liverpool started to close, and less and less cargo found its way through the docks as colonial markets stagnated and the European Economic Community became a more lucrative trading bloc. As a result, Britain’s port economy shifted south and east: between 1966 and 1985 Liverpool’s share of all ship arrivals in the UK was halved, while Dover’s increased by four and a half times. In the late 1960s Liverpool was still handling some 23 per cent of Britain’s manufacturing exports, but a decade later this had fallen to under 10 per cent. Accompanying the changing trade patterns was the move from cargo liners to container ships, which had no need of the wharfs, quays and narrow docks of Liverpool. Instead, the containerization revolution of the 1960s concentrated larger vessels into fewer ports, with Felixstowe and Harwich gaining hold of the European cargoes coming in from Hamburg and Rotterdam. Liverpool responded with the development of its Seaforth docks in 1971, but it could do little to stem the haemorrhaging of trade. In 1985 Felixstowe berthed 496 container vessels of 20,000+ tons, Southampton managed 272, London 156, while Liverpool could only entice 76.48 Containerization also meant much reduced local employment as cranes and terminals took the place of stevedores and dockers. By 1980 the number of dockworkers had fallen from its 1920 high of around 20,000 to little more than 4,000 (out of a total of over 600,000 jobs in the Merseyside area).49 If that wasn’t damaging enough, the growth of transatlantic air travel and the accompanying decline of the deep-sea passenger liners meant fewer city-centre hotels, waterfront business and ship repairs. For the port of Liverpool and its granite quaysides once as mighty as the Pyramids, decolonization and technological innovation combined to produce a perfect storm of economic immiseration.50