As plans were laid for the Liverpool Overhead Railway, the port was in its prime. By the mid-nineteenth century there was an almost insatiable demand for labour in America, where wages were five times those in Europe, and 1,000 ships a year were taking emigrants across the Atlantic. In the peak year of 1852 nearly 300,000 – many from Ireland – said their farewells before heading off to a new life in America. The shipping bonanza did not stop there. Liverpool was also a major outlet for the goods of industrial England, including mineral salts from Cheshire, iron and cloth from Yorkshire, coal from Lancashire, pottery from Staffordshire and engineering products from Birmingham. At first most ships went to America, returning with tar, turpentine, timber, tobacco and of course cotton. But the entire world was soon in the grasp of Liverpool’s merchants. The first ship had docked from Calcutta in 1815. The China trade was opened up to Liverpool shipping in 1833, and by 1851, the year of the Australian gold rush, Liverpool shipowners led the world with their super-speedy wool clippers.
But back on the Liverpool waterfront commerce was being strangled by the congestion along the Dock Road, which ran along the Mersey shore from north to south. Buses, lorries, horse-drawn carts and drays tangled with wheezing steam shunters pulling packed goods trains in and out of the docks using the many crossings interrupting the road. One ingenious solution was developed in 1856 by a clever engineer called William Joseph Curtiss, in which specially adapted buses could run on sidings and tracks. With the flip of a lever, the flanges of the wheels would retract and the bus would return to the road, rattling over the granite setts to overtake slow-moving goods trains. Though Heath Robinson would surely have delighted in it, it was hardly efficient, and poor Curtiss abandoned the idea when he was forced to pay tolls to use the tracks. It was obvious something more ambitious had to be done to separate passengers from cargoes.
The need for a passenger railway following the line of Liverpool’s docks had been recognised as early as 1852, and in 1878 the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board put forward a parliamentary bill for an elevated line five and a quarter miles long. The Board of Trade objected to the proposed single track with passing places, and the plan had to be amended to provide a double-line railway, which was sanctioned in 1882. But dithering and prevarication were the order of the day until 1888, when a group of local businessmen frustrated with the lack of progress got their own railway together, forming the Liverpool Overhead Railway Company and commissioning two of the greatest engineers of the day to develop a grand plan. Who better to engage than Sir Douglas Fox, famous for the tricky construction of the railway up Mount Snowdon and the Great Central Railway’s ambitious London extension, and James Henry Greathead, inventor of the eponymous Greathead Shield, a brilliant device that bored through the London clay to create the tunnels for London’s Tube? Within a year these two titans of the civil engineering world were ready, and work got under way in October 1889.
But it wasn’t just the infrastructure – with trains hugging the river suspended high on a serpentine steel platform – that was revolutionary. Steam motive power for haulage had to be ruled out for fear that sparks from the ash pans would ignite flammable ships’ cargoes. Why not go further, it was argued, and employ that new-fangled technology – electric power? Although hardly revolutionary now, the only similar operations at the time the Overhead was conceived were the Blackpool tramways and Volk’s electric railway along the seafront at Brighton. In 1890 the City & South London broke the mould as the world’s first major electric railway. But the Overhead became the world’s first electric elevated railway and the first to be operated by electric automatic signals.
Construction was finished in January 1893, and the line was formally opened on 6 March by the Marquess of Salisbury, who flicked the switch on the power at the railway’s own generating station at Bramley-Moore Dock, with its ‘awe-inspiring’ range of machinery, including six Lancashire boilers and four steam horizontal engines. Services began at Alexandra Dock in the north, with eleven other stations at Brocklebank, Canada, Sandon, Clarence, Princes, Pier Head, James Street, Custom House, Wapping, Brunswick and Toxteth, most taking their names from adjacent docks.
It was immediately regarded as a wonder of the era, and its reputation quickly spread on the bush telegraph operated by sailors from across the globe, who had never seen a marvel like it. What a delight, in an age when railways were characterised by slowness and filth, to find a mode of transport whose attributes were precisely the opposite – speed, cleanliness and an absence of noise. But with only poorly paid dock workers as a source of revenue, ticket sales outside working hours could not deliver the revenue needed for a thriving railway. So the line was extended to entice passengers from the more affluent residential areas in the north and south of the city. There were to be new termini – at Seaforth Sands, a stretch of beach along the Mersey where it was possible for people from the city terraces to paddle on the muddy edges of the Mersey and pretend to be at the seaside – and the quaintly named Dingle in the south. The last section involved building a new station at Herculaneum Dock and boring a half-mile tunnel through sandstone rock to the new terminus, bringing the route length up to six and a half miles. The first passengers at Dingle station were flummoxed at having to descend a flight of steps underground to board what was billed as an overhead railway, but this was soon accepted as one of the oddities of one of Britain’s most individualistic lines.
In 1905 the route was extended further north to the Lancashire & Yorkshire’s station at Seaforth and Litherland, allowing passengers to connect to that railway’s Liverpool to Southport Line, and for a while through services ran between Southport and Dingle, effectively turning the little Liverpool Overhead into a main line along the Lancashire coast, although these services ceased at the outbreak of the First World War. A further useful connection was made with the L&Y’s line to Aintree, enabling the Ovee to take docklands families out of the city to enjoy a flutter on the Grand National.
Technological advances along the little railway continued apace. In 1901 the first railway escalator and only the second in the country (the first was at Charles Harrod’s London department store in 1898) was installed at Seaforth Sands station. Advertised as a ‘Reno system moving staircase’ it took its name from the American inventor Jesse Reno, who had created a novelty ride at Coney Island in 1895 – though perhaps ‘staircase’ was too dignified a term since passengers had to clamber onto a moving belt with rubber ridges at a twenty-five-degree angle. Sadly this primitive Lancashire version of the escalator had to be withdrawn five years later after a rash of claims from ladies who had caught their camisoles in the mechanism, ripping off some expensive lace in the process.
When the electrically operated semaphore signals were replaced in 1921 by Westinghouse coloured light signals, these once again set the pace as the first such examples in the country. Even the hinged doors on the carriages were balanced in such a way that they would jerk shut when the train set off. A visiting New Yorker observed that the Overhead had the finest automatic doors he had ever seen. But never mind the technology; the view from on high along the Mersey was one of the most memorable to be had in any world city. You might be a docker travelling on a humble workman’s ticket or a tourist freshly disembarked from America, enticed by a series of posters for which the Overhead was famous – elaborate prints showing panoramic vistas of docks lined with the vessels of the great shipping companies of the world. ‘See the wonderful docks and gigantic liners,’ they proclaimed. ‘Book the round trip (13 miles). Trains every few minutes.’
And wonderful it was. The young Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, wrote in 1849, ‘The sight of these mighty docks filled my young mind with wonder and delight … In Liverpool, I beheld long Chinese walls of masonry; vast piers of stone; and a succession of granite-rimmed docks. The extent and solidity of these structures seemed equal to what I had read of the old Pyramids of Egypt.’ For the modest price of the fare, which in the 1930s was as little as 2d. for a tr
ip along the entire length of the line, you were a privileged passenger in an unfolding diorama of the history of world shipping.
As your train clicketty-clacked high above the wharves, you might glimpse the scarlet funnels of the great Cunard liners, which had pioneered from Liverpool in 1840 the world’s first scheduled transatlantic service, taking just fourteen days to Boston. Here too might be seen over the years the ships of the White Star, another of Liverpool’s great lines. The company’s Oceanic opened up a new era for steamships in the 1870s, with its waterproof, fireproof bulkheads, though her sister the Titanic, which notoriously hit an iceberg in 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 lives, proved to be less resilient! (Although Titanic bore the name of Liverpool on her stern, she never actually visited the city.)
Watch out for the ships of the local Brocklebank family, founders of the oldest shipping line in the world, as well as those of Blue Funnel, established by the Liverpool Nonconformist entrepreneur Alfred Holt, who started out as an apprentice on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. Blue Funnel’s fast coal-fired ships put paid to the era of sail. Other great local firms whose vessels you might spot on this journey included the Bibby Line, founded in 1807, Clan Line, Pacific Steam Navigation, and Lamport & Holt, who developed the first mosquito-proof ship.
You were unlikely to miss the yellow funnels and white hulls of the ships of the Liverpool-based Elder Dempster line, which controlled 500 vessels in its 150-year history, dominating the west Africa trade. Elder Dempster almost single-handedly as a company invented the banana as a favourite fruit for the British, giving them away to Liverpool street traders in an early version of free advertising. Celebrity-watchers should keep their eyes skinned, since that most glamorous of transatlantic lines, Canadian Pacific, might have one of its famous Empress liners arriving in port, heading imperiously along the river, with the firm’s trademark red and white chequered flag ready to discharge its payload of North American socialites heading for the boat train to London.
The demise of the Liverpool Overhead Railway heralded the end of the liners too. As a young journalist on the Liverpool Echo I was sent to report on the very last arrival of a regular transatlantic passenger service in the city on 23 November 1971, when the Empress of Canada steamed in from Montreal. I remember dock workers standing in silence as she moved gracefully up the Mersey. ‘It was almost the like the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day,’ recalled the master, Captain W. E. Williams. True, the city has a new cruise terminal on the waterfront, where some of the world’s largest ships can tie up, but most Merseysiders would agree it’s a poor substitute for the great days of old.
But let’s not be sad, since there was never much time for regret in the bustling heyday of the Ovee. Hard to recapture it now, but here was a tough but magical city teeming with life and activity, dominated by its mighty river and an intense sense of urgency as arrivals and departures came almost endlessly along its miles of docks and wharves. In the city streets uphill from the Mersey were the stern Victorian offices of the merchants, brokers and shipowners, with their polished brass plates and pompous-sounding names. Add to this the beating of hooves, the gongs of trams, the whistles of the trains and the singing from the Dock Road pubs thronged with exhausted but mostly cheerful men sinking pints of Higson’s, Bent’s and Walker’s bitter. These might be the very same ones identified in Liverpool dockers’ slang in journalist Frank Shaw’s entertaining book My Liverpool. Here was Dulux (always gets it in one coat), London Fog (he never lifts) and the Chemist. Helping his chums to stolen bounty off the dockside, he shouts merrily, ‘Here’s more f’ yer [morphia].’
Standing imperiously at the centre of it all, with the Overhead rumbling past just yards away, are the famous Three Graces at the heart of the waterfront – the Royal Liver Building, topped with its two mythical liver birds, the Cunard Building and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board Building. The image of the Overhead’s trains superimposed on this waterfront panorama resonated throughout the empire. It’s no exaggeration to say that no railway on the planet was the starting point for more exotic destinations than the Liverpool Overhead Railway, since generations of sailors travelled on its trains to access their ships to faraway places. In its day it was the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow, the Heathrow Express and the Gatwick Express rolled into one.
So climb aboard for a journey along the line, but don’t expect luxury. With austere wooden seats, except in first class, these are among the plainest carriages in Britain. And don’t even think of the Skytrain. (These days we must defer increasingly to Asia for sophistication in metro systems; after all, the Hong Kong Metro, in the shape of MTR, jointly runs today’s London Overground.) Let’s instead locate ourselves in the period just after World War II, one of the busiest times for the Overhead, while the docks were still in their prime and before the decline set in. Even at this time, however, the trains – despite their electric operation – had a slightly fusty air of the past about them. But the entrance to Dingle station is cheerful enough, with its cinema-like foyer and a notice by the ticket office proclaiming the cheapness and value of the tickets compared with the city’s buses and trams.
Soon there’s a rumble from the tunnel ahead and the headlight of an approaching train illuminates the tangle of tracks. With a sigh of air brakes, it pulls into the island platform and all is bustle as doors are slammed, wooden-framed carriage windows rattle and the familiar gudder-gudder sound so characteristic of old electric trains starts to resonate. The driver moves smartly from one end of the train to the other and clunks his brass controller key firmly onto its mount in the cab.
Blinking in the darkness after the Toxteth sunshine outside, the train interior with its dim lights seems gloomy beyond belief. But we have chosen a perch on the left side of the carriage, where we shall soon find ourselves among the most privileged passengers anywhere on Britain’s rail network. There’s a frantic wave of his flag from the guard, and the train begins to move, the wheels hammering and squealing over the points as we roll off into the tunnel, motors humming and the grimy tunnel bricks brilliantly illuminated by the lightning flashes from the conductor rail.
Half a mile on, we’re out in the sunshine and up in the air suspended on the solid girder work, which lacks the baroque flourishes of, say, the Métropolitain in Paris or the L in Chicago but has the virtue of appearing modern in this early post-war period when anything antiquated-looking is facing the wrecker’s ball. All along the broad sweep of the Mersey is a panorama which is both the hell and heaven of the Industrial Revolution at a glance. Here are dockside cranes soaring skywards, glinting acres of sidings, steam and smoke pouring into the sky, cathedral-like warehouses and an unimaginable tonnage of shipping lined up beside the quays, while the Mersey ferries buzz like water beetles over the river. One might appropriate the famous description of the New York High Line written by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker: ‘It does not offer a god’s-eye view of the city exactly, but something rarer, the view of a lesser angel, of a cupid in a renaissance painting, of the putti looking down on a renaissance manger.’
We’re picking up speed now through the South Docks (who would know from this busy scene that commercial shipping would be all but extinct here by the 1970s), but despite our altitude we’re far safer than on most British main lines of the period, since the track contains a stopping device that applies the brakes should a train overshoot a signal. We’re through Herculaneum, Toxteth and Brunswick. (In later years the stations dropped the ‘Dock’, and souvenir hunters snapped up tickets from Pier Head to Canada for just a few pence to impress their friends!) Billows of steam issue from the shunting engines nipping in and out of dock entrances below us. These were both the sustenance and downfall of the Ovee, since the steam and sulphur rotted away the girders to the point where they eventually became irreparable.
The wheels are squealing now as we approach the central area, and towering above us is Giles Gilbert Scott’s mighty Anglican cathedral – a ‘symphony in sandstone’ as it was
once described. The frame of this, the largest church building in Britain, though yet to be completed, dominates the surrounding terraces, which are humble but when the sun glints off the rows of shiny slate roofs just as exalted in their own way. This is the heart of Liverpool’s famous Sailor Town. Every ingredient in the commercial life of a busy port is here. Shipping offices, chandlers, sail makers, wheelwrights, tobacconists, greasy-spoon snack bars, pawnbrokers, off-licences, brothels – almost every aspect of human aspiration and degradation is to be found here, as well as, of course, on every corner the regulation public house.
The docks get smaller and older as we rattle through Wapping, Custom House and James Street, and tempting though it is to swivel your view seawards, the better view is on the other side of the carriage, incorporating the throng of Merseyside humanity that oils the wheels of this great city. John Gahan puts it colourfully in his book about the Ovee, Seventeen Stations to Dingle: ‘Behind glass windows large and small one sees clerks at their desks in the mostly old and gloomy offices, girls in blue overalls at benches in a clothing manufacturers, men queueing up at lunchtime in the cocoa rooms for pint mugs of tea and inch-thick sandwiches. Groups of seafaring men, including bands of Coolies who walk along in single file, mingle with the men of Merseyside in the cosmopolitan port …’
But look out too for the towering brick walls and elegant colonnades of the early-Victorian warehouses, including Jesse Hartley’s Albert Dock from 1846, which would eventually become Grade 1 listed and help to rescue Liverpool from the doldrums as a tourist attraction by becoming the northern home of the Tate Gallery. Not many vessels are tied up today, since this is one of the oldest city docks and already mostly obsolete. But no time for sentiment, as the brakes start to grind for arrival at Pier Head station, the busiest on the line, with connections to the famous ‘ferries ’cross the Mersey’ to Birkenhead, Wallasey and New Brighton.
The Trains Now Departed Page 12