The courts and back streets of Liverpool’s slums were private places where few outsiders ventured. In 1856, the journalist Hugh Shimmin railed against ‘the old, dilapidated courthouses, with their fetid air and small squalid rooms’ which ‘still form the only dwellings which are supposed to be within the means of the labouring and casually employed poor … the Liverpool courts present scenes of social degredation and misery which it will be almost hopeless to induce people who have no practical acquaintances with the habits of the people to believe.’
Photographers tended to avoid the slums, probably with good reason. The hand-held camera allowed some anonymity, but most amateurs stuck to the street scenes around Pier Head and St John’s Market. You will not find Ben Jonson Street (rather inappropriately named after the dramatist and poet contemporary of Shakespeare) in Gore’s Directory because it is not listed (along with all the other surrounding courts and backstreets. The population was so numerous and transient that there was little value adding the current occupants to its list). This view of the street (which connected Comus Street and Scotland Road) is particularly interesting in that the raised viewpoint has captured a candid scene that contrasts with the later photographs of the City Engineer’s Department where a plate camera was used at street level. My immediate thought is that the photographer is sitting on the upper deck of an omnibus as it passed along Scotland Road.
The doss-house with its sign ‘good accomodation for travellers’ (sic) reminds me of the ubiquitous sign outside public houses offering good food and fine ales. When did you ever see a sign offering bad food or bad accommodation? The thought of a night in such a place does not bear thinking about.
Photograph courtesy of Liverpool Record Office.
This photo fascinates me. I found Ben Jonson Street on an old OS map of around the same time (it was between Gay Street and Bent Street!). I was wondering what the tower was in the background. There was a brewery set back from Comus Street and I wonder if it was part of that. But I also wonder if the photo was perhaps taken from Comus Street and not Scotland Road, as there is what looks like a pub in the background directly opposite the street and on the OS map this would be on Scotland Road as there is no building directly opposite the other end of the street.
I love the little boy/girl in the foreground wearing what looks like a sailor collar . Such a pretty child amongst all that dirt and ugliness. It truely is a moment captured in time.
I was very interested to see Ben Jonson street. My maternal grandparents, who were from West Lancashire, have this address on there marriage certificate. As my grandmother was only 16, they had given a false age when they married at St. Nicolas church Liverpool, and they had probably stayed in one of the doss houses in Ben Jonson street.
I’m drawn back to this photo time and again and I find something new each time I look at it: like the poor spelling on the sign “Accommodation” for “Travellers” and the child in the sailor suit who has made a make-shift swing with a piece of rope, and the boy in the foreground right who seems to be “peeing” agains the wall. Little did he know, he was being photographed for posterity!
Margaret, I think the street and the area in general was demolished in the 1940s/1950s. When did your grandparents live there?
I found my great-great-grandfather in this street in the 1841 census. He was a 14 year old boy living with his elder sister and her husband. This was much earlier than this photo was taken, but I cannot imagine things were much better! I am fascinated by this picture and, like Barbara, spot something different every time I look at it. Is the seated, shawled woman in the foreground clutching a small dog?
Would it be possible to take such a clear photo from a moving bus in those days?
Do you know, Linda, I thought the same thing; it looks like a little chiwawa, but it could just be the folds of her apron.
My paternal great-grandparents were Irish imigrants who lived in the Scotland Road area and I would love to think that this lady was my great-grandmother. I must do some more research!
Oops; I mean “Chihuahua”.
Very interesting comments by everyone. Perhaps Colin could clarify that his source for the information that this is in fact Ben Jonson Street is reliable. Not that I would doubt it as that street would have ran on an incline from West to East and Comus street did back then run across the top of it which would explain the buildings seen immediately opposite the photographer. It’s just that tower which is puzzling me though it could have been on an establishment that was either demolished soon after or indeed bombed though it doesn’t show up on my 1922 aerial map of the area. A number of us on a local history forum are trying to get to the bottom of it. Rose Hill police station would have been directly in the sight lines too, perhaps the tower belonged to that, though it wasn’t there for sure before the police station’s demolition. Also, I too think it unlikely that the shot would have been from a moving bus in 1890, though perhaps a stationary one. It is a raised view, so perhaps from the upper floor of houses on Scotland Road that were directly facing Ben Jonson Street.
This picture is causing a facinating interest in what the tower is, im sure someone will find the answer, in addition what is at the corner of the street ? on the extreme left of photo is four letters, the end of four words going from top to bottom.
the ‘phrase’ that is Ben Johnson Street has been a byeword in my family for at least 70 years. My grandfather, a protestant from Kensington Street, Low Hill, used the phrase ‘you wouldn’t see that in Ben Johnson Street’ as anything that was crude, lewd or downright vulgar or probably Catholic.ie at the age of 7 after a delicious bowl of scouse, I proceeded to lick my plate. To be admonished ‘cut that out where do you think we live, Ben Johnson Street’? It was his personification of what we would call ‘the underclass culture’ in a named street. Considering he lived in A 4 roomed house with no inside water supply, or electricity and a family of 5 kids, his snobbery, or genuine high sense of cleanliness and manners, probably made him feel slightly ‘upper’ compared with some people’s demeaner. Seventy years on my well spoken, unbigotted grand kids, still used the word jokingly, without any idea of its social origins. For instance I wore a pair trainers with a pair of suit trousers in the garden….granddad ‘you wouldn’t see that in Ben Johnson Street!’
If you go to http://www.losttribeofeverton.co.uk and click on pictures you will see a photo taken from Everton Brow with a tower in the distance, i.e. the view from the opposite side. What do you all think? Could it be the same tower?
I think the photograph was taken far too close to be from a building on Scotland Road; my money is on a stationary vehicle or a plinth.
Also, I wonder what the two wooden buckets in the road are for (dread to think).
The Tower on the lost tribes of Everton is that of the round counter cafe where Scottie met Bevington Bush which is further north than the top of Ben Jonson Street. I met Colin last week and remarked about this ‘tower’ interest and he said somebody has ‘possibly’ solved it, telling him what it was, though frustratingly, he couldn’t remember. It could just be another red herring of course.
Hi Ged
What if my suggestion at No. 1 is correct; i.e. that the photo was taken from Comus Street and not Scotland Road? Then it could perhaps be the tower you mention above?? What do you think?