Streets of Liverpool

Gallagher’s Stores, Crown Street, 1925

Irwins, Myrtle Street, 1920s

Commercial photographers had to be a versatile lot to survive. From weddings and portraits to the occasional commercial commission, it was never an easy occupation, particularly in the poorer areas where money was scarce. One common practice was to photograph proud shop owners outside their premises, ideally with all their staff so extra copies could be sold.
The photographs might be of often mundane premises but time has added an extra dimension. A proud Mrs Gallagher stands alongside her daughter in the doorway of her newsagents. Posters advertising films at Olympia and The Tunnel Picturedrome date the photograph to 1925. The second photograph of Irwins grocery at 68 Myrtle Street is probably of the same period. The staff of seven, all smartly dressed, were part of a large Liverpool chain with head offices in Orwell Road (Kirkdale) and over 100 outlets throughout the area.
Thanks again to Colin Weekes for allowing me to post these fascinating pieces of social history.

Upper Dawson Street c1895

St John’s Gardens c1900

My last post emphasised child poverty at the turn of the twentieth century. Today’s photographs show two different aspects of life at that time.
The top photograph was taken at the back of St John’s Market. The street is thronged with traders and shoppers. McKenna’s bar is prominent (licensee Catharine McKenna), with Hassons (poultry and game dealers) next door. Out of 13 buildings listed in Gore’s 1893 Directory, 5 were public houses and one was a restaurant (or eating house). Apart from a hairdresser and a mariner, all the rest were in the food trade.
The second photograph is of St John’s Garden, which had just been laid out following the removal of St John’s Church. The bookshop shown in the previous blog had been demolished at the time of the photograph to make way for the Technical School. It is hard to work out the ages of the couple sat on the bench – I guess they look about 60 but they both look careworn and could be much younger .At least public statues have their uses judging by the number of men congregating on its steps.

William Henry Street c1895

William Brown Street c1895

I was going to write about the new Museum of Liverpool but my two attempts to walk round have both been aborted after less than 20 minutes each due to the amazing number of people visiting. With the outside temperature in the mid 20s, it wasn’t the time to make any critical analysis, so I will wait until September when I expect it will get much quieter. My initial impression is that too much space has been allocated to the entrance/atrium, which has created congested gallery space, but I need to see how the exhibitions work without such a volume of people. The very positive note is that over 100,000 people have been through already – an encouraging sign of the level of interest in Liverpool’s history.
Today’s posts reflect the darker side of that history. Child poverty has never been eradicated from Liverpool and these photographs of barefooted boys are a reminder of how tough life was a century ago. The first photograph is, I am reasonably certain, of William Henry Street. Blackledge & Sons had a small chain of bakers shops and this one seems to be the most likely location (on the corner of Canterbury Street). (The only other possibility could be Great Crosshall Street). I am not sure what the boy of the left is carrying – maybe a bunch of flowers for his mum.
The second photograph is of Bentley’s bookshop in Shaw’s Brow/William Brown Street (on the site of where the Technical School – now part of Liverpool Museum – was built a few years later).

County Road, 1911

Sefton Street, 1911

Armoured Car

Cricket outside St George’s Hall

Over fifteen years ago, I published a book Near to Revolution by Eric Taplin on the 1911 Transport Strike in Liverpool (not to be confused with the 1926 General Strike). This year Liverpool City Council has launched its City of Radicals 2011 to mark not just the centenary of the strike but a number of other events (including the first Post-Impressionist exhibition outside of London at the Sandon Studios – now Bluecoat Art Centre, the death of Robert Tressell -author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists) – and the first International Women’s Day.
The strike itself should be seen against the background of a divided society, with 120,000 people owning two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. The Industrial Revolution had widened the poverty gap with millions living barely at subsistence levels. Liverpool was a hotbed of activism and there was a growing feeling that a united labour force could take over the means of production. Inspired by radicals such as Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, ‘War’ was declared and industrial action began to spiral out of control. Troops and police from other forces were called in, HMS Antrim was moored in the Mersey and, inevitably, two strikers were shot dead in the most violent strike action seen in Britain. Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, described the situation as ‘near to revolution’. Panic resolutions to settle with the different unions began to take the sting out of the strike, which had lost some of its willingness to continue after the police and military aggression coupled with the two deaths.
From a photographic point of interest, this was the first major strike to be fully documented photographically and cinematically (although only brief snatches of the film survive). Most of the photographic record is the work of the Carbonora company run by Gwilym Mills. His set of postcards published throughout the strike are now amongst the most collectible of postcards (reaching up to £100+ per card). Unfortunately, the offices and workrooms of Carbonora were destroyed by enemy bombing and their negatives and archive destroyed (the company still survives as the Mills Media Group).
The top photograph shows a police and army convoy travelling along County Road in Walton. The shops on the left belonged to Robert Crease (a music dealer), Arthur Rattenbury’s tobacconist, and Elizabeth Ford’s hosiery shop. The second photograph, showing troops protecting food supplies in Sefton Street was an American Press print I purchased from a supplier in Dallas – which indicates the international importance of the strike. The other two photographs are my favourites: the rather inadequate riot car (although petrol bombs had not been thought of at that time) and the boys playing cricket on St George’s Plateau in the midst of all the mayhem.

Ann Fowler Home c1968

Interior of Home, 1910

The announcement today that Southern Cross, the largest provider of care homes for the elderly in the UK, is cutting 3000 jobs and possibly closing over 100 homes, highlights a problem that has persisted for generations.
I studied social administration at university and was taught the maxim ‘a society is judged by the way it treats those in need’. I soon found out – on my first placement, I spent four weeks in a wing of an old workhouse in Sheffield looking after homeless men. With crowded dormitories, a small locker for their life’s possessions and little else but a roof over their heads, it would seem little had changed since the Workhouse had closed. The Ann Fowler Salvation Home for Women perhaps offered sanctuary of a sort but what a miserable place, as can be seen in the interior photograph taken a century ago. Housed in an old Welsh Congregational Church (built in 1868), I was surprised to read that it had survived until 1983 before closure and demolition. What sad lives had been lived by the women who passed through its doors.
Southern Cross’s problems, the cuts in public expenditure and the growing number of old people points rather ominously to a slow slide back into the Dark Ages of care. In a week when a 20 year footballer is bought for £20 million pounds, it makes me wonder how today’s society will be judged in 100 years time,

A dramatic vista with the Huskisson Memorial prominent.

The descent from the Cathedral

This Bank Holiday Monday, I took a couple of visitors around the Anglican Cathedral. Having marvelled at what I consider Liverpool’s finest building, we then wandered around St James’s Cemetery. It is really one of the most interesting places in the city and I am surprised at how poorly it is presented to the visitor. With the exception of Highgate in London and Necropolis in Glasgow, there can be few other cemeteries with such a dramatic setting. Sadly, the gravestones have been over-tidied up, but that only marginally spoils the impact. Every time I walk around it, I am reminded about the grim reality of Victorian life (and death). Only a handful reached three score years and ten, with an astonishing number dying before they reached one score. All around are graves of sailors lost at sea in foreign places, soldiers dying in colonial wars and the great and good of the city (including Kitty Wilkinson and William Huskisson).
Particularly poignant are the graves to the children of the orphan asylums, both boys and girls, with row after row of long-forgotten and little mourned names. Perhaps for many, it was a release from an almost inevitably desperate life of poverty and drudgery but it is impossible to read the inscriptions without feeling deeply moved.

Gravestones to children from the Female Orphan Asylum

The mass grave of orphans from the Bluecoat Hospital

The tragedy of Louisa Wood (aged 11) whose “death was occasioned by her apparel having accidentally taken fire.”

The hazards of the sea. The sad fate of the Keay brothers.

What is really needed is a cemetery trail – with information boards pointing out people of interest, as well as the history of the place. After all, Huskisson was the world’s first casualty of the railway age – but his mausoleum does not give any clues. Nor is it evident how the horse-drawn hearses descended from the roadside down the narrow ramps cut into the precipitous rock face. We really do undersell the city – the cemetery is up there with all the other great (free) attractions.

Upper Stanhope Street, 1930s

Bridget and Patrick Hitler in America

I know Liverpool tourism officials are always on the lookout for interesting news stories yet the extraordinary claim that Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was written at the Adelphi Hotel is quite staggering.
A guide to an event entitled “Liverpool Discovers”, contains a map of more than 20 locations where famous people were born along with places associated with celebrities and events in their lives. The guide proclaims: “Martin Luther King visited his supporters in Liverpool three times, and the first draft of his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech is alleged to be written on Adelphi Hotel headed notepaper.”
After ridicule in the national press, the claim was hastily withdrawn. Apparently, the information came from a member of the public and was published without checking. So what about another piece of history. Did Hitler come to Liverpool? Michael Unger, past editor of The Echo, has just published his book based on Bridget Hitler’s memoirs. Bridget was a seventeen year-old Irish girl when she met Alois, Hitler’s half-brother in Dublin. They eloped to Liverpool, where they rented 102 Upper Stanhope Street (in the top picture, the house is at the bottom right at the junction with Berkely Street. Upper Stanhope Street is the street joining up with Princes Avenue). Soon after, they had a boy, William Patrick.
In November 1912, a dishevelled draft dodger arrived at Lime Street station. From then until April 1913, he idled his time away until, notified of his father’s will being finalised (his father Alois had died in 1903), he returned to Austria much to Bridget and Alois’s relief. Later, in the 1930s, William Patrick travelled to Germany to reacquaint himself with his father and uncle – who welcomed him half-heartedly. Eventually, after pressure to become a German national, William Patrick fled to New York with his mother and became a minor celebrity giving talks about Uncle Adolf.
So is Hitler’s stay in Liverpool another piece of mythology? Well, in the 1970s, a hand-typed document, the memoirs of Bridget Hitler, was discovered in a New York library. The question is why would a rather naive Irish woman claim Hitler had stayed with them in Liverpool? Her memoirs were never published and it would be a rather pointless claim to make if untrue. She was, after all, living in America at that time and had no reason to distort her life in England. The claim has been refuted by a number of historians – but they cannot account for Hitler’s whereabouts at that time. Hitler was very careful to remove most of the references to his younger years – certainly any suggestion he was a draft dodger. Back in 1913, he was just an ordinary German citizen, who could travel unhindered around Europe without records being kept – so I go along with Michael Unger.
The subsequent history of the Hitler family in Long Island in America is equally fascinating – so why not buy the book (published by Bluecoat Press, of course) and make up your own mind.

With all the clamour building up for the Will and Kate show, today’s post is a kind of antidote to the sentimental vision of Britain the media will be churning out. Bessie Braddock was no ‘people’s princess’ – just a hard-working socialist who wanted to lift her people out of poverty. Much derided by the national press for her larger-than-life persona, she understood her role as a constituency MP (for Exchange division) and was not afraid of speaking her mind. She had been tutored in her politics by her firebrand mother, who started taking Bessie to political meetings while she was still a baby. (Bessie remembered standing on St Georges Plateau as an eleven year-old listening to Tom Mann’s oration during the 1911 General Transport Strike).
The photograph was taken in Soho Square in 1954. The caption reveals the other woman as Elizabeth McGuinness and her son, Peter, aged two, standing in the rubble to the rear of their Soho Square house.
This weekend (Saturday and Sunday) is the Big History Show at St George’s Hall. I have a table selling a substantial number of old and rare books and maps about Liverpool (I am reducing my library). Dozens of bargains to be had and some very interesting out of print titles. Definitely worth a visit for the many other organisations and talks.

This is the third of Paul Trevor’s photographs I am trying to locate. Looking at the second frame, taken at the same time, it is clear that the cleared site is near to Princes Road with the spire of the Welsh Presbyterian prominent in the background but can anyone pinpoint the road running behind the boys (who were probably in for a few sharp words when they went home looking at the state of their clothes).

In 1975, Paul Trevor came to Liverpool as a member of the Exit Photography Group who were documenting the state of Britain’s inner cities. Their fascinating record was published in a book Survival Programmes and the photographs were a stark reminder of the desperate deprivation that still blighted most of Britain’s cities.
Now, over 35 years later, Paul’s work is to exhibited at the Walker Art Gallery in May (for six months) and I am publishing some 50+ images in a book Like You’ve Never Been Away, which will coincide with the exhibition. The photographs are outstanding, a fantastic record of Liverpool’s relatively recent history.
However, Paul’s work has not been completed. He has returned to Liverpool to re-photograph as many of the people (mainly children) in the photographs he took at the time with the intention of a follow-up exhibition (and book). For this, he needs some help. He has already identified many of the people and locations from 1975 but has a few outstanding photographs he needs help with. The top photograph is to appear in the exhibition and the frame below is one he took at the same location. Paul thinks it is Lowther Street at its junction with Sandon Street. Most of the buildings in the area have been demolished since the photograph but can anyone confirm the location and also put names to the faces?
I will post further images in the next few days.