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.
When I started this blog, my aim was to illustrate how photography had recorded Liverpool over the past 150 years. Wherever possible, I have been posting previously unseen images that add to the already large number of Liverpool photographs in circulation. My collection is obviously privately owned but I believe there is a responsibility to make it public, rather than hide it away unseen. Our interpretation of history is very much dependent on primary sources of information being made available and photography is an indispensible tool for all local historians.
This is nowhere more evident than in the photographs I have posted today. The desperate poverty shown in the first photograph (taken off Scotland Road by N. Steven in the early 1890s) compares dramatically with the second photograph, taken from one of the Earle family albums, of their relatives, the Swinburnes in about 1870. Admiral Charles Swinburne is photographed with his wife and three daughters, all dressed in their finest outfits – a total contrast to the rags and barefeet of the three girls. As the saying goes … a picture is worth a thousand words.
In starting this thread about Lost Liverpool, I was concerned with those buildings that would have enhanced today’s city had they survived. The underlying criterion is that of architectural merit but that would probably not apply to Liverpool Overhead Railway, which was not a particularly beautiful structure. In the case of other inclusions, such as the Old Hutt, the historical context is of greater importance – offering clues as to pre-Industrial Revolution Liverpool. One of the other areas worth adding to the list is the building’s significance within the context of social/public health reform – and here Liverpool was the centre of many pioneering ideas.
15 Upper Frederick Street Wash-House
One hundred and fifty years after her death, Kitty Wilkinson is to be honoured with a statue in St George’s Hall. Born in Derry, in 1785, Kitty courageously took in the washing for over 85 families each week during the cholera epidemic of 1832 in an effort to stop the contagion spreading. Her persistent petitioning for better facilties led to the first public wash-house being opened in Upper Frederick Street in 1842 (and later rebuilt in 1853). The idea took hold and further wash-houses were built in Liverpool and elsewhere. The wash-house was still operating up to 1925 but was demolished shortly afterwards. Modern housing now stands on its site.
16 The last court
Probably my most controversial selection – but what a tragedy that no courts survive. The last one disappeared in late-1960s and with it a huge piece of Liverpool’s history. (The photograph is certainly one of the last to be inhabited). This was how hundreds of thousands lived for much of Liverpool’s post-1800 history. The politicians were in such haste to remove these ‘blots’ on the conscience of a modern city (albeit to create the disasters of new towns and high rise living) that they did not stop to think of the educational potential of keeping an example for future generations. Today we are building a multi-million pound Museum of Liverpool – but we could have had a museum like Ironbridge or Beamish that told a far more meaningful story (and at a fraction of the cost). I suppose hindsight is easy – but these humble buildings were as much a part of Liverpool’s history as any of the churches or commercial buildings I have posted.
Time to take a short break from Lost Liverpool to look at Liverpool’s darker past. The above two photographs are from a set of lantern slides I purchased from Frank Lenhan (whose own photographs I published in My Liverpool). Frank explained that he had inherited them from his father, who was a friend of the photographer N. Stephen, and that they had been used in Band of Hope temperance meetings to highlight the evils of drink. Frank remembered helping his father project the slides at meetings in the 1930s when he was a young boy.
By coincidence, I was recently researching the educational uses of lantern slides and came across a reference to the Church of England Temperance Society. Apparently the Society had commissioned hundreds of photographs (to be turned into lantern slides) of children in the streets with bottles/jars of alcohol – all taken in Liverpool. I have started looking into whether these slides are archived anywhere – but to no avail so far. Perhaps these photographs taken by Stephen around Scotland Road c1895 (I have about 20) were part of that collection – or does anyone have any further information that can help ‘rediscover’ these important images of Liverpool’s social history?
Twenty years ago, back in 1990, a tall, white-bearded American burst into my office holding a box of photographs.
His name was Frank Dugan, born in New Jersey in 1925. Frank joined the US Air Force in 1949 and was sent as a control tower operator at Burtonwood in 1950.
He met Mary Green, from Anfield, at Speke Airport and they married in 1953 after he had demobbed. Fancying himself as a photographer, he took wedding photographs for a living, finishing off his rolls of film with the occasional shot of Liverpool life.
As an American in a foreign city, Frank was fascinated by Liverpool, particularly the endless terraced streets and the poverty he witnessed. Frank returned to the States in 1955 to start up as an antiques dealer and his short career as a photographer was effectively over.
Back in 1990, Frank was hoping to have a book published but there weren’t enough images – so I used many of them in a calendar. The photographs all had that magic quality of freezing time that only photography can achieve. Frank died in 2003 but these images will stand the test of time.
The idea of this blog is to bring to a wider public the thousands of images that are hidden away in archives both public and private. My own collection (of over 5000 historical photographs) illustrates many aspects of Liverpool’s history – the social, topographical, economic and cultural – and I will be posting new images daily to create a unique perspective on the city as seen through the camera’s lens.
Please add your comments. Perhaps you know what happened to the three lads in the photograph. They look desperately poor – but how did they turn out? This is the great thing about the web – it creates communities and shares knowledge in a way that was inconceivable ten years ago.