There She Goes (eBook)

Liverpool, A City on Its Own. The Long Decade: 1979-1993

Simon Hughes (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019 | 1. Auflage
217 Seiten
deCoubertin Books (Verlag)
978-1-909245-91-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Liverpool was once one of the greatest cities in the British empire but it no longer feels like it is in England, if it ever did. It had retreated as a significant port after the Second World War and by 1979, it was already on the brink. What it needed was support but instead, a Conservative Party with aggressive new ideas allowed it to slide. Thirty-years after the Toxteth Riots, classified government papers revealed that the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was urged to abandon the city and embark on a programme of 'managed decline'. Why did Liverpool's fortunes change so dramatically? Why did it fight back when other cities did not? This is the untold story of what it was like for Liverpool's people and how the period defines who they are.

Simon Hughes is a journalist and award-winning author. He covers Merseyside football for the Athletic. His other books include Men in White Suits, Ring of Fire, On the Brink and Allez Allez Allez.

Textauszug

Another Cholera-Smitten City In India

THE CASA IS AN OLD SEA MERCHANT’S HOUSE ON LIVERPOOL’S HOPE Street, where there are vast Catholic and Protestant cathedrals at each end. The city’s wealth is illustrated here, its entire existence succinctly explained in the Georgian Quarter – up on its rise and looking down into the centre and the docks beyond, where the real money was made and labourers, not knowing whether they’d be working from one day to the next, lived in squalor.

‘Looking down,’ Tony Nelson, thought, ‘was a deliberate emotional decision by the powers that controlled the whole of Liverpool.’ Nelson saw Liverpool’s emergence as the most significant maritime port in the British empire differently to the majority of historians, whose focus had reliably been taken by the enormous provision towards the capitalist economic cycle rather than the consequences of a fairer redistribution.

Nelson had been a docker, though he was now the landlord of the Casa, more of a social club than a bar; a place born out of one of the longest and most heroic industrial struggles in the twentieth century, the 850-day dockers’ dispute. It had raised a million pounds a year, providing a lifeline for people in need of help, the latest of whom had been Stephen Smith, a 64-year-old whose weight had dropped to six stone because of a range of health problems but was still denied benefits and told to find a job. When his story became public, it was Nelson and the Casa who came first to Smith’s aid.

At the Merseyside Maritime Museum, there are walls filled with recollections which reflect what Liverpool used to be like. ‘Ships filled the river, waiting their turn to gain access to fully packed berths,’ one quote reads. ‘The dock road was once again a daily confusion of traffic, while quays and warehouses were full to bursting with haphazard piles of crated, bundled, bagged and baled cargo.’

‘The regions of the world were still sea-laned to Liverpool,’ was another explanation. ‘Within hailing distance of the Liver Building were small ships to Paris via Rouen, and a mere ten-minute walk took in ships of varying sizes loading for Limerick, Barcelona, New Orleans, Demerara, Lagos and Manaus… It was impossible to exaggerate how much the city of Liverpool was a sea port.’

History was illustrated on the walls of the Casa too. There was a framed plaque with all of the names of the Merseyside volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. There was a photograph of Robbie Fowler whose support of the dockers strike, which ran between 1995 and 1997, coincided with his advent as a legendary goalscorer for Liverpool FC. There was also a glass case of pins donated by seafarers, demonstrating the multitude of shipping companies that once operated out of Liverpool.

In the corner of the lounge area beneath ‘Let It Be’ sounding from the jukebox was a group of smartly-dressed bearded men, warmed by their duffle coats and leaning into one another in a sort of conspiratorial manner. They look like sailors and their presence confirmed that while in Liverpool there is religion, politics, football and music, the heart and lungs of the city was in the docks: the space where workers spent the most time, talked about the most and where the experience and personality of both its men and women was ultimately defined.

Liverpool had been one of the richest cities in the British Empire, producing more wealthy families in the nineteenth century than any other urban area outside London. Its golden era was between 1880 and 1899, when it was estimated that Liverpool produced as many millionaires as Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, Tyneside and East Anglia combined. Over a longer period, 1804 to 1914, Merseyside produced almost twice as many millionaires as Manchester, and this showed just how lucrative shipping was compared to manufacturing. In the writing of this book, I would meet Michael Heseltine, a member of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government who tried for Liverpool when it was at its lowest economically and nobody else within his party bothered. Heseltine spoke endearingly about the grandeur of Liverpool’s buildings and other civic monuments, erected because of the endowment of its business people. The painting by Atkinson Grimshaw from 1887 showed Liverpool as it was widely viewed in its peak: a centre of trade, with tall men walking the streets dressed in elegant Victorian tailcoats; horses and carriages tapping and rolling across the oily cobbled dock streets, washed by seawater; bright lights in the shop fronts attracting customers and wine merchants inducing high-spiritedness.

Contrary to Heseltine’s impression, Hugh Shimmin, the Tory radical, questioned intent, describing philanthropy in 1861 as ‘a fashionable amusement’. If an old wealthy family of Liverpool donated funds for a new hospital or school it wasn’t because they cared about the shocking levels of poverty that existed. ‘It was because,’ he wrote, ‘it brought them into passing contact with this Bishop or that Earl.’

Liverpool’s elites were more autocratic than philanthropic. Sir William Brown, who donated a free library as well as a museum to the city, was a millionaire cotton broker who sacked a footman for taking sympathy on a beggar by giving him a plate of food. Meanwhile, the ‘public’ parks were not really public at all; owned exclusively used by the carriage-owning classes who lived in grand residences close-by.

Hugh Farrie was a journalist at the Liverpool Daily Post. In 1899, the city had made more money than ever yet the gulf between the rich and the poor was stark. Farrie’s reporting described a district around Scotland Road, which led north from the city centre towards Anfield and Walton. The area was, he wrote, ‘dirty, tumble-down, and as unhealthy as any part of squalid Europe’, despite its location less than a mile away from Liverpool’s banks, cafes and commerce. On Dale Street, there was ‘wealth and ambition … of busy, happy men, all bent on winning some prize in the world.’ He depicted a glorious place ‘of ship windows, of gossiping politicians lounging on the steps, of carriages rattling past the Conservative Club’. Yet walk a few paces ‘from this bright and cheering scene,’ he concluded, ‘and you will find gathered upon the very edge of it a deep fringe of suffering, helpless, hopeless poverty.’

The culture of casual labour allowed Liverpool’s economy to boom for a born-into-privilege minority as well as a few entrepreneurs. According to Nelson, it could not be overestimated how profound an effect the culture of casualisation had on Liverpool’s collective psyche. Every morning and afternoon, men would assemble at the gates of the shipyards not knowing whether they were going to work and whether they were going to get paid. Tides played a role on starting times and there was a lot of uncertainty. ‘Unlike in manufacturing towns elsewhere in the north west where shift work was tough but reliable, there were no consistent patterns in Liverpool and this led to an undisciplined way of life,’ Nelson said. ‘It was uncommon for dockers in Liverpool to wear watches because they didn’t live by the clock. Geography by its sheer nature meant that while being freer, we also had more to be concerned about because we didn’t know for certain when the next pay was going to arrive and therefore had to be more creative in the way we worked.’

Nelson reasoned that because Liverpool’s workers did not have a regular authority looking over them and because they were not constricted by contracts or shift-patterns, they were able to develop a single-mindedness, and a suspicion of anyone in authority telling them what to do developed from there.

The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne had not been in Liverpool for six months when, in 1854, he recalled observing on a Mersey ferry a labourer eating oysters using a jack knife from his pocket before throwing the shell overboard and wolfing down another. He then took out his clay pipe, filled it with rush and smoked the whole thing. Hawthorne considered the labourer as the embodiment of a Liverpool person because of his ‘perfect coolness and independence’ which was mirrored by other passengers. ‘Here,’ he wrote, ‘a man does not seem to consider what other people will think of his conduct but whether it suits his convenience to do so.’

The extent of casual labour in Liverpool or anywhere else in Britain has never been established at any particular time. In 1921, a census revealed the number of workers who reported having no fixed workplace, though the figures did not include seafarers on voyage. This had also been the life for many men in Liverpool: a life at sea of casual relationships and few commitments on land. The census showed that there was twelve times as many men in Bootle, right next to Liverpool’s dockland, without an address or a workplace than in St Helens’, the glass-making manufacturing town twelve miles inland.

While the city was the first in Britain to appoint a Medical Officer of Health and amongst the first to build council housing at St Martin’s Cottages in 1869, these developments did not represent progressive politics but rather, the desperation of Liverpool’s situation. The deprivation in the docklands was astonishing. In 1880, more than 70,000 people lived in...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 26.9.2019
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• ISBN-10: 1-909245-91-7 / 1909245917
• ISBN-13: 978-1-909245-91-4 / 9781909245914