monumental granite, quarried from the [Mersey Docks and Harbour] Board’s own quarries in Scotland, fronts the river in a vast sea wall as solid and enduring as the Pyramids ... Nor is this all. Immense ugly hoppers, with groanings and clankings, are perpetually at labour scooping out the channels of the estuary ... To a traveller with any imagination few spectacles present a more entrancing interest than that of these busy docks, crowded with the shipping of every nation, echoing to every tongue that is spoken on the seas, their wharves littered with strange commodities brought from all the shores of the oceans. It is here, beside the docks, that the citizen of Liverpool can best feel the opulent romance of his city.11
River activity sent many writers reaching for their pens. Another American literary figure, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was installed as the United States’ Consul in Liverpool in the 1840s. Living on the Birkenhead side of the river, he wrote in his diary that the
parlour window has given us a pretty good idea of the nautical business of Liverpool; the constant objects being the little black steamers, puffing unquietly along ... sometimes towing a long string of boats from Runcorn or otherwhere up the river, laden with goods; – and sometimes gallanting in or out a tall ship ... Now and then, after a blow at sea, a vessel comes in with her masts broken short off in the midst, and marks of rough handling about the hull. Once a week comes a Cunard steamer, with its red funnel pipe whitened by the salt spray; and firing off some cannon to announce her arrival, she moors to a large iron buoy in the middle of the river ... Immediately comes puffing towards her a little mail-steamer, to take away her mail-bags, and such of the passengers as choose to land; and for several hours afterwards, the Cunarder lies with smoke and steam coming out of her, as if she were smoking her pipe after some toilsome passage across the Atlantic.12
Thirty years later the Reverend Francis Kilvert, better known now than then, wrote in his diary that he had been to Liverpool’s Exchange:
one of the finest buildings of the kind in the world, and passing upstairs into the gallery and leaning upon the broad marble ledge we looked down upon a crowd of merchants and brokers swarming and humming like a hive of bees on the floor of the vast area below.13
The next day Kilvert took to the river:
The Mersey was gay and almost crowded with vessels of all sorts moving up and down the river, ships, barques, brigs, brigantines, schooners, cutters, colliers, tugs, steamboats, lighters, ‘flats’, everything from the huge emigrant liner steamship with four masts to the tiny sailing and rowing boats. From the river one sees to advantage the miles of dock which line the Mersey side, and the forests of masts which crowd the quays.14
Another clergyman, arriving in Liverpool from New York in the 1870s and writing for a New York newspaper, thought the city could be ‘aptly termed the “Chicago of England” [being] without doubt, essentially modern, and its rise and progress is something wonderful’.15 In the docks the Reverend Bell found
a long vista of vessels alongside the quay, lashed together with planks, reaching far ahead. There multitudes of goods are shipped – all kinds of hardware, railway supplies, iron in all shapes, of all kinds and sizes, sheet, wire, bar, spring, etc.; bales, boxes, casks, wines, spirits, ales, for India, Madagascar, Asia, Persia, the Continent and America.16
Major additions to the dock system appeared always as extensions of Liverpool’s grandeur, as opportunities to reassert the role of the city as a port and trading centre. Of global importance. When the Gladstone Dock was opened in 1927, F. C. Bowering, Lord Mayor, shipowner and a major force in world-wide marine insurance, reminded readers that Liverpool was still the world’s pre-eminent liner port and thought it appropriate also to remind the ‘rest of the world’ that,
Liverpool was called into being, not as a terminus for ocean tourist traffic, but as a junction for the landing, embarkation and storage of the vast wealth exchanged between the North and Midlands of England and the overseas world.17
No exaggeration was involved when another writer in the special supplement of the local daily newspaper said, ‘Worldwide interest is aroused by the completion and opening of the greatest dock which the world has ever known.’18
The world role or claims to size measured on a global scale were a recurring feature of articles written about one or another of Liverpool’s firms in the local press which was not then, nor subsequently, parochial. The Journal of Commerce was the more important of the two national daily shipping papers and far superior to the London-published Lloyd’s List. The Liverpool Daily Post was one of Britain’s great Liberal newspapers, if obviously inferior to the Manchester Guardian.
The constant juxtaposition of Liverpool and the world was not made extravagantly. It was presented quietly and confidently. Running through a list of the commodities imported through Liverpool, the chairman of the Liverpool Steamship Owners’ Association, ends by saying: ‘Almost all the world pours in its tribute.’19 Another shipowner points out that the frequency of sailings from Liverpool to Calcutta is ‘not excelled in any other long-distance trade in the world’.20 An advertisement for the Cotton Exchange accurately presents it as simply ‘THE WORLD’S GREATEST COTTON MARKET’.21 In like vein, the Stanley Dock tobacco warehouse is ‘the largest and most up-to-date in the world’; the Liverpool Grain Storage and Transit Company is ‘one of the leading grain handling concerns of the world’.22 Waring and Gillows, meanwhile, have so ‘exquisitely furnished and equipped’ Liverpool’s passenger liners that the city’s fame ‘as a centre for the manufacture of the highest class of furniture has spread all over the civilised world’.23 The city’s merchants have also been busy, tapping
huge consignments of cotton, corn, raw sugar, provisions, oil-bearing seeds, timber, fruit from over the seven seas of the world to the port of Liverpool.24
These cargoes and the ships carrying them were insured in Liverpool, making it one of the world’s greatest insurance centres.25 Surveying all these activities in 1927, the general manager of the Bank of Liverpool and Martins, said:
It is fitting that reference should be made to a characteristic of Liverpool which impresses a newcomer. Expressed briefly, the cosmopolitan outlook and worldwide interests which exist make it the least parochial of our cities, and Liverpool may well be proud of her commanding position.26
Novelists, poets and memoirists writing of their Liverpool connections place port, river, ships, merchants, shipowners and seafarers so firmly in the foreground that other activity appears secondary or absent altogether. As if to prove a once popular contention that Lime Street led to all parts of the Empire, there stands over the main entrance of the old Lewis’s department store a large bronze figure by Sir Jacob Epstein: poised like Ulysses on a ship’s prow, a muscular nude looks purposefully seaward.
John Brophy’s novel City of Departures is set in Liverpool at the end of the Second World War. His protagonist Charles Thorneycroft is returning to the city after artistic success in the metropolis and reflecting, that had he stayed in his native city, he would have become ‘a “local painter”, deriving most of his income from formal portraits of aldermen and shipowners and cotton-brokers’.27 Describing his city, Thorneycroft recalls that there was hardly ever a day without wind and that that, too, spoke of the sea and the port.
The city air was fresh, it blew perpetually, strong or mild, off the sea and the river, and channelled its gusty way through every street. It ought to be a healthy air, and it had the tang of health, the odour of tidal salt water, edged with smells from mud flats and sandhills and shores strewn with seaweed. But it was not healthy. It was laden with smoke and soot and grease, and with smells from tanneries, breweries, oil-cake factories, margarine factories, smells from the engine-rooms of ships, from dockyards, from thousands of warehouses where every sort of cargo was stored.28
Walking through the city streets, noticing the grime and dirt, the dinginess and the