Here where the ships sailed in and unloaded, loaded again and sailed out once more to all the oceans of the world, here was visible all around him a continuing magnificence. Here was no sign of lethargy or despondent regrets for the prosperities of the past. Here Liverpool was laying claim with a brawny fist to its own important place in the world.29
Far more contemporary, saturated with recent memory, is Matt Simpson’s anthology of poems relating the benchmarks of childhood and adolescence in a waterfront district.30
Leaving the city to go to college, Matt Simpson says he was
... the sailor’s son who never put to sea.
I left the city like
the Cunard liners and returned
to find their red and black
familiar funnels gone from gaps
between the houses where I’d lived,
those girls become as vulgar as
tattoos along my father’s arms.31
And he recalls the streets of childhood:
Salt winds keep these ocean-minded streets
voyaging. There are men here who, landlubbered
(wedded, winded, ulcered out), still walk as if
steel decks were rolling underfoot; riggers
and donkeymen, dockhands and chandlers,
shipwrights and scalers, who service ships
with something of love’s habits, insisting on
manhood and sweet memories.
Look in one bedroom. On
the glass-topped dressing table stood
a carved war-painted coconut Aztec head –
to me, memento mori, shrunken thing,
who watched death dredge this bed.
And yet for years it was a trophy,
souvenir of all the thousand miles
of furrowed brine, of fragrant isles.32
Cheek-by-jowl with Liverpool’s heroic feats of dock engineering, world-scale organisations of commerce and finance, and the sights and sounds of ships and cargoes there were less reputable institutions. As much a part of Liverpool as the respectability of business and other productive employments was the sailors’ Liverpool, discreetly evoked here by a young ship’s doctor in 1911:
The sailor is the real king of Liverpool. Everybody in Liverpool loves the sailor, and is only too anxious to show him how to have a good time and spend his money while he is ashore; and it is he is the great man there till he has spent it.33
The young Dr Abraham, about to embark on his first voyage, was carefully echoing a rowdier rhetoric of the second half of the nineteenth century – that merchant seamen were essentially innocent, noble savages, preyed upon by a vicious class of semi-criminals when ashore. So apparently effective were these beliefs that in Liverpool, as in other ports around the world, Sailors’ Homes were being built from the 1830s onwards to provide sinless shelter. The oratory that might be employed to finance the construction of these Homes could not often have been more eloquent than that of the Reverend Hugh McNeile at an inaugural meeting in Liverpool in 1844:
If every sea is whitened with our canvas – every foreign harbour crowded with our ships – if from every country, and from every clime, there flows into our native land a full tide of all that ministers to the comforts, the conveniences, and the embellishments of life, to the materials of our productive industry, and the sinews of our national strength – it is to the energy and enterprise of our seamen that we are indebted for these blessings ... And what is the return we have made? What is the social and moral condition of that class to who we acknowledge these obligations? ... They return, indeed, from distant scenes and barbarous climes to the bosom of their countrymen, but they return to be plundered and pillaged, seduced and betrayed, by sharks and harpies ... they are so helpless and so confiding ... they have had so little of the habit or the means of becoming provident, that they dissipate their hard- earned wages in a few days and are obliged to engage in any service, or embark on any voyage, by which they may extricate themselves.34
Charles Dickens was visiting Liverpool at this time, ‘keeping watch on Poor Mercantile Jack’ and, as if not to be outdone by the Reverend McNeile, records a seaman
with his hair blown all manner of wild ways, rather crazedly taking leave of his plunderers. All the rigging in the docks was shrill in the wind, and every little steamer coming and going across the Mersey was sharp in its blowing off, and every buoy in the river bobbed spitefully up and down, as if there were a general taunting chorus of ‘Come along, Poor Mercantile Jack! Ill- lodged, ill-fed, ill-used, focussed, entrapped, anticipated, cleaned out. Come along, Poor Mercantile Jack, and be tempest-tossed till you are drowned!’35
Dickens had visited Liverpool, he says, to join the police for a night and to be shown ‘the various unlawful traps which are set every night for Jack’. Melville also found ample provocation to moral outrage:
of all seaports in the world, Liverpool, perhaps, most abounds in all the variety of land-sharks, land-rats, and other vermin, which make the hapless mariner their prey. In the shape of landlords, bar-keepers, clothiers, crimps, and boarding-house loungers, the land-sharks devour him, limb by limb.36
Although the Sailors’ Home was soon built, the intention of undermining the disreputable part of Liverpool’s economy was never realised. Three decades later, in 1879, the Liberal Review was saying that it was an everyday thing ‘to find seamen, the day after their arrival in port, lying about the streets ... almost naked, and in a stupefied state’.37 And a full century after Dickens, McNeile and Melville wrote so vividly of the traps set for seafarers, a government publication in the Second World War was using remarkably similar language:
In most port areas ... especially by the dockside, there are cafes and public houses of low type which can only be regarded as traps for the unwary seafarer. In these he may meet women of undesirable character, and may be induced to spend part of his wages in drink and entertainment of a harmful character.38
In post-war Liverpool the same ‘traps’ were still there. The Duck House (because you had to duck your head to get in through the low doorway) disappeared with the old St John’s market, right in the city-centre, in the 1960s. With it went the Eurasia, a Chinese restaurant that brought together unattached seamen and prostitutes without customers after the pubs closed. One of the very last ‘traps’ still going – if tottering – was in Upper Parliament Street, described here by John Cornelius:
The Lucky Bar was open all night, every night. Depending upon which ships were in dock, it could just as easily be chock-full on, say, a Tuesday night as on a Saturday. The ‘business-girls’, as they called themselves, me to do as they did when trying to predict whether the club would financially worth a visit or not: get a hold of a copy of Lloyd’s List ... gave details of which ships were due in the Port of Liverpool. Ships, course, dock at any time of day or night. Frequently, the Lucky would be almost entirely devoid of male company, the girls sitting quietly around the place, waiting. But at any time the doorbell might ring and in would pour a gang of freshly docked ‘mushers’ (seamen) ready for anything, wallets bulging, banknotes flying like confetti.39
Melville would have understood the continuity, for, while he could be frightening in the language of his disapproval, he also knew that seamen were not quite so innocent. Regretfully, he recorded that
sailors love this Liverpool; and upon long voyages to distant parts of the globe