Liverpool necessarily had a very large transient population comprised of visiting seafarers and those who, at least notionally, were domiciled in the city. In 1872 the Chief Constable estimated that at any one time the city had a shifting population of about 20,000.41 Although this figure is certainly inflated, the social life of the sailor ashore was not lived in some discreetly hidden and therefore ignorable quarter. The most notorious cluster of streets by the turn of the century were those in the vicinity of the Sailors’ Home (!), the Shipping Office, where crews were engaged and paid off, and the Seamen’s Dispensary which specialised in treating some of the better known maladies. These streets were part of the heart of the city, less than a five-minute walk from the columned entrance to the Liverpool branch of the Bank of England and other financial emporia. The port had two public presences and, if the one was celebrated as much as the other was deplored, each was equally expressive of how the sea and its commerce possessed the city.
Ships, docks, cargoes and the people associated with them were, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Liverpool’s past and future. In the twentieth century the city’s economy did diversify into manufacturing, but it came late, was never sufficient and was too impermanent to offset the dramatic and headlong decline of the port from the late 1960s. The condition of Liverpool today – economically, politically, socially – is a direct outcome of the changing fortunes of the port.
In the 1890s the one-sidedness of Liverpool’s economy had become a regular source of comment. The Liverpool Review remarked:
We are not great as a manufacturing centre. By the side of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Bradford and smaller places we have as manufacturers to hide our heads.42
Comment had plainly become anxiety in the mid-Edwardian years, when one of the local evening newspapers, the Liverpool Express, ran a competition for schemes to diversify the local economy. ‘By 1914’, a historian wrote of the port, ‘the high peak of achievement had been reached and passed; the lean years were quickly recognised at the time.’43 In 1923 a group of local businessmen co- operated with the relevant city and borough governments to found the first local promotional body.
The Liverpool Organisation ... is influencing what people think about Liverpool the whole world over. It is broadcasting in every language its advantages as an industrial centre and as a great seaport. It is in touch with those who, abroad and at home, contemplate setting up factories in this country. It acts as a clearing house for information about the city, and ... it seeks, persistently, to further the interests of the people of Merseyside.44
The language of intent and ambition in this ringing declaration hardly varied at all in the remainder of the century as successor organisations set themselves identical objectives.
Before 1914 the Port of Liverpool accounted for 31 per cent of the UK’s visible imports and exports. By 1938 the city’s share had fallen to 21 per cent as measured in value. The port’s fortunes had for long been linked to the cotton industry and, as Lancashire textile manufacture declined, so too did Liverpool’s port. Britain’s industrial centre was shifting to the Midlands and the South-East and other ports were within easier reach.
After the Second World War, and with the post-war boom in full swing, the port did regain some of its lost export trade. In the mid-1960s the dock road was in a daily confusion of traffic; quays and dockside sheds overpowered by haphazard queues of crated and bundled and baled outward cargo. The regions of the world were still sea-laned to Liverpool. Almost within hailing distance of the Liver Building were small, low ships running 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. Ford’s had opened at Halewood and sucked in hundreds of ex-seafarers, but it was still impossible to exaggerate how much the city of Liverpool was a seaport.
The main Post Office, next door to the Fruit Exchange, could offer its customers the scents of fresh Spanish oranges – or onions in another season. The produce had come into the city, via the North Queen’s Dock, carried by the white- hulled ships of the MacAndrew’s Line, whose faded and peeling offering of ‘fast cargo services to Spain’ remained on the gable end of a quayside shed for 20 years after the dock had closed. Berthed nearby, then, were the Booth Line ships which traded first to Portugal and then to Brazil and as far up the Amazon as Manaus. An illicit trade in green parrots was a sideline for crew members.
Tied up in Toxteth Dock, a swing-bridge away from the Booth boats, were Elder Dempster Line ships. These were known throughout the port as the ‘monkey boats’ because, where other ships kept cats, these had once kept monkeys. The monkeys became part of the folklore of the city’s South End and kept Elder Dempster’s nickname going, for they had done their bit in the Second World War. Late in the war, Captain Laurie James, then a young second officer, was in a convoy proceeding northward up the Portuguese coast and about to be attacked from the air:
Now we had a monkey on this ship and they were the finest spotters of planes going. They had a very acute hearing; we called them grass monkeys and they were very small. They were the pets generally of somebody on board and they’d be looking in the direction of the plane and you could see them getting excited. It seemed as if they felt there was something menacing. This was well known amongst those of us on the West Coast trade.45
Elder Dempster’s carried West African crews and had done so since before the First World War. Over the decades numbers of black seafarers had settled and married in Liverpool. They and their descendants provided a ready market for the yams, plantains and sweet potatoes sold to Granby Street shopkeepers by enterprising African seamen. African grey parrots, highly prized for their linguistic skills, also came off ships in the ‘West Coast’ trade. Some fetched prices still discussed in the bar-room talk of retired seafarers. Others ended up with Gran in the back kitchen, like the one remembered here by Matt Simpson:
My father’s brother brought it home,
madcap Cliff, a ‘case’, with wit as wild
as erotic dreams. It was his proof
of Africa and emblem of the family pride
in seamanship.46
The port also left its mark, if more obscurely, through its folk rituals. In the Protestant streets of the Dingle, at the southern-most end of the dock system, children ran through the streets at dawn on Good Friday dragging burning effigies of Judas Iscariot. As unknown in other parts of Liverpool as elsewhere in the UK, this was a Portuguese practice and seems to have arrived with the fruit trade. The Chinese New Year was an event in Liverpool long before the rest of Europe had heard of it.
For the entire length of the dock road, the pubs either bore the names of the adjacent docks – the Coburg, the Bramley-Moore – or appealed to the ships, hence the Baltic Fleet and Al at Lloyd’s. Lime Street, no less than La Canabière in Marseilles, had its American Bar and was similarly decorated with ships’ photographs and mementoes deposited by sentimental departing seamen.
The businesses lining waterfront streets also announced their dependent livelihoods: makers of flags and bunting; chandlers specialising in deck and engine-room stores; bleaching agents and holystones for scrubbing wooden decks; Lion Brand patent packings for steam valves and bales of colour-flecked, grey cotton waste to clean engine-room ladders and plates. Firms making paint, firms selling other people’s. Spinnaker Yacht Varnish: well spoken of by foremen painters in Solent yacht-yards and made in Liverpool to withstand the weather thrown at the woodwork of ocean liners. Tarpaulin and sailmakers. Ships did not forsake canvas when they got rid of their sails. Around the most modern motor ships there was canvas everywhere. Canvas awnings to shade decks in the tropics, covers for the deck lockers containing the awnings. Tents for open hatches and at least three tarpaulins to cover the forward hatches when at sea. If the fancy canvas for gangway screens was made by the ABs (able seamen), the rest of it was cut, shaped