The irregular roof line of the landward side of the dock wall peaked with the grain and sugar silos, the warehouses in grey-trimmed red brick, the undecorated castles of commerce giving shelter to bales of wool and cotton. The city itself broke through the workaday buildings, stood over the regiments and battalions shifting cargoes, driving lorries, caulking decks – and calculated their wages. At the Pierhead the city intrudes into the docks and divides them into North and South. Here are the grand buildings of Edwardian opulence, fronting for the wealth once made in owning and insuring ships; in lending money to the merchants who bought and then sold unseen the raw materials carried on homeward passages. Here in Liverpool’s City there were other and better dressed regiments at work. Bowler hats and rolled umbrellas were as de rigueur in Water Street as in London’s Leadenhall Street. On the morning and evening ferries across the Mersey the bowler-hatted, and those aspiring to the same rank, promenaded, anti-clockwise and four abreast, around the boat-decks. The old custom was defiantly maintained in the late 1960s although the ranks had thinned compared with the phalanxes once common. The business side of ship operation and other shipping services, not to mention banking and insurance, were all labour-intensive activities. Thousands of office workers poured into the city every day – clerks and typists from the inner suburbs of Liverpool and Wallasey, managers and directors from West Kirby and Blundell Sands.
Moving ships, cargoes and money from one part of the world to another by telex cable was, on its own, a fair-sized economy with its own ring of satellite firms. Every large firm had its organisational formula and accordingly provided work for the local printshops and bookbinders. Ships’ chart folios went ashore to chart correctors’ offices for the latest marine hazards to be entered in indian ink; ships’ chronometers and barographs were landed to be cleaned and rated. Men from Sperry, Marconi and Decca went down to ships to check gyro compasses, radios and radars respectively. Board of Trade surveyors checked ships’ safety equipment while their examiner colleagues tested and grilled the young mates and engineers temporarily ashore studying for their certificates of competency.
In other offices scattered around the city were the average-adjusters to settle claims between the insured and the insurer; the ship-brokers to buy, sell or charter a ship; the freight forwarders to arrange shipment of crates or bales of anything to anywhere; the agencies to handle the business of foreign ships; the foreign consular corps to guide and advise resident and visiting nationals. The Dock Board, in its magnificent offices of marble and mahogany, had its own army of clerks, managers and superintendents to watch over and log in and out its revenue and expenses, its pier-masters and dockgatemen, the crews of buoyage ships, dredgers and floating cranes; the gangs of skilled tradesmen and their labourers who ran the internal railway system, the water hydraulic lines and pump- houses which angled cranes and swung bridges; the shipwrights, millwrights, boilermakers, ironmoulders and blacksmiths who made and maintained the lock- gates and their machinery.47
A ship arriving in daylight would be certain to find on the quayside waiting groups of men whose purposes were in their clothes and in their manner. A dark- suited and homburged Marine Super come to welcome home his charge and wanting a briefing of immediate ship’s requirements from the master. The master stevedore to see the Mate about readiness to discharge cargo and to say what he wants first out of the holds. The riggers waiting to clatter their boots up the gangway, to open up hatches and top derricks. Customs rummagers to look for contraband. The Port Health wanting reassurance on the absence of infectious diseases. The union reps come to collect dues, pin down evasive members and hoping to avoid complaints. A tailor’s runner, briefcase bursting with samples of suitings, swift with the tape and the sizes into dog-eared notebook, talking constantly of other ships just in and how he saw old so-and-so only yesterday. More sheepishly, a Mate newly gone ashore tours the officers’ accommodation hopeful of selling some life insurance. With bonhomie, a padre or two from the Church of England Mission to Seamen and the Roman Catholic Apostleship of the Sea come looking for the faithful, the sad and lonely, leaving calling cards and posters advertising their service. Less welcome by far, the evangelical tract pedlars for whom seafarers might imaginatively ham up their sinfulness.
On the first night ashore the port’s evening economy provided voluntary as well as revenue-generating services. Of the former, and hugely popular with seamen, were the dances run by the Apostleship of the Sea at Atlantic House. Parish organisations were then still strong, parishioners still obedient and young women kept close to the Church. It was almost sufficient for the word to go out from Atlantic House to the parishes and dozens of women would arrive to do their Christian duty and dance with the seamen.
When the whaling fleet docked in Liverpool overnight to discharge its cargoes of Antarctic oils, women distinctly lacking the priesthood’s approval were in town and in number. On those nights Lime Street could seem like a Hollywood set of San Francisco in the days of the gold rush. The men came uptown from the Gladstone Dock with a lot of money and a determination to obliterate the six months just spent in the frozen wilds of South Georgia. The big money and the number of men drew women in from St Helens, Wigan and Salford.
Of the other Liverpool that had little to do with ships except through family and history, a substantial part either lived off processing cargoes or worked for firms needing the volume generated by ships to cover their basic costs. Ships arriving from a foreign voyage brought with them a hidden cargo of dirtied bed linen and towels that sustained a number of laundries. Neither was it a coincidence that Britain’s largest dry-cleaning firm, Johnson’s, was close to the local waterfront; it had a handsome business in cleaning the curtains and loose covers from the public rooms of the passenger and cargo liners. Bits and pieces of port-related employment of this sort contributed many hundreds of jobs to the local economy – but not nearly as many as the big processing industries.
At its peak, the port provided direct employment for perhaps as many as 60,000 people. Almost as many again worked in the processing and manufacturing industries that were only in Liverpool or its close hinterland through a dependence on the port’s commodities. When Bryant and May built their model match factory close to Garston Docks just before the Second World War, they could draw upon the standards of Baltic timber brought in on lop-sided ships. It made sense, too, for BICC to build its insulated cable factories on Liverpool’s borders: ships of the Blue Funnel brought in latex from Malaya and Sumatra and those of Pacific Steam carried copper from Chile. Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight took copra off the Bank Line ships which had ferried it home from the Pacific Islands and palm oil from Nigeria off ships of their own fleet – and then gave it back again in bars of soap to be distributed around Scotland and the North-East of England by Coast Line’s weekly sailings to Aberdeen and Newcastle.
The British American Tobacco Company made cigarettes and Ogden’s pipe tobacco from leaf brought in by the Harrison boats from South and East Africa and the USA. And so the connections went. The mills of Rank and Spiller and Wilson ground the grains of Canada and the US Midwest while Joseph Heap’s mill husked the rice of India and Burma. The Crawford family’s factories mixed, so to speak, Rank’s flour with Tate and Lyle’s sugar to bake their biscuits. Meanwhile and nearby, other factories – Read’s and Tillotson’s – made tins and cartons for the biscuits and the cigarettes. Courtald’s first rayon plant – then British Enka – overlooked the Grand National course in the suburb of Aintree and fed itself on imported Canadian woodpulp. Evans Medical, later absorbed into the pharmaceutical giant Glaxo, began life in docklands producing tinctures, powders and pills from exotic spices, roots, herbs and seeds. Before finally leaving Liverpool, Tate and Lyle had absorbed all its other cane-sugar-refining competitors in the city to become the largest refinery in the world.
A manufacturing sector independent of the port did develop in the inter-war years. ‘The Automatic’, later part of Plesseys, produced telephone exchange equipment, employed 16,000 at its peak and was just about the only representative in Liverpool of the growing consumer durable industry of the 1930s. Elsewhere in the city during the same decade, rearmament saw huge new factories making air frames, vehicles and aero engines. These were the very first factories to be directed by central government to Liverpool and represented recognition by the state of Liverpool’s need for a more broadly based economy.
The armament factories were sold off shortly after 1945 to become satellite factories for English Electric,