Liverpool. Tony Lane

yet further employment consequences.

      It took little more than a single decade for Liverpool’s port to shrink so much that it became almost unrecognisable. Herman Melville and all those other celebrated nineteenth-century visitors would still have found something to recognise in the mid-1960s, for although ships might have changed, the cargoes they carried and the methods of handling them were sufficiently similar to have been recognisable. By the early 1980s most of the dock system had changed and been converted to other uses. The port that had created Liverpool had dwindled to insignificance and left the city with huge economic and political problems.

      2 THE OLD FAMILIES

      The ‘old families’, who in early nineteenth-century Liverpool had come to be regarded as the local aristocracy, were not obviously qualified for the label. Few of them had been resident for more than three generations, and the longest established were not always the most conspicuously rich. But some of the names undoubtedly attracted respect, and this was usually based upon evidence of successive generations from handfuls of families committing themselves to advancing the collective interests of local commerce. Once fortunes were established and consolidated, some might even practise noblesse oblige in the city in the same way that landowning families were supposed to practise it in the countryside. Not many did, but then not many had done so in rural areas either. Handfuls, however, did play leading parts on committees that offered no direct financial advantage beyond the maintenance of public order and the improvement of civic amenities; they lent their names and sometimes made handsome donations when subscription lists were raised for ‘good works’ and public projects. Newcomers making new fortunes and aiming to establish their social importance added their names to the subscription lists and by the second generation became ‘old families’ too. But just as the generationally replenished stock of ‘old family’ names became most luminous and known nationally, the changing institutions of the world of commerce and industry were eroding the basis of individualised power and influence.