Liverpool is famous for many things. Its long-held cosmopolitanism is probably one of those you can remind Scousers about without too much eye-rolling.
Liverpool has a history of being a world port, and notoriety for its role in the African slave trade. These have, perhaps more than any other factors, helped forge the city’s image as a – cliche alert – ‘melting pot’.
But don’t forget just how much influence incomers from our own isles have contributed to the city’s landscape and character. As a landscape archaeologist this has usually been of only side interest to me. But since reading Our Liverpool, and the epic Liverpool 800, I’ve come to realise just what ‘Liverpool Cosmopolitanism’ can mean.
I also feel a greater understanding of the way people from all over Britain (the ‘Celtic’ areas) come together to make Liverpool the individualistic town it is.
The British in Liverpool
I can’t judge as an expert, but Liverpool 800 draws the lines between the characters of Irish, Scottish and Welsh immigrants fairly clearly
The Liverpool-Irish
The Irish are some of the most famous of Liverpool’s incomers. Both sides of my family (the Crilleys and the Greaneys) came over from Ireland in the 19th Century. I can guess that a large proportion of Liverpudlians reading this could trace a similar lineage.
A huge number of Irish migrants came over fleeing the potato famine in the middle of the 19th Century. Their numbers rose quickly, and landlords lost no time stuffing them into tiny and unclean court houses. They arrived poor and lived in squalid conditions. Their communities had a reputation for harbouring diseases, and conflicts often arose out of this with their neighbours (see below).
On the other side of the coin, yet still probably due to their great numbers, the Irish community contributed more than other groups to politics. The sectarian troubles of their homeland accompanied them across the Irish Sea. But in addition to the differences between Protestant and Catholics the Irish community took part in electoral politics. Irish Catholic clergy were elected to School Boards. Pub landlords like Hugh McAnulty and Jack Langan lent their premises to meetings of various activist groups. Austin Harford, a successful cloth merchant, led the Irish Party from 1903 to 1923, and became the first Catholic mayor in 1943.
As Liverpool 800 has it, ‘Liverpool-Irish’ was a distinct ‘hypenated identity’. Some sought to distance themselves from their roots to “effect the quickest way out of the Liverpool ‘ghetto'”. But it seems that as a distinct group the Irish were very active in all parts of Liverpool life. For example, William Brown, funder of the Museum which sits on the road named after him, was an Ulsterman.
Cymry Lerpwl
The Welsh, in contrast to the Irish, appear at first to have kept themselves to themselves. As Liverpool 800 (p345) puts it, they “looked after their own”. Having not come as far as the Scottish and Irish, many only stayed as long as it took to make their fortune and move back home. Others came seasonally to work, travelling along the coastal trade routes of north Wales.
The language barrier exaggerated the Welsh insularity that the Irish never found trouble overcoming. The Welsh became known for their building skills, and the various groups of ‘Welsh Streets’ of ‘Welsh Houses’ developed as a hallmark. In addition, Liverpool was scattered with the Welsh chapels which still stand across the city today. In a way these were enclaves which may have helped isolate the Welsh from wider involvement in, for example, politics.
However, in later years there were movements to end this isolation. Campaigners saw education as a barrier to the Welsh becoming something more than admired builders and architects.
Even as the Eisteddfod and St David’s Day celebrations took place on Merseyside there were encouragements to “Amalgamate … with Anglo-Saxons – in other words, the English”. Though “they loved their language [and] they loved their country” they also “loved their Queen”.
However, perhaps due to their lower numbers, although they took part in electoral politics they never left the mark in the way the Liverpool-Irish did.
Liverpool Caledonians
As Belchem and MacRaild admit in their chapter ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, the Scots are relatively unstudied in their roles within Liverpool history. The journal Porcupine suggested (1877) that “had it not been for the enterprise of the Scotchmen, Liverpool would not have emerged from its early obscurity”.
It was individual Scottish men, rather than communities, which seem to have made their mark on Liverpool. Sir John Gladstone, father of a future Prime Minister, moved to the city from Leith. He was a commercial man, as were many of his fellow Scots, including Samuel Smith, the ‘Cotton King of Liverpool’.
Commerce was not the only professional contribution of Scotland. Dr. Duncan, the first Medical Officer for Health, was just one of the leading lights in medicine of Scottish origin.
The skilled Scots tended to cluster further from the docks than their Irish contemporaries, right on the outskirts of the north end of the city. This, Belchem and MacRaild tell us, was partly due to no little antipathy between the Scottish and Irish. Dr Duncan, a prominent Scot outspoken on matters of health and living standards, may be the source of the widespread view of the Irish living in filthy and overcrowded courts.
British Liverpool
I’m usually more interested in the bricks and mortar of the city – the landscapes of roads and fields. This means the topic of people has always played second fiddle to the built environment. But Liverpool 800 has given me a glimpse into the roles into which the ‘Celtic’ nations fitted in Victorian Liverpool.
Having said that, one of the things which struck me were the well-defined lines between what the Irish immigrant could expect to find when he arrived from Belfast compared to the life of the Welsh builder or the Scottish shipwright.
Was the truth of the matter so clear cut? I’m sure it wan’t, but what impressions do you get of the Irish, Scots and Welsh in historic Liverpool? Was it the numerous and politicised Irish? The skilled or highly educated middle and upper class Scotsman? And the quiet, insular Welsh communities with their occasional outbursts of Eisteddfod extravaganzas?
Or none of these things?
Image: old liverpool church by ,joe neary on Flickr, released under a Creative Commons license.