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 will be continually dilating upon its charms and attractions, and extolling it above all other seaports in the world. For in Liverpool they find their Paradise – not the well known street of that name – and one of them told me he would be content to lie in Prince’s Dock till he hove up anchor for the world to come.40
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
