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 and sewn ashore in the lofts that had once supplied sailing ships.
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.
