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, GEC, Lucas and Dunlop. Ironically, these were among the first to be caught in the big wave of factory closures in Britain in the late 1960s and which continued through the 1970s and 80s. It was unfortunate for Liverpool’s working people that the desperate attempts by senior British managements to overcome their archaism and incompetence, which produced the flood of factory closures, should have come at a time when the port was suffering from the final expiry of the imperial connection, entry into the EEC and containerisation of non-bulk sea-borne commerce.
Since the 1920s there had been an underlying shift of the axis of UK manufacturing industry away from the North of England, Scotland and South Wales to the South-East, so attempts to attract factory-based employments had always gone against the national trend. The Liverpool Daily Post reported in 1954 that, although nearly 60 non-Merseyside firms (including Dunlop, GEC and others) had opened factories and created jobs for 27,000 people, this had not been sufficient to alter the economy of the area radically.48 Five years later Mr John Rodgers, MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, said that no area of similar size anywhere in the UK had remotely comparable employment problems. He went on to say that, although new factories were being built, progress was still not good enough.49 The outlook had not improved in 1962 when the North-West Regional Board for Industry said: ‘The amalgamation and rationalisation of firms on Merseyside was resulting in a loss of employment opportunities in an area where unemployment was a serious problem.’50 The car industry, then arriving, was to provide only temporary relief. The port and its related processing industries therefore continued to provide the city’s core. Although the number of jobs centred on the port steadily shrank during the 1950s and 60s, it could still appear to be the one area of economic activity that was deeply rooted.
Until the mid-1960s the Port of Liverpool’s share in the national totals of imports and exports had remained more or less constant. Liverpool’s prominence came from cargo liners and these, of course, were precisely the type of ship that were soon to be replaced by the container ships.
The movements of manufacturing industry, population and wealth to the South-East inevitably made that region’s ports more attractive to shippers of goods. The coastal ports of south-eastern England, being tidal, were also much cheaper to use than Liverpool’s enclosed dock systems, which were expensive to maintain. At the same time the decline of Commonwealth countries as trading partners and the rise of EEC countries left Liverpool marooned on the wrong side of the country. Between 1966 and 1994 Liverpool’s share of all ship arrivals in the UK was halved, while Dover’s share increased four-and-a-half times. By 1994 the East coast ports had totally eclipsed the importance of those to the West. The following league table of UK ports in 1966, 1994 and 2011 provides a neat illustration of the transformation of Britain’s patterns of seaborne trade.
Table 1: Ten largest UK ports, 1966, 1994 and 2011*
| 1966 | 1994 | 2011 |
| 1 London | 1 London | 1 Grimsby and Immingham |
| 2 Liverpool | 2 Felixstowe | 2 London |
| 3 Tees and Hartlepool | 3 Grimsby and Immingham | 3 Felixstowe |
| 4 Manchester | 4 Tees and Hartlepool | 4 Dover |
| 5 Clyde | 5 Liverpool | 5 Liverpool |
| 6 Hull | 6 Dover | 6 Tees and Hartlepool |
| 7 Newport (Mon.) | 7 Medway | 7 Southampton |
| 8 Bristol | 8 Port Talbot | 8 Belfast |
| 9 Port Talbot | 9 Hull | 9 Hull |
| 10 Grimsby and Immingham | 10 Southampton | 10 Medway |
Source: National Ports Council (1967) and Department of Transport (1995 and 2012)
*As measured by volume of foreign and domestic non-oil traffic for 1985 and non-fuel traffic for 1966.
Between 1966 and 1994 the relative importance of East and West coast ports
