West coast port remaining in the top ten. Containerisation went in parallel with the shift of traffic to the East coast, although the timing of the two movements was largely a coincidence. The impact on port and shipping operations of the containerisation of cargoes was swifter and greater than the transition from sail to steam. Until the 1960s ships carrying frozen or manufactured goods were loaded in much the same way as furniture removal vans – giving due consideration to stability, items were packed in accordance to shape and with a view to minimising lost space. In 1927 it was reckoned not surprising to see in the list of cargo of a ship loading for the Far East:
a ton or two of bicycles, a ton of metal polish, three tons of sewing thread, two of boracic acid, nearly a ton of blotting paper, ten tons of biscuits, a hundred of soap, twenty of whiskey or stout, and as much as four tons of assorted chocolates.51
If the list was perhaps slightly different by the 1960s, a comparable variety was nevertheless packed into the same space. Even homogeneous cargoes like cane sugar were still coming into the port in bags until the early 1950s – and the description which follows of moving from bagged to bulk sugar stands as a useful analogy for the transition from handling individual goods to stowing containers:
The first bulk cargo of raw sugar was received in Liverpool, in the S.S. Sugar Transporter, in August 1952, and, once bulk receiving started, the amount in bags gradually decreased to vanishing point, taking with it the old-fashioned method of weighing at the docks, the trailer wagons that carried the bags to the refinery and the gangs whose job it was to open and empty the bags in the silo bays, which now stand generally idle. Gone, too, was the livelihood of the man who made sack hooks.52
The containerisation of general cargoes was first successfully introduced in the 1950s on the West coast of the USA, where it showed spectacular savings in the time ships spent in port. One US study showed that where it took 10,584 working hours to load and unload 11,000 tons of general cargo it took only 546 working hours to load and unload 11,000 tons of containers.53
The capital cost of containerising general and frozen cargoes was simply enormous; special ships had to be built; quays and cargo-handling equipment reconstructed and replaced; stocks of steel boxes built up; compensation paid to dock labourers whose considerable skills were being made redundant. This gave a premium to new port sites like Felixstowe, where there were no costs involved in scrapping obsolete equipment and no compensation to be paid to displaced workers.
The most visible consequence of containers, and the one the public knew about, was the large reduction in the number of dockers’ jobs. Less visible, because hardly publicised, were the effects on seafarers and those who serviced ships. Container ship operation became almost identical to that of tankers, which had for long been accustomed to port turn-around times of less than 24 hours. This mode of operation meant that most ship maintenance was done by ships’ crews rather than by ship repair firms who had previously swarmed over vessels during their lengthy stays in port. For their part, seafarers were plainly affected by a type of ship that on the Australasian routes, for example, halved the voyage time once normal (from five months to two-and-a-half), could carry the equivalent of six traditional cargo liners and needed only half the crew of one of them. These ships, too, were now completely bare of their own cargo-handling gear, while a conventional six-hatch ship had had 20 derricks, each with its own set of winches. Here there were effects upon the rigging lofts and the rope manufacturers. Shipowners themselves, now operating fewer ships, no longer needed such large staffs ashore, creating 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.
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