Liverpool Opinions
The long and winding road
By
John Williams
Remember the world shattering impact that Liverpool made in the sixties? Thanks to the Beatles everybody wanted to be associated with the magic of the Mersey. In New York City a disc jockey even renamed himself 'Wacker the K'. Wacker was in those days a Merseyside expression for friend,
"Everybody wants to be my baby now...."
Swarms of television crews homed in on the most insistent signal on the planet, and images of almost everyone, from writers to footballer supporters were beamed all over the planet.
Things are different now. Liverpudlians are depicted as incorrigibles. This perception is promoted in part by the quasi racists who inhabit the medias of television and newspapers and who snipe incessantly at Liverpool and its people from the long range safety of game shows, chat shows or newspaper columns. They are irredeemable cowards who wouldn't dare utter their slanders in the city itself.
On reflection, the adulation of all things Liverpool, during the sixties, was simply a brief pause in the historical denigration of what was once the greatest seaport in the world.
For over a century Liverpool has been regarded as a kind of virus in the body politic of the United Kingdom. The second world war began and the Luftwaffe and the U-boats accounted for the deaths of tens of thousands of Liverpool people. Their sacrifice was soon forgotten in the rush to brand Liverpool as a hotbed of industrial unrest.
While it is true that local dockers and seaman hit the headlines by leading strike action, nobody pointed out that the dockers of London and Southampton benefited from the subsequent improvement in pay and conditions. Instead, the perception of truculent Merseysiders continued to grow.
Industry after industry left the area, mainly because after the British entry into the EC the Western seaboard was superfluous, as the bulk of cargo traffic was between Europe and the South Coast. However, the fact that in the space of ten years Merseyside lost the likes of Dunlop, Tate and Lyle* Kraft foods, and saw the erosion of its shipbuilding industry, itself part of a world wide trend, only heightened the sense that Merseysiders were work-shy and antagonistic toward employers.
Then the life-hating Thatcher government decided to put the lights out altogether and ushered in the new dark ages. Indeed, at one stage the Thatcherites almost ripped up the main rail link between Liverpool and London! With employment at between ten and twenty percent throughout most of the eighties and nineties the region's poverty eventually drew the attention of the European Commission, which promptly injected a billion pounds into the area.
Ironic, then, that many of those responsible for the attempt to regenerate Merseyside were Germans, some of whom might actually have taken part in the bombing of Liverpool. As for the British, some of them couldn't give a damn whether its citizens lived or died.
Of course, the attacks on Liverpool have a long history and they almost all originate from the fact that Liverpool is a city built and inhabited by people from alien traditions. Jews, Irish and many more ethnic groups all found their way to Liverpool in the nineteenth century. All were victims of oppression of one sort, all were viewed with deep distrust.
The Jews because they were millennial scapegoats, the Irish because they were, in the main, Catholics. Even the famine displaced Irish protestants were regarded as belonging to a rogue strain of Christianity.
Imagine, then, England in 1846, when England's population was sixteen million.
This newly Protestant country, filled with fear and loathing of Catholics to the point where the execution of them had been commonplace, was suddenly host to 300,000 destitute Irish, with most of them Catholics, and almost all of them located in Liverpool.
Out of Ireland's population of 8 million at least one million had died and 1 million were in flight. So, one in eight of the Irish died of hunger. If those statistics and percentages had been repeated among Ethiopia's population of 54 million in the famine of the 80's we would have seen seven million dead rather than the still lamentable total of approximately one million.
Given the scale of the catastrophe it would seem that pity for the Irish refugees was called for, but it was not forthcoming.
"Imagine no possessions..."
Observing Britain's current climate of hostility toward refugees/asylum seekers it is not difficult to imagine the hatred the Irish encountered. The shock waves would have travelled the length of the land, and the myth making forces must have gone into overdrive as the aliens were demonised and driven into cellars and workhouses,
"The long and winding road led me straight to your door..."
The workhouse where many of these wretched human beings ended their days was the biggest in England, capable of holding 5000 at a time. As the gods of irony would have it, Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral stands on the very site of the demolished workhouse.
"In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?"
John 14:2
In 1847 the daughter of a clergyman wrote a book whose central character taught children to swear, dogs to bark and, as if that wasn't enough, was a necromancer responsible, in part, for the demise of a lovely girl.
Now this grotesque wasn't born in Liverpool. Worse, he was simply found there, as if he had jumped ashore from a ship, like Bram Stoker's Dracula.
You will have guessed by now that the character was Heathcliffe. Every time I see Larry Olivier acting the role or hear the gorgeous Kate Bush singing the hysterical lament to Kathy I can't help reflect that Ms Bronte's original dark perceptions of Liverpool are likely to outlast the city itself.
*In exchange for the loss of thousands of jobs in Tate and Lyle Liverpool got the Tate Gallery. Some sweetener!
27th of April 2002, three years after I wrote this account, John Casey, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge, writing for the Daily Mail in a 'liberal's praise' of the beneficial influence of immigrants to Britain, managed to mention every group from Huguenots to Ugandan Asians, and even the French aristocrats who sought Asylum from the revoluton of 1789. Not once did he allude to the contributions of the Irish!
Patrick Bronte was the eldest of 10 children of Hugh Brunty, an agricultural labourer, and Eleanor (a.k.a. Alice) McClory, of Drumballyroney, County Down, Northern Ireland. He was apprenticed to a blacksmith and then to a linen weaver, but by sixteen, he was Master of the village school. At first self-educated, he was later helped by local clergymen, Revs. Andrew Harshaw and Thomas Tighe. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge in 1802, where he adopted the name Brontë (Greek for thunder). He graduated in 1806 and paid a visit to his family in Northern Ireland. He returned to England and never visited Ireland again.
Mr. Bronte has now no trace of his Irish origin remaining in his speech : Elizabeth Claghorn Gaskell 1855
I have to ask, Why did Patrick change his name and lose all trace of his accent?
Answers on a postcard please
Catholics set to pass Anglicans as leading UK church
Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
Roman Catholicism is set to become the dominant religion in Britain for the first time since the Reformation because of massive migration from Catholic countries across the world.
How bloody ironic!