When Liverpool was founded in 1207 by the Charter of King John, its best
friends would have described it as a small fishing village. As late as 1500, its
population was still less than 3,000 and the town could have been walked across
in three or four minutes. Liverpool profited from London's misfortune at the end
of the Civil War. With Dutch ships in the River Thames, Plague and the Great
Fire, business moved to where money could be made, and proceeded with in peace.
Mr Smith brought his sugar refinery from London, and other small industries
began to attach themselves to the town. In 1715, Thomas Steers build Liverpool's
first dock, beginning the city's drive to economic power and pre-eminence. The
main industry, almost the only industry in the 18th century, came from clay. The
Herculaneum industry, with forty or fifty small companies, produced pottery
which was much sought after. But they lost the industry to Staffordshire, the
Midlands and Mr Wedgwood. By then, most employment was casual and connected to
the ships and trade.
The first theatre opened in 1750, by the same Thomas Steers who had built the
first dock, in the appropriately named Drury Lane. In 1772 came the Theatre
Royal in what is now Williamson Square. The mid-19th century saw up to a dozen
more theatres. The repertoire started with Shakespeare and the classics and
descended to melodrama, music-hall, circuses and even tortoise racing. In the
postwar gloom of 1946 there were four major Christmas pantomimes in four massive
town centre theatres, with another half-dozen in suburban theatres, most playing
to full houses. In 1911, the Playhouse repertory theatre opened, ultimately
launching careers in London's West End, British films and Hollywood. The
Everyman followed in 1964, and the city supported two reps through thick and
thin, producing new work by native writers like Willy Russell and Alan
Bleasdale, until the two joined towards the end of the last millennium.
In 1946, apart from the concerts at the Philharmonic Hall, which began in the
1840s, there were twelve chamber societies doing small classical works,
quartets, trios and so on. These fared quite well, although most stopped during
the war. By the early 1950s, small jazz clubs began to appear, with the now
legendary Cavern arriving in 1957.
The industrial situation remained largely stable until the decline of the
port, which began, perhaps, in 1907, when the shipping lines moved their main
offices to Southampton. The great waterfront buildings, often seen as evidence
of the city's great progress, were in fact an answer to its decline, as was the
Gladstone Dock of 1927, beaten by docks in Southampton and London. The rise of
industry was as a result of that decline, and a decision of the 1950s. Ford's of
Halewood, Yorkshire Imperial Metals, the English Electric Company, the Automatic
Telephone Exchange Company and others brought manufacturing and jobs. The port
remains, in the volume of cargo it carries, a significant enterprise. The
factories have nearly gone, and yet somehow or other, the Liverpool population
has found itself a niche - and work.
The theatres survive, although fewer than there once were. Concerts are often
now limited to the 'Phil', although chamber concerts are thriving again at the
reopened St George's Hall. The cultural effort of the 19th century was an
attempt to civilise the town, to make it, as the historian Picton said, more
than a collection of docks and warehouses. Today, that culture is an attempt to
hold onto a civilisation, to keep the best people in the city and to remind
people that the city will survive on its economic and its cultural wealth.
There was a Liverpool Academy of Arts from 1774 (reconstituted in 1810), its
collections based on a donation of Italian paintings by the 18th-century
historian David Roscoe. Internal divisions in the 1850s saw a split into a kind
of traditional academy and a new artists' academy, which continued into the 19th
century. The Walker Art Gallery was given to them by the brewer Sir Andrew
Barker Walker in 1877, and remains one of England's finest provincial galleries,
with works including Liverpool's most celebrated painter, George Stubbs. In the
20th century, the John Moores' exhibitions encouraged many young artists to come
to the city.
Liverpool, of course, is known for its humour, and the city had a thriving
variety tradition, from which came such figures as Rob Wilton and Tommy Handley,
whose death in 1949 had an impact comparable to that of Winston Churchill thanks
to the extraordinary popularity of his radio programme It's That Man Again
(ITMA). Other celebrated Liverpool comedians included Ted Ray, Arthur Askey and
Jimmy Tarbuck, but none has had the staying power of the great Ken Dodd, still
going strong in his eighties.
Steve Binns
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