Museum of Liverpool

Liverpool has its fair share of museums. I can’t help and get the feeling this new one (due to open in 2011) will be more exciting to look at from the outside. The waterfront has transformed immensely in the five years I have been away. Some good, some not so good (Beatles Museum).

I wonder though what legacy these buildings will have? They have some serious competition from the three graces. Time immortal architecture. I suspect in 100 years many of the new towers of glass and steel won’t have a legacy due to the uncertainty of consumer capitalism as it devours every last natural resource in its path in the name of profit.

So the Waterfront and L1 is all shiny and new. All you have to do is travel less than a mile in any direction to see the still stagnant and decaying truth of Liverpool’s so called ‘Renaissance’.

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The Old Town Bride

Lucky guy! I love the way the tourists look at the astronomical clock and ignore the beautiful bride. Something I tried to document a few times was the crowds of tourists in Prague at the old town hall clock. I ways always firstly impressed by the amazing range of hardware on show. Digital photography has broken down the elitism of photography by making it completely accessible for everyone.

I would also enjoy the idea of photographing people while they photograph something else. Their attention was so far away from me that they wouldn’t even notice that I would be the only snapper facing in the opposite direction to the crowds. If I had spent more time in Prague (like four years wasn’t enough) I would have done more documentation on this theme.

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Wrecked

I got into a spot of bother last night with some drunken locals. I’d started talking about how ‘Mersey Wreckers’ were a total myth. Not that people didn’t salvage from wrecked boats, there are many written documents confirming the activity. However the notion that people in Wallasey lit fires and used lanterns to fool captains into thinking they were safe light and causing the boats to be wrecked. This is a myth and one locals are not willing to accept as the folklore is so deep.

Just as with the tales and shanty songs of the Cornish wreckers the Merseyside wreckers have only folk songs and pub stories to validate their claims. There is no written evidence or documentation of records which support the theory of wrecking by fire or lantern.

The term ‘wreckers’ should be used with the utmost caution, warns Merseyside maritime historian Patrick Moran. ‘In spite of the huge numbers of myths about wrecking around the UK coast, it didn’t happen. There were no wreckers. It is an absolute grave insult to the brave men who went out to the assistance of the stranded ships in bad weather. These were fishermen who went out from the very villages which would have supplied the wreckers.’ As evidence to back this up, there was only ever one prosecution for wrecking and that was on the North Wales coast, he says. The case was moved to Shrewsbury to ensure getting non-biased jury and the verdict was not guilty. The captain under oath said that far from being enticed ashore, he was driven ashore by the cause of weather. He owed his life to the the people who dragged him out of the surf – who then did strip him and rob him and left lying beside his dead wife on the beach. But they did save his life.

There’s a fine line between wrecking, possession and salvage. It’s like many crimes, it has great moral complexity. However the idea that locals could bring ships onto the rocks with small lanterns or fires (how do you light a fire in a force 8 gale anyway? How do you see a small lantern through fog a mile out at sea?) is total myth.

It was Mother Nature who wrecked ships not the locals of Mother Redcaps. As nice as the story is it just doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the documentation of the times.

According to a revealing customs report dated 1750…

‘Smuggling into the coasts around Liverpool …is generally from the Isleman (sic)…in small boats that never appear on the coast but fall in with the land just in the dusk of the evening, that by their observations they may run in the night time into the place intended for the discharge of their goods where persons are always ready to assist and convey them to a proper place of safety…’

Jarvis, Rupert C

One such place of safety was undoubtedly a Wallasey pub called Mother Redcap’s , which stood ‘on the promenade between Egremont and New Brighton ferries’. At that time Wallasey was wild and desolate:

Wirral up to the middle of the 18th century was a desperate region. The inhabitants were nearly all wreckers and smugglers — they ostensibly carried on the trade or calling of fishermen, farm labourers or small farmers…Then for smuggling: fine times the runners used to have in my young days. Scarcely a house in North Wirral that could not provide a guest with a good stiff glass of brandy or Hollands.

That part of Wallasey was separated from the rest of Wirral by a tidal pool, so the pub was more or less free of unwanted observers on the land side.Mother Redcap’s was riddled with storage places, and was stoutly defended against attack: the door was five inches thick, and heavily reinforced, and the windows had shutters in a similar style. A customs officer who succeeded in entering the door could be precipitated into the cellar via a trapdoor on the threshold: forcing the door released a catch that opened the trapdoor.

Wallasey in these days was only a small fishing village. Infamous for its smuggler taverns and murderous population. Nothing much has changed yet the fact remains wreckers were people who salvaged and are more likely connected to the illegal smuggling trade than full scale piracy.

However Merseysiders are always so sentimental and often prefer the myths to the reality.

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