© John Kerrigan 2006
CULTURAL LINKS
OVERVIEW.
Liverpool’s cultural links with the USA are probably stronger than anywhere else in the UK,
as you would expect, as
it was for many centuries the main point of transatlantic travel.
The cultural links section is sub divided into:
Entertainment – American movie stars
and
Parents
who were born in
Music –
The
Beatles are the most obvious but there are others.
Literature -
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman
Buildings and
Institutions –
It might be quicker to list the buildings
that don’t have an American connection
The French Connection
– (only for Scouseophiles)
The
New York-Liverpool connection
An
in-depth look at
Université Paris 13
99 avenue Jean-Baptiste Clément
F93430 VILLETANEUSE
Perhaps the Beatles' success is not due to
any originality in the use of US-style rhythms, as this was readily accessible
all over the world, perhaps it is owing to other qualities. I would list at
least two such specifically Liverpudlian qualities:
First, in all such impoverished and declining
environments, the individual's hope resides in some sort of show business. The
success stories of Liverpool in the last 30 years are stories of comedians,
boxers, footballers, actors and playwrights, and folk or pop musicians, to whom
I should add a few politicians: in Liverpool, you fight your way up thanks to
the gift of the gab, you chat, joke, act, talk your way up — or else, kick or
punch. At the time of the Beatles' formative years, there were more than 400
such groups in
Second,
But this is not enough.
We need to dig further to grasp why it is that in
In 1923 or 4, one Joanna
C. Colcord, daughter to an American skipper and who had lived on board ship with
her father, published a collection of songs heard among American sailors. Out of
112 songs and their variants, 21 related directly to
Just
take a trip to
To
You had to
make the trip to
The
Yankee sailors you'll see there,
With red-top boots and short-cut hair.
This to distinguish the American crew-cut hairstyle
from the rat-tail protruding from the nape of the neck, still favoured by a
great number of British seafarers.
For a long while,
When Hawthorne became American consul in
Liverpool, he produced not only the famous English Notebooks, but also a
purely administrative correspondence.
The correlation between the two shows him being swindled by all sorts of Liverpudlian
adventurers who speculate on American naïveté to get a free passage to New York:
he is suspicious, but yields nonetheless, to the demands of people, both men and
women, posturing as distressed Americans when they are not. But he also
describes part of his occupation as being guardian angel to American seamen who
fall prey to all the street pirates and the violent emotional life of Liverpool
pubs and whorehouses — of which there were more than in any other city per
square mile, if one is to believe the later visitors or reformers. And
here comes a song again:
As I
went down
To me wey, hey, blow the man down...
— Paradise
Street being one of the streets between the centre and the docks where brothels
and pubs were particularly numerous. Yes,
Some historians have estimated that half the
crews on board packet ships plying between New York and Liverpool hailed from
Liverpool — i.e., seamen attached to Liverpool and recruited from a wide
catchment area taking in North Wales, Southern Lancashire, Cheshire and
Derbyshire, the South-Western tip of Scotland, and the whole of Ireland, people
drawn from cultures where the Roman Catholic church has always remained strong
(Wales excepted) and whose mingling makes up the peculiar dialect of Liverpool
and Manchester, the peculiar language which is identified elsewhere as
"North-West". I know Professor Higgins
would make a fine distinction between Liverpudlian and Mancunian gutturals, but
heard from
The
history of every family we had on board was pretty much the same. After
hoarding up, and borrowing, and begging, and selling everything to pay the
passage, they had gone out to New York, expecting to find its streets paved
with gold; and had found them paved with very hard and very real stones.
Enterprise was dull; labourers were not wanted; jobs of work were to be got,
but the payment was not. They were coming back, even poorer than they went. One
of them was carrying an open letter from a young English artisan, who had been
in New York a fortnight, to a friend near Manchester, whom he strongly urged to
follow him. One of the officers brought it to me as a curiosity. 'This is the
country, Jem,' said the writer. 'I like America. There is no despotism here;
that's the great thing. Employment of all sorts is going a-begging, and wages
are capital. You have only to choose a trade, Jem, and be it. I haven't made
choice of one yet, but I shall soon. AT PRESENT I HAVEN'T QUITE MADE UP MY
What Dickens
failed to understand here was the belief validated by the shared experience of
the North-West that you could pretend to know a trade in order to obtain the
corresponding job, through a mixture of contempt for real skill, overestimation
of one's rhetorical ability, underestimation of any stranger's wits, of any
foreigner's brains, of woolyback or furryback culture. A strong sense of
community can go hand in hand with extraordinarily insular arrogance. I do not
want to go far out of my subject but a few elements of digressive reflections
may here prove useful.
A year before, one humble emigrant had sailed
from Liverpool to New York with his own and brother's family and written back
to his mother in law on their safe arrival, as only one of their children died
during the five-week passage. Here is his description of New York:
There they are wood houses, I think that Finningley houses is more like pigsties to them than anything else. I never thought that they had such buildings as they are most of them made of wood, but for beauty and compactness they far exceed England. Some are painted red, some brown, some buff and some stone colour. Where I was sat I can count twenty different colours and I consider Doncaster a pretty place, but it is really nothing in comparison. So I am well satisfied so far. [There] is no more at present. Remember me to James Moulson.
This
agricultural labourer's point of reference is his home village and market town,
rather than Liverpool, which was so much more a city it could not compare with
New York. While the future big apple was still built of wood between streets
that were mere tracks in the mud,
Let us look now at the skills or craft or
trade issue. When the Trades Union Congress was founded in 1868, it was a
North-Western initiative, the Manchester-Salford trades council's: the national
leaders of the powerful amalgamated unions, the so-called London Junta, were
not interested and did not even turn up. As the
A concurring factor is that Liverpool has for
a long time been characterised as an industrial city without skilled jobs, and
therefore without the culture of skill: when an exceptional skilled job is on
offer, it is like a fat ham hanging from the maypole, which everybody reaches
for, and which the boldest may actually pry out. As a cosmopolitan seaport with
part of its population being transient and shifting, and struggling hard for
survival across the seas, the only common ground has been pretence and daring.
Pretend to be what your mate, neighbour or would-be employer expect you to be:
how else do you make friends with strangers? how else to ingratiate oneself?
Hence the culture of scamping, shoddy workmanship and false pretences, of doing
foreigners and moonlighting, of showmanship rather than craftsmanship. Hence
the reiteration of the unemployed character's catchphrase in Alan Bleasdale's
play and TV drama, Boys from the Black Stuff: "I can do it, I can do it,
I can do it..."
It is a pity that Goffman developed his theories on the Presentation of Self
within the context of interindividual relationships,
rather than collective relationships and representations, for we would then
have a conceptual framework to analyse what I have just described. General
showmanship, i.e. a mixture of extrovert pretence and bold daring, is a more
flexible quality than craftsmanship in a particular trade, when you cross the
Atlantic Ocean and do not know what to expect, or what is to be expected, in
New York, also growing into a cosmopolitan jungle. Social know-how rather than
technical know-how gives this culture a quasi postmodernist outlook: Scouse
culture makes for great fabricators, rather than makers, it makes for great
communicators -- comedians, actors, pop stars and politicians.
But to return to the experience of
interrupted migrations across the Atlantic, as this coming and going of
families and friends between Liverpool and New York and other places continues
well into the present day, perhaps we begin to understand that in the Liverpool
local culture, there is no such thing as New York superiority: it is just one
of the familiar places you may go to, one of the many possible extensions of
the Scousers' identity. To quote our folk-song collector again, "familiarity
breeds contempt." If American culture has rarely been perceived as a threat to
local culture in the Liverpool context, it may also be because from a North of
England perspective, the enemy culture would rather be that of London, or of the
aristocratic and rural South — beginning in Cheshire, on the other side of the
Mersey.
The Liverpudlian working class may have had a very conservative ruling class, but
with its lack of skill or employment stability, it has proved thoroughly
egalitarian and aspiring to democratic forms best represented by the United
States in the 19th century.
In many ways, this culture of a privileged
relationship to an America epitomized by New York was revived by the two world
wars, as it is through Liverpool that many things American entered Britain: the
sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, with mostly American passengers, but a
Liverpool ship with a Liverpool crew, triggered anti-German riots on
Merseyside, the rioters mistakenly taking the local Ashkenaze Jews for Germans.
When the
For Scousers, then,
This vision of a superior Liverpool is
obviously very different from another vision of the Mersey port which can be
found in Melville and other writers, or indeed in the English propaganda in
favour of emigration. But it must be emphasised that this is an outsider's
view.
In order to avoid "crime, drink, shame,
destitution, despair and death", go to British colonies as domestic
servants, go to foreign lands if you have a skill, go to "the colony
across the sea", the Salvation Army's establishment in the land of
nowhere, in the happy utopia of Booth's dreams, where no city — no New York —
is visible at the points of landing. Oddly enough, a number of landmarks at the
top of the map make it recognisable as the shore of Lancashire between the
Mersey and the Lune. On the left, there is a "Whitechapel at the sea"
which is Liverpool (Whitechapel is one of the streets linking the commercial
centre of the city to the docks) and is studiously avoided as a point of
departure, ships being visible in the recognisable estuary, narrow, long and
crooked, of the small river Wyre at Fleetwood and the main port of embarkation
being created ex nihilo where none in fact ever existed, on the shallow
estuary of the Ribble at Lytham St Anne's, downriver from Preston and just
south of Blackpool.
All this is a rehash of all the emigration
schemes, voluntary or coerced, as a form of hope or as a form of punishment —
both leading to redemption, I am sure, in Protestant thinking — which began in
Liverpool in 1648 when the mayor made a contract with local shipowners to rid
the city streets of its orphaned child-beggars by transplanting them to the
American colonies. With this and the slave trade which developed later, the
Blundell family made a fortune of which 10 percent was invested in the
foundation of a charity school for orphans, the Blue Coat School. In the 1830s
and 40s, the "ragged school" movement kidnapped orphans in the
streets, taught them a trade (girls became domestic servants, boys anything
else) and shipped them to the colonies or the States. In the 1860s, a catholic
charity adopted the scheme of renewing the effort, and placed orphans with
settlers' families in the English-speaking world, the practice being soon
emulated by Barnardo's and continued until the 1960s, when at long last the
horror stories (forced labour and child abuse) of this mass transportation of
innocent children came to the surface and changed attitudes put an end to this
practice.[38]
A great number of people actually and genuinely believed that transporting
children to the Americas, or transporting slaves to the same place, or
transporting consenting adults, but consenting under duress only, was offering
them a better life -- see the relentless campaign in favour of "pauper
infants emigration" in the columns of the liberal, though Liverpudlian, Porcupine
in the years 1870-1872.
Liverpool made a fortune in the trade of such
unwilling migrations as those of slaves and indentured children. But mass
migrations of entire families had begun in the second half of the 18th century,
first from Scotland, with the clearances following in the wake of Culloden,
then from Lancashire itself when the powerlooms made the handloom weavers
unemployed, and from the whole of England as the last enclosures further
reduced the rural population. The reason why Liverpool's opposition to the
abolition of the slave trade was so ineffectual may be that in fact Liverpool
shipowners had already developed alternative sources of income, one of them
being the emigrant trade mostly to New York — at the beginning, emigrants were
treated worse than slaves, with the exception of irons and flogging, as a dead
emigrant meant a nicely increased profit, whereas a dead slave was a sad
financial loss. And soon, the young American republic issued regulations on the
conditions of transport for emigrants if ships were to be accepted in American
harbours, and the United Kingdom had to follow, entrusting the new law
enforcement to customs officials. The first Liverpool officer to do so took his
new task to heart and was soon considered an enemy of reasonable profitability
by shipowners, who successfully complained to the government: they could not
care less if the American authorities had issued similar regulations, they were
not to be dictated terms by anyone. In any case, this emigrant trade
established the privileged connection between Liverpool and New York — hence
the foundation in 1816 of the Black Ball line already mentioned.
What is strange, though, is that present-day
public figures should give the same advice to Liverpudlians as was given to all
the English poor in the 19th century: "Off on your bike," said
William Tebbitt in the 1980s. But the Conservative politicians of Liverpudlian
origins say exactly the same thing to their ex-fellow citizens — in a city where
Conservative councillors are nearly an extinct species, they had to make their
careers outside Liverpool and have, indeed, become doubly strangers to their
native city. Edwina Currie, once a Health minister in Mrs Thatcher's government,
explains that she loves Liverpool, but success comes when leaving it. Alan Hunt,
once a member of John Major's cabinet, explains that he knows about poverty, as
he was born in poor Liverpool, but he made it by leaving it. Both Currie and
Hunt unwittingly substantiate Paul Barker's judgment on Liverpool: "It's a place
people are very proud to come from. But they don't stay there.
Willy Russell, the playwright and film-writer, an adopted Liverpudlian, though
he personally made it by settling in Liverpool, forcefully gives the same
advice in his film Dancin' thru the dark. This advice, profusely
proffered by outsiders, is spurned in the local culture, but followed in actual
practice by more and more: the population of the city has been cut by half since
the Second World War, and it continues to decline, and this is not solely due to
the new housing estates in the periphery, but to actual migration outside
Southern Lancashire.
Some of these migrants
still take the quantum jump to America or Australia, and others are content with
London or even Manchester. But many return when they can, they leave Liverpool
with a pang of heart, and return with a smile. This has been surveyed
in the poorest district of Liverpool, Toxteth or
These Liverpudlians may love their city, but
their movement spells its decline. The twinning agreement signed 2 or 3 years
ago between Liverpool and New York is probably one last attempt at setting
Liverpool on a world stage compatible with its nostalgic ambition. In many
ways, it is the continuance of the constant illusion of British politicians
since 1945: they have believed that, with strengthened Commonwealth links and
the American "special relationship", they could be helped to climb
back to their former splendour. If Churchill or Macmillan or Wilson (MP for
Omskirk, then Huyton in the vicinity of Liverpool) and even Thatcher still
believed that they could get their way with the US executive thanks to their
superior brains, training, culture and mastery of the English language, Blair
on the contrary believes that the US should be aped. The whole of Europe seems
now to be hooked to a Reagan-Thatcher hyper-laissez-faire model believed
to be American, whose implementation world-wide is demanded by the Americans on
the ground of superior economic performance and superior muscle to flex. Social
performance has ceased to be a relevant indicator. But it will take a long time
before Liverpool reconciles itself to the fact that it has ceased to be
superior to New York for at least a whole century.
I hope that through the previous pages of
banter, you have discovered a few more serious preoccupations of a
methodological nature.
First, I have confronted the professional writers'
view of Liverpool with whatever I could find of non-literary evidence on the
issues they dealt with. It appears that the 19th century vision of Liverpool as
one of the largest harbours in the world, and certainly as the most impressive,
was shared by all, New Yorkers included. But it seems that, long after it has
become obsolete, this vision lingers on in Liverpool itself, though in
Liverpool alone: opinion polls would probably corroborate, but none has been
taken. Popular writing and interest generated in the 1920s by the civic pride
movements, then the publications of readers' letters in the local press, and
lastly the production of writers' workshops in the last 20 years or so, from
children's poems to old people's life stories, point in the same direction.
This is already an invitation to consider with great suspicion the evidence
given by professional writers whose trade, after all, is the realm of the
make-believe, rather than that of hard-facts, whether practical, material,
social or cultural: how far do writers reproduce existing legends? how far do
they contribute to shape them? and what about the time discrepancy between
their writing and popular beliefs? The gulf between the professional writers'
imagination and the local people's vision is even wider when considering the
future envisaged for the city: the "leaving of Liverpool" as the road
to success and away from poverty and crime is the sort of advice offered by
outsiders only, whether Americans or British.
Second, can I really envisage collective
representations within any large community, in particular the variegated city
of Liverpool? many sociological writers have emphasized how divided the city
was — is? — on quasi-tribal grounds, while at the same time it has professed a
collective pride and expressed a common culture. People live on several sets of
representations and self-representations, sometimes contradictory, and which
they use according to their needs or their whims. There is no such thing as
single-track identity and collective identity is but short for "in most
circumstances of the same kind, most people would probably behave and justify
their behaviour in this way". It is a vague tendency for a sizeable
proportion of a given population to act and perceive in a certain way or in
certain ways, it is by no means a dogmatic, sharp-edged vision which would be
adopted by all. It is therefore so elusive that it often defies serious
description and can all too easily stoop to mere stereotyping — which does not
mean that stereotypes are untrue: they are the basic grade in any system of
individual and collective representations, they are the core nutrients of any Weltanschauung
or ideology or collective identity and one simply does not live without them.
The question is whether they are capable of change, or rather of assimilating
change, or not. Our predicament is that the manifestations of a peculiar
Liverpool identity are all too obvious: it is there for sure, it is real, but
how do I define it? And attempts at doing this a the level of city, difficult
as they appear to be, are far easier than performing the same exercise at
national or international level. Is there such a thing as French or English or
Slovak or Bulgarian culture? Is there such a thing as European identity? Is
there such a thing as Western values? do you think that Mr Bush jr. and myself
see eye to eye on anything, except abiding by the outcome of a democratic vote
in our own country? I am not too sure Mr Bush cares very much for the votes of
other countries, as recent events in Venezuela have shown. Whenever we try to
pin it down, it flows away, like a rope of sand. But we know it does exist, as
there are occasions when we see the performance in practical deeds of such
collective identities.
Which raises a third question.
Surely, there is no other way to look at collective identities but to look at
the actual social practice developed by those who claim them. For there is no
other way to know what is claimed exactly by each identity. People, both in
individual and collective practice, use existing representations, use the common
idiom to express very idiosyncratic views or perform extremely singular acts.
They tinker with representations so as to produce their own meanings, they
subvert the dominant values and endow them with alternative meanings.
But how is collective practice to be documented in a large urban community over
a century and half? The likelihood of Victorian dockers and seamen reading
Melville's Redburn or Hawthorne's English Notebooks is nil. What
else have we got, from which we can infer their likely social practice? their
probable representations? their possible meanings? We have... everything else.
A close study of marriage and birth and death registers, of customs returns, of
Lloyds' lists would certainly help us go much further than we have, and would
provide a quantitative basis to the qualitative interpretation suggested above.
It could make it more convincing, but it would probably not alter it
fundamentally.
And this raises the fourth issue: my
interpretation would not be altered by more precise data, because it is part of
the representations actually projected by Liverpudlians, although on the
critical side. This is the reason why my most esteemed colleagues and friends
go on reproducing the wildest legends without even thinking of checking the
evidence: such stories are too good not to be true and within Liverpool, they
make sense of so much. Scousers have had so little left to them with the
decline of the port, that they have to interpret individual success, maybe due
to random factors, as their own, as the outcome of a collective way of being
and thinking and moving around. Otherwise, the Fab Four, as many other stars,
would just escape them. The perversion of this is that when something awful is
committed by a few Liverpudlians, the blame has to be shared by all: the Heysel
disaster, or the murder of 2-year-old James by two boys of 10, this is analysed,
dissected, repackaged and sold as typically Liverpudlian, as though it could
not have happened anywhere else in the world. This is based on the unconfessed
view that Liverpool is a world in its own right, "complete unto itself", and
henceforth, the relationship with the real world has to be interpreted as the
meeting of two powers on equal terms.
And Liverpool does not believe it has yet met
its equal. In its bid (February 2002) to make Liverpool "European capital
of culture" in 2008, the city council had adopted this bold slogan:
"Liverpool — the world in one city".
Perhaps councillors or their advisers read a
1923 pamphlet which I found in New York Public Library and whose conclusion I
have no scruple in borrowing:
Let me
gather up the threads of my homily, the threads which bind heart and hand, town
and gown, culture and commerce. Each in isolation is good, but combined their
potency is magnified tenfold. This unification and concentration of opportunity
should be eagerly grasped: and if class consciousness divides forces and
sterilizes effort, civic consciousness and pride will focus and vitalise, most
of all where heart and hand rejoice in active sympathy and co-operation.
Liverpool, the city which has been fought for and has been won from the
tides, has its outlook across the oceans, and in its chief industry of shipping
employs instruments and equipment which are in themselves noble — a calling
which demands resolution and alertness, ceaseless struggle, unbroken vigilance.
Liverpool is a city where stirring examples have been set, great lessons
taught, and where the very highest objectives must still be attained.
But it may
have already been too late when this was published. Although five years later —
and this is yet another item of New York Public Library which I never found in Liverpool
—, another writer developed the same sense of Liverpool superiority above, inter
alia, New York:
No one
wanted fiction when the early American pioneer turned the soil with his shot
gun on his back. The real Indian was all the fiction he required. And no
pioneer of commerce can afford the relaxation to cultivate the purely artistic
in life and thought. It is the comparison between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Boston
and New York. In Liverpool, however, there has been this excellent distinction.
However recent in development she has been raised on the highway of the seven
seas, her association with literature bears the stamp of high endeavour and an
imperial rather than provincial flavour. Seafaring men from the days of the
merchant adventurers onwards have brought to Liverpool more that their cargoes
from the East. They have given her the far horizon of great enterprises in the
making of modern commerce and modern civilisation. As Aloysius Horn, a
And the
same author concludes his pamphlet with this call to the pen:
But so
far no outstanding interpreter of Liverpool in fiction has appeared. And yet
there is a magic and glamour about Liverpool for no more mysterious reason than
because she is the gateway to the seas. I recall that Joseph Conrad, on one of
his visits to the city, wandered for happy hours along the dockyards, and
watched with his intense scrutiny the cargoes of the world being swung upon the
quay. Who will capture the soul of Liverpool in that aspect of the eternal
voyager, the city of hail and farewell?
What of the privateers of the eighteenth century, and the merchant
adventurers in their tall ships? What of the human cargoes of the slave traders
and the converts of the Mormons bound for the "wheel-barrow" trek to
Salt Lake City? The town of farewells. To quote the inimitable Aloysius Horn
once again: "He's like a Liverpool-born lad. No sooner does he see a sailing
vessel than he wants to leave his Mother."
It is upon such brave instincts that
I fear that
And it is this decline that has made way for
American — and New Yorker — dominance. A decline, in fact, of the whole
of