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STUDIO INTRO RICHARD MEEGAN Academic Consultant Hello, I’m Richard Meegan. This audiocassette band accompanies Book 1, “The Geographical Imagination” – and particularly the chapter I wrote about my own local world, the ex-slave city of Liverpool. The material is adapted from a programme first broadcast on BBC Radio. I chose it because it supports the written material by describing some of the key geographical concepts. As you listen, check out the notations of place representation, links between local worlds, and social and special segregation. You may also like to think about how the personality of a place is almost built into its history; and its history, in turn, is reflected in its built environment. Recorded on location SINGING 1st tx 24:09:03 “Steal away, steal away, to Jesus” INSERT TAPE: BAND 1 (49”) Teacher of Black Studies MIKE BOYLE Liverpool 8 We’ve been here a long time. I mean the black 1st tx 24:09:93 population of Liverpool, it’s the oldest in the country and I’m third generation. Er my Dad went to sea, er he’s 77 now. Er his father was from, from the West Indies, from Barbados, and my grandmother was a white woman, born in Liverpool. My great-grandfather on my Mum’s side was from Freetown, Sierra Leone and he’d come here to be educated and had passed out as a sea captain but sadly he was never allowed to take a ship out of Liverpool as the captain; he always sailed, sailed as first mate, because the white men wouldn’t take orders from a black skipper. SINGING …”steal away, steal away oh …” STUDIO LINK CHRISTINE GREGORY Teacher ………… That’s Mike Boyle, a member like he says of a black community that goes back generations in Liverpool. Mike teaches Black Studies in Liverpool 8 on a course that takes its students on a dramatic and sometimes painful historical journey. It’s a history particular to this great city. A history which until very recently few people have bothered to look at. In 1993 Mike Boyle took us to one place where the city keeps official account of its past. INSERT TAPE: BAND 2 (1’50”) ……… WOMAN ….. the original entrance to the first dock was later enclosed to become Canning Dock. As Liverpool’s trade grew in the 18th century ….. MIKE BOYLE We’re standing on the first floor of Liverpool’s Maritime Museum. The Museum’s basic task is to promote and, if you like, identify the history of Liverpool as a major seaport. It deals with emigration across the Atlantic and down to Australia in the main. Models of ships, ships that sailed in and out of the port of Liverpool; in the basement there is a mock- up of an immigrant ship which would sail across to the United States taking the emigrants there; sailing ships, then you’ve got steam power erm and right up to the present day, the way the docks would function and so forth. We’re still on the First Floor and we’ve come across one particular cabinet which has got a model of a slave ship in it, a model of a collar which the slave would have around his neck and erm a naval architect’s drawing of a slave ship, depicting how the slaves would be packed into the ship. It’s about 3 foot long, it’s, it, it’s cut away so as you, to, to reveal the decks and on the decks there’s, there are models of slaves on the first deck and then as you go below, there’s all kinds of barrels and stuff so basically the ship seems to carry both cargo and slaves. So that it really doesn’t tell you a great deal. As we move away from the cases now and if you turn sharp right, there’s a video film being shown. Erm there’s an area here where you can sit down and watch the video film. I mean the subtle commentary that’s being made there, completely ignores the fact that, that Liverpool had a very much vested interest in slavery. That isn’t coming across in the film. It’s been totally ignored. Now anybody coming into the First Floor of the Maritime Museum and walking through it would obviously see this film and they would go away with the wrong impression and that’s what I find terribly disturbing. STUDIO LINK CHRISTINE GREGORY ………….. Late to join the slave trade, Liverpool soon caught up when business boomed between the 1750s and abolition in 1807. This success was partly due to Liverpool’s position as a port, partly due to the ruthless undercutting of Bristol and London by local merchants and partly due to the proximity of the cotton mills of Lancashire, when cotton became the City’s principle slave product commodity. The Liverpool Advertiser, 1788: INSERT TAPE ……… DRAMATISED READING BAND 3 (38”) For several years past 90 vessels have sailed John Graham Davies annually from the port of Liverpool to Actor purchase slaves on the coast of Africa. These 1st tx 24:09:93 90 vessels carry out 2,700 hands with goods, including said vessels outfit, to the amount and value of between £800,000 and £900,000. They consume prodigious quantities of provisions brought from Ireland and employ vast numbers of workmen as carpenters, joiners, ironmongers, painters, sail makers, braziers, boat builders, coopers, riggers, plumbers, glaziers, gunsmiths, bread makers, carters and labourers and consume great quantities of copper of ships’ bottoms. STUDIO LINK CHRISTINE GREGORY ……………… June Henfry was born in Barbados and at the time of her death in 1992, she taught in the Sociology Department at Liverpool University where she was a specialist in Ethnic Studies. INSERT TAPE JUNE HENFRY BAND 4 (1’36”) …….. We know that people were crammed together Lecturer for reasons of economy, that there was very Specialist in Ethnic little space between the layers of slave shelves Studies almost and that apart from a short period Liverpool University during the day, when they were taken up on 1st tx 24:09:93 deck and forced to exercise as a way of preventing even more death and disease, that they lay in these cramped positions often in each other’s urine and, and, and faeces, vomit and next to corpses for the duration of the crossing. DRAMATISED READING The floor of their rooms were so covered with blood and mucus, which had preceded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse. It is not in the power of human imagination to picture to itself a situation more dreadful and disgusting. By purchasing so great a number, the slaves were so crowded that they were even obliged to lie upon one another. This occasioned such mortality among them that nearly one half of them died before the ship arrived in the West Indies. The place allotted to the sick Negroes is under the half-deck, where they lie on the bare plank. By this means, those who are emaciated frequently have their skin, and even their flesh, entirely rubbed off by the motion of the ship. Few indeed are able to withstand the fatal effects of their sufferings. STUDIO CHRISTINE GREGORY LINK ………… It is not known how many slaves died on the notorious Middle Passage but we’re talking about huge numbers who perished in the appalling conditions at sea. They died from disease, starvation and the punishment metered out in the frequent uprisings on board. Many took their own lives. But awareness of the cruelties of the slave trade was, for the most part, limited to the traders themselves and those in the abolition movement. They were rarely brought to the notice of the Liverpool gentlefolk and far from shame in trade, the City Fathers chose to celebrate it. INSERT TAPE …… MIKE BOYLE BAND 5 (55”) We’re now outside the Town Hall in, here in Liverpool, in Dale Street. As we look up there’s a frieze, the frieze depicts elephants’ heads and the heads of black people. It’s as if these heads, if you like, have remained invisible to the people of Liverpool. In point of fact, they had to be pointed out to me – I didn’t know they were here and I’ve grown up in the City and have been here all my life. There they are for all the world to see, the trade has been celebrated by the Liverpool merchants and the bankers and the politicians of that particular period. It’s as if they’re put up there as, as a monument to Liverpool’s involvement in the slave trade. STUDIO CHRISTINE GREGORY LINK…….. All of the city’s major institutions were involved in the trade which embraced the religious, political, social and commercial life of this growing city. INSERT TAPE ……. MIKE BOYLE BAND 6 (51”) We’re inside Martins Bank Building just down the road from the Town Hall at the top of Water Street. It’s now the headquarters of Barclays Bank in Liverpool. This place was built in the 1920s. In the entrance you can see the relief carvings done in an Art-Deco style, rather lovely till you realise what they are actually depicting. There’s Neptune and two dolphins over his head, the two little African children carrying bags of gold. Even in this century this bank recognised the source of its wealth. Barclays Bank absorbed Martins Bank which had taken over from the Bank of Liverpool. The Bank of Liverpool in its, in its turn absorbed Arthur Heywood and Sons.