sign in sign up
<<
Home , Bishop of Liverpool, Communion table, High church, Low church

The and the Slums

The Church and the Slums: The Victorian Anglican Church and its Mission to ’s Poor

By

Alastair Wilcox

The Church and the Slums: The Victorian Anglican Church and its Mission to Liverpool’s Poor, by Alastair Wilcox

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Alastair Wilcox

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5421-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5421-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One ...... 4 The Context of Liverpool

Chapter Two ...... 27 Existing Studies of Victorian Urban Religion

Chapter Three ...... 40 Church Attendance

Chapter Four ...... 78 The Meaning of Baptism

Chapter Five ...... 107 The Ideal Clergyman

Chapter Six ...... 129 House-To-House Visitation

Chapter Seven ...... 164 Working the ‘Ideal’ Parish

Chapter Eight ...... 214 Conclusion

Appendix One: Anglican Religious Census Figures 1881-1902 ...... 219

Appendix Two: Professions of Faith 1881 ...... 234

Appendix Three: Anglican Worshippers in the Different Liverpool Districts...... 245

Appendix Four: Chart Showing Morning and Evening Attendance at Selected Slum Churches 1881-1902...... 247

Index ...... 250

INTRODUCTION

If we struggle to understand Victorian society without some understanding of religion then it would be impossible to understand the workings of nineteenth century Liverpool society without realising the importance of religion. Religious practice differed from region to region although few areas offer a more singular glimpse at Victorian society and religion than Liverpool. Commercially-orientated ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, with its swirling pattern of migrants in transit from a host of nationalities, contributing to its outward gaze, was unlike any other city in Britain. Self- contained, turning its back to its hinterland to look across, not only the Irish Sea, but the Atlantic, this world city was, as The Times in 1875 observed, ‘a very peculiar place’.

Yet it was self-contained only in certain respects. One aspect of its peculiarity was that its population was drawn not only from Lancashire but, disproportionately, from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Liverpool, as a gateway to the Irish trade, had acquired a significant Irish population even pre-famine. In 1842 one detailed survey of the northern dockside area of Vauxhall found 2,243 Irish-born families as against 1,326 Liverpool-born ones. Prior to this, this dockside area had been a focus for Welsh settlement. In 1871, out of Liverpool’s population of just less than half a million, 15.5 per cent had been born in Ireland, and even this did not represent the peak for Irish born migrants. Significantly, its Irish population also included a number of Ulster Protestants. Although it is hard to be certain, contemporary estimates put the number of Ulster Protestants in Liverpool at the same as the indigenous population, and what these Protestants added to Liverpool’s mix was a contribution to sectarian tensions. The Welsh had a presence in the city during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The earliest Welsh speaking school in Liverpool, the Calvinist Pall Mall, dated from 1798 with the Cambrian Society to provide aid to Welshmen in Liverpool being set up three years later. The Welsh migrants brought with them strong Nonconformist adherence. In 1881 there were around thirty Welsh- speaking chapels in Liverpool and the Calvinist Methodists, a bastion of Welshness, numbered their active members in Liverpool at over 11,000 in 1874. The Welsh community estimated its own numbers around this date 2 Introduction as being 70-80,000. One Anglican cleric residing in Everton bemoaned the fact that, on a Sunday morning, he was so close to five Nonconformist congregations he could hear their singing. Liverpool’s Anglicans whilst secure within the political framework of the town, found their religious position as the leading denomination under challenge, and faced the problems of ministering to a town representing urban migration at its nineteenth century extremes.

But this book is not primarily about the migrant groups, Irish Catholics or sectarian tensions, although these must feature in this story. It is a book about that somewhat neglected religious group, the Liverpool Anglicans. The Anglican Church indeed had contributions from incomers linked to the Welsh and Irish Established churches. There were services in Welsh at St Paul‘s as far back as 1794, whilst St David’s Church had always been exclusively Welsh-speaking to the annoyance of some English speakers in the Brownlow Hill area. As late as 1894 a new Welsh-speaking Anglican church, St Deiniol’s, was consecrated in Upper Parliament Street. These other kingdoms also famously populated the city’s Nonconformist ranks (especially the Welsh of course) as did the Scottish population. Anglicans have been considered by other writers, but usually within a political context. What this book is primarily concerned with is how effectively the Anglican Church functioned in ministering spiritually to Liverpool’s poor. It is peopled by clerics who employed differing tactics to deal with their parishes, such as the combative vicar of St Bartholomew who chased unruly Catholics down the street brandishing a penny cane, or the highbrow academic vicar of All Souls who regularly visited his slum parishioners whilst studiously avoiding the ‘Catholic, Mormons and the grossly immoral’. It is not simply a roll call of individual evangelical heroes who were able to record their battles for . Hidden in the slums are clerics such as the vicar of St Anne’s whose response to the alarming downward socio-economic shift of his parish was, to all intents and purposes, to lock up shop. Individual parochial operations and clerical attributes will be set against what the Victorians considered their ‘ideal’— and the Victorian Anglican cleric had plenty of advice about the ‘ideal’. Anglican writers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards began laying down guidelines about how an Anglican cleric should act and how a well- regulated parish should be conducted.

So this book examines the operation of in a very specific context. How can we measure the effectiveness of the Anglican mission to the labouring classes? Is it possible to measure the number of worshippers and identify the proportion from the working classes? What meaning The Church and the Slums 3 might be placed on working class rites of passage? How effectively did Anglican clerics discharge their duties, and how did they run their parishes? CHAPTER ONE

THE CONTEXT OF LIVERPOOL

One journalist at the end of the nineteenth century recorded what must have been the first glimpse common to many visitors to the city:

Lime Street seems to be more haunted than any other terminus in this island by loafers, large and small, pestering people to carry their bags and the splendid site with its noble buildings on which it opens, and the streets which run from them have far more than their fair share of bare headed- women and barefoot boys and girls... the port necessarily receives not only crowds of sailors and foreigners that add so largely to its death rate, but the needy from the sister island and elsewhere, too poor to move further inland and satisfied to live the precarious life which a large shipping centre invariably offers. Hence no one can be surprised that the largest of its public buildings are the workhouse and industrial schools.1

Thus neatly delineated were some of the singular characteristics of this town: an ever-shifting population and its relation to an abnormally high death rate; and civic pride juxtaposed with endemic poverty. To the Anglican the constantly changing pattern of migrants meant that it was difficult to minister to a set population: one of Liverpool’s most prominent slum clerics likened his task to writing in water. The above extract also pinpoints another feature of Liverpool life—the influx of Irish migrants, with the suspicion that the most able of the migrants moved on, all seemingly contributing to the town’s intractable public health problems. However, others came to marvel at Liverpool’s alternate face. This self-styled ‘second city of the Empire’2 possessed great wealth alongside great poverty. It was a city newly arrived, its citizens ‘thoroughly rough and ready who sprang from our native mud only a century back.’ 3 It was a city which drew visitors eager to see this ‘Florence of the North’. The Adelphi Hotel was awash with the dollars of its American guests, whilst the Lime Street Hotel, with admirable economic sensitivity, was run ‘along the latest American lines’. Tourists came to view Liverpool’s ‘noble buildings’, to stare at St George’s Hall, and even its commercial lifeline, the long line of docks, was recommended as a must-see to urban tourists. As late as the 1960s, when the Albert The Context of Liverpool 5

Docks were nearing the end of their useful life, one architectural commentator made the then unfashionable but far-sighted comment that they should be preserved simply for people to marvel at, much as they would the pyramids.4 The Victorians would have found the comparison apt. Flattering comparisons were not only made between the town and Florence, for the town was ‘another Venice’; the Mersey akin to the Bay of Biscay; the St George’s Hall plateau area likened to Trafalgar Square; its principal streets—Bold Street and Lord Street—were compared to Regent Street, the Rue Quatre Septembre and the Avenue de la Paix. Its transatlantic links invited comparison with New York, but it is significant that those who thought of British comparisons often selected cities outside of England in the more problematic shape of Belfast and Glasgow.

Liverpool’s source of wealth from commerce, rather than manufacture, shaped the town both socially and economically. The casual dock labourers, who needed to be close to their place of employment, crowded a narrow strip of land parallel to the Mersey. Rising up towards the Mount Pleasant area were the socially exclusive Rodney Street and Abercromby Wards. The undulations of Everton initially had similarly elite connotations. Liverpool’s compact geography ensured that curious early Victorian urban juxtaposition of rich and poor, which meant that those who strolled around the grandeur of the city centre could still be treated to the sight of the drunken poor reeling from the densely packed courts and alleys. Yet, in the later Victorian city (as the maps of Charles Booth and the writings of Engels testified) the main streets in the slum areas were still lined with the dwellings of the middle classes. Clerks and labourers lived in fairly close proximity for much of the nineteenth century. It was always the very rich who could insulate themselves best from the most noisome aspects of urban living.5 Rich and poor might have segregated themselves as Two Nations in one respect. In others ways there was little escape: through epidemics such as cholera and the high death rate engendered by the endemic presence of disease, and through successive journalistic campaigns to reveal how ‘squalid Liverpool’ lived, the rich were keenly, if uneasily, aware of the existence of that other nation.

Liverpool was far from static. Its social geography changed throughout the nineteenth century. The commercial elite, who in the late eighteenth century combined residence and counting house in the central zones, now decamped outward to the far southern suburbs, leaving the central area to commercial buildings or to move downwards in residential desirability. Again, the southern area around Toxteth Park, which had partly comprised of larger houses, now saw these larger residences sub-divided to meet a 6 Chapter One poorer class of tenant, although the Princess Park and Sefton Park areas retained their high status cachet. Everton had maintained some desirability because of its commanding, elevated position overlooking the Mersey combined with coincident desirability for health reasons, but by the mid- nineteenth century found itself similarly colonised by poorer classes, although its social tone was preserved in parts by the more respectable Welsh-Liverpudlians making it a small Welsh enclave. The northern area of the town around Vauxhall, did not really go down in the world because it had never been up in the world: its squalid court and alley housing was a testimony to both the cupidity of the speculative builder and the poverty of its tenants. The Head Constable of Liverpool, M.J. Whitty, casting his eye over the town commented:

Not many years ago Old Hall Street was regarded as aristocratic. Hanover Street and Duke Street were inhabited by the great merchants of Liverpool, and within thirty years St Anne Street was a street of what on the continent would have been called palaces. Everton, the sweetest of suburban villages has changed its character. For as the port testifies to the immensity of trade so do the labouring classes push each other to a distance from the dock sides.6

Such social readjustments mattered to the Anglicans. Class-bound, the Anglican Church was ill-adapted to urban and social change. Unlike their quasi-nomadic Dissenting brethren, it was harder for the parochial institutions of the Established Church to move. Empty central churches with their locked private pews bore a silent testimony to those parishes which failed to adapt to social change.

From the 1840s, concerns were also voiced over another perceived change—the increasing death rate in the town. Dr Duncan, the Medical Officer of Health, in 1844 estimated that one third of the working classes living in the parochial boundaries (that is, one quarter of the population) lived in court dwellings.7 These concerns were also mixed with attacks on the Irish migrant population. Dr Duncan put it thus:

The districts of Liverpool where we have seen fever to be the most prevalent, are exactly where the Irish are congregated in the greatest numbers viz. Lace Street district in Exchange Ward and the Crosbie Street district in Great George Street. In Lace Street about four years ago where 1 in 9.87 of the inhabitants was yearly attacked with fever, 87.22 per cent of the entire population were Irish... the Irish fever patients [at the North Dispensary] formed 43¼ per cent of the whole fever cases attended, but in a district comprising Exchange and Castle Street Wards and a few adjoining wards of St Paul‘s and Vauxhall Wards, they amounted to no The Context of Liverpool 7

less than 54¼ per cent. If the facts which we have brought forward are really what they profess to be, they are surely calculated to arrest the attention of all those who are interested in the welfare of the community.8

The Irish, that is, the Irish of the above ‘low’ central and northern districts, thus appeared not merely outsiders grouped in ghetto-like communities; they appeared dangerous aliens, a canker in the civic body of Liverpool. Although debate on the geographic distribution of the Irish has suggested that the Irish lived in poor districts simply because they were poor, this still left the Irish crowded around certain ‘core streets’.9 The Welsh too might be clannish in a way: they retained their own language in sufficient numbers for there to be a sprinkling of Welsh-speaking churches and chapels even at the end of the nineteenth century, and canny retailers recruited Welsh speakers as assistants to find out what was being said about their goods and prices. As late as 1900, reputedly 20,000 Liverpudlians spoke Welsh at home.10

Certainly, Anglican clerics were capable of using the theme of migration for their own ends. Revd Howard of St Bartholomew‘s, in an overwhelmingly Catholic northern area, portrayed his church as being under siege. He depicted himself as protecting his Church premises from extreme danger, including arson. The image from his writings is of an individual defending the Anglican Church in almost a foreign territory, continually under threat of physical violence because he was operating in a community hostile to the values of the Established Church.

Liverpool was a city of opportunity. Even the Irish, were, on closer examination, not simply a residuum left behind in the wake of the more ambitious emigrants, but included those who gained prosperity from the cross Irish Sea trade; whilst Liverpool’s Catholic Club testified to the solid middle class respectability of such men. Skilled Welsh migrants were able to carve a not insignificant niche in the town’s building trade, and used vertical business integration to combine supplies of raw materials from North Wales with terrace building in Liverpool. Welsh chapels, where prosperous builders acted as deacons, were often the recruiting ground from the newly-arrived pool of Cambrian labour. A publication of 1927 remarked that merely a generation ago Welsh builders had made it possible for new emigrants to prosper without knowing a word of English.11 In part Welsh recognition that Liverpool was a place of opportunity put pressure on the desirability of the retention of Welsh language for business transactions. The Liverpool Cambrain Society claimed that much as Welshmen loved their country they were right to 8 Chapter One come to that ‘metropolis of commerce Liverpool’ and noted that the days of Welsh speaking might well be doomed. 12 One anecdote ran that, to the amusement of older hands, the question put to any fresh faced arrival from Anglesey of ‘what did your mother tell you when you left home?’ invariably drew the reply, ‘save, my boy, save’. The town’s Welsh population also had a reputation for making competent drapers. As warehousemen, on the docks, they were reputed to keep a close control of job opportunities.

Even the poorer Irish though could form networks within the docks or aspire to gain openings in the public house trade. Father Nugent commented that his fellow Irish were ‘born traders’ even if, he sadly added, they could be too fond of the drink. Popular stereotypes gave the Scots a different label: considered hardworking but careful with money, one Liverpool aphorism pointed out that they made good foremen, for if they cheated a master they at least took good care to ensure that nobody else did. Liverpool’s utilised this influx of migrant labour by integrating much of it into its casual workforce pattern, primarily around the dock area. Casual dockworkers were employed by the half-day, and whilst wages could exceptionally reach £4 or even £5 at the busiest of times, they were more often around a fifth of this. When Eleanor Rathbone conducted an in-depth investigation into the on-going budgets of a small number of casual labourers in the dockside area in 1909, she found that whilst three men had average earnings of over 25s, and two men enjoyed wages of over 20s, on average this was exceptional; 12 men averaged between 15s to 20s, whilst 10 men had an average below 15s. Such wages could not be easily supplemented by women’s earnings as in other parts of Lancashire, for Liverpool was primarily a commercial, not a manufacturing, town. True, limited work existed in foodstuff and similar processing factories, for example, Cope’s tobacco works employed around 3,000 female workers, and there were also opportunities for women in jam and sweet making factories. The 1871 census had recorded that 91,340 of Liverpool’s 144,151 females aged over 20 were engaged in ‘housewife duties’ rather than paid work, but behind this statistic for the poor lay ‘hidden’ part-time openings to be found in work such as chip chopping, and the preparation and vending of firewood. Casual work existed in the garment making sector, and the census allows no easy distinction between those engaged in skilled higher class work and those who worked in sweat shops or domestically in ‘slop work’. An 1890 House of Lords inquiry into sweating found that one of the city’s clothiers paid wages equating to a mere 2d to 4d an hour, and the deterioration in pay over the previous decade was sweepingly attributed to ‘the influx of foreigners, principally The Context of Liverpool 9

Jews’.13 Liverpool’s concerned middle classes articulated fears, not only about poverty, but also that such casual work gave labourers a more devil- may-care attitude to life and an undisciplined attitude to work. Whilst the self-initiated ‘holiday’ of St Monday, a survival from a pre-industrial mentality, was considered a feature of artisan communities in places like , it was alive and flourishing in Liverpool too. In a large town like Liverpool there was also no dominant, single employer exercising paternalistic control, which contrasts with the experiences of small communities chronicled by Lee when describing the struggles of the Anglican Church in Durham.14

Whist this book will not examine the political aspects of religion, politics can be instructive in reflecting the religious tensions within Liverpool.15 On the micro level, the operation of the town’s Select Vestry dealing with the Poor Law provides a useful insight into Liverpool’s religious conflicts. The very retention of the title ‘Select Vestry’, post New Poor Law, was seen by some of its members as more than merely symbolic, and questions were raised as to whether Catholics were entitled to serve on the body. When, at a Select Vestry meeting, one member shouted excitedly mid- session that it ‘was a Protestant institution’, he was articulating an extreme position yes, but one which represented fears of an Anglican hegemony being threatened by Catholic intrusion. In reality, most Anglican must have realised that any such hegemony was a fragile entity. A key debate, which exercised so much early Select Vestry energy, was whether the Catholic chaplain to the workhouse should be paid. Again, this was as much about threats to perceptions of Anglican dominance at an institutional level, as any Anglican desire to convert the Catholic workhouse population or fears of Catholic proselytizing.16 The struggle to enforce a Creed Register was, to the Catholic body, important if they were to administer the last rites and to prevent ‘leakage’ into the surrounding of the workhouse. The Anglicans probably had few designs on such paupers, and it is not clear how interested Anglican Evangelicals were in securing deathbed conversions in Liverpool’s workhouse. But the issue was a sensitive one, with the Anglicans fighting a rear guard action over creed identification, and it was sensitive enough to have lady workhouse visitors suspected of breaking the Creed Register rules instantly debarred from the workhouse. The battles in the Select Vestry also reveal another facet of Liverpool’s religious struggles, that is, the position of Liverpool’s Nonconformist body. Protestant they might have been, but they were usually Liberal, not , in the town’s politics. From a standpoint of religious and political tolerance they supported Catholic 10 Chapter One rights in the Vestry over Anglican dominance—a relationship which was to last until the intrusion of Home Rule politics late in the century.

The Anglicans did not possess unchallenged economic and political power within the city. It was the Unitarians of Liverpool, through their spirit of independence, inherited from their free-thinking theology and combined with judicious inter-marriages, who were disproportionally powerful, both economically and politically. The small group of notables—Holts, Booths, Rathbones and Mellys—may have been more-or-less all there was to Unitarian power, but this small pool of ship owners and merchants was sufficient to make its mark on religious philanthropy, as well as economic power. Certainly, their mission to the poor, in the shape of their Domestic Missions, deserves to be better known.17 These Liberal Unitarians tended to remain aloof from sectarian politics, unlike sections of Tory Anglicanism. The pro-Anglican Tories dominated municipal government, although the size of the popular Liberal vote was obscured by Tory manipulation of the alderman system. The Liverpool press tended to be a pro-Liberal institution, with the most important papers, the Liverpool Mercury and the satirical weekly commentary on politics and social affairs, The Porcupine, falling in the Liberal camp. The vocal outpourings of the Liverpool Journal, Liverpool Courier and the openly and virulently anti-Irish Liverpool Herald, disguised their subordinate position in the town.18 Looming large over the relationship between Dissent and the Established Church was the question of rivalry: were Nonconformists overtaking Anglicans as the more influential Protestant body in Liverpool?

If the twentieth century was an age of tentative ecumenicalism, then the nineteenth century was an age of open religious competition. But it is a mistake to see each side in Liverpool’s Catholic and Anglican communities as competing for the immediate conversion of each other’s members. To many Liverpool Anglicans, any converts from the town’s Catholicism were not generally viewed as worth having. Anglicans were only too aware that the probability of promoting hypocrisy outweighed the desirability of conversion in many cases. Some Anglican clergy did try to convert Catholic priests in high profile public debates but this was to prove the superiority of their theology rather than act as a prelude to converting Liverpool’s Catholic community.19 As for Liverpool’s Catholics, they had enough on their plate holding on to their own flock and preventing ‘leakages’ (which they did, everything considered, reasonably well, and to the envy of their denominational rivals). As ever, those ‘heretics’ who were closest to one’s own belief were the ones to be most feared. Thus, the Ritualistic in Liverpool, The Context of Liverpool 11 which, it must be admitted, was never a large body, drew the wrath and suspicion of the Evangelical which feared that High Church liturgy would lead to political and theological breaches in Anglican defences. The mix of migration and sectarianism was to be a feature of Liverpool. Waller pithily observed that the city ‘exhibited sectarian conflict rather than religious observance’. Perhaps, for too long, historians of Liverpool have focused on the former, without always fully evaluating the latter.

The ecclesiastical

The work of Anglican clerics in Liverpool cannot be understood without reference to the city’s singular parochial structure. In the seventeenth century, the only Anglican Church in Liverpool was that of St Nicholas. Liverpool was not a separate parish at this point, but part of Walton-on- the-Hill and, accordingly, St Nicholas had the status of a chapel of ease. The rapid rise in Liverpool’s population by 1699 necessitated the formation of a new parish. Other Anglican churches were added in the eighteenth century, but only three enjoyed parochial status: St Nicholas, St Paul and St John. This had implications for the practical administration of the town. Although in 1814 the new church of St Michael was given a district upon formation, and indeed this was the pattern for future church building, this was not the same as having a full-blown parochial structure. Residents of a particular district were under no obligation to attend services in the district church, or to have rites of passage conducted there. Residents of a district could, apparently, attend services anywhere without fear of censure.20 The compact geography of the town meant that it would be little hardship to walk to a different parish. Parish churches had more protection against such congregational wandering: the obligation was for parishioners to use their parish church. There were financial advantages attached to having a legal parish in terms of fees, and these were often jealously guarded. The difference in status enjoyed by the older Liverpool churches, as will be seen, was often translated into a desire to be baptised in the older churches.

The pace of urban change had two broad implications in the development of ecclesiastical history. Firstly, the shift in population meant that churches could become stranded in areas very different from the original population for which they were intended. The Anglicans pointed out, with a degree of self-righteousness, that Nonconformist chapels, during the nineteenth century, abandoned their inner township chapels and moved to more 12 Chapter One affluent areas. Thus, the Unitarians moved eastwards, away from the coast, with their congregation moving from Key Street to Renshaw Street. The abandoned Byrom Street, with their building bought by the Anglicans, and moved to Hope Street. In a similar fashion, the Methodists moved from Leeds Street to locations in Everton. Slum cleric and historian, Abraham Hume, claimed that the Established Church never deserted the poor—its mission ground was the ‘unchurched’ masses of the slums abandoned by other religious denominations but still nominally under the control of the Anglicans. The chapels of the Nonconformists were often bought by Anglicans, he claimed, and when Anglican churches were demolished for railways, they were always replaced in the same district.21 Dissenting chapels, however, had flexibility, which Hume chose to denigrate: were often able to leave mission outposts supported by the mother chapel. Hume dismissed these buildings as ‘mere mission stations’, but here he was being disingenuous. Close to Hume‘s own church were several Dissenting places of : there was a Wesleyan chapel together with schools (noted as ‘large’ by Picton22); the Independents had an important mission chapel in the slum district of Burlington Street; the Presbyterians had a chapel in the rough area of Limekiln Lane; and there was another Wesleyan chapel in Vauxhall Road. A few of these Dissenting missions were indeed adrift from their mother chapels and were akin to a form of hopeful religious colonisation, rather than a religious grouping arising directly from the community itself. The Dissenters, of course, did not enjoy the financial support from central and local government upon which the Established Church was able to draw. The Unitarians had made considerable efforts in their Liverpool Domestic Missions at slums at the south end (Bedford Street) and the north end (Bond Street). Hume‘s comments on the Nonconformists’ failure to involve themselves in slum areas consequently made him an unpopular figure with the Liberal Liverpool press. Church building proceeded at an uneven pace which, in some ways, sat ill with the satisfaction with which many Anglicans viewed the organisational strength of their parochial system. As the of Chester put it when opening another church in Liverpool during the 1860s, ‘the fault [of Anglicanism] was not in any defect in the machinery, but that the machinery was on such a small scale’23—what was needed was simply more churches, not necessarily a different mode of organisation.

The Established Church still faced problems in the slum areas. Firstly, the Anglicans’ slum churches still often struggled to support these in terms of either finance or suitable volunteer staffing. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century there was awareness that resources had to be more The Context of Liverpool 13 carefully husbanded. The fashion for parochial sub-division of the 1850s had cooled two decades later. By the 1870s Hume himself had changed his tune and was bemoaning the fact that so many Anglican churches had been so injudiciously built.24 Holy , Toxteth, he felt, was in competition with the schools and church of nearby St Barnabas (although it could be argued that they catered for very different social groups), whilst he thought St Cleopas was similarly unnecessary within a few years of being built. The answer to the crowded parish now lay, according to Hume, in the rather more cautious solution of re-allocating streets between different parishes. Resources were not always used in the most careful fashion. When four sponsored by the non-Evangelical Additional Curates’ Society were appointed in the 1860s, they were awarded to the more affluent central areas. With salaries between £230 and £300 they enjoyed higher incomes than the stipends of many incumbents.

Secondly, in population terms, the Anglicans felt themselves under pressure to provide accommodation for the burgeoning town. Hume estimated that the following ratios applied to church accommodation and the town’s population:

Anglican accommodation and seating 1725-1841

Date Accommodation Percentage seating provided for population 1725 1987 17.0 1765 4204 15.0 1785 1099 21.0 1801 1592 20.5 1821 23533 20.0 1841 44452 19.0 Source: A. Hume Condition of Liverpool religious and social 1850.

However, it must be remembered that only a small percentage of the above seats were free. In the period 1821 to 1841, for example, of the 14,238 additional seats created, only 6,683 were free. This is perhaps surprising, given the increasing awareness of the exclusion of the poor from worship. Another anomaly was the large variation in district size. By 1858, St Thomas’s, Toxteth Park, had 22,000 souls, whilst at the same time St Philip’s had a mere 400. The 1851 Religious Census listed Liverpool as one of the areas where there were the most churches needed; it estimated that nearly 70,000 of the population were unprovided for.

The piecemeal ecclesiastical development of Liverpool did nothing to promote clerical awareness of the geography of their parishes. In 1879 the 14 Chapter One incumbents of Holy Trinity, St Michael, St Thomas and St Philip’s professed themselves unaware of the extent of their cure. Given the small size of St Philip’s, with only 400 souls, this is a rather startling assertion. This was perhaps better than the incumbents of St Anne’s, St Catherine‘s and St David’s who denied even having a district at all.25 This confusion was the result of the town’s strange parochial growth. Most Anglican churches, therefore, had the theoretical status as a chapel of ease and were under no legal (nor even, according to some incumbents, moral) duty to visit their conventional district. Although an Act of 1831 granted districts to many churches, the situation remained confused. The mechanism for learning the new boundaries of one’s parish or district remained haphazard. Scripture Readers might inform a new incumbent, or boundaries would be ‘simply chanced upon’.26 A single reference map did exist to show boundaries, but even here there were problems. The incumbent of St Philip’s made the somewhat outrageous claim that the marked boundary line was painted so thickly on the map that it obscured his precise boundary. When St Nathaniel’s was formed in Windsor, Liverpool, confusion over districts, and the complications of forming a parish from combined districts, resulted in its being formed from one district only, rather than a more logical consolidation of several awkward areas. In consequence, the new parish of St Nathaniel’s was one of the smallest in Liverpool.27 The denial of the vicar of St Anne’s that he had a parish almost led to the creation of a new church, which would have further wasted resources, as the area became progressively depopulated during the nineteenth century. Parochial boundaries might well change due to ‘gerrymandering’ by Rectors or of Liverpool to secure grants for parishes with over 10,000 souls. St Matthias requested a formal district to secure an endowment from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. St Matthias and later, St Nathaniel’s, were both ‘given’ neighbouring streets in order to qualify for grants.

The struggle between Anglicanism and Dissent was given a sharper twist in Liverpool by the fact that the town’s Corporation had generously endowed the salary of many Anglican clerics to the older Anglican churches and purchased the right of patronage to these churches, together with other gifts. The construction of St Michael‘s, Pitt Street, for example, was completed, courtesy of the Corporation, at a cost of £10,300. As Picton observed, the unelected old Corporation was ‘in possession of unlimited funds without any responsibility’. The old, unreformed Tory Corporation in 1835, realising that its days of control were numbered, hastily concocted a deal to endow these churches on a permanently generous basis. To finance this, St John’s Market and Salthouse Dock The Context of Liverpool 15 were mortgaged for £105,000, with this sum to be invested in the Grand Junction Railway. The Liberals, who gained municipal power in 1835, challenged this and in 1838 a compromise act was passed which allowed the Corporation to retain control over endowing the Anglican churches. By 1877, Nonconformists calculated that St Michael’s had ‘fleeced’ the ratepayers of over £25,000.28 The Anglicans defended this arrangement by noting that, whilst the Corporation paid salaries, it received many of the pew rents. Within a couple of decades these were to prove worthless in many Corporation churches. The Act of 1838 required the sale of the advowsons held by the Corporation, and it was fortunate in receiving nearly £18,000 for these—a few years hence these too proved to be virtually worthless. Although, subsequently, aspects of the 1835 deal had to be unbundled, not least because some of the payments appeared to be non-obligatory, the Corporation still financed several Anglican places of worship. Thus, some churches, established prior to 1835, enjoyed Corporation subsidies whilst many, arguably more effective, churches after 1835 received no municipal funding. One Nonconformist source calculated that the main beneficiaries of Corporation largesse had morning attendances in 1877 of around 100 souls, including children. Thus, St Michael’s was calculated to have 118 worshippers (35 of whom were children); St Martin’s had 107 worshippers (53 of whom were children) and St Thomas’s in Toxteth had a mere 63 worshippers. Corporation money was thus not even laid out effectively. To the town’s Nonconformist body this was ‘the State Church in Liverpool’ and the battle for ‘Liverpool disendowment’ was waged, with echoes of the national battle for Disestablishment. Later in the century, Liverpool’s Liberals compared the 1838 Act to the peace treaty forced on France by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and hinted darkly that retribution was inevitable. All this partisan manœuvring engendered long-lasting bitterness between Liberal and Dissenting groups and the town’s Anglicans which persisted for much of the nineteenth century.

Evangelicals and the High Church

It is difficult to understand nineteenth century religion without an appreciation of the impact the evangelicals made. As a doctrine, possessed a very individualistic view of religion—each soul was precious and had to be saved, and salvation was a conscious act of deliberation. The evangelicals aimed to awaken the conscience of each individual: sin was to be acknowledged and repentance sought by God’s grace. This was the route to conversion, and thus salvation. Historically, 16 Chapter One this had existed as part of a Calvinist tradition, but it took renewed root in Britain during the eighteenth century, shorn of its predestination theology and notions of the elect. What implications did this new religious force have for nineteenth century religion?

Firstly, although not a doctrine exclusively Anglican, it did aid a rejuvenation of the Established Church as the practices of non-residency and plural livings came under attack and serious-minded, hardworking incumbents and clerics took their place. The evangelicals felt that they had to account to God for every waking moment. This attitude to work infused all aspects of an evangelical’s life. Liverpool’s epitome of evangelical effort, the Revd Abraham Hume, not only visited each parishioner four times a year and wrote 2,000 letters, but meticulously recorded such facts as well.

Secondly, evangelical beliefs spilled over into social work-type activities. This of course appears something of a paradox. The evangelical mind was concerned with the overriding business of saving souls and would, therefore, appear to have little interest in more secular activity. Further, evangelicalism, at first glance, appears to be the embodiment of individualism. Conversion, however, could also involve feelings of brotherly love to others. In addition, there was the possibility that material help would make the individual more responsive to evangelising; the poor had become so degraded by their physical and moral surroundings that they required physical as well as spiritual aid.29 Thus, for example, a metropolitan evangelical ‘mission to the watercress and flower girls in Clerkenwell’ involved not only an effort to save their souls, but the provision of breakfasts as well.30 In typical fashion, part of the mission appeared to involve schooling, for the evangelicals were drawn incrementally into the field of social welfare provision. Individuals required some degree of education to ensure that they understood the implications of their profession of faith. As the evangelically-minded Church Pastoral Aid Society, which funded the provision of extra curates, pointed out at its outset about one typical slum area:

The inhabitants of more distant parts [of this district]... have been in a deplorably destitute and ignorant condition [their minister on pastoral visiting] has been distressed to find the object of his visit so totally ignorant of the first principles of the doctrine of Christ that weeks of patient teaching would be requisite before he could safely attach any weight to the individual’s profession of belief.31 The Context of Liverpool 17

Evangelicals were keenly aware of the need to propagate their message using a variety of methods and were advocates of house-to-house visitation as well as cottage lectures and open air preaching. ‘My people will never fill this place,’ complained one evangelical cleric to Charles Booth in 1889, ‘if we want the people we must go out and fetch them.’32

An alternative to the evangelical approach lay in a High Church route to salvation. The slum dweller, in part, was to be awed by the elaborate surroundings of churches offering ritual and symbols—to ‘worship in the beauty of holiness’, citing an Anglican legacy going back to Hooker. The High Church clergy saw themselves as returning worship to a purer, more traditional form and contrasted the worldly stress on the personal fashion and decoration of church-goers with their emphasis on the elevation and decoration of the spiritual. The contrast between the environment of the slum dweller and the decoration of the Ritualistic church was often used to suggest the particular efficacy this approach to worship might have on the minds of the ‘lower orders’. As the London cleric, Littledale put it ‘Ritualism is a sort of excursion train on the Sunday to bring the poor man out of his dull, squalid everyday life into a land of beauty, colour light and song’.33 The High Church worship involved emotion and intuition—Father Dolling described one of his services at his slum parish of St Agnes in Portsmouth thus:

Often the silent tears trickling down a women’s face would show you she was praying for her own boy or girl. To these poor feeble folk, with no power of prayer or concentration of mind, with but few words they can use... the knowledge that just saying ‘Jack’ or ‘Mary’ as they kneel in silence, was the truest intercession, gathering all the sighs and tears of their heart in union with that all-sufficient , which could alone bring joy and peace to Jack or Mary. I had a better right to know this, for often as I went into the Vestry a name would be whispered in my ear or a little piece of paper pressed into my hand.34

All this stands in contrast with the evangelical stripped-down worship and stress on the catechism of conversion through conscious acknowledgement of sin and acceptance of Christ as saviour. The High Church image of the highly decorated church, standing majestically above the slums and staffed by sisters and deaconesses, did not always receive an automatic endorsement from an awed working class. The artisan commentator Thomas Wright acerbically commented: 18 Chapter One

To a man who has witnessed an Alhambra ballet or a magnificently mounted burlesque, or a sensational drama of light, the mummeries of ritualism have little attraction.35

Reid in his study of the impact of Anglo-Catholicism in the slums of East London had difficulty in establishing who used the Ritualist churches given their proximity to wealthier areas. He concluded that Anglo- Catholicism was probably little different from Low Churches in attracting the working classes, although the personality of Anglo-Catholic clergy was capable of building a loyal working class following.

On the surface it might have been thought that Dissent posed a greater challenge to Anglicanism than the emergence of an Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church. However, Anglicanism had been defined by its very separation from Roman Catholicism (despite the intentions of the Anglo- Catholics) and there were other tensions at work during the nineteenth century. The reinstatement of a Roman Catholic hierarchy, Ultramontanism, the political calculations of and Irish migration to the west of Britain all served to raise suspicions over Catholicism, with of course the last mentioned factor being especially significant in a seaport which contained a significant number of Ulstermen. Liverpool was not therefore the best ground for Anglo-Catholicism. Whilst in Liverpool the high profile Bell-Cox case, which centred on the legality of High Church liturgy, generated much heat, the reality was that there was little High Church presence in the city’s slums. Although in 1902 opponents of the High Church managed to locate in the Liverpool Diocese thirty-four members of the English Church Union with allegedly sixty-three clergy facing eastward during , three using incense, whilst twelve wore and twenty-four used lights, there was muted enthusiasm in Liverpool for the High Church and scarcely any in the poorer and more Catholic-populated northern Liverpool. As will be seen below, the precise identification of High Churches was slightly more difficult than it first appeared. The most prominent High Church services in Liverpool were conducted in the suburbs—the middle class area of Princess Park held St Agnes, and there was also the exuberantly decorated St Margaret’s (which could claim as part of its informal district an adjacent artisan territory).36 Also in Toxteth Park there was St John the Baptist, in the affluent Abercromby district St Catherine‘s was, at times, considered suspect; while the only High Churches in markedly poorer areas were St Martin’s, St Margaret’s (Anfield), St James-the-less and Christ Church (Hunter Street). In 1899 coordinated demonstrations (complete with Orange band) managed to find seven churches identified as Ritualist on Psalm Sunday, The Context of Liverpool 19 with the vicar of St Margaret’s being abusively castigated as ‘Pope John of Anfield’.

Did such churches bring in the poor? Charles Booth claimed that in parts of London it was the High Church which made the most significant contribution to the slums.37 When changes of incumbency altered the tone of worship at St Martin’s, Liverpool, one account of the congregation, in 1877, claimed that the Low Church service now attracted 107 worshippers, as opposed to the 59 that had been observed one Sunday under a High Church service, although the authors were likely to have been unsympathetic to the High Church position.38 Of the worshippers in Liverpool at St James, one journal sardonically commented that whilst the female worshippers included both the well and more humbly dressed, the very poor of both sexes were absent, ‘as if it had been conducted on the soundest of Evangelical principles’; although a few male worshippers, according to Hugh Shimmin, ‘displayed the large coarse hands of those engaged in heavy manual labour’.39 Shimmin, whose denominational tastes made slow progress from Nonconformity to Anglicanism over the course of his career, had no qualms in defending as well as attacking the High Church. Shimmin, despite his comments about St James, claimed that he could not help noticing that:

wherever ritualism establishes itself, there schools arise and spread, and the interest of the children is enlisted in the work of the church, and the clergyman is to be found very often in the courts and garrets of the poor, and the clergyman’s wife busies herself about the sick, and a close warm bond seems to bring together somehow the church, the minister and the flock.40

Shimmin was no less enthusiastic writing about the Sisterhood of St James-the-Less. In particular, he was impressed by the vigour of the nursing work amongst the poor by the Sisterhood, and concluded his article with an appeal for funds for their work. In addition, Shimmin felt that the High Church was the driving force behind the early successes of one force for civilisation: window gardening in the slums. The Liverpool Mercury showed some even-handedness by giving space to describe the workings not only of the evangelical St Nathaniel’s in its columns on successful Liverpool churches, but also the High St Margaret’s Princess Road.41 The presence of the pence of the poor in the latter’s offertory (£5 in one week) was proof enough of working class worshippers drawn from the nearby terraces. Protestants as a whole were slightly less inclined to sympathy. After the High Church cleric Bell-Cox of St Margaret’s was 20 Chapter One released from serving his prison sentence in 1887, a letter of condolence was signed by several clergymen, but hardly any signatures originated from the Liverpool clergy. The spectre of sectarianism in Liverpool ensured that the High Church was viewed with suspicion at best, and open hostility at worst, by those who feared it was one step away from Catholicism. ‘The Word’ and ‘The Image’ were to be locked in conflict. When the change of patronage at St John the Baptist occasioned a move toward High Church worship in 1886, the church was packed with protesters attempting to disrupt the service by standing up during what they saw as key ritualistic moments in the service. When the Revd Herring faced the east at the start of the communion service this was the sign for one quarter of the congregation to leave in protest and congregate outside the church wearing their coloured buttonhole flowers as a mark of solidarity. The Liberal Nonconformist press had a field-day.42 The Liverpool Review commented that the system of purchasing advowsons had led to this change, but was this purchase of livings not part and parcel of the Established Church? Herring’s wealthy predecessor, Revd Halsall, had been content to let the church moulder, whilst the ‘Toxteth Protestants’ left St John’s ‘severely alone’ rendering it a ‘waste of empty and dust-covered pews.’43 The controversial service, it turned out, was not quite so High after all. The was bare and the responses were of a Low Church style, and the service read instead of intoned. Further, the journal continued, were not more High Church practices to be seen every Sunday at St Nicholas and St Peter‘s? Perhaps the categorisation of ‘High’ and ‘Low’ then, was less clear cut than at first it seemed. 44The female element of the protesters appeared to The Liverpool Review journalists to have been of the domestic service class or ‘coarse dowdily-dressed women’, and the lads were ‘simply and entirely animated by a spirit of boyish mischief stimulated perhaps in some cases by “Protestant” parents’.’ The journal, although appearing to make light of the protesters ominously hinted that further trouble was only averted by the police patrolling the outside of the church. Liverpool’s response to the High Church was never to be solely ‘boyish mischief’. Once the initial hostility died down, the church remained just as empty as a High Church as it had as a Low Church.

Liverpool’s religion and politics needless to say, fed off each other. As far back as 1835 tensions were heightened when the Liberals proposed to provide non-denominational education in the Corporation schools, an action which foreshadowed the pattern of state intervention in 1870. This eventually allowed Catholics with their own annotations, the Douai edition. The Liberals argued that the North and South Corporation schools The Context of Liverpool 21 were supported by ratepayers, and that ratepayers included denominations other than Anglicans. This produced a fierce backlash which included the rather disturbing sight of the Protestant Protection Society marching and brandishing bibles on poles. The Revd McNeile of St Jude‘s was at the forefront leading this campaign against Catholics and their Douai in Corporation Schools. In 1842 the political and thus the non- denominational position was reversed, as the Liberals were ejected from the Corporation, so too were the Douai Bibles, and with them most of the Catholics. Many of Liverpool’s Anglican clergy, like McNeile, had Ulster backgrounds, which engendered a fierce hostility to ritualism. Waller comments that McNeile was the real creator of Liverpool Conservatism, fashioning it in a sectarian mould by his powerful oratory.45 Belchem has commented on how the transference of allegiances by migrants to allegiances facilitated an easy transfer of Orange sentiments into Liverpool. Although most of these clergy did not openly play ‘the Orange card’, a few proved sympathetic enough to allow their mission halls to be used for Orange meetings and, on occasion, front more extreme Protestant movements. The Revd Carson of St Bartholomew‘s had been fairly open about his Orange connections. The Revd Ince, of St Alban‘s, was the chairman of the ‘Layman’s League’, which existed to ‘defend the laity’ against the ‘excesses of ritualism’ and press for a Church Discipline Bill to help curb High Church practices. Several of Liverpool’s clergy not only had Irish Protestant roots, but had been involved in ‘missions to Roman Catholics’ in Ireland, Reverends Clemenson (St Matthew’s) and Hobson (St Nathaniel’s) being two prominent examples. It is significant perhaps that the visits to local churches by the Liverpool Review during the 1880s, found that successful services (for example, at Holy Trinity, St Anne’s and St Nathaniel’s, Windsor) often included an openly anti-Catholic element, and the pro- Orange Liverpool Standard singled Hobson’s ministry out for particular praise. Hobson allowed parochial branches of the National Protestant League and the Orange Order, and whilst he refused an invitation to join the latter body, he lamented that evangelical clergy made a great mistake in not fusing Orangism to the ‘latent’ Protestantism of the masses. Hobson candidly admitted that, whilst the parochial Orange society did not come up to his standards, it had been a factor in the success of his church.46 The more middle class St Augustine’s, in its 1902 summer programme of ‘popular subjects’ of evening aimed at working class men, devoted a sole sermon on ‘Romanism’, alongside lectures on ‘hearth and home’ and ‘husbands and wives’. The strongly evangelical church magazine for Liverpool, the Sun-light, during a two year run included 22 Chapter One several articles on Ritualism (although only one on ‘Romanism’) although significantly when this magazine had served only the middle class St Luke’s only one anti-Catholic reference could be found within those two years of publication. Shimmin through his journal, The Porcupine, suggested that Corporation Churches would be better employed educating the working classes than indulging in religious controversy. Low Church practices however were made explicit in many slum churches. Under Howard, St Bartholomew’s made great play of the fact that those who expected the congregation to stand during the anthem were to remain disappointed. Hobson made the point of ensuring that crosses were not prominently placed within his church. On occasion, tensions flared up openly within Church meetings. One assembly in the Concert Hall at St George’s Hall in 1866, meeting to debate proposals of the Open Church organisation, (which in Liverpool was recognised as having High Church leanings) occasioned police intervention to separate the openly warring factions.47 The Liverpool press by and large tended to play down sectarian tensions, fearful of what might have arisen from unrestrained popular passion. Likewise, the Liverpool clergy usually admitted their Orange credentials, but did so in a way which suggested that they rather wished that they didn’t have them. Howard at St Bartholomew’s talked about how well his lectures against Romanism were attended, but invited his parishioners to instead hear him talk about other subjects. Even the doctrinal animosity which existed between Bell-Cox and his antagonist in court, Mr Hawkes, appeared, in the imagination of the press at least, to be laid aside when the two worked alongside each other on the Liverpool School Board. Obviously some public protestations were pure cant, the Revd Verner White felt able to declare himself to be ‘no Orangeman’, when clearly his sentiments lay strongly in this direction. Whilst the middle class attempted to distance themselves from the excesses of Orangism, the sentiments of the working class, fed on a diet of anti- Catholicism, could not so easily be switched on and off. In London, the momentum generated by anti-Catholicism, which served to unite evangelicals and Dissenters, largely fizzled out after the protests against the re-imposition of the Catholic hierarchy in the mid-nineteenth century.48 Not so in Liverpool: there were to be outbursts of disorder in the early Edwardian period, culminating in serious clashes between Catholics and Protestants in 1909. As late as 1937 the Bishop of Liverpool was voicing concerns about the effect that Irish migration had on Liverpool’s ecclesiastical and political character as the Tory strategies looked like unbundling: The Context of Liverpool 23

... there are a quarter of a million Irish in Liverpool and they come in every year for the higher dole... Their chief effect on Church life is to drive out conservative evangelicals into extremism. The most serious effect is political. They may give control to the local Labour Party which in turn may gain control of the local government. In this event Liverpool will be dominated by Roman Catholics.49

Two further institutional factors buttressed Liverpool’s evangelical path. The local theological college of St Aidan in Birkenhead was, for most of its life in the nineteenth century, evangelical in outlook, and it supplied some of Liverpool’s most able clerical workers. Secondly, Liverpool’s first bishop in 1880, Charles Ryle, was of the evangelical party.

Provocative Protestant clergy were liable to feel the wrath of the local Catholic community. Open space, utilised for open air preaching, often proved disputed ground, and aggressive Protestant Scripture Readers could be found before the magistrates over assault cases involving sectarian dispute, just as sections of the local Catholic community felt it within their right to attack local Anglican open air preachers who intruded into ‘their’ space. Howard of St Bartholomew‘s, a forceful evangelical, at first decided that a good way to preach to those in his new parish who would not come to church was to preach in the streets. This was a misjudgement. The two streets he started with, Paul Street and Cherry Lane, were of a mixed religious community and notorious for their poverty. In one court, such was the ferocity of the attack against him (which included a dead cat thrown at his face with a fair degree of accuracy) that a hasty retreat had to be beaten. On another occasion, a bucket of cockle and mussel shells (for this was fish preparation country) was emptied over him. He recounted how, on several occasions, he had had to seek protection from a ‘Romanist mob’ who, pursuing him, chanted:

Minister, minister, quack, quack, quack O go to the div’l and don’t come back

Alternating with:

Have you seen the minister, have you seen his daughter? Have you seen him spit on his hands and call it holy water?

Even on the journey from church to tram Howard was forced to seek police protection. During the weekdays, without police protection, Howard escaped the mob at the front of the church by using a ladder to escape from the backyard. Howard, who had more than an edge of showmanship 24 Chapter One about him, even claimed to have resorted to disguise to escape hostile Catholic attention. On several occasions this was no more than ‘a cap and muffler with turned up collar’, but more dramatically Howard revealed he had had a false beard and moustache made for him, and was thus able to mingle with his would-be attackers. The church gates were often tied with tarred ropes following the Monday evening meetings, and step-ladders had to be used to exit from the church. When Howard attempted to burn the ropes this merely acted as a signal for ‘rioters’ to ‘swarm’ down Naylor Street and chant in front of the church. One Sunday an attempt was made to fire the church coal store; another Sunday witnessed a gun discharged outside during church service hours; in another, more minor incident, the mat was stolen from the church (with the vicar in hot pursuit of the culprits); whilst vegetable refuse and dung were regularly thrown into the church during the evening service.

The relationship between the Anglican Church and the local Catholic community could, therefore, be tense. When the Bishop of Liverpool came to preach an evening service at St Bartholomew‘s, he was rather perturbed when his carriage was roughly jostled and dung thrown at it. Upon remonstrating that this should not happen to the bishop of the diocese, Howard shot back the reply that this had happened to him at least a dozen times, and that he was the parish priest.50

Notes

1 ‘Leisure Hour’ 1898 cited in A. Wilcox Living in Liverpool (2011) p.71 2 Glasgow, of course, claimed the same distinction for it all depends on where the boundaries lie: if Greater Merseyside, then after 1861 Merseyside would qualify for the appellation. 3 The Porcupine 6th July 1861. 4 I. Nairn, Britain’s Changing Towns (1967) p.145. 5 R. J. Morris and R. Rodger [eds.], The Victorian City 1820-1914 (1993). 6 M. J. Whitty, A proposal for diminishing crime, pauperism and vice (1865) p.4 7 Note the parochial, not borough, boundary—see Wilcox Living p.76. 8 W. H. Duncan, On the Physical Causes of the high rate of mortality in Liverpool (1844), cited in Wilcox Living p.136. 9 See J. Belchem and D. MacRaild ‘Cosmopolitan Liverpool’, in Liverpool 800 (2006). 10 P. J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism (1983) p.9. 11 J. Hughes Morris Homes Methodistaeth Liverpool cited in J. R. Jones The Welsh Builder in Liverpool (1946) 12 See press reports of the Cambrian Society in Liverpool where the St David’s Day dinners would often have speakers, including the Chairman and guest