Stories Of Old Liverpool With Stories And Customs Of Old West Derby

By Canon H. E. Crewdson

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473353053

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PREFACE

I have not tried to make these ‘Stories of Old Liverpool’ a full or consecutive record of the major events in the history of our city. What I have done is to pick out a few which are of special interest to myself and, I hope, to others. The selection ends with the close of the eighteenth century. This means that I have not even looked at the period which saw the biggest and most rapid development in our commercial and civic life, with a tenfold increase in population from 77,708 in 1801 to 789,532 in 1951. Exactly how many there are in 1957 no one knows. But, as the old woman said of the Commandments, there’s plenty on ’em!

The whole story has been told in a scholarly volume recently written by the City Librarian, with a wealth of illustrations, ancient and modern. I acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. George Chandler, as well as to the late Mr. F. A. Bailey, part-author of ‘The Story of Liverpool’ (1951); and I am grateful to the Liverpool Corporation for permission to use several illustrations from this book. If here and there I have followed the steps of these distinguished annalists with an unbecoming lack of dignity, my excuse can only be that the history I myself like best is, if not quite in the style of ‘1066 and all that’, sufficiently flavoured with frivolity to make it palatable—to me. And I know that there are others like me.

I hope that, in these word-pictures of the Liverpool that was, they will find the same kind of entertaining information that has been found (so I have been told) in ‘Stories and Customs of Old West Derby’, reprinted in response to many requests, and included in this booklet.

H.E.C.

STORIES OF OLD LIVERPOOL.

The Calder Stones.

On Ilkley Moor ba t’hat I saw many years ago some prehistoric carvings, probably dating from the early Bronze Age, between 2000 and 1500 B.C., with the distinctive ‘cup and ring’ markings of that period. Anything that Yorkshire can do Lancashire can do better, or at least as well. No loyal son of Lancashire, therefore, will be surprised to learn that, getting on for 4,000 years ago, there was a big funeral at Calderstones. When the smoke of the funeral pyre had cleared away, the slaves of the departed chieftain, who had been busy for days quarrying sandstone blocks, hauled them along on sledges and built them up into a vault around the pyre, marking them with ‘cup and ring.’ Then they covered them with a mound of earth (‘tumulus’). At a later date someone dug it up. That is how we got our Calder Stones. Not long ago you could have seen them by the roadside at the point where the boundaries of Allerton, Wavertree and Little Woolton meet. But they have recently been removed to our City Museum. Here, also, but for Hitler, we should have five funeral urns from a prehistoric cemetery at Wavertree. But three of them were smashed in the ‘blitz.’ That is about all we know locally of our Bronze Age ancestors.

The Romans.

The Romans, quite content with their fortified port of Chester at the head of the Dee Estuary, may have explored the trackless wastes of the Wirral as far as Birkenhead. From there they would have looked down their long noses at the little group of huts among the sandhills by ‘the Livered Pool’ (‘the pool with thick water’) on the opposite side of the Mersey. But they saw nothing to attract them in the prospect. Nor were they in the least bit interested in the marshy and scrub-covered hinterland which was the approach to the forest of West Deorby (‘the place of wild beasts’), a royal hunting-preserve of the Anglo-Saxon kings, as it afterwards became. The nearest Roman thoroughfare was the military road from Chester to Lancaster which crossed the Mersey at Warrington. All through the period of the Roman occupation of Britain, and the Saxon era which followed, the Lancashire side of the Mersey Estuary was the other side of beyond.

The Vikings.

In the ninth and tenth centuries, however, the Vikings livened things up considerably, and not at all pleasantly for the thinly scattered population of Merseyside. These ruthless invaders, coming from the Isle of Man and Ireland, appropriated everything they took a fancy to, killing off or enslaving their rightful owners. Some of them, who had come for what they could get and take back home with them, liked what they saw so well that they decided to stay, leaving their lasting traces upon many of the place-names hereabouts. All which end with ‘by’—West Derby, for example—show by this suffix that they were in origin Viking settlements.

The Anglo-Saxons.

These names exist side by side with others which are Anglo-Saxon in origin, such as Walton, Knowsley and Childwall. Walton, where the parish church for the whole area was built at an early date, was the ‘ton’ or ‘tun’ of ‘the Wealas,’ i.e. a Romano-British clan. Roman legionaries, who lost their hearts to British damsels, had settled down at Walton, raised a family there, and never went back to Rome. Later the wild Norsemen of West Deorby (the name suited them) married Anglo-Saxon wives from Childwall, or Romano-British wives from Walton, and were tamed by domesticity. Their aunts and cousins were racially a very mixed lot, and conversation at family parties must have been difficult. But by the time of Edward the Confessor, last but one of the Saxon kings, who probably built West Derby Castle in its original form as a hunting lodge for his royal manor, people hereabouts were on reasonably good terms with their ‘in-laws’ and other neighbours, and had become, in the main, a respectable and peace-loving community.

West Derby Castle.

But not so as they could do without the moral support of the military. Up to the time of King John the history of the fishing hamlet by ‘the Livered Pool’ had been a part—a very unimportant part—of the history of West Derby. During John’s reign the Castle of this well-populated and ancient township,