P.O.S.H. Portside Out – Starboard Home My Life Story

By Jack Woodside

The liner on the cover is the Empress of Scotland, the flagship of the Canadian Pacific Steamships, known as CPR, a very elegant liner.
In the year of 1951 at the age of eighteen I was one of the three officer’s stewards on board the liner. That same year Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Phillip had completed a tour of Canada and America. The princess was returning to England for her coronation which was taking place on the 2nd June 1953.
In her party were five Canadian Mounted Police. Throughout the seven day voyage, the princess and duke spent every day on the bridge deck of the liner in the company of the ship’s captain and officers. One of my duties was to serve beverages to the princess, the duke and the officers. I was eighteen years of age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398438866

Jack Woodside

Jack Woodside grew up in Liverpool, and at the age of fifteen, in 1949, his one ambition was to join the merchant navy, just like his father and his grandfather, so he could see the world.

Book preview

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The first verse of a Liverpool ballad, titled ‘In My Liverpool Home’, starts the with the words, ‘I was born in Liverpool down by the docks’, followed by, ‘My religion was dodgy, my occupation hard knocks, at stealing from lorries I was adept and under old overcoats each night we slept; in my Liverpool home.’

The second verse tells us, ‘We speak with an accent exceedingly rare, and we meet under a statue also exceedingly rare.’ The statue is a sculptured nude Greek god in all his glory mounted over the front door of Liverpool’s largest department store. It is the meeting point for seventy percent of the Merseyside people.

The third verse of the ballad tells us that, ‘Back in the nineteen forties the world went mad and the Germans threw at us all that they had, when the dust and the smoke had cleared from the air, thank god we all said, Liverpool’s still there.’

The final verse tells us, ‘If you want a cathedral, we have one to spare; in my Liverpool home.’ Liverpool has the largest Anglican Cathedral in the world, with the highest and heaviest peel of bells in the world. The Cathedral was designed by a twenty-two-year-old Roman Catholic, Giles Gilbert Scott, later Sir Giles. The cathedral took seventy-four years to complete – 1904 to 1978.

Liverpool also has a Roman Catholic Cathedral. It was designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd who also designed London’s Heathrow Airport. Work began on the Catholic Cathedral in the year of my birth 1933 it was opened in 1967.

Liverpool is a very characteristic city, it has many attributes. It was home to the first United States Consul in the World. He was James Lawry who was appointed to Liverpool by George Washington from 1790 to 1819.

The liberal statesman William Gladstone, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for four parliaments was born in Liverpool. He became the greatest liberal statesman in our history.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Lincoln, in Fords Theatre Washington in 1865, was also born in Liverpool. Along with his family he had emigrated to America in 1821.

The first man ever to be killed by a Steam passenger train was William Huskisson. He was a Member of Parliament and he was also the President of the British Board of Trade. He was killed by George Stevenson’s train, the Rocket, on 15th September, 1830, the opening day of the Liverpool to Manchester railway. He was crossing the rail line to speak with the Duke of Wellington when he slipped and fell in the path of the Rocket, losing both legs. He died that evening.

In the field of medicine, the first person to provide greater freedom from pain for women in child birth by administering a mixture of gas and air was Doctor R. J. Minnett. The gas, called minute gas, was administered whilst the patient remained conscious. It was first used by Doctor Minnett in 1933, the year of my birth.

Also a Liverpool achievement, in the year 1944, T Cecil Gray was the first Doctor to use the drug curare (a muscle relaxant) in conjunction with anaesthetic. He later became Professor of Anaesthesia at Liverpool University. Cecil Grey is known as the founder of anaesthetists. Curare is the deadly poison used by South American Indians, who tipped their arrow heads with it, stunning their prey when hunting.

Liverpool was the cradle for orthopaedic surgery stemming from Hugh Owen Thomas who was born there in 1834.

In 1898 Sir Alfred Lewis James (1845–1909) established the first tropical school of medicine in the world in Liverpool. The school’s first big success was the discovery by Sir Ronald Ross that malaria was transmitted by the bite of the anopheles mosquito. For this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1902. In 1900 The Liverpool School of medicine detected the parasite that causes elephantiasis, in 1901 the school detected the origins of sleeping sickness and in 1905 the cause of tick fever.

In December of 1913 the first crossword puzzle appeared in the New York Sunday World newspaper. It was devised by a Liverpool immigrant, his name was Arthur Wynne.

In the year 1908, the first Boy Scout troop in the world was formed in Birkenhead, whilst Lord Baden Powell was on a visit to Liverpool. The movement spread throughout the world.

Liverpool has boasted many stars of stage and screen; John Gregson, Rex Harrison, Glenda Jackson, Tommy Handley, The Beatles, Cilla Black, Frankie Vaughan, Freddie Starr, Ken Dodd and Gerry Marsden.

Liverpool also had the first underground Railway in the world running beneath the city and the River Mersey. One of the greatest engineering feats was Liverpool’s overhead railway. It spanned the whole length of the Liverpool docks, a distance of seven miles. It was considered to be more educational than a school geography book. From a carriage one could view ships from every shipping company in the world, from the smallest of cargo boats to the largest of luxury liners. To the dismay of the Liverpool people and on a bureaucratic Liverpool City Council vote, the railway was dismantled in the nineteen sixties.

Liverpool up until the nineteen sixties was one of the biggest seaports in the world. It was also very big in ship building having built some of the largest passenger liners and warships the world has known.

Liverpool has a lot of fine buildings with Roman and Greek influence. The Vikings also set up camps in Liverpool.

For the year 2008, Liverpool has been voted Europe’s number one city of culture.

Liverpool has a huge football following. It lays claim to two of the world’s oldest football clubs; Liverpool Football Club and Everton Football Club. Each club is within a half mile of each other and both have supporters well into the hundreds of thousands worldwide.

Liverpool is sometimes referred to as the capital of Ireland. There was a large Irish influx stemming back to the eighteen forties, before and after the potato famine. Liverpool at that time was the closest seaport to Ireland. Thousands of Irish families made Liverpool their home, arriving in the clothes that they stood up in, no money and no furniture. After arriving in Liverpool and having no money to take themselves any further, they settled in their port of arrival hence the term ‘The Liverpool Irish’.

I was also born in Liverpool. The year of my birth was 1933. I weighed in at eleven pounds, a lot of pounds to bear for my mother! I was one of ten children, one of which was still born. I was born in the South end of Liverpool in an area known as The Dingle. At that time Liverpool consisted of the city, the north end of the city and the south end of the city plus a few outlying suburbs.

The first year of my life was spent in a terrace house (age unknown) but very old with no electricity or hot running water. The light source was gas mantles and candles when money was unavailable for the gas meter. Our terraced house, like all others, consisted of a parlour (commonly known as a sitting room) and a living room divided by a coal fed fire with adjacent oven. The coal fed fire was the main source of heat for cooking the meals, boiling the water plus warming the house. The fire, which stayed alight day and night three hundred and sixty-five days a year, also dried the clothing that had been washed in a tin tub or the neighbourhood wash house.

A large cast iron kettle with the capacity to hold no less than eight litres of boiling water was always beside the fire. This provided hot water for washing hands and face plus boiling water to make cups of tea.

The houses did not have bathrooms. Each house owned a tin bath approximately four feet in length and eighteen inches wide. When the bath was not in use it was hung by a nail on the back yard wall. Bath night was a weekly occurrence. The bath would be brought into the house from the backyard. In the winter months it would be coated with a layer of ice and would have to be thawed out in front of the fire. The bath would be half filled with hot water from the large kettle and then topped up with cold water. The same tub of water served everyone in the family which, at this particular time, consisted of my parents, my elder brother plus three sisters. The positioning of the bath in front of the fire served a dual purpose which was to save on towels as well as wash the family. The warmth of the fire dried you and only one towel was required to dry everyone.

The houses did not have gardens. They each had a back yard, approximately one and a half square metres in size. A back yard wall divided each house. Every house owned a mangle machine situated against the back wall. A mangle machine consisted of two rollers five feet in length and a cog type mechanism to turn the rollers which in turn pressed the wet washing. The pressed items were placed on a clothes rack to dry in front of the fire. Clothing was then ironed by a cast iron flat iron which was heated over a gas ring. Ironing was carried out on the kitchen table as ironing boards were unheard of.

Each house had a coal cellar accessed from a circular steel plate on the pavement in front of each house. The cellars were dark, dismal and very damp. They were accessed from inside the house by a flight of stone stairs. The coal to each household was delivered by horse and cart. The coalman, as he was known, would arrive at each terraced house with his Clydesdale horse and cart. He would shoulder each one hundred weight bag of coal to the access plate of the cellar, removing the plate to unload each bag of coal. From the inside flight of stone stairs the family would shovel the coal into a bucket to keep the fire burning. Coal was the life blood of every house.

Most terraced houses had two bedrooms. Ours had three but they were very small, eight foot by eight foot as I recall. My parents had one room with a cot or two adjacent to their bed, in our situation always occupied. Our house would have been rented like ninety percent of home tenants.

The bedrooms were also dark, dismal and damp. Lino or oil cloth as it was commonly known covered the floor boards downstairs and upstairs. Wardrobes and chests of drawers were unheard of. The beds were always made of a sturdy structure, but not the mattresses which were filled with horse hair or flock – a substance of cotton waste. The pillows were filled with feathers but I do not remember our beds having sheets or pillow cases during the first fourteen years of my life. The blankets were always grey or hospital blue and each household would only have possessed a few; I don’t know why. Hence the line in the ballad, ‘And under old overcoats each night we slept’. Our house had a few army overcoats adorning our beds, complete with brass buttons.

The houses in this dockland area of Liverpool were infested with rats. Almost every house owned a cat for the sole purpose of catching rats. Owning a dog was unheard of. No trees or greenery surrounded The Dingle. The greenery and trees were in the parks. Occasionally the odd sparrow could be found haunting the houses looking for crumbs. No other birds were seen.

My grandparents on both sides lived within one hundred yards of the house that I was born in. Also my aunties and uncles lived within walking distance. I can’t remember my grandmother on my mother’s side, but I do remember my grandfather. He was a great old man with great mannerisms. He was a truck driver for most of his working years.

My father’s father I cannot remember except that he was christened William. My grandmother on my father’s side was a neighbourhood money lender. All neighbourhoods had one. She probably charged sixpence or a shilling interest in every pound. Beneath her long, ankle length black dresses she always wore an apron with a large pocket. When paying out or recovering money she would lift her dress to her waist to gain access to the pocket. My grandmother, who we called Nin (the name for all Liverpool grandmothers) did have a partner or a defacto as we term it today. I will always remember him. Throughout his life he worked as a stevedore (a Liverpool docker) another term was a ganger – a foreman docker. He was a big man. I believe he was feared and respected by his fellow stevedores. I always remember him wearing a union type shirt always without a collar. Around his neck he wore a spotted scarf. Dockers always reversed their belts that held up their pants. The reason for this was to ease the tension on their stomachs when loading and unloading cargo in the ship’s hatches. The buckle of the belt on the back of the docker was used to hold the dockers hook which was the tool of their trade.

The women of this era dressed in three quarter length black dresses over which they wore white pinafore smocks. On their feet they wore laced ankle boots. In winter they would wear a shawl covering their shoulders. The young girls also dressed this way minus the shawl. The men always seemed to wear suits. They would possess one throughout their life. They also wore black patent leather boots and flat caps. The young boys wore short pants and a jumper. On their feet they wore plimsolls or went barefoot.

In the south end of Liverpool almost every major crossroad had a public house and a pawnshop. Poverty was everywhere but the pubs flourished. Consequently, the three most popular businesses to be involved in were; pubs, pawnshops and money lending. I will always remember the street hawker who sold his goods from a horse and cart, the rag and bone man, the coal man, the man who sold the salted fish (a very popular Sunday morning specialty in every household) and the salt man who sold blocks of salt, cut to size by a hand saw. Salt was in great demand to preserve food in every household. Hawkers sold vegetables and fruit as well as food items. Supermarkets were unheard of. I remember the barrow girls who congregated in the City Centre selling their fruit from beautifully displayed wheel barrows complete with greenery from the garden.

My father was a merchant seaman from 1920 to 1926. He went to sea at the age of sixteen. He was classed as an AB which stood for Able Bodied. Able Bodied seamen were associated with the deck department of all ships. Three categories of men crewed a ship; the deck department which consisted of deck officers and able-bodied seamen, the engine room department which consisted of engineers and firemen and the catering department which consisted of cooks, stewards, galley boys and saloon boys. My father served with two shipping companies one of which was the Elder Dempster hipping company, which sailed its ships from Liverpool to the West Coast of Africa. The second company was known as the Harrison Line. The Harrison Line was rated as one the meanest shipping companies plying the oceans. Their company colours were red and white and they displayed three red and white bands on their funnels. Two of the bands were prominently thick the other band was very thin. Their motto soon became known as, ‘Two of the thick and one of lean’. It was said that if a man undertook a six-month voyage on a Harrison Line Ship signing articles weighing fourteen stone, he would sign off six months later weighing ten stone. The seamen took their own mattresses on board. They consisted of a sack filled with straw. It was known as a donkey’s breakfast. The Harrison Line ships sailed from Liverpool to the West Indies in the Caribbean.

My father met my mother in 1923. My mother was already widowed, aged seventeen and with a six-month-old baby boy. My mother’s first husband died of tuberculosis six months after she married him. He was nineteen years of age. My father stayed at sea for the first couple of months of 1926 but his sea faring years then came to an end due to the great depression that hit the world. His first reaction would have been, ‘I must look after my wife and stepson’. He immediately sought work in the coalmines. This decision would have been a task not many men would have undertaken. Firstly the coal mines of England were in far north Lancashire, Wales, Yorkshire and the Midlands. Secondly in those days the coal mines were a family orientated job, just like merchant seamen. He found work in the coal mines of Derbyshire and returned to Liverpool to prepare for the move to Derbyshire with my mother and her baby boy. This would have involved a train journey taking a few hours with a couple of suitcases containing their belongings but no furniture. In that era of the depression most men found themselves out of work and on the breadlines. Poverty was everywhere.

My father never spoke much of his few years in the coal mines. To him it was a necessity. He would have been like a fish out of water. When the majority of men were on National Assistance and the bread lines he found work in the coal mines. He also found a little house to rent in a Derbyshire village. He left his sea faring friends and his sisters, brothers and parents and likewise my mother left her parents, her sister and two brothers. In 1926 my eldest sister was born on Christmas day in Matlock, a little coal mining village in Derbyshire.

In 1927 the young family of four returned to Liverpool. The depression was over but work was still very hard to find. They set up home in the house that I was born in close to their parents and sisters and brothers. From the year 1927 to 1929 two sisters were born into the family and as previously mentioned I myself in 1933. My father went back to sea for a further three years after returning to Liverpool.

In 1933 he secured a job with the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board as a quarter master on one of their salvage vessels. One day on, one day off. These vessels had two crews each. They were on call three hundred and sixty-five days a year except when the vessel went into dock for servicing. Dad never looked back. He stayed with the sea which was in his blood from the age of fifteen until he was sixty-five minus the years in the mines.

In 1934 our family, like many other families that were living in very old houses in the city, was relocated to council estate housing on the outskirts of the City. The suburb was Huyton. It was five miles from the city centre of Liverpool and approximately eight miles from our