The women and men who arrived in Liverpool from Ireland in the nineteenth century may have been poor and often starving but they soon developed a communitarian culture whose strength eventually overcame prejudice and denigration, writes John Belchem
Some nine million migrants passed through Victorian Liverpool, the commercial and human hub linking the Old World and the New. Not all of them were to continue onwards: considerable numbers were to remain in the great sea port whether through misfortune, deception or choice.
This was most notably the case with the Irish. As trans-shipment port and central hub of the Irish diaspora, Liverpool had to cope disproportionately with its casualties, categorised cruelly by contemporaries as "the residuum of the Irish" - that is, those cases who had not "wing" enough, when they came from Ireland, to carry them across the Atlantic. Labelled as the dregs, those who stayed put in the port of entry were dismissed as a kind of underclass, unable, unwilling or unsuited to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere in Britain or the New World.
It was Irishness of this order - immobile, inadequate and irresponsible - that purportedly set Liverpool and its notorious social problems apart. Even before the famine influx began in 1845, the Liverpool-Irish suffered the prejudice and negative reputation that subsequently came to blight the city itself. Attitudes have persisted. "Do you want to hear my theory about Scousers?", the Lake District hotel owner asks the job-seeking Liverpudlian Danny Kavanagh in Jimmy McGovern's TV drama series The Lakes (1997-99): "Bone idle. It's not your fault, you understand, it's in your genes. You're all descended from the feckless Irish. Half starved, you get on a boat, you get as far as Liverpool and say, ‘Sod that, I'm not going any further, this'll do'."
However, Catholic migrants from Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were by no means passive victims of such crude prejudice and denigratory stereotyping. As Catholic and Irish became synonymous in Liverpool, they were to formulate their own versions of Irishness. This ethno-confessional affiliation served at first protective and defensive functions against disadvantage, disability and discrimination, but then became increasingly assertive, leading to a form of home rule in pre-First World War Irish Liverpool. Ethnicity was a positive force, aided and empowered by the sheer scale of the local Irish enclave. However lowly the conditions, here was a milieu of solidarity and security - mobilised around the Irish pub and the Catholic parish - which tended to preclude further movement, the uncertain quest for success elsewhere.
This, in its turn, led to the development of a remarkable range of Catholic welfare provision in Victorian Liverpool. It had its own distinct identity, facilitating a culture of poverty in which individual material advancement was often eschewed in favour of the communality, solidarity and charity benefits available only at the bottom of the social, but not the spiritual, scale.
While the Catholic hierarchy at this time was drawn from Recusant English stock, the local Church readily embraced Irish idioms and personnel in its philanthropic, associational and pastoral provision. For the most part recent arrivals from Ireland themselves, priests displayed none of the condescending censoriousness of the Protestant clergy and other visitors to the poor. In a manner Protestants admired but could not emulate, the resident Catholic priest in his humble adjacent abode served as "the parson, the policeman, the doctor, the nurse, the relieving officer, the nuisance inspector, and the school-board inspector all in one".
Beyond the parish, however, substantial funds were required for institutional and other forms of charity to reclaim (and rehabilitate) the outcast Irish poor - and prevent leakage from the faith. The parlous socio-economic plight of so many Irish Catholics in Victorian Liverpool left them vulnerable, it was feared, to Protestant proselytisation. Those who relied on the streets for a living risked "certain perversion" if taken into care in official, thus Anglican, institutions.
From the early 1860s, Fr James Nugent's Association of Providence funded a number of schemes, extending from emergency rescue provision at the Boys' Night Shelter and Refuge in Soho Street (initially managed by the formidable Christian Brothers) to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories (including the Clarence reformatory ship moored in the Mersey) for those already tainted by street crime. Sustained by popular penny subscription schemes, these institutions, continued into the twentieth century through Fr Berry's Homes, were later to seek a more radical solution by preparing orphan and destitute children for emigration to Catholic families in North America.
The extent of Catholic rescue and welfare provision was remarkable, all the more so in the absence of a wealthy resource base. Within the institutions themselves, the Little Sisters of the Poor, recent arrivals from a French order, were perhaps the most saintly and streetwise in balancing the books. Preferring "the regular weekly pennies of the people, to the occasional pounds of the well-to-do", the sisters covered the building costs and capital expenditure for their home for the infirm elderly in Belmont Grove. Food was obtained by systematic daily begging trips in a sombre black van to city centre hotels, restaurants and refreshment rooms as well as collecting scraps from St John's Market, the best pickings being given to the inmates (some 138 in 1887) before the 15 sisters allowed themselves anything to eat.
An Irish-Liverpudlian himself, Fr Nugent displayed a showman's flair in raising funds for his array of charitable activities, a form of one-man welfare state, as recorded with due appreciation in the inscription on his statue which stands to this day in St John's Gardens in the shadow of St George's Hall: "Apostle of Temperance, Protector of the Orphan Child, Consoler of the Prisoner, Reformer of the Criminal, Saviour of Fallen Womanhood, Friend of All in Poverty and Affliction, an Eye to the Blind, a Foot to the Lame, the Father of the Poor."
Fr Nugent's penchant for publicity, however, was regarded in some Catholic quarters as counter-productive, keeping the "problem" Irish too much in the forefront of the public eye. By the mid-1860s, amid growing discussion of parliamentary reform, franchise extension and the redistribution of seats, members of the Catholic middle class, proud of their advance since the famine years, were looking for political recognition. Their aspiration to secure the proposed third parliamentary seat for Liverpool for one of their own exemplified the equitable citizenship to which Catholics, one-third of the population, felt they were entitled by virtue of their contribution to Liverpool's progress and prosperity.
Much to the detriment of the case, however, the Irish presence in workhouses, industrial schools, prisons and other such institutions was disproportionately much higher. It was these statistics that Fr Nugent chose to broadcast when appointed in 1863 as Catholic chaplain to Walton Jail. Between 1864 and 1879 no fewer than 65 per cent of all those committed to the prison were Catholic, eight out of 10 of whom were Irish-born or the children of Irish-born parents. Worse still, the preponderance was accentuated among Irish Catholic women, no strangers to pubs and "houses of bad character". It was a matter of shame, Fr Nugent remonstrated, that Liverpool was "the only prison in the world where the females exceed the males".
Under Bishop (later Archbishop) Thomas Whiteside (from 1894 to 1921), known popularly as the "bishop with a trowel in his hand", Catholics sought to complete their infrastructure of parochial provision and institutional care. Opening a new chapel in 1908 at the Homes at Everton Crescent run by the Sisters of Charity (which ranged from accommodation for "respectable servants out of place" to a night refuge for vulnerable girls), Whiteside noted that there were "over 30 institutions founded for the work of alleviating all manner of human misery and poverty, comprising seven industrial schools, three reformatories, four poor-law schools, one blind asylum, three refuges for the aged poor, seven institutions for looking after waifs and strays, and other places, including the group of Homes at Everton Crescent".
Deep and broad as it was, though, Catholic welfare was neither comprehensive nor inclusive. In his 1934 autobiography, Liverpool Irish Slummy, Pat O'Mara recalled how his mother, given the Church's teachings on marriage, was unable to turn to the priest and the parish when compelled to leave her drunken and violent husband. For this and other reasons, the dreaded workhouse and associated institutions beyond the confessional safety net perforce loom large in O'Mara's book - as do pawnshops and moneylenders, the infamous "Fish and Money" people, who relied less upon collateral than upon their reputation for administering physical beatings to recalcitrant debtors.
Just as the economic fortunes of Liverpool began to collapse in the Depression of the interwar decades, the Church promoted a great prestige project: "The Cathedral in our Time". By dwarfing the tower of the Anglican Cathedral (and all but outstripping St Peter's in Rome) the proposed edifice, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to be built on the site of the former workhouse, was of immense symbolic importance, attesting to the Catholic contribution to Liverpool. As in the earlier construction of the parochial infrastructure of worship, education and welfare, the burden of finance fell upon hard-pressed, ordinary Catholics, now enjoined not only to donate but also to purchase a range of special products such as Cathedral Tea and Cathedral Cigarettes.
Only the crypt was built before funds ran out. It was not until the early 1960s that construction work began on Frederick Gibberd's radically different design, to be christened on completion with characteristic Scouse wit as Paddy's wigwam.
After a brief period of Merseybeat prosperity in the 1960s, economic decline returned with a vengeance. As industry and population dwindled, what remained was heritage and nostalgia. Emblematic of the Liverpudlian struggle against adversity, misperception and misrepresentation, the Liverpool-Irish slummy became a symbolic figure of inverse snobbery and pride, the true Scottie Road Scouser.