The Incidental Tourist Read online

  All microbiologists know about Leeuwenhoek, but I was only vaguely aware of Leverhulme. As we were to discover on a second visit years later, a fifteen-minute transit under the River Mersey via the Birkenhead Tunnel takes us from Liverpool’s historic river and seaport to Port Sunlight on the Wirral Peninsula. Constructed between 1899 and 1914 to house 3500 people in 800 plus houses, Port Sunlight was the brainchild of William Hesketh Lever, the first Viscount Leverhulme, who, with his brother James, founded the company now known as Unilever. Among their familiar products in the ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ zone are Lux, Lifebuoy and, of course, Sunlight Soap. That cleanliness/godliness juxtaposition extended to Leverhulme’s vision for the Port Sunlight community. Driving around Port Sunlight gives the impression of an attractive, suburban environment dominated by the architectural themes of the arts and crafts movement. Once a tied factory town, home ownership is no longer restricted to company employees.

  Living in a self-contained model village, Leverhulme’s Port Sunlight workers were required to be sober and diligent churchgoers in return for excellent housing and ready access to healthcare, disability support and recreational activities, including a swimming pool and exposure to literature, art and music. They were, by the standards of that time, extraordinarily privileged. Their good behaviour was made easier by the fact that, as the Birkenhead Tunnel was not completed until 1934, Port Sunlight was remote from the fleshpots of Liverpool, which, like any major seaport of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, was both dangerous for the unwary and offered just about every possibility for self-destructive behaviour.

  Established following his death in 1925, the Leverhulme Trust continues William Lever’s philanthropy by supporting ‘scholarships for the purposes of research and education’. Associated with this commitment to ‘high culture’ are a number of Leverhulme Medals and Lectures, including those awarded by the British Academy, the Royal Society and, as I’d now discovered, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Liverpool is hardly a tropical city so why would it be home to such a school? The reason: from the eighteenth century, Liverpool was a major port of arrival and departure for ships conveying goods and people to and from Africa and beyond, across the far-flung British Empire. As a consequence, some passengers disembarked with high fevers and/or severe debility caused by infection with (often unfamiliar) tropical pathogens. This caused shipping magnate Sir Alfred Jones to donate £350 in 1898 to establish the School.

  Heading to Liverpool by the most direct route, we flew from Memphis to Amsterdam (Leeuwenhoek lived in Delft), then on to Manchester. Collecting our checked bags, it was a half hour drive to the Swallow Hotel for our 7 March visit to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the University of Liverpool. Housed initially within the University and delayed in its relocation by the First World War, the School of Tropical Medicine moved in 1920 to the redbrick premises in Pembroke Place that I visited. My recollection is of a typical research institute of an era that prevailed till the 1950s – dominated by dark woodwork and with small laboratories, it was more than a bit dated. But it has since expanded into the magnificent new Wolfson building, opened by Anne, the Princess Royal, in 2014, which reflects how research on tropical infectious diseases has assumed increasing prominence. This enlightened evolution in priorities has been driven by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (augmented by a massive contribution from business magnate and investor Warren Buffett), The Wellcome Foundation and, in the case of the London School of Tropical Medicine, the Wolfson Foundation. Such extraordinary individuals and institutions continue the late nineteenth and early twentieth century philanthropic tradition exemplified by Lord Leverhulme, the Scottish/US industrialist Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefeller Foundation.

  Much of the focus at the School in 1999 was on parasitic infections (nasty worms and protozoa, like malaria) rather than on the viruses that fascinate me. The first faculty member they recruited was British Army of India medical doctor and parasitologist Ronald Ross. Awarded the second ever (1902) Nobel Prize for Medicine, Ross used both human patients and birds to work out the life cycle of the malaria parasite, and was a great character who also wrote plays and poetry.

  The public theatre at the School was considered too small to stage a Leverhulme Lecture, so my talk was at the University. We had a pleasant dinner afterwards and, with no acute timeline to get to London for the Royal Society events that were to follow, we had the next day free to walk around the city, particularly the old port area. That opportunity was repeated in 2010 when I was back to give another talk, this time under the auspices of the University’s School of Veterinary Medicine and, again, Penny came along for the trip.

  The most accessible port area is Liverpool’s Albert Dock. Opened in 1846 by Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort, Albert, and constructed from cast iron, brick, stone and wood, this new facility revolutionised cargo handling, first by having ships unload directly into purpose-built, non-combustible warehouses, then by the introduction of a hydraulic cargo handling and hoist (cranes) system in1848. With its enclosed, rectangular harbour flanked by colonnaded, multi-storey, brick-fronted buildings, this utilitarian complex is remarkably elegant. Bombed during the Second World War, Albert Dock has been restored as a user-friendly visitor’s precinct, featuring the largest collection of grade 1, heritage-listed buildings in Britain. The vast warehouses, made irrelevant by the development of purpose-built containers ports (Seaforth Dock in Liverpool), now house bars and restaurants. Even in the bleakness of winter, Albert Dock offers the opportunity for a brisk and interesting walk, followed by a cappuccino or hot chocolate in a coffee shop with a view.

  While it’s unlikely he left from Albert Dock, I’d long been aware that, in 1852, my Irish Catholic paternal great-grandfather, Patrick Doherty, emigrated via Liverpool. What I’d not realised though is that Tom and Nanny Chippendale, my paternal grandmother’s Anglican parents, also sailed from there. As I’ve researched what happened, I understand that I was profoundly ignorant of the major part Liverpool played in both the small story of my ancestors and in the massive transformation of human society that occurred through the nineteenth century. Having trudged over some of the northern and southern battlefields in the more than two decades we lived in the United States, it was particularly intriguing to discover that the likely cause of my Lancashire great-grandparents’ decision to leave England permanently was the American Civil War!

  In the big department stores of my Brisbane childhood, cotton goods, towels and linens were to be found in the Manchester section reflecting that, with the long-established trade relationships between Australia and Britain which persisted until the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community, most of it came from Manchester and the various Lancashire mill towns nearby. Their rural location was determined initially by the availability of fast-flowing streams to drive the water wheels that, in turn, powered machines like the Spinning Jenny (invented in Lancashire by James Hargreaves in 1864), Richard Arkwright’s water frame, and Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule that combined both technologies. By 1800, steam was replacing water as the driving force.

  The raw cotton and flax that served this industry was off-loaded at Liverpool and the finished product then went out via the same route. Goods were initially transported via a system of waterways, including the Bridgewater Canal that, by 1776, connected the Merseyside town of Runcorn (now administered as part of Liverpool) to Manchester. The Runcorn canal basin is about 27 metres above the river, so the boats had to negotiate a tedious climb through a system of ten locks before setting off for the inland. That ended with the 1830 opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad, the first ever dual-track steam railway. With a signalling system and a timetable, it began the railway age that so revolutionised the transport of people and goods through the nineteenth century. Those early locomotives were not very powerful, so cable haulage (ropes and a stationary engine) was used to lift the Merseyside-loaded goods wagons through the 2-kilometre Wapping
Tunnel (with a 1:48 gradient) to the railroad’s Edge Hill junction. The resultant increase in trade further drove the construction of Liverpool’s 12 kilometres of interconnected docks, the largest such structure in the world. Years later, with the 1894 completion of the 58-kilometre Manchester Ship Canal (from the Irish Sea), the tables were reversed and rail gave way to water, though steam still ruled the day.

  In that earlier era, beyond the shipping of goods across the Atlantic and to the far-flung reaches of the British Empire, Liverpool was also about the mass movement of people. In a world with one billion (in 1800) or 1.6 billion (in 1900) inhabitants, and where, despite the rise of steam power, most physical work still required human labour, minimally educated European emigrants were generally very welcome in the new worlds of North America, then Australia, New Zealand and the African colonies. Nobody worried too much about the fate of the indigenous peoples who had inhabited those countries for thousands of years. While they’d lived sustainably in what were (at least in Australia) some very harsh environments, their ways of life fitted into the ‘wild savage’ category characterised by ‘civilised’ Europeans and, as such, they were considered legitimate targets for suppression and even genocide. They weren’t much of a threat either to invaders armed with guns made in London, then 120 kilometres south east of Liverpool in Birmingham (BSA and Webley), or to the east in Sheffield (Vickers).

  Prior to the abolition of slavery by the Westminster Parliament in 1807, Liverpool-based ships also carried about half of the three million or so Africans transported to North America by British slave traders. Many of those brutalised people ended up working the large cotton plantations of the American South. In turn, the cotton found its way to Liverpool and Lancashire. That strong association between this English port city and the slave owning, predominantly protestant and Scots–Irish culture of what became the Confederate States of America, continued through the American Civil War (1861–65), with Liverpool functioning unofficially as the European provisioning and manpower base for the Confederate navy.

  The CSS Alabama, the most successful of the confederate raiders, was built Merseyside by John Laird and Sons. Unarmed when she sailed out in 1862 as the Enrica (in an attempt to confuse watching Union spies), her reinforced decks, cannon emplacements and powder magazines below the waterline meant the Alabama was immediately combat ready when her big British-made guns were added in the Azores in Portugal. Powered by wind, sail and a single propeller driven by two 300 HP (horse power) horizontal steam engines she could, using her boilers, reach a speed of 24 kilometres per hour, or 13 knots to use the maritime terminology of that time. With the screw retracted, that dropped to 10 knots under sail. Before being sunk off Cherbourg by the steam sloop USS Kearsarge, the CSS Alabama had captured or sunk some sixty-five union ships and taken two thousand prisoners, without a single loss of life.

  Then, having fired the final shot of the conflict across the bow of a whaler in the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific Ocean, the Alabama’s fellow raider, the CSS Shenandoah, dropped anchor in the Mersey alongside HMS Donegal and struck her colours. That was the last time (6 November 1865) the Stars and Bars, the red Confederacy battle flag with white stars on a blue St Andrew’s cross, flew officially on a ship of war. The Mayor of Liverpool formally accepted Captain Waddell’s surrender of his crew at the Town Hall and, though the Union wanted them for piracy, the English justice system freed the Shenandoah sailors, many of whom were British. And Liverpool was not the only town in the British Empire to provide support for the southern cause. From 25 January to 18 February 1865, the crew and captain of the Shenandoah were much feted in Melbourne, where she also took on supplies and forty new crew members, partly to replace eighteen who very sensibly deserted and remained in Australia.

  The American Civil War was a disaster for both Liverpool and Manchester. Because of the immediate Union blockade of New Orleans, Mobile and other southern US ports at the outset of hostilities, annual cotton exports dropped from ten million to 500,000 bales. Lancashire fell on very hard times, with starvation and massive unemployment. My great-grandparents, cotton weavers Nanny Holden (or Olding) and Thomas Chippendale married at aged nineteen and twenty, respectively, in 1855 near the mill town of Great Harwood. In 1863, likely as an assisted passenger, Thomas sailed from Liverpool to Moreton Bay (Brisbane) on the Black Ball Line’s Saldanha. Two years later, Nanny and their two children, Fielding and Alice, left Liverpool on the Golden Land, also a Black Ball ship. Thomas and Nanny farmed at Goodna in the Brisbane Valley, had more children (including my grandmother) and lived till 1906 and 1911 respectively. In 1919, Coolangatta alderman (1914–22) Fielding Chippendale (died 1930) donated the box and line that led to the founding of the Currumbin Surf Life Saving Club. Four years earlier, his 23-year-old daughter Eva had washed off the Currumbin rocks and drowned.

  Liverpool’s Black Ball Line carried my ancestors, and maybe some of yours, safely across the seas. On some fifty vessels, their ships transported nearly 40,000 people to the Colony of Queensland alone. Founded by James Baines in 1852, the business declined due to the 1866 English (and Queensland) financial collapse. Baines continued to operate some ships until (at least) 1871, and is thought to be the model for James Onedin in the BBC’s TV drama The Onedin Line. Written by Liverpool-born playwright Cyril Abraham, a leading character is Captain Baines. With much of the accessible dock area still showing its nineteenth century bones, Liverpool is a fascinating place that is well worth a visit by any family detective who traces their forebears back to this intriguing port of departure.

  CHAPTER 27

  Hearing the music

  HOMECOMINGS ARE ALWAYS GOOD. Connecting from anywhere in America, we sit around at Los Angeles airport and then board one or other direct flight to the east coast of Australia. With luck, we’ll take off sometime between 10.30 pm and midnight for the diagonal, fifteen plus-hours north–south transit across the Pacific. A late, light dinner is then followed by sleep, perhaps a movie or two or, maybe doze a little and tune-in, semi-conscious, to one of the audio channels on the entertainment system – depending on mood, my choice will be opera, classical or country music, or maybe jazz and the blues. With a time difference of seventeen to nineteen hours (varies with daylight saving), we land two days beyond our departure date, generally sometime after dawn.

  Depending on our destination, landfall will be very different. Flying over north-east Victoria into the southern-most portal of Melbourne, returning residents ask the perennial Australian questions: Has it been raining? Are we in drought? Are the pastures green and the little ‘turkey’s nest’ dams full? Then, as the city towers come into view, we may see the coastline and the breadth of Port Phillip Bay. Even for a first-time tourist, Melbourne from the air looks vaguely familiar. It’s unremarkable and presents much as might be expected for any city by the sea.

  If we’re heading north Brisbane may be our first landfall. It’s a while since I’ve taken the LA flight to my hometown, but I’d expect to see the long, sandy, ocean beaches of one or more of the big barrier islands – Moreton, Bribie and the two Stradbrokes – that border the expanse of Moreton Bay with its mud-flats and mangroves. And, depending on how the plane banks and where we’re seated, we might look south to the sandy strip and hotels of Australia’s Miami – the Gold Coast/Surfer’s Paradise – or to the towers of central Brisbane, that subtropical city of hills that drops to the winding river and its silent, fast-moving catamaran ferries.

  Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, is the one that offers the most extraordinary view to the arriving traveller. If we’re lucky with the weather and the flight path, the plane will descend directly over the dramatic heads that define the entrance to the magnificent blue harbour. Even more unique, we are then confronted by the iconic trifecta of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the already bustling ferry terminal and, most spectacular of all, the arching white sails of the Bennelong Point Opera House. For Australians, the long beaches, the brilliant blue sky, the sclerophy
ll eucalypt forests and the ancient, dry inland in some senses define us. But, if we’re thinking in terms of human constructs, it’s that conjunction of Sydney Harbour, the coat-hanger Bridge and the Opera House that both welcomes us home and provides an unforgettable introduction to those visiting modern Australia.

  Mostly from the nineteenth century, the great European opera houses tend to be embedded in cityscapes and, as a consequence, we don’t normally see them from the air. Viewed across a street or plaza they can be imposing, but much of their visual impact is more decorative and internal. By contrast, the spectacle of the Sydney house is immediate, external and dominant in the land/waterscape. It stands alone on a site that projects into and is largely bounded by the Harbour. And you don’t need to pay the dollars for an opera ticket (though you might find that a surprisingly delightful experience), or to have even climbed the steps to the foyer, to be acutely aware that this building is an ambitious statement of pride and achievement. Like the columns, theatres and coliseums of classical antiquity, and the flying buttresses and vaulting space of the mediaeval Gothic cathedrals, the soaring structure of the Sydney Opera House is an in-your-face statement of human ambition and innovative design, a reach for something beyond the mundane. It defines Australia globally as more than just a mine, a farm and a venue for competitive sport.

  For any opera, music or live performance fan, the Sydney house is a special place. Though identified with opera, the building is, in fact, a complex of different-sized theatres that serve a variety of functions. And, whatever you’re attending, it’s worth taking advantage of the interval to sip a glass of champagne (or some other fizzy) in the bar that overlooks the Harbour. Cruise ships are lit up, ferries dart back and forth, and it is just pure magic. One evening, I had the experience of being a keynote speaker there, then sitting next to Anne, the Royal Princess, at the dinner that followed. The first and only member of the British Royal Family I’ve met, she was charming, perceptive, informed and an excellent conversationalist. Though I remain committed to the idea of an Australian Republic, that’s no reason to disrespect good people who work hard and use their hereditary status to achieve positive outcomes.