In June 1999 The Historical Diving Society paid a visit to Liverpool to take part in the City’s Mersey Festival. The event not only proved to be highly entertaining, but provided members and the public with a vivid reminder of this city’s important maritime heritage.

by Nick Baker

A GREAT MARITIME CITY

Liverpool. Even to say the word is to invoke the famous ‘scouse’ accent. Proud linguistic badge of a city so bound to the sea that it may as well be an island rather than an integral part of England. Manchester, a mere twenty miles to the west is, as both Liverpudlians and Mancunians will tell you with ethnic intensity, a wholly different place. Whilst even the most geographically aware may have to think twice before placing Liverpool in Lancashire.

For Liverpool is one of the great maritime cities. Its face and identity set to the West, to the Atlantic, to the Americas and beyond. Liverpool’s famous and imposing waterfront representing, as do those of New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Cape Town and all the principal mercantile centres of the globe, both a division and union between peoples and cultures.

Liverpool’s past is one of fierce fortune-making and awful poverty. A dynamic fluctuating melée mirroring the ebb and flow of the great river Mersey along which commerce and conflict has been conducted over generations of human experience.

Diving took place in the Salthouse Basin, adjacent to the famous Albert Dock, a complex of quays, warehouses and offices which once formed the heart of Liverpool’s commercial waterfront. Built of brick, stone and cast iron – those essential materials of the Industrial Revolution – the docks were the great achievement of Jesse Hartley, appointed Chief Engineer in 1824. An archetypal self-taught man, Hartley was as vernacular as he was meticulous, possessing a grasp of bad language which prompted a contemporary to write "he used expletives which even the angel of mercy would not like to record"!

Prince Albert opened the dock, completed at a cost of £722,000, in July 1845. Its principal feature was a rectangular basin enclosed by a system of five-storey fire-proof warehouses, ground floors flanked by a colonnade of massive cast iron columns. Thus goods could be transferred directly from ship to storeroom, reducing (if not entirely eliminating) damage and pilfering.

The opening of the docks was followed by an exponential growth in trade, bringing with it an explosion in population. As a result Liverpool became one of the world’s first ‘international’ cities with immigrants from Ireland, Wales and Scotland living alongside – if not always in harmony with – Chinese, Russians, Poles and Germans, to name just the most sizeable communities. Liverpool also became infamous as a staging post for Irish immigration to the USA, 300,000 departing in 1847 alone. This was a typical seaport city, where squalor and disease lived hard by fortune-making and ostentatious wealth.

TRADE & WAR

At the centre of it all were the docks, augmented in later years by great extensions into the Mersey, and complemented by the wildly unplanned development of surrounding towns as places of shipbuilding and transhipment.

In 1866, during the American Civil War, Birkenhead built the Confederate cruiser Alabama, which (as a famous shanty tells us) ‘Liverpool fitted with guns and men’ before setting out to cheerfully ‘Sink the commerce of the North’. An incident which brought the Union States and Britain within a cat’s whisker of war. During later wars, with Britain and the US more or less on the same side, Liverpool again played her part as an important strategic Atlantic port and naval base. The so-called Battle of the Atlantic, by which Great Britain stood or fell in WW2, was directed from Liverpool, and the port, its pubs and other diversions became well known to numerous Allied veterans.

DIVING PAST & PRESENT

Liverpool also has a very strong association with diving. The harbour employed divers, of course, and in later years the famous Liverpool and Glasgow Salvage Association had a base and headquarters here. Quite apart from its ‘routine’ peacetime salvage work, the Association formed the backbone of British salvage efforts during both First and Second World Wars; its plant, personnel and ships being seconded to naval use on both occasions. Frederick Young, later Sir Frederick, rose to command the Admiralty’s Salvage Section during WW1, with the honorary rank of Commodore. Sir Frederick was, amongst many other things, a formidable diver as well as marine engineer.

Thus it was to this famous – indeed infamous – place that The Historical Diving Society came in June of 1999, to help celebrate the Mersey River Festival and pay homage to a glorious and colourful past.

The festival, now in its 19^th year is held over two days, and represents a major maritime event, centred around over twenty large vessels and dozens of smaller craft. On the dockside, besides the two major permanent museums, were numerous displays ranging from Morris Dancers to shanty singing, all lubricated by bars and beer tents! In the docks and on the river there was a constant steam of activity, with every kind of in an on-water action, from raft races to a special gay night afloat entitled Fairies Across the Mersey!

LIVERPOOL LANDMARKS

Diving took place within sight of several famous Liverpool landmarks. To the west the Liver Building, whilst to the north both of the city’s cathedrals (Anglican brick neo-gothic and Roman Catholic contemporary – the latter known affectionately as ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’) could be seen. Enhancing the maritime atmosphere was the nearby presence of the tallship Phoenix, whose masts towered over HDS proceedings from the adjacent Canning Dock. Astern of her were two German Navy minesweepers, FGS Pinguin and FGS Loewe, whilst close by several other vessels, vintage and modern, warships and mercantile, were on display. Meanwhile all the dockside museums, businesses and bars stayed open late to provide interest, entertainment and sustenance to HDS members and public alike. From a floating stage in the Albert Dock itself came the sound of every kind of music ranging from brass bands to Beatles

HDS DISPLAYS

On working display were several Siebe Gorman sets provided by HDS stalwarts Peter and Cheryl Wingett and Phil Thurtle, whilst new member Dick Woodward from Staffordshire tried out his newly restored Six-Bolt. All air was provided by Phil’s ‘furniture quality’ Siebe Gorman Admiralty Pattern twin cylinder pump.

Access was via a slipway, which though perhaps not as elegant as a ladder, was nevertheless traditional enough, with cover diving provided by John Smillie Jnr. Remarkably, visibility existed, and a smattering of smaller sea-life demonstrated that efforts to clean up the Mersey are taking effect.

‘Ashore’ an HDS stand was organised and manned by Graham Hullett and a group of volunteers who did their best to fend off the inevitable barrage of ‘scouser’ wisecracks – not a few concerned with ways to remove the display helmets to apparently better homes ("They’re worth how much? I know someone who used to have one of those in his garage!") In between the humour a number of diving reminiscences were volunteered. Several older Liverpool residents were reminded of divers working in the docks, whilst others had encountered the gear in the Merchant and Royal Navies. One old lady had a particularly special memory, recalling that a friend of her family named Charlie Laughton was a diver. Every Christmas he was persuaded to loan his divers socks for hanging up in anticipation of a visit from Father Christmas (as ‘Santa’ was more properly known in those days), "They were marvellous" said the old lady in best scouse, "because they really, really stretched".

The Liverpool Festival was a superb event in a great city. During two very busy days HDS divers made over a dozen dips, always attracting large and appreciative audiences. Once again The Historical Diving Society provided a very special link with the past, an unequalled visual display, made new friends and had a ‘lorra-lorra’ fun!

PHOTOS
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