We recently visited Liverpool where we had the great pleasure of meeting up with friends Ray Costello, historian and author, and Adam Duckworth, who works in the education department at the International Slavery Museum. We took the opportunity of handing over copies of ‘Windrush Pioneers and Champions’ to Adam and Ray and also to donate a copy of each of the ‘Fern and Kate Meet…’ books to Adam.
In addition to being a very good historian, another of Ray’s talents is to organise fabulous weather whenever we visit!
Later, we had a very enjoyable afternoon in Ray’s company as he took us on a walking tour of aspects of Liverpool’s black history that even many Liverpudlians are unaware of.
Let’s start with a quote from Olaudah Equiano’s ‘Interesting Narrative’, Equiano, having been promised his freedom, now finds that he is being sold, he argues that, as they are in England this is not legal:
‘I have been baptised; and by the laws of the land no man has a right to sell me.’
He was given short shrift:
‘Upon this Captain Doran said I talked too much English; and if I did not behave myself well, and be quiet, he had a method on board to make me.’
Needless to say, Equiano lost the argument and was duly bought by Captain Doran.
Being such fine, upstanding citizens, the Doran family have a street named after them in Liverpool:
Ray showed us the building that used to be the headquarters of Heywoods Bank. By introducing a system of promissory notes the bank effectively became a key enabler of the slave trade. The building is now occupied by a restaurant but it’s earlier function is still evident from the doorway:
Ray also showed us the site of the headquarters or unofficial embassy of the Confederate side in the American Civil War.
Britain was officially neutral but there were plenty in Liverpool’s merchant class whose sympathies, because their wealth owed so much to slavery, lay firmly with the Confederacy.
That Liverpool (like several other British cities) owed much of its wealth to the transatlantic slave trade was hardly a surprise but, visiting with someone steeped in local history, showed us how reminders of the shameful trade linger on if you know where to find them.