The “Emigrants to a New World” Gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool

Abstract

THE “EMIGRANTS TO A NEW WORLD” GALLERY AT THE MERSEYSIDE MARITIME MUSEUM, LIVERPOOL D A V II)|. J E R E M Y The Merseyside Maritime Museum, one component of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, is devoted to recording and re-creating Liverpool’s role as the “western gateway” of Europe.1 Trade in commodities and in people had been the port’s business for 300 years. All that rapidly ended in the 1970s and 1980s. World depression saw the 5 miles of docks, basins, and wharves along the Mersey waterfront progressively abandoned. As one response to the precipitous decline of port and city, Margaret Thatcher’s Conserva­ tive government and the EEC have directed £50 million into the restoration of the Albert Dock, a compact but impressive section of the 5-mile complex. Around the four sides of the dock the massive five-story 19th-century warehouses have had their warm orange brick repointed, their cast-iron pillars checked and painted, their stone­ work cleaned, and the stone blocks of cobbled yards renewed. On three sides of the warehouse quadrangle, a property company is letting the ground floor premises as shops and the upper floors as apartments. The fourth side of the Albert Dock warehousing forms the main site of the Merseyside Maritime Museum—other museum properties and two ships lie opposite, around the Canning Half-Tide Basin (see fig. 1). The main museum, representing an investment of £10 million, has 130,000 square feet of space on six floors, 60 percent open to the public. Its collections comprise primarily artifacts and archives (in­ cluding some important company archives). Its major exhibit is the Dr. Jeremy, senior lecturer in economic history at Manchester Polytechnic, was formerly visiting research associate at the Smithsonian Institution, curator of the Merrimack Valley Textile Museum (now Museum of zKmerican Textile History), research fellow in the Business History Unit at the London School of Economics, and editor of the Dictionary of Business Biography. He is the author of Transatlantic Industrial Resolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies between Britain and America. 1790— 1830s (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). 'I am grateful to Mike Stammers, keeper, and Gordon Read, archivist, at the Merseyside Maritime Museum for discussing their collections with me when I visited the museum on July 13, 1989.©1990 bv the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3102-0006$01.00 278 “Emigrants to a New World” 279 Fit;. 1.—The Merseyside Maritime Museum’s main building on the Canning HalfTide Basin and (rear) Albert Dock in Liverpool. (Photos courtesy of Merseyside Maritime Museum.) “Emigrants to a New World” gallery. The purpose of this permanent gallery, located in the basement and opened in 1986 at a cost of£350,000, is to recapture the common elements in the experience of the nine million people who left Europe for North America and Australasia through the port of Liverpool. Reflecting this experience, the gallery is organized in three sections. The introduction outlines who the emigrants were, where they came from, why they wanted to go abroad, how they reached Liverpool, what happened to them there, and the kinds of ships they sailed on. The centerpiece presents a typical 19th-century Liverpool quayside street lined by emigrants’ boardinghouses, a transit shed, and, beyond it, the replica of a 40-foot section of the steerage accommodation on board a mid-19th-century emigrant vessel. Lrom street and steerage the visitor moves to the third section, which treats the emigrant’s vicissitudes in the New World. In this last section there is an interactive computer that visitors are invited to use if they are interested in finding out about their ancestors’ migration through Liverpool; this is supplemented by three publications on sale in the well-stocked museum bookshop on the 280 DavidJ. Jeremy ground floor.2 Accompanying the exhibit are a small guide3 and a packet of facsimile documents (and transcripts).1 How successful is the exhibit? At least two levels have to be evaluated: research and presentation. Emigration research has fo­ cused on three aspects of the phenomenon: motivations, networks of distribution, and adjustment to new economic and cultural condi­ tions. The “Emigrants...