Merseyside Maritime Museum Research Articles

Decolonisation, Diversification, and Decline: Liverpool Shipping and the End of Empire

The publishing and curating career of Mike Stammers demonstrated Liverpool’s multifarious colonial connections. The port city’s overseas trade remained heavily oriented towards markets in the Global South into the era of decolonisation after the Second World War. The non-European trade bias was reflected in the cluster of world-renowned imperial shipping lines which continued to be based on Merseyside. Drawing upon the rich archive collections of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, as well as company histories often written by ex-employees or authors with privileged access to business records, this article explores Liverpool’s experience of decolonisation. It analyses how Liverpool’s maritime cluster was affected by the ending of the European empires, how Liverpool shipowners reacted to decolonisation through diversification, and how the combination of decolonisation and diversification led to the decline of Merseyside’s overseas shipping sector by the late-twentieth century.

The museum and the border: the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the construction of the migrant and refugee

This article examines how the state imagines and represents migration. Using the Merseyside Maritime Museum as a frame, it provides key insights into how perspectives of time and particular constructions of colonial history have contributed to a system of immigration law that is characterised by a policy of institutional forgetting.

Comment from the Field

Held at the Merseyside Maritime Museum on 13 October 2015, this conference brought together recent research, policy, and practice to discuss the latest developments in challenging hate crime. Organized by the International Criminological Research Unit (ICRU) at the University of Liverpool, in with Merseyside Police and Moving On with Life and Learning (MOWLL), the importance of partnership echoed throughout the day. The transdisciplinary nature of the conference invited speakers from a range of fields to explore the impact of hate crime for the communities too often placed at the centre of victimology. The wide range of speakers included activists, academics, and practitioners representing disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity. While recognizing the unique cases of hate crime for these different communities, the idea of collaboration was central to developing future debates that could continue to challenge all aspects of hate crime.Introducing the day's keynotes, Professor David Ormerod employed a political interpretation of hate crime. In relation to the project assigned to the Law of Commissions by the Ministry of Justice, he provided a brief outline of the Commissions response for the development of hate crime legislation. The primary concern underpinning this project was the need to extend the categories of aggravated and stirring up hatred so that they applied to all five protected characteristics. In a politically informed exploration of the conceptual tensions underpinning hate crime legislation, Professor Ormerod concluded by giving the final recommendation of the Commission not to extend the current offences. Although justified on the basis that such offences lacked relevance to the forms of hate crime most often experienced by both lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), and disabled communities, this conclusion generated a varied response among the academics, activists, and professionals in the room. While I recognized the political complexity that legislative change entails, this conclusion left me pondering the political misinterpretation of a human rights agenda that continued a system of legislative discrepancy. Moreover, I could not help feeling pessimistic about the political developments aiming to challenge hate crime. If disabled and LGBT communities are not given equal status and protection in legislation, I wonder how they might gain this in a society that has historically nurtured a rejection of difference.Centred on a approach to the of hate crime, Professor Paul Iganski invited us to move away from the criminological focus of reporting crime toward a perspective on both the spatial and psycho-social consequences. The psycho-social approach extended my own interpretation of victimization, and led me to focus not only on the instant physical and emotional effects of hate crime but also on those of post-traumatic stress, identity, and visibility. Perhaps of greater impact, however, Professor Iganski reaffirmed the spatial impact of hate crime, such as the sense of locational imprisonment, whereby many communities feel restricted and have to avoid certain areas that threaten their identity. The unsettling severity of a global problem questions the cultural and social conditions in which hate crime is nested, probing the need for preventative measures on both individual and community levels. Professor Iganski's attempt to move toward a public health approach therefore encouraged a model of resistance and prevention predicated upon a communitive challenge to hate crime.These keynotes introduced the conference to hate crime in relation to race, religion, gender identity, and sexual orientation. However, my main reflections here are on the work of Professor Alan Roulstone regarding disablist hate crime.1Professor Roulstone introduced the conference to many of the issues faced when challenging disablist hate crime. …

British Veterinary Association annual general meeting, 2012

The 2012 annual general meeting of the British Veterinary Association was held at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool, on September 29, at the end of the Association's annual congress

Random Sample

A landing card presented by Albert Einstein upon his arrival in Belgium in 1933 went on display at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool on 10 May. Losing Control , a new film by former biophysicist Valerie Weiss, is now on the festival circuit and will make a stop at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., in October. And this week's numbers quantify visible stars in Orion, the economic impact of the Human Genome Project, and a donation to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Reconfiguring the shipping news: maritime's hidden histories and the politics of gender display

This paper discusses the book Hello Sailor! The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea published in 2003 by Paul Baker and Jo Stanley, re‐interpreted as a landmark temporary exhibition Hello Sailor! Gay Life on the Ocean Wave at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool from where it travelled in 2007 to other maritime museums. Based largely on oral history interviews and part of a hidden histories project, the book recovers the previously repressed twentieth‐century histories of gay sailors in the ‘gay heaven’ of the merchant navy. This paper explores the construction of gay seafarers presented in the book and exhibition. It reveals what can be understood about the re‐presentation of gendered identities and relations through the celebration of camp and cross‐dressing. Baker and Stanley draw on queer theory rather than gay and lesbian studies, and argue that the recovered history is not about civil rights but is rather‘a politics of carnival, transgression and parody’. The book and, to a greater extent, the exhibition, however, only partially unravel two important issues: sex and misogyny. The present paper asks what light ‘hidden histories’ re‐presented in museums can shed on gender and sexual relations in the present.

Muslim Geographies

“Muslim Geographies,” a conference and public lecture organized byRichard Phillips (University of Liverpool) with support from the Economic&Social Research Council (ESRC Research Grant RES-000-22-1785), tookplace on 4-5 April 2008 at Liverpool University and the Merseyside MaritimeMuseum. The event had several goals: to draw together and advancegeographical research involving Muslims, provide a forum for debate aboutthe spaces that shapeMuslimlives, and establish informed dialogue betweenMuslims and non-Muslims as well as between academics and activists.These goals were pursued through a public lecture and debate, to whichmembers of Muslim, activist, and other local communities were invited. Tomake the conference as inclusive as possible, the eventwas free, some of the sessions were held off-campus, and researchers in architecture, sociology,religious studies, anthropology, public policy, geography, and other disciplineswere invited to participate.The opening session, “Envisaging Geographies of, for, and byMuslims,”traced current trends and future directions in geographical research involvingMuslims. Peter Hopkins (Newcastle) presented, and the ensuing discussionfeatured panelists Claire Dwyer (University College London), Ayona Datta(London School of Economics), and Kevin Dunn (New South Wales). Thepanelists complicated the term Muslim geographies by acknowledging theheterogeneity of Muslims’ experiences and identities and expressed concernabout how academic research represents Muslims. Nevertheless, they identifiedthe purchase of geographical research on key areas of Muslim life,including their integration, relationships, surveillance, and identities ...

Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity

Between 1500 and 1870, millions of Africans were transported across the Atlantic by European traders to work as slaves in the Americas. They were shipped in conditions of great cruelty to lead lives of hard, unremitting labour, subject to degradation and violence. The products of their labour - primarily sugar, coffee and tobacco - were sent back to Europe and the profits derived from slavery helped fuel European economic development in the 18th and 19th centuries. The cost in lives and human suffering was enormous. First published to accompany a permanent gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, this reissue of Transatlantic Slavery with new material documents this era through essays on women in slavery, the impact on West and Central Africa, and the African view of the slave trade. Richly illustrated, it reveals how the slave trade shaped the history of three continents - Africa, the Americas, and Europe - and how all of us continue to live with its consequences.

Engineering myths

Perceptions of Great Engineers: fact and fantasy . Edited by Denis Smith. Science Museum, 1994. Pp. 115, paperback, illus., Price £9.95 ISBN 0 901805 65 3 This book publishes the proceedings of a one-day conference held at Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool on 26 June 1993. It comprises an introduction by Denis Smith, and eight papers by distinguished scholars on aspects of the biography of engineers. This is an important collection, and should be required reading by everyone interested in engineering history. It is nicely produced, though plate 8, illustrating a lathe copying device, has been printed upside down. In his introduction Denis Smith states that the aim of the conference was to examine two historiographical problems, namely the selection of engineers for immortalization, and the growth of a widespread folk tradition within engineering biography. Michael Duffy goes furthest in examining the selection of engineers for immortalization with a paper which shows how the history of engineering has been moulded by ill- formed prejudices against it in Victorian times.

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

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...

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

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.' 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 Conservative 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 stonework 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 (including some important company archives). Its major exhibit is the