Scouse honour

I left Liverpool 40 years ago, but I still regard the city as home: I am tied to the past by the unbreakable strings of memories and beginnings. If an uprising broke out in Liverpool — and God knows it’s often threatened — I would rush to the barricades, like those exiled Jews who returned to defend their country during the Six Day War. And that, following an unfortunate leading article in last week’s Spectator, is what I am now doing.

The city I grew up in, a quarter destroyed by the bombs of the Luftwaffe, had once been a monument to trade and commerce. When my father was born, there were sailing ships in Salthouse Dock. Such ships had carried cotton goods to Africa, refilled their holds with slaves, borne them in misery to the West Indies, and returned in triumph loaded with sugar and rum. My father served as a cabin-boy on a sailing ship to America; later, so he said, he imported the first safety matches from Berlin, dealt in diamonds in Holland, lived for some dark, unspecified purpose in Dublin during the Troubles, dabbled in shipping, cotton and property. By the time he was 30 he was in ‘a good way of doing’. Doors opened to him without appointment. A rosebud in his buttonhole, he pranced like Fred Astaire up the steps of his beautiful Cotton Exchange. That was before the strike of 1926, the slump that followed in 1929, and his subsequent bankruptcy.

A month ago I returned to Liverpool to attend the funeral of Lady Margaret Simey, originally from Scotland and a tireless supporter of the city in troubled times. She was the gallant lady who, as a magistrate and member of the county council, was appointed chairman of the police committee set up after the riots of 1981, and clashed with Michael Heseltine and the government.