The Liverpool Experience

Late in January I braved the weather, and the weather disrupted travel, to return to Liverpool Central Library, to undertake an 11-day research trip, endeavouring to find more examples of Runaway Slave advertisements in the English newspapers.

Before I get to the meat, a few words about Liverpool. What a wonderful city! The people are friendly and welcoming – two stopped, unbidden, and gave me instructions for direction finishing with a nod and a smile – and remind me very much of home, Glasgow. There is a similar couthie air, and it really helped me relax from the off. Thank you Liverpool!

Liverpool Central Library is a wonderful building. Flanked by the World Museum Liverpool and the Picton Reading Room, its neo-classical Victorian style is at once both impressive and humble. The inside, refurbished in 2013, provides a contradictory modern look: with gleaming stair cases, an attractive atrium that – in conjunction with the glass and white wood panelling – brightens all five floors, and a busy, buzzing clientele, the transition between old and new is spectacular rather than jarring. The staff are all uniformed and welcoming, accommodating and supportive, and it was a real pleasure working alongside them.

My day would start with the lift up to the fourth floor (almost invariably with an excellent coffee in hand from the ground floor’s café) and either a left to the microfilm readers, or right to the Archives room. There were four papers that I needed to cover for our period of 1700-1780:

Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser

The Liverpool Chronicle (which then turned into…)

The Liverpool Chronicle and Marine Gazetteer

The Liverpool General Advertiser or the Commercial Register

The first three above were on microfilm. Microfilm can be quicker than searching through hard copies, and avoids sticky fingers and damage to the originals, but it is fairly monotonous, and not much fun on the eyes! Apart from making the capture of something interesting more difficult, for example with a camera, the reels can be worn and extremely faint in places. This is, of course, not peculiar to Liverpool Central Library’s holdings – this goes for library holds of microfilm all over Britain, and the importance of not giving out the originals, but still providing people access to the information, is underscored when you see the tens of people using microfilm every day in libraries. Certainly Liverpool was busy with people researching their ancestors, a hugely popular pastime that I haven’t, yet, found time for.

So the first six days of my trip were given to hand-reeling through microfilm. While there are an equal amount of hand and electronic microfilm readers, the hand-reeled ones were often less busy and provided a bigger image from the film. Something about using microfilm feels very Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (the Alec Guinness version) and I caught myself giving a few furtive glances behind now and then, and once even surreptitiously assessing the possibility that the 80 year old gran next to me researching the cooking pages of the 1920s Liverpool Echo might be a covert agent of the KGB. I wouldn’t do well under torture.

Luckily, she was just another body interested in the research of ancestors (Rosa Klebb in this instance), and my research continued apace.

On day 7, I had finished all the microfilm reels and, with a contented sigh, knew I had only one paper left: The Liverpool General Advertiser or the Commercial Register, edited by one John Gore. And better yet, it was the original copies.

Newspapers are a wonderful artefact, and I thank my stars that I’m in the position of being able to read, examine and analyse them for both the project and my own research. There is something magical about reading original copies, like you are transported back in time, you can hear the hustle and bustle outside, the bell as someone comes in with an advert for entry into next week’s paper – it’s delightful.

My daydreaming of being a Liverpool newspaperman of the 1700s was helped by the fact that these were the very papers John Gore had himself used. He had taken his pen to each and every page – marking down who still had to pay, which adverts needed amended, how many more editions the adverts would last, and there were even notes of his own interest, separate from issues of governing the paper. It was fascinating, and whenever I look back on these years, I will always fondly remember reading and handling up to three-hundred-year-old newspapers, a real experience! Some of the quirkier finds were posted both on my twitter account, and blog.

The Liverpool Research

It was particularly disappointing that a greater number of Liverpool newspapers from the 18^th century were not available, some were damaged during a previous move, and others were not kept at all – there is only ephemera of the Liverpool Courant of 1712, for example, which is reckoned the city’s first newspaper. Of the four newspapers I was examining this trip, several years were missing, which is extremely frustrating from a perfectionist point of view, but also from a humanitarian point of view.

Why humanitarian? Well, I felt like I was missing examples of advertisements that, while obviously not helping the individuals, would help paint a greater picture of what 18^th century Britain was like for the enslaved. The nine-year-old supposed Angolan boy will never get justice, but by highlighting his case and others, we can hope that such awful scenes as the auctioning of people will be remembered, at the least.

Unfortunately, he was not the only person auctioned and sold, as the Liverpool papers held many adverts of the same ilk. Almost completely male, it was touching and saddening whenever I came across and advert. While runaway adverts at least contain some hope that the enslaved found freedom, the For Sale adverts convey an image of a lifetime’s servitude and mistreatment.

The Liverpool General Advertiser, or the Commercial Register, Friday 2nd December 1768, p.2

To be sold by Auction,
On MONDAY next, the 5^th instant December,
At Eleven o’Clock in the Forenoon;
At the House of Mr. WILLIAM STAINTON,
The Sign of the Custom-House, in Brooks’s-Square,
A very handsome NEGRO BOY,
About 11 or 12 Years of Age;
And very suitable for a Gentleman’s Family.
Enquire of the said Mr. Stainton.

The Runaway adverts ran to almost double the amount, which offers some hope, and keeps me turning the page. Alongside the image of working as a newspaperman from the period, I tried to imagine how everything would appear to a young boy or girl, perhaps straight from the African coast and so with no grasp of the language, how bizarre and frightening everything would seem, men and women leering at you, gauging your worth. It seems unimaginable to us now, that there might be a re-occurrence of slavery in Britain. And yet there may be as many as 13,000 slaves in the country today. The two trades are not comparable, for a number of reasons, but it is a sobering thought that there just might be more enslaved in modern-day Britain than there was in the Britain of three hundred years ago…

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This piece by Mr. Nelson Mundell. Follow him on Twitter: @NelsonHistory or read more on his  18th century newspaper finds: Peculiarities in the Press 

To find out more about the project, follow this link: ‘Runaway Slaves in Britain: bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century’. Twitter:  @runawayslavesgb

The project is based in History, School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow. The principal investigator is Professor Simon P. Newman; Postdoctoral Research Associate Dr. Stephen Mullen and Postgraduate Researcher and Research Assistant, Mr. Nelson Mundell.