In May 1909, Leonard Dunning, the head constable of Liverpool, wrote to the Home Office in London to warn that some very serious disturbances were looming in the city. Dunning had previously spent thirteen years in the Royal Irish Constabulary and, as he reminded Whitehall, ‘had a good deal of experience of troubles between Orangemen and Roman Catholics, in the North of Ireland, and here’.
While sectarian conflict was nothing new in the city, the situation was at that time particularly dire, he wrote. ‘Liverpool is in some way peculiar among the cities on this side of St George’s Channel, being comparable to Belfast for displays of sectarian bigotry and hatred, and at the present time the spirit of antagonism is peculiarly evident.’
Dunning explained that members of Liverpool’s Catholic Young Men’s Society had been parading through the city, many dressed in monks’ habits, sometimes accompanied by people from the community known as the Italian Colony. A number of Protestants were enraged that priests were at the head of the parades, carrying the Host, which technically placed them in breach of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. The following month, the Orange Institution placed an ad in the Evening Express newspaper calling for a demonstration to stop the parades.
At the place north of the city centre where the Catholic parade would come face-to-face with the Protestant protest, Dunning’s assistant head constable, Harry Lane, was waiting with 700 officers, many of them on horseback. ‘The rioting was so serious from the very beginning that I had to send for more men,’ Lane reported next day. ‘Several Orangemen drew swords from under their coats. I then gave orders for the street to be cleared, but before this could be done several people were badly hurt. I myself saw one man with an open knife stabbing at all who came near him; swords, iron bars, sticks and belts were freely used.’ Thousands of people were rioting, homes were ransacked and set alight, policemen were beaten and horses injured. A particular method of fighting had evolved during sectarian clashes in the city. Men would climb onto their adversaries’ houses and hurl down the roof slates, injuring people and damaging their homes at the same time.
The rioting continued for several days, consuming much of the North End of the city, and also breaking out in an area to the south known as the Dingle. More than a hundred Protestant families were driven permanently from their homes in the predominantly Catholic Scotland Road area, near the north docks, and more than 150 Catholic families were forced out of their homes in the Netherfield Road neighbourhood, up on a hill two-thirds of a mile to the east. It was probably the worst outbreak of sectarian violence that the city had witnessed, and there were complaints from Protestants of police heavy-handedness. Before the end of the year, Harry Lane had left Liverpool to join the Lancashire Constabulary; shortly afterwards, the Eton- and Oxford-educated Dunning retired early on health grounds.
Occasional clashes would continue until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and resume in earnest in the mid-20s. Some Orangemen still armed themselves with swords during marches and, as the press reported, used them. There was discrimination in some workplaces and many people voted along denominational lines, sometimes for Irish Nationalist city councillors, or for the Liverpool Protestant Party, founded in 1903. The 1920s saw the start of slum clearance efforts, and between the two world wars 140,000 people, or 15 per cent of the city’s population, were rehoused. There seems to have been little attempt to break down the old sectarian divisions: the construction of new tenement blocks may have consolidated them.
During the Second World War, there were rumours of some air raid shelters operating as Catholic- or Protestant-only places of refuge. In 1958 the Roman Catholic archbishop, John Heenan, was stoned while visiting a sick woman at her home off Netherfield Road; in 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, advised against Queen Elizabeth attending the consecration of the city’s new Roman Catholic cathedral for fear of a Protestant backlash. In the following year, Protestant Party candidates were again elected to seats on the city council, albeit for the last time. There were attacks on Orange marches as recently as the 1980s.
And now it has vanished. The violence, the suspicion, the enmity are gone. So, what happened? Why did sectarianism emerge in Liverpool, and then wither and largely disappear? Why is this a city where hatred ran riot? And why did that hatred die?
Like much of the rest of England, Liverpool in the eighteenth century was a place in which anti-Catholicism was firmly embedded; it was perhaps one of the foundational facts of the nation’s life. The city’s exponential growth as a port from the middle of that century attracted people of all classes from across the British Isles; soon, the city’s culture, politics and accent were coloured by Irish, Welsh and northern English influences.
Lying just 135 miles east of Dublin, the city had long had a significant Irish population, and passage between the two cities became more reliable and less expensive once the first paddle steamers began making the crossing in the 1820s. Orange Lodges had been founded in Liverpool and other Lancashire towns not long after the first was established by Ulster Protestants in Co Armagh in 1795; in July 1819 the city experienced its first sectarian riot, which a number of historians say was ignited by an attack upon a small Orange march as it approached the city centre. Although the lodges then ceased marching for a few years, their membership continued to grow, strengthened by immigration from Wales.
A few years later, a new Anglican curate was appointed to a church in the city. Originally from Ballycastle in what is now Northern Ireland, Hugh McNeile was a charismatic figure and a gifted pulpit demagogue. Like many Anglicans of his day, he fervently believed that the protection of his church was a constitutional imperative; he appears to have genuinely believed the pope to be the Antichrist, and saw ‘popery’ as a threat to Anglicanis’s position as the Established Church. In 1835, McNeile formed an organisation called the Liverpool Protestant Association in order to unite middle class Anglicans with both working class members of the Orange Order and the leadership of the Conservative Party. It was soon being said that prospective Conservative councillors required his endorsement, and that he ‘made and unmade Mayors like Warwick made Kings’. The city’s Conservative Party, meanwhile, saw that Protestant fears and prejudices could be harnessed for political ends.
The same year that McNeile founded his Protestant Association saw further rioting in the city, with the leadership of the Conservatives’ opponents, then known locally as the Reformers, conceding that some trouble had been instigated by their Irish supporters. The city’s population was growing rapidly, and with growth came ever more intense competition for work and homes. The 1841 nationwide census was the first in which an individual’s place of birth was recorded: 17 per cent of the people of Liverpool had been born in Ireland. The census suggested that there was an average of 275 inhabitants per square mile across urban and rural England and Wales. In Liverpool the estimated figure was 138,224. Of every hundred children born in the city at that time, fifty-two died before their fifth birthday.
The American novelist Herman Melville, who first visited the city as a young seaman in 1839 – returning in the 1850s to visit his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, then US consul there – wrote a semi-autobiographical novel in which he described finding what had been a woman’ in a cellar near the docks, clutching her children: ‘I knew not whether they were alive or dead.’
And then came the Great Famine.
From 1845, gripped by starvation and disease, Ireland’s population fell by more than 20 per cent as around a million people died and more than a million fled the country. Many came to Liverpool, where immediate – although not continuing – Poor Relief was available, unlike in Ireland. During 1847, the worst year of the famine, Liverpool’s chief magistrate, Edward Rushton, instructed police to count the numbers of people landing from Ireland. Between mid-January and mid-December, the police counted 296,231. The figures appear to have reached their highest point in March that year, when the Commons was told that the number of people landing in the city was running at two thousand a day.
Rushton wrote to the home secretary to say that while 50,000 of the arrivals were not destitute, and around 130,000 were passing through Liverpool en route to the United States, the remaining 116,000 were ‘paupers, half naked and starving, landed for the most part during the winter’. A further 80,000 ‘paupers’ arrived in the city in 1849, 78,000 in 1850 and 68,000 the following year. Others were landing in south Wales, particularly Newport, and in Glasgow, to which both Catholics and Protestants from the north of the island were fleeing – around 50,000 in 1847 alone.
Conditions on the ships to Liverpool could be dreadful: in December 1848, seventy-two of the 206 passengers on one vessel suffocated; the following April, three passengers on another died of exposure. Others, sick and starving, perished shortly after arrival in the city, and early in the morning, police officers would recover their corpses from pavements. A coroner ruled that he and his jury should visit the cellar where Sarah Burns, an Irish mother of seven had died. He found seventeen people crammed into a room with a mud floor, no bedding, and a ceiling so low that no adult could stand upright.
Rushton reported that the city’s ‘labouring classes’ were for the most part sympathetic to the new arrivals, but became terrified when there were outbreaks of typhus. In the Dingle, a memorial was erected to the ten local Roman Catholic priests who died of the disease in 1847 while ministering to the sick. Before long, what would now be termed compassion fatigue began to set in, underpinned by local taxpayers’ realisation that they were funding the Poor Relief that was supporting the immigrants, and not the owners of Ireland’s large estates. The Liverpool Mail claimed that the reasons why ‘the scum of Ireland come to Liverpool and die in thousands’ were ‘idleness on the part of the peasantry and ignorance and extravagance on the part of the gentry’.
Many of the new arrivals found whatever shelter they could in the Vauxhall and Everton areas of the city’s North End. There were more Irish people here than in most Irish towns, with 30,000 estimated to be living in cellars, many of them Gaelic-speakers from the west of the country. It was close to the city’s north docks, a major source of employment. Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, lived cheek-by-jowl. Work was precarious and conflict was common, and not only around July 12th, when members of the Orange Order celebrated the victory of William of Orange over James II in 1690.
By 1850, sympathy for the incomers had largely evaporated, often replaced by resentment and hostility. There had been large Orange marches that year, and the next, and some marchers armed themselves with cutlasses and pistols. There were clashes, countless beatings, one Catholic youth was shot and fatally wounded; another man was beaten to death and a police officer was stabbed. Violence spread across the Mersey, to Birkenhead, and even to Mold, over the border in Wales, where a few hundred Irish had settled, and where they and their homes were attacked. There was outrage in the Liberal press, with the Manchester Examiner laying the blame for the violence at the feet of McNeile. The Tory press blamed the Irish, however, with the Liverpool Mail condemning ‘ferocious Papists’ and insisting that they must not be allowed to ‘interfere with the liberty of the English subject’ to march wherever he wished.
Over the decades that followed, the Conservative Party continued to rely on Protestant support, while the Liberals, who supported Home Rule for Ireland, drew votes from Catholics. At grassroots level the Tories were dominated by an organisation called the Working Men’s Conservative Association, which was founded in 1868, had twelve branches by 1872, and 7,000 members by the end of the century. Until 1935 it was open only to Protestants. Meetings began with the chairman inviting anyone present who had associated with a Catholic to confess their crime.
Irish Catholics and their descendants were also increasingly politically active. In 1885 Thomas Power O’Connor, a newspaperman originally from Westmeath, and a former Daily Telegraph sub-editor, won the Liverpool Scotland constituency in the North End for the Irish Nationalist party. TP, as he was universally known, held the seat for the next forty-four years until his death in 1929. He was the only Irish nationalist elected to a parliamentary seat outside Ireland. Irish Nationalists also contested, and won, city council seats. The future of Ireland apparently meant more to some local politicians, and many voters, than the needs of their city. The year after TP’s election, the first Home Rule Bill was introduced to the Commons, with the aim of granting Ireland greater autonomy within the United Kingdom. Before long there was further violence in Liverpool, with rioting, homes wrecked and churches attacked. One Saturday evening in July that year saw eighty people treated for injuries in just one hospital in the Dingle.
Towards the end of the century another religious agitator in the mould of McNeile descended upon the city. George Wise was an Anglican from south London and, in the words of one historian, Philip Waller, a ‘Protestant crusader and menace to authorities’. The open-air speeches delivered by Wise were so inflammatory that he was twice jailed. In 1903 he formed his own church, which regularly drew a thousand-strong congregation, and also founded the Liverpool Protestant Party, which immediately won three council seats. Electoral pacts with the Conservatives saw Protestant Party candidates standing without Tory opposition; those who were elected then voted in alignment with the Conservatives in the council chamber. The fledgling Labour Party struggled for decades to make headway. The party held high hopes at the 1907 by-election at Kirkdale in the North End, but the Working Men’s Conservative Association mobilised its local members and the seat was won by the Conservative candidate, a Protestant. Ramsay MacDonald, who would go on to lead his party, is said to have concluded that Labour would only progress in Liverpool if Orangeism was broken. The early years of the twentieth century were marked by fierce clashes. People were killed. The violence reached its nadir with the sustained rioting of 1909 and the ‘cleansing’ of the neighbourhoods of the North End. The Scottish historian Tom Gallagher has assessed that religious divisions were even more bitter than in Glasgow at this time, possibly because competition for work was more intense. George Wise died in 1917, aged sixty-two, but his Protestant Party lived on. After the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, the Irish Nationalist Party’s branch in the city picked up a greater number of council seats, then rebranded itself briefly as the Catholic Party.
With the failure to break up religious divisions when new homes were built, people who moved into tenements in the Dingle recalled that one block would be predominantly Protestant, and a neighbouring one largely Catholic. ‘Even as kids,’ one recalled years later, ‘we had to be really careful where we walked.’ People espying an unfamiliar face in their neighbourhood would demand: ‘I or O – what are you?’ At least one tenement in Everton had an Orange Lodge hall located within the building. Couples who entered into what were termed mixed marriages could expect to be ostracised by one of their families, or sometimes both. Sometimes there could be hostility from local clergy. One woman born from a ‘mixed marriage’ in the late 20s described how her Catholic father had agreed to marry her mother at an Anglican church in the area known as Knotty Ash, and they then baptised their first child there. One Saturday afternoon, in a busy shopping street, a local Catholic priest approached her father and asked: ‘Hey John, how’s your whore and her bastard child?’ Her father, she said, ‘decked’ the priest. Frank Neal, a historian who studied sectarianism in the city, once wrote: ‘Anyone born and raised in working-class Liverpool in pre-slum clearance days could not fail to be aware of religious differences within that society and, in many instances, these had a deleterious consequences for friendships and families.’
But by now Labour was beginning to win votes among both Catholics and Protestants.
In 1939, not long after the outbreak of World War Two, Brendan Behan alighted from a ship from Dublin. Shortly afterwards he was arrested at a lodging house in a predominantly Protestant area of Everton. The police raiding party seized him as he attempted to escape through his bedroom window, clutching a suitcase stuffed with potassium chloride, gelignite, detonators ‘and the rest of my Sinn Fein conjuror’s outfit’. Behan was sixteen. He was apparently planning to bomb the city’s docks on behalf of the IRA, or perhaps destroy one or two of the new battleships being built at Birkenhead.
In his prison memoir Borstal Boy, Behan recounts how the police sergeant who led the raid ordered a young constable to stop punching him in the face, then invited him to sit beside him on the bed while the crowd that had gathered outside was dispersed: ‘I don’t think they mean you any good … that landlady of yours won’t have a window left in her house tonight.’ On remand at Liverpool’s Walton Gaol, Behan says that while the handful of warders from London were kind, ‘Catholic warders were the worst … Irish Catholics, worst of all … they showed their loyalty to King and Empire by shouting at me and abusing me.’ The Germans were at the gates, Liverpool’s Irish were picking sides, and some, apparently, had decided that teenage volunteers for Ireland were little more than unwitting Nazi collaborators.
A series of Luftwaffe bombing raids during 1940 and 1941 brought enormous devastation to Liverpool and claimed around four thousand lives. During eight nights in May 1941, 70,000 people were made homeless. Outside London, Liverpool is said to have been the most bombed British city. Doubtless the raids helped to concentrate the minds of men and women who had been embroiled in the lesser conflict rooted in religious animosity. Some would find themselves serving alongside each other in the British armed forces. Nevertheless, sectarian divisions continued to disfigure the city after the war, and perhaps became reheated. Some companies employed only Protestants and others only Catholics. The man who recalled having to be ‘really careful’ while walking around the Dingle as a child in the ’30s, went out to work in 1944, aged fourteen, saved enough money to buy his first suit, and was berated by his father when he arrived home because it was made of brown cloth. ‘He told me it was a cogger’s (Catholic) colour; I shouldn’t be wearing brown or green, but grey or blue.’
Today the slashings, the beatings and the destruction of homes are no longer living memories. People of any faith and no faith at all can walk wherever they wish in the city. Nobody throws stones at Orange marches. Steve Kingston, grand master of the Liverpool Provincial Grand Orange Lodge, says it’s not unknown for women to hoist their skirts and flash their green knickers at them; other than that, the colours of clothing carry no significance.
The conventional wisdom among many older people in Liverpool is that sectarianism broke down when segregated neighbourhoods were disintegrated during a renewed wave of so-called slum-clearance and post-Blitz rebuilding programmes in the years after World War Two. But this raises the question: why did sectarianism not evaporate to the same extent in Glasgow? Although Glasgow is a city whose relationships with Ireland may be significantly different, and whose neighbourhoods may have been more mixed, there were similar housing redevelopments. Yet perceptions of religious rivalries persist. And are there other questions and answers in Liverpool, demanding a wider understanding of matters of faith, culture, economics and emerging forms of identity politics?
The explanations for the remarkable demise of religious division in Liverpool may be many and complex, sometimes contentious and frequently elusive. They may involve town planning, church leadership, employment rights and trade unionism, football, popular music and poetry; and also the links between Liverpool and Ireland, the relationship between Liverpool and the rest of England and between the United Kingdom and Europe. An adequate explanation may also require an understanding of why Liverpool eventually came to see itself as a place apart – neither Lancastrian Protestant nor Irish Roman Catholic – where fans at Liverpool FC’s Anfield ground frequently display an enormous banner declaring ‘We’re Not English We Are Scouse’; a city which, in the words of one writer, believes itself to be ‘the Capital of Itself’.
The enormous housing redevelopments of the postwar years undoubtedly did play a role in the demise of sectarianism in the city. What is less clear is whether this was an accidental outcome, or a planned – if largely undocumented – objective. In 1965 the city council’s chief planner, Walter Bor, produced a document entitled the Interim Planning Policy, in which he noted that religion had had a ‘profound influence’ upon the development of the city. A third of the population were Roman Catholic, he wrote. ‘Concentrations of residents of one particular social class or religious denomination … have important local effects.’ Bor set out plans to demolish and rebuild 50,000 homes over the next twenty years, a programme that he said presented ‘enormous opportunities’. He also warned of ‘certain inherent dangers’, in that his plan would involve ‘a complete upheaval in the structure of the population and great care will have to be taken to secure that a balanced population structure is achieved in new development. This could be achieved through a careful lettings policy.’
Bor was a Czech Holocaust survivor and, perhaps more than most planners, may have been sensitive to the need for his work to avoid disharmonious results. He had escaped Prague together with his lifelong friend Herbert Lom; one young man went on to become an actor, starring in the Pink Panther films alongside Peter Sellers; the other found himself bulldozing the North End of Liverpool. In the event, Bor left the city the following year. After helping to develop the new town of Milton Keynes he wrote an unpublished autobiography in which he lamented Liverpool’s insistence on building high-rise flats. He also described his ‘many confrontations with bigoted small-time politicians’ in the city – pointing the finger particularly at Jack Braddock, the council leader. Braddock was a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who had, in the words of the historian AJP Taylor, ‘lapsed into respectability’ and joined Labour.
After Bor’s departure, many new homes were built in the North End. But large numbers of its residents found themselves being sent to outlying areas of the city region like Skelmersdale, Kirkby and Halewood. People who had lived in the predominantly Protestant areas around Netherfield Road claim that they were disproportionately affected at this time of turmoil. Some older Orange Lodge members describe what happened as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Ron Bather, a former grand master in Liverpool who has recently retired as grand master of England, believes ‘the prime motive was to break up the Protestant areas’, and that while new Orange lodges opened in places like Skelmersdale, population movements did lead to the demise of the Protestant Party. While the primary aim of the rebuilding programme was always the improvement of the city’s housing stock, and desegregation was not an avowed purpose, the break-up of communities which had tended to vote Conservative -–when not voting for the Protestant Party – would have been a desirable outcome for local Labour politicians. Today the areas around Netherfield Road are largely parkland.
A number of historians have examined the rise of sectarianism in Liverpool, but few have studied its demise. One who has is Keith Daniel Roberts, for his 2014 PhD thesis. Roberts says: ‘The priority more than anything else was to get people out of those slums. Bringing about the decline of the Protestant Party may have been a useful by-product. I have nothing to substantiate the claim that the break-up of single-denomination communities was deliberate. Instinctively it makes sense. Objectively, I have no proof. But it wasn’t the sort of thing that anyone was going to write down: it wasn’t going to appear in any minutes.’ Peter Kilfoyle, who was a Labour MP for a north Liverpool constituency for nineteen years and a government minister, doubts that the break-up of single-denomination communities was a deliberate policy, but believes the housing redevelopment programme did have an impact on sectarianism. ‘I think it had a great effect, because you had people living in very, very close communion with people of a similar creed, who suddenly found themselves in new housing estates with people of all sorts of different backgrounds.’
Brendan Nevin, a development consultant who has studied social housing in Liverpool for forty years, believes that frequent changes in control of the city council – and huge errors over predicted population growth – may suggest that the programme was characterised as much by chaos as conspiracy. While Walter Bor and his colleagues were expecting the population to increase, it almost halved to 470,000 during the second half of the twentieth century, as people moved to outlying areas or away from the region altogether. ‘The planners got their population prediction completely wrong,’ says Nevin. But if housing development is part of the reason why sectarianism collapsed in Liverpool – accidentally or otherwise – it cannot offer a complete explanation. After all, development did not eradicate rivalries in Glasgow. What else brought about its almost complete disappearance?
Following the 1945 General Election, Labour began slowly to gain the foothold in Liverpool of which Ramsay MacDonald had dreamt. Very slowly: in 1952 an Orangeman was elected to the council as a Labour candidate in Netherfield, but the party did not take control of the city council until three years later, twenty-one years after it had won power in London, and twenty-nine years after winning in Sheffield. Steadily, class began to replace religion as the main motive behind voting behaviour, and the growth of trade unionism was seen by many to bring real benefits. In 1967, for example, following strike action, dockers finally won the right not to be hired and fired by the day.
Eventually, support for the Conservatives collapsed. Steve Kingston estimates that Orange Lodge members are probably more likely today to vote Tory than other people on Merseyside – ‘it still runs through the Institution,’ he says – but the Conservatives could no longer rely on the votes of working-class Protestants. In the city itself, the Conservatives lost their last two MPs in 1983 and their final councillor in 1998. ‘The lessons were well learned in Liverpool.’ Kilfoyle says. ‘It’s just that they were very slow to learn those lessons.’ The growth of working class solidarity, however, coincided with the city’s ruinous economic decline. Following the UK’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973, and the increase in trade with the Continent, rather than the former empire, this great port found itself to be on the wrong side of the country. Greater air travel and mechanisation rubbed salt into the city’s wounds. Total employment in Liverpool fell by 33 per cent between 1971 and 1985; nationally, the figure was three per cent. It is little wonder that the city lost almost half its population. Immigration from Ireland all but collapsed: there was too little work.
Following serious anti-police rioting in the south of the city in 1981, the Conservative government minister Michael Heseltine produced a remarkable Cabinet paper, entitled It Took A Riot, which recounted the city’s history, detailed the reasons for its economic decline and prescribed a series of solutions. Many of these were acted upon, with admirable results, but by this time Liverpool was seen – and largely saw itself – as a left-wing and anti-Conservative bastion. With unemployment remaining high, and the city council under the control of the far-left Militant Tendency, which was in open conflict with both the Labour Party leadership and the government of Margaret Thatcher, a new sense of ‘us and them’ began to emerge. It was no longer Protestant versus Catholic, but Liverpool versus the London government. London-based media developed a predilection for unpleasant and often poorly researched journalism about the city; articles appeared with headlines like ‘Self-Pity City’, or complaining of the ‘deeply unattractive psyche’ of its inhabitants. A feeling of isolation and neglect developed. In the minds of some, it was no doubt ‘us against the rest of the country’.
Church leaders also played a critical role in removing Liverpool’s dividing lines, particularly from the summer of 1975, when David Sheppard was appointed as Anglican bishop, and the following year when Derek Worlock arrived as Roman Catholic archbishop. In sending Worlock to Liverpool, Pope Paul VI had told him he must work to ensure the city did not become ‘another Belfast’. Sheppard, for his part, could not have been more unlike his Anglican forebears McNeile and Wise. He was the first person to visit Worlock on his arrival. ‘Building bridges between divided groups seemed plain Christian duty,’ he later wrote. Sheppard was a former captain of the England cricket team who had campaigned against apartheid in South Africa. He was hailed by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a man who ‘believed in a God who hated injustice and challenged people to combat it’. Worlock was a lower-key figure, who had served as secretary to a number of bishops and worked with homeless people in London’s East End. He was described in the Catholic review The Tablet as ‘an inspired and too often under-rated Church leader’. He had, however, also offered the view that Catholics might not always avoid contraception and publicly suggested to the pope that the church’s position on divorce and remarriage should be revisited. Sheppard and Worlock quickly formed a bond, taking each other’s beliefs as seriously as they did their own. More than anything, over the next two decades they became a visible symbol of ecumenical respect and reconciliation, walking the city’s streets together, leading services at each other’s cathedrals – finishing each other’s sermons – and encouraging the young members of their churches to spend time with each other. So often were the two men seen together that people in Liverpool dubbed them Fish’n’Chips. The sense of unity trickled down, and other Anglican and Roman Catholic clergymen around the city realised that they too could be seen to be friends. Canon Neville Black, who served as an Anglican curate in Everton from 1964, and later as a vicar, recalls: ‘The hostilities came primarily from the Orange people, the marchers and their bands. Catholics also did their bit.’ He believes Sheppard and Worlock talked on the telephone every day. ‘I also formed very good relationships with Catholic priests – we had no choice but to take the lead.’
On April 15th, 1989, with ninety-four Liverpool Football Club fans crushed to death and more than 750 injured, three fatally, at an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, Worlock decided that the following evening’s Mass at his cathedral should be a special service for the dead, the hurt and the bereaved. Sheppard was on the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides at the time, with no flights or sailings. The coastguard agreed to fly him by helicopter to Prestwick airport near Glasgow, from where the Royal Air Force would fly him to Liverpool. The RAF helicopter was diverted to assist a stricken climber in the Lake District and, by the time it had picked up Sheppard and landed him at the city’s south docks, he had only ten minutes to spare before the start of the service. The police blue-lighted him to the cathedral, where a congregation of three thousand had gathered, with five thousand more, many of them traumatised, standing outside. Worlock delayed proceedings for a few seconds while his friend threw on his robes. Sheppard did not say anything during the service. He did not need to: the two men, and the two churches that they led in the city, needed simply to be seen to be side-by-side at this moment of calamity.
The most intense moment of the embrace between the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches in Liverpool had been the visit of Pope John Paul II in May 1982. An estimated one million people turned out to greet the pope, who took part in a ‘celebration of faith’ at the Anglican cathedral before making the short journey along the aptly named Hope Street to say Mass at the Catholic cathedral. The cheering and applause that greeted him at the Anglican cathedral is said to have ‘gone on and on’. The pope made clear that he was well aware of the city’s economic torments, and spoke of the scourge of unemployment.
The visit to the Anglican cathedral might never have happened. A senior Vatican figure, visiting the city in advance, suggested that it should not. After the visit was announced, the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, the head of the Anglican church and the worldwide Anglican communion – and a native of the city – attempted to deliver a sermon at Liverpool’s Parish Church, but was howled down by members of the Orange Lodge. The protesters attempted to intimidate Sheppard by rocking his car from side to side as he left the church.
Attendances at Orange marches in Liverpool had been in decline for decades before the pope’s visit, but there was an uptick for a couple of years afterwards. After John Paul II had departed, Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church announced that it had formed an alliance with the Protestant Reformers’ Church, which George Wise had founded in Everton in 1903. But nothing much seemed to come of that. But there were still Orange Lodge marches, and occasionally they were attacked. One man recalls this as ‘a Sunday morning ritual’ when he was a child in the early ’80s. ‘On our way to playing football, we’d hopefully come in sight of the Orange Lodge marches, throw bricks at them, run; they would always leg it after us. It was a little game. It’s a bit like when you play football against someone, and you kick lumps off each other while the game’s going on, and afterwards you’re fine, you know?’
During the papal visit there were no clashes, however, and while there was a muted Protestant demonstration, the Orange Lodge did not protest. Perhaps this was to the credit of the Order. David Sheppard took another view. ‘The extremists knew that Liverpool was no longer on their side,’ he wrote in a memoir. ‘When the Pope came, they stayed at home.’ But again, the ecumenical efforts of the churches alone cannot fully explain the waning of sectarianism in Liverpool; ecumenism did not work in Belfast.
Given that the Liverpool Grand Lodge mounts around ten marches on Merseyside each year, the decline in its support has been entirely visible. People come out to line the pavements and, over the years, see fewer and fewer marchers. There are still dozens of lodges across the city region, but the exact number of members is less clear. This may have been inevitable, given growing secularism. The percentage of people in Liverpool who describe themselves as Christian fell to 57 per cent in the 2021 census, although this is still higher than in England and Wales as a whole, and there is a far greater proportion of faith schools in the city than elsewhere in England. It may also be that the decline of the Orange Order is – like the growth of working class solidarity and the increasing number of so-called mixed marriages – both a consequence of the demise of sectarianism, and a catalyst for that change.
Keith Daniel Roberts has conducted polling among Lodge members themselves, asking why they believe membership has fallen. Most pointed to a general decline in religious observance and a loss of interest among younger members. When broken down to take account of age, however, those respondents aged fifty or above blamed slum clearances. There was also a split in Liverpool’s Orange ranks in the late ’80s over displays of support for loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. Several hundred members departed for the Independent Orange Institution after being told that they were not permitted to fly Ulster Volunteer Force banners. Such was the bitterness over the dispute that some people left the Lodge altogether.
This appears to have been one of the surprisingly few episodes in which Northern Ireland’s late twentieth century Troubles impacted Orangeism in the city. Nor did the IRA often target the city at this time, in contrast to its 1939 campaign. Orangeism, although in decline, remains a deeply ingrained aspect of some individuals’ identities, no doubt bolstered by the continuing practice known as ‘cradle rolls’ – enrolling infants into the Lodge when they are just a few days old. Lodge members insist that the support for the monarchy, Protestantism and constitutional government remain their core values; they clearly enjoy their music and regalia, and are proud of their traditions. They say their marches are a witness to the Protestant faith. Doubtless, some march because they always have: it is who they are. Others see the movement as the lingering after-taste of a once bitter history.
A few thousand Merseyside Orange marchers and supporters will still turn out for the most important annual processions on July 12th. As Keith Daniel Roberts points out, that figure might be compared with the numbers who attend the city’s annual Pride event, which can reach 75,000. One clear sign of the easing of sectarian tensions is that it is only the July 12th march that is policed: on other occasions, police are not needed. Some Orangemen in Liverpool see themselves as being among the beneficiaries of a new tolerance. ‘The worst we get is verbal abuse from someone driving past and shouting out the window,’ says Steve Kingston. ‘The occasional egg. But we wouldn’t march around what would be seen as a Catholic area.’
On a bank holiday Monday in May last year, Orangemen and women marched on the Wirral, the peninsula across the Mersey from Liverpool. Their destination was Hoylake, at the mouth of the river Dee, from where King William set sail for Ireland in 1690. There were a few hundred marchers, several bands and a replica cannon. Some men wore tartan trews. One or two were riding mobility scooters. At their head were a young boy and girl, dressed as King William and Queen Mary. At one Hoylake pub a woman could be overheard asking her friend: ‘Why is that girl dressed as Queen Victoria?’ On receiving an explanation, she asked: ‘So what’s an orange lodge?’
Finally, it may be worth looking at the cultural forces that undermined sectarianism. In December 1963, the New York Times magazine introduced its readers to Beatlemania: ‘The most important thing about the Beatles is that they come from Liverpool. In this city, where the Catholics and Protestants still fight every Saturday night after the pubs have closed, there are close to 300 beat groups performing in converted cinemas, cellar clubs – anywhere where an amplifier can be plugged.’ The significance of the Beatles’ sound, the correspondent added, ‘is that it is a raspberry blown in the direction of London’.
The Beatles brought national and international attention to Liverpool. Many other groups from the city enjoyed success in the years that followed: Liverpool bands had twenty-three Number Ones in the charts in the ’60s alone. Then came the poets, figures like Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough, who published The Mersey Sound anthology in 1967. Hard on their heels came a crop of outstanding playwrights and screenwriters. This was also a time when the city’s two football clubs, Everton and Liverpool, were winning a string of trophies.
Everton has been seen by some supporters in the past as a Catholic club, and Liverpool as Protestant. This is a view that may have been formed in the late nineteenth century, when several of the former club’s directors were associated with the Home Rule-supporting Liberal Party, and many members of the latter’s board were members of the pro-union Conservatives. Furthermore, a number of figures from the Working Men’s Conservative Association were involved in the running of Liverpool, while Everton signed a series of Irish players in the 1940s and ’50s. But in fact, the divisions have never been as rigid as in Glasgow, where Celtic and Rangers players and managers – and even officials who have refereed their matches – continue to receive death threats and offers of police protection. Many families in Liverpool include supporters of both clubs, and traditionally, derby matches were occasions for friendly rivalry. When the two teams met at Wembley cup finals in the 1980s, their supporters united to chant one word: ‘Merseyside’. There may have been a greater degree of rancour between rival fans in recent years, but it is a tribalism of the social media age, not sectarianism.
In the North End, the murals of King William on his horse are gone, and new murals of Everton and Liverpool stars have taken their place. Canon Neville Black says the city was greatly united by the campaign to overturn the false narrative about the events at Hillsborough, which resulted in a new inquest jury returning unlawful killing verdicts. ‘Football,’ says Roman Catholic bishop Tom Williams, ‘brought people here together.’ Liverpool’s cultural gifts – music, poetry, theatre, football – are a source of immense pride within the city and help give its people a feeling that it is a special place. The ‘Scouse, not English’ proclamation may be misplaced – and some polling suggests that it is – but there is little doubt that it is a city which sees itself as a place apart from the rest of Britain. Perhaps this is unsurprising: it is a port, which produced generation after generation of seamen, many of whom would have been more familiar with the streets of New York and Buenos Aires than they were with Manchester, thirty-four miles down the road.
But this exceptionalism may also be rooted in the new sense of an embracing, city-wide identity that was forged as the old religious divisions slowly dissolved. David Sheppard and Derek Worlock described this shared Scouse identity in a book that they jointly wrote, entitled Better Together, as having ‘to do with the most intense loyalties’ and “’a sense of belonging’; the people of this city, they wrote, could quickly be ‘united in vigorous response to an enemy’. That enemy could be the Thatcher government, the London media, the police officers who lied about Hillsborough. It could be the football fans from other cities who sing disparaging songs about them still. The enemy is no longer Catholics, however. It is no longer Protestants. The lingering death of sectarianism in Liverpool may have been largely an unplanned affair. Almost accidental at times. But perhaps other communities could do worse than to ponder this city, and ask themselves why it became a place where people ceased to hate.
1/2/2025
Ian Cobain is a London-based journalist and author. His most recent book, Anatomy of a Killing, Life and Death on a Divided Island, is published by Granta.
