I was in Liverpool this week for a trade show, and the city was basking in June sunshine, making for a very pleasant walk along the Waterfront. I had time to ponder part of my ancestral roots in Merseyside.
My maternal grandfather, Thomas Stanley Clarke Brown, was born in Liverpool in 1894. As he entered his teen years, the Three Graces buildings at the Pier Head were newly opened or still being constructed. The city lost its Unesco world heritage status in 2021 because of the plethora of modern buildings that now surround the historic edifices overlooking the Mersey.
I wondered what Stanley would have thought of the transformed area now, with the former docks attracting visitors from across the globe, sauntering round the walkways that would once have bustled with horses and carts, dockers and passengers disembarking from transatlantic sailings. Stanley himself is listed as arriving in November 1915 at Liverpool on the SS Philadelphia, the musician having joined the ship at New York before heading home to the Old Swan area of Liverpool.
I’m sure he would have been astonished at how his home city looked, 110 years after docking on the Mersey, though enough of the old Waterfront remains for him to have found his bearings. I’m still intrigued as to why he was in New York.
He served with the Royal Defence Corps briefly – their role was to protect sites such as docks – before seeing service with the Cameron Highlanders until 1918. Stanley was a concert violinist and musical director by profession, visiting Keighley Hippodrome and meeting my grandmother Teresa McHale and the rest is my history.
