National Museums Liverpool Blog - transport

A divine Clarice Cliff 'tea for two' set from Age of Jazz.

It's an eclectic selection and there are some great books, my personal favourites being 'When Time Began to Rant and Rage...' which is a fab book of Irish figurative work and totally worth a fiver,  Age of Jazz: British Arts Deco Ceramics as I'm a sucker for a deco teaset, and British Watercolours and Drawings from the Lady Lever's collection.

If you've still not got a John Moores catalogue then now is the time to buy one as they're reduced to £7.50. And if you buy it from the Walker shop you get the John Moores China version for free.

At first families back home in Liverpool were oblivious to the horror that had befallen their loved ones.

On November 23 1942 my grandmother watched from Crosby beach as Liverpool liner SS Ceramic left the River Mersey. Her husband Fred was aboard working as a steward. Clutching her three-month-old baby, Annie Felton waved the ship off, unaware that this would be the very final farewell.
 
The 18,400 ton Ceramic was launched in 1912 by Harland and Wolff in Belfast. She was the first ship built by White Star Line after Titanic and spent her years sailing the Liverpool to Australia route.

She was nicknamed “the relief of Bootle” because she’d offered work to jobless Liverpool seamen taking them off the dole queues.

On this day 70-years-ago (December 6 1942), Ceramic was en-route to Sydney. But she never made the Harbour Bridge. The merchant ship would be torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic off The Azores.

In deep of night U-515 aimed its torpedoes and unleashed hell. Passengers and crew scrambled into lifeboats, but this only prolonged the agony. As lifeboats capsized there was no escape from chaos of storm and sea.

Of the 656 men, women and children aboard, just one survived. U-515 emerged to pluck just one person from the carnage - sapper Eric Munday. It would be 10 months before the fate of Ceramic would be known back in Liverpool.

The sinking remains one of the worst shipping disasters of all time. The definitive story of Ceramic and account of sole survivor Eric Munday is available in a book by Clare Hardy called: “SS Ceramic – the untold story”: www.ssceramic.co.uk

SS Ceramic photograph is from the collections of Merseyside Maritime Museum. Our Maritime Archives and Library holds an extensive collection of maritime books and archives spanning three centuries, including one of the finest collections of merchant shipping records in the UK. www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/archive/

By Dickie Felton

Our work placement student Jacob Cook tells us why the transport collection at NML is so important:

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Yesterday I was given the rare opportunity to visit the museum store and I got to see just how many valuable artefacts the museums in Liverpool have in their collections. It’s a shame they don’t have the space to display them all.

We were told that not many people are allowed into the storage facility so I instantly felt privileged. Even though some of the things I saw (century old vehicles) weren’t exactly exciting, they told their own story about my home city and gave an insight into how my family would have lived only a few generations before me.

From fire trucks to taxis, boats to wheelbarrows, it was like seeing the natural progression of travel all in the same place.

There is no denying that this stuff matters. People work hard to preserve these objects so that future generations can learn about their past (not just from a book). I think that this is the ultimate example of pride to be from Liverpool.

Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post & Echo

I have some fabulous foxtrot 78 rpm wax records from the 1920s which evoke the crazy days when people reacted to the horrors of the Great War.

This was also a time when countries such as the United States started to put restrictions on immigration after the great free-for-all when virtually any healthy person could settle.

The three sister ships took settlers to Canada in the closing years of the great age of emigration which lasted from 1830 to 1930.

In 100 years nine million people set sail from Liverpool for new lives, making it probably the greatest emigration port in world history.

The Andania, Antonia and Ausonia were A Class liners built by Cunard in the 1920s for the Canadian service. All were about 14,000 tons and carried about 1,700 passengers.

In Merseyside Maritime Museum’s emigration gallery there is a fascinating 1923 film called Travel Cunard Line. This would have been shown at the ever-increasing numbers of cinemas as well as trade fairs and other promotional events.

There are views of the new Cunard Building with trams rattling outside, ships on the river and passengers embarking on liners at the Princes Landing Stage.

Stage hands skilfully handle ropes securing a liner, people hurry to board as crowds wave from the stage. A ferry boat scurries nearby.

Third Class passengers make their way up the gangplank, smartly dressed for the voyage to new lives. They hand boarding passes to Cunard staff. Two young travellers are framed in a lifebelt marked Andania Liverpool.

Kitchen staff work hard over huge ranges in the galley of the Ausonia. Third Class passengers are seen at breakfast.

An oil painting by Arthur J Burgess is also on display in the gallery (pictured). It represents one of the three A Class liners. She is pictured at sunset heading out to sea with two yachts off her port side.

The Ausonia was built in Newcastle by Armstrong, Whitworth & Co and made her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Montreal in August 1921. She had a fairly uneventful career and was requisitioned by the Admiralty in 1939 and converted into an armed merchant cruiser.

She ended her days as a repair ship for the Mediterranean Fleet from 1958 to 1964. Ausonia was scrapped in 1965.

The Antonia, built by Vickers at Barrow, followed a similar career path before being scrapped in 1948.

Andania, built by Hawthorn Leslie & Co of Newcastle, was not so fortunate. After working on the Liverpool – Montreal route, she also became an armed merchant cruiser at the start of the Second World War. She was torpedoed and sunk off Iceland in June 1940, fortunately without loss of life. 

This is an edited version of the Maritime Tale that originally appeared in the Liverpool Echo.

Seaforth Conqueror - image courtesy of Liverpool Daily Post & Echo

I had several toy boats as a child ranging from wooden yachts to a plastic submarine that fired red torpedoes.

These paled into insignificance with the huge model sailing ship my friend treasured – it was kept in the bath. I can see it now with three masts towering above the soap dish.

I think they used to put it on the model yacht lake at Liverpool’s Newsham Park. I haven’t seen anyone use this pond for boats recently but there are plenty of fishermen.

This model (pictured) reminds me of a plastic clockwork motor boat I had about 1957. On a beach I wound it up, let it go and it never came back – I forgot to set the rudder to make it return.

The offshore oil and gas industries grew from small beginnings in Victorian times, gradually developing into the sophisticated systems that are widespread today.

Support vessels have developed in tandem with the growth of the industry. They provide vital assistance to enable the process of extracting oil and gas from the seabed to run smoothly.

The first submerged oil wells were created about 1891 in the United States. Five years or so later the first salt water oil wells were drilled under the Santa Barbara Channel in California.

In later years wells were drilled in tidal zones and by the 1920s concrete platforms were being used in Venezuela. In 1923 oil was extracted from the bed of the Caspian Sea using an artificial island.

Ten years later steel barges were being utilised to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. An offshore drilling platform came on stream in 1937 standing in just 14 ft of water off the coast of Louisiana. By the end of the 1940s platforms were operating out of sight of land.

Modern offshore drilling methods were largely perfected in the 1960s as oil companies moved into deeper and deeper water to reach fields.

Britain started its major offshore oil and gas industries in the 1970s with the North Sea and Morecambe Bay becoming prominent.

On display at Merseyside Maritime Museum is a 1:100 exhibition model of the Seaforth Conqueror, a powerful Offshore Support Vessel (OSV), built in Aberdeen in 1976.

The 224 ft long Seaforth Conqueror was originally used as an anchor handling vessel for North Sea rigs. In 1987 Seaforth Conqueror was sold to Norwegian operators and two years later re-sold to British owners Toisa Ltd (Sealion Shipping) of Farnham, Surrey.

Under her new name Toisa Conqueror, she spent several more years in the North Sea and was scrapped in Mexico in 1999.

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. A paperback – Mersey Maritime Tales (£3.99) – is available from the museum, newsagents and bookshops.

As a young news reporter in the 1970s I flew by helicopter to an exploratory gas rig in Morecambe Bay on a facility trip. We were taken on a fascinating tour but what I remember most was how strange we all looked in flight suits and helmets.

This was especially true of Ron and Les Clare – twin brothers who were at that time the Liverpool correspondents of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Express respectively. Oil and gas rigs may not be the most beautiful structures on the seas but they have become familiar sights off our coasts. A 1:100 exhibition model of the Sovereign Explorer semi-submersible oil rig at Merseyside Maritime Museum bristles with amazing detail and demonstrates the supreme practicality of these craft.

In 1981 shipbuilders Cammell Laird of Birkenhead received an order from Dome Petroleum Ltd of Canada to build this drilling unit for offshore oil exploration. At that time it was the most valuable offshore contract obtained from abroad for a British yard, marking the start of a new era for Laird’s. The massive Sovereign Explorer was handed over in June 1983. Standing at 109 metres, she was specially designed to tap the vast resources of oil located beneath the sea bed in the North Sea’s British section.

Sovereign Explorer was a steel catamaran where two huge hollow barges or pontoons supported a three-deck platform on four columns. She was capable of drilling to a depth of 7,600 m and exploring underwater depths of up to 600 m in severe wind and sea conditions. Another 1: 100 exhibition model depicts the self-lifting offshore accommodation platform AV-1 of 1985, also built at Cammell Laird’s, It was built for British Gas for use in the Morecambe Bay Gas Field. This unit had four 88 m legs with a hydraulic jacking system enabling it to operate in tidal waters to a maximum depth of 47.5 m. It had a helicopter landing deck (helideck), storage areas, workshop, cinema and gymnasium. A huge crane could lift up to 150 tonnes over a radius of 50m.

A gangway provided access to adjacent gas or oil rigs. Until 1975 most of Britain’s oil had to be imported and natural gas came in liquid form on tankers from North Africa. Once natural gas and oil were discovered in the North Sea, a number of fields were developed off North East Scotland and further south. Fields were later developed in Liverpool and Morecambe Bays. Before Britain’s resources began to decline, the industry supported more than 300,000 jobs including 4,000 seafarers on various kinds of offshore and support vessels.

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. A paperback – Mersey Maritime Tales (£3.99) – is available from the museum, newsagents and bookshops.

Object number 1 arrives at the Museum of Liverpool

The Overhead Railway carriage - which many will remember from the basement display in the old Liverpool Museum before it became World Museum - has been conserved in a project funded by our membership scheme. Now fully restored, this morning it was delivered to the Museum of Liverpool ready to go out on display there. This makes it the first object in the brand new museum, which opens next year.

It was quite a sight to see the carriage arriving and travelling past the Liver Building, as it once would have done, full of passengers enjoying the view. Today there was quite a crowd at the Pier Head to greet it. If you didn't make it down you can see some photos of the carriage's last journey on our Overhead Railway Carriage goes home set on Flickr - and keep an eye out for it in the local news tonight.

A builder’s model of the Coast Lines’ motor vessel Ocean Coast of 1935. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post and Echo. 

The idea of taking a slow boat to China is very appealing to me but the company would have to be good and the surroundings congenial.

Travel should be enjoyed as a part of a wider experience rather than just as a means of getting somewhere. Between the ages of 16 and 24 I went on many walking holidays, savouring the people and places I encountered.

Sea travel offers similar experiences as events unfold gradually so we are able to adjust better to our surroundings. It is also much more comfortable and relaxing than air or road travel, for example.

More than 70 years ago people could take a cruise from Liverpool to London, stopping at a number of ports on the way.This was still a comparatively leisurely age with large numbers of people being carried across the seas and oceans. Air travel was in its infancy as passenger aircraft were only capable of carrying small numbers of passengers.

Aerodromes were the provinces of the very rich – everyone else going abroad took to the waves. Likewise road travel was still a big adventure. Before the Second World War, lorries were only permitted to travel at slow speeds.

They would frequently break down and had great difficulties going up hills. Roads crawled through every town and village on tortuous routes across the country before the age of the bypass. It is not surprising, therefore, that some people still preferred to travel by sea between British ports – as they had for centuries – if they had the time and money.

Coast Lines grew into the largest coaster company in the world after being formed in 1913 from the merger of three Liverpool coastal shipping companies. Business declined in the 1950s largely due to the growth of road transport.

At Merseyside Maritime Museum’s World Gateway gallery there is a builder’s model of the Coast Lines’ motor vessel Ocean Coast of 1935 (pictured). She ran a regular cargo service between Liverpool and London.

The 1,700-ton Ocean Coast carried general cargo and up to 10 passengers. The round trip took about 10 days and made an unusual cruising holiday.

Ocean Coast was withdrawn from service in 1964 and she was sold to a Greek company. A smaller half model in the Life at Sea gallery shows how mixed cargo was stowed on the Ocean Coast.

Most cargo vessels carried a wide range of goods. The Merseyside Maritime Museum holds the Coast Lines archives (see our Archives section on our main site).

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. A paperback – Mersey Maritime Tales (£3.99) – is available from the museum, newsagents, bookshops or from the Mersey Shop website (£1.50 p&p UK).

Wilson's cooking apparatus poster. Image courtesy Liverpool Daily Post and Echo

I enjoy cooking and this weekend helped prepare a traditional Christmas meal for six at Lowlands, the Victorian mansion in Liverpool where I am a trustee.

You do not need a great deal of space to cook a good meal – I once went on a French submarine for breakfast and was amazed at the tiny galley. They dished up their own Gallic version of black puddings.

Good food is very important at sea both to seafarers and passengers and this is even more so over Christmas for those who find themselves away from traditional family gatherings.

In the past, sailing ship crews were unlikely to get much change from their everyday diet of water, bread, ship’s biscuits, salted meat, dried peas, rice, tea, coffee and sugar. The best they might expect at Christmas was a double ration of salt pork followed by plum duff (thick flour pudding).

It was not possible to have fresh food on board ocean-going ships before the advent of steam and refrigeration.

However, some innovative cooks might use the bounty of the sea or land they were passing at Christmas. There are reports of crews being dished up such delights as penguins, turtles and even porpoises.

Robert Louis Stevenson captured the atmosphere in his poem Christmas at Sea:

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it’s just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessed Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard’s was the house where I was born.

The advent of large liners transformed catering at sea for passengers. British companies manufactured top-of-the-range equipment so that ships’ kitchens could produce top class meals.

On display at Merseyside Maritime Museum is eerie film footage taken on the wreck of the Empress of Ireland which sank off Quebec, Canada, in 1914 with the loss of more than 1,000 lives.

A huge cooking range looms out of the gloom, clearly embossed with the words Henry Wilson Co Ltd, Cornhill Works, Liverpool. This company supplied and fitted most of the kitchen, pantry and bakery equipment for such ships as the Titanic, Lusitania and Empress of Ireland and many other passenger liners. Its cooking ranges for Titanic and her sister Olympic were at the time possibly the largest ever made.

This contemporary advertisement from the summer 1911 issue of Shipbuilder shows one of the huge ranges.

A new Maritime Tale by Stephen Guy appears every Saturday in the Liverpool Echo. A paperback – Mersey Maritime Tales (£3.99) – is available from the museum, newsagents, bookshops or from the Mersey Shop website (£1.50 p&p UK).