City revival

‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ an inquisitive adult asked during the break for tea at a tennis party given by my parents in the Vale of Clwyd, North Wales, c.1948. ‘A cotton broker,’ I replied, wishing to follow in the ancestral footsteps. Then my father’s head shook from side to side, slowly, silently and solemnly at the head of the table.

And so it came to pass that I joined the postwar Liverpool diaspora — to London, in my case — while remaining proud that both my father and grandfather had been presidents of the Liverpool Cotton Association, the latter about 100 years ago when more cotton came to Liverpool than to any port on earth. Before the era of containerisation, in the days when docks were docks and the river Mersey boasted ten miles of them, Liverpool definitely merited its ‘Second City of Empire’ status and title — despite Glasgow’s rival claims.