Proud past of forgotten gem Seaforth

Jan 28 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Time has forgotten the elegant seaside village, boyhood home of a great Prime Minister, but now Seaforth is to be celebrated again. David Charters reports

‘IT WAS, of course, the place to live in those days,” says the doughty lady, who has chosen to combat the skittish weather with a sensible woollen hat, of a style which would have hung happily in the cloakroom of Jane Marple, late spinster of St Mary Mead.

And those with finely tuned senses noted a knowing nod in the emphasis she laid on of course and the.

For she speaks with profound affection of that place, where she bicycled as a girl on legs, which, blessedly, have retained much of their spring and vim.

This is not Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, sage of the tea-rooms, mistress of gossip and diviner of evil, but our own Brenda Murray – gloriously with us to promote Seaforth.

To the ignorant and snobbish, this is the patch of dockland between Bootle and Waterloo, almost forgotten in the hullabaloo about Liverpool being the 2008 European Capital of Culture.

However, to natives and local historians, and Brenda is both, Seaforth is the village in which the young William Ewart Gladstone watched the seals frolic, before buttoning an Eton suit, on his way to growing side-whiskers of Biblical ferocity, as he prepared to be a Whig Prime Minister – never guilty of lifting the gloom with breezy observations.

William was born five miles away in a three-storey house on Rodney Street, Liverpool, but his father, John, a merchant, shipbuilder and slave owner with sugar plantations in Demerara, had bought 100 acres of Litherland Marsh, on which he had built Seaforth House.

The Seaforth name came from his wife’s father, Lord Seaforth.

The family of four sons, two daughters and servants, moved there in 1813, enjoying horse-riding and bathing on the sandy beach.

Soon, other fashionable families followed the example and collectively their homes became the village of Seaforth.

In 1918, John Gladstone was elected Tory MP for Lancaster and was soon attracting men of distinction, wealth and learning to his home.

He invited William Rawson, of Cheshire, to become vicar of the local St Thomas’s Church and to start a small boarding school for the Gladstone sons and other well-to-do boys from the North West, preparing them for the grand public schools.

It was during these days that William would write to his father about the goings-on in Seaforth.

“At 13, he went to Eton,” says Brenda.

“He was a model pupil there. His three older brothers didn’t work and weren’t so clever and they were always getting the strap, but he was a model pupil.”

On Thursday, March 29, 1821, shortly before he started at Eton, William wrote to his father: “The weather has lately been rainy . . . The wind was so strong one night that it carried away the wooden roof of one of Mr Rawson’s out-houses in which he kept his tools. The orchard wall is actually falling inwards. I hope you continue to give my seals your powerful patronage. I am, my dearest father, ever your most affectionate and dutiful son.”

In an earlier letter, he wrote: “I am really writing for very little use and there is a great scarcity of news in this part of the country. The poplars are not all come out into leaf, indeed very few of them, but all the other trees are out and Thomas (probably the gardener) is to begin gravelling.”

It is to tell of Seaforth’s beginnings and development that the South Sefton Local History Forum is holding a local history exhibition with paintings and photographs at Our Lady Star of the Sea Church, on February 9. Another of the Rev Rawson’s pupils was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-1881), the theologian and poet, who, as a pupil at Rugby School, provided the model for George Arthur in Tom Hughes’s book, Tom Brown’s Schooldays.