A celebration of Liverpool - the Pool of Life

Mar 15 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

“These are often quite spurious in terms of what I was doing, but fascinating. I love the dodgier versions of Liverpool history like the mythology of the Liver Birds and Hitler’s time as a waiter at the Adelphi Hotel.”

In a flash of genius, John poses four Liver Birds striding over the Abbey Road zebra crossing, a la the Beatles album cover. Even without such flights of imagination, Liverpool provides us with a dazzling array of talent and eccentrics.

There was the pirate turned Liverpool dockmaster William Hutchinson, who improved parabolic mirrors on light houses, and William Scoresby, who was one of Liverpool’s last whalers. Scoresby explored Greenland and named geographical features such as Liverpool Land and Roscoe Bay. After retirement, he became a curate on a floating chapel here.

“What a load of Renaissance men they were. In addition to their day jobs as curates and sailors, they also hopped among interests such as amateur astronomy and designing medical or navigational instruments.

“It’s so refreshingly different to today. We can’t cope with Paul McCartney stepping out of his box, producing poetry and exhibiting his art.

“I’m in the peculiar situation of being the designer of my own book. As an illustrator I expected people’s copy to be culled to fit my illustration. Now I’ve got to cut my words to fit my drawings.”

John’s friend and freelance editor Jackie Krendel edited the book, he says “largely to keep my standard of English up”.

“I abandoned the correct approach of trying to be even-handed. For example, with the need to talk about Hillsborough and Heysel, which were Liverpool FC events, but had knock-on effects nationally,” says John.

“When it came to drama there are so many actors associated with Liverpool it became an arbitrary list. Overall, the total number of subjects rose from 130 to 150.”

John’s self-imposed guideline is to take people who affected the city and were affected by it, but were not necessarily born there. Elizabethan playwright Francis Bacon (a candidate for writing Shakespeare’s plays) was MP for Liverpool, but never visited.

“Ultimately, this is just an interesting collection of people, but the process of finding them makes understand how these people made the city.

“Phil Redmond is an intriguing character as his very first episode of Brookside was shown in between the last two episodes of Boys From the Black Stuff.

“Black Stuff showed a Liverpool at a dead end, whereas Brookside was the future with programmes made outside London and following a more business-like agenda as led by Thatcher and Heseltine.”

The caricature of Michael Heseltine was done for a New Statesman article about his appointment as Minister for Merseyside, in which he was expected to produce rabbits (and money) out of hats.

John also plans to give multi-media presentation with illustrations with music and narration, similar to the show based on his book Hitler’s List.

He performed the latter on Liverpool’s Holocaust Memorial Day and will repeat it for the city’s first Limmud (Jewish study day) event, to be held at Hope University on May Day bank holiday.

This show was staged in London and he was deeply touched and humbled that the audience included people who escaped from Nazi Germany as children on the Kindertransport refugee trains.

What do his subjects make of their caricatures?

He says: “Politicians love cartoons of themselves, but they aren’t like normal people. Most people are shocked when they see themselves. I certainly don’t set out to insult,” he says.

Interestingly, John fits into Liverpool’s mainstream art tradition, which is portraiture.

The artists were treated as part of the service industry for the wealthy to turn out portraits for their subjects’ self-aggrandisement.

But there is one big difference between then and John’s contemporary take.

He says: “Back then, portraits were painted in a way that flattered the subjects.

“Caricatures are the opposite of that. If you worry too much you’re really shackled.

“That’s why I like to work from photos or paintings to keep my distance.

“Again, some crucial characters were left out. I’d have liked to include Yoko Ono, whereas I went for artists of older times – Stubbs, Audubon, Sarah Biffen, WG Herdman, Edward Lear, Augustus John and Arthur Dooley.

“Not only did the UK and US benefit from Hitler’s narrow-mindedness, but it benefited Liverpool. Without Hitler we’d never have had Fritz Spiegl and the loophonium.

“Left to my own devices, I would have gone on and on. I dumped a four-page section and eight people bit the dust, including avant garde artists and photographer Chambre Hardman.”

Such is his enthusiasm for his adopted hometown that John had the book printed by in Liverpool, by Printfine, based in Gibraltar Row, off the Dock Road.

“I had a period in London when I was at the top of my profession, but I enjoy far more this small scale thing of following my enthusiasms.”

* POOL OF LIFE, by John Minnion, Checkmate Books, £14.99; available in Liverpool at: Editions Ltd, 16 Cook Street, tel: 0151 236 4236 (original drawings also on display until April 5); News from Nowhere, 96 Bold Street; 08 Place, Whitechapel; also Pritchard’s Bookshop, 54 Brows Lane, Formby, tel: 01704 875765; or from John Minnion’s own website: www.checkmatebooks.com

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk