Sharing the lives of a bygone world

Jun 17 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

In an old gin box bought by chance, a sculptor found photographs, letters, poems and diaries telling of a family’s rise in Liverpool. David Charters reports

IT’S faint now, the scent of those ghosts, whose faces gaze from the photographs spread across the stout kitchen table, where the man on the chair adjusts the angle of his spectacles to examine each one more closely.

Ah, the sailor suits and the bonnets of the children, the glorious, imperial hairstyles and the “Belle Epoque” dresses of the tight-waisted mothers and daughters – the fob-watches and puffed chests of the whiskered gentlemen, whose tweed and careful poses suggest a family on the up, and fast.

Even now, the air is sweetened when the lid is lifted on the tin of pot-pourri, once sniffed in the bedrooms of giggling sisters and now savoured by Robin Riley, who exclaims delight at each image before him.

The tin, which says, “Old English pot-pourri, very strong and lasting,” was true to its words.

This is history as most people experience it – the tiny domestic details which gather into a picture of the nation.

We make history all the time. But in the rush of our days we forget that. We forget that we are history, too – just as much as King John, Winston Churchill, Paul McCartney, Posh Spice or Gordon Brown. You play a part, even if your name isn’t in the papers every day.

But we didn’t know that we were history then, so our stories, diaries, letters, photographs and souvenirs were often lost, or tossed into a box to be forgotten in the attic.

That happened to the collection on the table before the sympathetic, blue eyes of Robin Riley, the sculptor and local historian, devoted to ensuring that his native Liverpool’s heritage retains its proper place in today’s regenerating city.

In the mid-1980s, he was in the old auction rooms of Marsh Lyons in Rigby’s Building, Dale Street, where he had bought a settee, a chest of drawers and a cupboard.

In the cupboard was a Gordon’s gin box. It looked ready for the bin, but the staff said that he had bought it, so Robin decided to take it with the furniture to his Georgian home, near Liverpool Cathedral.

Fleeting consideration was given to throwing out the box, which seemed to be stuffed with papers of no great importance.

Instead, though, it was left in the attic, where it would have stayed had it not been for Robin’s son Si, 48, a geologist, who started sifting through it. The collection’s charm lies in it not being of great importance in the same way as government records, but it gives us a picture of people in Liverpool, during the most exciting period in its history, from the mid-19th century to World War II.

Robin, 75, is trying to piece into chronological order the various fragments, the tin of pot-pourri, letters, exercise books; religious verses and sentiments, all in copperplate handwriting, of the Cooke family, who seem to have been joined by marriage or friendship to the Cadmans and the Millers.

John Miller, of Hope Street, an old boy of St Margaret’s Higher School, Princes Road, was a leading gymnast in Liverpool in the 1920s and later a PT instructor.

But long before that, in October, 1875, Minnie Cadman had copied Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade (1854) into her book. Three years later, she wrote at the end of the same book, “God hath wonders which we cannot fathom . . .”

Robin’s collection dates from April 23, 1830, when Richard Cooke signed his indentureship with a company of ribbon manufacturers.

He moved to Liverpool, where the family prospered, staying for periods in America – some members perhaps even settling there, as can be gathered from the following letter’s reference to the Chicago World Fair of 1893, marking the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus discovering the New World.

Written on that June 19, it anticipates that they will have picked up American ways.

“My dear Papa and Minnie and all enquiring friends, You will think that because I have not written, I have forgotten all about you, but I have not.

“I often think about you and wonder what you are doing. I would like to be with you. I expect when you come home you will be saying, ‘I guess so’ and be getting like the Indians. I do not mean in manner, but in colour. I suppose you missed the boat accidentally on purpose (had they been expected home earlier?) but you may not see America and the World’s Fair again, so you are having a long stay while you can. I do wish you would hurry up and come home.