Proud people from a passionate city

Jan 9 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

As a new book is released paying tribute to 100 great Liverpudlians, Laura Davis considers what makes a Scouser Scouse

A GREAT sense of humour, a welcoming spirit, a compulsion to steal hubcaps and a penchant for black, curly hair. Rightly or wrongly, these are all things that Liverpudlians have become known for.

For hundreds of years, Scousers have had a strong identity, some of it positive, some of it not, but everyone in the country has an opinion of what one is like.

Would they be able to describe as clearly the personality of someone hailing from Loughborough or Gloucester? Almost certainly not.

Jokes about Scousers are as extensive and many arguably more offensive than jokes about the Irish, from Harry Enfield’s light-hearted “Calm down, calm down” characters to that old one about what you call a Scouser in a suit (the accused).

Since Liverpool entered its renaissance in the 1990s, putting behind it years of unemployment and political troubles, the reputation of its people has risen with the city’s fortunes. To celebrate, the Liverpool Daily Post & Echo has produced a hard back book, Scousers: The People, the Pride, the Passion, featuring 100 local names, from present day and history.

In the five years since winning Capital of Culture, there has been a positive change to how Liverpool is perceived by those in other parts of the UK, with the late style guru Isabella Blow dubbing it “Livercool” in Tatler.

Even some of the jokes have changed – “Now that Liverpool has been named Capital of Culture, the cars are propped up on piles of books instead of bricks.”

OK, it’s still not very funny, but at least people are aware of what we are celebrating in 2008.

There have been human beings living in the Merseyside area since the Stone Age, though of course it wasn’t called that then, and some of the villages that make up modern-day Liverpool were listed in the Domesday Book.

We may never know whether those residents shared the wit and creativity Scousers are known for today, but the Liverpudlian reputation for having a good sense of humour can be traced back to the 1940s.

“The modern perception of Scousers is something I would say was really solidified in the Second World War, partly because a lot of Liverpudlians served in the forces and a lot were bombed out of their homes and went further afield,” says Anthony Grant, of Edge Hill University, who has just completed the academic study, The Mersey Sound: Liverpool’s Language, People and Places.

“In terms of always having a ready quip and a dry line in humour, one thinks of characters on the wartime show Itma (It’s That Man Again) with Tommy Handley, who was from Liverpool, and Deryck Guyler, who played a character called Frisby Dyke, who had a working-class Liverpool accent. He would have been one of the first recognisable Liverpudlian characters on radio.

“The term Scouser, as a term for being from Liverpool, doesn’t actually emerge in use until the ’50s or ’60s and the term Scouse as colloquial Liverpool English is only a couple of decades older than that. Before then, when people thought of Liverpool, they would have thought of Irish immigrants living in the poorer parts, or of the prosperous merchants living in the smart parts of town such as Abercromby Square.”

Grant, who incidentally was in the year below Harry Enfield, he of the comedy curly wigs, at York University, believes the rise of television to be one explanation for Liverpool’s strong national identity.

“It’s always been a city that punches considerably above its weight when it comes to dramatic production. Take Alan Bleasdale or Phil Redmond, creator of Brookside. It took a programme set in London (Grange Hill) to make his name but he followed it up with a soap set in Liverpool. Other towns of that type, for example Birmingham, have never been able to do quite the same thing.

“And a lot of Liverpool-based television material was comedy, and comedy has always attracted big audiences.

“The idea that Liverpudlians are nefarious criminal types is one that’s solidified partly at the hands of Liverpool writers like Carla Lane, the Boswell family in Bread for example, and non-Liverpool writers such as Harry Enfield.”

Scousers’ ties to their home city remain strong even when they have chosen to move thousands of miles away. Ex-pat websites are full of people who sailed or flew out of Liverpool apparently never to turn back but spend a lot of their time reminiscing.

In Perth, Western Australia, thought to be Merseyside’s largest ex-pat community in the world (no jokes about convicts please), residents celebrated Liverpool’s 800th birthday last August as we did but 9,115 miles away.