Lavish tribute to life on the other side

Jan 21 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

A couple enjoying the Mersey view from Birkenhead _320

“Yes, I have heard about them,” says Ian Collard, the spritely author, as he reaches the top of the slipway, clutching his book, appropriately called Birkenhead Docks. “But I didn’t take part myself.”

HE HAS, however, been taking wonderful photographs of those docks since his short-pants days at Laird Street School, located near the home of William Ralph (Dixie) Dean, perhaps the most famous Birkonian of them all – the man who scored 60 league goals for Everton in 1927/28.

So his book is a welcome offering in this year of cultural festivity, reflecting the part played by Birkenhead in the recent history of the Mersey.

Ian’s father, Henry, died when he was two and he was brought up on Churchill Avenue by grandparents and his mother, Margery, a chocolate factory worker. “It was a terraced house on the Birkenhead Park side of the railway line,” Ian recalls. “On the other side of the line, they had built prefabs replacing houses bombed during the war. From my bedroom window, I could see right down to the docks. The Blue Funnel and the Clan Line ships used to load and unload there.

“At the weekend, we kids used to use the docks as a playground. You could see children swimming there in the summer, which was a very dangerous thing to do. I used to dangle my feet in, but I wasn’t very adventurous at that age. They were very deep and cold.”

There are 200 photographs and illustrations in Ian’s book charting the history of the docks. At their peak in the 1950s, some 25,000 dockers worked on the Mersey, rarely more than a third of them on the Wirral side.

After a brief spell with a Brownie 127, Ian quickly graduated to high-quality Pentax cameras, one for black and white film and the other for colour. These were birthday and Christmas presents from indulgent relatives.

From Laird Street School, Ian passed the 11-plus into Birkenhead Park School, leaving at 16 to work as a clerk in ICI’s shipping department, on the fourth floor of the Cunard building, which gave him a magnificent view over to Birkenhead and the green-domed Town Hall.

He worked there until the mid-1970s when he joined Liverpool City Council’s social services department, eventually gaining a diploma in Applied Social Sciences from Liverpool University.

Now he is retired and lives in New Brighton. But today he is back in the place romantics would name as the Mersey’s first dock – the stretch of water in front of Birkenhead Priory, built for the Benedictine Monks in 1150. It was sold after the dissolution of the monasteries (1536-41). Part of it is still there, the oldest building on Merseyside. The slap of friars’ sandals on cold stones has now been replaced by the shuffle of visitors’ feet. But it is still a haunted and holy place, this little strip of Birkenhead, almost hidden from the modern world, where old people rest in their graves and birds sing on naked branches.

Can you hear the old refrain (in a slightly refined form) – “Don’t be mistaken, don’t be misled, we’re not Scousers, we’re from Birkenhead; you can keep your cathedrals and keep your Pier Head, we’re not Scousers, we’re from Birkenhead”.

* BIRKENHEAD Docks, by Ian Collard, is published by Tempus, at £12.99.

davidcharters@dailypost.co.uk