Mr Brocklebank: Stop splitting heirs

Oct 7 2008 by Mr Brocklebank, Liverpool Daily Post

TALKING proper: it was noted by a leading phonetician that when HRH the Princess Royal opened the final phase of Grosvenor’s Liverpool One shopping centre last Wednesday, the Duke of Westminster pronounced Chavasse Park as “Shar-vaze” Park. Have we been saying it wrong all these years, or is it nature’s compensation for that Birkenhead mayor who introduced Viscount Leverhulme as “Vizz-count” Leverhulme?

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SUCH were the stormy conditions during the opening of Liverpool One phase two that the band’s trombonists were in danger of getting their jackets tangled up in their slides, which could have been orchestrated into a very nasty health and safety compo case. Will sliding claims be the new tripping claims? It could be another Liverpool first!

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MR BROCKLEBANK also feels bound to point out that the blame for demolition of Liverpool’s oldest domestic building, the circa-1725 Mr Brooke’s House, at No 31 Hanover Street, does not lie with Liverpool One. The project’s director Rodney Holmes repeatedly asked the city council if he should preserve the house, but the answer remained negative. Manchester-based English Heritage also refused to back campaigners wanting to save this precious Georgian house, citing its much-altered state.

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HISTORICAL note: when Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue “antidote to panel games” was on tour, its host, Humphrey Lyttelton, provided a pen-portrait of the venue’s location. Collected in a new book, Lyttelton’s Britain, we are reminded of his comments when the show visited Liverpool Playhouse. Humph explained the origin of the city’s name differed from accepted sources: “Liverpool has a linguistic derivation of some considerable historical interest.

Guidebooks relate that the city took its name from two Old English words meaning “Boggy Water”, and the name is first mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle when King Edmund sailed up a creek of the Mersey and discovered “Muddy Pools”, who went on to become one of the greatest blues guitarists of the 9th century.

However, some historians believe there is a more plausible explanation for the name Liverpool, suggesting that it may actually have come from the famous Liver Birds. In fact, they reckon if Carla Lane hadn’t been available to write it, the town would still be known by its old name of It-Ain’t-Half-Hot-Mummapool.”

IS IT Mr Brocklebank’s fevered imagination, or is the Corporation taking up the very granite slabs it laid along Liverpool Strand but six months previously and replacing them with cobble setts? Is this indicative of a council with a need to spend surplus cash, rather than festering in its usual groat-challenged state?