In Conversation with Nancy and Patsy L1 Oral History Chinatown 2005 Moira Kenny

M. Right so, first of all if you tell me about Cornwallis Street

N. Me and Patsy like?

M. Yeah

P. Well we should really talk about Brick Street do you remember that?

N. She has just asked the question ‘did we both live in Cornwallis Street?' and I am answering her

P. Go on then

M. Did you live in Brick Street first?

N. Oh yeah we were all born in Brick Street

M. Start off with Brick Street then.

N. Okay then

P. You ask the questions and I’ll make the tea

N. See! She’s getting out of it already

M. Well what about Brick Street?

P.  That is where we were born

M. Okay Leave the tea for a minute I’ll record for ten minutes and then we will have a cup of tea, okay?

N. Well we were a big family all of us, there were three families all connected but one big family there were seventeen of us all living in Brick Street together wasn’t thee?

P. Mmmm

N. We all had our little fights but all our children got on alright

P. That was when we were young you see and we were all married from there

N. Oh Aye yeah

M. Where is Brick Street?

N. Facing St Vincent’s Church, there is Brick Street and Norfolk Street we used to go from Norfolk Street to Brick Street you know

P. The Girl’s school was in Norfolk Street and the Boy’s school was in Brick Street. We had our kids there didn’t we?

N. Was our Colin born in Brick Street?

P. Of course he was

M. What type of housing was it?

P. It was an old Public House and we had two addresses

N. We had 56 Brick Street and the corner of that 61 Simpson Street and we had an Aunty that lived with us and she always used the address 61 Simpson Street but it was one house, do you know what I mean?

P. With it being a pub.

M. Did you live above the pub?

P. It wasn’t a pub then, just an ordinary house with no back kitchen

N. No it wasn’t a pub then

P. There was no back kitchen was there?

N. No everyone used to wash in the yard in their bare feet, we used to have a little fire built and boiled the water to wash the clothes

P. and we always had the turkey’s there for Christmas running around and then they got killed. I hated that.

N. It was a good house like you know we all very happy in it. Everyone was a good family and there was loads of us living in it wasn’t there?

P. Oh yeah and then it was condemned and we went to Cornwally

N. You would go past this block of flats and say ’God I’d Love to live there’ there was one block on its own.

P. I never lived there I lived in 17 Great George’s Square

N. Well I went on the bottom, my mother  was over me and my cousins who lived with us in Brick Street they went as well and we got three houses and everyone used to call it McGee’s Mansions, that was my mother’s name before she got married. She was known as Cissy McGee and do you know all the people that talk about you they would say

P. How did that family get three houses on the one block?

N. McGee’s Mansions

P. It wasn’t malicious when they talked about us, that was just a rumour

In Conversation with Brian Clarke L1 Oral History Chinatown 2005 Moira Kenny

B. One of the most interesting characters that I have come across in Liverpool history particularly in the field of medicine is a guy called Yuen Thomas he came originally from Wales. Bit of background, before he arrived in Liverpool he descended from the Anglesey Bone Setters and these were people who specialised in setting the bones or repairing the bones of animals of course if you had a broken arm it was easier to go and see a bone setter than to travel miles to see a surgeon who was sufficiently competent to set bones. In those days I believe more limbs were taken off by surgeons rather than trying the intricate skills it needed to repair them.

So Yuen Thomas travelled with his father to Liverpool. Yuen Thomas was born in 1834 by 1857 he was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. He didn’t actually join his father in his practice which was then in Great Crosshall Street until about 1858 but then Thomas as all sons decided to set up his own practice which was actually his home and a clinic was at 32 Hardy Street in Liverpool One and that was in 1856 and continued there until about 1859 he continued there but also set up premises at 11 Nelson Street and that is where he would hold most of his clinics and he would manufacture splints and other supports for broken limbs. He retained Hardy Street as a private clinic.

Most of the work he did was with the poor and in fact he even set up a Sunday clinic which he and his wife ran. That is because Sunday is one of the few days off that people had in those days and would be able to attend his clinic without absenting themselves from work or requiring a member of the family to bring them along.

Most of the people he would treat would be people injured at work in those days Health and Safety was another one hundred years off. If people broke a limb and they were at work they simply would not get paid, there was no National Health System and they relied on the benevolence of local surgeons or in this case a local orthopaedic surgeon. I must say that at this time orthopaedic surgeons practice was a separate practice, as I hinted at before a surgeon might attempt but more often would just remove the limb.

He also produced a considerable amount of publications at that time which would leave orthopaedic practice a practice in its own right. The School of Orthopaedic Surgery was set up quite late in Liverpool University where it now has a seat as I say prior to that it was gathered up together with the surgeons within a surgery.

The equipment which Yuen Thomas would design and manufacture would be made out of leather and metal so he became quite a skilled leather and metal worker, a lot of those designs are in use today and a lot of practices and practices of bone setting that originated are still in use today. 

In Conversation with Maureen Doyle L1 Oral History Chinatown 2005 Moira Kenny

M. Can you tell me how you set up the Co-Op Housing with Frank Carroll?

MD. I am Maureen Doyle and I came down to this area in 1960 to a flat in Great Georges Street. I didn’t like it. I was out of my own area it took me a long time to settle in. Then it was great at first I had two girls and me and my husband in a two bedroomed flat and then we had a boy and we were overcrowded. I worked, I didn’t go socialising around but my husband did and he used to drink in a pub called The Horse Shoe just around the corner from here and Frank Carroll used to go in there and Roger O Hara and they were in the Communist Party, and Frank was a Communist candidate for this area. 


I knew them briefly then but I didn’t socialise with them and as the kids got a bit older and I was able to go out and go around to the pub at the weekend, we started to have little discussion groups talking about this and that and everything else and it was nice and we were all dead dissatisfied really the way we were living in the flats and we couldn’t get anywhere with the Council to move us anywhere bigger or that and most of the people who went in there lived in flats.


Frank then was born in this area and was an altar boy and went to St Vincent’s school but he moved up towards the Dingle around Mill Street and he used to come and drink and we had started a community council in 1981, I was on it, Frank was on it, Roger, two of the Doctor’s and it was in Prince Albert Gardens Dinner Centre, they had a Dinner Centre for St Vincent’s school underneath it. The Tenements were on top of it and we used to meet every couple of weeks trying to put the world to rights and trying to get things done for the residents and that.

We just started talking one night about the situation we were in with the Housing and everything and Roger O’Hara said ‘Why don’t we form a Co-Op?’ Well, we were horrified because we were Catholics and we all thought ‘Oh no Communists and Co-Ops’ Well I did think that  anyway!

But he said ‘No, no that’s not what it’s about’ he said it was about getting together and in fact ‘I can put you in touch someone who can tell you better about it’ So he put us in touch with Paul Lusk who worked for CDS they had only just started out CDS a development service in Bold Street.  Anyway, Paul Lusk had a good talk with us and that and we started to going to meetings in Bold Street and joined this registered society or something fifty pence a week, every week. They put us through a bit of education about it and everything else and that is how it started. I didn’t get on it at the beginning because my husband didn’t tell me they were doing this and it was only about six months after and Herby Rankin said ‘Maureen, why aren’t you joining this?’ and I said ‘Joining what?’ ‘This housing Co-Op?’  Well I said ‘I don’t know nothing about it’ because by then I thought it must of fell through because I didn’t go out much. ‘Tommy didn’t tell you?’ So I said ‘Put my name down and put me mams name down as well’ because she lived over me. We were one of the first Co-Ops to be set up in Liverpool. 
TBC PROJECT CHINATOWN PUBLICATION

In Conversation with Professor John Ashton Regional Director of Public Health 2005 L1 Oral History Chinatown Moira Kenny

Florence Nightingale and Agnes Jones was an interesting partnership and also with William Rathbone, I think maybe the second or third, the men in the Rathbone family all went into Parliament, they had a family tradition of looking after the family business which was timber import into Liverpool until they were in their forties and then they went into their social responsibility and of course they were on the Liberal wing of the Liberal party and broke off to form the Labour party later on. 


But William Rathbone was very much of an innovator socially and established community nursing in Liverpool with Florence Nightingale. Now Florence had been bought up by her father in a very political way and I do not think he had any sons and so his daughter was treated as perhaps a son would have done. She was bought up on the blue books of Parliament which are statistical manuals of finance in the House of Commons and so she was very familiar with statistics and she was the first person to use indicators for hospital outcomes in the Crimea to demonstrate mortality rates in different clinical situations in the Crimea so she was also very much involved with the promotion of circular wards. We still have circular wards in the old Royal Infirmary, we managed to save, I think two of the old wards, that is now part of the University, but the thing about these particular wards, they were a Belgian idea and she picked it up in the Crimean war and bought it back.


The circular ward had the stove in the centre and the beds were laid out radially from the stove so the patients heads were by the wall by the window so that they could be open and they got ventilation and fresh air and so on and she believed this was more hygienic for the patient to have fresh air near where their heads were and she was very influential on that. There are books on Florence Nightingale and Liverpool but suffice to say... TO BE CONTINUED PROEJCT CHINATOWN PUBLICATION 

Extract from In Conversation with Johnny Lin and Georgie Quarless L1 Oral History Chinatown Moira Kenny 2005 To be continued PROJECT CHINATOWN newspaper publication

My name is John Lin I was  born in 113 Pitt Street 30/07/1929 I was reared up here in Pitt Street until the War finished and we was bombed and we had to move. My mother and father, well my mother’s father had the laundry in 113 Pitt Street at that time from there we moved to Clarabelle Street off Upper Warwick Street Liverpool 8 because it had been condemned because the bombing was on. From there the air raid at that time, my mother’s twin died and so she was left looking after ten of us in Liverpool. She reared the ten of us in 18 A Kent Gardens all the local neighbourhood were dispersed all over Liverpool, Skelmesdale, Netherley, Kirkby, Norris Green everywhere but we happened to remain in Kent Gardens until the redevelopment came about from Gresham Street. 
When my mother and father died I went to live in Wavertree by Sandown Railway Club and I remained there for, Oh how long? And then it was condemned, they had a preservation order but they got by the preservation order. So I moved to off Rathbone Road, Piggy Lane and I was in a bungalow there for three or four years. From there, I was there for three or four years and one night I was at a social down here and I go’s home one night and find out that they had taken out a window out of my bedroom so from there, as it happened that's how I got back in Liverpool by St Vincent’s church it used to be called Prince Albert Gardens now it is called Prince Albert Mews.


My younger sister lives in New Zealand she has been there around thirty years my nephews and that they live in Australia in Melbourne but still keep in contact with one another, my other nephew works for the Metropolitan Cathedral and he has been there a while now. It is much better now being in ‘Old Chinatown’ well that is what we call it because you had no vandalism or what you have got the present day it is a pity when the bombing moved the place we weren’t moved into the same community, okay.

My name is George Quarless I was born on August 21^st 1921 I was born in 14 Kent Street which has been renamed Frederick Street now. I am the youngest of, I am not quite sure now; I think it was a family of twelve and then I am the only one left now. My father was Chief Steward and we had our own property in Kent Street and I have always been connected with St Michaels Church which I am now as well. I have never lived out of the area. We moved from 14 Kent Street to Nile Street in 1939 the day before War was declared on the Sunday; no we moved up on the Monday, War was declared on the Sunday. 30 Nile Street that is the farthest I have been in the area so I think I am the oldest in the area that has never moved out of it. All my relatives lived in the area all around about, aunties and cousins whatever.

If you go back to my school days though one of the aspects of that was we used to see immigrants coming up from the Pier Head and some of them used to walk up in groups you know  and they used to have an old fashioned charabanc with no hood on, some of them would be in that and that was driven by a Mr Skeleskie he used to live in Pitt Street opposite our St Michael’s Church, the old church, the church that was bombed in the May blitz in 1941 and he was the driver and he used to take them up to St George’s Square to the houses further on from the Doctor’s where the Medical Centre is now and do you see the Façade that is still up there now? Well them big houses he used to put them in there. They came from Poland and all around there, some were from Germany and they put them in there and they would leave them in there for a couple of weeks until they moved on to America and then they would put another load in. 

Sound Agents attend The Ming-Ai Project Launch St Martin in the Field London

Congratualtions to the Ming Ai Institute on the success of their HLF project. We had a wonderful time at the project launch.

www.britishchinesefoodculture.org.uk 

Chinatown my Chinatown Reflections