Liverpool (2)

Here I am Rune

Distance 0 miles

Total 1150 Locks 65 Tunnels

Running total mileage 1655.3miles

Today has been a sort of ‘information overload’ type of day. The original plan was to visit one museum this morning and another this afternoon but it didn’t quite work out like that. Once again when we set out the wind was blowing an absolute gale (is this wind ever going to abate??) and so as we walked along the waterside here it was really just a case of going into the first museum, which happened to be the Maritime museum and Museum of slavery. There is absolutely masses of stuff to see here, the morning was spent going through the ‘Siezed’ exhibition of the Border Agency covering the work that they do, this was located in the basement of the museum.This was followed by the next floor which covered the amount of emigration that went through Liverpool. It is said that you learn something new every day and I have to say that I was stunned at the level of child export that this country has gone in for over the last century or so. The figures are something like 100,000 unaccompanied children were sent out to Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand basically to work as cheap farm labour in those countries. To be fair to South Africa that work was mainly done by the native blacks so the children who were ‘exported’ were put into agricultural training be become the farmers in charge of the black labourers (and we didn’t even reach the museum of slavery). 

At this point we took lunch. After lunch it was back into the Lusitania exhibition which I felt only told half of the story. There was the generated outrage at the fact that Germany had sunk a ‘civilian’ ship but the fact that the ship was carrying a lot of munitions to be used against Germany in World War 1 was skated over, even though this was the source of the second explosion after the impact of the torpedo  and it is likely that this was why the boat went down so quickly. Probably one of the first documented instances of people being used as civilian shields. We finished the day halfway through the Titanic exhibition so I’ll need to go back to finish that and the museum of Slavery before moving on to either the Museum of Liverpool or The Tate.

Items recovered.........

......from the wreck of the Titanic

It has been a pleasant stay here so far, we are virtually underneath the Liverpool Hilton for which I looked up the prices for a stay there and it seems that the cheapest you can stay there for is about £590 for the 6 days were are here (over £600 with breakfast!!). It makes our 6 days here for nothing look a pretty good deal. The only minor irritation was a couple of drunks who decided to play up in the early hours of this morning (05.20am) by throwing one of the harbourside lifebelts onto the mooring pontoon and then coming down onto the pontoon themselves. I was woken by some shouting from them but when I looked out they had gone. The guy in the adjacent boat got a look at them as they made off but it seems that, other than being an annoyance, they didn’t cause any substantive harm (I had a cheap (£1) solar garden light on the front of the boat that was broken off!). Since we are pretty much in the centre of the city this sort of thing can be expected.

Tomorrow onto more museums, or perhaps a trip across the Mersey.