Member Musings: Good Gossip

Good Gossip

By Phil Whitfield

I’ve made a living listening to it. Heard a guy gossiping about christening his son with the names of all the English football team. That took me from the Daily Post to the Daily Mail, where I heard a Littlewoods guy gossiping. He’d stripped a Liverpool lass of her pools win because her daughter was a checker.

Which took me to the BBC, where I heard an insurgent in Belfast say the Provisional IRA had been set up during a punch up at a wedding. Which took me into the war reporters’ room and on to the Middle East, Vietnam, Africa and America.

Gossip is the lifeblood of correspondents. Soldiers gossip about their day, which turns out to be at odds with government guff. The same’s true about the flu. The government says it’s on top of things. Those in the know say they’re muddling through.

The cabinet is split over exiting the lockdown. According to Fleet Street gossip.  Some ministers say now. Boris says not yet. The government says it’s idle gossip. Maybe. But it makes headlines.

What’s this to do with Liverpool?

When Liverpool was but a handful of clusters they didn’t stand around gossiping… blaming the Romans for establishing Meols for a port. They did something about it.

The Lyver Pool was dug out for the world’s first enclosed deep water port. Thomas Steers’ dock made Liverpool’s fortune. A dozen sailing ships could be loaded and unloaded at any time instead of one in the Mersey when the tide was in.

People came from all over: two million from Ireland; nine million from Europe en route to America. Alfred Holt brought the Chinese in. Fifty thousand Scousers multiplied into a million.

Britain wouldn’t have an Empire without Liverpool. The city’s ships found Australia, New Zealand and countries in Africa and Asia.

When Liverpool gets around to discussing recovery it should listen to the enlightened. The way the Athenaeum’s founders did. They could have hung out at the Corn Exchange finding out where ships had come from with what.

Instead, they sent a stagecoach to pick up the papers in London to read which ships were on their way. The Athenaeum newsroom became the fulcrum of Liverpool’s knowledge.

Liverpool could grasp opportunity when the world recovers; so long as it considers the big picture. It’s one thing to depend on radio and TV. It’s another to read The Guardian and The New York Times, who invest heavily in critical-thinking journalists to gather knowledge. And keep overheads minimal.

Liverpool’s biggest problems are availability of work (job density) lagging behind similar sized UK cities and worker productivity, which is bottom of the list. Not gossip. Facts.

Does Liverpool have a plan?

That’s worth gossiping about.