Al Jolson and Liverpool

It has recently been mooted that Liverpool should have a National Migration Centre, sort of like a British Ellis Island.  For nine million people the Liverpool waterfront would be their last view of the grim Old World. 

Many of those emigrants were fleeing poverty and persecution.  They were not just from Britain but from all over Europe.  In 1894 a young Lithuanian family arrived in Liverpool on their way to begin a new life in America.   The family, Naomi Yoelson and three young children had ridden on hay wagons, trains and packet steamers to reach Liverpool where they would board a grand ocean liner to take them to New York.

'RMS Umbria' - the Cunard liner that took the Yoelson family to America.

They must have been anxious, the father Rabbi Mosel Reuben Yoelson had already reached America in 1891 and had been saving money so he could afford to bring his family over with him.  Times had been hard and it had taken four years before he could afford it.

Whilst waiting for passage in Liverpool, Naomi let her children wander the teeming cobbled streets full of sailors, entertainers (like Seth Davy), hawkers, costermongers, prostitutes and the human detritus that so characterised 19th century Liverpool.  Her youngest child, eight year old Asa Yoelson was fascinated by the street life of the city and the day before they were due to board the Cunard ship 'RMS Umbria' he wandered off and got lost.  Naomi was distraught. 

'A young Asa Yoelson'

Luckily no harm came to young Asa, a policeman returned him.  Little did that policeman know that the young Jewish emigrant he had helped would become one of the greatest stars of film and stage in history.

The young Asa and his brother would perform on street corners for coins which they would then spend on buying theatre tickets.  It would be years before Asa Yoelson became 'Al Jolson - The Worlds Greatest Entertainer'.

Did the star of stage and film remember his brief time in Liverpool?  

Later in his career, when filming the seminal film 'The Jazz Singer' a Liverpuddlian would enter the story.  George Groves a Lancashire lad who studied at Liverpool University would become a pioneer of sound recording and so impressed Jolson that he dubbed him 'the quiet little Englishman' and insisted he recorded all his later pictures. 

 Liverpool was the greatest emigration port in the world and it is no wonder that many prominent Americans can trace their origins through Liverpool at one time or another.

The Singing City

Today, as following the themes of recent posts i'm going to look at music in the context of urban regeneration.

In 1965, during the midst of the great urban renewal where the Victorian slums of northern Liverpool were bulldozed wholesale the BBC sent a documentary crew to Liverpool.

The premise of this documentary was:

"How urban regeneration tore the heart out of the Singing City."

The documentary hosts interviews with dockers, priests, seamen and even the famous police constable 'Herbert Balmer'.   The highlight for me are the rare interviews with the women who kept the communities together when the men were away at sea. 

 For anyone who pines for the 'good old days' before they knocked the slum terraces down these interviews are a stark reminder of the utter deprivation, poverty and danger that haunted those terraces and tenements.

Listening to the stories of these people, it if difficult to believe that such poverty was still prevalent into the second half of the 20th Century.

This bleak image is constantly undercut by the use of music which is central to the film. Typical folksongs of the era are present in abundance (inclduing live recordings of Pete McGovern in local pubs) and even more remarkable is the recording of the childrens songs, sung on countless playgrounds.

These childrens playground songs and rhymes seem to echo through the ages but are held up to contrast with images of children in the same streets singing American blues music 'The Wood-chopping Blues'.  

This documentary really shows the birth of the modern world where children still have to sleep in houses infested by damp and rats yet the police were deploying CCTV in the city centre (30:00 mins).

Britains first CCTV cameras?  Liverpool 1965, showing the Metropolitan Cathedral half-built.

Was this the first use of CCTV in the UK?

You can watch the documentary here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/mersey/5183.shtml

'There are no folk in the whole world so helpless and so wise, their is hunger in their bellies, and laughter in their eyes'.