A new book uncovers the dark history of Bramley Moore Dock – site of the new Everton's new ground – tracing the historical links between the city of Liverpool and the slave trade. Author Bob Waterhouse examines the ties between the club's historical links with slavery.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Bob Waterhouse uncovers the dark history of Everton Football Club's new ground in a new book.
00:06It's believed to be the first of its kind to examine the links between slavery and the origins
00:11of the club. John Bramley Moore at the time of the Docks opening was chairman of the Liverpool
00:19Docks and Harbour Board. He later went on to be Lord Mayor of the city and eventually a
00:26Conservative MP. He was very coy about his slavery links. It was not something 30 or 40
00:34years after the abolition of slavery that was designed to forward his political career.
00:40Publicly he had a very respectable non-slaving image. Everton Football Club is set to acknowledge
00:47the history of slavery at Bramley Moore Dock with a lasting memorial on the site of the club's new
00:51stadium. In 2021 a source from Everton told Liverpool World what happened across Liverpool
00:56in terms of slavery should not be airbrushed out of the city. It's not just this new chapter of
01:01the club's story which has links to the transatlantic slave trade. Everton has historic
01:06ties with slavery through some of its earliest patrons. When Everton as a football club were
01:12getting off the ground they needed money and there were various feelers put out to
01:19rich bigwigs in the city and not surprisingly for a city that as you said before based its wealth on
01:29slavery many of these bigwigs were the relatives of people who in the past had major connections
01:38with the slave trade. Liverpool's ships carried around one and a half million enslaved Africans
01:43and the city grew rich on the back of trading enslaved people. Though Britain's slave trade
01:48came to an end in 1807 the city's connections with slavery continued through cotton and other
01:53trades that were dependent on slave labour for much of the 19th century.