He was a patriotic Irishman, and once offered himself to our committee as a Nationalist candidate for the Parliamentary representation of Liverpool.  This was in the days when it was a three-membered constituency.  It was only the belief that the sacrifice which he thus offered to make for his country would have injured his career as an actor that prevented us from accepting his offer.

In my boyhood a great feature in Liverpool was the annual procession of one or other of the local societies.

The great Irish and Catholic procession, of which the Hibernians formed the largest contingent, was, of course, on St. Patrick’s Day.  A considerable portion of the processionists were dock labourers; a fine body of men, who were at this time, as I have already said, mostly Irish.

The Orange processions in Liverpool were often the occasion of bloodshed, for in them they carried guns, hatchets, and other deadly weapons, as if they were always prepared for deeds of violence.  The ship carpenters were the most numerous body in the Orange processions.  Indeed, they formed such a large proportion that, by many, the 12th of July was called “Carpenter’s Day.”  Shipbuilding used to flourish in Liverpool, and, as none of the firms engaged in it would take a Catholic apprentice, it was quite an Orange preserve.  This became somewhat changed when the Chalenors, an English Catholic family, who were already extensive timber merchants, commenced ship-building, and, of course, took Catholic apprentices.

The Orange ring was thus gradually broken up, and, as iron ships superseded wooden ones, ultimately the shipbuilding trade almost vanished from Liverpool.  The ship carpenters, for the most part, found their occupation gone, and many of them ended their days in the workhouse.

A further instance of the decline of rabid Orangeism might be cited.  It was not an altogether uncommon thing for people to be fired at from the windows of Orange lodges.  I see, according to the “Nation” of July 20th, 1850, that “an innkeeper of Liverpool named Wright fired out of his house and wounded three people.”  In justification of this he stated that “a crowd of Ribbonmen assembled round his house.”  At one time there used to be a notorious Orange lodge held in a public house called “The Wheat Sheaf” in Scotland Road.  The members of this body thought nothing of firing upon an unarmed and peaceable crowd from the windows, and I remember an Irishman being shot dead upon one of these occasions.  The change that has taken place in this district can be best realized from the facts that, in after years, the landlord of “The Wheatsheaf” bore the name of Patrick Finegan, that, at the present moment, Scotland Road is, as it has been for many years, represented in the City Council by a sterling body of Irish Nationalists, and that the Scotland Division of the Borough of Liverpool is the one place in Great Britain where an Irish Home Ruler, as such, can be returned to Parliament against all comers, as Mr. T.P.  O’Connor has been, ever since the Division became a separate constituency.