What's left to learn about the post-war forced repatriation of Chinese seamen from Liverpool?

I had the pleasure, yesterday, of meeting Yvonne and Charles Foley, who have carried out detailed research into the post-war forced repatriation of Chinese seamen from Liverpool. I would encourage anyone interested in the repatriation to visit their website: https://dragonsandlions.co.uk/. A really good summary of the story can be read in Dan Hancox's article for The Guardian last year: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/may/25/chinese-merchant-seamen-liverpool-deportations.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the repatriation is the survival, or not, of documentary evidence. Other than the files in the National Archives, relatively little remains, despite this being a significant effort that would have required planning, research, manpower, logistics, and inter-agency cooperation. I will briefly explore some of the difficulties in obtaining documentary evidence below.

Ocean Archives

The archives of Blue Funnel Line, the Liverpool shipping company that employed Chinese seamen, are held in Merseyside Maritime Museum, having been transferred there in the 1980s. Although there are files about the employment of Chinese seamen, those covering the Second World War and after contain many conspicuous absences, including very few direct references to repatriation, no mention of working with the police or the Ministry of War Transport, of the 1942 strike, or of individual casework.

Shell Archives

Anglo-Saxon Petroleum, owned by Royal Dutch Shell, was the only other British shipping line systematically employing large numbers of Chinese crew. Their archives are, presumably, with the other Shell Archives, in the Hague, and are effectively inaccessible. Royal Dutch Shell are apparently very protective of their archives and allow very few people access.

Police Archives

The archives of Liverpool City Police (later Liverpool and Bootle Constabulary, and then Merseyside Police) have not been deposited with a record office and remain under the control of Merseyside Police's records manager. I have thus far had difficulty in arranging access, but I intend to write to the Chief Constable and I have also enquired with the Police History Society for advice. It may be fruitless, however, as I understand that Special Branch files were destroyed, possibly in the 1970s when Merseyside Police was formed.

MI5 Archives

On the tail of Special Branch files, there is a suggestion that they maintained a close contact with MI5 about their activities. It goes without saying that these are not easy files to get access to, and in any case may have been routinely destroyed. I intend to write to MI5 to ask.

Other repositories

• There are the National Union of Seamen files at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, and the John Swire & Sons files at the School of Oriental and African Studies, which are both of varying degrees of usefulness.
• I believe that any routine Home Office files generated by immigration officials in Liverpool at the time will now have been routinely destroyed, if they haven't been deposited in the National Archives.
• It may be that Liverpool City Police Special Branch communicated with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch over the repatriation. There was a practice of provincial police forces calling on the Met for advice. I have sent an FOI request to them to see what exists, if anything.
• One source may be found closer to home, as it has come to my attention that the Liverpool university settlement operated in or around Chinatown, and their files are in the Sydney Jones Library. I intend to follow this up at work.

In answer to the question posed in my title, there is certainly more to be learnt about the repatriation, but whether or not we'll be allowed to learn it is another matter! If anyone has any other ideas about useful archives or files, don't hesitate to get in touch.

The 18th century Liverpool newspaper problem... as I understand it

As I plan and scope for my proposed MRes on the subject of Lancaster's trans-Atlantic trade, I have been keeping my eye out for useful sources.

One of the most useful sources for this sort of study is the local newspaper, as one might imagine. While the Lancaster Gazette is very helpful, there is a problem: it only began publishing in 1801. Looking earlier than the nineteenth century, there are a handful of options, including the Manchester Mercury, the Chester Chronicle, and the Cumberland Pacquet, all of which are available to some extent, digitised, online.

But throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, Lancaster acted very much like Liverpool's little cousin. So, I turned my attention to the Liverpool newspapers of the eighteenth century. The two main titles were Williamson's Liverpool Advertiser (WLA) and the Liverpool General Advertiser (LGA)*. So, where can you read these papers?

In any meaningful volume, there is just one place: Liverpool Record Office, where they are on microfilm. They have escaped the major newspaper digitisation projects run by the British Library, although there are some runs of LGA mostly in the nineteenth century on the British Newspaper Archive. If I was to guess, I would guess that the British Library does not have a very good run of these newspapers compared to the LRO.

I had the opportunity to visit the Record Office a few weeks ago where I asked to see the microfilms for both newspapers covering the eighteenth century. For WLA, I viewed microfilms covering 1768-69, 1772-76, and 1779-84. And for LGA, from 1767-72, 1775-84, 1790, and 1793-97. This is less complete than what Alexey Krichtal indicated in his 2013 thesis. In Appendix A (pp. 111-113) he discusses the utility of WLA and LGA to studies of imports. I think I had bad luck on the day, though, and a few of the microfilms were missed out - perhaps they were in use or had just been misplaced temporarily. I did find that LGA, from about 1775 to 1800, reported the details of imports into Lancaster, which is the same year the Manchester Mercury began doing it.

It goes without saying how fantastically useful digitised (and OCR'd) copies of WLA and LGA would be to historians of the Atlantic world, including, specifically, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Black British history. I don't know why Liverpool Record Office hasn't put them online, but if I was to guess, resource constraints. The Record Office and Merseyside Maritime Museum have both had parts of their slave trade collections digitised, but only after private companies approached them to organise it (Microform in the former case, Adam Matthews in the latter). It appears from this blog by Glasgow's Runaway Slaves in Britain project that LGA was not even on microfilm as recently as 2016.

There may also be a concern that if it is digitised, it will remove an important reason for visiting the Record Office and reduce footfall. This ties into the copyright debate, because even if the LRO scan the papers in themselves, the newspapers will be in the public domain. But here's to hoping digitisation is in these newspapers' futures!

P. S. For those interested in Liverpool's newspaper history, keep an eye on the Liverpool newspaper heritage research project. Dr Nick Foggo from that project is delivering the next talk to Liverpool History Society on Friday.

* WLA became Billinge's Liverpool Advertiser in 1794 and the LGA became Gore's Liverpool General Advertiser in 1790.

Me and my work

Hello! My name is Andrew, and this is my research blog where I will provide periodic updates about what I've found and what I'm working on. I'm hoping this will help develop connections with researchers looking at the same things, and also that it will help to hold me accountable as I try to complete my goals.

A little about me... I am from Scarborough, North Yorkshire, and grew up there until the age of 16, when my family moved to Sandbach, Cheshire. I studied History and Politics at Lancaster University and now I work in the Victoria Gallery & Museum, University of Liverpool, as a Collections Assistant. Since I participated in Lancaster Black History Group (LBHG)'s Slavery Family Trees project, I have developed a really strong interest in the eighteenth century, particularly in maritime and economic history, and the transatlantic slave trade.

I have applied to a couple postgraduate programmes and I hope one of them works out: the MRes in History at the University of Liverpool, to complete a study of the trans-Atlantic trade of Lancaster between 1750 and 1815, and the MPhil in History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, to complete a study of the trading community of Kingston between 1770 and 1800.

I have been working on a few projects (other than those I do at work). When I was at Lancaster University, my research for LBHG was focused on the sugar refining industry. Since then, I have been asked to do some research into the Scotforth enclosure award of 1809 and the ownership of property in Dalton Square. My research on the former is quite advanced and just needs some polishing and a bit of data crunching. I will consider submitting it to a journal, possibly Contrebis, the journal of Lancaster Archaeological and Historical Society. My research on the latter is less developed and probably requires a few visits to the Lancashire Archives in Preston in order to make any headway.

While visiting Liverpool Record Office for work back in November, I realised that one of the volumes of the Gregson MSS is actually the foreign letter book of Hamilton & Smyths between 1770 and 1780. Matthew Gregson had used it as a scrapbook. I don't believe this letter book has ever been examined before by scholars of Liverpool's history, so I am slowly progressing on turning the contents of that letter book into an article reflecting on Thomas Smyth's experiences in the American Revolutionary War. I hope to have it finished in draft by mid-year, and submit it (perhaps to Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire) by the autumn.

One of the stories I first uncovered in my job at the University of Liverpool was a connection with the forced repatriation of Chinese seamen from Liverpool in 1945-46. This story has stayed with me and I have taken it upon myself to do further archival digging to find out more. I haven't yet decided what to do with what I've found, however (there may be some news on that by the week's end).

I have a lot of other ideas, although limited time to explore them. One example: I think there's a good piece of work to be done on the details of the slave ship surgeons examined at Liverpool Royal Infirmary in the last couple decades of the slave trade, their careers and so on.

So, that's me. I am not planning to use this blog for anything other than the occasional stream of consciousness. I will probably use it to post about interesting sources (such as the Liverpool customs letter books) as I find them, and other things like that. All the best.