Liverpool Communities - Hispanic

 

José Blanco White is, without a doubt, the best known of all Liverpool's Luso-Hispanic residents. He settled at first in London, then Oxford, before being appointed Anglican Archbishop of Dublin. By 1835, he had become unhappy with the Anglican Church and in January that year, he left Dublin for Liverpool, where he would spend the final six years of his life. In February 1841, in his final sickness, he moved to Greenbank, the home of William Rathbone, where he died on 20 May 1841. He is the beneficiary of Liverpool's only public commemoration of its Luso-Hispanic history in a small garden on the site of the Renshaw Street Chapel and presented by a delegation from his birthplace of Seville. José Romero was also one of the earliest residents of what would become Liverpool's thriving Hispanic waterfront community. Born in the Canary Islands, he had arrived in Liverpool by 1850, when his first child was born. His wife, Catherine O'Brien, was born in Ireland in 1831and they had at least 6 sons, almost all of whom were given Spanish names and most of the children had Spanish godfathers and Irish godmothers, perhaps reflecting their parents' respective social networks. They lived on Drury Lane, in the heart of the old waterfront community and it is likely that he, a cooper by trade, and Catherine, were also running a sailors' boarding house, since their household on census night included ten Spanish and Portuguese sailors. José appears to have been something of an entrepreneur, albeit not a terribly successful one and ran an unspecified pub on Atherton St, which ran North to South between Paradise St and South Castle St (where Liverpool One now stands). He died in 1863 at the early age of 42 and was buried at St Oswald's cemetery in Old Swan. His son, Joseph junior, followed in his father's footsteps and, before his own early death in 1883, was landlord of the Duke's Vaults public house on the corner of Orford Street and Wapping, in the heart of the now booming Hispanic waterfront community.

The Richard De Larrinaga 

 

Nineteenth-century Liverpool was a global city and home to thriving Spanish, Basque, Galician, Filipino and Latin American communities who lived and worked in the maritime and trade networks connecting Liverpool with its sister ports in the Luso-Hispanic world. In the Museum of Liverpool's Global City gallery you can see personal items relating to the de Larrinaga family – a successful Basque shipping family in Liverpool. The Larrinaga family came to Liverpool in the 1850s from the fishing port of Mundaka in Spain's Basque region. Within 20 years they had built up a global shipping network connecting Liverpool and Mundaka with port cities such as Bilbao, Cadiz, Barcelona, Manila and Havana. From the 1860s the Larrinaga Steamship Company made regular journeys to the Philippines, stopping off in the great trading ports of Hong Kong and Singapore. Liverpool merchant and shipping families such as the Holts of Sudley House, the Booths, as well as the Larrinagas played an important part in the development and exploitation of trade routes, which in turn facilitated the development of networks – of kinship and friendship, social, cultural and business relationships – that not only connected Liverpool with the Luso-Hispanic world, but also brought thousands of migrants from the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds to Liverpool. Their ships also brought silks, lacquer boxes and Chinese-style furniture for their grand Liverpool homes, mostly situated around the Sefton Park area of Liverpool. Rosario Perez was a housekeeper at Buena Ventura, a large mansion house, at 2 Greenbank Drive, near Sefton Park, the home of Miss Asuncion de Larrinaga. Rosario worked for Miss Larrinaga for around 20 years and Jose sailed on the Larrinaga ships. The family lived in L8 and Elisa stayed at Buena Ventura in the summer holidays when Miss Larrinaga travelled back to Spain every year (usually for 6 weeks). Rosario's granddaughter, Elisa came to Liverpool in 1921 aged 23 from Valencia, Spain and met and married Jose Maria Perez, also from Spain, in Liverpool in 1930. They had both travelled to Liverpool for work. Elisa remembers Miss Larrinaga with fondness; "She bought beautiful presents for all of the family and we always appreciated her kindness. She got us a turkey every Christmas. When we were young my dad would go to collect the turkey from a butcher in Smithdown Road and take us to see her with a bouquet of flowers. She would have the most wonderful boxes of chocolates for my brother Michael, sister Christine and I, which had drawers in the boxes or were engraved, not the usual Milk Tray that was popular at the time. There were suits of armour in the house, a grand piano and a horse in the grounds. To me, as a kid living in Liverpool 8 in the 1960s it was a different world. We still have a very strong connection to Galicia and have gone to Santiago de Compostela many times."

Nos. 36-30 Greetham Street at the corner with Gilbert Street in 1938. Courtesy of Liverpool Record Office.

 

These shipping companies connected Liverpool with Luso-Hispanic port cities and brought many commodities to Liverpool's docks that remain familiar today, such as Canary Islands bananas, Valencian oranges, Brazilian coffee, Malaga raisins, Portuguese figs, Azorean wine and Manila cigars, as well as more unusual goods like salted seal skins from Buenos Aires. The docks were also a hub for passenger traffic, including sailors, merchants, migrant, expats, and, from the end of the nineteenth century, tourists. Argentineans, Andalusians, Asturians, Basques, Brazilians, Cape Verdeans, Castilians, Catalans, Chileans, Cubans, Filipinos, Galicians, Panamanians, Portuguese, Peruvians and Uruguayans all made their homes in Liverpool during the 19th century. The core of Hispanic Liverpool was the dockside community of Basques, Galicians, Filipinos and others who inhabited the streets and alleys inland from the Wapping Dock. Greetham Street, which ran from Gilbert Street to Park Lane, was a popular residence for Hispanic Liverpudlians from the 1880s until the First World War, and home to at least two Hispanic boarding houses: the De la Cruz Filipino boarding house at No.19 (c.1879-1881) and the Bilbao Basque boarding house at No.17 (c. 1904-1911).

see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2022/03/liverpool-communities-jewish.html