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I am pleased that you mentioned the famous Liverpool Institute for Boys / Girls which with the Collegiate was a key player in providing links from the town/city's general population to work and jobs in white collar employment and for the favoured, through to university and college in the professions from 1835 to 1985 when it was closed by persons known! Take advantage of the treasures of social history contained in the Liobian website to explore one of the country's finest, fullest, most informative and interesting displays of the school's fascinating history, packed full of links to school mags, scores of photos of pupils and staff and their many achievements and activities over the decades. Iain Taylor (attended 1954-61) and working on the School History project.

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I was n’t sure whether to open a fresh box of Cleanex tissues after reading Swift’s lament over “the very little place left for the Middle Class scouser in the public imagination”. As a retired history teacher still passionately attached to “public history” and a history from below that seeks to redress the historical amnesia around our port city’s working class and labour movement and remarkable “extraordinary-ordinary lives”, his focus on a Liverpool Middle Class “taken to include merchants, industrialists, and philanthropists” nearly made me gag! That’s why I needed a fresh tissue as lumping together the Gladstone’s, Josephine Butler, Henry Tate a “British Rockefeller”, with "41% of families in council housing" classified by the Housing Department in 1939 as middle class", is trip the light fantastic stuff. I did n’t know whether to laugh or cry.

There are always teasing and conceptually challenging issues around definitions of class and it’s analysis that include objective and subjective criteria, intra as well as inter class “confict’. Maybe that’s a bit too academic but a little genuflection to that complexity rather than the big shovel trawl you indulge in would have been welcome.

I’ve travelled a long way from my Croccy days of kid guerilla raids over the River Alt into Lord Derby’s woods and encounters with gamekeepers, as I type and live now in the snow covered lanes of Allerton in south Liverpool where the merchants had their big parks and big houses. (Liverpool had more millionaires than any other city outside of London in the late 19th century long after the abolition of the slave trade. It was described as the New York of Europe but the CONTIGUITY of wealth and poverty, the Liverpool TALE OF TWO CITIES is the stark and egregious one that blighted so many lives. )

Perhaps I’m still an inverted snob having called our beautiful four kids MCBs (Middle Class Brats) but come on Swifty get a handle on some of the real glittering generalities and issues that come out of studying a local history that is decidedly not parochial. Settle down on this side of the river before you speculate again on the Bermuda Triangle of the British Middle Class or is it Classes? There are far many more worthy stories that deserve to be rescued from “the enormous condescension of posterity" than your spectre of a disappearing oxymoron! Try Fred Bower and the story of the Dingle Yank for a start. It ranges from Boston Massachusetts to the Dingle and over to your old neck of the woods in Heswall.

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I'm usually bowled over by Swift's pieces so felt really conflicted reading this. Why didn't I nod along as I read it like usual? You've just helped me answer that question. I'm doing my family tree at the moment and to think my widowed great great grandmother with 11 kids living in a council house in Bootle before dying at the age of 50, probably from exhaustion, might have been considered middle class doesn't quite make sense to me.

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Dear chums

Please note that the middle-class dancer from Liverpool is Matthew (Matt) Ball.

Michael Ball is an entirely different species.

Happy new year

See you at the barre

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corrected, thanks for flagging, Kevin! happy new year.

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The sad story of Josephine Butler got me welling up 😢. What a way to cope with such tragedy!

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Whilst I agree with the general thrust of the article, the writer has made a number of errors and omissions, viz:

William Roscoe was not part of 'Mid-Victorian Britain' He was bankrupted in 1820 and died in 1831, six years before Victoria became Queen.

There are no 'palatial villas of Princess Drive'. Surely he means Princes Road?

The Bluecoat's principal founder was Bryan Blundell not Foster Cunliffe.

The Walker Art Gallery was not funded by William Brown. It was paid for by brewer Sir Andrew Barclay Walker. Also, it was not 'opened to house the collection of banker William Roscoe'. Roscoe's paintings were owned by the Liverpool Royal Institution and were presented to the Walker in 1948. Also, when the Walker finally opened after the war in 1953, a number of local businesses donated extremely valuable paintings to the gallery, including George Stubbs' 'Molly Longlegs' and a Rembrandt 'Self Portrait'.

The writer mentions hardly any 'modern' benefactors. What about Sir John Moores, after whom the LJMU is named, as is the bi-annual John Moores Painting Prize? Aldham and Avril Robarts also helped fund two LJMU libraries. Likewise, Sir Phil and Lady Redmond helped fund LJMU's Redmond Building. And let's not forget Sir Paul McCartney's founding of LIPA in his former school, or Yoko Ono Lennon' who, in John's name, has helped finance a number of Liverpool initiatives over the past 40 years. I am sure had your writer looked hard enough he would have come up with many others.

(Ron Jones)

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In a similar vein of correction, the Portia at the Liverpool Institute's Merchant of Venice was not Steve Norris, who had left the year before. Portia was actually a fourth-former called Keith Dinwoodie, who in later life upped sticks to Canada as a computer consultant.

More in line with the writer's theme was Antonio, played by another fourth-former, Tim King, who is now known as Mr Justice King KC.

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