Henry Sumners was an architect who designed numerous buildings in Liverpool and the surrounding area in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sumners was born in 1825, the son of a bootmaker who traded out of 31 Bold Street. On completing his education he was apprenticed to Charles Reed, an architect in Birkenhead and […]

Temperance campaigner Theobald Mathew, more commonly known as Father Mathew, paid a number of visits to Liverpool in the middle of the 19th Century. Mathew was born in County Tipperary in 1790 and schooled in Kilkenny. After being ordained as a priest in Dublin in 1814, he settled in Cork. In 1838 he set up […]

In June 1848 there was a tragedy at Liverpool Zoological Gardens in West Derby Road. Rajah the elephant, one of the main attractions, killed his keeper and was subsequently destroyed. Rajah had been at the zoo since 1836 and was around 35 years old. He was usually a very docile elephant and would pick his […]

Agnes Jones,  a nurse who strived so hard to improve the health of the inhabitants of Liverpool’s workhouse, died at the tragically young age of just thirty five years old. Agnes was born in Cambridge on 10th November 1832. The daughter of a lieutenant-colonel in the Twelfth Regiment, she spent six years of her childhood […]

Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery was opened in 1877 and was donated to the town by brewer Andrew Barclay Walker, who lived in Gateacre. Walker was born in Ayrshire in 1824, the second son of Peter Walker of the Fort Brewery. He was initially educated at the Ayr Academy but when his father moved to Liverpool […]

Petrie was born in Newburgh, Fife in 1853 and continued his father and grandfather’s tradition of salmon fisheries along the River Tay. In 1876 he moved south to Manchester, starting a firm of salmon merchants and general fishmongers. He then moved to Liverpool and also pursued salmon interests in Ireland and oyster fisheries in Essex. […]

Charles Thurstan Holland, one of the pioneers in the field of radiology lived in Liverpool’s Rodney Street, where he died in 1941. Holland was born in March 1863 at Bridgwater, His father was William Thomas Holland and his mother Florence Holland was the second daughter of portrait painter Charles Allen Du Val. Holland studied medicine […]