One of the main thoroughfares of south Liverpool is Mather Avenue. It was named after Arthur Stanley Mather, a solicitor and alderman who lived in Woolton. Mather was born in 1842, the son of J P Mather of Bootle Hall. He was educated at Rugby School and in 1865 was articled to Messrs Simpson, North […]

William Sewell, one of the heroes of the Crimean War who was injured in the Charge of the Light Brigade, is buried in Woolton’s St Peter’s Churchyard. Born at Dorking in Surrey, Sewell enlisted with the 13th Light Dragoons at Westminster in 1851 at the age of nineteen. The cavalry regiment was sent to Crimea […]

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 […]