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 […]

Father James Nugent was a pioneer for child welfare, poverty relief and social reform whose lasting legacy continues today through the work of the charity  Nugent Care, which operates throughout Merseyside and the North West. Born in Hunter Street, Liverpool in 1822, the son of a grocer, he was one of nine children and educated privately. […]

John Jackson, a member of the first cricket side to tour overseas, died in Liverpool’s workhouse in 1901 and is buried in the city’s Toxteth Park cemetery. Jackson was born in 1833 in Bungay, Suffolk but his family moved to Southwell in the East Midlands while he was in infancy. After first playing for a local […]

One of the statues in front of St George’s Hall, nearest to the entrance to the heritage centre, commemorates Major General William Earle, a Liverpool born army commander killed in Sudan in 1885. Earle was born in Hope Street on 18th May 1833, one of ten children born to Hardman Earle, a broker, and his […]