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 […]

Harry Evans was born in 1873 in Mertyhr Tydfil, one of ten children. He was the son of a local choirmaster and showed such talent at music that his local church appointed him as their organist when he was aged just nine. Harry’s church paid for him to remain at school until aged fourteen and […]

One of the statues in St John’s Gardens, Liverpool commemorates ship owner and politician Sir Arthur Bower Forwood. Born on 23rd June 1836, Forwood was the son of Thomas Brittain Forwood of Thornton Hough on Wirral. His middle name Bower was as a reference to his mother’s maiden name. He was educated at Liverpool College […]

The first integrated sewage system in the world was developed in Liverpool in 1848 and overseen by newly appointed Borough Engineer James Newlands. Born in Edinburgh in 1813, Newlands was one of nine children. After distinguishing himself in mathematics and natural philosophy at the High School of Edinburgh in the late 1820s he became apprenticed as […]

Hugh Walter McElroy, the chief purser on the Titanic, was born at 3 Percy Street in Liverpool’s Georgian Quarter  on 28th October 1874. Hugh’s parents were staunch Roman Catholics Richard and Jessie McElroy who originated from County Wexford in Ireland. When he was seven his parents moved to 6 Eversley Street in Toxteth. When Hugh […]