Although the improvement of Liverpool has been so remarkable, it is difficult to say to whom it is mainly due; there have been so many active public-spirited men who have given the best of their time and thought to the promotion of municipal undertakings. Liverpool has been fortunate in possessing so many sons who have taken an active interest in her welfare, and have done their work quietly and unobtrusively. The re-making of Liverpool has been accomplished in the quiet deliberation of the committee room, and not in the council chamber.
The Town Hall—Its Hospitality.
The hospitalities of the Town Hall were in my early years limited to dinners, and most of these took place in the small dining room, which will only accommodate about forty guests. When the fleet visited Liverpool the Mayor gave a ball, but these occasions were rare. To Dowager Lady Forwood, who was Mayoress in 1877, the credit belongs of introducing the afternoon receptions, which have proved so great an attraction. The Town Hall and its suite of reception rooms are unique, and although built over 100 years ago, are sufficiently commodious for the social requirements of to-day. The late King, when Prince of Wales, on his visit to Liverpool in 1881, remarked to me that next to those in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg he considered them the best proportioned rooms in Europe.
The Lord Mayor receives an allowance of £2,000, and is in addition provided with carriages and horses. In olden time this allowance was ample, but it is no longer so, and it is impossible to maintain the old traditional hospitality of the Town Hall unless the Lord Mayor expends a further £2,000 out of his own pocket, and many Lord Mayors have considerably exceeded this sum. It has often been urged that the allowance should be increased. I doubt if this is desirable. The invitations to Town Hall functions might be more strictly limited to representative people, or the entertainments might, as in Manchester, be placed in the hands of a Committee, but it must not be forgotten that more is expected of the Lord Mayor in Liverpool than in other places. He is not only the head of the municipality, but of all charitable and philanthropic work. The initiation of every undertaking, national as well as local, emanates from the Town Hall. All this throws upon the Lord Mayor duties which directly and indirectly involve the dispensing of hospitality, and I do not think the citizens would wish it should be otherwise.
Although Mr. Alderman Livingston was always supposed to have a candidate ready for the office of Mayor, and loved to be known as the "Mayor maker," the finding of a candidate for the office has not been always easy. I remember in 1868 we had some difficulty. The caucus decided to invite Mr. Alderman Dover to accept the office. I was deputed to obtain Mr. Dover's consent. I found him at the Angel Hotel smoking a long churchwarden clay pipe; when I told him my mission he smiled and replied that his acceptance was impossible, and one of the reasons he gave was that if his wife once got into the gilded coach she would never get out of it again. However, after much persuasion he accepted the office, and made a very good and a very original Mayor. In those days we had a series of recognised toasts at all the Town Hall banquets:
"The Queen,"
"The Prince and Princess of Wales, and the
other Members of the Royal Family,"
"The Bishop and Clergy,
and Ministers of other denominations,"
"The Army and Navy and Auxiliary Forces,"
and very frequently
"The good old town and the trade thereof."
This was a very serious list, as it involved two or three speakers being called upon to reply for the church and the army. Mr. Dover prepared three speeches for each toast, which he carefully wrote out and gave to the butler, with instructions to take a careful note of those present, and to hand him the speech which he considered had not been heard before by his guests. So the butler, after casting his eye over the tables, would hand a manuscript to the Mayor, saying "I think, your Worship, No. 2, 'Royal Family,' will do this evening." At the close of his mayoralty he offered to sell his speeches to his successor, and he handed to the charities a cheque for £500, which he had saved out of his allowance as Mayor.