CHAPTER 18

Mysterious Death of a Street Singer

1899

The body was very thin and emaciated … covered in vermin

ne of the most colourful aspects of Liverpool’s social history is the rich street-life, particularly in the days of the great ocean liners and the busy docklands. A common sight in those days were the street singers, as immortalised by folk groups in songs such as ‘Set Davey’:

Come day, go day, wish in me heart it was Sunday, drinking buttermilk all the week, but it’s whisky on a Sunday.

The words of the song suggest extreme poverty and desperation, and most of these people were in that category. The vicar, Francis Kilvert, met such a young girl on the train from Wrexham to Liverpool in 1870, and he left an interesting account of these artists’ charms and habits of work:

This girl kept her companion and the whole carriage laughing from Wrexham to Chester with her merriment, laughter and songs and her antics with a doll dressed as a boy … She had a magnificent voice and sung to a popular comic air while the doll danced wildly…

The girl sang Dolly Varden and then, when she left the carriage, she collected money for some bags of peanuts. Kilvert was smitten with her and felt mesmerised. As Henry Mayhew showed in his monumental study of Victorian street life among the poor in London, London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the street entertainers had a very tough life. He describes such types as street clowns, street bands and conjurors and the physical features described paint quite another picture from that in Kilvert: ‘He was a melancholy looking man, with the sunken eyes and other characteristics of semi-starvation.’ Some street singers were surely lively and attractive like the girl in the railway carriage, but they seem to have been in a minority.