Royal Liver Building

There must be many people on Merseyside and further afield who have worked in the Royal Liver Building and have developed a strong attachment and affection for it. In this initial Website Post we shall try to bring out some of the key elements which went to Royal Liver’s creation of this iconic Building at the Pier Head, Liverpool.

In 1900, with Queen Victoria still on the throne, Royal Liver Friendly Society was celebrating its 50^th Anniversary and was outgrowing its Prescot Street offices. Having Funds under Management of a million pound plus it was the strongest – if not the largest – Collecting Friendly Society “in the World” and certainly in the United Kingdom.

The Royal Liver Board of the early 1900s was determined to create a Head Office for the Society which truly reflected the great wealth which had been accumulated on behalf of its many thousands of members. After much discussion at the 1907 Annual Meeting held in Dublin, the Delegates (the voting members of the Society) agreed with the Board’s recommendation that a plot of land adjoining what was then George’s Dock at the Pier Head in Liverpool be purchased and the erection of what might have been described at the time as a Scouse Sky-Scraper commenced!

Some interesting facts about Royal Liver’s creation of the Liver Building are:-

• The Architect, Walter Aubrey Thomas was born in 1859 in Tranmere, Birkenhead.
• The Engineering Firm was L G Mouchel (Belgium) – still trading today – and the construction technique was based on the so-called “Hennebique Principle” after its inventor, Francois Hennebique who was also quite influential in the creation of the New York skyline during the early 1900s.
• In just over four years, the Royal Liver Building was erected and opened by the Society’s Senior Trustee – Lord Stanley of Alderley. The original cost of the building was in the order of £533,000 pounds. It came in, on time, and on budget and it is understood now to be valued in the order of £50 million pounds.
• The great Liner – RMS Lusitania – was moored at the Pier Head around 1910 with the Building half-built in the background. The Lusitania was destroyed five years later by enemy action off the coast of Cork in Southern Ireland during the early years of the First World War.
• The Royal Liver Clock is named The Great George after George V, the Queen’s Grandfather. It was set in motion on 22^nd July 1911 to coincide with the precise moment of the King’s Coronation in that year. The Building itself was opened on 19^th July 1911.
• The creator of the Liver Birds was Carl Bernard Bartels a woodcarver from South West Germany. He had come to England to make a living from his trade and he was successful in securing the brief for the design of the Birds.
• The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was the catalyst for a lot of anti-German feeling and Carl Bartels was interned on the Isle of Man. He was forcibly separated from his wife and children. At the end of the First World War, Carl Bartels was not returned to the home he had made for himself and his family in England but was sent back to Germany where he was neither fish nor fowl and continued to be separated from his loved-ones in England. He did eventually manage to return to England and he passed away in London in 1955.
• The memory of Carl Bernard Bartels was honoured by the City of Liverpool in 2011 when he was awarded, posthumously, the Freedom of the City.

The Building continues to strike the right balance between the heritage of its past and the need to equip itself for the future. It’s now well over 100 years old and whilst the city-scape of the Liverpool Waterfront is changing – perhaps not to everybody’s taste – the Pier Head would be unimaginable and unrecognisable without the 3 Graces of the Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building aligned along the front.

That seems only natural as the Building and Royal Liver Friendly Society which created and owned it – and occupied it for just on 100 years – is full of history and it’s a history which revolves around real people and the personalities they brought to their work and association with Royal Liver.