Sir Harold Wilson and the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool

We were given a key to the joint entrance to rooms 100 and 101 in Liverpool’s most iconic hotel, The Adelphi. Four years earlier I had only managed to get as far as the plaque outside that very modestly marks the fact that Harold Wilson - the 20^th Century’s most electorally successful party leader - had used the suite as his Constituency Room.

The entrance to the Sir Harold Wilson suite, replete with modest plaque

The dark wooden doors led you into two rooms that are virtually unchanged since the Labour leader had used the hotel to conduct constituency business for his Liverpool seat of Huyton, located close to the city centre where the hotel stands. Opening the door to the sitting room, we were struck by the large dark marble fire place, replete with electric fire that looked vintage 1960s, an original looking dining table and even a fold-out green beige card table. The sofa was decidedly of a different vintage. However the huge windows, subtly painted mock Georgian wall panels, and phenomenal ceiling plaster moulding that would in Harold’s time have sported a chandelier not an electric mock candelabra, made it easy to imagine yourself in a time when the PM needed somewhere very comfortable to, perhaps once a month, conduct meetings with local party officials and trade unionists or to simply be based for a night in advance of a Saturday morning constituency surgery in Huyton.

Harold's sitting room (Room 100)

Room 100 at the Adelphi was handy on election night too (1966) (c/o 'Harold Wilson' by Ben Pimlott, HarperCollins, 1992)

Harold’s bedroom was equally original, minus the bed with its mock leather headboard. The huge, fitted wood and marble washstand cum chest of drawers, replete with deco-looking chrome towel rack, and the large marble fire place were not only in place when Wilson used these rooms but when this incarnation of the famous hotel opened in 1914. 

Harold's washstand

A huge wooden, mirrored, wardrobe had certainly been in the room for more than half a century. It is hard to imagine that a hotel that for several decades has had a funding problem – one not remotely alleviated by its comparatively recent transfer to the ownership of the Britannia chain – would replace anything that wasn’t broken, save for maybe the odd light bulb and, sadly, the original carpet. 

Sir Harold Wilson's bedroom

The bathroom separated the two main rooms; its tasteful frosted glass lattice work door opened to a porcelain furniture set that may not have been 1914 but was probably at least 1950s. Valerie mused on the idea that Sir Harold had used the very same bath as her. From the bathtub you can look out via an enormous window to the rather grand building opposite that in Wilson’s time housed Lewis’ department store. Above the entrance to Lewis’ (now no doubt housing offices or flats) is a slightly odd but no less iconic stone sculpture of a naked male, which was referenced in a famous local tune popularised by a mostly local act, The Spinners. The sculpture almost matches the campness of a much smaller, metallic one depicting a naked young soldier sporting what looks like a Teutonic hard hat, which is located in the Adelphi Hotel ballroom.

The view from Harold's bathroom

When I booked the Sir Harold Wilson suite, I discovered the rather odd fact that it is actually known as Room 101. In fact it isn’t really known as the Sir Harold Wilson suite at all. The scouse-sounding and very helpful guy who took my phone reservation confirmed that he had typed into the booking that the ‘Sir Harry Wilson suite’ i.e. Room 101 had been requested. After successfully checking in to the suite we heard an older person’s voice outside the door informing her husband that Harold Wilson had stayed here, and evincing a disinterested response.

Wilson is mentioned on the Adelphi Hotel’s website, as is his ‘preferred suite’ where we stayed. However the Huddersfield-born man, part schooled in Liverpool, who represented a Liverpool constituency for 33 years, 13 of which as Labour leader and eight of which as prime minister, remains almost an incidental figure in the catalogue of famous people who’ve either made Liverpool their home or who were born and raised there.

If that’s true of Liverpool, it’s much more so nationally. In 2006, a decade after his death, a metal sculpture of Wilson was unveiled in Huyton by the then Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair (the only Labour leader to serve more years as PM than Wilson). Blair is reported as saying that his fondness for Wilson was because he was the first ‘modern British prime minister’, more or less code for the fact that he was (more or less) working class. Wilson was a ‘modern prime minister’ because unlike every predecessor save Lloyd George, and patently unlike Blair (or his successor but one, Cameron), he wasn’t privileged. Wilson’s immediate predecessor as Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, was, according to Wilson's biographer Ben Pimlott, superiorly conscious of the huge class gulf between them, while some of the upmarket press mocked Wilson for being a philistine. Yet he had a first class brain, got a first class degree from Oxford, and founded the Open University – the only Wilson policy legacy that Blair noted. Only a year before Blair unveiled the sculpture, he gave a speech to the Labour conference in which he attacked the Wilson-led Labour governments of the 1960s for being responsible for Thatcherism by failing to understand the depth of economic and social change. Ironically, just prior to entering No 10 for the first time Wilson urged change on both sides of industry in his famous ‘White Heat of Technology’ speech. As prime minister Harold Wilson would be weakened by often senseless industrial action; his successor and close colleague Callaghan was destroyed by it. However Mr Blair’s simplistic attack on, in effect, Wilson’s legacy was rich coming from the man ultimately responsible for fiscal mistakes that subsequently helped undermine the Brown Government amidst global economic meltdown. In supposedly praising Wilson, Blair failed to mention the neo-colonial American war that he kept British troops out of (Vietnam), in marked contrast to the one Blair sent British troops to fight in (Iraq). If, as the comment attributed to Churchill has it, ‘to govern is to decide’, then Wilson’s decision to in effect break with Washington (and for which the UK economy was punished by the US) was very much about governing - and doing so in the national interest.

Perhaps you don’t get remembered or properly respected as a British prime minister for the wisdom of what you didn’t do – as opposed to the damage caused by much of what you did (Margaret Thatcher). However Wilson did much in general to expand higher education and its availability to people of his background. A BBC story written in 2009 about long abandoned car production in the Merseyside town of Speke begins with a reference to what it calls ‘the dark days of the 1970s’. While there was much industrial action, there was also much less inequality pre-1979, and, for all the faults of Wilson’s public housing and welfare programmes, far less homelessness. As we walked around the centre of Liverpool the number of very visible homeless people on the streets was shocking. No doubt they congregated in the centre to try to tap visitors coming out of pubs, but their plight in the middle of winter was, and is, very real.

Partrick's adventures in Pepperland

Our "Magical Mystery Tour" was hosted by Holly Johnson’s kid brother, Jay. He suggested that we kick off with some Frankie tunes. We thought that would be fab, falling for the famous Scouse humour. This tourist coach trip could have simply been a mindless milking of the sites memorialised by the Beatles to an endless accompaniment of their sometimes over familiar tunes. Yet Jay Johnson’s humour and knowledge, and our felt connection with at least some parts of the four lads’ back-story, turned the experience into something quite unexpected and, well, magical.

We visited George's two up two down terraced house (see pic below), glimpsed Ringo's place in Toxteth due for demolition along with 400 others, saw Paul's up-market council house run by the National Trust, and marvelled at just how smart and suburban John's home for 17 years actually was. Aunt Mimmie’s middle class mock Tudor pile was brilliantly introduced by Jay after he played a few bars of Lennon’s “Working Class Hero”. Jay’s was a well-honed act. We told him afterwards that he should have stuck on “Two Tribes”. That would be sackable offence, he said, not in jest.

The coach tour had been much more than a Beatles’ nostalgia trip. The gulf between the image and the actual home life of John, the most socially conscious member of the Beatles, was a sociological trip in itself, as was the sight of the boarded-up houses of Ringo’s manor. They have apparently stood in that condition for 15 years as the council dithers over what to do with the only one that they consider has heritage (and potential monetary) value, and believes it cheaper to destroy the rest and build new ones but lacks the funds to do it. Ringo used his local boozer, which still stands at the end of his old street, on the cover of a solo album, "Sentimental Journey", inserting family members into the windows.

As the bus pulled away we heard a snatch of Ringo's cover of the Doris Day song performed in his inimitable tone deaf fashion. Ringo hasn't found enough spare cash to even save his former home, let alone the rest of the area that he was once so sentimental about. Why not fund a tax-deductable refurbishment of the 400 plus homes and hand it over to a housing association, Mr Starkey?

Mathew Street’s Cavern Club is the premier pilgrimage site for many of course. Yet, try as the publicity does to convince you that this is more or less the real thing, it does not succeed, despite being a similarly brick built subterranean venue. Located a few doors down from the original, whose entrance is marked by a life-sized photographic replica, it claims to stand on 75% of the original site and to have been built using many of the original bricks. This is perhaps true in the dryly technical sense, but not even the various displays and the wee stage on which acts perform can quite give it the air of authenticity.

Strangely the Cavern Pub over the road, a fairly recently opened enterprise owned by the same company that owns the club and the Magical Mystery Tours, was a more satisfactory experience. It isn’t pretending to be something it wasn’t, has more interesting displays, and, on the night we visited, the advantage of a first class Beatles tribute act, Two of Us. This sibling duo have so imbibed their John and Paul shtick that they do it as a kind of method act, sounding a lot like, and even looking a bit like, their respective icons, albeit carrying rather more weight than appropriate for a couple of mop-tops (see pic of "John" below). Their version of “Don’t Let Me Down”, performed, like all their Beatles’ covers, to the accompaniment of  just their two acoustic guitars, was a tour de force. And I don’t normally like cover bands.

At the corner of Mathew Street and Whitechapel is an enormous and rather hideous souvenir shop, unimaginatively entitled “The Hard Day’s Night Shop" (to go with the adjacent “Hard Day’s Night Hotel” (sic). The balding, surly looking, bloke behind the counter repeatedly drummed the counter with a pen in a manner bordering on malevolent. He didn’t manage even a grunt when I wished him good morning. Mind you, if you’re not a fan of the Beatles, or even if you are, working in a supermarket selling stuffed Blue Meanies and Ticket to Ride pencil sharpeners, with Beatles’ documentaries playing on endless loop, would almost inevitably render you pretty humourless.

Our hotel was the Britannia Adelphi. Now in its third incarnation and sharing its centenary with World War One, this is a magnificent building located in the very heart of Liverpool and a short stroll from the neo classical late Victorian glory of St George’s Hall. The splendour of some of the hotel rooms is though more fading than others. Our bathroom door had recently been shouldered. However this incredible hotel features superb sitting and conference rooms. When I return to Liverpool I am going to try and book the Sir Harold Wilson Suite, which the former PM and local MP used for constituency business. I don’t know which floor John’s mother Julia worked on as chambermaid.

The Metropolitan (Catholic) Cathedral – this city has two – was stunning. This ultra-modernist wonder was built in 1967, relying in part on local fund raising. The spire depicts a kind of medieval crown, while inside an enormous crown of thorns iron work hangs over the huge central altar. An imaginative use of stain glass in the spire and in several chapels is mesmerising. The Anglican cathedral on the other hand is a routine mock gothic affair dating back 70 odd years. These days it seems to function as a kind of kindergarten cum shopping centre. At least the catholics keep their money changers outside the temple. The two cathedrals face each other at opposite ends of Hope Street

On our final day we inevitably took the Ferry Cross the Mersey. Gerry Marsden (the song’s author and singer) was our tour guide on this occasion, albeit pre-recorded. I am quite a fan of the modest man whose Pacemakers (also managed by Brian Epstein) have two of the greatest pop performances of the 20^th century to their name. Their version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is quite simply the definitive interpretation. Yet no “serious” pop or rock historian ever deems to give them much consideration. We sat on deck, drank in the sun and marvelled at the stories about the former resort of New Brighton and admired the £27bn development at Seaport – a container port and wind farm just down from the city. The latter was a reminder of how this city was once and could yet be again a strategically vital trading hub – the gateway to America, as Gerry called it. As the legend has it, local bands in the 1950s got their hands on US blues and rock n roll records weeks before Londoners as they sourced them straight off the inbound ships.  

Only half a million people live in Liverpool, and it is a relatively compact and therefore quite handlable city. Yet it has over 2000 buildings deemed to be of historic interest, a contributory factor in UNESCO declaring it a city of world heritage in 2008, placing it alongside the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids. Even just at the pop level there is much more to it than the Beatles (or Frankie). Measured by the number of No 1 hit singles it is apparently the most successful city in the world. Its other big name acts are depicted on an Albert Dock sculpture, part of a huge and actually quite tasteful renovation scheme that began after the 1980s riots (take a bow Mr Heseltine). Their names can also be glimpsed alongside non Liverpudlian artists and writers named in stone on the entrance to the beautiful central library.

There was so much more that we never had time to see. A return trip is very much in order.