Historic Liverpool Dwellings - 19 Poplar Grove

An Ordnance Survey map of 1843 showing Booker’s Cottages

 

Although there is little detail about his residence, considering his wealth, and the size of his estate, his residence would have been substantial. Josias Booker, born in 1793, was the second of seven sons of John Booker and his wife Ann Hacking who lived in the area of Carnforth, Lancashire. Baptised at a church in Over Kellet, two miles east of Carnforth, Josias, who had grown up on a farm, appears to have gone to Demerara in 1815 to work on a cotton plantation, Broom Hall, in British Guiana, owned by Thomas Bond of Lancaster, and in 1818 he was attorney (owner's representative) and manager of Plantation Broom Hall. He was very interested in the farming system on the plantation and introduced many improvements which lessened the burdens on the slaves and even wrote an account of the farming system and of some of the improvements he made, and for this he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Society of Arts in London. Josias encouraged his brothers: George, William and Richard to join him in Demerara, as it was known then, in order to take advantage of business opportunities in the new colony. The brothers followed in his footsteps, establishing themselves as plantation managers (attorneys), general merchants and later, plantation owners in their own right. Having made his fortune, Josias left his brothers to return to England, and in 1826, having returned to Liverpool, he married Elizabeth Higgin and took up residence at 19 Poplar Grove, Allerton. The couple went to Demerara later the same year, but left for good in 1827. In Liverpool he established the firm of Josias Booker & Co. Then later, Josias, with John Moss, C.S. Parker and J.A. Tinne (all with businesses in Liverpool and Demerara) gave money for the founding of the church of St Anne, Aigburth, Liverpool where his son John Horrocks Booker was the first child to be baptised there on 29th of March 1837. Among his many activities in Liverpool, Josias was the founder Chairman of the Royal Insurance Co. He was a patron and benefactor of Liverpool Collegiate School and in 1840 he was chosen as the first chairman of the Royal Insurance Company and proprietor of the Athenaeum.

Prior to the Calderstones being relocated by Joseph Need Walker in 1845, one of the stones was taken by a Mr Booker for use as a rubbing stone for his cattle. Josias was certainly no farmer, but having emigrated to Demerara (now Guyana) in 1815 and studied farming, the fact that his family lived so close to the field where The Archer’s Stone stood seems quite a coincidence. Although Robin Hood’s Stone may originally have been part of the Calderstones, we know that it has stood alone in this part of Liverpool since at least 1771, when Eye’s map of Liverpool shows the Stone Hey field name. Bennison’s Survey of 1835 shows, at the top left, the wooded estate of Calderstones and further down is the land held by J. Booker.  Allerton Primary School having its address at Booker's Cottages, Greenhill Rd, Allerton was founded by Margaret Booker, the daughter of Josiah. This philanthropic family owning much land locally, as well as their business interests overseas, developed many local businesses and had also built St Anne’s Church in Aigburth. The London and North Western Railway company purchased some of his land for a branch line running to Runcorn, three statute acres and 37 perches (15,639 square yards ). A map of Allerton in 1870 shows an area described as Mr Booker's land. Above the door of Booker Cottage School before it was destroyed there was a stone bearing the initials 'JB' and and the date 1865, the year Josias died.

Booker Direct, the largest food wholesaling firm in the country is named after the Booker Brothers, who had founded a company in Liverpool in 1835 when they purchased a ship to transport sugar from the plantations they owned and managed in British Guiana to Liverpool. Booker Avenue is named after Josias as he owned the land that the road now runs through. By 1829 he was trading as a West India merchant out of offices he had built in Old Post Office Place. Josias paid the significant sum of £6500 for the prominent site, demonstrating that he was financially secure on his return from the colonies. The site had originally been the home of the Liverpool Dispensary for the Sick, founded by many of Liverpool’s most prominent slave traders in 1778. Josias’ brother, George, opened the Liverpool branch of his business in offices at Post Office Place in 1834, and in the same year he acquired the Georgetown based firm, Lucas & Cook, merging it with his own company to found Booker Bros & Co, partnering with his younger brother Richard in running the business. The reasons for the brothers establishing a Liverpool base for trade was to take advantage of the need for a range of manufactured goods in Guyana. The Bookers imported plantation machinery used to crush cane, metal used in barrel-making, clothing, and a range of other British made products, ensuring that the family made profits on each leg of the trans-Atlantic voyages their ships engaged in. When slavery was abolished in 1834 the family received compensation of almost £1000 for the enslaved people they owned, indicating that they leased the vast majority of slaves used on their plantations, but after abolition, rather than pay their former slaves and their descendants a decent wage to work for them, the Bookers would instead import indentured labour from India and later, China. 

After a dispute with the Liverpool Shipowners who had been transporting their sugar, the brothers decided to form their own shipping company, and in 1835 they acquired their first ship, the Elizabeth, a brig built in Scotland in 1832. In the early years Bookers bought and sold many ships, unfortunately a lot of the company’s records were destroyed by fire in Guyana, and the complete record of the company’s activities was destroyed in London during WW2, but it is known that some of their early ships were; Palmyra, Standard, Lucknow, Lord Elgin, John Horrocks and Lancaster.
In 1846 John McConnell went to Guyana to work as a clerk for the Booker Brothers, where he prospered, and in 1874 founded his own firm of John McConnell & Company. Due to his long and close association with the brothers, the two firms merged in 1900 and became known as Booker Brothers, McConnell & Co Ltd, with the company setting up an office in The Albany, Old Hall Street, Liverpool, where it remained until 1941. The company then became the Booker Line and in Merseyside Maritime Museum’s: World Gateway gallery there is a small 1:96 scale exhibition model of the Booker Line's Amakura of 1949, Amakura being an Arawak name for a river in Guyana. The passenger and cargo steamer was built by Smith’s Dock Company of Middlesborough, sailing on the Booker Line’s services out of Liverpool. The model has finely-detailed rigging and Amakura Liverpool emblazoned across the stern. The company’s last vessels were the Booker Crusade, Challenge, Courage, Voyager and Vulcan.

Booker were the sponsors of the prestigious Booker Prize for literature and two local authors have featured in its shortlist (Beryl Bainbridge and Linda Grant) but perhaps a less welcome link to such an important prize is the unsavoury fact that the Booker’s wealth depended on slave labour.

Although the Liverpool merchants, John Gladstone and John Moss were the first to bring indentured Indians to Guyana, it was on a Booker ship that the first Chinese arrived in the colony in 1853. The system of indentured labour instituted by Gladstone, Moss and the Bookers on their plantations would be equated to slavery in all but name by contemporary commentators. During the 1850s the family would become fabulously prosperous based on this system of unfree labour, leading them to buy up many other plantations in the colony. This dominance would last for more than a century and so complete was the company’s command of business life in the colony it would be referred to as ‘Booker’s Guiana’.

In 1845, Josias Booker used £20,000 of his wealth to purchase 1000 shares in the Royal Insurance Company and would be elected the first chairman of what was to become one of the largest insurance companies in the world.

 

see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2023/03/historic-liverpool-dwellings-blackburne.html