City’s bread riots,1855

FOOTNOTE: Just before attending the L6 Community event I’d been reading about the Liverpool Bread Riots that took place in the coldest of winters in 1855.

Thousands of Irish immigrants (including my great great grandad), who’d fled their small farms during the Great Potato Famine, were starving in ‘Little Ireland”, in the

Great Howard Street area of the city.

Frost and ice had blocked the canals and port, preventing fleets of ships from entering or leaving the docks and causing massive unemployment.

For weeks, my family, and hundreds like them, had been totally reliant upon the goodwill of charities for a few handfuls of bread and biscuits.

Fast forward almost 170 years and how moving it is that our family name is now linked to a Liverpool charity doing the same vital work ... and in a part of the city where we all lived.