When we live in a house, we're just passing through.
People have occupied it before us
and others will take our place when we leave.
A hundred human dramas played out in every room.
Every house in Britain has a story to tell,
but in this series I'm going to uncover the secret life of just one.
A single town house here in Liverpool.
A city that rivalled New York in the 19th century,
yet, 100 years later, was one of the poorest places in Europe.
In many ways, 62 Falkner Street is an ordinary house,
but, as I'll show you, in reality, it is an amazing treasure trove.
He leaves them not just £100, but also number 62 Falkner Street.
In March 1885, again in this house,
he grabbed her by the throat and assaulted her.
The life that you can see
recorded in these old documents is extraordinary.
Delving into the archives,
I'll use the personal histories
of the residents of this house to reveal the story of Britain
over almost 200 years.
It's a period of seismic social change.
From the early years of Victoria's reign...
..right through to the present day.
This episode, a man with a taste for the high life moves in.
A couple rise from domestic service to fantastic wealth.
And one resident's journey
takes him from debtors' prison to a foreign war.
He's left his children behind.
HE SIGHS
I'm going on the ultimate detective hunt
to uncover lives that haven't been recorded in the history books,
but which can tell us a new version of our nation's past.
A new history of Britain, hidden within the walls of a single house.
Today, Liverpool is a dynamic city of half a million people.
And, just a mile south of the centre,
in a quiet, residential district,
is 62 Falkner Street.
Gaynor is a working mum.
I'll bake it. Be ready for around 6pm?
She lives here with her two children, Rosie and Tom.
They share the house with a family friend, Kalyn,
who has a room in the basement.
Gaynor has agreed to let us into her home to see what stories
we can find inside it.
So, Gaynor, how long have you lived here?
We've lived here since March 2010.
Do you know much about its history?
I know that it hasn't always been a single-family dwelling.
It was flats at one point.
But I don't know anything about the people who lived here before us.
What would really surprise you, as we dig up the history of this house?
What would shock you?
If any crimes have been committed,
I think it would shock me and then worry me,
but I think whatever history is found becomes part of your history
because you lived where they lived,
and we are walking on the floors where they walked.
Um, can I have a look around?
Of course. Thank you.
Let's start by showing you the front room.
I think, 100 years ago, this might well have been
a very formal dining room
with the kitchen downstairs.
That's very different from today.
The kitchen is now on the ground floor.
And there have been lots more changes over the years.
Don't be too surprised,
there are not many original features in the living room.
There's no fireplace. So it is... No cornicing.
..effectively just a white box? It is a white box.
But... But the sash windows make it all all right.
Oh, they are wonderful.
And at the back is a play room for Gaynor's children.
And above that is another floor
where the family have their bedrooms.
From my first look inside Gaynor's house,
I can already begin to imagine
how these rooms might have looked in earlier times.
And how other people might have lived here
when they had oil lamps and open fires.
But if I'm going to piece together the stories of those past lives,
I need to go back...
..over 200 years
to before this house was even built...
..and Liverpool was a town of just 80,000 people.
Joseph Sharples is an architectural historian
who can tell me how this street came to be here.
Joseph. David, hello.
Very nice to meet you. And you.
So, what was here before Falkner Street was built?
Well, this area of Liverpool was known as Moss Lake Fields.
This is a map of 1796,
and here you can see several fields owned by Mr Faulkner.
Winding its way between the fields you can see Crabtree Lane,
and that's what became Falkner Street.
Right. So when do we think this house was built?
Well, it seems that the house was in existence by January 1841.
We don't know how much a house like this would have cost
but maybe in the region of £1,000, something like that.
So, this is a home that's financially out of the reach
of 99% of the population? I should think that's true, yes.
By the time this house was built...
..Liverpool was already one of the biggest ports in the British Empire,
and business was booming.
The town's new middle class wanted houses away from the slums
by the docks, and so farmland
on the outskirts were snapped up by developers and built on, bit by bit.
So many of these projects were built individually
and the rest of the street is filled in around them?
Yes, and this piecemeal development's
also reflected in street numbering.
This house was originally number 58, but it's now number 62.
Because Falkner Street was built without a plan,
houses had to be renumbered as new ones were added.
So, knowing that this was once number 58
is vitally important as I start my investigation.
Records for the early years of Falkner Street are hard to find,
but, in a private library,
I've discovered a rare collection of Victorian trade directories.
Buried within these pages, I hope,
is the name of the very first resident of our house.
This is a copy of Gore's Directory.
It's a list of all the traders and the merchants
and the business owners in Liverpool.
This directory was regularly updated from the 1760s onwards.
And thanks to Gore's Directory, we can tell exactly
who's living at 58 Falkner Street in the year 1841,
because it lists the name Richard Glenton,
and it tells us that he is working for Her Majesty's Customs.
With the help of the census also of 1841,
we can learn a little bit more about Richard Glenton,
because this confirms that he's 45 years old
and that he's not the only person living at 58 Falkner Street.
There is no Mrs Glenton on the census,
but there is someone called Erness Moller a clerk who's 20,
and a middle-aged woman, Julia Schwind.
My guess is that they're both lodgers.
There's also a Katherine Smith, who's just 15 years old.
The letters "FS" mean female servant,
which means Richard had a maid,
as did most middle-class households at the time.
So from these two documents we can deduce that Richard Glenton
was the master of his own home,
that he was wealthy enough to employ a female servant,
but he appears to be subsidising his lifestyle
by taking rent from two paying lodgers.
So it is a bit of a mixed picture.
Richard certainly had room to spare in his substantial new house.
The basement would have been where the servant worked,
in the kitchen and the scullery.
The ground floor would probably have had a dining room at the front
and a morning room at the rear. Plus a toilet.
The first floor rooms are the most expansive.
At the front would have been a drawing room
and behind it the master bedroom - Richard's, no doubt.
Finally, on the top floor, were the bedrooms where Richard's lodgers
and his servant would have slept.
Already, though, this house has thrown up its first mystery.
We know it would have cost about £1,000,
which was out of the reach of most people.
So I wonder if Richard Glenton had taken in lodgers to make ends meet,
especially if his job in customs didn't quite pay enough.
To find out, I'm following the trail back to where Richard once worked.
In his day, these docks were the commercial heart of Liverpool.
Ships from every corner of the globe carried millions of tonnes of cargo
in and out of here every year.
But what was Richard Glenton's part in all this?
I'm hoping that doctor William Ashworth
from University of Liverpool can tell me.
Will. Hi. Hi. How are you doing?
So this is the centre of Liverpool's story, the docks?
Yeah. By the end of the 18th century, early 19th century,
Liverpool is beginning to even challenge London
as the heart of trade.
What would the docks have looked like when Richard was working here?
Well, I've got a picture here of the Custom House built in 1839.
It was here? Yeah.
If you look just to the left of the pump house...
Uh-huh. ..that's where the Custom House was.
And that's where Richard's spending his career?
Yeah. The first record of him is from 1832
and it has him down as a clerk to the register.
Now there are an array of different clerks.
They're everywhere. Remember, there's no photocopiers,
so these guys just sit there
scribbling and copying documents from the treasury, letters...
But it looks to me like he was one of the many clerks
that would keep a register of all the ships coming into the port.
So, how would Richard have got this job?
It seems fairly clear that his father was instrumental
in getting him the job.
Now, his father was a land surveyor,
which basically means he's one of the top boys working in the docks.
This is jobs for the boys, this is not what you know, but who you know.
Yes. The whole of the 18th century is about patronage,
so this is not unusual.
When Richard's father, Jonas,
started work here in the 1790s
a job in customs was an invitation to line your own pockets.
Crooked officials took backhanders to turn a blind eye to smuggling,
and thieving was rife.
But by the time Richard was a customs clerk
the government had cracked down on corruption and criminality.
Jobs for the boys were on the way out,
promotions were to be strictly on merit,
and the days of casual bribery were all but over.
The epitome of the new regime was the Albert Dock,
which Richard would have seen being built in 1846.
So where we are now represents that new professional world
that's developing down here at the docks?
Yes. We're in a bonded warehouse.
The idea is that the vessel comes in and is then swiftly off-loaded
and placed in these warehouses.
There's bars on the windows.
Yes. The architecture here is specifically designed
to stop this Wild West world of corruption and backhanders.
Yes. It's almost like a Victorian prison.
As a clerk, what's happening to Richard Glenton, personally?
Not a lot. He remains a clerk.
We don't know much about him and his attributes,
but he doesn't seem to go anywhere.
There's no promotions, no advancement...
No. He doesn't climb the ladder. If we're to believe that this is
the start of a kind of new world
in which meritocracy, for example, is important,
I get the feeling he's a little bit inept,
a little bit useless at what he's doing.
What does that mean for him financially?
It means he stays at the bottom rung on the wage,
probably on a salary of about £50 a year.
A lot more than most people in Victorian Britain,
but it's not a lot for somebody
living in a very big house on Falkner Street.
No. That makes no sense at all if you're looking at purely at him
and his income. So, there's a bit of a mystery there.
There is a bit of a mystery there. Something else is going on.
The mystery deepens when you look at the occupations of Richard's
neighbours on Falkner Street in 1841.
It certainly tells you a lot
about their income bracket, compared to his.
And the expense of a house like this
wasn't just in the bricks and mortar, of course.
The interior would have been highly decorated,
especially the centrepiece of the house, the drawing room.
I imagine that when Richard Glenton first got the keys to this house,
this would have been the room that he was most excited to see.
There were catalogues at the time, just like this one,
and because Richard was the first owner of this house
he would have had the chance to have selected the cornicing
and the other decorative features.
And the whole idea was to make rooms like this
into statements about their owners,
about their refinement and their taste.
The plaster cornicing would have been elaborately ornate...
..with a ceiling rose in a matching style.
And there would have been a fireplace, too.
Marble, I'd imagine.
Having personally selected the decor,
Richard Glenton would, of course, have wanted the furniture to match.
Now, incredibly,
by going through the back issues of the Liverpool Mail,
I found a list of the furniture that Richard Glenton actually owned
and had in this room.
There's items like a rosewood couch, Trafalgar chairs and a cheffonier.
Now, I am by no means an expert in Victorian furniture,
but, to me, none of this stuff sounds like it's going to be cheap.
I've given the list to Professor Deborah Sugg Ryan,
a design historian.
She's come to the Geffrye Museum in London to see what she can discover
about Richard's lifestyle from the objects in his home.
Here is somebody who has a very fashionable interior.
We've got lots of luxurious furniture,
expensive fabrics,
and expensive carpet, too.
This is a Brussels carpet here, like Richard's.
And they were absolutely the most high-quality kind of carpet
you could get. This is a card table.
Richard had a pair of these.
You pull the legs out.
The top flips over, and, lo and behold,
you've got a lovely green baize top for playing cards on.
I could imagine Richard at this card table, maybe with some friends,
placing a little bit of a bet and downing a few drinks.
I think that, you know, it might have got a little bit rowdy.
The louche bachelor was a favourite figure of fun
in 19th-century cartoons. So, perhaps, a night of gambling
with his drinking cronies was Richard's idea
of an entertaining evening at home.
And Deborah's found another eye-catching item
on the furniture list.
Richard had a couch like this one.
This is mahogany.
Richard's was rosewood, which would have been even more luxurious
and, to my mind, this is somewhere where maybe Richard
would have entertained his lady visitors.
The couch is lovely for the female visitor because it accommodates her
clothing and allows her dress not to be crushed.
And I can imagine him cosying up to them on the couch,
poor, lonely bachelor, perhaps, that Richard was.
58 Falkner Street might have echoed with the shouts
of rowdy card players and the laughter of female guests, as,
for three years, Richard enjoyed the lifestyle of a wealthy bachelor...
..albeit on the salary of a customs clerk.
But I've found a document that seems to mark a dramatic change
in Richard's fortunes in 1844.
It's his father's will,
still stored in the archives of the Lancashire Record Office.
And what it shows is that Jonas Glenton left all his money,
his entire estate, to one of his children,
and it's not Richard.
It's his sister Eliza.
Eliza was unmarried,
so I can see why Jonas wanted to provide for her future,
but it speaks volumes, I think, that Richard didn't get a penny.
From this point, everything begins to unravel for Richard Glenton.
That list of Richard's furniture
from the Liverpool Mail now makes perfect sense
because it's actually an advertisement
for an auction at 58 Falkner Street.
But Richard wasn't about to replace all these expensive items,
he was selling up and moving out,
or, as the notice puts it, "changing his residence."
But I think this is the saddest document,
it's a page from the Liverpool census from 1861.
Now he's living in a much smaller house in Everton,
a far less prestigious part of the city.
Richard's departure from Falkner Street just a few months after his
father's death would seem to solve the mystery of his lavish lifestyle.
Richard had been living off the bank of Dad,
and when his father died the party really was over.
Now, there's a lot of people living in a Liverpool of 1844 who are
far more deserving of our sympathy.
Richard Glenton's not living in a slum, he's not starving.
But I can't help still feeling a bit sorry for him,
cos he's clearly someone who was a bit of a Daddy's boy.
But he has been, to an extent, humiliated, and been exposed
to the harshness, the cruelty of Victorian society.
For him, 58 Falkner Street had been a stage on which he had played
the role of a man of means.
A role that he never really had the money to pull off.
After Richard Glenton,
the next people to move into 58 Falkner Street,
in 1844, we think, were James and Ann Orr.
And James' story starts with a journey.
Liverpool has always been associated with movement and migration.
This was the port of entry for hundreds of thousands of people,
from right across the British Empire, from across the world.
In the 19th century, Liverpool was famous for
its huge Irish population, but one community who are often overlooked
in the Liverpool story are the Scots.
In fact, there were more Scottish migrants in Liverpool
than in any city outside London.
And James Orr was one of them, born in Peebles in 1814.
Now, he appears in Gore's Directory for the year 1847,
and he's listed here as a gentleman.
Pretty general catch-all term, and it could mean little more
than somebody doing a middle-class occupation.
What we do know about James is that he was 33 years old
and that, three years earlier, he'd married Ann Waters.
So, on the face of it, this is a simple, domestic story,
a nice middle-class couple have got married and they've got themselves
a nice house.
But there's one detail about James and Ann that just doesn't fit
that simple story,
because their marriage certificate lists their profession as servants.
We think that James and Ann may have moved into 58 Falkner Street
as early as 1844,
because, as a rule, couples had to leave domestic service
once they got married.
A house like this would have been a big step up for most
Victorian newlyweds,
but for two former servants it seems almost miraculous.
It's quite easy to imagine James and Ann Orr sitting here
in what, after all, was their living room,
enjoying the fact that they could pour cups of tea
for their guests rather than the guests of some employer.
So, how on earth did this couple manage
to change their fortunes so radically?
We know from the records that both James and Ann had fathers
who worked as labourers,
and there's almost no chance that they inherited any money from their
families. And this document, the Liverpool census from 1841,
shows them both working as servants in the household of Richard Earl.
Now, he was a wealthy barrister,
but there's absolutely no evidence that he left this couple any money
or property, so you're left to conclude that this scene
of this middle-class couple pouring cups of tea for the guests
in their nice, new middle-class home,
that all of that was down to their own efforts and their own ingenuity.
The hunt for clues as to how they managed it has to start, I think,
with James and Ann's time in the service of Richard Earl.
Richard Earl's household is really quite substantial.
He's got eight indoor staff and one gardener.
I think we can assume James Orr is probably something like a butler,
because he is the oldest male indoor servant.
He's 25, which seems young now, but in those days would have been
relatively old in work experience terms.
It's easy to imagine James serving dinner guests
or polishing the silver,
but a butler in the truest sense was much more than just a manservant.
As a butler, James would also have run the household accounts,
so he must have been both literate and numerate.
Someone who has skills in managing other people,
in James' case, a staff of eight,
would have had talents which would have been very useful
in all sorts of jobs in the outside world,
and the most obvious one is going into the hotel business,
into guesthouses, innkeeping.
And a great number of servants, including Mr and Mrs Claridge,
who set up Claridge's Hotel in London, had come from service.
So for James, butlering was perhaps like an apprenticeship
in business management.
And he must have already taken up a well-paid job when he and Ann
moved into this house, in 1844, we think.
But it's not until the next census seven years later
that we are finally able to discover what James
was doing that enabled him to live on fashionable Falkner Street.
This document tells us that his profession by then
is master of newsroom.
I think today we presume that this is a journalistic job,
but if you were involved in the world of business
in the 19th century, you'd instantly recognise this
as a managerial job in a gentleman's club.
Liverpool was becoming evermore prosperous in James Orr's day
and grand, new buildings were being erected to cater for
a growing professional class.
Gentleman's clubs were places of business and leisure,
and there were many, including the Rotunda, where James Orr worked.
The Athenaeum is one of the last survivors
from the city's Victorian heyday.
The current master of the newsroom is Vincent Roper.
Vincent. Good evening. Good to meet you.
Welcome to the Athenaeum. Thank you very much.
Wow. Impressive, isn't it?
Vincent, what would a newsroom in a gentleman's club
have been like in the middle of the 19th century?
Not very different to this.
We'd have had newspapers.
There'd have been a bar.
There's always a bar.
And there'd be conversation going on all around us.
People reading the newspapers, talking, having meetings,
discussing business? Yes.
Newspapers and magazines were then the only mass medium.
There were over 50 titles in London alone.
And clubs like the Athenaeum would have had the latest editions
sent up overnight by train
to meet the demands of their news-hungry business clientele.
Thinking about James Orr,
do we know what sort of man was recruited,
what sort of skills they looked for?
One of my predecessors, Mr Roscoe, the master in 1851,
wrote down everything you're looking for.
"The master of the newsroom should be an active and intelligent man."
Don't look sceptical about that.
"He should be between 30 to 40 years old.
"If married, so much the better."
So, they want stable men, family men.
Yes. So, to have got this job,
James Orr was clearly a man of some capacity.
Of sound character.
He wouldn't get it otherwise.
It sounds very conceited, doesn't it?
That's the way it goes.
In the archives here, they still have an original list of duties
for the master of the newsroom,
which include everything from collecting fees to lighting fires.
Most chillingly, it says his duties start
at seven o'clock in the morning. Yes, but they also...
They finished at midnight.
So, he runs this enterprise all day long, from 7am to midnight?
He's a manager. He is responsible for everything that goes on in here.
James Orr would probably have earned around £250 a year,
five times what Richard Glenton earned.
But his job offered much more than just a good salary.
So James Orr would have known pretty much everybody
in Liverpool who was significant, anyone who's a major businessman.
Yes. Liverpool was maybe one of the richest cities
in the world at that stage.
And they would be coming in his club the same as they would be
coming to the Athenaeum.
So he has the...the ear of the most powerful men in the city?
He would have a lot of influence with them as well.
They would tell him things, they could ask his opinion,
so he'd have the contacts, if he wanted to use them.
And James clearly did make the most of his position.
By 1850, he and Ann could afford a larger house on Falkner Street,
at number 28.
And I've found evidence of him taking on new, prestigious roles
in the world of finance.
The details are in one of the same papers that would have been
in James' newsroom. In 1860 the Liverpool Mercury
reports that James Orr is a trustee
of the Harrington Permanent Building Society.
Seven years later, the same newspaper notes
that he's the treasurer
of the South Lancashire Permanent Benefit Building Societies.
Now, these societies were one of the great financial,
or one of the great social innovations of the 19th century.
And it seems that James Orr is involved from quite early on.
Building societies began as savings cooperatives
for aspiring homeowners.
They were so successful that the number went up from 250 in 1,800
to almost 3,000 by 1860.
James had acquired the skills and the contacts to join the ranks
of trustees and treasurers, managing other people's money.
But I think he saw that the new housing market
held opportunities for him as well.
This isn't a man who's involved in this world of finance
just for these glamorous titles.
I think he's using his growing knowledge to build
his own fortune and change his own story, because this document,
from 1874, shows that James Orr is an investor in 18 houses
just across the Mersey, in Birkenhead.
Birkenhead was a property hot spot.
The demand for housing had skyrocketed,
thanks not least to the growth of the Laird shipyard
where the latest steamships were being built.
But there's more to admire in James Orr than just his eye
for a shrewd investment.
These same newspapers from the 1860s
show that he was collecting funds for local charities.
One that was vaccinating children,
and another that was helping women trapped in poverty.
By any standards, the life of James Orr,
the life that you can see recorded in these old documents
is extraordinary. He was somebody who found himself in 1844 a servant,
a man on the wrong side of a social barrier that millions of people,
no matter how hard they tried, could never even dream of crossing.
And, yet, when James dies in 1881
he's able to leave his widow Ann the sum of £16,000.
Now, there's lots of different ways that we could estimate
how much that sum is worth today,
but the most conservative of those estimates puts that amount
as being worth around £1.5 million.
The transformation of the life of James Orr and his wife, Ann,
I think began in those years in Falkner Street.
And what his life demonstrates
is that for the very luckiest and the most talented,
Victorian Britain could be a society in which there were
phenomenal levels of social mobility.
This is a journey from the parlour and the kitchen to the boardroom.
This is a life transformed.
A transformation was going on in Falkner Street as well.
When Prince Albert visited Liverpool in 1846 to open the Albert Dock,
he toured the city's finest sites,
and his carriage passed right by 58 Falkner Street.
It was then still part of a new development on the outskirts...
..but, by the 1850s, there were many more houses on the street,
and the owners were an even broader mix
of Liverpool's up-and-coming class.
After James and Ann Orr,
we know that a shipping agent called Alexander Gillespie lived there
briefly in 1851.
And a single woman Isabella McNeill.
Then, in 1853, the records show two new residents,
Eliza and Wilfred Steele.
Looking at these documents it's possible to come away
with the impression that Eliza and Wilfred Steele
are just another young couple moving into one of the posh houses
on Falkner Street, but if you look a little bit closer
you realise that isn't the case at all,
because Eliza isn't Wilfred's wife,
she's his mother.
He's just a bachelor, 25 years old.
And SHE is listed as the head of the household.
Now, this is another document that helps us paint
a better picture of the relationship between Eliza and Wilfred
because this is the will of Wilfred Steele's father,
and he dies when Wilfred is just a baby.
So the impression that you come away with is of a woman
who's brought up her son by herself,
of a protective mother,
and of a young man who's going out into the world
to try to make his fortune.
The question is what is the profession
that he's chosen in which he's going to make his fortune?
Well, I found this tiny clipping.
It's from a Liverpool newspaper
called the General Advertiser from 1851,
and it's an advertisement for an auction that's going to take place
at the premises of the company Bourne and Steele.
Now, this document, to me,
casts Wilfred Steele in a new light
because what it tells us is that the commodity in which he is trading
is the most profitable,
it's the most risky,
but it's also the most controversial commodity of the age,
because Wilfred Steele is a cotton broker.
If the docks were the commercial heart of this city
in the 19th century, then cotton was its lifeblood.
A quarter of a million tonnes of raw cotton passed through the port
of Liverpool each year,
destined for the giant mills of Lancashire,
which produced almost half of all the world's cotton cloth.
Most of that cotton came from the slave plantations
of the American South.
So although slavery had been abolished in the British Empire,
it was still at the core of the business that Wilfred Steele was in.
It was a business worth £70 billion a year in today's money,
and it put people like Wilfred at the top table of Liverpool society.
This is the very first time I've been able to look into the face
of somebody who lived in our house on Falkner Street,
because this figure on the horse, this is Wilfred Steele.
His likeness hangs anonymously in the Walker Art Gallery,
where it's been for the last half-century or so.
I've been able to identify this as Wilfred Steele from a history
of Liverpool's early Victorian painters, published in 1904.
Wilfred was a friend of the artist's wealthy patron,
but there's no other explanation for why he agreed to pose.
The picture is an imaginary scene, inspired by a Scottish ballad.
The woman, Helen, is pregnant with her lover's child,
but he will not give up his ride for her and she's forced to walk
alongside his horse across the Highlands.
This painting was produced in 1856, so Wilfred was in his 20s
and he was, by then, fully established as a cotton broker in Liverpool.
So this is how, at the moment he's risen to middle-class status,
he allows himself to be portrayed,
as this cruel and callous character from literature.
Perhaps Wilfred didn't care about the meaning of the painting.
Perhaps it was enough for him to know he was now mixing
in the highest circles.
As a cotton broker,
this square would have been Wilfred's place of work.
It's where all of Liverpool's wealthiest businessmen
would gather to make deals.
I'm meeting Dr Nigel Hoare to find out exactly
what Wilfred would have been doing here. Nigel.
David, lovely to meet you. Hi.
Really good to meet you.
So, although we're outside in the open air,
this is a trading floor?
Yes. Here we have a picture of Exchange Flags in 1847,
and we can see these splendid, top-hatted gentlemen
around the memorial.
Networking is a phrase we would use today.
So these frock coats and the top hat, that's like the Versace suits
of the mid-19th century. Absolutely, yes.
You've got to look the part. You've got to look like a merchant.
Someone like Wilfred Steele, we know he comes from
quite a humble background, yet he's here parading the Flags
with the wealthy, looking like the wealthy, it's all part of the image
for an up-and-coming and aspiring cotton broker.
Exchange Flags was Liverpool's Wall Street at a time
when the city was a serious rival to New York as a centre of trade.
And the young Wilfred Steele was poised to make a fortune.
So he's in the business elite
of one of the most dynamic cities in the world? Yes.
It must have been immensely exciting. Incredibly exciting.
And particularly at this time in the 1850s when the cotton industry
is roaring ahead, and booming, and people are making huge profits,
he must've thought he was made for life.
It looks like a safe bet, buying cotton.
And what happens? It's not a safe bet.
One Sunday, in late 1857, a ship arrives with news from America.
And that news is the banks have closed, there's a run on the banks,
the stock market's crashing, the price of cotton is collapsing.
Come Monday in Liverpool, and the market opens...
All hell breaks loose. Turmoil, pandemonium,
they can't even quote the price of cotton.
Within weeks, the price of cotton falls by 40%.
So Wilfred Steele, a bright young thing, what happens to him?
Anybody holding cotton would have been ruined in that situation.
And on the 6th of November 1857,
Wilfred Steele is listed as being out of business.
He's gone bust. It looks that way.
And it gets even worse for him.
The 10th of November,
we find Wilfred Steele has been sent to Lancaster gaol,
and that's a debtors' prison for Liverpool.
So one month he's a cotton trader.
Well, a city trader, effectively.
The next month he's literally in the nick.
He's finished. Absolutely finished.
It must have felt to Wilfred like a very long fall from the comfortable
surroundings of Falkner Street
to the harsh confines of Lancaster gaol.
And anyone sent to a debtors' prison in Victorian times
would have had to stay there until they'd cleared their debts,
or reached a deal to have them wiped out.
Wilfred Steele suffered this terrible reversal of fortunes.
I imagine he's feeling sorry for himself,
and I think he has reason to.
A Victorian debtors' prison is an appalling place.
I really wish I could feel sorry for Wilfred Steele, but I don't.
The cotton bales that land in Liverpool,
the last hand to have loaded them on a ship in New Orleans
is that of a black person who is a slave.
It's a profession that's steeped in blood and exploitation
and evil, and he's part of it.
It might be a worthy fate for Wilfred to be languishing in jail,
but I need to know how long he was there and what happened to him next.
I'm hoping I can find the answers in Liverpool Central Library,
which houses the city's record office.
Laura. Hi. Lovely to meet you.
I found Wilfred after he left jail,
so he clearly managed to pay his way out eventually.
And in 1859 he's living in Percy Street in Liverpool,
which was actually his mother's address.
And he marries this widow Marian Elizabeth Clegg.
A widow at just 28. Mm.
So Wilfred's life had taken some dramatic twists
in just a few short years.
From Falkner Street to jail,
then back to living with his mother at a new address, and now married.
Marian Clegg's first husband Edward had been a pharmacist.
He had died of scarlet fever in November 1858,
leaving Marian with two young daughters.
Wilfred married her just four months later
and settled with his ready-made family in the new industrial town
of Widnes, 12 miles upriver from Liverpool.
But there's a final piece in the puzzle of his hasty marriage
that Laura has managed to uncover.
And it links Wilfred, his new wife, and her first husband.
What's really interesting is that Edward Turnbull Clegg
was in debtors' prison at the same time as Wilfred.
Right. So, he's married a widow with two very young daughters,
and their father was somebody he'd met in prison.
Yeah. That's what it looks like. It's a bit EastEnders so far.
Yes, yeah! Well, maybe he was doing the chivalrous thing
and looking after this young family that he's taken pity on.
We've got the family together in the 1861 census,
but, interestingly, Wilfred's occupation has changed.
He's now a clerk in the chemist's trade.
He's really stepping into the shoes of her dead husband.
Basically, yes. It's all a bit dubious.
You wonder whether it's opportunistic, but...
It seems like he's trying to begin his life again. Yes. Exactly.
And there's a young son there as well, Wilfred Augustus,
who's seven months old.
So Wilfred and Marian have had their own child now? Mm.
It looks initially like things are looking up for the family,
but very sadly on 7th October, 1861,
Wilfred Junior passes away. Right.
He was exactly one-year-old.
Died on his birthday. He died on his birthday, yeah.
It's a pretty terrible blow for Wilfred.
Yes. Yes, it must be.
Wilfred Steele registers the death.
That's actually the last record that we have of Wilfred
in the Liverpool area. Right.
Whatever hopes Wilfred might have had of building
a new life had turned to dust.
And if he had now left Liverpool,
I worry what that meant for his young family.
I have managed to find a couple of records for the two stepdaughters,
Marian and Frances.
They're in Kirkdale Industrial School.
We have actually got a picture of it here.
It was this huge institution just north of the city,
built because the workhouse is getting so overcrowded,
they wanted to move as many children as they could.
Workhouse? Yes.
Where the children of the destitute end up? Mm.
So this isn't looking good.
In the 1860s, Kirkdale held over 1,000 children
in overcrowded and squalid conditions.
Boys learned trades like tailoring and shoemaking.
Girls like Marian and Frances were trained for domestic service.
So we actually find the girls there in 1862.
Where are they? Here they are.
Yeah. Steele.
So there they are listed under their stepfather's surname.
So they're here because they're orphans?
Well, this tells us that their stepfather had gone to America.
So he's left his children? He's left them and, yeah...
He's gone to America. What's the date?
September 1862.
So, he's gone to America in 1862
in the middle of the American Civil War...
..and he's left his children behind.
HE SIGHS
There's nothing in the Kirkdale records to say what happened
to the girls' mother, Marian, so her fate is a mystery for now.
But to find that somebody who'd once lived in this house
was in the United States in the midst of the bloodiest conflict
in its history is astonishing.
GUNFIRE
By the time Wilfred was there, in September 1862,
America had already been gripped by civil war for more than a year.
On one side were the southern Confederate states,
who had gone to war to defend the rights of slave owners.
Opposing them were the northern states,
fighting to save the Union.
Although Britain was officially neutral,
in Liverpool there was strong support
for the southern states because of their historic link
to the cotton trade.
I think the cotton connection is what's taken Wilfred to America
in the midst of civil war.
And if I'm going to find out what happened to him,
I've got to go there, too.
Richmond, Virginia, was the capital of the Confederacy,
and 30 miles outside the city is Petersburg National Battlefield.
The Union and Confederate armies
fought each other to a standstill here for nine months,
with tens of thousands of casualties on both sides.
And there is evidence that Wilfred Steele was here,
more than 3,000 miles from Liverpool,
as the battle for Petersburg began.
Civil War historian Harry Jones has the information I'm looking for.
Harry. How are you? Good to meet you. My pleasure.
Good morning, David. This is a beautiful landscape.
It feels like a park.
This is a park where we commemorate history,
but it's not a park where we play.
The last time Wilfred Steele appeared in the record,
we discover that he's in America. What's he doing here?
Well, when he comes here, he establishes a business
on Wall Street. He's in New York? Cotton and tobacco, 91 Wall Street.
Steele and Harthill. So he's back in the cotton trade?
Yes. Then in August of 1863,
he enlists an artillery regiment, the 5th Light Artillery.
There he is.
In the Union Army.
The Union Army? In the Union Army.
I have to say, I'm surprised,
because my fear was that Wilfred Steele, cotton broker,
had come to America and that he'd joined the Confederate army
to fight FOR slavery rather than against it.
My worst fears about Wilfred have not been realised.
Well, I'm glad to be the bearer of that good news.
Wilfred Steele, a man who had made his living from cotton
produced by slaves, was now standing shoulder to shoulder
with men like these,
in the Union Army, fighting AGAINST slavery.
In fact, around 50,000 British volunteers
fought in the American Civil War.
Most of them on the Union side.
You see what I want to believe is that he's come to New York
where there's a big black population and he's had a conversion,
a moral conversion against slavery.
Well, merchants in New York at this time tend to be pro-slavery,
so he's really not in that atmosphere.
But on Wall Street, near where his office is,
you have these brokerage firms who,
for rich men, find substitutes for the draft.
So you pay somebody to do your military service?
That's correct. Many immigrants would actually enlist
as substitutes. So this is probably more about money than morals.
That's where the evidence leads me.
So, it looks as if Wilfred wasn't fighting against slavery
because of his conscience, and if he was, in effect, a mercenary,
he was risking his life in a war that left 650,000 dead.
At Petersburg, they've reconstructed part of the Union line
where artillery units like Wilfred's were based.
So what was it like being a soldier in the Civil War,
manning these sort of defences?
On a day-to-day basis, your biggest concern was actually sharpshooters.
Snipers? That's what we'd call them today.
GUNSHOT
So, if you're in an artillery regiment, like Wilfred Steele was,
it's very easy to get killed. Well, Wilfred Steele,
his life is a little better than the average artilleryman.
Right. He's not a gunner. He's not on the guns.
He is a quartermaster sergeant.
He's accountable for all the equipment that you have
in the artillery, but he's not a front-line soldier.
So he's not out here exposed to fire, keeping his head down?
This is correct. This is a letter from an Englishman
who's a part of the Union army as well, James Horrocks.
So, this is one of Wilfred's colleagues.
And when he writes home, he talks about this quartermaster
and fellow Englishman Wilfred Steele.
"The Orderly and the Quartermaster Sergeant and myself
"sat down to beef steak and onions and coffee and bread.
"Tonight we are going to have some stewed oysters."
If you're an infantryman down in the trenches,
you're not sitting down to stewed oysters and beef.
You're eating rations out of a tin in the trench.
The privilege of a quartermaster sergeant. Yes.
Privilege is the word.
So, having abandoned his wife and stepdaughters to their fates,
and having signed up to fight in a brutal civil war
thousands of miles from home,
Wilfred Steele has nevertheless managed to land on his feet.
It is a bit of a charmed life, isn't it?
If you have to go to war and you do not have the angst for shooting
your fellow man, Wilfred Steele's life is the life you want.
I mean part of me thinks, you know, good for him.
Did you find yourself finding
at least, maybe not in his character but in his story,
something quite remarkable? Yes.
The war ended in 1865 with victory for the Union Army.
Wilfred was, of course, on the winning side.
By this time he was 37 years old,
so still a relatively young man,
having to make a big decision about his future.
I wonder if he thought about returning to Liverpool?
Or if the news had reached him
that his wife Marian and her eldest daughter had both died
of tuberculosis the previous year?
His youngest stepdaughter Frances was now an orphan.
If I'm going to find out what Wilfred did decide to do,
I'll have to look at the American records.
Five years after the war, Wilfred is still here in the United States.
He settled in Philadelphia, on Poplar Street,
and he is with Emma Steele, his wife.
Emma? Yes. His wife? Yes.
Wilfred, in 1869, marries an Emma F McLathery.
He still describes himself as a cotton broker.
Cotton broker, yes. And he has a son born in 1871.
Milford. Milford Steele.
Yes. So, another new life....
Exactly. ..as it were. He's definitely starting over again.
But, sadly...
..Milford dies at nine weeks.
So, the second time in his life he's lost a baby boy.
Right.
And do we know much more about what happens to Wilfred?
We do. He died March 23rd, 1873.
42 years old.
He dies of phthisis pulmonalis, or tuberculosis.
He dies of the same disease as the woman he married
and stepdaughter that he promised to care for.
HE SIGHS
So this is where the story ends for Wilfred.
For Wilfred it does, yes.
For 42, it's a full life -
he's had two families, he's lived in two countries,
he's been to war,
he's been in prison,
he's been bankrupt, he's been a businessman,
and he passes away in Philadelphia.
A long way from Liverpool.
I think if you gather all the evidence that I've learned
about the life of Wilfred Steele here in America
and you put it alongside what we already knew about him
from his time in Liverpool,
what emerges is a man with an incredible gift for reinvention.
Every time he seems, despite the adversity, to land on his feet.
And, yet, it's impossible to look at death certificates
for children who faded away in workhouses,
of a wife who dies in her 20s, abandoned,
and not conclude that what Wilfred Steele's life
demonstrates is the flip side of all of those virtues
that the Victorians admired,
the virtues of self-help and inner drive
and a determination to make it in business,
because the flip side of those virtues is ruthlessness.
And I think you get that in spades in the life of Wilfred Steele.
So far, I've only looked into the first 15 years
of the history of this house,
but the stories I've already uncovered could hardly have been
a more vivid reflection of their time.
What all the first residents of this house had in common
was that they were strivers, they were people
who were trying to rise up the social ladder and, for each of them,
this house represented everything that they aspired to.
Comfort, wealth, status, and respectability.
But, if you take all of their stories together,
what they lay bare are the forces that were then sweeping through
Victorian society in the 15 or so years after the house was built.
Because, at that time, the old world of patronage
upon which the very first resident of this house,
Richard Glenton, had so heavily relied on,
that was being shaken to its foundations.
And the new forces - trade, finances -
the forces that have propelled the careers of James Orr
and Wilfred Steele, they were the forces that were going to
change the future of this city and this house in the decades to come.
Next time, a deadly disease strikes Liverpool...
The residents of Falkner Street must have thought
they were going to be safe.
I think the sense would have been, "None of us are safe up here."
..the dark shadow of domestic abuse...
"Alfred Robinson dragged her by the hair of her head
"and violently assaulted her." In this house.
..and an unexplained death.
But the police still don't know what's happened?
No. That's the mystery. That's the mystery.