When we live in a house, we're just passing through.
People have occupied it before us,
others will take our place when we leave.
100 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 townhouse, here in Liverpool.
A city that rivalled New York in the late 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'm going to show you,
in reality, it's an amazing treasure-trove.
Cos 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.
In this episode, we look at the house from the 1890s to the 1940s
when its residents struggle with technological revolution.
"We have nothing to fear from motor carriages."
Two world wars changed the house forever.
The bombs fell right here.
And the building descends into shabby lodgings.
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.
Welcome to 62 Falkner Street.
Today, it's home to a 21st-century family.
Gaynor and her two children, Rosie and Tom.
GAYNOR: Good idea!
SHE LAUGHS
Built in the early 1840s as a merchant's residence,
by the late 1880s it had become an up-market lodging house...
..run by landlady Catherine Robertson.
Now it's 1890, and she's selling the house to new residents.
But who are they?
To find out, I'm delving deep into the archives.
And hunting through official records.
So I've called up a page from the 1891 census,
and that tells us that the new residents of 62 Falkner Street
are the Snewing family.
William Snewing, who's 48 years old.
And under profession or occupation it says, "saddler,"
which means that he's a manufacturer
of saddles and harnesses and bridles for horses.
To afford 62 Falkner Street,
William Snewing was clearly more than just a jobbing saddle-maker.
Perhaps he even ran his own business.
He's married, his wife is Fanny Snewing,
and I think it says a lot about the way women's work was regarded
in the 19th century that under occupation there's nothing.
She doesn't have an occupation, according to the census,
and yet, the couple have six children.
There's a 13-year-old, 12-year-old, ten-year-old, seven-year-old,
three-year-old and an eight-month-old baby.
So she's not exactly living a life of leisure.
The other resident is a 19-year-old domestic servant.
The fact that they can afford a domestic servant
and they can afford to live here
means that they're probably not rich, but they're certainly
going to be a comfortable,
relatively well-off middle-class family.
In the basement of 62 Falkner Street
was the kitchen
and a bedroom, where we THINK
their domestic servant lived.
On the ground floor, at the rear,
a day room, where the Snewings lived on a day-to-day basis.
At the front, the dining room, used only for entertaining guests.
On the first floor was the parlour, the grandest room in the house.
Just for best.
Across the way, the main bedroom.
Used by William and Fanny.
Then, on the top floor, were bedrooms.
Most likely shared by the six Snewing children.
Inside the house you can begin to imagine what it must've been like
when it was the family home of the Snewings.
You wonder - what were the sounds that echoed around
these corridors and these rooms?
Did they have a piano, like many people did?
Did the children sit in this room and have piano lessons?
Did they go out and buy one of the new gramophones?
The main sound for many, many years in this house
must have been the sounds of children, SIX children.
FAINT ECHO OF CHILDREN PLAYING AND LAUGHING
The two youngest, Lillian and Mabel, were actually born in the house.
Ranging in age from teenagers to toddlers,
the ground floor day room would have been full
of their toys and games.
This is one of the last remaining original features in the house
and you can imagine children sliding down this banister
and really taking possession of the house and making it really feel
and sound like a family home.
Around the back were stables,
where the Snewings probably kept their main form of transport...
A horse and cart.
If we take a look at the jobs their neighbours did
it gives us a good indication
of how the social status of the street's residents has changed.
There's a draper's agent, a brush-maker.
A watchmaker and a painter.
These are not the merchant and managerial classes
who once lived here.
By the 1890s,
Falkner Street was clearly less fashionable than it had been.
The Snewings first appear
in Liverpool's Gore's Directory in 1877.
When they're living in nearby Upper Hope Place.
By the 1890s they had made enough money to move up the ladder into
the much larger 62 Falkner Street.
As this early footage of Liverpool shows,
horses powered all forms of transport on the city's streets.
So saddlery and harness-making were profitable trades to be in.
TRAIN WHISTLE HOOTS
Even the coming of the railways didn't dent the industry.
In fact, the number of working horses increased dramatically
as they were still needed to move goods to and from stations.
In the city, they lugged carts laden with goods from the docks,
pulled trams, and carriages owned by wealthy merchants.
There were over three million
working horses in Britain at the time.
But I have a question.
If William Snewing did run a saddlery business, how big was it?
The 1891 census simply tells us he's a saddle-maker.
So I'm looking back through the archives for more clues.
The 1881 census tells us a little bit more.
William is listed here as employing 11 men.
So this is clearly a proper saddle-making business.
And if we spin forward, 20 years through time to the 1901 census,
we can see that their son, William Junior, who was then 23,
has joined the firm as a saddler's assistant.
So this is a classic family business.
I've trawled through trade magazines and newspapers,
looking for references to Snewing Saddle-makers, but found nothing.
In fact, I could see no reference to them anywhere.
I need to find some sort of family connection.
By forward tracing Snewing descendants, using birth,
marriage and death certificates, I HAVE tracked down a relative,
who I hope can provide some answers.
SHE LAUGHS
Eileen Burkenshaw's husband John was William's grandson.
He was absolutely besotted with the history of the Snewings.
She has found photographs of William and Fanny
taken around the turn of the 20th century.
She also has a picture of William's uncle, Charles Snewing,
that gives us a clue
as to where William's passion for horses came from.
This is a painting of Caratacus,
with Charles Snewing and, of course, the jockey,
and this blue is the Snewing colour.
They won the Derby.
And this is 1862, so you can see why he wanted to be in the horse trade.
Yes. Yeah.
It's in the blood, clearly. Yes.
As a young man, his uncle's success at the Derby
must have made a deep impression on William.
And Eileen has another family treasure
that I'm hoping will provide more clues
about William's saddlery business.
All that we know about the Snewings was in this letter.
So this is real treasure? So this is...
LAUGHING: It's wonderful. So...
So, tell me, tell me... And all handwritten.
..what it tells me.
"William Snewing was always interested in horses,
"and finding it either impossible or impracticable
"to be a veterinary surgeon,
"he joined the firm Mennies, who were leather merchants."
So, he'd wanted to be a vet...
And couldn't... Couldn't get the training or...
Perhaps he wasn't capable, I don't know.
Yes. So, he's gone to London to be an apprentice, I think?
Yes, in saddlery, horsemanship, anything he could find, I suppose.
Anyway... "William soon encountered obstacles to his plans.
"Mennies had an agreement with all their staff,
"that if they set up in opposition,
"it had to be more than 50 miles away.
"So, he chose the town,
"which in 1875 was the most prosperous
"and certainly the most aristocratic outside London - Liverpool.
"He took over ownership by loan of Dobell & Son."
Ah, Dobell & Sons.
Yes. That's the company's name?
Yes.
So it sounds like he's gone to London,
learnt the leather trade
and then decided to take those skills out into a new venture...
Mm-hm. ..and chosen Liverpool and come to the town
and then bought this company.
Now I have the name of the company,
I can look them up in Gore's Directory.
And it reveals that Dobell & Son were based at 31 Church Street.
Today, Church Street is exactly what it was back in the 19th century,
it's one of Liverpool's main shopping streets.
It's about 20 minutes by foot from Falkner Street up the hill,
but William and Fanny Snewing
probably didn't come down here by foot,
they probably came in a horse and carriage.
And they had to come down here
because that's the site of their saddlery and harness shop.
This is a prime city centre location,
and you can imagine what the shop would have been like,
with the saddles and the harnesses all around the door, decorating it.
It would have looked like what it is, a thriving city centre business,
involved in a trade that was essential to the lives of absolutely
everybody in the late 19th century.
They were in a prime location, so presumably, doing well.
I want to know the type of saddlery Dobell & Sons were making,
and who they were selling it to.
So I've come to what was once the heart
of the Victorian saddle-making industry...
Walsall, in the West Midlands.
Today, it's still a centre for leather-working.
A select few make saddles here for the leisure market.
The curator of Walsall's Leather Museum, Michael Glasson,
has been searching the archives for any reference to Dobell & Son.
Mike. Hi, David.
Hi. What have you found?
Well, we found a few obscure references to Dobell & Sons.
They're not easy to track down.
Here we've got a reference to the Liverpool International Exhibition,
and Dobell & Sons win a prize -
this is 1886 - for their saddlery and bridles.
So it suggests that it's... You know, it's high-end stuff.
Michael has also found some classified adverts,
placed in Liverpool newspapers.
We've got one here, too -
a light set silver-mounted harness by Dobell.
And then another one here, too...
Plated mountings on a set of double and single harness
by Dobell & Son.
These are the metal parts?
These are the metal parts, the sort of the buckles,
and the sort of ornate fittings.
So this stuff is really desirable.
It's part... Blingy, yes. Yeah.
So, patent, shiny leather... Yeah.
..and nice silver buckles and metalwork. Yes.
So you can imagine, it would be very striking.
So William Snewing's Liverpool shop
focused on the top end of the market.
What's happening in the late 19th century is that increasingly,
the cheaper saddlery and harness is being made in Walsall.
Where we are now. Where we are now, in factories like this,
and there were about 200 factories in Walsall,
are really cornering the market in ready-made saddlery and harness,
and they're very, very good at it
and they can churn it out really cheaply.
But their secret weapon, their competitive advantage,
is the fact that unlike the saddlers in Liverpool and other centres,
they're getting all the stitching done by women stitchers.
Male saddle-makers were paid up to 40 shillings a week.
But they could get away with paying women just ten shillings.
That was less than a third of the wage needed
to support a family in the 1890s.
Exploiting women gave Walsall saddle-makers a competitive edge
and allowed them to produce more saddlery at a cheaper rate.
Dobell & Son in Liverpool couldn't hope to compete in this market.
So for Dobell & Sons, the options are either you sack all the male
saddle-makers, hire a load of women and pay them peanuts,
or you go into the top end of the market. Yeah.
So they are providing services to the wealthy... Yes.
..and that's where you can manage to find a niche in the market
cos you can't compete with what's being produced here in Walsall.
Yeah, yeah. So it's quite clever what they've done.
Yes, yes.
By 1897, the Snewings had lived in 62 Falkner Street
for seven years.
In that same year,
Gore's Directory shows that Dobell & Son have moved from Church Street
in the heart of the city.
Their new address is 22 Paradise Street.
These days, Paradise Street has been very much tidied up,
but in the 19th century, this was a side street,
it was off the main thoroughfare, away from the route to the docks,
and so for the Snewings to relocate their shop to here,
and we think their shop was somewhere around here,
has got to mean that they were downsizing,
that their business was in decline.
By the late 1890s, we know transport was about to be revolutionised.
But to establish what was hitting Dobell & Son's trade,
I've tracked down a sixth-generation saddle manufacturer,
who has spent his life working in the industry...
Cliff Kirby-Tibbits. ..An ongoing problem.
Some of the people started to buy bikes,
and latterly you then had the car.
And, in fact, if you read this article here from Saddlery And Harness News...
So this is the trade magazine? This is the Bible. Right.
"Now we hear another cry threatening the extinction
"of the horse on our roads.
"Carriages propelled along the highway by machinery worked by
"a small quantity of petroleum are now causing great excitement."
Then it goes on to say that,
"We have nothing at all to fear from motor carriages."
CLIFF LAUGHS
So they're pretty confident that the car's a fad.
It seems obvious to us today
that the car was going to decimate the saddle business,
but it's not obvious to them at the time, is it? No.
In 1895, the total number of cars in Britain was 14.
Then along came a vehicle that changed everything.
The Ford Model T.
Launched in Detroit in 1908, it brought motoring to the masses.
By 1910, the number of cars in Britain was 100,000.
What was different about this car to the other cars that had come before it?
This was mass-produced on a production line.
And they even moved production to Manchester.
So this was cheaper?
Cheaper, quicker, more reliable.
So what did saddle-making companies do to try to adapt and survive?
My great-grandfather Frederick realised early on
that you had to diversify to survive.
And this just shows you what we used to make.
Oh, really? Leggings.
So putties that the Army wore. Oh, yes.
Dog clothing, look at this.
That's lovely. It's with a hood.
I actually want one of these. DAVID LAUGHS
We moved into items like this...
This is a medicine ball, isn't it? That is a medicine ball.
Six pounds.
We were making footballs,
we had 600 women stitching footballs in the 1930s.
We're still making saddle and harness, but in smaller quantities.
For the Snewings, the speed of change must have been terrifying.
If they didn't adapt fast, they were dead in the water.
The 1911 census tells us 20 years after moving in,
the Snewings are STILL living at 62 Falkner Street.
It should also reveal how their company, Dobell & Son, is doing.
What this document tells us is that the company is still going,
but that it's not being run any more by William.
Instead it lists Fanny Snewing as the employer.
And the company is still described
as a manufacturer of harnesses and saddles,
which means they haven't chosen to diversify
or to produce any other sorts of leather goods.
It looks like the firm is still in business,
but why is Fanny now listed as the person running it?
I've called up William's death certificate,
and it reveals that he dies in 1908, aged 66, in his home -
62 Falkner Street.
The cause of death is listed as Bright's disease,
a chronic inflammation of the kidneys.
So that's the reason why Fanny is registered in the 1911 census
as being the one who's running the family business.
And it's also significant that in that 1911 census,
it shows that their son, Charles,
who was then single and 32 years old,
was working as a travelling salesman for Reckitt's & Co,
who were a chemical company.
He'd chosen not to join the family saddle business.
So perhaps the writing was already on the wall for the Snewings
and their family business.
While Fanny Snewing tries to keep the business afloat and a roof over
their heads, she has no idea what's about to hit the country.
In July 1914, the First World War broke out.
Almost a million horses were requisitioned from farms and cities
to haul guns, ambulances and ammunition wagons.
For the residents of 62 Falkner Street,
demand for military saddles and harnesses
SHOULD have provided a much-needed boost to their business.
But there was no call for the posh saddles they made.
What the Army needed was cheap saddles made as quickly as possible.
Worse was to come for the whole saddle industry...
..when hundreds of thousands of horses died at the front.
This is Liverpool after the First World War.
And it's clear that electric trams...
..lorries...
TRAM BELL RINGS
..and, of course, petrol cars were replacing the horse.
What I haven't been able to find is a single advertisement that leads me
to believe that Dobell & Son were still operating,
that they were still trading throughout the 1920s or the 1930s.
And what that leads me to believe is that the company failed to diversify,
and they continued to try to make traditional saddles and harnesses
in the traditional way,
and that by the time Fanny died in 1934,
there wasn't a company to leave to her eldest son.
And if that's the case,
it is a really sad end to a proud Liverpool company
and a sad end for a proud Liverpool family,
who lived in 62 Falkner Street for 45 years,
longer than any other family.
Fanny Snewing's death certificate tells us that she,
like her husband 26 years earlier, died here at 62 Falkner Street.
Her son, Charles, still living at home, was at her side.
A few months later,
the house was on the market for the first time in two generations.
The '30s were a tough time for Liverpool.
The Wall Street crash had resulted in economic turmoil
around the world.
International trade was badly hit
and had a profound effect on Liverpool's port.
And those who worked there.
One in five Liverpudlians found themselves out of work -
double the national average.
The depression also hit house prices.
Although the Land Registry records for Liverpool in this period
are incomplete,
it's likely that the new owners got 62 Falkner Street
at a bargain price.
The 1935 electoral register tells us they were a couple.
Robert and Sarah Ann Duffy.
I've tracked down the birth certificates
for Robert and Sarah Ann
and what they tell us is that Robert was born in 1870 in Liverpool,
and Sarah Ann was born four years later, 1874, in Manchester.
So they are relatively old when they buy 62 Falkner Street.
Robert - 66, Sarah Ann - 62.
And they must've had a reasonably large amount of cash to buy the house outright.
We can find out a little bit more about them through their certificate of marriage.
They got married in 1902, Robert was 31, Sarah Ann was 27.
It tells us Robert was a tailor and Sarah Ann, a dressmaker,
so perhaps they met in the trade.
We also know quite a lot about Robert's life
leading up to buying 62 Falkner Street at the age of 64.
His father, also Robert Duffy, was a cotton porter.
Now that's a manual job.
It's the very bottom rung of the rag trade.
This also tells us that the family are living in Renshaw Street, in Liverpool,
which is described here as court housing.
FAINT ECHO OF BABY CRYING
Court housing was the very worst slum accommodation
Liverpool had to offer.
Built around a central courtyard with a communal water pump,
they typically had just two toilets for 80 residents.
A far cry from a four-storey townhouse like 62 Falkner Street.
This is not a very auspicious start for the young Robert Duffy.
To discover how a boy from the slums
rose to become the owner of our house,
I've tracked down one of his relatives.
There's that one of Sarah.
Ceilia Ellis, now 71, lives in Matlock, Derbyshire
and is Robert and Sarah Ann Duffy's granddaughter.
Is he somebody in your family who you are proud of?
Very proud of him, yes, yes.
I would have loved to have met him, but he died before I was born.
He was ambitious, but he was kind.
My mother told me that he came across some children with no shoes
and he bought each of them a pair of shoes.
And so that shows just how caring he was.
But when he saw childhood poverty,
it kind of maybe triggered something in him?
Yes, yes, that's right.
You can take the boy out of the slum, but, uh... Yes.
SHE LAUGHS
Although Ceilia can't remember Robert, she CAN recall her grandma,
Robert's wife, Sarah Ann.
This is the sewing box my grandma had.
So the tools of the trade for someone who'd been a seamstress?
Yes. It's a lovely thing.
It is.
She gave me this book when I was a little girl.
And this is Sarah's handwriting? That is, yes.
It says, "To my dear little granddaughter, Ceceilia.
"From Grandma, with lots of love,
"Christmas 1955."
That means an awful lot to me, that book.
I can't give a value to it because it's so special.
What do you recall of what Sarah told you about her childhood?
I knew that she hadn't had a happy childhood
and she found it difficult to forget that.
So these are drawings that you did... Yes.
..of Sarah's childhood, how you imagined it?
Her mother was very, very strict
and she had to do several jobs before she went to school.
One was cleaning and polishing the range in the kitchen,
and another job she had to do
was polishing her mother's shoes and fastening them for her,
and if she pulled the laces too tight, then she was hit.
So you can gather from that,
she didn't have a happy childhood.
We'd call that today an abusive childhood.
Yes. And I think it's something that she...
never forgot.
Cos it does seem she had a really happy later life.
She did, yes.
It was very fortunate that she met my grandfather.
They were very close.
Sarah Ann's rise is even more remarkable,
given her difficult childhood.
Searching through the newspapers,
I've come across an article which backs up Ceilia's story.
This is an article from one of the Manchester newspapers from the year 1887.
It's a report into cases of cruelty to children,
and the victim of one of these cases is Sarah Ann Duffy,
then the 12-year-old girl Sarah Ann Gemmell.
And her abuser is her own mother, Elizabeth Gemmell.
What seems to have happened is that Sarah Ann was taken to a children's shelter
and there she was examined by a doctor.
And he found her covered all over the back,
from her head to her feet, with bruises.
When the doctor counted these bruises,
he reported that there were 33 double bruises from 8-12 inches long
and four short, thick bruises.
Now, when Sarah Ann's mother was confronted
with her child's injuries,
she admitted that she'd stripped her naked and then beat her with a
piece of clothesline, and the reason for this was because Sarah Ann
had fallen out with another child.
Because of these injuries, Elizabeth Gemmell was summoned
to the Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Children.
This was an era in which parental rights were everything.
The Victorian writer, Whatley Cooke-Taylor,
claimed he "would far rather see
"even a higher rate of infant mortality prevailing
"than intrude one iota on the sanctity of the domestic hearth."
That view was challenged in the 1880s
when, here, in Liverpool,
the Society For The Prevention Of Cruelty To Children was set up...
A forerunner of the NSPCC.
Sarah Ann was one of its early cases.
It was entirely normal in the late 19th century for children to be
disciplined and punished violently.
Children were smacked at home,
they were beaten and subject to corporal punishment at school,
and very few people saw anything wrong in that.
So, for Sarah Ann's case to have ended up in the newspapers
and her mother to be summoned to the authorities,
it must have been extreme.
Of all the people I have met who lived at 62 Falkner Street,
the one who you hope recovered
and had a happy life has got to be Sarah Ann Duffy,
the 12-year-old girl covered in bruises.
And so it is wonderful to learn that she did go on to have a happy life,
that her and Robert found one another
and lived together in love and happiness,
and that the abuse that she suffered
did not shape and direct the rest of her life.
But how exactly did Sarah Ann and Robert
turn their lives around and rise from the slums?
Official records tell us that by the time they married in 1902,
Robert had surpassed his father's job as a cotton porter.
In the 1901 census,
Robert has risen up to become a tailor's cutter.
A cutter was one of the most important jobs in tailoring.
Responsible for designing the suit
and making patterns to form the panels of the garment.
By the age of 40, Robert's skills are in high demand.
In the 1911 census,
we can see that Robert Duffy
has risen to the top of his profession,
he is now a master tailor, he has transformed his life.
He no longer has a hands-on job,
he was now running his own tailoring business.
But Robert Duffy, together with his wife, Sarah Ann,
still had ambitions.
In the 1920s and '30s, they invested their money...
..building up an impressive portfolio
of businesses and houses for rent,
including our house, 62 Falkner Street.
After living in number 62 for a year, Robert and Sarah move out.
But they keep the house and rent out rooms.
Until now, this has been a residence
for merchants and middle-class families.
By 1939, though,
62 Falkner Street was not the desirable home it had once been.
I've discovered some adverts the Duffys placed in local papers
that give us clues as to how the house was divided up.
One offers a furnished basement and bedroom, own linen, no children.
Another, furnished or unfurnished rooms.
The basement kitchen and servant's quarters are most likely converted
to provide rooms to rent.
And the hall, stairs and bathroom
were communal areas,
shared by all the tenants.
Professor Deborah Sugg Ryan is an expert on how people in the past
lived in their homes.
These rented rooms are not like self-contained flats or bedsits,
it's simply tenants occupying individual rooms.
They probably didn't even have locks on the doors.
But one of the things they would be doing
would be sharing the washing facilities in the house.
With all these different tenants,
the hallway, the stairs and the landings
would have accumulated quite a lot of dirt and grime.
Despite their relative poverty,
the women tenants of the house would have had a rota
for cleaning the front steps
and keeping the portion of pavement outside of the house clean.
The Duffys' tenants, packed into 62 Falkner Street,
were now very much working men and their families.
There's Joseph Ward, a dock labourer,
his wife Patricia and their daughter.
James Flood, a builder's labourer and his wife.
Patrick Behan, a bricklayer,
his wife Eileen and their son and daughter.
Jack Greenall, a dock labourer, his wife Florence and their son.
And Mary Hallsall, a hotel cook.
ECHO OF AIR RAID SIREN
Their worlds were about to be turned upside down on September 3, 1939.
The residents of the house had survived the First World War,
but they were under threat again as World War II broke out.
Liverpool found itself in the line of fire.
Its port was vital to the war effort.
Two-thirds of Britain's food was imported.
Cattle, dairy products, sugar, oil,
wheat and fruit all came through the city's docks.
To cut off supplies,
the German Air Force conducted 68 air raids on Merseyside...
..peaking in a seven-night blitz in May, 1941.
This footage reveals the destruction wrought upon Liverpool.
The Germans were targeting the docks and the city's infrastructure,
but, in the process, destroyed huge areas of housing -
a real threat to our house and to the residents of Falkner Street.
These documents are the bomb reports.
They're a report of every bomb that drops in this part of Liverpool in May, 1941.
Now that was the very darkest days of the Second World War
for the city of Liverpool,
because for night after night, the Luftwaffe targeted the city.
And this area, Falkner Street and the streets around it,
didn't escape their attention.
On the 2nd of May, the second day of the so-called May Blitz,
bombs fall on the junction of Falkner Street and Bedford Street.
Well, this is Bedford Street, this is Falkner Street,
and our house is just there.
And the report says, "The bombs fell in the roadway,"
which means that they fall right here.
Our house is 20, 30 metres away from where bombs are dropping.
It is metres away from being destroyed.
The bomb reports use codes.
H.E. means high explosive bomb, I.B. means incendiary bomb,
and both types of bomb
have fallen on Falkner Street and Bedford Street on this night,
because there's a fire in Bedford Street,
the streets are blocked by a crater.
There's debris burning in the houses
between Falkner Street and Myrtle Street,
which is just over there.
The next night, the 3rd of May, 1941,
Liverpool suffered the worst bombing in its history.
Hundreds of people were killed.
Few eyewitnesses remain of those fateful nights in May, 1941.
But one current resident of Falkner Street,
just a few doors down from number 62, lived through it all...
June Furlong.
How long have you lived in Falkner Street, June?
I was born here 87 years ago.
I was born in this room.
So you remember that week and a half in May, 1941, when Liverpool really
gets hammered by the Luftwaffe? Yes. Yes, I do.
What happened? We had a bomb,
an incendiary bomb that came in, I remember that!
An incendiary bomb came through the ceiling of your house and it didn't go off?
Well, around the lampposts around here were bags of sand, you see?
And the sand put out these bombs.
Cos these are bombs that are designed to cause a fire, not to explode.
Yes. So my grandfather said to my mother,
"Flo, go out and get a bag of that sand for this bomb," you see?
They put it out.
Residents of Falkner Street
could buy a Morrison air raid shelter for £7...
A metal box that doubled as a kitchen table.
We had here a pit bull mastiff dog and the pups,
and when the sirens went,
the whole family had got under that great, big table -
also the dog and all these pups!
So I remember all that, everybody under the table,
not in the air raid shelters.
That was funny. And that's true, and it was...
You wouldn't get hit on the head, I suppose, with bombs.
I remember that.
It would have been the same story in 62 Falkner Street.
These are just some of the bombs
to fall on the streets around our house.
It's a miracle that number 62 survived.
When you walk along Falkner Street
and you see this mix of 19th-century houses
built in the 1840s like our house,
and then modern developments from the '60s
or more recent developments,
some of it is due to what happened in the spring of 1941.
The real cost of the Liverpool Blitz
has got to be measured in human lives,
4,000 people died in this city as a result of German bombing.
But the other cost was in the destruction of property.
Now, Falkner Street was already in decline
before the Second World War,
but the level of bomb damage, the destruction of houses,
the gaps that were left between the houses,
the bombsites that littered this whole area,
that really accelerated the street's decline.
Throughout this period, a variety of tenants lived at 62 Falkner Street,
in rooms rented from Robert and Sarah Ann Duffy.
Then, on the 6th of December, 1941,
as Liverpool lived in fear of more attacks,
Robert Duffy died, aged 71.
Sarah Ann had lost not just her husband of almost 40 years,
but also her soulmate.
She was now a widow in a city bludgeoned by war.
The last will and testament of Robert Duffy
is a truly remarkable document.
This is a man who was born in the courtyard slums
of late Victorian Liverpool,
and yet, on his death, he's able to leave money to charity
and amply care for the future of his family.
The first thing he does
is he bequeaths unto the RAF Benevolent Fund
the sum of £100.
Now, in his final months,
Robert will have witnessed
the RAF desperately trying to protect Liverpool
from the German bombers of the Blitz
and he clearly understood their sacrifice,
cos he leaves them not just the £100, but also two houses -
number 32 Princes Road, and our house, number 62 Falkner Street.
He then goes on to leave to his daughter, Margaret Elizabeth Criton,
shops and houses to care for her future.
And then finally, he speaks directly to his wife, Sarah Ann Duffy.
And he writes,
"All the remainder of my property,
"including stocks and shares, cash at the bank,
"and personal belongings go unto my wife, Sarah Ann Duffy,
"to whom I am eternally grateful
"for all her loving kindness and loyalty in our long, married life."
This is the final act of that long marriage,
a marriage of two people who were never supposed to make it in life,
and yet, they escaped from poverty.
A boy from the slums
and a girl who had been beaten and abused by her own mother,
and together they found wealth and happiness.
It is a beautiful, beautiful story.
62 Falkner Street was now the property
of the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund.
Yet, the records show little changed.
Rooms were still being rented out...
And in 1941, as the war raged on,
one family living in the house particularly stand out.
John Greenall, his wife Florence and their young son.
They're both 31 years old
and John is described as a "wharf labourer, light work,"
which means he works down at the docks.
Florence is described as doing unpaid domestic duties,
which probably means she's a housewife
and that she's looking after their son, John Junior,
who's just six years old.
Another thing we learn is that John's father,
also called John, was a foreman stevedore.
So he also works down at the docks,
but in a much more senior position to his son.
The 31-year-old John Greenall, known to his family as Jack,
was one of tens of thousands of men working at Liverpool's docks,
loading and unloading ships.
In an age before mechanisation, all of this was done by hand.
They worked in teams around the clock,
under the supervision of a foreman.
A job that was tough in peacetime was even harder during the war.
As a stevedore labourer,
Jack's take-home pay would have been just a few pounds a week.
Squeezed into just one room at 62 Falkner Street would have been Jack,
his wife Florence and their six-year-old son.
There was space for just the bare essentials.
In a local paper, I've come across an advert for what could very well
have been Jack and Florence's room,
complete with a kitchenette, a tiny kitchen area.
They would have had a small,
compact space to do their cooking
and food preparation in,
and what they were likely to have is one of these.
This is a kitchen cabinet.
These became popular in Britain from the mid-1920s.
So if I open it up here...
So you can see that you've got lots of places to store packets
and jars of food.
But where it really comes into its own,
is if I actually want to do some food preparation.
I can pull out this enamel top here,
and open the doors,
and, hey presto, I've got my own work surface here.
This is an incredibly useful piece of furniture,
because it's your entire kitchen in a cupboard.
And the nice thing about the kitchen cabinet
is that when it had been used,
it could all be shut up and put away.
We can get a real sense of how Jack,
Florence and their son John would have lived in their cramped space.
The kitchenette would probably have been at one end
and the beds at the other.
Then, in the middle, the kitchen table.
This was not just a place where the family sat down to have their meals,
it was more than this.
Lots of these women who had husbands on low incomes
needed to work to supplement the family income.
However, work outside the home was frowned upon,
so women often took in work that was hidden from view.
So the kinds of things that Florence might have done is took in
dressmaking or mending, or even piecework, like making matches.
With the kitchenette, table and beds crammed into one room,
there may have been no space for cooking.
Instead, Florence would have had access
to a communal stove on the landing.
It's likely that the Greenalls endured these cramped conditions
throughout the war.
I'm intrigued by Jack's background
and how he ended up living in one room at 62 Falkner Street.
He has no direct descendants,
but, by building his family tree,
I've managed to trace his niece, Jane Greenall.
There's Jack, he was the eldest boy.
There's Jack. Yeah.
And that was my grandad and my grandmother.
So, your father was the baby of the family?
He was the baby of the family. And Jack was his big brother?
Yes, yes.
Your grandfather looks like quite a stern character.
I think he probably was.
Obviously, I never knew him, he died before I was born.
I suppose the thing I have to remember about your grandfather is
I say he looks stern, but he is literally a Victorian.
He is, yes. So I'm probably judging him a bit harshly.
I remember my dad saying that when Jack was a young boy -
I suppose he would have been in his teens -
he would come home late and me grandad would be hanging around, waiting for him coming in,
and he'd beat him up for coming in late.
And me dad wondered if that caused his epilepsy.
Jack had epilepsy? He did, yes. Yes.
He's working on the docks and he has epilepsy? That's right.
Yes.
Um, working on the docks, even if you're in full health,
is a very demanding, difficult job.
To do it with epilepsy...
It would have been very difficult, I would think, for him.
We don't know how severe Jack's condition was,
but in the 1930s and '40s,
there was a terrible stigma attached to any suggestion of epilepsy.
If the dock management had known about his condition,
he would have been refused work.
Yet, the records show, for several years,
Jack held down a job at the docks.
So could his father,
a foreman's stevedore, have helped his son to hide his condition?
Generations of Tony Nelson's family worked on the docks.
And he knows how the system operated.
So there was a culture? If you were one of the dockers, one of us,
they would look out for him?
Without a shadow of a doubt.
They would have given him light work, they would have looked after him.
They would have recognised he had to feed his family.
It wouldn't be the boss that'd look after him, it'd be his workmates.
So they were making allowances because he was part of their community?
Yes, that was the... Uh, the culture behind those dock walls.
And his father also worked as a foreman in these docks,
so would that have made things a bit easier for him?
It would have helped,
because it was the foreman that done the hiring and firing.
Dock labourers were casual workers.
Every day, Jack arrived at the docks,
more in hope than expectation.
He would line up in the pen, hoping that the foreman
would give him a tap on the shoulder to get a day's work.
So, obviously, if he's working with his father,
his father would have looked after him.
So he wouldn't be assured work, but it would have helped him.
And then, after going through all of that,
then he has a very physical day's work on the ship.
He was 24 hours a day, he was under stress.
He probably didn't sleep at night because of the air raids.
He would probably walk to work. That's a couple of miles.
Yeah. Before you get to work.
Yeah. So even though he's working,
even though he's got a job, he's still living in poverty?
He would just about be able to feed his family on the pay
and he wasn't guaranteed that pay week after week.
And, basically, he had to rely on the goodwill of his workmates,
basically, to earn a living for his family.
So his income is unstable and unreliable
and he's got a disability,
and we're a few years before the NHS,
so he's got almost no access to medical help.
But it's impossible to see how he could've made his life any better.
He was living in abject poverty, yes.
To me, Jack is an everyday hero,
who worked in all conditions through the Liverpool Blitz.
It's difficult to overestimate just how strong, just how cohesive
working-class communities were in this era
and the dockers of Liverpool were a classic case.
Thanks to men like Jack and his father,
the port of Liverpool remained operational throughout the war.
Ensuring that Britain was fed, equipped and armed.
But I can't imagine how Jack Greenall
could have sustained his job
without his fellow workers and the protection of his father.
The sad truth is that he had little else.
Back home, in their room at 62 Falkner Street,
was his wife Florence.
When you think about the predicament that Florence was in during the war
years, your heart does go out to her,
because she's huddled in this house,
looking after a child,
while the bombs are literally falling in the streets all around,
and her husband is down at the docks, working every hour he could
just to try to keep their heads above water
and make a little bit of money.
And she will have had, through all of that,
two thoughts in the back of her mind.
The first is that the docks are the number one target for the German bombers,
and the second is that, at any moment, her husband could have
an epileptic seizure and be injured, or...or worse.
I want to know how long Jack and Florence endured these conditions.
But there are few records of casual labourers in the 1940s.
And Jack's trail runs cold.
There's only one document that can help me.
I've got hold of Jack Greenall's death certificate
and it tells us that he dies in 1950,
and that the cause of death
is myocardial failure due to an attack of epilepsy.
Now, every death certificate is a tragic document,
but this one is particularly poignant,
because under "occupation", it says
Jack is an invalid with no occupation,
and he's only 42 years old.
So it's clear that, at some point, he was no longer able to work,
no longer able to support his family,
and the only hope you have to have is that this is 1950,
this is two years after the foundation of the National Health Service,
the beginning of the welfare state.
You have to hope that Jack and Florence, in Jack's final years,
at least had some help from the state.
Unlike the Duffys and the Snewings,
the Greenall family didn't have the resources to weather the hard times,
and poverty was never far away.
But one thing all three families had in common was 62 Falkner Street,
the place which provided them with sanctuary during the most turbulent years of the 20th century.
We see the house through
the post-war years to the present.
The very existence of number 62 hangs by a thread.
And if the house is vacant,
then it was at serious risk of being demolished.
Riots rage on the doorstep.
And a new epidemic takes hold.
People were not going to recover from this.