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A LIVERPOOL GENTLEMAN?
 
 
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE was born in Liverpool at the end of 1809. When, just over half a century later, he had introduced the pattern-setting budget of 1860, Walter Bagehot recorded this description of him: ‘Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below.’1 Bagehot, founder of the Economist, was in many ways the nineteenth century’s best substitute for Dr Johnson. He could aphorize at the drop of a hat, and often with wisdom. But was he right on this occasion? Gladstone undoubtedly became a great Oxonian, an accomplished scholar in his youth, a member of Parliament for the University for seventeen years in middle age, and towards the end of his life its most famous ornament. The town of his birth, on the other hand, faded into the background while he was still a very young man. Did he nonetheless remain ‘Liverpool below’?
 
He was indisputably born in the heart of that metropolis of ships and commerce which from about 1790 to 1925 had a high claim to be the second city of England. Its population in 1810 was 94,000, below that of Manchester (and of Dublin, Glasgow and Edinburgh, but they were not English), but it was growing more rapidly and had more metropolitan quality than its inland rival. The day of Gladstone’s birth was 29 December and the place was 62 Rodney Street. The late-December date meant that he was always a year younger than was signified by a superficial calculation, although his morbidity made him stress the reverse. Furthermore, despite his longevity and the fact that he was Prime Minister later in life than any other holder of the office, he was the youngest among his best-known near contemporaries, Newman or Disraeli, Manning or Tennyson. The Rodney Street address meant that it was a good modern 1793 town house, less than a mile from the waterfront. Over the two centuries that have since gone by Rodney Street property has experienced two transitions: first from merchants’ semi-mansions to consultants’ rooms and residences in what became outside St Marylebone the most eminent medical street in Britain (at the end of which from 1912 onwards there arose the massive solidity of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral); and then, much more recently, the further change to the sad decay of the Liverpool 8 of the late twentieth century.
 
Gladstone did not have many years of the town life of Rodney Street. He was there long enough to be brought downstairs at the age of barely three and shown off at a large dinner party which his father, John Gladstone, was giving for George Canning, whom Gladstone père was instrumental in persuading to stand and be elected for Liverpool against Henry Brougham the future Lord Chancellor. Thereafter Canning remained for William Gladstone a hero until and indeed well beyond his early death six months after he had become Prime Minister in 1827. But John Gladstone was at this period of his life both socially and geographically mobile, and Rodney Street could not long contain him. His wealth, which he had estimated at £15,900 in 1795, had risen to £145,600 by 1812 (and continued to climb to £502,000 by 1828).
 
There is no difficulty about knowing the exact current cash value of John Gladstone’s assets. He kept very careful stock of them, and when in 1815 he built two churches, St Andrew’s in the city and St Thomas’s at Seaforth, he entered them in his balance sheet at £10,000 and £4000 respectively, and endeavoured to get a 5 per cent return, mainly through pew rents, on these amounts. What is more difficult is to make a rough estimate of what his wealth was worth in modern terms. If this is to be done simply it must also be done crudely, and the best working rule I have been able to devise is to multiply all nineteenth-century values by a factor of fifty in order to turn them into late-twentieth-century terms. This obviously leaves jagged edges. The last century compared with the present enjoyed relative currency stability. But there were fluctuations from decade to decade for which no allowance is made. There have also, between the centuries, been variations within this general price level, the cost of services rising much more rapidly than that of manufactures. But the ‘fifty factor’ produces results which rarely defy common sense and give a vivid and reasonably accurate impression of the command over resources that went with the relatively modest cash sums which were involved in the various Gladstone family transactions. On this basis John Gladstone’s 1828 fortune would be worth a modern £25 million.
 
From where did it come? In his early Liverpool days he had been primarily a corn trader, bringing with him to the Mersey the skill which he had developed in Leith, and making mostly Baltic purchases. Then he was a partner in an East Indian house, dealing mainly with the subcontinent, and coming up against the restrictive privileges of the East India Company. This and Liverpool’s natural direction made him look more westward. In 1789–90 he spent a year buying cargoes in what had just become the United States. He did some cotton trade with Brazil. But it was on the West Indies and particularly on the two territories of Demerara and Jamaica that he became increasingly concentrated. By 1833, which was the peak of his trading activities, he showed total assets of £636,000, of which £296,000 were in Demerara and £40,000 in Jamaica. By 1843, however, he had turned himself from a merchant adventurer into a rentier. The West Indies stake was down to £53,000 and his shareholdings (mainly in railways) were up to £213,000.2 Sugar was the core of his West Indies activity, but tobacco and cotton were also important. He did not trade in slaves, even before the slave trade was outlawed in Britain in 1807, but the plantations he owned operated on slave labour throughout his time as a West Indian magnate.
 
In 1811 he began the building of Seaforth House, a full-scale country residence (except that it was not really in the country, having the mouth of the Mersey on one side and the beginning of Liverpool on the other) set in an estate of a hundred acres. By 1815 the family had effectively removed themselves five or six miles downstream to this new location. In 1817 he sent his eldest son, Thomas Gladstone, to Eton. Liverpool wealth did not intend to be shut out from privileged education, and already by 1811, according to William Ewart, a business partner of John Gladstone’s whose name was immortalized in W. E. Gladstone, there were ‘enough Liverpool Etonians to fill a coach’.
 
Then in 1818 John Gladstone became a member of Parliament. His parliamentary career never prospered. He was too old (fifty-four) when he started. But there was more to it than that. He was like an elderly philanderer who always had to buy his favours, and failed to make neat transactions. Liverpool rejected him, and he went to Lancaster. Most of his two years as member for that borough was occupied with fighting off a petition alleging that he had been corruptly elected. In 1820 he transferred to Woodstock, where the Duke of Marlborough had a seat going cheap – for £877 to be exact. But by 1826 the market seemed to have improved and John Gladstone failed to come to terms with the Duke for the renewal of his mandate. With a fine indifference to locality he once more removed himself, this time to Berwick-on-Tweed. There he was elected in second place (in a two-member borough) by a margin of three votes, but was once again subjected to a petition for corrupt practices. This time it succeeded, and his far from splendid parliamentary career (much of it devoted to defending the rights of West Indian slave-owners, of which he was a leading example) came to an end in 1827. But these nine years at Westminster, inglorious though they may have been, required five or six months a year of London residence, for which 5 Grafton Street, between Bond Street and Berkeley Square, was rented, and which constituted a further extension of the horizons of Rodney Street.
 
After the débàcle of Berwick John Gladstone never again sat in Parliament. It was not for want of trying. He was humiliatingly defeated at Dundee in 1837 and flickered towards the prospect of a nomination for either Aberdeen or Leith in 1841, when he was seventy-seven. He did, however, largely turn his back on England. He regarded his £500,000 as adequate (although it grew to £750,000 by 1850), and he abandoned Liverpool, the base of his West Indian trading fortune. At the end of 1829 he bought Fasque, a Scottish estate on the northern slope of the Mearns, between Dundee and Aberdeen, for the very considerable sum of £80,000 and supplemented it with an Edinburgh New Town winter house in Atholl Crescent. Fasque was (and is) a fine mansion, as elegant as it is substantial, built in the year of William Gladstone’s birth. It has a delicate staircase and a particularly good first-floor library with a commanding view to the south-west.
 
John Gladstone took time to move in to these two houses, and for the years around 1830 led a somewhat nomadic existence taking his invalid second wife (William Gladstone’s mother) and his invalid elder daughter (William Gladstone’s senior by seven years) on an ineffective search for health at some of the watering places of England. Thus when William Gladstone was at Oxford he several times did the forty-five-mile walk to join his family at Leamington, and when he was summoned to Newark for the beginning of his first election campaign in September 1832 he was at Torquay and had to do some hard posting to get there via London in forty hours.