Notes on the History of Liverpool`s Luso-Hispanic

THE HISPANIC LIVERPOOL PROJECT:
Notes on the History of Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic Communities
Kirsty Hooper
Introduction
Liverpool’s Hispanic history has just
one formal monument. Since 1984, the
memorial to William Roscoe on the
site of the Renshaw Street Unitarian
chapel has been adorned by a colourful
azulejo with a bright floral border,
picking out in blue the legend ‘Sevilla
en homenaje a JOSE BLANCO
WHITE, 24 mayo 1984’. As the
companion plaque beneath records,
this tile, presented by a delegation
from the Andalusian city of Sevilla,
commemorates ‘JOSEPH BLANCO
WHITE, Spanish writer and political
exile, buried near here’.
Blanco White, born José Blanco
Crespo in Sevilla in 1775, had come to
England in 1810 in the aftermath of
Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, initially
settling among the large Spanish exile
community in London. After periods
in Oxford and Dublin, he arrived
in Liverpool in 1835, a guest at the
Seel Street home of his friend and
fellow Anglican convert Clemente
de Zulueta, a member of the extensive Basque merchant family with interests in
Cadiz, London, Liverpool and - notoriously - Cuba. But while a Spanish connection
may have brought him to Liverpool in the first place, Blanco White had little interest
in engaging with his countrymen during his time in the city. He quickly discarded
his adopted Anglican faith to join Liverpool’s burgeoning Unitarian congregation,
becoming a great friend of Liverpool’s leading Unitarian families, such as the
Rathbones and Roscoes. Having moved house frequently during his six years in the
city, seeking better or quieter or brighter lodgings as he became more persistently
unwell, Blanco White at last settled at the Rathbone family home, Greenbank, where
he died on 20th May 1841. He was buried, as the plaque records, in the graveyard
of the Renshaw Street Chapel.1
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It is somewhat paradoxical, if not entirely surprising, that White - who lived in the
city for just five years - should be the beneficiary of Liverpool’s only public
commemoration of its Luso-Hispanic history. Don José’s twin plaques, placed by his
native city of Sevilla and his adopted city of Liverpool, demonstrate his status as a
rare Anglo-Spanish figure whose memory is cultivated both in Spain and in the UK.
But his connection with the city, generally considered exceptional, is just the tip of a
very large iceberg. Although the city does not remember them, Liverpool was once
home to thriving Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Galician, Filipino, Lusophone
African and Latin American communities who lived and worked in the maritime and
trade networks connecting Liverpool with its sister ports in the Luso-Hispanic world.
Unlike their Irish, Welsh, Scandinavian, Italian, Chinese or West African
contemporaries, however, Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic communities have seemingly
left little trace of their existence. Until very recently they remained on the periphery
of the city’s official history; unmentioned in scholarly histories, they have no
monument like that of the Chinese, no community centre like the West Africans, no
published histories like the Italians, nor any church like the Scandinavians. With the
exception of José/Joseph Blanco White’s azulejo, there is almost no visible record of
their existence.
The Hispanic Liverpool Project aims to change this. A collaboration between
academics, heritage professionals and family and local history researchers, the
Hispanic Liverpool Project was created to gather, preserve and share the forgotten
stories of Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic community from the nineteenth century until
the present, and to put their history back on the local and global map.2
Background
With so little published information available, the project’s first task in tracing
Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic communities has been to establish the empirical data that
proves their presence in the city. A pilot project carried out between 2008 and 2011,
drawing primarily on the decennial census of England and Wales, provided a detailed
empirical survey of individuals, families, and kinship networks. Since then, we have
expanded our research base to include church records (christenings, marriages,
burials and confirmations), civil records (births, marriages, death, citizenship and
naturalisation), business and residential directories, probate records, consular
records, newspapers, and shipping records.
Gatepost to Belem Tower, Aigburth Drive, Liverpool, in 2012 (left) and 2015
(centre and right). For more information on Belem Tower and its history, see
www.hispanicliverpool.org/stories/villas/belemtower
The core of the project is a biographical database of some 2,500 individuals born in
the Luso-Hispanic world who settled in or passed through Liverpool during the long
nineteenth century.3 We began with those who were recorded on one or more census
returns, working to the following criteria:
 ‘Luso-Hispanic world’ in this context refers to any country or territory where
Portuguese or Spanish was an official language. In practice, this normally
means current or former possessions of the Portuguese or Spanish Empires.
 ‘Liverpool’ in this context includes the City of Liverpool and the central part
of the current county of Merseyside. This means chiefly areas that are now
included in the Boroughs of Sefton and Knowsley, but not Wirral or St Helens.
 The ‘long nineteenth century’ in this context incorporates the period from
approximately 1800 to the First World War.
We have also walked Liverpool’s streets to map the buildings, streets, routes and
locations where Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic history played out and, wherever we can,
to locate and record material traces of this history, from carved gateposts to
gravestones. For example, the pictures below show the carved sandstone gatepost to
the lost villa, Belem Tower, constructed between 1871 and 1881 for the family of the
fruit broker James Adam and his wife Penelope, who named their home after a
landmark in their adopted city of Lisbon, Portugal.
For the first, census-based phase, we decided to select solely on the grounds of birth
country as stated on the census, ignoring citizenship and other factors.4 The first
iteration of the database therefore does not include Spanish, Portuguese or other
foreign citizens born in Britain - that is, second-generation migrants who may have
retained their parents’ foreign citizenship - but it does include British citizens born
overseas. As a result, it is a promising resource not only for Luso-Hispanic
community history, but also for those interested in the individual and social
ramifications of Britain’s broader commercial, military and social connections with
the Luso-Hispanic world - in which Liverpool, of course, was a crucial hub.
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The development of Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic-born population broadly reflects the
city’s own population growth, more or less doubling in size between the first useful
census in 1851 and the last available one in 1911. A survey of birth countries
recorded in census returns shows that some 75 per cent of all those recorded were
born in Spain, and around 10 per cent in Brazil. Further clusters originate in Portugal,
the Philippines, and Cape Verde, while other Spanish - and Portuguese - speaking
countries in the Caribbean, Central and South America, Lusophone Africa and the
Pacific are represented by a handful of individuals or family groups. The main
sources of employment for Luso-Hispanic Liverpudlians between 1851 and 1911
were, unsurprisingly, the sea, commerce, skilled trade (eg tailoring), and domestic
service. While these figures may not be especially different from the wider Liverpool
population, their transformation across time is quite revealing. In what follows, we
will look at two snapshots of the population: in 1851 and in 1881.
clustered around the waterfront. A single Spanish-run boarding house was located at
32 Drury Lane, where the Canarian cooper and translator José Romero (also known
as Joseph Rosemary) hosted eight Spanish and two Portuguese sailors.
Hispanic Liverpool in 1851
Twelve years later, Liverpool had gained another Spanish-run boarding house at
39 Lancelots Hey. This establishment, run by Madrid-born Antonio Bargas and his
wife Maria Reu, would enter the public eye when one of its residents, the young
Malaga-born seaman José María Álvarez was tried (and later executed) for a
gruesome and widely-reported crime known as ‘The Oldhall Street Murder’.5 Back
in 1851, however, Romero’s was the only dedicated Spanish boarding house, so that
most seamen from the Luso-Hispanic world stayed with local families. This is the
case, for example, for the four Filipino sailors found at 137 Vauxhall Road, the home
of George Guerden, registrar of births and deaths, who was presumably the man
responsible for anglicising his guests’ surnames as Bartholm, Francis, Nash, and
Wright.
In 1851, fully half of the recorded Luso-Hispanic-born population comprised
foreign-born British citizens, mostly born in Brazil, Argentina or Chile, and residing
in family groups in large villas or townhouses in the districts of Mount Pleasant,
Toxteth Park and West Derby. This was the community of Brazil and South America
Merchants, with longstanding commercial bases in North-East Brazil and the
Southern Cone. A typical household was that of the Gunston family, headed by the
widowed Thomas Bernard Gunston, a second-generation Brazil merchant born in the
Brazilian state of Pernambuco in 1813. In 1851, Thomas’s household at
5 Abercromby Square included his two young sons Henry and Thomas and his
unmarried older sister Ellen, all born in Pernambuco, and three servants; two women
born in Chester and Ireland, and one, named only as ‘Frederick,’ who had been born
in the Portuguese island colony of Cape Verde.
The cases of Romero/Rosemary and the Filipino sailors highlight a key challenge in
researching a foreign community in British records. Census data is notoriously
unreliable, travelling through at least three incarnations before it reaches the modern
researcher: firstly, the original return; secondly, the enumerator’s transcription; and
finally, digitisation and/or indexing. The returns are especially unreliable where
householders were not literate or had limited English, as was the case for many of
the foreign sailors passing through Liverpool’s dozens of boarding houses. In such
cases, a landlord, neighbour or other person might have acted as interpreter, or else
the enumerator might simply have completed the form from the limited
communication possible. Foreign names were often transcribed phonetically or
approximately or, as in the case of the Filipino sailors, Anglicised or converted to
more recognisable English variants.6
Their elegant home at 5 Abercromby Square is now part of the University of
Liverpool. The streets around the Gunstons’ townhouse were also home to other
merchant families with Brazil and South American connections, such as the Clarks
of Grove Street, the Coxes and Youles of Shaw Street - who had their own African
servant in Mozambique-born Sabino - the Heskeths of Mount Pleasant, the Mellors
of Everton Terrace, the Paceys of Aigburth Road, and the Ryders of Falkner Square.
The Brazilian Consul, John Francis Ferres, a native of Bahia, was at 80 Grove Street
with his Mancunian wife, Sarah Elizabeth.
Romero’s case is more unusual. He was one of the earliest residents of what would
become Liverpool’s thriving Hispanic waterfront community. Born in the Canary
Islands, he had arrived in Liverpool by 1850, when his first child was born. His
family-name, Romero, is the Spanish word for Rosemary, and Catholic priests in
If the South American-born population in 1851 was largely of the merchant class,
the European-born population had a much more eclectic profile, divided between
merchants, tradesmen, mariners, and a handful of British citizens born during or
shortly after the Peninsular War - most likely the offspring of military families. The
Spanish and Portuguese merchants, like their South American counterparts, are
generally to be found in the area now occupied by the University of Liverpool, while
the mariners, at this time generally just passing through between sailings, are
Baptismal records for Rachael and Valentine Francis, two of the children of José
Romero (aka Joseph Rosemary) and his wife Catherine (née O’Brien) at St Mary’s
RC Church, Highfield Street, Liverpool in 1856 and 1858. (LRO 282 HIG 1/9)
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Liverpool sometimes recorded the English version in the family’s baptismal,
marriage, and death records. We can’t tell, today, whether that was the priests’
misunderstanding, or José’s own initiative - after all, one of his many occupations
during his time in Liverpool was ‘interpreter’.7
Transformation: The Larrinaga Line
The demographic profile of Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic-born residents in 1851 was
dominated by Liverpool’s role as a gateway for the South American trading
community, with a large proportion of foreign-born British citizens, but over the next
thirty years, this profile would be transformed. As the largely unremarked presence
in 1830s Liverpool of Blanco White’s friend, the Basque merchant Clemente de
Zulueta demonstrates, Liverpool had long been a crucial hub on the trade and
maritime networks of the Luso-Hispanic world, and the city had always had a handful
of individual Spanish, Portuguese and South American residents. Between the 1850s
and the 1880s, global changes in maritime technology and geopolitics, together with
significant reforms in Spanish trade, shipping and emigration law, created a perfect
storm of opportunities.
By the 1870s, Liverpool’s unparalleled infrastructure, resources, skills and
connections had made it a key destination for Spanish merchants and shipping
companies. Longstanding connections with sister ports such as Bilbao, A Coruña,
Málaga, Porto, Lisbon, Funchal, Las Palmas, Manila, Havana, Buenos Aires,
Manaus and Callao, were expanded, bringing hundreds of ships, and thousands of
sailors, merchants and their families to Liverpool. By the second half of the
nineteenth century, dozens of
shipping companies, large and
small, British- and Spanishregistered, ploughed the
maritime routes between
Liverpool,
the
Iberian
Peninsula, South America,
and the Pacific outposts of
both Portugal and Spain.
Among the most prominent
British companies engaged in
Luso-Hispanic trade were
MacAndrews, the Pacific
Steam Navigation Company,
Lamport & Holt, T & J
Harrison, Elder Dempster,
House flag, Larrinaga Steamship Co Ltd (c 1955) © National
Maritime Museum Collections. The flag is said to represent a hand
and the Booth Line. Their
shake between the three partners confirming the decision to run steam
Spanish counterparts included
services through the Suez Canal or alternatively the three Basque
López y López, the Compañía
families who founded the firm - Olano, Larrinaga and Longa. It was
Trasatlántica
and
most
in use from the 1860s until 1974.
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famously of all, the Anglo-Basque Larrinaga line, whose history is inextricably
bound up with that of Hispanic Liverpool.
The Larrinaga line was founded as Olano, Larrinaga, and Company in Liverpool in
1862 by three Basques from the small fishing port of Mundaka in the Basque
province of Vizcaya (Biscay); Ramón de Larrinaga, his brother-in-law Captain
Bautista de Longa, and a ship’s chandler, José Antonio de Olano.8 The company
initially ran a successful fleet of sailing ships (the Olano, Feliz, Trinidad, Victoria,
Gloria, Cosmopolita, and Doña Telesfora) between Liverpool and the Philippines.
Always with one eye on the future, and appreciating the potential of the newly
opened Suez Canal, the company made the switch to steam in 1871, launching the
Sunderland-built Buenaventura and Emiliano to great fanfare.9 These were just the
first of what swiftly became a large, modern fleet ferrying cargo and passengers
between Liverpool and the Philippines under the Spanish flag. The founders were
ambitious, and in 1873 won the lucrative Spanish government contract to transport
government and military personnel between Spain and the Philippines - then, with
Cuba, the final remnant of Spain’s crumbling empire.10 Losing this contract at the
end of the 1870s, in 1881 the company became the Liverpool agent for the vast
Compañía Trasatlántica Española, known in Liverpool as the Spanish Line. Shortly
afterwards, it switched its focus to the other end of the Spanish Empire, investing
heavily in its routes to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the US cotton ports. After the end of
the Spanish-American war in 1898, the company
severed formal ties with Spain and began registering
its ships in Liverpool; despite heavy losses in both
world wars, it would survive until 1974.
‘Chasing a merchantman: the “Niceto de Larrinaga” being pursued
by the German Cruiser “Karlsruhe”in the South Atlantic’
(Illustrated London News, 14th Nov 1914). The pursuit ended with
the capture and scuttling of the Niceto de Larrinaga on the 4th
October 1914. A second vessel of the same name was lost in 1941.
One of the Tower Hill Memorial panels for the Jose de Larrinaga,
torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic on the 7th September 1940 with
the loss of all 40 hands (image courtesy www.benjidog.co.uk). An
earlier vessel of the same name was lost in 1917.
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The foundation of the Larrinaga line, with its modern fleet of ships crewed by
Basques, Galicians, and Filipinos and its close ties to the tiny town of Mundaka,
would be a transformative moment in Liverpool’s Hispanic history. As the 1860s
opened, Liverpool was home to a handful of Spanish, Portuguese, and South
American merchants, sailors and other expats. Within two decades, thanks to pull
factors such as the Larrinaga line’s expansion in the city and increased British
investment in South America, and push factors such as Spain’s brutal Carlist Wars
or the disastrous hurricane of 1878 that decimated the Basque fishing fleet, the city
had become home to a large, socially and ethnically diverse community from all
across the Hispanic world. The biggest communities were those from the Basque
province of Vizcaya, from the northern Spanish regions of Galicia and Asturias, and
from the Philippines. From the 1870s onwards, the Liverpool waterfront, its
warehouses, shops and boarding houses, hummed with conversations in Spanish,
Portuguese, Basque, Galician, Tagalog, or Chavacano.
Hispanic Liverpool in 1881
The 1881 census vividly illustrates Liverpool’s new ethnically and linguistically
diverse Luso-Hispanic reality. In 1851, most of the Liverpool residents born in the
Luso-Hispanic world had been foreign-born British citizens, generally members of
the wealthy mercantile elite living in elegant
Mount Pleasant or West Derby. Thirty years
later, Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic residents
were mostly foreign citizens, the vast
majority of them born in Spain and
connected in some way with the sea;
boarding house keepers, ship owners,
merchants, shipstore dealers, brokers,
seamen’s outfitters, ship’s captains and
dozens of firemen, ship’s cooks and bakers,
stewards, and ordinary seamen. They were
clustered in three main areas. The wealthiest
Spaniards, such as the Larrinagas and their
relatives, the Bollegui and Longa families,
lived high above the city in fashionable
Salisbury Street, Shaw Street, and Islington.
The small middle class, mostly made up of
ship’s captains and skilled tradesmen, were
in Toxteth Park: the Basque shipwrights
Gatepost to Villa Maria, 23 Alexandra Juan Bautista Abaitua and Jose Mutizabal in
Drive, Liverpool (2012). This was the
Carter Street and Hill Street respectively; the
home of Maria Larrinaga, daughter
of company founder Ramón, and her Catalan blacksmith Tadeo Cumella in
husband (and distant cousin) Teodoro Beresford Road; the Basque seamstress
Larrinaga, who married in Liverpool in Macaria Leguineche (or Leguinestia) and
her tailor brother, Rabelardo Elinago, in Dombey Street. During the 1880s and 1890s,
many of the wealthier families would move into the opulent, newly-constructed villas
surrounding Sefton Park, where their traces are occasionally visible in the carved
gateposts that stand sentinel by paths and driveways.
While better-off Hispanic families in the 1870s and 1880s established themselves in
Everton and Toxteth Park, the Basque, Galician, Filipino and Portuguese seamen
who crewed their ships were concentrated in the central waterfront, close to Wapping
and Salthouse Docks. Around them, in Bridgewater Street, Cleveland Square,
Frederick Street, Hurst Street, Liver Street, Mersey Street, Morley Street, Salthouse
Lane, and Wapping, were the shopkeepers, outfitters and boarding house keepers
who saw to their physical and professional needs. Liverpool in 1881 had a good
selection of boarding houses catering to Spanish-speaking sailors. Whereas in 1851
there had been only one Spanish-run boarding house, by 1881 there were at least
twelve, often organized along ethnic lines.
Spanish sailors might stay with the former shipping master José Lago at
41 Cleveland Square,11 while Asturians might go to 20 Liver Street, where the
Oviedo-born outfitter Avelino Pérez García and his second wife, Mary, hosted a
variety of boarders. Their Filipino shipmates, if they weren’t put off by its association
with a gruesome murder the previous year, could head for Eustaquio and Mary Jane
de la Cruz’s boarding house in Greetham Street.12 However, the greatest selection of
boarding houses catered to the Basque sailors who made up the majority of the crews
on Larrinaga ships. Mundaka-born Alexandra Basterra (née Rodriguez Urrutia) was
at 26 Cleveland Square; her parents, Pablo Rodriguez and Maria Urrutia were around
the corner at 4 Pitt Street, and would go on to run the big Spanish boarding house at
the corner of St James Street and Park Lane.13 Meanwhile, at 28 Wapping, the tailor
Florencio Bengoa and his wife Antonia Bengoechea, from the Basque fishing ports
of Ea and Elantxobe respectively, also hosted visiting Basque sailors and other
friends until Florencio’s early death in 1894.
The 1881 census also provides a first snapshot of two of the Basque families who
would establish themselves at the centre of Hispanic Liverpool’s social and kinship
networks, as we can see from their frequent appearances as witnesses and godparents
to Basque and other Hispanic weddings and baptisms. At 4 Mersey Street, formerly
the Yorkshire Dining Room, the shipping master Miguel Bilbao and his wife Maria
Antonia Ortuzar hosted eight fellow Basques, with the help of their two Basque
female servants, Simona Cafranga and Feliciana Espicia.14 The Liverpool Mercury
provides a vivid glimpse into life in the Bilbao boarding house in a report from
October 1875, when Miguel - in Liverpool just three months - had been summoned
for selling without a license at the property. Police Inspector Overend reported that
on visiting, he had found “about 40 men sitting at tables playing cards, with silver
and copper money before them, while other people were dancing to music. There
were bottles of champagne and glasses on the tables, and there was a large quantity
1897.
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of wine in bottles on the shelves”. Miguel’s defence was that he was “merely
[carrying] out a practice which prevailed on the continent,” but it did him no good,
and he was fined the substantial sum of £10 plus costs.15
Two minutes’ walk away at 41 Hurst Street,
Prudencio Clemencot and his wife Ygnacia
Ansuategui, from the Basque fishing port of
Elantxobe, were just establishing the
household that would become the inspiration
for Helen Forrester’s novel The Liverpool
Basque (1993).16 In this photograph, taken in
1938 by Father L J D’Andria, parish priest at
St Peter’s RC Church in Seel Street, 41 Hurst
Street is the second house after the
refreshment rooms on the corner, with a
woman sitting on the front steps (LRO).
As the presence of so many married couples shows, it was not unusual for Hispanic
women to migrate to Liverpool, especially from South America and from northern
Spain (in contrast, few, if any women travelled to Spain from Portugal or the more
distant Philippines). While many women who arrived during the 1870s came with
their husbands, others travelled alone or for work. One popular route, which
continued well into the twentieth century, was domestic service; Liverpool’s wealthy
Basque households were run by domestic servants brought from the family’s home
town or nearby villages. For example, on the 1881 census, we find Dionisia Ibieta
(or Obieta), Josefa Arribalzaga (or Areitabiza), and Teresa Bilbao working for
Ramón Larrinaga’s family at 9 Salisbury Street, Josefa Elgarte working for
Florentino Larrinaga’s family at 23 Shaw Street, and Martina Ozollo (or Arollo)
cooking for the Longa-Bollegui family at 161 Islington.
But families of more modest means also employed servants from home, often
younger girls or married women who were part of the family’s wider social or kinship
network. For example, in 1881, Nicolasa Arriandiaga from Elantxobe was working
as a servant at the Charlotte Place boarding house of her sister-in-law Maria San
Martin, from the neighbouring town of Ea (Nicolasa had married Maria’s brother
Miguel in Liverpool the previous year). Nicolasa and Maria were part of a large,
female-dominated Hispanic community residing in near-derelict Charlotte Place,
which lay between Salthouse Lane, Mersey Street, and Wapping, and was the first
Liverpool residence for many Basque, Spanish and Portuguese brides and grooms
who gave it as their address between 1871 and 1882. By census night 1881, only
eight properties remained on Charlotte Place; five of them were Basque households,
one was Portuguese, and more than half were headed by women.17
Conclusion
After the ‘boom’ of the 1870s and 1880s, Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic community
continued to expand. The maritime and economic ties between Liverpool and sister
ports in Spain, Portugal, the Philippines, the Caribbean and Central and South
America grew stronger, ships became larger, and sailings became more frequent,
making it much easier for families to travel and to stay in touch with friends and
family back home.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) brought a fresh wave of migrants from Spain,
including the ‘niños vascos’ (Basque children) who were evacuated from the
bombing raids of 1937 and who stayed at Greenbank in Upton on the Wirral, and in
Liverpool.18 Today, the Hispanic Liverpool Project works with descendants of
Liverpool’s Luso-Hispanic communities to record, preserve and share Liverpool’s
forgotten Hispanic history.
Our new digital archive, the Hispanic Liverpool Community Collection
(www.hispanicliverpool.org/communitycollection), brings together stories,
images, and memories of Liverpool’s Hispanic residents, from the
nineteenth century until the present. We also have a Facebook Group
(www.facebook.com/groups/hispanicliverpoolproject) where people can post
questions, share photographs and memories, and tell us about their research.
We welcome information and questions about Liverpool’s connections with Spain,
Portugal, the Basque Country,
Catalonia, Galicia, Asturias, the
Philippines, Cuba, Brazil, Central
and South America, Lusophone
Africa, or any place where
Spanish or Portuguese is or has
been a major language. We look
forward to putting Liverpool’s
Luso-Hispanic history back on
the local and global map.
Letter holder sent to Isabel
Marcos in Liverpool by her
brother Emilio in Havana.
Contributed to the Hispanic
Liverpool Community Collection
by Joe Murphy and Ann
Monaghan, August 2015.
Within a year, the Hispanic residents had moved on and by 1891, the land had been
cleared entirely.
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Notes
1
For more on Blanco White in Liverpool, see
www.hispanicliverpool.org/stories/people/joseblancowhite
2 Although the project’s formal name is the Hispanic Liverpool Project, its remit also includes the
Portuguese-speaking world, which is explicitly referenced in the prefix Luso-Hispanic.
3 At time of writing (February 2016), the database is available in beta form, as we refine both frontand back-end functionality.
4 It goes without saying, of course, that the database is comprehensive rather than exhaustive.
Searching was undertaken both manually and using published indexes (eg Find My Past; Ancestry).
5 In 1866, Antonio Bargas was convicted of stealing cotton and sentenced to two months’
imprisonment (Liverpool Daily Post, 14th February 1866, p 7). The Bargas family relocated to
London shortly afterwards.
6 The database records all known variants of a name. For the purposes of this article, where we have
been able to identify the standard form, we use that, followed by the relevant variant in parentheses,
eg Romero (or Rosemary).
7 For more information about Romero, see www.hispanicliverpool.org/stories/people/joseromero/
8 The earliest references I have found to the company are in October 1862. One is an advertisement
for a shop to let, where interested parties are invited to apply to Olano, Larrinaga and Co, at 4 Goree
Piazzas (Liverpool Mercury, 1st October 1862, p 2). The other is a newspaper report of the
appearance at Liverpool Police Court of one Eliza Evans, accused of stealing “a coil of cordage, of
the value of £1 10s” from the company’s premises (Liverpool Mercury, 21st October 1862, p 5).
For an outline history of the company, see David Eccles, Larrinaga Line, 1863-1974, Windsor:
World Ship Society, 2005.
9 For one Spanish passenger’s enthusiastic review of the inaugural sailing to Manila (in particular
its “unbeatable dining experience”), see La Epoca (Madrid), 12th June 1871, p 4.
10
See, for example, Marciano R de Borja, Basques in the Philippines, Reno: U of Nevada, 2005,
p 94-95.
11 In 1871, José Lago is recorded hosting seven Spanish seamen at 2 Cleveland Square, adjacent to
Price Street.
12 For more information about the Greetham Street community and the murder of Cecilia Rigby,
see www.hispanicliverpool.org/stories/boardinghouses/greetham
13 Pablo and Maria were at the address in 1891; by 1901 it had been taken over by Antonio Sánchez
and his wife Francisca Bilbao. The Sánchez family and their boarding house are mentioned in
Autobiography of a Liverpool Irish Slummy by Pat O’Mara, a friend of their son ‘Jackie’ Sánchez.
14 Miguel’s brother Pedro would also settle in Liverpool, running boarding houses at 58 Park Lane
(1891), 54 Upper Pitt Street (1901), and 17a Greetham Street (1911).
15 ‘An Extensive, Illegal Business on Sunday Night,’ Liverpool Mercury, 23rd October 1875, p 8.
16 The novel, which is a vivid story of life in a Liverpool Basque boarding house, came about
through Forrester’s friendship with the Clemencots’ grandson Doroteo Vicente Elordieta, when
both were expats in Canada.
17 For
more information about the Charlotte Place Hispanic community, see
www.hispanicliverpool.org/stories/boardinghouses/charlotteplace
18 These were just two of dozens of ‘colonias’ for the child evacuees around the UK. For more
information, see www.basquechildren.org/colonies/directory.
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