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February 1841: School of Science opened in Socialist Hall in Lord Nelson Street

Socialist Hall
As early as 1832 Finch and Falvey had opened in a large room attached to the co-operative bazaar in Bold Street a kind of embryo socialist group entitled the “Institution of the intelligent and well-disposed for the removal of ignorance and poverty by means of education and employment”.
From November 1837 the New Moral World began to report Sunday social meetings of a branch of the AACAN [abstinence association] at a new institution behind the York Hotel, to be succeeded by the “Social Institution” in Tarleton Street. Attendance rose rapidly from an original 400 to over a 1,000, and at the beginning of 1838 Finch, as branch secretary, collected 120 signatures for a request to [Robert] Owen to visit Liverpool. On 11 February, after considerable difficulties over the hire of a public hall, occasioned by sectarian hostility, Owen delivered an address at Tarleton Street, repeated on the 16 February “on the best means of providing education and employment to the working classes”. On the fourth he had attended a lecture by Finch which inspired the slightly pontifical comment that the socialists should “cease discussing theological matters”. The two men remained on good terms, however, for on the morrow of the sixteenth they travelled together to Preston for further missionary work.

By June the Liverpool socialists had begun to look round for a permanent meeting hail, for which they had obtained promises of £1,000. Some weeks later Finch announced the purchase for £1,900 of a site near Renshaw Street Chapel, where it was intended “to erect a handsome structure with temperance coffee house, book shop, club-rooms etc. underneath and our lecture rooms above”. However, nothing further was heard of this plan, and the Tarleton Street premises continued to be used for the remainder of 1838. In November a “public festival and ball” was held in the Glare Street rooms, and an open debate on socialism between John Green and the Rev. John Bowes at the Queen’s theatre ended in a riot, only quelled when the police extinguished the gas lights.

The following year the Owenite movement underwent one of its frequent metamorphoses, and emerged, in April, as “The Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists”, under which title the socialists reached their apogee of strength and influence. One of the chief ventures of the Rational Religionists was the building throughout the country of “Halls of Science”, the temples of the new cult. By July 1840 nearly £22,000 had been expended to this end, and halls opened at London, Manchester, Huddersfield, Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, Bradford, Leeds, Glasgow, and other places. Liverpool’s hall, at £5,000, was the largest and most expensive, and a remarkable building by any standard. Its erection was first mooted in February 1839, when William Westwick was appointed paid secretary of the Liverpool socialists. In March Finch and his friends chose the site, and on 8 April he was able to report the issue, by the Hall of Science Building Society, of 400 shares. On the 17 June Finch laid the foundation stone on a site in Lord Nelson Street. A temperance coffee house had already been opened by Westwick at No 15.

As the erection of the Hall progressed, so opposition to the socialists’ project began to crystallise, and, in August, Fielding Ould, a popular open-air preacher, began to organise a campaign against the infidels. A meeting was called at the Music Hall on 20 June, under the patronage of the No-Popery Association, in support of a petition to the queen which denounced Finch, the Hall, and the socialists generally. Finch, who had the courage to be present, was seriously assaulted. The builders were not deterred, and even succeeded in obtaining 700 signatures of a counter- address. By December the Liverpool Hall of Science was complete and ready for use. The building, which still stands in 1957, offered, as originally designed and constructed by Cooper, the architect, a main lecture room, 70’ x 54’ x 28’, with an organ, orchestra space for 120 performers, and seating room for 1,500. Later, when used as a concert hall, the building once accommodated 2,700 persons. There was also a smaller suite of rooms: a committee room, a newsroom, library, store room, kitchen with accommodation for 1,000 persons, and a schoolroom 40’ square. There was even an observatory, on the roof. “Our hall,” The Liverpool leader proudly proclaimed, is the hall of the working classes. We open it to all parties, and for all purposes strictly legal and moral.” It is not impossible that this included Chartist purposes, for Owen’s biographer, Podmore has it that much Chartist money went to build the halls of science. On the other hand there is no extant evidence for any political, let alone radical, activity centred on the Liverpool Hall. On Saturdays the socialists held popular temperance soirees, for one of which (27 November 1841) a playbill survives in the collection at the Liverpool Record Office. The entertainment, “under the superintendence of a committee of management, whose design is to furnish the industrious classes of Liverpool with a combination of sober and rational amusements for the smallest possible expense” was quite unpolitical, and consisted of such items as “The Blue Tailed Fly” and the recitation “Daniel versus Dishclout”. Thomas Westwick conducted the orchestra, and the stars of the evening were Mr. C. Ashort, “the celebrated nigger singer”, and Mr. Mackintosh who, after “a short
scientific lecture” administered laughing gas to the audience. Such an innocuous, if not altogether sober, programme compares oddly with the recollections of the author of Fraser’s Guide to Liverpool who, in 1861, titillated his readers with an account of “Young ladies dressed in the bloomer costume” who, at the socialist hail, “ ‘tripped it on the light fantastic toe’ with young gentlemen who thought the laws of matrimony unnatural and tyrannical.”

A more serious aspect of the Liverpool socialists’ activities was the opening, in February 1841, of a Juvenile school of Science. School began at the Hall with only 30 pupils, but within six weeks the attendance had risen to 108, and separate infants’ and boys’ and girls’ departments had been created. There was a full-time master, and a married woman to look after the girls, and fees were charged on a graduated scale: 2d. a week for infants, 3d. for children from six to eight, and 4d. for those above eight years.46 How long the school survived, and what were the subjects of its curriculum, it seems impossible to discover. The socialists themselves ceased to use the Hall in May 1842, although it was not until November 1843 that the premises were disposed of to the Oddfellows for £4,600.
About the failure of the Liverpool Hall of Science there clings the atmosphere of farce which seems to have been inseparable from the collapse of any Owenite project. On the socialists’ withdrawal in May 1842 the Hall was renamed the Nelson Assembly Rooms, and let on a normal commercial basis. A gathering volume of complaints began to appear in the press correspondence columns about the rowdiness of patrons, and their late hours, and the Building Society Committee was soon forced to ban the sale of drink at functions. Nevertheless, in March 1843, William Westwick was summoned before the magistrates and fined for letting the Rooms to a brothel keeper, and “allowing bad characters to assemble”.

Building the Union, Studies on the growth of the worker’s movement 1756-1967. (pp 43-45) Published to celebrate 125 years of the Liverpool Trades Council.

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