Lime Street had a world wide reputation for "ladies of
the night", with one name particularly associated with that trade, but as
the opening lines of the chorus of the famous song "Maggie May" tell us …
"she’ll never walk down Lime Street anymore". "Prostitution was
rife in the 1800s, especially during the so called 'naughty nineties', when
Maggie and her contemporaries offered their services to seaman, and others, on
Lime Street and in the public houses which lined that famous thoroughfare.
"Maggie herself is alleged to have plied her trade in the American Bar.
Some other famous "ladies" associated with that period are Mary Ellen,
the "Battleship", Jumping Jenny and Cast Iron Kitty, although how and
why they acquired those names is not clear.
A Policeman from the 1940s recalls Liverpool's prostitute
problem:
"When you see films with regards to prostitution, you
get the impression it was a tremendous problem. Well that didn’t apply to
Liverpool. The poor girls in Liverpool were just poor girls. In my day, a lot
of them were just married women who were just bloody hard up."
The song was "A foc'sle song of Liverpool origin
apparently, but immensely popular among seamen all over the world..."
Oh Maggie Maggie May, they’ve taken her away,
And she’ll never walk down Lime Street anymore. For she’s
robbed so many sailors
And Captains of the Whalers
That dirty, robbing, no good,
Maggie May.
Stan Hugill in his Shanties from the Seven Seas writes of an
early reference to the song in the diary of Charles Picknell, a sailor on the
convict ship Kains that sailed to Van Diemen's Land in 1830. In 1964, the
composer and lyricist Lionel Bart (the creator of the musical Oliver), used the
song and its backstory as the basis of a musical set around the Liverpool
Docks. The show, also called Maggie May, ran for two years in London
Hughie Jones of the Spinners Folk Group recalls his memories
of Maggie May…….
"My first job was as an office boy in Duke Street and I’d
heard the rumour that Maggie May lived at number 17. One day somebody came in
and said a funeral has just gone by and it was Maggie May and that was in 1952.
I thought that can’t be true because I’ve always known the song; there’s two
versions".
It seems that the landsmen sing the dirty version and the
sailors sang the clean version. Sailors were very puritanical in that way
because they reserved their dirty songs, and there were hundreds of them, for
on board ship. When ashore, they wouldn’t sing their working songs, their
shanties, they would sing what they call forebitters, which are songs they sang
for their own amusement.
There is a clue in the song as to when Maggie May was born.
' Four pound ten a month it was, my pay.'
' Four pound ten a month it was, my pay.'
So I found out what an able seaman’s pay was, when it was
four pounds ten. That gave me an idea of the date. So was she still alive in
the 50s? It is possible. Maggie May had many contemporaries of course. One was
called Jumping Jenny and the famous one was The Battleship, pretty ominous
really.
The Author Lyn Andrews borrows the name in her book 'Maggie May' which recounts the tale of a young girl made to suffer by her cruel father Nago May who, disappointed and disgusted that his wife has given birth to a girl instead of the boy he wanted insists she be called "just plane Maggie".
Liverpool's own 'Lovehistory Tours' offer to take you back
to the days of Maggie May with their 'Love Real Ale' tour.
“To really get to the beating heart of Liverpool you have to
visit its pubs. There you will find what defines its identity, its history and
most of all it’s people” The Great Liverpool Pub Crawl"
(Lovehistory website)
(Lovehistory website)
However you choose to remember Maggie May, I suspect she will be part of Liverpool's history for a
long time to come...
Robert F Edwards
