ST George’s Hall had never seen anything like it, a five-day event with one purpose. To raise money for the wives, widows and children of Confederate soldiers during the brutal American Civil War.
In today’s money the spectacular bazaar would have raised around £2.2m, so much support was there among Liverpool’s businessmen, merchants and shipping communities for the Deep South during the conflict in the 1860s.
Bolton-born novelist David Chadwick, one time media officer with the government news network in Liverpool, has woven that real-life event into an intriguing drama in his latest novel, Liberty Bazaar.
After his own personal battles with alcoholism and later cancer, he says creative writing saved his life.
Runaway slave Trinity Giddings finds her way to Liverpool from the cotton plantations of South Carolina. Her task is to find support for Abraham Lincoln’s Union side in the bitter and deadly war. Also winding his way to Liverpool is shell-shocked Confederate officer General Jubal De Brooke, tasked with using his charm to win support for that money raising bazaar.
The dual narrative story takes readers on a journey through Liverpool of the day, from the slums of Scotland Road, the narrow, warehouse-lined streets around Cheapside and the posh homes around Grassendale.
Throw in a conspiracy to build the deadliest warship ever over at Birkenhead, and the scene is set for high drama on the Mersey.
Fuelling a chemical dependency is serious hard work. When you stop doing it, there’s an enormous void in your life and the doctors told me it was vital to find a replacement activity if I wanted to stay sober
The Confederate Bazaar took place over five days in October 1864 at St George's Hall called the 'Southern Prisoners' Relief Fund', raising about £20,000. Liverpool was the most pro-Confederate city in Britain, while, interestingly Manchester took the side of the Union.
The stalls included a raffle for a donkey. The bazaar was organised by the Southern Independence Association and hosted by Charles Kuhn Prioleau's Liverpudlian wife, Mary. It captured the imagination of the city and thousands of people were turned away at one point, such was the capacity inside the hall, then just 10 years old.
Chadwick says: "I chose the American Civil War because it has captivated me since childhood when I collected bubblegum packs that also contained picture cards portraying explicitly gory battle scenes, and replica Confederate currency that was sufficiently authentic to prompt a federal investigation."
He added: "The Civil War gave me my broad canvas but I still needed a specific aspect or event that might have produced a different historical outcome. As I looked more closely into diplomatic aspects of the conflict, I became increasingly intrigued by the efforts of both the North and South to court British public opinion. Nowhere was this activity more intense than Liverpool, the scene of illicit ship-building ventures, espionage and public relations campaigns such as the real Liberty Bazaar, which raised £20,000 for destitute Confederate families. It was fascinating to imagine how this huge amount of money might have been subverted by rogue Confederates and this became the fulcrum of my narrative."
Chadwick will be in Liverpool on Wednesday (May 27) to talk about Liberty Bazaar as part of Hurricane Ports, an event organised by Liverpool’s Writing on the Wall literature festival which, this year, is themed around all things American.
He says: Without creative writing I might well be dead. I began doing it on medical advice, as part of a successful strategy to overcome alcoholism. The introduction to the movie Trainspotting is spot on: fuelling a chemical dependency is serious hard work. When you stop doing it, there’s an enormous void in your life and the doctors told me it was vital to find a replacement activity if I wanted to stay sober.
"Almost 25 years later, it’s still working – but there have been major complications. Three years after I had my last drink I developed oral cancer in 1992, probably as a result of drinking and smoking. Major surgery and radiotherapy cured the cancer – and did nothing to dent my resolve to carry on writing. Twenty years later, in 2012, I developed another oral cancer, this time caused by the radiotherapy I’d had for the first one. This was a devastating blow after all those years living a healthy lifestyle. Nonetheless, the cancer was successfully removed and my prognosis is encouraging.
"Again, creative writing proved a crucial therapy. Not only did writing a novel demand time and focus that would otherwise have been wasted on worrying, but it also gave me a long term goal to aim for. So in a very real sense, I owe a great deal to writing fiction."
Chadwick will be joined by Andrew Lees, author of Liverpool: Hurricane Port, and local writer and social historian Tony Wailey, for a discussion on Liverpool’s history, heritage and present-day challenges.
*The event takes place at The Casa, 29 Hope Street, starting at 7.30pm. Tickets are £4 and £2, pay at the door.*Liberty Bazaar by David Chadwick, published by Aurora Metro Books in May 2015. Paperback, £9.99. Order it here.
