Love Lane Lives
The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane
LIVERPOOL DAILY POST headline on 11th February 1981
Written by Ron Noon at 14:51 on Thursday, February 11th 2021
What a headline, especially when you relect on a PRIME MINISTER who quoted St. Francis of Assisi on the steps of 10 Downing St. when she came into power in 1979. There HAD been such a thing as SOCIETY Maggie Thatcher.
Am I biased? I’m a professional historian OR at least I was before I retired in 2010. Here’s a bit of reflexivity. I’m more determined to use more of the sources that Albert E Sloane and John Maclean my sweet fightin’ mentors accumulated in the struggle to keep the lane open. HOW DO YOU BLOG A NEWSPAPER HEADLINE?
Anyway the man who had first dibs on that rich archival source Albert and John put together was a TATES MAN by the name of Watson and his book came out in 1985. I’ve used the same sources and have not produced a BOOK yet but hopefully in the last of my summer wine I will do precisely that. It will have an obvious PARTIALITY and bias but it will always be in pursuit of KNOWLEDGE.
“Selection, subjectivity and interpretation enter into every aspect of the historical record because absolute objectivity is fantasy. Facts do not speak for themselves and an element of subjectivity and bias is intrinsic to placing AND prioritising facts in our written records. In “fact” it’s much more. Delineating the facts is a painstakingly forensic effort to minimise the subjective element in reconstructing REAL history.
“THE ONLY COMPLETELY UNBIASED HISTORIAN IS THE RECORDING ANGEL AND EVEN HE ACCORDING TO MARK TWAIN HAD OPINIONS WHICH TO SATAN WOULD APPEAR LIKE PREJUDICES.” Get my meaning!?
So here we GO on 11/02/2021, a day 40 years after the now deceased DAILY POST acknowledged ABOVE the head line news that REDS HEAD FOR WEMBLEY, with the now day old 21st Century news that BLUES HEAD FOR WEMBLEY!
“FACTS ARE SACRED, OPINION IS FREE.”
Albert was a Blue, John was a Red.
