C O N T E X T 1 0 9 : M A Y 2 0 0 9 27 Stonehouse (c1845) and Charles Hand (c1920), on which so much assumed knowledge of Williamson is based, state that Williamson never sold any of his sandstone but gave much of it away. One such gift was made to St Jude’s Church, a few hundred yards downhill from Mason Street. With his wealth, Williamson certainly had no need to profit from selling it. A study of property records shows that beneath his own house he had no mineral rights and therefore was unable to sell stone he extracted without paying the freeholder, the West Derby Wastelands Commission, from whom he held the property. After completing alterations to his own home, Williamson quickly set about adding more properties along Mason Street, employing bricklayers, joiners and masons. The houses followed the fashion for large gardens and orchards. The lie of the land between Mason Street and Smithdown Lane resulted in these gardens initially being at some eight metres or so lower than the houses and backed by a previously quarried steep ridge.Williamson had his men build brick arches in front of this low cliff, upon which the terrace gardens were brought up level with the houses. These arches became the first parts of the tunnels. Williamson then began digging back into the hillside behind the arches, and did not stop until the day he died. Little is known about the early life of Joseph Williamson, a self-made man. He was born in 1769 and was a child-apprentice to Liverpool tobacco and snuff manufacturer Richard Tate in the central merchants’ district around Parr Street and Wolstenholme Square. When Joseph was 18 and had been with the firm some seven years, his employer died and the son Thomas Moss Tate took over the business. During the next 15 yearsWilliamson began to amass capital, and went into mercantile partnership with Joseph Leigh of Lymme and Belmont in Cheshire.The relationship lasted their lifetimes until they both died in 1840. In 1802, Joseph Williamson married Elizabeth Tate, sister to Thomas Moss Tate. Meanwhile, the firm of Leigh and Williamson flourished. By 1806 it was trading directly with North America, exchanging Irish beef and dairy produce for high-quality tobacco. In 1822, Williamson’s wife Elizabeth died, aged 56. She left no children. There is a supposition that thereafter Williamson sought solace by turning his attentions ever more assiduously to the labyrinth. Local author and journalist Richard Whittington-Egan has written (c1985) several entertaining chapters in his books about Liverpool eccentrics, giving us a flavour of the legends that have grown up around the man they called the ‘King of Edge Hill’. Williamson was reputed often to have his men perform apparently pointless duties. It is said that he would get a man to move a pile of rocks from one place to another and then back again. There is evidence of tunnels being built and immediately bricked up again, alongside fine arches that lead nowhere. Many of Williamson’s workmen became skilled as they served their apprenticeships on his tunnels, and probably they were recruited by the rail engineers to augment those gangs already in their employ. By 1830 Stephenson had constructed the Wapping railway tunnel. After that he began the Edge Hill to Lime Street tunnel extension to the Liverpool and Manchester railway, directly beneath Williamson’s garden. There is little doubt that Williamson would have taken himself the few 100 yards up the road to witness the inaugural locomotive journeys at Crown Street and the Chatsworth Cutting. Perhaps he was one of the many private shareholders in that highly speculative and controversial project. Williamson died, aged 70, on 1 May 1840. He was buried alongside his wife and her family in the Tate family vault in the cemetery of St Thomas’s Church, Park Lane, where they had married 38 years earlier. Today the grave site is skirted by Liverpool One, the large new downtown retail development. Grosvenor, the major developer of that scheme, has approved the design of an innovative garden to mark the site of St Thomas’s churchyard, which will be known as the Williamson Memorial Garden. Joseph Williamson’s true memorial is the mysterious labyrinth at Edge Hill, so much of which is still under threat, and which awaits rescue and conservation. For further information visit www.williamsontunnels.com. Claire Moorhead is treasurer of Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels. A close-up of the ‘Gash’ under Williamson’s house. The walls show the marks of the navvies’ picks. The ‘Gothic Arch’ under Williamson’s house and, to the right, the rock-cut sloping passage, the ‘Gash’, leading up to the sandstone arch All photos: CA Iles, Trustee, Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels
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