A remarkable album of large format photographs, documenting the daily lives and routines of boys at the Navy League Training Home in Liscard, near Liverpool. The twenty-four hand captioned pictures are clearly intended to showcase the good work of the institution, and the album itself was prepared for presentation to the Navy League. The photographs are signed in negative from the Merseyside studio of Priestley & Sons.
The Navy League, established in 1895 to lobby for Britain’s ‘command of the sea’, boasted 15,000 members by the turn of the century. The establishment of the Training Home at Liscard in 1903 was its first foray into the training of boys for the Royal and Merchant Navies. The Liscard school’s founder, George C. Thomas, a former captain of the mercantile marine, insisted that there was no place for ‘weaklings’ in his institution, as this album bears out. Most of the Liscard boys ended up in the merchant service. After a general view of the Training Home come two before-and-after photographs of three dirty, destitute boys transformed into promising future sailors with the help of a wash, haircut, and uniform. This is also indicative of the social reformist objective of the institution; to provide housing and useful training to boys who would otherwise be homeless.
The bulk of the album depicts the boys’ daily routine from ‘fall in’ at 6.10 a.m. to lights out at 8.30 p.m., from taking a bath, hoisting the colours, cleaning the buildings, breakfast, inspections, and prayers, to bayonet, rifle, and cutlass drills, recreation in the gym (boxing, fencing, and gymnastics), and bunking down in hammocks.
Some of the longer captions provide interesting commentary e.g. “each boy uses soap for face, hands and feet every morning and takes a warm bath every week”; ‘“sword-bayonet exercise”, this greatly improves the muscular development of the body, in addition to teaching the use of the rifle’; “after dinner, at 12.30, instruction is continued (with a short interval for “stand easy”) until 4.30 p.m., when the “ship’s company” are piped to clean for tea at 5, then comes recreation for the remainder of the day.” The final two photographs show the boys being inspected before church on Sunday, and the school’s very serious-looking instructors and ‘Petty Officer boys’.
Records for the Training Home are preserved at Liverpool’s Maritime Museum. See E. J. Smith, “Raising Boys for the Navy: Health, Welfare, and the British Sea Services, 1870–1905” in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (76:1, Jan. 2021), pp.53–77.
