Centre of Port and Maritime History events
CPMH runs a series of events throughout the year. Highlighted events are listed in brief below. Please click on the link or select from the drop-down menu boxes below for further information, including, venue, time and how to join us.
Scheduled events 2025
- 7 May - Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture, Peter Elson will deliver 'The Sinking of the Lusitania - Murder or Misfortune?' at the Museum of Liverpool, 5.30pm.
- 17 May - War at Sea Conference, Quaker Meeting House, School Lane, Liverpool, 9.30am to 5pm (Full conference programme and abstracts available below.)
- September - CPMH Annual Conference 'Environment and the Sea', dates and venue to be confirmed.
- 15 October - Peter N Davies Seminar, John Foster Building and online, speaker to be confirmed.
Faq Items
Past events
Scheduled events 2024
13 March 2024: CPMH Hybrid Seminar: Dr Mike Benbough-Jackson (LJMU), 'The other Liverpool Welsh: A rough history'.
1 May 2024: Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture: 'Liverpool's ship portrait artists' by Tony Tibbles, author and Emeritus Keeper of Slavery History. 5.30pm at the Maritime Museum, Royal Albert Dock, Liverpool.
3 June 2024: 1pm and again at 2pm, Cunard Queen Anne Event, Open Eye Gallery, 19 Mann Island, Liverpool L3 1BP: Three talks on the history, art and culture of Cunard by Dr Graham Gladden, Dr Clare Horrocks and Dr Emma Roberts
Scheduled events 2023
13 January 2023: Musical Drama Production (LJMU Drama Students supported by CPMH and in conjunction with Western Approaches HQ Museum)
‘Blowing a Raspberry at Hitler’ - The story of the search for a way to defeat the U-Boats terrorising the Atlantic during World War Two – a search led by the women involved in the Western Approaches Tactical unit.
2pm and 6:30pm LJMU John Foster Drama Studio
23 March 2023: History Pub Talk '"Hostage Capitalism”: Liverpool, Shanghai and the Blue Funnel Line in the 1960s’, Nick White (LJMU)
Spring 2023: (Date TBC) Exhibition Launch: Captain Morgan Archive
20 May 2023: Battle of the Atlantic 80, Conference.
24 May 2023: Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture: Dr Jo Stanley, (Senior Visiting Research Fellow, LJMU)
26-28 May 2023: Battle of the Atlantic 80: A weekend of events across Merseyside to mark the 80th anniversary. Further details will be announced in Spring 2023.
7 and 8 September 2023: Annual Conference
18 October 2023: CPMH Hybrid Seminar, Gillian O'Brien (LJMU)
1 November 2023: Peter N Davies Seminar, Dr Sam Jones
Scheduled events 2022
15 and 16 September: Annual Conference
12 October: Seminar: Michael Bennedsen Hansen (Copenhagen Business School)
2 November: Peter N Davies Seminar: Morten Tinning (Copenhagen Business School)
22 November: Seminar: Jayne Friend (University of Portsmouth)
Peter N. Davies Seminar
Peter N Davies Seminar 2023
'Weathering the Storms: The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), 1849 – 1897', by Dr Sam Jones
Wednesday 1 November 2023, 5:30pm
Online and at John Foster Building, Liverpool John Moores University, Mount Pleasant, L3 5UZ
The seminar is free and if you’d like to attend, in person or online, please email Hanna Nsugbe.
In your email please state 'CPMH PND seminar' and whether you will attend in-person or require a link to join the seminar online.
Peter N Davies Seminar 2022
'Imagined futures of sail and steam' by Morten Tinning, PhD candidate, Copenhagen Business School
Wednesday 2 November 2022, 5.30pm GMT
Hybrid event - Liverpool John Moores University and Online
Venue: Room 106, John Foster Building, LJMU, 80-98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5UZ
Registration for online participation only.
Register via Eventbrite (opens in a new tab)
Abstract
This presentation explores how a Danish maritime community shaped entrepreneurial activity through the process of envisioning competing imagined futures. It does so through a public debate about the transition from sail to steam in 1899. In the debate, local actors evaluated and negotiated expectations for the future as embedded in existing norms, interpretations of the past, and socio-technical systems. The presentation gives an in-depth view of a traditional maritime community struggling to navigate the transition from sail to steam and the potential role of community in constructing and disputing over imagined business futures.
Peter N. Davies Seminar
‘Maritime Education in the 1890s: microhistories from the Liverpool Nautical College’ by Dr Wayne Turnbull, PhD Candidate LJMU
November 2021
Venue – Online
Time – 5:30pm GMT
Length - 45 Minute Presentation followed by Q&A
Call for Papers
Peter Davies was one of Britain’s foremost scholars of the international shipping industry and was instrumental in strengthening the international standing of maritime history. Peter was a founding member of the Centre for Port & Maritime History (CPMH) and, as such, the Centre is pleased to host this annual seminar series in honour of his contribution to maritime history and his support for emerging scholars in the discipline.
The seminar will take the form of a 45-minute online presentation followed by Q&A.
CPMH seeks applications to present the seminar from emerging scholars working on any topic within the discipline of Maritime History. All applications and supporting materials should be submitted to Professor Nick White at n.j.white@ljmu.ac.uk by the Deadline 15 June 2022. The successful applicant will be notified week commencing 31 July 2022.
Please access the links below for further details and an application form:
Conferences
War at Sea 2025
17 May 2025
Quaker Meeting House, School Lane, Liverpool
Registration is £7.50 and all delegates must register in advance.
Download full Conference programme (PDF, 143KB)
Battle of the Atlantic 80, Conference
20 May 2023
The Centre for Port and Maritime History is hosting a one-day conference on Saturday 20 May at The Maritime Museum, Liverpool, to mark the 80th Anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Speakers include:
-
Capt. Sean Ryan, The Maritime Warfare Centre, Naval Command Headquarters. Intelligence, wargaming, and naval doctrine
- Dr Jayne Friend, University of Portsmouth. ‘Veterans and Relics: Britain’s Shipping Crisis and the V, W and Town-class Destroyers’
- Dr David Kohnen, Naval War College, USA. “All the Dismembered Heads”: Special Intelligence and the U.S. Navy in the Atlantic, 1937-1947
- Dr Sarah-Louise Miller, visiting scholar at the University of Oxford. ‘The Wargame Women: The Women’s Royal Naval Service and the Western Approaches Tactical Unit During the Battle of the Atlantic’
- Dr James W E Smith, King’s College London. ‘Refighting the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ After 1945: Policy, Plans, Doctrine, and the State’
- Rear Admiral James Parkin CBE, Director Develop, Naval Command Headquarters. Innovation in the ASW space: NavyX and Patrick Blackett
The event is free, but all delegates must register in advance.
Centre for Port and Maritime History Annual Conference
Hybrid Event - Thursday 15 and Friday 16 September 2022
Conference Theme: Memorialisation and the Sea
Call for Papers deadline: 19 July 2022
Centre for Port and Maritime History Annual Conference
Online
Thursday 9 and Friday 10 September 2021
Conference Theme: Identities, Nations, Seas
Registration £5 waged, free unwaged
Registration closes on 7 September 2021.
Call for papers deadline: 18 June 2021
12 and 13 September 2019, CPMH Conference, Art and the Sea
22-23 March 2019, The British Commission for Maritime History New Researchers in Maritime History Conference
14 September 2018, Singapore 200 ESRC funded workshop.
13 September 2018, CPMH Conference, Labour and the Sea
Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture
2024 Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture
Second image: Courtesy of National Museums Liverpool
Venue - Maritime Museum, Liverpool
Date and Time - 1 May 2024, 5.30pm
'Liverpool's ship portrait artists' by Tony Tibbles
Abstract
Since the late eighteenth century Liverpool has been home, permanently or temporarily, to more than seventy artists whose principal activity was painting portraits of many of the ships that visited or were based in the port. They produced thousands of paintings which are now often the only surviving visual record of those ships.
In this lecture, Tony Tibbles will look at whom these artists were and the paintings they produced. Some, like Samuel Walters and Joseph Heard, were very successful and were able to sustain themselves from their painting, but the majority of them relied on other work, whether it was associated, such as producing promotional material for the many local shipping companies, or unrelated, including plumbing and house decoration. Whilst some have well-known careers, others are more shadowy and some remain unidentified except for the work they produced.
Tony Tibbles is former Director of Merseyside Maritime Museum and author of The Dictionary of Liverpool Marine and Ship Portraitists, published by Liverpool University Press in 2023.
Download 2024 lecture flyer (240KB, PDF)
2023 Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture
Venue - The Maritime Museum
Date and Time - Wednesday 24 May 2023, 5:30pm.
'Race, gender and class: ayahs and amahs as “worker-passengers” in British ships 1890-1950'. By Dr Jo Stanley, FRHistS, AssocRINA, writer, consultant and Honorary Research Fellow, Blaydes Maritime Centre, University of Hull and Senior Visiting Research Fellow, LJMU
Abstract
New ideas about equality, diversity, and inclusion are enriching maritime historiography. Exploring transnational movement by a significant group of mobile subjects - Asian nannies - enables fresh understandings of how intersectionality worked on early 20C ships. Thousands of Indian ayahs and Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian amahs travelled round the British Empire creating domestic comfort afloat as non-kin members of the Raj families they accompanied.
Voyages changed ayahs. In gendered, racialized and very hierarchical colonial times these non-white, poorly-educated, female domestic workers gained unusual mobility and motility. Conversely, ayahs’ status changed voyaging. For example, segregationist policies and practises led to ship’s architects creating ayahs’ bathrooms aboard.
This talk looks at ayahs and amahs as part of an under-researched group: worker-passengers. Neither seafarers nor passengers, such voyagers included maids, valets, bearers and governesses. Their subjective, segregated and exceptional experiences differed from those of maritime labourers directly employed by shipping companies, such as Lascars and white stewardesses who routinely serviced the vessel and processed multiple batches of human cargo respectively.
Ayahs’ own testimony is barely visible. But the quantitative evidence used here includes freshly-sorted data derived from passenger lists. This is triangulated with genealogical information about ayahs’ employers, travellers’ voyage descriptions, newspaper reports of ayah-related crime, and recent interviews with ayahs’ (now elderly) carers. The lenses used include those generated by the new international working party on ayahs and amahs, which contextualises them along with today’s airborne chattels.
2022 Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture
Venue - Merseyside Maritime Museum
Date and Time - Wednesday 4 May 2022, 5.30pm
Abstract: 'The Bethesda Shipping Company and its Liverpool connections, 1877-98' by Dr David Jenkins, Honorary Research Fellow, National Museum of Wales
This lecture is an attempt to reflect Mike Stammers' interest in the maritime history of north Wales in the 19th century and the close connections that developed with commercial activity on Merseyside. The 1870s marked the high point of the north Wales slate industry when slate quarrymen had money to spare, money which was invested in a remarkable series of shipping companies founded in the quarrying areas during that decade. In particular, the lecture looks at the company founded in Bethesda in 1877 and traces the company's links to Liverpool and ports elsewhere in the UK, reflecting the economic vitality of the slate quarrying communities during that remarkable decade.
Wednesday 12 May 2021, Roy Fenton, 'Salt, Stone and Steam: Making the Mersey a Coastal Shipping Hub'.
The Mersey developed as the West Coast’s major centre for coastal shipping through its unique geographical position. The river was the natural outlet for Cheshire salt and Lancashire coal, and became a highway for moving Welsh stone and slate for urban development. Major canal systems connected it to inland industries as far away as Yorkshire and the Midlands. Increasing trade with Ireland was an important growth factor, whilst Liverpool becoming Britain’s Atlantic gateway was a major stimulus to coastwise trade. Local shipowners grasped the opportunities offered by exploiting the steam ship and helped turn the Mersey into one the busiest in Britain for coastal shipping. This lecture aims to demonstrate how these factors contributed to the rise of the Mersey as a coastal shipping hub, and considers how shipowners in Liverpool and the other Mersey ports contributed to and benefited from this growth.
8 May 2019, Rachel Mulhearn, ‘”Don’t think of emigrating!”: Liverpool and overseas migration during the First World War’ (opens in a new tab).
13 June 2018, Prof. Nick White (LJMU), ‘Liverpool Shipping and the End of Empire’ (opens in a new tab).
Seminars and talks
Cunard Queen Anne Event
3 June 2024, 1pm to 2 pm and again at 2pm to 3 pm
Open Eye Gallery, 19 Mann Island, Liverpool L3 1BP.
To mark the official naming ceremony of the Cunard liner Queen Anne, CPMH is pleased to present talks by three experts on the history, art and culture of Cunard.
Emma Roberts will present, ‘Art at Sea: The Art Collection on Board Cunard's Queen Mary, 1936-67.’
Clare Horrocks will speak on Savouring the Gastronomic Delights of Cunard from Queen Mary to Queen Anne
Graham Gladden will explore some of the opportunities and challenges facing Cunard over the last hundred years.
The in-person event is free to attend and there is no need to register in advance
Download the seminar flyer (PDF, 220KB)
CPMH Hybrid Seminar
13 March 2024, Online and at LJMU at 5pm
'The other Liverpool Welsh: A rough history', by Dr Mike Benbough-Jackson, LJMU.
The seminar is free and if you’d like to attend, in person or online, please register to receive venue details or a link to join online.
Abstract
The Welsh on Merseyside have a peculiar image problem: they are too respectable. Academic and popular histories focus on chapels, their ministers, eisteddfods, St David’s Day, some more chapels and the occasional church. There is nothing wrong with this, indeed some of Mike’s work falls into this category. Yet other, less respectable Welsh were around during the early nineteenth century and probably later as well. This talk will justify the topic, reflect on the methods used and consider the source material. Moreover, a special guest, ‘Old Owen Roberts’, will take the stage, though not in person because he was 87 in 1825.
Download the seminar flyer (PDF, 227KB)
CPMH Hybrid Seminar
18 October 2023, Online and at LJMU at 5pm
‘“Ships, Sugar & Slavery”, Catholics, Provisioning and Eighteenth-Century Cork’ by Gillian O’Brien, Professor of Public History, LJMU
The seminar is free and if you’d like to attend, in person or online, please email Hanna Nsugbe. In your email please state 'CPMH seminar 18/10/23' and whether you would like to attend in-person or require a link to join the seminar online.
Abstract
Cork's wealth in the eighteenth century was largely dependent on the sea, not so much on what could be fished from it, but what could be traversed across it. Cork merchants specialised in trading salt-beef, butter and pork. The provisions were primarily destined to be consumed on ships taking enslaved people from Africa to the West Indies or on Plantations in the West Indies. Using a range of sources from newspapers, personal papers, convent archives and memoirs this paper examines the extent to which the Catholics of Cork consciously or unconsciously aided, abetted and benefitted from slavery.
History Talk at Carnival Brewing Company
23 March 2023 at 7pm
‘“Hostage Capitalism”: Liverpool, Shanghai and the Blue Funnel Line in the 1960s’. By Nick White
Abstract
In the late-1960s a number of Blue Funnel seafarers were interned in China. The Liverpool-based Blue Funnel Line was Britain’s premier shipping group in eastern Asia, and the talk will address this ‘hostage capitalism’ in the context of China’s Cultural Revolution and the UK’s enfeeblement ‘east of Suez’. But it will also delve deeper in discussing the shifting power balance between Liverpool and Shanghai going back to the 1860s and the origins of Blue Funnel’s trade with China in the period of so-called ‘informal empire’ period followed by the twentieth-century upheavals of the Nationalist Revolution, Japanese militarism and the ascendancy of the Chinese Communist Party
Event flyer (opens in a new tab)
Hybrid Seminar
12 October 2022, 5pm BST
"Narrating Pride and Loss at Sea: Oral History and the Exploration of Seafarer Identity in the Age of Containerization” by Michael Bennedsen Hansen
Michael Bennedsen Hansen is a PhD candidate at Copenhagen Business School and visiting researcher at CPMH, LJMU.
Abstract
The seminar is based on Michael's dissertation, an oral history project exploring changes in the life world and identity of Danish seafarers employed in container shipping 1970-2022.
Containerization as a key driver of globalization has transformed international shipping and maritime cultures. But how has this historical transformation affected the working lives of the seafarers experiencing the changes onboard the ships? The dissertation seeks to answer this question by exploring how the seafarers construct an identity when remembering and narrating their work life stories in oral history interviews.
The dissertation views oral history as a way for the historian to engage with processes of memory and to explore people’s relation to the past. Remembering and narrating one’s life is an active form of identity work, as much about the present as about the past. Narratives are, to quote Ricoeur, how people reckon with time.
Drawing on insights and concepts from narrative theory, the dissertation shows how the seafarers: i.) Draw on public and available narratives and myths in constructing their personal story and identity. ii.) Negotiate contrasting feelings of pride and loss by stressing continuities with the past in container shipping. iii.) Express a reflective nostalgia, actively negotiating the meaning of the past. iv.) Are able to ascribe new meaning to their work by aligning their values as seafarers with the values of the company and industry at large. v.) Strive for composure and coherence in their narratives thereby also constructing silences.
The dissertation contributes to the renewed conversation between business history and oral history by showing how business historians can work with memories when trying to understand the meaning of larger historical transformations.
Hybrid Seminar
Wednesday 22 November, 5pm
'Not a Round of 'Beer and Skittles’: Life Aboard Royal Navy Destroyers, 1900-1945' by Jayne Friend, PhD Candidate, University of Portsmouth
Venue: Room 116, John Foster Building, LJMU, 80-98 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, L3 5UZ
Registration for online participation only.
Register via Eventbrite (opens in a new tab)
Abstract
Life aboard destroyers could be especially arduous and uncomfortable owing to the cramped conditions, the nature of operational duties and the danger of conflict. Yet, despite numerous hardships and privations, many men expressed a preference for life aboard destroyers. The purported resilience necessary to endure such acute hardships coloured reporting and honed an image of the destroyer sailor as an embodiment of the bravery, heroism and resilience that underlined the ‘best traditions of the British Navy.’ This presentation examines first-hand accounts, news reporting and narratives that explore the unique nature of life aboard destroyers and contends that the ship had a significant part to play in shaping sailors' experiences and identities.
Online Seminar
9 December 2020 at 5pm
Dr Simon Hill, ‘Why was Liverpool the leading whaling port on the west coast during the 18thCentury?
For details of how to join the online seminar, please contact Prof. N. J White at n.j.white@ljmu.ac.uk
26 February 2020, Dr Alston Kennerley (researcher and historian of the University of Plymouth), "Preparing for Sea”: Merseyside and Merchant Seafarer Training since the 18th Century.’
10 February 2020, Visit by MA Transport Planning and Management students from Lagos State University who attended a talk delivered by Patrick Toosey, former MD of Elder Dempster Lines hosted by CPMH at LJMU.
23 October 2019, Dr Eric Schneider (LSE & Pei Gao -NYU Shanghai),’ The health of boys on the Training Ship Indefatigable, 1865-1995.’ (opens in a new tab)
21 November 2018, Dr Edmund Chilaka (Lagos State University), ‘The Impact of Apapa’s Traffic Gridlock on Global Maritime Trade and Nigeria’s Economy: The Case for Re-design and Renewal of the Port City’.