Secret stories of our best loved buildings NO 2
UNEARTHED STORY OF A SOCIALIST’S HOPE
Liverpool Cathedral, St James’ Mount, Liverpool L1 7AZ
For Liverpool Cathedral, as Tony Robinson remarked in the TV programme Britain’s Great Cathedrals, “you need a whole dictionary of superlatives”. It is the UK’s largest, and the world’s longest cathedral. By internal volume, there are only three cathedrals on earth that surpass Liverpool’s. The cathedral’s cavernous grandeur is only matched by its fascinating history – part of which has largely been hidden, if not intentionally suppressed.
After all, the TV programme which purported to tell Britain’s cathedrals’ ‘greatest secrets’ made no mention at all of its most powerful one.
But thanks to the relentless work of labour historian Ron Noon and local trade unionists, a workers’ history of the Cathedral is now more widely known.
Work on Liverpool Cathedral began in 1904. Completing the Cathedral would go on to take more than 70 years, two World Wars, and the toil of thousands of building workers. Among the first of these was Fred Bower, a stonemason who cut the Cathedral’s very first stone.
Fred was born in Boston, United States, raised in Liverpool and came from a long line of stonemasons originally from Dorset. A jack of all trades, Fred traversed four different continents and
32 unite buildingWORKER Spring 2025
also variously worked as a labourer, a prospector for gold, and a fireman on a tramp steamer.
He was also an ardent socialist, trade unionist, writer and poet. His adventures are documented in his captivating autobiography The Rolling Stonemason, first published in 1936, which also revealed for the first time ‘the secret’.
At the time that Fred cut Liverpool Cathedral’s foundation stone in 1904, he was a confirmed socialist who counted Jim Larkin – a giant of the trade union movement in Ireland – as one of his closest friends. Together they had an idea: they would secretly
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