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THE TOFF OF LIVERPOOL |
John H. McFadden and His Age
By Richard Carreño
Camino Press (2021)
BOOK'S STARTLING REVELATIONS
GET ACCLAIM FROM LOCAL AUTHOR
By Ron Jones
Amazon.com
This is no hagiography. Where there are skeletons in the cupboard (and there are), Richard Carreño relishes dragging them out into the light of day. I consider myself a reasonably well-read amateur Liverpool historian, but confess that I had never heard of John H. McFadden. And neither had any of my fellow local history buffs, despite the fact that he and brother George headed up the biggest firm of cotton dealers not just in Liverpool during the late Victorian and early Edwardian era when the city was indisputably “King Cotton”, but on both sides of the Atlantic.
Like John Howard McFadden's life itself, this is a book of two halves covering his early and later years in Philadelphia and his two decades or so in Liverpool when he was at the height of his cotton dealing powers. In spite of his business success and the great wealth that went with it, McFadden largely lived his life under the radar. So, it is thanks to Carreño that he has managed to tease out so much of the detail of his life. Aside from dealing in cotton futures, McFadden had three main passions, and the money to indulge them: medical research (of which Liverpool was a major beneficiary), polar exploration (and in particular Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton), and assembling an outstanding private collection of 18th and 19th century British paintings by the great masters.
Whilst McFadden largely amassed his fortune during his days in Liverpool, it was his birthplace of Philadelphia that was the main recipient of his largesse. Having spent the greater part of his life buying British masterpieces, what to do with them with life drawing to a close? The answer was to donate them to his hometown. But the canny McFadden had one stipulation: the “City of Brotherly Love” must first build a fitting gallery in which to display them…and build it within a challenging timespan. Hence the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Carreño has undertaken impressive research into this whole saga, which rightly takes up a goodly part of the book.
In other hands this biography might have resulted in a worthy but rather dull account of an extraordinary man leading a fairly ordinary life, but in Carreño’s hands it comes to life, mainly because it is so well-researched and entertainingly written.
Ron Jones is a journalist based in Liverpool. He is the author of The American Connection: The Story of Liverpool's Links with America from Christopher Columbus to The Beatles.