John Bramley-Moore, slavery and the site of Everton’s new stadium

Mary Anne Kinloch was a Beatles fan, and when she visited Liverpool from Canada in 1970, the place she really wanted to see was Mathew Street’s Cavern nightclub.

Yet she also had family connections with the city. One-hundred and thirty years earlier, John Bramley-Moore, her great, great grandfather, was a major player in Liverpool politics.

He became the Lord Mayor after campaigning for the northward extension of the docks, a decision which ensured Liverpool remained a global port for more than a century.

During her stay, Mary Anne saw traces of her ancestor, including a street sign by the Mersey with the names Nelson, Wellington and Bramley-Moore attached to it. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, he’s in very good company’.”

When she saw the Bramley-Moore pub just across the road, she could not hide her excitement and proudly revealed to locals that the old watering hole was named after her distant relative.

On the same trip, a cousin gave her a diary dating back to 1831. It belonged to Joseph Bramley-Moore, John’s brother. Mary Anne took it home to Canada, where it remains in her possession.

Joseph’s observations about his brother made John, who built up one of the biggest merchant houses in Brazil before landing in Liverpool, seem a benevolent sort of chap. The significance of passages where slaves were mentioned did not fully register with Mary Anne: “Until this fateful week, when everything has changed…”

She likes sport and once read Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, which piqued an interest from afar in the fortunes of Arsenal. Unable to get a ticket for The Emirates, she attended a Queens Park Rangers game at Loftus Road on another tour of England.

When Mary Anne heard about Everton moving to the dock named after her ancestor, she roughly understood what it meant and was thrilled, wondering whether it would result in her getting an invitation from the club to see the new stadium, maybe even taking in a match.

Now, as she speaks about her family’s history from Vancouver Island accompanied by sister, Helen Sanderson, she says that idea seems wildly inappropriate. Six days earlier I had emailed her, loosely enquiring whether she’d speak to me about the Bramley-Moores, without knowing precisely how far her knowledge stretched.

The proud story that had been passed from generation to generation in the Bramley-Moore family related to John convincing Prince Albert to build a much more famous dock in Liverpool, which ended up being named after him, and still thrives today as a tourist attraction.

Mary Anne had looked on the internet, where she saw evidence of an exchange involving John as he attempted to become a parliamentarian at some point in the 1850s. Someone accused him of being a slave owner, which he denied, and though Mary Anne bought it, she mentioned the finding to her daughter, Frances. It had always puzzled her why the family’s coat of arms had two black faces on it. “Is there something fishy going on here?”

Everton’s new stadium being built, photographed in September 2022 (Photo: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)

These thoughts slipped from her mind until last week, when she went online again and read an update — a blog written by Dr Joe Mulhern, a historian and fellow at Durham University, which detailed how John Bramley-Moore was a slave owner who profited from the trade long after it was outlawed by Britain, having changed his name for no other logical reason than to avoid his past. “It was like reading a horror book. It got worse and worse…”

She called her sister the next morning. “I said, ‘Helen, I’ve got bad news’.” Over the days that followed, she thought a lot about her family. “I asked myself, ‘What did they know? Is this kind of a cover-up?’. I always got the impression my own mum was suspicious. His career is certainly sanitised. He is presented as a philanthropist and a devoted Christian.”

There had previously been claims about John Bramley-Moore and how he came to have a dock named after him in Liverpool, but until Mulhern’s blog post in 2021, very little was known about his life in Brazil. Mulhern, however, knew exactly what he was looking for when he obtained a copy of Joseph’s diary, which showed that John had chased an escaped slave to a nearby town and recaptured him.

Mulhern’s writing prompted a fair amount of discussion among Everton’s fanbase, across social media and message boards. There tended to be agreement that the club needed, in some way, to recognise the history of the site it was inheriting.

The move from Goodison Park to the new stadium on the Bramley-Moore dock is now two years away, but Everton have long been working with local authorities about how to deal with the matter. Liverpool as a city, indeed, is in the midst of finally confronting its own past. Seventeen of its 43 docks are named after famous people and seven of those have links to the slave trade. Liverpool was developed on the blood money generated by a narrow field of businessmen, but that grim reality was only recognised properly for the first time when the International Slavery Museum opened in 2007.

Shackles exhibited at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool (Photo: Christopher Furlong via Getty Images)

Since then, many of the streets named after slave owners and traders have been marked with plaques that detail the truth. One of them is a famous Beatles song: until 2020, when a Liverpool museum denied the links, it was thought Penny Lane was named after James Penny, whose business interest in the slave trade was so profound that he stood up in British parliament and endorsed its continuation despite enormous opposition.

Slavery was not, as some even today claim, simply of its time. The abolitionist movement is testimony to that: many were appalled at what was happening, which is why it was forbidden altogether by Britain in 1833. That, however, did not stop John Bramley-Moore.

“The slave trade and slavery is indefensible in any historical context,” Mary Anne insists. “I’m embarrassed that at one point I thought I could make a lame attempt at defending what he did. But as soon as I read the Mulhern article, I realised that was impossible.”

Had it not been for the dock extension of the 1840s, inspired by John Bramley-Moore, then perhaps Liverpool wouldn’t have developed into the place it became. Maybe then, Everton FC wouldn’t have been founded three decades later and Liverpool FC after that.

This gets to the heart of an uncomfortable conversation for the city of Liverpool, because without men like Bramley-Moore, it would not be where it is now. Though it cannot — and should not — recognise his contribution towards the city’s growth in any proud way, it should be honest about it.

Ultimately, Bramley-Moore was out for himself. Just as Liverpool and its health was not on his mind as he set off for Brazil determined to make his name in 1828, he knew that the northward advance of the docks 20 or so years later would help line his own pockets, sending him into a political career where it seems he did very little for the people of Liverpool by intent.

A lesson in history is necessary here because the conditions of the time made it possible for young men like Moore, as he was known then, to make lots of money in Brazil very quickly.

He was seven years old when Napoleon invaded Portugal, and the country’s royal family fled across the Atlantic to Brazil under the protection of Britain’s Royal Navy.

With that, the British government became heavily involved in Brazil’s quest for freedom from Portugal, a process that led to Britain being called “the midwife of Brazilian independence”.

Initially, the Portuguese agreed to open up Brazilian ports to foreign trade, and from 1808 there was a huge influx of British merchants, many of them with links to Liverpool.

Bramley-Moore arrived in Brazil just as Britain took its pound of meat from the separation with Portugal, with preferential trade tariffs opening up.

While this meant Britain was allowed to import goods into Brazil such as textiles on better terms compared to any other nation, Britain also promised to suppress the slave trade. These were conflicting challenges with which Britain grappled, as it tried to increase commerce with Brazil without the involvement of a traffic which already dominated the shipping economy between the two countries.

Having found their way to the interior of the country, some of these goods would then be re-exported by Brazilian merchants in exchange for slaves. Some British firms, meanwhile, specialised in the supply of firearms, which were not only later used in the slave trade but in a number of wars that Brazil fought.

Bramley-Moore would always deny his links to the slave trade, but Mulhern was able to establish that he imported manufactured goods from factories in Manchester through Liverpool. Lots of these products were then sold on in the slave trade, an industry which has an important distinction from slavery — even though both are connected. In basic terms, the slave trade took people from Africa to the Americas. The British slave trade to the West Indies was abolished in 1807, but Africans and their descendants already in British colonies remained enslaved until the Abolition of Slavery Bill in 1833.

Mulhern believes it is beyond doubt that Bramley-Moore was extremely close to the horrors of slavery in Brazil. His brother Joseph, as Mary Anne can now see, tried to paint him as a “kind and indulgent master”, but the wider context of the era, along with John’s pursuit of an escapee slave, suggests he wasn’t. “Slavery in Brazil was built on violence and coercion,” says Mulhern.

In 1830, an Anglo-Brazilian treaty turned slavery into piracy. A year later, the British slave trade to Brazil was made illegal but it continued for more than 20 years — a period when the trading of slaves increased because of merchants like Bramley-Moore, who were able to help Brazilians, who were not prohibited by new British laws, by offering them lengthy credit terms to charter the ships that continued to bring slaves to Brazil from Africa. In 1839, John Moore & Co publicly supported Portuguese nobleman Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, who was already trading slaves with such success that he later became the second-largest slave importer in Brazilian history during the illegal era.

A ship called the Guiana, which was owned by Bramley-Moore and another merchant, sailed from Liverpool to Brazil before being chartered by well-known slave traders, who carried tobacco and alcohol across to Africa, where it was captured by the Royal Navy for aiding and abetting the slave trade.

“This was at the height of British naval suppression in the Atlantic, so the rewards must have been enormous,” says Mulhern. “It means we can say that Bramley-Moore has some of the most provable, direct links to the slave trade of any British merchant. Others had similar connections, but they didn’t have their ships captured.”

Though the scandal appeared in parliamentary papers, it did not impact upon Bramley-Moore’s ascent. Within two years, he was appointed as an alderman and by the end of the same decade he was Liverpool’s mayor. The latter achievement was accelerated by his role as the chairman of Liverpool’s harbour board, a position he used to expand the docks — helping him sail even bigger ships carrying more cargo in and out of the city.

Modern cranes tower over the walls of the dock that bears Bramley-Moore’s name (Photo: Simon Hughes)

According to a profile published in 1865 by the Porcupine, a satirical newspaper printed in Liverpool, Bramley-Moore was the “ablest, or at any rate, the most enterprising and successful dock chairman Liverpool ever had”. According to detractors, his dock plan was “chimerical and wasteful”. Robertson Gladstone, a certified slave trader, suggested it would make “fish ponds” out of Liverpool’s harbour.

The results in Liverpool, however, were more or less immediate. The dock and quay spaces, which critics suggested would not be wanted for generations, were quickly occupied. Berths were clamoured for. “The godfather of a dock should be a somebody,” the Porcupine insisted. “And it is not after a nobody that the Bramley-Moore dock is named.”

Mary Anne and Helen’s father was William Bramley-Moore. William’s father was Alwyn. Alwyn’s father was also called William. And then you have John Bramley-Moore.

The link to Canada is through Alwyn, who moved from London when he was 17. Initially, he became a farmer before developing an interest in the province’s natural resources, which fed his politics through a belief that Alberta should be independent. The second William Bramley-Moore, Mary Anne’s father, was 10 years old when Alwyn died while serving in World War I. Later, William died when Mary Anne was 25. These early deaths go some way to explaining why a clear oral history between recent generations is not particularly strong.

Helen had more of an interest in the women in her family, and given that Alwyn was one of 14 children, there was a lot to unpack before she even got to William Bramley-Moore I, son of John. William Bramley-Moore II, meanwhile, had three sisters who never married but, according to Mary Anne, they rather liked the cachet of having a hyphenated surname because of the “sense of Englishness” that it invited.

Perhaps that was part of John Bramley-Moore’s intent when, in 1840, he added Bramley to his surname. He had simply been John Moore before — a man of modest means from Pontefract made good from the grimmest of industries. The addition of Bramley suggested he came from nobility, which could not have been bad for business. A different name made him seem a different man from the one that thrived in Brazil.

Mary Anne has seen the plaques at St James’ church in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, where he lived after retiring from civic life in Liverpool. She has also visited 26 Russell Square in Bloomsbury, London, where William Bramley-Moore I was raised. It is a university building now and worth millions. The wealth generated by John Bramley-Moore, however, did not extend beyond three generations. Once Alwyn died in Boulogne-sur-mer in 1916, life became very challenging for the Bramley-Moores over in Canada.

There, the name is expected to die out, but there are other Bramley-Moores in Australia, as well as England. In 1970, the closest to Liverpool lived in Chester. That was the decade when John Bramley-Moore’s name disappeared even further from public view in the city with which he is most but nevertheless quietly associated.

Right at the back of St Michael’s churchyard, south of Liverpool’s city centre, is a compost heap. Laying underneath that compost heap is a concrete slab with the name John Moore engraved on it. Only over the last decade did the church realise it was there. In the 1970s, the graveyard was in such a bad state that local authorities considered it unsafe. The parish became involved in a job retention scheme and young men and women came to work in the graveyard. Some of the graves were moved from their original plots but John Moore stayed where he was.

Valerie Jackson conducted a survey of the churchyard in 2010. Weather damage has since made it harder to see all the inscriptions but records confirm who is resting in vaults 316, 317 or 318 next to some of his family members. The significance of the name, however, did not mean anything until recently, when a local historian writing about Everton came looking. “It was only then we realised, ‘Oh crikey, we’ve got John Bramley-Moore in our graveyard’,” says Jackson when we meet at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral.

There are 353 vaults in the graveyard. The biggest of all the headstones belongs to the Gladstone family, who have their own connections to the slave trade through Robertson — another former Liverpool mayor, five years before John Bramley-Moore.

For a period, St Michael’s was the go-to resting place for rich Liverpool families. It was built in 1815, funded by a dozen or so trustees. Each of them had similar business interests, and having made their wealth out of the docks, gravitated towards Aigburth and other suburbs.

Bramley-Moore, or simply Moore as he was then, paid 10 shillings for his plot. The money, Jackson thinks, went towards the refurbishment of the church pews. After his death, his son Arthur made another donation, which paid for a new organ in the gallery.

Yet there is no other record of the Bramley-Moores being parishioners, certainly not at St Michael’s. It is possible that they only ended up beneath a compost heap because there wasn’t enough space at nearby St Anne’s, where the tiny churchyard was already filled to capacity. The uncertainty, however, invites the question: was John Bramley-Moore really a man of religious conviction, as his family later believed?

The issue of the name on his slab invites further debate. John Moore bought the vaults shortly after his return to England in 1835. He died 51 years later, having changed his name in the 1840s. Was this simply a clerical error on his part, forgetting to update his information with the church?

Alternatively, was this again all a part of him trying to steer people away from his past, even in death?

Just to the north of affluent Aigburth is Toxteth, which has had a large black community for 300 years. Park Road dissects the district into two parts, with a mainly white population living closer to the river and a more diverse mix of ethnicities in the Granby Triangle, known locally as L8 due to its postcode.

A march from Toxteth in support of Black Lives Matter in 2020 (Photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)

Very few, if any, of the people who live here are the descendants of slaves. There are records of some slaves ending up in Liverpool, but mainly Liverpool’s black population arrived in the city through the port by choice — which grew rapidly after John Bramley-Moore convinced the Earl of Derby to sell several miles of coastline.

Despite his contribution to Liverpool’s growth — and despite his links to the slave trade — Bramley-Moore is not mentioned in any of the museums that illustrate Liverpool’s history, including the International Slavery Museum, where there is more of a focus on the slaves themselves.

This helps explain why so few people in Liverpool really know about him, and this includes even some of the most informed leaders within the black community.

L8 had been the setting for some of the worst race riots ever seen in Britain. When, in the summer of 1981, the Conservative minister Michael Heseltine tried to broker a peaceful ending to what locally is referred to as “The Uprising,” Joe Farrag was in the room. Ironically, that room was a basement in a huge Princes Road mansion that used to belong to one of Liverpool’s merchants.

Farrag’s father arrived in Liverpool from an Egyptian village in the Nubian desert, close to the Sudanese border. His mother’s Lancastrian family were Protestants, originally from Ireland. His first name had originally been Yussuf but a conversation with a Jesuit scholar from a nearby synagogue was transformative after he was told that in Hebrew it translated as Joseph.

He cites the containerisation of the docks as a contributing factor in the build-up to 1981. There was also a sense of segregation due to town planning decisions. Though they were race riots, they were also economic riots. Unemployment in Liverpool, following the collapse of the docks, was approaching its highest at the start of the 1980s. The black community, also subject to police brutality, was hit the hardest.

Farrag’s “sanctuary” was Goodison Park, though it was never really that safe. Football across Britain reflected the society it belonged to and often racism went unchallenged. He became an Evertonian because of his grandfather, Ramsey, a dock worker, who used to listen to horse racing on the radio every Saturday afternoon. When he heard on the radio that Everton had won the league, Farrag wanted to see what Goodison was like.

He was in the minority whenever he visited Walton, a strongly white working-class area of Liverpool, and the racist chanting aimed not only at opposition players but Everton’s first black player Cliff Marshall annoyed him “horrendously so”. But he stuck at it and found friends, close friends, who he still attends matches with today.

Following a late-1980s documentary that highlighted racism in football, Farrag received a letter from the club’s owner, John Moores (no relation), who committed to making changes across the club. Farrag suggested to Moores that his business interests across Liverpool should try to employ more black people.

Ahead of Everton’s game with Manchester United earlier this month, a banner celebrating six of the club’s most famous black players was unfurled across the Gwladys Street end. Farrag acknowledges that 40 years ago, such a gesture would have been unthinkable.

Fans display a banner featuring Joseph Yobo, Mike Trebilcock, Kevin Campbell, Cliff Marshall, Daniel Amokachi and Dominic Calvert-Lewin on October 9, 2022 (Photo: Simon Stacpoole/Offside via Getty Images)

The new stadium is expected to transform an area that was utterly dilapidated until recent investments. Coal was transported from the dock site but it has not been active for 34 years.

Farrag believes Everton understand that heritage comes with responsibility. The inscription that Kinloch saw on the dock wall 52 years ago will remain because it is part of a conservation area and the club believes that airbrushing the original name would be counterproductive towards any future education.

It is unnecessary, Farrag says, for the club or the city council to change the name of the Bramley-Moore site. He has been encouraged to hear about potential plans for a museum, with a section detailing the full records of the dock. A heritage trail should eventually connect the stadium to other parts of the city with links to slavery.

“It’s important to keep the name and attach the precise history to it,” he says. “Trying to re-write what has happened doesn’t help anyone because you run the risk of it happening all over again if people don’t learn. It’s much wiser to inform.”

For the time being, Everton are more careful than they once were around branding. The club are now referring to the site as the Everton Stadium and a new Twitter handle about the development using that name was assigned in August.

According to Farrag, however, there remains a danger that the longer the stadium goes without a sponsor or a long-term name, there is an increased chance that Bramley-Moore becomes casually embedded in its identity among the fanbase.

Racism shows itself in different ways across Merseyside now. It is not as consistent and overt as it once was on the terraces at each of the region’s biggest football grounds. It should never be forgotten that when John Barnes became Liverpool’s first black signing from another club, warnings were left on the walls of the Kop by the National Front. When he played at Goodison Park, he backheeled a banana that was thrown from the crowd.

Last season, two Brentford players said they were racially abused at the same stadium. “There is no place in football — or society — for racism,” Everton’s official Twitter account wrote in response to a post from striker Ivan Toney. “We are assisting Merseyside Police to ensure the individual is identified and dealt with appropriately.”

Earlier this year, a female Everton fan was banned from football grounds for three years for using racist language towards Burnley’s Dwight McNeil, who has since become an Everton player. The club suspended the woman’s season ticket and she was subsequently banned from attending any matches for three years.

Farrag says that while lots of attitudes have become more progressive, these examples show that football still struggles with racism.

His neighbour, Jimi Jagne, was a teenager in 1981 and ended up in a cell following battles with the police. An activist, he recently published a book about how Liverpool’s black community experienced and resisted racism in the 20th century. Despite being as knowledgeable as anyone about Liverpool’s relationship with race, he was not aware of John Bramley-Moore’s story until approached about this article.

Jagne describes Bramley-Moore as a “shadowy figure” and wonders whether a plaque would be enough to educate readers. The plaques elsewhere in Liverpool require a reader to go online to find out more information. “If you hit people with history, you’ve got to go hard,” he says.

Given its history, given the scale of the dockside project, given the amount of coverage it is going to receive, Jagne believes Everton have a unique opportunity to “take the lead” over discussions about race in Liverpool.

While it is important Bramley-Moore’s history isn’t hidden or buried, he also says it is even more important that, with all of the building work going on, only original features like the Bramley-Moore name on the dock wall should remain as a testament to the past.

“There’s a difference between retaining and reintroducing,” he stresses. “If the site’s geography is changed and a name is reinstalled somewhere else, then there’s a problem because it serves as a contemporary tribute to him.”

Everton’s new stadium during construction (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

Liverpool is a different place to the one Jagne and Farrag grew up in but it is yet to see the light fully. In 2017, when the English Defence League turned up at Lime Street, they ended up in the station’s lost and found with the shutters down and a strong police presence protecting them. Four years later, Joanne Anderson was elected as the first black female mayor in any British city.

Since 1998, Liverpool’s council has not been run by the party in charge of the country. While Farrag thinks the city’s political isolation has led to more unity between communities who now see problems through the guise of class rather than race, he says it is also now more common to see black families living in wealthier suburbs.

Though integration is championed, some lament that the streets and shops in L8 are less vibrant than they once were. “There isn’t a readily identifiable black community anymore,” Jagne says. “Some people will cite that assimilation is a sign of progress while others will say without a black community, they feel lost.”

Jagne defines multiculturalism as communities of different ethnicities and religions coexisting side-by-side. In Liverpool, a smaller but considerably well-established black community has simply been absorbed into a bigger one and this has led Jagne to ask himself regularly whether “progress” should really constitute losing a sense of identity.

“All we are doing then is celebrating someone else’s existence — we’re no longer existing ourselves,” he says. “I don’t feel it’s essential to have an officially recognised black community but our legacy should be recognised and established for everyone to see. I don’t think that has happened — and that is as much our fault as a community as it is the city’s.”

Last week, a story on Everton’s website detailed how the club’s new 52,000-seater home would make a “respectful nod to the past.” That the article focused on the site’s historical assets and there was no mention of Bramley-Moore’s links to slavery illustrates the challenge in dealing with the history of a man who is likely forever to be associated with Everton’s future.

Upon his death at 86, the Liverpool Courier described Bramley-Moore as: “One of those old Liverpool merchants who was associated with the early development of the trade port.” There was no mention of his activities in Brazil. Similarly, in 2018 the Liverpool Echo profiled Bramley-Moore without making any reference to his links to the slave trade, which ultimately gave him the platform to become a very wealthy man with a fortune of around £14million.

The highlight of his year in the highest public office in Liverpool had been a Fancy Fair in Princes Park, where the trifles were described by the Courier as “light as air”. As a Conservative, he would hang around in politics for another 15 years, but in 1865, Liverpool’s council was reviewing his status as an alderman. This prompted an examination of his work in the Porcupine, which suggested that for some years he had been “very slack in his attention to local affairs”.

Eyewitnesses in the council chamber claimed that Bramley-Moore was complacent, preferring to shake hands with his friends as they took turns to sit by him, and gossiping lazily about different commercial interests instead of paying attention to the public affairs under consideration.

By 1865, he had been an alderman for 24 years but his parliamentary career was nearly over. “A certain amount of work for the town may reasonably be followed by a certain duration of lazy dignity,” the Porcupine wrote. “But a man in the prime of his life cannot expect to be permitted to retain honours which he does not utilise. Mr Bramley-Moore does nothing for the town either by work, council or vote. He is constantly away from his post, and renders no service whatsoever.”

He had been thought of as one of the “best men of business” in Westminster, but he struggled with serious debate, appearing only as an authority, particularly on Brazilian affairs, where he had experience and knowledge that others did not have.

“It is unfortunately true that special knowledge is not an unmixed good,” the Porcupine added. Bramley-Moore knew all about Brazil but he only ever spoke about what suited him. He denied his links to the slave trade and a speech in Parliament in 1855 about relations with Brazil led to him being given the Order of the Rose, the highest order Brazil could bestow upon a foreigner.

A healthy relationship with a country where he had business interests was always of importance to Bramley-Moore, who became the chairman of Brazil’s chamber of commerce in Liverpool, a role which allowed him to reduce duties on sugar and coffee, both of which he was importing to Britain.

None of this translated into increased living standards for the people of Liverpool. There was virtually no trickle down from the top, or meaningful private investment. When a rich man showed philanthropic intent, it was only because, as Hugh Shimmin, a Conservative radical, suggested, because the building of a school or hospital would bring them into contact with an influential bishop or earl.

“Liverpool ought to remember how absolutely the docks represent their whole claims to the admiration of their fellow countrymen,” the Porcupine claimed. “Such a community ought to have done great things; such a town ought to be a magnificent place. They have done absolutely nothing, and the town is ugly, inconvenient and insignificant. The docks constitute the only title of Liverpool to consideration, and they are the only thing of which a Liverpool man can be really proud.”

Liverpool, arguably, is paying for such “fashionable amusement”, as Shimmin called it in 1861, even now. If it was the most significant port in the British empire, it was also one of the most impoverished, serving the needs only of the wealthiest few.

All along, according to Mulhern, Bramley-Moore had “deliberately obfuscated” his links to the slave trade and slavery and his name change was part of a process. Later, when he was called before Parliament to give evidence about the slave trade, he continued to deny any involvement, “not just by him but any British merchants, which we know is not true”, says Mulhern.

In 1901, Bramley-Moore was considered important enough to have an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, which defines him as “a young man who went out to the Brazils to engage in trade”.

“The description can appear innocuous — unless you know Brazil received more Africans than any other country in the history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade,” says Mulhern.

In 1888, Brazil became the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery. More than 45 percent of the world’s slaves had landed in the country and long after Bramley-Moore moved to Liverpool, they continued to work the lands.

From his offices on the banks of the Mersey, he continued to make lots of money — becoming one of Brazil’s biggest exporters of coffee. Having grown beans on his estate back in Rio, he had a direct knowledge of what became a global industry through the labour and suffering of others.

(Photos: Getty Images/Simon Hughes; graphic: Sam Richardson)