LIVERPOOL'S UNDERGROUND KINGDOM

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 36, 12 February 1938, Page 27

LIVERPOOL'S UNDERGROUND KINGDOM

That an underground City of Dreadful Night, made b,y a mad "King" a century ago, should be used for airraid shelters is a suggestion Liverpool City Council may shortly consider, says "Reynolds News." . The secret city, honeycombing mucii of the populous Edgehill district, is one of Britain's weirdest mysteries. To this day, nobody knows why it was made. The story of its making and maker is one of the strangest chapters in the whole history of human eccentricity. Its maker was a wealthy Liverpool tobacco merchant , eccentric Joseph Williamson, the self-appointed "King of Edgehill." Born in 1769, as a poor boy he went to Liverpool, entered the tobacco business of one Thomas Tate, married his master's daughter, and on his death succeeded to the business and a vast fortune. He had always a mania for excavating. He became a "human mole," anJ spent the rest of his life honeycombing the earth with tunnels, wearing old, shabby clothes, rarely coming up to see the light of day, and living mostly underground in a cave thai looked like a wild beast's den.

Armies of workmen were employed. Deep underground—with no known aim or object—huge caves were hewn from the solid rock. Underneath houses and streets the excavations wound; gloomy caverns, labyrinths, winding stone passages, that led to nowhere; dungeons, vast vaults with solid masonry, underground chambers separated by yawning chasms, j eerie tunnels and tombs that seemed like nightmares come true. While digging one day, the mad "King" was surprised by a visit from George Stephenson. The famous engineer was underneath digging a tunnel, too—a tunnel to carry his first Man-chester-Liverpool Railway of 1830 into Liverpool. The excavations went on until Williamson's death in 1840—a death that was mourned by hundreds who .for years had had constant work on his schemes. Today his tunnels and caves still stand, an underground city of dread- ■ ful night, awesome, infested by rats 1 and spiders. Shortly, however, if suggestions are acted upon and the • caves cleaned, hundreds of Liverpool ; people may be sheltering there from ; air raids, and giving silent thanks to the man who built them—Joseph Williamson, the "King of Edgehill."