1 - Custom and Spectacle: The Public Staging of Business Life

Summary

Introduction

On 6 January 1854, heavy snows fell on the great port city of Liverpool, enough to disrupt and eventually halt the open-air trading that was the preferred practice of the city's vibrant community of cotton brokers, who could, on any normal working day, be found flocked together on the ‘Change Flags, the paved courtyard of the Exchange building in the heart of the business district (in Liverpool, the word Exchange was habitually shortened to ‘Change). Left idle and frustrated with the unwonted interruption to trade, the cotton brokers were soon engaged in a pitched snowball fight with rival brokers from other commodity trades. Hundreds were involved. Windows were smashed and town council proceedings interrupted. When the town's police attempted to intervene they were met with volleys of both snowballs and insults; the contending brokers now had a common enemy. Perceived ringleaders, all of them prominent brokers, were taken into custody, but on their release battle simply recommenced. Now the police attempted to enter the Exchange newsroom but were roughly ejected. In the end it was only nightfall that brought an end to the three-sided hostilities.

Soon the day's events were being celebrated in rhyme, in a piece of doggerel written by local poet John Pedler and published in the Liverpool Mercury, and in image, local artist John R. Isaac producing a fine lithograph of the scene. The event is remembered to this day and receives extensive coverage on the website of the International Cotton Association (ICA), a trade association still based in Liverpool. Pedler's pseudo-epic records how:

So without more ado, they the matter cut short And snowballs they threw, at each other for sport Thus forgetting awhile, both the cotton and grain To resume the arch smile, of their boyhood again.

Pedler's verse seems to emphasise that this was a moment of play, a suspension of normal behaviour: a moment of misrule, significant, if at all, only in its exceptionality. Are not those moments in which we are confronted with a ‘world turned upside down’, in the end, only ever about a reinforcing of the status quo? In this light, the snowball fight appears a mere ‘intrusion … compulsive, rather than self-conscious or self-activating’.