In Liverpool up until the 1990s, I used to see a lot of “Liverpool eccentrics”. Back then it was as if they were manufactured in some secret factory.
One of the most memorable was George Smith, a tuba player with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. He is remembered for many things, but perhaps most vividly for riding a three-man bicycle through the Mersey Tunnel, pursued by police, after an evening involving a few too many drinks following a concert. The incident was reported nationally.
According to those who knew him, he lived simply and in a hut. He rode bicycles, tandems and triplets. He was a committed vegan long before veganism was fashionable. He never owned a TV. Later in life he travelled vast distances by bicycle and tuned pianos across Europe after retiring from the orchestra.
Liverpool in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s hosted a wide range of eccentrics. There was the man remembered as “Plinky-Plonk”, who “played” a badly made cardboard guitar in the city centre. This “instrument” was handmade and roughly drawn, and he never accompanied his playing by singing, so his act was very much a silent one.
There was the “opera singer” who would perform arias accompanying himself on the accordion. His sole haunt was Williamson Square, near the stage door of the Liverpool Playhouse. He was always smartly dressed, wearing a maroon felt jacket and cravat. Unfortunately, his repertoire was limited to just two or three songs repeated in a loop.
There was Tony “Beep Beep”, who stood at traffic lights encouraging drivers honk their horns, responding with delight each time they did. Over time, drivers familiar with his antics would participate automatically.
There was Sandy, a man with a limp often seen around the Pier Head and city centre. He did not perform or have an “act”, but would shout frequently for reasons never quite clear.
And there were others still: the trumpet player on Bold Street, the man singing into a toy microphone on Church Street, the cyclist covered in anti-smoking signs, the so-called “Hoover guy” who turned a vacuum hose into a musical instrument, and many more eccentrics whose names survive only in memory and online forum recollections.
What connects these people is not eccentricity alone, but the structure of the city at the time. Liverpool still functioned, in part, as a “repeated-contact environment”. People moved through the same city centre streets regularly. The city centre was smaller in footfall and patterns of movement were more predictable. This meant that unusual individuals were not just seen once and forgotten, but seen again and again until recognition accumulated. They became known without ever becoming formal “celebrities”.
Modern Liverpool is in many ways more dynamic than it was in those decades. But the structure of city life has changed. The city centre is now more transient in population, more commercially structured and no longer the large “village” it once felt like. In many respects it has become homogenised with other UK cities.
People still pass through the city centre obviously, but they do not necessarily pass through in the same patterns, so familiarity no longer accumulates in the same way. As a result, eccentrics like George Smith are harder to envisage now, not because eccentrics no longer exist, but because the conditions that once turned them into shared local reference points no longer exist. What has been lost is not eccentricity itself, but the social mechanism that once turned repeated visibility into folklore.
George Smith, in that sense, is not just a memory of one man, but a reminder of a time when a city could absorb its eccentric individuals into a shared narrative, and allow them to become part of its identity.
