Merseyside Maritime Museum

When you drop anchor at Merseyside Maritime Museum don’t miss Seized! The Borders and Customs uncovered - a permanent gallery unveiling attempts at smuggling and tax evasion that have kept our Customs Officers on their toes over the years!

The exhibition focuses on detective work, fighting crime, patrolling frontiers, catching criminals, undercover surveillance and an insight into the motives of the bad guys. Visitors can see items used for drugs smuggling such as carved African statues and garden gnomes, a chilling collection of smuggled weapons, and an emotive display of tourist souvenirs made out of endangered species.

Suitable for

• Any age

This new display features 14 posters dating from 1888 to 1980, advertising Liverpool shipping companies. Many of these posters have never been on display before.

They are a record of the style, glamour and excitement of a long-gone era when sailing by liner was the only way travel. Starting out as simple bills of sailing, over time shipping company advertisements developed into highly designed full colour posters that reflected the changing needs and aspirations of passengers.

From emigrant services, through the age of luxury transatlantic liners, to latter day cruise ships, posters are snapshots from a time when global travel was still an unusual and often exotic undertaking. Together these posters show the changing face of passenger travel by sea.

Website

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/exhibitions/sail-away/

Shipping posters exhibition (title tbc) (16 May 2014 – May 2015). This will contain 25 shipping posters used to promote transatlantic travel from the first decade of the 20th century to the more glamorous and luxurious posters of the 1950s.

Website

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime

From the 1860s until the late 1960s more than 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries through child migration schemes. Some were orphans and many came from families who were unable to care for them. At the time charitable and religious organisations sent them overseas, with the belief that their lives would improve as a result. They were supported by governments for which these schemes supplied much needed population and labour.

Liverpool and Glasgow were the main departure ports for children sailing to Canada. Liverpool's Allan Line carried almost half of Canada's child migrants on its ships.

Siblings and friends were split up on arrival and left isolated, facing long hard days of labour in extremes of climate. This isolation often let to a lonely, brutal childhood.

This exhibition tells their emotional stories, and through detailed case studies, visitors will meet a number of child migrants and find out more about their different experiences.

Suitable for

• Family friendly

Website

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/exhibitions/child-migrants/

Are you smart enough to take on the Morse Code challenge? Join us to test your skills at sending messages without a mobile phone!

Admission

No booking required