Quote Originally Posted by fortinian View Post
I think (although I do not have the book I read it in to hand) that they used the biblical 'threescore and ten' to mean a lifetime. That would be about 70 years perhaps? So altogether that would be 231 years I think.

Penny lived in numerous places, but I can't find any reference to a mansion house as such. Towards the end of his life I think he was living at Mount Pleasant.
Information from the Liverpool Record Office and Local History Service places James Penny at a number of downtown locations:



"James Penny is listed in the available Gore's Directory of Liverpool for the period as follows:
1772, 1773 Capt. Penny, Church Street
1774 Captain Penny No. 18, Old Church Yard
1777 Capt. James Penny, 18 Church Street
1781 James Penny, merchant
1787 James Penny, merchant, Ranelagh Street
1790 James Penny, merchant, Hope Street, Martindale Hill
1796 James Penny, merchant, 2 Hope Street, Mount Pleasant Street
James Penny, Junior, merchant, is also listed at this last address."

He appears to have come originally from Ulverston in the Lake District. The family appears to have retained connections to the Ulverston area as well.

"The burial register of St. James, Toxteth, 1790-1799, gives the date of death for 'James Penny, Mercht. Agd. 58 yrs' as 26th August 1799 and the date of burial as 29th August. James Gibson Epitaphs... in Liverpool Churches..., Vol. 3, p. 201, gives his date of death as 27th August 1799 and the death of his eldest son, James, as 7th August 1820, aged 47 years."

Conceivably it is this Toxteth connection that might imply a link with Penny Lane, the land where Penny Lane is located (running from Greenbank Road to Smithdown Place) being, I should think, within the limits of Toxteth Park. That might imply that Penny Lane might owe its name to his son rather than the Liverpool merchant involved in the slave trade, and who for defending that trade was honored by the Corporation of Liverpool. The other alternative might be that, if the thoroughfare is indeed named for the merchant, someone named it after him because of his work as an anti-abolitionist.

If it is not possible to establish a link between James Penny and Penny Lane, could it be that the connection is more traditional rather than factual, i.e., just be a coincidence of names? What's the true story?

In his Street Names of Liverpool (Countryvise Press, 2002), Steve Horton evidently does not feel comfortable enough to attribute the name "Penny Lane" to a connection with merchant James Penny as he does with other such streets such as Bold Street, Bold Place, and Tarleton Street which have clear connections to families involved in the African trade, as he discusses on pp. 9-11 of his book in a section entitled "The Slave Traders of Liverpool".

By contrast, he does attribute Greenbank Drive, Greenbank Lane, Greenbank Road as well as Rathbone Road in Wavertree to their origin with the anti-slavery Rathbone family whose mansion was Greenbank House, ironically (though the author doesn't say it!) located near the western end of Penny Lane, in a section titled "Liverpool's Slavery Abolitionists" on p. 12 of the book.

Chris