Featured on the tour was the grave of James Dunwoody Bulloch, the Confederate naval agent who coordinated secret shipbuilding operations from Liverpool during the American Civil War — a figure central to Maxwell’s forthcoming novel, The Shenandoah. Also buried there is his nephew, Irvine Bulloch, officer aboard the infamous raider CSS Alabama and another key character in the book.
Maxwell is the author of Water Street and The Americans of Abercromby Square, both rich with the hidden histories of Victorian Liverpool. His work brings historical figures vividly to life, revealing the transatlantic ties of war, espionage, and resistance that shaped the city.
Other notable graves included: Sir John Bent, brewer and Lord Mayor of Liverpool (1850–51), beneath a striking Gothic memorial; John Hulley, early Olympic pioneer and co-founder of the National Olympian Association; Andrew Hunt, Victorian artist and landscape painter; Sir John Harmood-Banner, industrialist, MP, and civic leader; war graves, pauper plots, Titanic connections, and unsung lives etched in fading stone. The event blended storytelling, social history, and urban archaeology.
Attendees were invited to consider the relationship between death and place — how burial sites shape memory, and how stories shift as we walk among the dead.