There is very little original material about Williamson and the tunnels dating from his time. This being the case, one has to look for information in writing and/or pictures which were produced as soon after his death as possible.

The prime example of this is the work of James Stonehouse. Stonehouse was alive in Williamson's day and toured the tunnels five years after Williamson died. Luckily for us, he wrote his findings down in a manuscript. The latter's contents were published in a local review called The Liverpool Compass and later re-published in two books: Recollections of Old Liverpool (1863) and The Streets of Liverpool (1869).

Reading Stonehouse's writings on the tunnels with the benefit of modern research, it is clear that in a small number of instances he makes factual errors. Equally, a few of his notes appear the subject of slight exaggeration (though this is difficult to prove). However, Stonehouse's work stands above all others in that it was written so soon after Williamson's death and is therefore untainted by decades of re-telling and misquoting. This applies particularly to his vivid descriptions of the tunnels he viewed in person in 1845. These passages are spellbinding to today's Williamson enthusiasts and we will be recounting some of them on this site in the near future.

The second important source of information about Williamson and the tunnels is the works of Charles Hand, one-time president of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. Hand, too, visited the tunnels but in his case it was much later - in the first two decades of the 1900s. His observations on Williamson, the tunnels and Stonehouse's manuscript are contained in two books of the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire. The first stems from 1916 and the second, with a great deal of amendments by Hand himself was published in 1927.

Hand's works immediately reflect the fact that he carried out much archival research - especially into areas such as what Williamson left in his will when he died. The 1916 notes are particularly useful in that they include a long extract from Stonehouse's writings. The second notes exhibit an admirable diligence in including 'corrections' of errors he believed Stonehouse had made alongside corrections of mistakes he had made himself in his own 1916 papers. Hand includes descriptions of his own visits to some of the tunnels (the reporting of which in a local newspaper in 1925 led to the rediscovery of the Paddington tunnels by FoWT). However, he did not have the advantage of viewing some of the spectacular sights available to Stonehouse seventy years earlier as they were long gone by the twentieth century.

Most 20th century writing on Williamson (mainly short summaries included in general books about Liverpool history) stems quite clearly from the works of Charles Hand and, by inference, from those of Stonehouse. Therefore little new has been added to their findings. With the research programme being carried out by FoWT, it is intended that a modern, authoritative version of the Williamson story may be arrived at. Of course, today we all owe a huge debt to both Stonehouse (for recording the story in the first place) and Hand (for researching it further).

More will follow on the Stonehouse and Hand material, and other research resources, in forthcoming updates of this site.