Captain Mike Lowe

Michael John Lowe was born in Birkenhead and went to school there. His dad, Jack, was a seaman, and his uncle Henry rose to chief officer. Both sailed with Lamport and Holt, one of the great Liverpool shipping lines. The river was in the family before it was in Mike.

On Sundays his grandad, Fred Dunne, took him out. Coat on, the tram down to Woodside, across to Liverpool on the ferry, then up the river on the New Brighton boat, and all the way back again. Mike called it a complete circle.

I loved that. Never believed it'd be to do with being on the ferries when I grew up.

Mike Lowe

Back home he left school at fifteen and tried a job in a garage. It didn't suit. So he went over to Liverpool to see a pal, Frank Buttler. On the ferry back he asked one of the deckhands about work, heard they needed lads, and was sent round the corner to the marine superintendent's office.

He said, right, start tomorrow.

Mike Lowe

It was September 1952, and he was nineteen.

The lad

He was the lad. He kept the fire in the fo'c'sle nice and red, kept the kettle topped up for the captain and the mate, and sometimes cooked their breakfast. Then there were the ropes. When the spring rope man went for his break, the lad took the spring rope. Then he took over the stern rope.

Mike joined at the right time. The captains and mates were all coming up to sixty, and the management realised there was nobody coming up behind them. They asked him to go for his mate's ticket.

I said yes, why not. I'll have a go.

Mike Lowe

The knowledge he needed wasn't in any book. You learned the river from the men who knew it, and most of them didn't want to tell him. Crews had stayed together for years. They went on holiday together and came back together. Nobody wanted a young lad coming up and disturbing that.

None of the captains really wanted to take me, because they were frightened of a young snotty-nosed kid coming up and disturbing them.

Mike Lowe

One man did. Captain Frank Cullen was big, powerful and very unpopular. Everybody did exactly what they were told. Nobody wanted to sail with him. Mike did, and it worked.

He turned out a great man to me.

Mike Lowe, on Captain Frank Cullen

He had a line for his new mate, too. "It's about time you learned to steer, Mr Mate."

In 1961 Cammell Laird began a new ferry for Birkenhead. Mike and his childhood friend Teddy Rodden went to the yard again and again to watch her take shape. She was the Overchurch, launched in November 1961. She was the first of the fleet to be welded all over instead of riveted, and the last boat built for the Birkenhead ferries.

Mike hadn't long been made mate. He and his skipper took her out into the bay for her trials, with the yard's engineers timing every run over the measured mile. His own doctor, who was also the yard's doctor, heard he was going and came along. "He was tickled pink."

They tell you what courses they want you on, and for so long, and they time you. It's simple. It was good, actually. And the weather was all right.

Mike Lowe

On her first trip over to Liverpool, the paper photographed Mike, the mate, with his daughter Christine, aged three, saying hello over the ship’s radio telephone.

The same year, aged 28, Mike was made master: the youngest the Birkenhead ferries had ever had. Five years on, the Liverpool Echo found him at work.

As he scans the Mersey from the bridge of the Overchurch, he knows he is doing the job he wanted to do since he was a youngster.

Liverpool Echo, 2 June 1967

Follow one name on the Mersey and you follow a century of the river. It runs from the Wallasey ferries, through a raid on the Belgian coast, to Mike's own sea trials and the new ferry on the river this autumn.

On Thursday 1 October 2026 Mike was back on the river, aboard the new Royal Daffodil on one of her showcase cruises from the Pier Head.

I was in charge of the vessel completely. That was my responsibility.

Mike Lowe

A full crew was a captain, a mate, three deckhands, a chief engineer and a second engineer, on a 152-foot ship. "Mind you," Mike says, "it took a thousand."

Once the police came aboard for his second engineer. Mike told them they couldn't take him off the boat. He was part of the crew, and they would have to wait until he had finished his duty. The policeman waited.

The girls on the ferries had a name for him: Captain Birdseye, after the bearded captain on the fish finger adverts.

Ring an order in the wheelhouse and it arrives down here. The Royal Iris came from William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton and went into service on the Mersey on 5 May 1951. Under her dance floor she was nothing like the steamers Mike started on.

She was diesel-electric. Four Ruston and Hornsby six-cylinder engines drove four generators. The generators fed two Metropolitan-Vickers electric motors, and the motors turned two shafts and two controllable pitch propellers. Twin rudders made her handy alongside. She was licensed to carry 2,296 passengers on ferry work.

Even her funnel was for show. The one by the bridge was a dummy. The real exhausts went up two stacks amidships, one on each side.

In those days, on the steamboats, the engineer gave the engines. You just sent a telegraph down, a signal, to tell him what you want.

Mike Lowe

A full crew carried a chief engineer and a second engineer. The captain rang the order. Down here, they answered it.

You never know what the river will do. One afternoon Mike went on duty in weather like any other day.

1. 4 pmBlowing a bit
2. 5 pmHowling
3. 6 pmBack

By five o'clock it was howling. Two ferries passing close to each other lost sight of one another in the spray.

She was grandma's knitting. Over one, under one.

Mike Lowe

By six it was back to normal.

Years later, after the ferries, he skippered a 76-foot former Norwegian fishing boat, done up for weekend trips to the Isle of Man. Coming home one Sunday night, it blew up out of the blue. There was no shelter back at the island, so they carried on.

But we made it. Still here.

Mike Lowe

The fog sits thickest just south of Woodside, off Cammell Laird, Mike says, where the water runs deepest. At first there was no radar at all. Then came a radar on shore, with one of the skippers watching the screen and talking four ferries across at once. "It's a bit much, really."

One day in thick fog a ferry ran into one, broadside. Mike was on deck.

It just ploughed into him. They didn't see him, and he wasn't told.

Mike Lowe

It's hard now to picture how full the river was. Tugs and more tugs. Barges. Ships. Dozens of little coasters, all moving at once, and a ferry crossing every ten minutes through the middle of them. Look at the river behind this page.

You got used to it those days. I think it's very sad.

Mike Lowe, on the empty river now

People went into the water more often than you'd think. One day at the south end of the Liverpool stage, Mike saw a man jump from the fire brigade's boat moored there. He tied a line round himself and went in after him.

I flew down and put a line around myself and went in, and we got him up.

Mike Lowe

Another time he went out in a boat and got a man out. Both rescues earned him an award from the Merseyside Passenger Transport Executive. Mike can’t swim.

On the old steamers the captain didn't touch the engines. He rang his order on the telegraph, and the engineer below answered it on his own dial. Usually.

I brought her up. Stop. Full astern. And I got full ahead.

Mike Lowe

There was a Wallasey boat ahead of him. Its captain saw what was happening and kept his own boat off the stage, and Mike went through the gap without touching either of them. Then he rang down twice for full astern.

After the steamers came bridge control, with the engines answering straight to the wheelhouse. "You knew where you were," Mike says.

Close on thirty years on the river means a great many passengers. A few of them stayed with him. Turn a ticket over to read it, and hear Mike tell it.

Mike's Sunday circle always took in the New Brighton boat, up the river to the pier. For well over a century the ferry brought the crowds. Scroll on and watch the pier come and go.

In September 2026 the Liverpool City Region Metro Mayor, Steve Rotheram, was aboard the new Royal Daffodil for her naming. Afterwards he told BBC Radio Merseyside that the Combined Authority is looking at whether new ferry terminals could be built, New Brighton among them.

This is one I'd love to do. The very first interview I did when I became Metro Mayor, they said what's your favourite place in the Liverpool City Region, and it's New Brighton.

Steve Rotheram, BBC Radio Merseyside, September 2026

He was straight about the problem. A landing stage at New Brighton has to cope with one of the biggest tides in Britain.

The river has nearly an 11 metre differential between high and low tides. You have to have something that floats, a pontoon. It has to be fixed to the riverbed, so there's huge engineering and costs to it.

Steve Rotheram

Would I like to do it? Yeah. Will we be able to do it? We're having a look.

Steve Rotheram

There is no funded terminal yet and no published business case. But the Metro Mayor is having a look, and he says he would love to do it. His own memory of the crossing is Mike's: the bus into town as a kid in the summer holidays, the ferry over the water, New Brighton on the other side.

Mike knows what it takes to keep a ferry. When the service was threatened years ago, he campaigned to save it with his pal Ted and a few others. He still holds that the crossing is a royal highway, and that the crowns on the gangways prove it.

So they can't shut it. It's got to go through Parliament to shut that.

Mike Lowe

The last ferry left New Brighton on 26 September 1971, and the pier came down in 1978. Since then there has been nowhere at New Brighton for a ferry to come alongside.

So tonight the boat is yours. Cast off from the Pier Head, keep clear of the big ships in the channel, mind the sands along the Wirral shore, and bring her alongside where the old landing stage used to float.

Watch the tide. It runs hardest down the middle of the river, and it will carry you sideways if you let it.