Dockland Theft

Dockland districts throughout the world have always had a reputation for wickedness and depravity. Teeming with sex-starved sailors and gullible travellers loaded with money, such areas are magnets for thieves and prostitutes. Nevertheless, Liverpool was singled out as being exceptionally bad. The worst quarter was Gibraltar Row, running from Great Howard Street to the Princes Dock. In the 1830s, Herman Melville described the area as ‘putrid with vice and crime to which perhaps the round globe does not furnish a parallel […] These are the haunts in which cursing, gambling, pick-pocketing and common iniquities are virtues too lofty for the infected gorgons and hydras to practise.’ Nearby Waterloo Road, with its 16 public houses, was also infested with ‘desperate and abandoned characters’.

Maritime crime was a lucrative business. In 1836 Head Constable Whitty claimed that 1,700 people lived upon merchandise plundered from the docks, although the figure seems somewhat excessive. Liverpool docks were one of the wonders of the western world, yet the dearth of secure warehousing facilities was cited as a major reason for so much crime. In the 1840s only the Albert Dock was completely enclosed and protected. The northern docks were sheltered by walls but had no warehouses within the enclosures. The southern docks were unprotected by walls and were open to the public. Valuable goods such as sugar, coffee and spices were stored on the quays for long periods, awaiting removal to the warehouses.