Most Victorian criminals might have been based in the city slums and rookeries but they were also migratory, travelling by necessity to wherever the spoils lay, be it a pair of silver candlesticks or a brace of pheasants. Though a seaport, Liverpool nevertheless enjoyed a close relationship with its neighbouring districts. The town was in fact surrounded by the large estates of the Earls of Derby and Sefton. Ince Blundell was also within reach of adventurous Liverpudlians. In 1880, during four days' shooting at Lord Sefton's estate in Croxteth, a party killed 6,344 head of game, including 4,832 pheasants, 197 ducks and 999 hares. While this sporting carnage was taking place, families in the squalid slums a few miles away were surviving on meagre rations. At the Liverpool hide market, where the skins of the animals were dressed, the workers had a sideline slicing off slivers of meat, called ‘scalps’, to sell to the poor.

Before 1831 only a small minority of ‘qualified’ gentry were allowed to shoot game. After that date game certificates were introduced that opened up the right to shoot. In practice, however, for the rest of the century game shooting remained the preserve of the landed gentry. The market for game was enormous in the north-west, with 500,000 rabbits a season (from October to March) going to Liverpool. This figure does not include the illegal catches of poachers who ransacked the surrounding countryside. In the 1840s Ben Jonson Street, in the heart of the Irish district, was the favourite resort of poachers from Ormskirk and Warrington selling their catches.