Port Towns and Urban Cultures by Brad Beaven Karl Bell & Robert James

Author:Brad Beaven, Karl Bell & Robert James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

On the other hand (and as this report acknowledges), historical accounts spanning the Georgian and Victorian eras connect the meaning of dock walls to an imaginary topography of thievery. Though varying in the precise target or purpose of their moralising and degree of reformist zeal, the accounts paint a landscape burdened by heterogeneous forms of crime. This terrain foregrounds the effort to reform dock architecture and establish a river constabulary to police it—the latter a parallel, roughly coincident and complementary reformist enterprise.

Patrick Colquhoun, in his 1800 Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames describes the ‘Robberies and Felonies, and other evil and detestable acts’ conducted along the Thames in his day. These were carried out by an underclass of a ‘rude, ignorant and unskilful number’ of watermen, ferrymen, and other characters, casually employed opportunists who conveyed paying passengers upon the river, whereby ‘diverse persons have been robbed, and spoiled of their Goods, and also drowned.’12

Colquhoun brought reforming zeal and imagination to bear on the classification of thievery, drawing his readers’ attention to the gallery of such rogues as ‘mudlarks’ who scoured the mud flats at low tide, ostensibly grubbing for nails and objects of little value, but in fact retrieving bags of sugar, coffee, and other produce stolen from cargoes and thrown overboard by shipboard accomplices. Readers were also introduced to the ‘scuffle-hunters’ who readily appeared dockside to offer their services as porters, but who came prepared with long aprons into which they secreted pilfered goods and quickly disappeared. In addition there were organised gangs of ‘Light-’ and ‘Heavy Horsemen’ who likewise devised devious means to pilfer quantities of traded produce and raw materials, both small and large.13 The story of dockland thievery was further and more widely dramatised in the popular press for decades to come. Stories including a report in the Penny Magazine, notable for being published after the initial period of wet dock construction, described ‘a system of pillage and depredation, which, though it was in full operation only 40 years ago, we at the present day can scarcely think credible.’14

Common to both sets of views—those fascinated with the treasures seeming to overspill the port’s quaysides and secreted within its warehouses, in the first instance, and reports of wholesale larceny extracting its toll on the city’s trade, in the second—was a complex and rapidly evolving material culture and social milieu. It was variously the subject of wonder and anxiety, aestheticised by means of visual and literary arts and captured for rational calculation by statisticians and reformers. The heterogeneity of this culture derived from a domain of miscellaneous goods, commonly available in substantial quantities; diverse modes of handling merchandise (or mishandling them as reformers believed); and unstable forms of agency (different actors and interests). These factors were all entailed in the reception, the storage and onward transportation, and the taxing of goods. There were also subjective aspects of this culture that require scrutiny, a parallel domain of behaviours and shifting values intervening on practical and material dimensions of commerce.

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