The Mersey Docks and Harbour Board had awarded the £206,000 contract in 1905 to John Scott of Darlington, son of Sir Walter Scott, one of the great regional civil engineering contractors of the era. Scott's reputation was for finishing on time and under budget; he had recently completed an extension to the Middlesbrough docks. Birkenhead was meant to be another quiet triumph. The new Vittoria Dock, sited at the northern end of Vittoria Street, would give the port an organised, accessible berth for the ever-larger vessels coming up the Mersey. Work had begun in 1905 and was due to wrap by the end of 1909. By March, it was running nine months ahead. The labourers on the night shift were finishing the easy part, the last of the rubble in the cut, with the four-year job set to close out by the following evening.

The men in the trench that night were navvies, a name short for navigators, the migratory workforce that had dug Britain's canals and was now hollowing out her docks. They lived hard and worked harder, often hundreds of miles from family, paid by the foot of earth removed. A gang in a Birkenhead trench in 1909 might have included Irishmen, men from County Durham, men who had followed Scott from one project to the next. They were the people who built the Mersey waterfront that made Liverpool one of the great ports of the empire. Their names do not often make it into the histories. After this night, fourteen of them would not be making it to morning, with three more injured. The men hauling rubble from the cut had no warning at all before the water came down.

High tide had run up the Mersey at about 11:15 the previous evening, filling the East Float to the brim. A coffer dam built in 1907, 200 feet of timber piling rammed with mud and cement, was the only thing between that water and the open cut. Just after midnight the dam's foundation simply failed. Fifteen men were in the trench. A crane straddled the excavation above them, hauling rubble up by the bucket, the only light in the snow. Then a roar, and the trench became a flooded grave. Three injured workers were dragged out. Fourteen were not. Rescuers worked through the rest of the night and into the morning in a snowstorm, knowing what they would find.

The shock fell first on the surrounding terraced streets, where the news ran from house to house before dawn. Birkenhead grieved openly, with subscriptions raised for the widows and orphans, with the local press reporting every funeral. There was a public outpouring of sympathy, and there was a demand for answers, but the Government refused to hold a public inquiry. The exact cause of the dam's collapse was never definitively established. Whatever evidence the contractor and the Mersey Docks Board gathered has largely been lost, and very little documentation of the disaster now survives. The Vittoria Dock opened anyway, the following evening, very nearly on the day the contract had always called for, with its entrance channel claimed by the river it was meant to admit.

The Vittoria Dock kept operating into the era of containerisation, and the surrounding system at Birkenhead, the East and West Floats and Alfred Dock, would handle a century of trade after the night the navvies died. There is no major monument at the site to the men of 6 March 1909. The fact that we know the disaster happened, at all, owes mostly to the books and local historians who have refused to let it disappear, including a 1990s history called Damburst that pieced together what newspapers and parish records still held. Standing today at the head of the old cut, with the gantries quiet and the wind off the Mersey carrying gulls instead of cranes, it is a place that asks to be remembered. Fourteen men, a snowstorm, and a dam that gave way hours before the work was done.