BARROW docks has played host to floating prisons but has never been sent any inmates.

In 1993 the town was being suggested as a host for a huge accommodation ship which would be moored in the dock system and converted for use as a prison.

The government looked at the idea of using ports to hold prisoners and the Liverpool-based Bibby Line offered a 10,000-ton barge to be based in Barrow.

A previous use of the Bibby Progress had been in Sweden to host 600 Bosnian refugees.

By May it had been converted into a prison ship and had reached Sullom Voe in the Shetland Islands - but political opposition to its arrival in Barrow was mounting.

In April 1994 the Home Office bowed to pressure and ruled out Barrow as a base for a floating prison.

The idea returned in 1998 with the arrival in the Anchor Line Basin at Barrow Docks of Bibby Renaissance.

It was 400ft long, six stories high and could hold up to 800 prisoners.

By 2002 Government officials were making inquiries about the ship due to a big jump in the number of prisoners.

At that time, the only floating prison in Britain was the Wheare at Portland, Dorset.

All the speculation came to nothing and the six-storey barge left Barrow in December 2007 at the start of a 75-day, 10,000-mile journey to China where it was to become a floating hotel.

Almost 100 years earlier the docks had been visited by a prison hulk - and old wooden battleship which had been converted into a floating jail.

On this occasion its career as a place to keep prisoners of war had long past and the old ship at the time of its Barrow visit around 1910 was just an unusual attraction to be seen by dock visitors before it was broken up.

Wars in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with France and the United States had led to the taking of thousands of prisoners, said doctor Jeremy Clarke, education officer of the Guildhall Museum in Rochester. He was speaking at a conference held by the British Association of Numismatic Societies at Gillingham.

He said: "Enormous numbers of enemy combatants were brought back to England."

The officers were generally released on parole while the captured private soldiers and sailors were put in temporary camps or held in old warships which had been cleared of all fighting equipment and moored in river estuaries.

Bars were put across the windows or former gun ports.

Dr Clarke said: "People paid money to be rowed out to the hulks so they could stand and stare at the prisoners."

Many of the French prisoners made things to sell, such as straw work, bonnets, ship models or decorated boxes.

A display inside the old prison inside Lincoln Castle describes how the prison hulk Captivity, moored off Portsmouth, held convicts in the early 19th century before they could be transported by ship to Australia.

It also noted that until independence in 1776, British criminals were transported to what became the United States.

The display noted: "Life on board the rotting hulks was tough and many convicts died of disease.

"Chained in leg irons, convicts were put to hard labour during the day."