Tales of London's Docklands (20 page)

‘What's a leprechaun, Paddy?' George the down-hold foreman asked.

‘A leprechaun?' Paddy said in surprise, then explained. ‘It's said to be a gnome or fairy in the form of an old man with a wrinkled face; they are considered to be evil. That's why nobody in Ireland goes anywhere near where they are supposed to live. But I found out there were no leprechauns in the woods behind the school, only wild animals. So when I'd finished cleaning the latrines, playground and classrooms, I went into the woods to talk to the animals. I didn't learn anything from my time at the school, but I learned a lot from the animals in the woods.'

‘Well,' said Terry, ‘schooling wasn't much better for working-class kids in this country before the Second World War. Labourers' children, and those of the unemployed, were given short shrift and were taught in the lower classes of most English schools. But we were taught basic lessons in what were referred to as the 3 Rs, that was reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic, with a fair dose of religious instruction thrown in.'

‘Well, I wasn't taught notting, notting at all, except I'm an expert at cleaning latrines, playgrounds and classrooms,' Paddy said. ‘How will we get these elephants off the ship and onto the jetty, Terry?'

‘Not my problem,' Terry replied. ‘Ask the crane driver.'

I'd been listening with great interest to the whole of the conversation between Terry and Paddy – Terry, our know-all university-educated communist ex-graduate, and Paddy our unschooled Irish workmate. After all, I was myself ignorant about the life cycle of elephants, of how and where they lived, and how long they lived. But I was more curious to know how and why they had trunks, so I asked Terry.

‘Why do elephants have such long snouts?'

‘Trunks,' he corrected. ‘Because they've developed them over millions of years for use in gathering forage from trees.'

‘Oh,' I replied, ‘ask a silly question and get a logical answer.' Then I shut up and made my way ashore to clamber up into the Wellman crane to begin lifting the caged animals off the ship's deck onto the cargo jetty.

I had finished bringing the caged animals ashore, placing the cages in a neat row along the top of the cargo jetty, more or less at the same time as the tide reached its maximum height. By now the Ark's deck was above the top level of the jetty, high enough to get the ship's derricks rigged ready to lift the elephants off the deck and up onto the jetty's top level. There wasn't a great deal of clearance and time was short because the tide would soon be on the ebb. If the beasts were to be discharged off the ship, we had only about half an hour before we lost the clearance required. So I asked the serang (the bosun) to get his Lascar seamen to rig the derrick shore-ways as quickly as he could. Now everything was prepared for the final act of this drama on the Thames in thick fog.

The elephants had been tethered on the afterdeck using chains that were held with shackles to the ship's hatch combing. The animals were enclosed inside a wooden box-like structure to protect them from the weather. This shelter had been removed by the time we dockers came aboard the ship, and our ship's gearer had brought the elephant harness from the store ready for lift-off. Unbeknown to us dockers, the ship had brought with it an Indian mahout (elephant-keeper) and he now arrived on the scene to take charge. There was a problem, however: I spoke no Indian and the mahout spoke no English. So the conversation went something like this: ‘You get elephant under union purchase.' No response from the mahout, who just stared at me. I pointed my finger at him and said ‘You', then I pointed my finger at one of the elephants and said ‘get elephant', then I walked under the union purchase and said ‘here.' The mahout still did not comprehend. Fortunately, the Lascar serang was on hand, and he immediately began to pass my orders on to the mahout, who then proceeded to try to get one of the elephants under the union purchase. The elephant, however, had other ideas and wouldn't budge.

Charlie, the ship worker, who had been watching the mahout's antics with the animal, came aboard and said to me, ‘You know,' – well, quite obviously I didn't know, so he proceeded to tell me – ‘when I was in the desert during the war, I was attached to a Long Range Desert Group patrol who used camels. We had one camel that was more stubborn than all the rest put together. One morning we were going out on patrol and this particular animal wouldn't budge. We tried every trick we knew to get it up, but try as we would, the soddin' thing lay on the sand with its big eyes focused on some object in the distance and it wouldn't move. After we had spent half an hour trying to get that bloody camel mobile, an Arab who had been standing close by came up to the camel, bent down and did something to it. The camel got up and took off across the desert sand doing about 35 miles per hour. “Jesus Christ,” I said to the Arab, “what did you do to get that animal to take off like that?” to which he replied in broken English, “I tickled his testicles,” to which I replied, “Then you had better tickle mine. I've got to catch that soddin' thing up.”' Charlie laughed and said, ‘I thought you might like to try that trick on the elephants.'

‘That sounds a good idea to me, Charlie,' I said, ‘but in this instance there is a slight problem.'

‘What's that?'

‘Well, in case you haven't noticed, that happens to be a cow elephant.'

He sighed, and then said, ‘Then you'll have to go over to plan B.'

‘What's that?' I replied.

‘You'll have to work it out yourself.' Then he laughed and went back up the ship's gangway, saying as he went, ‘If you can't work it out, ask Terry, he'll think of something.'

Paddy, who had been leaning against the ship's deck rail listening to all that was being said but saying nothing himself, now came up to me. ‘I'll do it.'

‘You'll do what?'

‘I'll get dem elephants to go under the union purchase.'

‘Be my guest,' I said. ‘The tide will soon be on the turn and we've only got about half an hour to get them up onto the jetty. But what do you think you can do that that mahout can't?'

‘I'll sweet-talk to dem elephants. Dat's what I'll do.'

‘Go on then, Paddy. Give 'em a bit of your good old Irish blarney,' I said. And as sure as God is my witness, this is what the untutored, illiterate Irishman did. He walked up to the first elephant and he stroked her trunk as he began to whisper to her. Slowly the elephant began to turn her head and look down at him. Then, as Paddy held her trunk and continued whispering to her, he started to walk under the derrick's head that held the union purchase, and the great beast slowly followed him while the other four elephants looked on apprehensively. It wasn't a long job for a couple of my workmates to rig the harness up under the elephant's belly, for me to lift the animal off the deck, and for my mate on the shoreside winch to haul it up onto the jetty. Once the beast had been landed, Paddy walked it over to the edge of the jetty where it stayed as if glued to the spot till all its fellows were safely landed ashore. Then, with Paddy still holding onto its trunk and its four companions following, the elephant made her way to the safety of the land side of the cargo jetty entrance. And that's where the animals remained till the lorry transports arrived to take them to their final destination. Paddy stayed with them till they were safely installed on the vehicles, stroking them and whispering to them till the backs of the transports were closed behind them.

Then he said, ‘They're very sad, dem five. They told me their friend had died on the voyage over here and had been buried at sea. They didn't want to stay on that ship, but they were afraid to leave it. They were very pleased I was there on board, as I was a great comfort to dem. I hope they'll be well looked after wherever they go.' He walked quickly away.

That was rather a funny experience. I'd never seen Paddy Quinn before that day and I've never seen him since. He just seemed to appear and then disappear. I asked George, our ship's gang foreman, where Paddy had come from. He replied, ‘I don't know. I picked him up in the Dock Labour Board compound as a pro-rata man. I'd never seen him before, but he shaped up for a job, so as it was only for a day I took him on. It was a bloody good job I did. If it hadn't been for him we'd never have got those elephants off that ship in time for her to sail out on the ebbing tide.'

‘Yes,' I had to agree. Paddy had been more than a great help, but where had he come from? None of our ship's gang had ever seen him before, nor did any of them see him again.

‘You don't think Paddy could have been an Irish leprechaun, do you, George?' I asked.

The look he gave me was enough to suggest I should have been locked up in a lunatic asylum.

‘Leprechaun?' he blurted out. ‘More likely a stevedore from up in the Surrey Commercial Docks. Lots of them Irish up there, descended from the potato famine immigrants. They all still believe in fairies.'

Well, if you ask a stupid question, you can't argue if you get a logical answer, can you? Leprechaun?

18

‘I
T
'
S JUST LIKE THOSE
BLOODY
J
ERRIES
'

T
his is an odd sort of tale, really, simply because I have to start by explaining why I was working first in a barge, shovelling ballast into ore baskets, then spreading and levelling the same ballast over the lower hold of a P&O luxury passenger liner. The reason was that I was a member of the Tilbury Docks Social Club and rowed for the Tilbury dockers in the Gravesend Regatta. The coveted prize for the winners of this annual event was the prestigious silver Gravesend Regatta Perpetual Challenge Cup for London Registered Port Workers, presented by A.W. King & Company (London) Limited. (The Challenge Cup now holds pride of place in the Mayor of Gravesham's parlour at the Civic Centre, Gravesend, Kent. I think, because it is a relic of a once great industry and is a representation of the dockers and stevedores of the Port of London, the cup should reside in the Museum in Docklands. However, I digress.)

The Gravesend Regatta is an annual event, introduced by our ancestors in the mists of the town's history. Men go onto the Thames (and women, too, in these enlightened days) to row in the same tideways that brought our forefathers to this land. They row for various medals, trophies and prizes. But none of the medals, trophies or prizes was ever more prestigious than the A.W. King cup.

The dockers' and stevedores' race was rowed over 1½ miles, usually on the turn of the tide, in whalers. One had to be fully physically fit to be able to row the course, and as I spent most of my time driving the Stothert & Pitt quay cranes that were used to service P&O liners, shovelling ballast was as good a way as any of hardening the skin on my hands and building the muscles in my forearms and shoulders. So you see, there was a good reason for my annual bouts of ballast-shovelling madness.

P&O luxury liners were, without doubt, among the finest ships in the world. How they were managed at sea I have no idea, but if the attitude of deck officers to dockers and other shore-based personnel who serviced those vessels when they were in port was anything to go by, the Lascar seamen must have had a miserable time. The officers and the deck and engine-room artificers were British. But the deck seamen, dining-rooms and cabin stewards, galley scullions and non-qualified engine-room artificers were mostly from Goa.

A deep-sea passenger liner heading downstream towards the Thames Estuary on an ebbing tide, with a Thames sailing barge in the background towards the Essex shore, 1950s.
(Author's collection)

Goa was a Portuguese colony on the south-west coast of India, facing the Arabian Sea. Its people scratched a subsistence living by fishing, and growing rice, cashew nuts and spices. The P&O Shipping Company had some sort of contract with the Portuguese government to employ citizens of that enclave as seamen. It followed, therefore, that those men who could get employment with P&O jumped at the opportunity, even though that employment meant they had to carry out the most menial tasks aboard liners or cargo ships; in fact just the same as lower-deck British seamen were obliged to do.

To Goanese seamen, it meant they had to be prepared to kowtow to any order or whim that should be given by the sahibs, that is, officers or petty officers of the P&O Shipping Company. As far as I could understand, the method of employment was that, once aboard ship, the Lascars would spend three months at sea. Then they would be returned to Goa. They would stay ashore for the next three months until their turn came to return to sea in any P&O ship that was changing its crew. Their employment at sea, it would appear, was worked on a rota system. The rota scheme meant that sea-going jobs were shared out over a greater number of men and raised the living standards of a large number of impoverished people in that Portuguese colony. It was a policy that the P&O Shipping Company has a right to be proud of.