Tales of London's Docklands (9 page)

‘What's that?' he said.

‘Good God, David,' said Little Fred. ‘It looks as if the tug rope got itself tangled round the guy rope's support peg.'

‘Yes, it does,' said Big Dave, ‘and it also miraculously made itself fast with a double half-hitch and finished up with a lighterman's knot just to make sure it wouldn't slip off the end of the main support peg. Clever ropes they make these days to hold marquees in position.'

‘Well, yes it is,' replied Little Fred sheepishly. ‘Although I distinctly remember you telling me about a bloke in India who could climb up a rope – the Indian rope trick? I'm sure it was you who told me that.'

‘Now cut that old toffee out and own up like the man you would like to have been, if you had ever grown up,' said Big Dave. ‘What have you been up to, tiny man?'

‘Well, David, you know how it is. I had a wager the police would win the tug-of-war match. I thought you lot would get tired pulling against the police team, more especially if they had a little bit of help from a friend,' said Little Fred. ‘Anyway, I was going to treat all of you to a nice long drink on my winnings. How was I to know you lot would wreck my marquee?'

The Ship & Lobster public house, The Sea Wall, Denton, Gravesend. Thames sailing barges, in times past, laid off the Ship & Lobster to ride out rough weather and fogs. River police used a shed at the back of the premises as a mortuary. The pub was also used for smuggling.
(Author's collection)

‘Well, I must admit you didn't know that, but no, we wouldn't dream of letting you buy us a drink now you have lost your bet. We'll get you one, instead.'

With that Big Dave picked Little Fred up above his head, walked over to the riverside where the tide was just beginning to ebb, and threw the miscreant out into the river, where he landed with a splash and disappeared under the water. Everyone who could get close to the riverside let out a loud cheer as Little Fred came to the surface.

‘Help! Help!' he yelled out. ‘I can't swim.'

Big Dave was not in a forgiving mood. ‘Don't worry,' he called back, ‘neither can I, but the tide's on the ebb. You should be able to touch the bottom in half an hour.'

T
HE
F
INALE

The police team accepted that the dockers had won the tug-of-war match. One of them dived in the river and pulled Little Fred out of the water (but not before he had ducked him a few times on his way back to the shore). It was a fitting end to a really enjoyable day at the Gravesend Regatta, although Big Dave couldn't understand why Little Fred didn't think so. It may have been because the two teams carried him back to his marquee and made him call drinks on the house.

The collapse of the marquee was put down to a freak wind getting under the canopy and lifting the steel peg holding up the mainstay. This must have been Little Fred's account of what caused the marquee's collapse, simply because it read more like a description of a Thames barge's mast being lowered. Trust him, the little sod.

7

D
OC AND THE
S
UGAR
B
OAT
I
NCIDENT

D
oc was a ‘green horn' – that is, he had only this very day entered the port transport industry, and through his ignorance he did something that would be unthinkable to established registered dock workers: he voluntarily gave his attendance book to a ship worker, who was in charge of a ship berthed alongside Tilbury Riverside cargo jetty that was due to load sugar.

‘The man must be deranged. He's obviously escaped from a lunatic asylum,' one of the lads was jokingly heard to remark. ‘Are you sure he's safe to work with?'

‘Well, he looks harmless enough – for an idiot, that is,' said another.

No docker or stevedore in his right mind would volunteer to work on loading or discharging ships carrying sugar in the enclosed docks, let alone on Tilbury Riverside cargo jetty. When ship workers had picked up their regular gangs in the Dock Labour Board compound, and a sugar boat was berthed somewhere in the docks, it was simply a matter of time before the men waiting on the free call heard the Tannoy system in the compound announce ‘All books in'; it was then a short wait to see which of them had drawn the short straw and been called to work on the sugar boats. It was, without doubt, like playing a game of Russian roulette with one's livelihood. The reason for their reluctance to work on sugar loading or discharging operations was not that it was hard graft – there were very few jobs in the docks that were not sweated labour. It was simply because the piecework rate was so low it was a hard slog for a very small pay reward.

Bagged imported sugar usually came in 3-hundredweight hessian sacks. The sacks were sometimes stuck together in slabs, like big bars of sticky toffee, and pom-pom guns had to be used to separate them before they could be discharged into lighters or barges.

Refined export sugar, on the other hand, was invariably exported in 2-hundredweight hessian sacks. The piecework rate for this export commodity was 2
s
11
d
per ton, shared between twelve men – in other words, less than 3
d
per ton to each man.

Sugar for export was brought downriver in barges or lighters, direct from the Tate & Lyle refinery in Silver Town, north Woolwich. Tate & Lyle is a major refiner and wholesale supplier of sugar. The term sugar is generic and covers a group of carbohydrates, including sucrose, glucose, fructose and maltose. To put it in plain, ordinary, simple language, to you and me sugar generally means sucrose, a substance that is obtained from sugar beet, sugar cane or sugar maple.

Millwall Dock, 1955. (Illustrated London News,
1955
)

When the job of loading a ship was ready to start, the refined sugar was made up by the men working in lighters or barges (the bargehands) into twelve-sack sets. The sets of sugar were hoisted aboard the ship by cranes or winches. When ships arrived in port, they were worked ten hours a day when loading or discharging, or for a ‘short night' (that is, from 8 a.m. till midnight) or an ‘all night' (that is, from 8 a.m. one day till 8 a.m. the next), if the vessel was a liner, due to sail on a schedule and required to depart at a certain time. As far as sugar jobs were concerned, the overtime rate on piecework was paid at just above the day rate between 5 to 7 p.m. This meant there was very little financial incentive for men to work overtime on sugar loading or discharging ships, other than to get back into the Dock Labour Board compound in the hope of getting a more financially rewarding job.

On some occasions, employers invoked the ‘you shall work overtime if required to do so' rule, a rule contained in post-war working agreements that had been drawn up between the port employers and officials of trade unions representing registered dock workers – the unions agreed without consulting the membership on this issue. The rule was contained in a clause introduced into dock working practices and conditions during the Second World War. It had been put in place, together with a continuity rule, in order to get ships discharged or loaded more quickly and made ready for protection by the Royal Navy when they joined a convoy. But when used in peacetime, it was a flagrant abuse of the liberty of man and totally disregarded dock workers' rights to choose whether they wished to work overtime (more especially after having been press-ganged into the job in the first instance). It was heavy-handed impertinence on the employers' part, an abuse of employment power that caused a great deal of resentment and bad blood between ship owners, managers and dock workers, especially as the remedy to the problem lay in the ship owners' hands.

However, this is not to say that some ship's gangs did not earn reasonable wages discharging sugar. Regular stevedore and docker gangs, working afloat off the Woolwich buoys, discharged several hundred tons of sugar each day between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., working over-side under a ship's derricks. In addition, thousands of tons of sugar were discharged with the use of grab-cranes at Samuel Williams's riverside wharf at Dagenham docks, Essex. The ‘down-holders' had to clear loose sugar from behind stringer boards with shovels, an operation any docker would have called ‘a doodle of a job' – stringer boards are wooden boards attached to a ship's ribs to protect the steel plates from cargo damage.

When hessian-bagged sugar was loaded aboard vessels moored to Tilbury Riverside cargo jetty, barges and lighters were brought inside, between the jetty and the shore, occupying the relatively calm water on the land side of the cargo jetty while they were being discharged. The shoreline protruded into the river behind and below the New Lock Entrance. The tidal river water was, therefore, kept away from the immediate areas between the Riverside cargo jetty and the rock-faced sea wall, and this created a tranquil, smooth, shallow basin where barges were worked without the bargehands becoming seasick, as they would if they were working in barges secured to a ship on the river side of the jetty, which was constantly being buffeted by waves made by a fast-running tide and the bow-waves of ships making way up or down the river.

The method of loading ships from barges moored inside Tilbury cargo jetty entailed using two cranes attached to the jetty. The shoreside crane lifted sets of sugar from the barge onto the top of the cargo jetty. The riverside crane took the sets off the jetty to be lowered into a ship's hold, where a stowage gang would then back the sugar (that is, carry the 2-hundredweight sacks on their backs) to the allotted stowage. On the occasion of this tale, the sugar was being stowed in number 2 upper 'tween deck, at the after end of the hatch. The ship's gang, except Doc, had been allocated to the vessel from the Dock Labour Board compound. Doc was the odd man out, having been picked up on the free call that very day.

Doc was very quietly spoken, a likeable, inoffensive chap, who had no idea what he was letting himself in for when he became a docker. He was quickly given the nickname Doc when it had become known to his fellow dockers that he had been a nurse and had worked at the local hospital.

‘Bloody psychiatric nurse,' one man mumbled. ‘He must have been to volunteer for a soddin' job like this. If you get dealing with a load of nutters for a long time it's odds on you'll wind up like them.'

‘Yes,' said his mate. ‘Is that your excuse, too?'

‘It isn't bloody funny, you fool. That loony business could be contagious.'

All the down-holders in the ship's gang turned and looked at him, then burst out laughing.

‘It takes a bloody idiot to know one,' the down-hold foreman said. ‘Come on, that's enough of that nonsense. Let's get on with this job.'

Doc's father-in-law also worked in the docks, and he was employed as an after-foreman for a stevedoring labour contractor that serviced P&O liners of the Far East and Australasian fleet. No doubt Dad had the intention of securing Doc a job with him as soon as an opportunity presented itself. (Nepotism was one of the endemic scourges of the port transport industry.) It was Dad who had advised Doc to give his attendance book to a ship worker. But he had not been in the Dock Labour Board compound to tell him who he should not ‘shape up for'. Consequently, poor Doc had got himself lumbered as a down-holder on this ship, a loading sugar boat, manned by a gang of pressed men. His only consolation was that he had not been picked to be a bargehand. That was a much more physically demanding job that would, as like as not, have finished him as a docker.

Doc was tall, with light-brown hair and bright blue-eyes. He was pale of face and thin in body. He had less muscle on his arms and legs than could be found on a sea mollusc, a creature with a similar-sounding name. He wore thick, steel-rimmed glasses. He had a curious gait insofar as his slim shoulders stayed rigid while his knees appeared to be semi-stiff and jerky. It was as though he had had a partially successful fusing operation on both of his hips and knees. This may have been the reason for what was to happen to him shortly.