The two brothers-in-law both worked in the same ship’s gang as me. Jim was one of the two pitch hands (men who were part of the ship’s gang, but worked on the quay or in lighters or barges) and Joe was the top hand (my eyes on a ship’s deck). I knew Jim’s face as well as I knew my own. I could see him and his mate on the pitch all day as they busied themselves with preparing cargo for loading. One or other of them was constantly looking up to see me in the crane cabin 60–80 feet above their heads, either to give me verbal orders or to make sign language that amounted to the same thing.
When Jim was bending down to his work, his black wavy hair stuck out of the yellow cravat he always wore to hide a wide, jagged scar that ran down the side of his neck. It made his hair resemble the black stigmas of a sunflower surrounded by bright-yellow petals. But as the day wore on and the sweat and dirt began to turn the yellow cravat a greasy brown colour, his head started to take on the look of a dying sunflower. That change in aspect always fascinated me. When I think of it now, it still does.
On the other hand, I could have passed Joe in the street without recognizing him. He was a lot older than Jim. Joe arrived at work at either 7 or 8 a.m., the start time depending on whether the ship was loading or discharging dry cargoes, or discharging frozen meats, cartons of offal, butter, cheeses or other chilled or frozen freight.
A normal day’s loading work ran from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. However, discharging a meat-carrying ship began at 7 a.m. and finished at 8 p.m. The reason for the earlier start and later finish was that freezer hatches were sealed with large caulk-filled plugs, which had to be removed before the ship’s discharging gang could start work and then replaced at knocking-off time. The quay gang called a halt to the day’s work when all the road transport lorries had been filled with frozen cargo or at 7 p.m., whichever came first. Four down-holders, the top hand and the crane driver then replugged and resealed the freezer hatch.
Joe, my top hand, always made his way up onto the ship’s deck as soon as he arrived at work, and that’s where he stayed till lunchtime, which was midday. Before the afternoon work period began at 1 p.m., Joe would again make his way up on deck, where he remained till seven or eight o’clock in the evening. He never, ever, came down the hold for his tea break, so I never had the opportunity to get a good close-up look at his features. When the ship’s gang stopped for tea, our teaboy filled an old glass bottle with tea and I brought it up onto the deck, the bottle tied to the crane’s hook on a piece of looped string. This saved the old fellow having to traipse down several decks to get into the hold in order to get a drink. Anyway, we were pieceworkers: time was money and Joe knew the score.
Another reason I would not have recognized him outside the docks was simply that, when we were working, he always had his back towards me. When I brought the crane round over the ship’s hold, Joe would be looking down into the open hatchway. If he wanted me to hold the set away from the hatchway, he would cross his hands over his head. If he wanted a set of cargo brought out of the hold, he would wave the fingers of his outstretched hand from his wrist with the palm facing upwards. When he wanted the load lowered, he would wave the fingers of his hand palm down. When he wanted the crane to stop, he spread the fingers of his hand and held it still. He often appeared to be giving a stage performance of a bird with one wing, although he never managed to raise himself off the ship’s deck.
When Joe was waving his fingers with the palm of his hand upwards they were always in the form of a V, and I never really knew if he was trying to be downright rude or whether his arthritis was causing him pain. I also knew there was little to be gained by waving my fist at the back of his head or shouting at him. For the truth is that he would never have seen my fist, nor would he have heard my voice. All I ever saw of Joe during the ten or twelve hours we were at work each day was his back, the nape of his neck and one of his hands. I knew every wrinkle in the nape of his neck, every arthritic knuckle of his right hand. That’s how I shall always remember the old fellow, my other pair of eyes.
I was the crane driver to a regular ship’s gang who worked for a stevedoring contracting company. The company supplied ships and quay gangs to a number of shipping lines from men picked up on the free call (or the free-for-all as it was known among the dockers) in the Dock Labour Board compounds. The system for obtaining the services of dockers and stevedores can be likened to that of procuring prostitutes for sex. The only difference in the case of dockers was they were picked up in Dock Labour Board compounds that were kept out of the public gaze. As for stevedores, they were picked up on the stones (cobblestones in the streets outside the docks). So one could say that the only difference between stevedores and the ladies of supposedly easy virtue was that prostitutes soliciting in the streets for sex were committing a criminal offence, whereas stevedores on the stones soliciting for work were not. Why was that, I have often wondered? After all, both groups were selling physical service for money. However, I digress.
As a ship’s gang discharging cargo, we were made up of one crane driver, one top hand, two pitch hands and six down-holders. On this particular day, we were working at number 1 hatch on a P&O liner that had returned from a voyage to Australia. The ship carried several hundred passengers, whose personal effects, trunks and suitcases not required on the homeward trip were stowed in the upper ’tween deck. The lower ’tween deck held bails of sheepskins and wool, which were over stowed alongside several hundred bags of letters and parcels. The lower hold, which was a freezer hold, was completely filled with sheep carcasses.
Now I have to explain that, on the day of this tale, a secondary driver had been picked up to drive the Stothert & Pitt quay crane. I had been picked up as a pro-rata man to the ship’s gang. The reason for this anomaly was that I had a hospital appointment that made it necessary for me to leave the job for some hours during one of the ship’s discharging days. As the ship was a luxury liner and had a limited time to stop in port, it was important for her to be discharged as quickly as possible, so she could dry dock to have her keel scraped and repainted with red lead, and her cabins, saloons and foyers stripped, revamped and restored to first-class habitable condition before she was refloated and towed by tugs to her cargo-loading and passenger-boarding berth.
It was on the fourth day of the ship’s discharging that I had to attend hospital. When I returned late in the afternoon, the gang had discharged sheep and lamb carcasses from below the skeleton deck in the lower hold. They had begun to move towards the bow of the ship, some 50 feet away from the bottom of the trunkway, which was the opening to the open hatchway.
As the set of two hooks used to carry the meat nets were not long enough to reach the made-up sets of sheep carcasses in the ship’s bow, a 20-foot wire pendant was attached to the hook of the crane. This was held in place by a shackle capable of holding 5 tons. The shackle was screwed to the hook of the crane. When a set of carcasses was ready to be taken out of the hold, one of the gang would go to the bottom of the hatchway and give the top hand the signal to draw the set into the centre of the ship’s hold before it was hoisted up the trunkway to be landed on the meat board platform, which was set between the railway lines on the quay. On this inauspicious occasion, Jim was the man in charge of giving the signal to hoist the set. Oh! Lucky Jim!
I must confess to having arrived back at work only at about 5 p.m. after having had my nose cauterized at the hospital. I had been advised not to go into a cold atmosphere, so I went back to the ship, made my way to the lower deck, where the Goanese galley scullions had their quarters, down through the number 1 hold hatch cover into the upper ’tween deck, through the lower ’tween hatch into the skeleton deck, down the vertical ladder into the lower hold, and arrived just as the most obscene and vicious exchange of bad language erupted between the two brothers-in-law.
I will not go into detail over the obscenities, but suffice to say that the vociferous and blasphemous exchange of language almost made me blush. Nor do I have any idea what caused the rum
pus. After all, the top hand was on deck some 100 feet away from the ceiling (bottom) of the lower hold. What I do know is that Jim waved his hand for the set of carcasses to be drawn into the centre of the hold before being hoisted up the trunkway and onto the quay. Instead, Joe stood at the top of the ship’s hatchway and shouted at his brother-in-law, ‘You greasy-looking, black-haired bastard, I’ll bloody kill you.’
With those remarks, Joe waved his hand to the crane driver, who instantly put the crane into full hoist. The set of sheep carcasses came out of the ship’s bow at top speed and shot across the lower hold like an express train. As it rose into the air, Jim, seeing the danger he was in, began to run to escape the set of sheep carcasses as it hurtled full speed towards him. Just as the set reached the centre of the hatch, he leapt up onto the bottom of the wooden skeleton deck, just as one of the frozen sheep came out of the meat net. It dropped down the side of the steel trunkway and the two hind shanks stapled Jim’s. foot to the wooden skeleton deck. He fell backwards and hung there, head downwards, arms outstretched, as though he was trying to mimic a circus trapeze artist.
‘You stupid old bastard,’ Jim screamed up at Joe. ‘I’ve got a good claim here for compensation, and for you trying to kill me. Just wait and see what will happen when we get in court. I’ve got lots of witnesses. You lot saw what he did, didn’t you?’
‘Shut up, you stupid sod,’ one of the lads said. ‘You waved to Joe to take the set up. Get on with your job.’
‘I can’t move. I can’t damn well move,’ he said. Nor could he. He was stapled to the wooden framework of the skeleton deck by the shanks of the lamb.
I walked across the floor of the lower deck, climbed up into the skeleton deck, pulled Jim up into a sitting position, and prised the frozen sheep off his leg.
‘I can’t walk,’ he complained.
‘Stop that bloody moaning,’ I told him, ‘or I’ll leave you where you are. You know how much the gang love you. They will probably book you out.’ (‘Booking out’ meant that the gang would inform the ship worker that he wasn’t working.)
I threw him over my shoulder in a fireman’s hold and set about carrying him down from the skeleton deck onto the lower deck floor, then up the 30-foot ladder into the lower ’tween deck, then into the upper ’tween deck, then along the companion way that led out through the gunport door onto the quay. He never stopped griping about his brother-in-law.
‘You had better wait here,’ I told him. ‘They’ve sent for an ambulance.’ I made my way back through the ship and down to the lower hold, where the gang were preparing to stop work for the night.
‘What have you done with Soapy?’ (Jim’s uncomplimentary nickname), the gang wanted to know.
‘Put him on the quay.’
‘You should have dumped him in the dock. What’s he doing?’
‘Sitting on a bollard, waiting for the ambulance.’
‘He’s a crafty sod. He wants a lift home. He’ll be back to work in the morning at seven. He won’t miss his unplugging hour’s overtime if I know him,’ the down-hold foreman said.
He was right. Jim turned up at 7 a.m. next day with his foot lashed into an old boot that had been cut from the tongue to the toecap. He looked like a down-at-heel retired army officer suffering from a severe bout of gout, who had escaped from the beach at Brighton and was seeking sanctuary as a stowaway in the ship’s hold.
Jim’s right hand was also bandaged, although nobody even mentioned that. The only comment that connected the lashed-up boot and the bandaged hand came from the down-hold foreman who said, ‘I see old Joe walked into a lamppost or something last night. He’s got a nasty split lip and a black eye. He should be more careful where he’s walking in the dark, especially at his age.’
Jim didn’t utter a word. It would appear the argument between the two brothers-in-law had been settled, at least for the present.
13
‘WHAT HEROES THOU
HAST BRED, ENGLAND,
MY COUNTRY’
During the mid-1950s I was picked up to be employed in a quite unusual operation for a baggage gang because the gang’s quay foremen had asked for the services of a crane driver. Needs must when a luxury liner is being prepared to sail, so baggage gets priority over almost everything else, especially first-class passengers’ baggage.
Charlie S., the ship worker responsible for loading this particular vessel, the SS Arcadia, picked me up in the Dock Labour Board compound specifically to join the baggage gang of aged ex-warriors who were employed by Scrutton’s Stevedoring Company Limited to receive passengers’ forward baggage on behalf of the Pacific & Orient Line.
The baggage gang was made up of ‘B’ men (those still reporting for work in Dock Labour Board compounds who were past the state retirement age of 65). Most were in their late sixties and seventies, but there were a few octogenarians thrown in for good measure. It is difficult to describe those old men accurately in their demeanour and attitude because they hardly spoke to each other, let alone to a stranger such as myself. When they did respond, however, their manner was belligerently hostile, and their demeanour pugnaciously offensive. They always appeared to be ready to square up for a fight. Mostly, too, if they spoke, their voices were as vitriolic as a sergeant major’s bellowing at raw recruits on a parade ground. We young dockers called them the old grousers, though most of us knew them for what they really were: the veterans of battles and wars that had long since passed into history. They were Britain’s forgotten (or ignored) heroes – the docks all round the British Isles still employed quite a few of them. They were men who had fought in the Boer War and the First World War. They were men whom the enemy had failed to kill on the battlefields. But that didn’t alter the fact that they really were old grousers, and that their deeds of long, long ago, performed in their youthful years, now counted for very little in the country for which they had fought, and possibly even less in an industry where, during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, almost every man was a veteran of some conflict or other.
Empire Parkeston. (Author’s collection)
Before I left the Dock Labour Board compound to make my way to the southern quay, Tilbury Docks, I was told by Charlie that I would probably be treated as though I was suffering from leprosy when I got to where the old grousers of the baggage gang were working. He was right.
‘What do you want, sonny?’ I was asked by the baggage gang foreman, a grey-haired, grey-faced, grey-eyed, wizened-skinned, round-shouldered remnant of a bygone age, who looked as though he had been recently dug up in the local churchyard, dusted down with a stiff brush and sent back to work in the docks.
‘I’m here as the pro-rata crane driver to the baggage gang,’ I told him.
He looked me up and down, glaring at me with those piercing grey eyes of his. Then slowly, with the cold, self-controlled deliberation of a praying mantis, he took a snuff box out of his waistcoat pocket and with well-practised mechanical movements, he opened it, took out a pinch of snuff with his index finger and thumb, raised it to his nose, sniffed some of it up each nostril in turn, gave an almighty sneeze, shook his head, blinked a couple of times, looked me up and down and said, ‘You’re a bit young to be a crane driver aren’t you, sonny?’
‘I drive the Stothert & Pitt quay crane at number 1 hatch on P&O boats for Charlie S.,’ I told him.
He looked at me in utter surprise. ‘Do you?’ he said. ‘Then you’ll have to do, I suppose. I’ve got a heavy lift coming by lorry that’s got to go onto a low-loader. It won’t be here for some time. The baggage gang are working out of rail trucks at the back door. They’ll find you something to do to amuse yourself till the heavy lift turns up, or they’ll let you know when they want you.’ With those last few words he disappeared among the cargo in the transit shed and I never saw him again. (It did cross my mind that he may have returned to his coffin in a churchyard somewhere.)
I made my way to the rear doors of the transit shed where the old grousers were busily moving crates,
suitcases and boxes of personal effects from rail trucks into the shed on wheelbarrows. There they sorted them out into their various ports for discharge and colour-coded each item accordingly.
At first I stood by an open doorway watching those agile old men enter a rail truck one at a time to have their wheelbarrow loaded. Then they slowly pulled their barrow backwards off the truck, over a toe-board and onto the cargo bank, before pushing the load into the transit shed to be sorted and placed in its correct stowage. I watched them for some time, listening to their occasional humorous banter or the vitriolic remarks they made to one another. It was always amusing to them when one of their number dropped a suitcase or some other package and had to pick it up; and there was always vitriolic language when one of them fell out of the line to relieve himself because of ‘water-works trouble’.
I was so engrossed that I was shaken when a voice behind me shouted in my ear, ‘And what the bloody hell do you want, sonny?’
I turned round quickly to see one of the old grousers standing behind me. He was holding a large old battered brown enamelled teapot, and he was glaring at me through a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles with what can only be described as an opprobrious look in his eyes.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m your crane driver. I’ve come to take a heavy lift off a lorry when it turns up.’
It was his turn to look surprised. ‘You’re a bit young to be a crane driver, aren’t you, sonny?’
‘Am I?’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what your foreman asked me.’ And before the old grouser had a chance to say anything else, I said, ‘I’ve been driving a high-flyer Stothert & Pitt quay crane for the ship’s gang at number 1 hatch on Pacific & Orient liners for the past two years.’
‘Hmm, have you?’ he grunted. Then he asked me, ‘Do you want a mug of tea? It’s beer-oh time.’
‘Yes, that will be nice,’ I replied.
‘Then you had better go and nick a PLA mug. I’ve only got enough for the baggage gang. We’ll knock off for beer-oh as soon as they’ve emptied that last rail truck. Then we’ll have to wait for a while till the next shunt of trucks are brought in. That’ll take at least half an hour.’ He continued, ‘The tea’s twopence a mug or sixpence all day. You can pay me when I pour the tea, right?’
Tales of London's Docklands Page 9