Tales of London's Docklands

by Henry T Bradford

  Old Dave and I had been sent to work with a freight-striking gang. Striking gangs were made up of eight men, six to push handheld wheelbarrows and two to load the barrows with cases, cartons or other packages. Our gang had been assigned the job of striking freight from rail trucks. The rail trucks carried mixed loads of cartons and cases all of sizes, shapes and weights destined for various Australian ports as cargo on a P&O liner. Dave and I were given the job of breaking out the freight and loading the hand-propelled barrows for the men who would remove the struck goods from the rail trucks into their respective bays in the transit shed. The scene is now set.

  We removed the tarpaulin covers from of the rail trucks, folding each one before we cleared the freight. Then, having removed the cases and packages, we put the folded tarpaulin cover back in each truck. We had progressed down the shunt, having unloaded about a dozen trucks before the mid-morning tea break. We had struck some 40 tons of dead-weight cargo – a large proportion of the goods were lightweight cartons and cases, of little value to us as we were paid by the dead-weight ton. Then we came to a truck of Scotch whisky, Black Label. Old Dave’s eyes lit up.

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ he said. They were the first words he had spoken all morning.

  ‘There’s about 300 cases here.’ I replied. ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘How do I get one open?’

  ‘Christ, Dave! You’ve been working here for forty years. Surely you must have learned something. Do what the customs openers do. Get your hook under the steel bands with a chock of wood and stretch them. Then push your knife blade under a slat to ease the nails up. Put the chock between the slat and the end of the case and give it a couple of taps with your hook to ease the nails out of the end of the case. Pull the nails out with your hook, slide the wooden slat out, and help yourself.’

  ‘You do it,’ he said. I did.

  He took a bottle of whisky out of the case with trembling hands, unscrewed the cap and took a long draught. His old eyes lit up like stars, and he smiled a rare smile.

  ‘I’ve never been able to afford this stuff on the wages I’ve earned in the docks. This Black Label is a lovely drop of stuff. It’s beautifully smooth, like Chinese silk. I get a half-bottle every Christmas from my children. Here,’ he said, ‘try a drop.’ He offered me the bottle.

  ‘It’s not for me, Dave. A cup of tea or a glass of milk is my tipple. Anyway, I think you’ve had enough.’

  I was about to take the bottle from Dave’s hands and replace it in its case when the lead wheelbarrowman came into the rail truck. Dave went deadly pale. We loaded six cases of Scotch onto the wheelbarrow and the trucker hurried off at speed.

  ‘Holy Mary!’ said Dave, who was a Roman Catholic. ‘The Port Authority Police will be round here in a few minutes. Do you know who that bloke is?’

  ‘Yes, that’s Turner,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes!’ Dave repeated. ‘He’s a police informer. He’ll shop us. What shall we do?’

  I said nothing, but stepped out of the truck and lifted the running board from out of the doorway to stop the other barrowmen entering.

  ‘Urinate in the bottle, Dave. Be as quick as you can. Fill it up.’

  ‘Do what?’ he said.

  ‘Piss in the damn thing, you silly old sod!’

  ‘Oh! Right!’

  He did as I asked him, but he was shaking like a leaf on a tree in a high wind.

  ‘That will look more like a bottle of bloody cocktail than a bottle of whisky by the time you’ve finished with it,’ I said. ‘For Christ’s sake, give me the bottle.’

  I took the bottle off him, replaced the screw top, then ran my gloved hands over it to remove any prints, placed it back in its case and nailed the slat back into position. I then turned the case over, put the point of my hook in between the steel bands and turned it to tighten them. I hurriedly jumped out of the rail truck and replaced the running board so the barrowmen could enter. I put the broached case of whisky on the top of the next barrowload of cases. All this action went on while Old Dave just stood where he was, rooted to the spot. He was as stiff as a tailor’s dummy, and more scared than a rabbit. It didn’t help matters when I quipped, ‘We could get six months for this.’

  ‘Do you know who it is Turner reports to?’ he said. ‘It’s that copper they call the Red Cap. You know, that bloke who the lads say served in the Military Police during the last war. He’s a really nasty piece of work; he acts as though he’s still in the army; he’ll turn this place upside down when he gets here.’

  Of course, I had to laugh. ‘Good luck to him, Dave,’ I said. ‘He’ll have his work cut out. Let’s hope he doesn’t find the only warm bottle in the consignment.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  I smiled and winked at him, ‘You work it out, Dave,’ I told him.

  When the next wheelbarrowman came into the truck I said, ‘I’ll take this set for you, Charlie. You can give Dave a hand loading up while I’m away. I’ve got to go to the toilet.’

  Charlie must have known something was wrong. There wasn’t a toilet within a quarter of a mile, but he kept quiet, took my hook and helped Dave load my barrow.

  I set off, pushing the wheelbarrow with six cases of whisky which I took straight into the warehouse lock-up. I had to pass a HM Customs watcher, who had a key to the lock-up where the whisky was being stored till shipment, and the receiving clerk, who was tallying the cases as the barrowmen went past him. When I got to the stowage I pushed the set up against the existing stacks, took the broached case off the barrow I had just brought in and put it several tiers further along the stowage. I walked out of the lock-up and left the barrow by the customs watcher. I jokingly asked him to keep an eye on it till I came back from the toilet. Then I quickly made my way back to the rail truck and told Charlie to collect his barrow from outside the lock-up.

  I had hardly arrived back to help Dave load the next barrow when a Port Authority Police car arrived carrying the Red Cap and one other, a bloke I had never seen before. The two of them walked quickly along the freight-striking bank at the back of the transit shed. They looked in the rail truck we were working. The Red Cap glared at Dave and me but said nothing. He walked up to the customs watcher and whispered something, then went to the receiving clerk. The Red Cap took the tally sheet and looked down it.

  ‘Where is the break in the number of barrowmen?’ he asked the clerk.

  ‘What do you mean?’ was the reply.

  ‘When they went from six to five.’

  ‘Just there.’ The clerk pointed to a spot on the tally sheet.

  ‘How many cases is that?’

  The clerk counted, then said, ‘Fifteen sets.’

  ‘How many cases of whisky is that?’

  ‘That’s fifteen times five, times six, that equals 450 cases.’

  ‘Right,’ said the Red Cap. ‘I want those last 460 cases weighed.’

  ‘You’ll have to get the shed foreman’s authority to do that,’ said the clerk.

  ‘Then go and get it,’ replied the Red Cap.

  ‘You get it yourself,’ replied the clerk. ‘I’m not leaving this consignment. It’s more than my job’s worth.’

  ‘Then don’t let any more cases into that lock-up till I get back,’ he said, and walked off to the shed foreman’s office.

  He soon returned with the foreman, who ordered the gang to fetch a set of scales and weights. They did, and then discreetly vanished. All of them.

  ‘There you are,’ said the foreman. ‘Now, if you want the last ninety cases weighed, you can do it yourself.’

  ‘Get the freight-striking gang to do it.’

  ‘What striking gang? They’ve all disappeared till you’ve cleared off. You don’t expect them to stand around waiting for you to implicate them in a charge of pilfering, do you? It’s like asking men to dig their own graves before shooting them. But you would know more about that than me. Besides, I’m not paying double handling money on the say-so of an informer, espe
cially that one.’ He nodded towards Turner, who was the only one of the gang in sight.

  ‘Are you refusing to help the police in the execution of their duty?’ the Red Cap said, assuming the threat might change the foreman’s mind.

  ‘Cut out that crap to me,’ said the foreman. ‘I’ve got a ship waiting to load out there.’ He waved his thumb towards the dock. ‘Neither the customs watcher nor the receiving clerk has reported anything damaged or tampered with. If you want the cases weighed, get on with it. Turner will help you.’

  Between them, the Red Cap, his sidekick and Turner weighed each of the ninety cases of whisky. Of course there was no shortfall in the weights. If looks could kill, Turner would have dropped dead on the spot. Not because he had passed on duff information, but because he had not reported how the loss of weight in the case had been made up. The Red Cap knew full well he had been made a fool of. He came to the rail truck we were working in. I had told Old Dave to clear off till they were gone.

  ‘Right,’ said the Red Cap. ‘I know you lot have had a drink. You had better be on your toes because I’ll have you.’

  ‘Yes, right!’ I said. The Red Cap and his sidekick walked off, got in the police car, and drove away.

  The striking gang reappeared as if by magic. It was obvious they had had a drink or two, or maybe three.

  ‘Have you lot been over the pub while this shindig’s been going on?’ I asked. All I received in reply were some broad smiles and rows of beer- and tobacco-stained teeth.

  ‘Let’s get back to work,’ I said. ‘Come on, Dave, old mate. Let’s be having you.’

  I put my hook into the bottom of the next set of whisky and rested my hand on the top case. It moved. I lifted it. It was obviously empty. I looked over my shoulder to see all the gang, except Turner, grinning at me.

  Charlie said, ‘That Black Label Scotch whisky is beautiful. It’s like Chinese silk in the throat.’ Where had I heard that before? ‘It’s a pity we didn’t know if the Red Cap and his sidekick liked a drink. We could have offered them a tipple.’ And they all just burst out laughing, the geriatric, delinquent old sods.

  But you just could not help admiring them – their resilience, their stamina and their courage. They had fought and won wars, they had worked as wage slaves all their lives, and they surely deserved their tipple of Black Label (smooth as Chinese silk), God bless them.

  16

  ‘RATS, RATS, AS FAT AS

  TABBY CATS’

  She was a South American-registered whaling ship docked on Tilbury Riverside jetty, towed into her berth by the old Thames steam tug Tanga. She had docked to discharge a cargo of whale meal and meat. Just because the vessel I am writing about was a South American-registered ship, that does not mean she was owned by a South American shipping company. It was more than possible she was sailing under a flag of convenience and that her true owner was either Japanese or Norwegian. The trick of registering ships under a flag of convenience was used for a number of purposes, possibly tax evasion, or the employment of non-unionized, unskilled crews, or in the cases of whaling ships, to obtain a larger quota of the whale catch permitted under an international law that was designed to prevent the species being hunted into extinction.

  She was a large vessel, this South American whaler. She not only acted as the mother ship to the whaling boat crews who pursued and caught the animals, but also had all the facilities to winch the catch onto her deck, dissect them, boil down the blubber to extract the oil (which was filtered into large tanks below decks), and to cut up excess meat and grind down the waste flesh into meal (which was used as a fertilizer in horticulture and as a feed stock for animals and fish). The oil extracted from the thick layers of fat under the animals’ skin (and also from sperm whales’ heads) was used in the manufacture of candles, margarine, soap and numerous other products.

  Whaling was, and still is, a very distasteful industry. But, like every creature on God’s earth, when they have been caught, killed, butchered, rendered down and put in second-hand hessian sacks, whales don’t look very big. They look at their worst, however, when their bagged remains are teeming with rats. Yes, big, fat, black rats, each one bloated out with whale meat that had been washed into the scuppers and various other places along and below the ship’s deck.

  The rats had made nests in the whale meal, which not only provided them with good food but also furnished them with comfortable, warm surroundings in which to mate and breed. In fact, below decks and among the whale meal cargo the environment was nothing if not a rats’ paradise. It was a proverbial Garden of Eden. It was a haven and a heaven for rats. The Pied Piper of Hamelin could have had a field day piping the vermin into the sea. But alas, for the rats, it was the dockers of Tilbury who were to bring an end to their fabulously rich, man-created, ideal world by the simple expedient of transferring their habitat from the warm comfort of the whaling ship’s bosom into battered, weather-stained, cold, steel barges – barges that were lying like predators’ offspring, patiently waiting to receive and devour the whale meal regurgitated from their parents.

  It had been noticed by a few of the more enlightened dockers – those who took the trouble to go into the local library to read Lloyd’s List of Shipping, that is – that a whaling ship was due to arrive in the Thames, bound for Tilbury Docks, on a particular date. The discharging piecework rate for whale meal and meat was listed in the Port of London Ocean Trades PieceWork Rates price book as 3s and 6½d per ton per twelve-handed ship’s gang, working over-side into barges on 1-hundredweight bags. But because these commodities were mainly stowed in confined lazaret hatches and bobby hatches, it was often possible to obtain extra payments to compensate for the slowness of discharging the cargo and the extra physical effort involved in carrying the bags from under the deck spaces. There were also potential extra payments for other contingencies. I should mention here that whale factory ships stank to high heaven. It is hard to describe such a stench. One can only say it was the smell of the death of whales. However, the working conditions were paid in with the discharging rate of the freight. So the dockers had to put up with the stench for no extra payment.

  Because whaling was a seasonal trade, when a whaler came into port stevedoring labour contractors were employed by the ship’s owners to service her. Dockers would be picked up in the Dock Labour Board compounds (or, in the case of stevedores, on the cobblestones outside the docks) to man the ship under the authority of a ship worker. Invariably the vessel would already be alongside its berth, ready to begin discharging its cargo, when the ship’s gangs appeared on the scene. Lightermen would have barges moored to the ship’s side, scraping their vessel’s plates on the over-side of the ship, waiting to receive the discharged freight by means of the ship’s derricks. Or they would have barges tied to the shore side of the jetty to receive the cargo by crane. OST clerks would be standing by, one assigned to each gang, to take separate tallies of the discharging cargoes for each ship’s gang. The gangs, when they came aboard the ship, would remove the covers and beams from the main hatches, the lazaret and bobby hatches. Hemp ropes, to be used in the discharging operations, were bought aboard by crane or the ship’s purchase. It was then that the real fun began.

  ‘What are all those bright little lights down there?’ said Les. The gang were standing round the hatch opening.

  ‘Bits of whale bone that have come out of the sacks, I suppose,’ replied Tom as he jumped down onto the sacks of whale meal.

  ‘Whale bone, my arse,’ said Les. ‘They have all disappeared now.’

  ‘Rats! They’re bloody rats,’ said old Percy, the top hand. ‘That lazaret’s full of them. You can’t see any dead ones, can you? Those things carry the bubonic plague.’

  ‘What do you know about rats and bubonic plague, you silly old sod?’ one of the gang teased Percy.

  ‘If you had been in the trenches during the First World War, sonny,’ old Percy replied, ‘you would know what I mean about rats. The trenches and battlefields we
re running alive with the vermin. We soldiers used to sing a song about them – “There are rats, rats, as fat as tabby cats, in the stores, in the stores. There are rats, rats, as big as tabby cats, in the quartermaster’s stores”.’

  ‘Cut that out, you lot. Are we going to start work today?’ Bill, the down-hold foreman, broke into the conversation. ‘Stop your gassing and throw those ropes down into the hatch. There isn’t enough room for all of us to get down there. Any two of you break into the stowage in that bobby hatch, while the rest of us break into this lazaret. Go on. Get moving.’

  The gang worked from 8 a.m. till 9.30 a.m., when a Port Authority mobile tea van came on the scene. Then they clambered out of the holds, lazarets, bobby hatches and barges and made their way off the jetty by means of a steel catwalk. They were smothered in whale meal, which was sticking to them where they had been sweating in the form of a greyish fish paste. Their hair looked as if it had been dressed in a thick layer of salad cream (or had suffered a direct hit from a sea gull suffering a severe bout of diarrhoea). They stank to high heaven – I mean stank like skunks. They stood in a long line, quietly talking to each other, just as they had done during the war, queuing by the NAAFI or Salvation Army mobile canteens, patiently waiting for their turn to be served. Doreen, the tea lady, was not amused.

  ‘You lot look as if you have just been dragged out of a sewer, and you stink,’ she complained.

  Most of the dockers smiled, but one remarked, ‘We don’t smell half as bad as those second-hand sausage rolls you sell.’ Then, ‘Are you sure they’re sausage rolls?’

  ‘We don’t sell second-hand sausage rolls,’ retorted Doreen, missing the point altogether. ‘All our food is brought fresh from the canteen every day.’ That remark brought a burst of laughter from the dockers. Doreen didn’t see the joke.