Tales of London's Docklands (14 page)

‘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

‘W
HAT HEROES THOU
HAST BRED
, E
NGLAND
,
MY COUNTRY
'

D
uring 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?'

Who was I to argue with that belligerent old blighter? ‘Yes, OK,' I replied.

I made my way onto the quayside where the Port Authority mobile tea van always parked to serve refreshments to the dockers, lightermen and lorry drivers. I found an empty mug and went back to the baggage gang where the old grousers were assembled in a small group, sitting almost in silence, except that is for the slurping of tea and the munching of sandwiches, at which they were gnawing with badly fitting false teeth. It was an experience that was best appreciated with closed eyes. Then one could imagine, without too much effort, that one was listening to a team of Spanish flamenco dancers going through one of their more energetic and rumbustious fandango routines, with the full use of castanets and the occasional accompaniment of intermittent bursts from the rumbling of kettle-drums (or even a runaway horse clip-clopping downhill at high speed).

One of the old grousers looked at me several times with half-closed eyes before he finally spoke. ‘Old Ted's boy, aren't you?'

‘No,' I replied. ‘Ted was my grandfather.'

‘I thought there was a family resemblance. You've got that sullen dog-in-the-manger depressed look about you.'

‘So would you have if you were me,' I told him, ‘being sent here to work with you miserable lot of old sods.'

He laughed, and then said, ‘How's your grandfather?'

‘He's all right,' I replied. ‘He's retired now. He left the docks in 1940 when he was 69. My grandmother didn't want him sent to Wales or Scotland by the Dock Labour Corporation. He went to work for the general manager of the Imperial Paper Mills as his gardener when he left the docks. He packed it in when he was 75 when my grandmother died.'

‘Good for him,' was the reply. ‘It must be nice to be able to retire while you're still young enough to enjoy life.' The old man said it with a smile on his face. ‘By the way,' he continued, ‘my name's Jack. The lads call me Jacko.'

‘Had you known my grandfather very long, Jack?' I asked him.

‘Since the end of the First World War when I came to work in the docks,' he replied. ‘I served with your father in the Royal West Kents in France during that war. We were lucky to come out of that lot alive, I'll tell you. We were both wounded in the first battle of the Somme in July 1916. We both got blighty wounds. Your dad was hit by a splinter of shrapnel that went through the back of his hand; I stopped a bullet with my leg. Saved our lives those wounds did. If it hadn't been for them wounds, we would never have survived the First World War, your dad and me.'

‘Listen to that young whippersnapper,' said one of the two octogenarians. ‘First World War was a bloody picnic compared to the Boer War. We wasn't loafing about in trenches out on the veldt in the Boer War, and having the odd game of football against the Boers, like you lot were doing with the Germans in France. No bloody fear. We were marchin' across the veldt chasing the bloody Boers, and when we caught up with them, the blighters opened up on us with their rifles, and bloody crack-shots they all were. They decimated our ranks they did. Didn't they, Harry?'

Harry, the other octogenarian, didn't reply, but went on gnawing, with some difficulty, at his sandwich.

The first octogenarian shouted at Harry. ‘Are you in today, you deaf old sod, or are you trying to ignore me?'

Harry looked up from his sandwich with some relief at being given respite from what was plainly a physical exertion on his part – the effort of simply watching him chewing was making me feel tired. But even when Harry stopped gnawing, his false teeth kept moving in his jaw, as though they were waiting for an order to stand down. As the order didn't come, the teeth took it upon themselves to lose momentum very slowly and they finally came to a stop. Then he asked, ‘What's that you said, Sid?'

‘I said the First World War was a bloody picnic compared with the Boer War,' replied the first octogenarian.

‘Was it?' said Harry. ‘I couldn't say. I got wounded in the Boer War and was classed as unfit for military service for the First World War, but I did join the Local Defence Volunteers in the Second World War – that's before Winston Churchill called it the Home Guard.'

‘I know you was wounded in the Boer War, you silly old blighter,' said Sid. ‘That's what I'm saying. We were both shot-up in the Boer War. It stands to reason it must have been worse than the First World War. Do you remember when we enlisted in 1899 and were sent to Aldershot?'

‘Yes,' said Harry. ‘Then we were sent to join the 1st Battalion, Essex Regiment, weren't we?'

‘Yes, that's right,' said Sid, ‘the old 44th/56th of Foot, the Essex and the Wessex.'

‘Yes, 1899, or was it 1900 when we sailed for South Africa from Liverpool? Or was it Southampton? My memory isn't as good as it was.'

‘Mine neither, but it was one of those two ports, I think,' said Sid.

It was then that Sid went into a sort of daze or daydream. A period of absolute silence descended over the baggage gang, except for the slurping of tea, burping stomach gasses, gnashing teeth and the passing of excess wind that escaped through some rectums as loudly as if it were being discharged from a jet aircraft engine. Then Sid came back to reality.