Tales of London's Docklands (4 page)

To get a hydraulic crane to operate, one had first to turn on its main water supply, which was installed under a heavy plate in the quay, then climb up a vertical 30-foot ladder into the crane cabin; then luff (move) the jib full in with a luffing lever; then climb up another ladder to release the jib by removing a securing pin; then climb back down the ladder to the front of the crane cabin to release the slewing pin. Now the crane was ready to work, with a bit of luck and with God on one's side. (At night the whole process had to be carried out in the reverse order.) These machines were a nightmare to operate and control.

Perhaps I should mention here the drill required when a ship entered the locks, the gates were closed, and the hydraulic pumps in the pumping station were put into play to fill or empty them. First, the crane driver was supposed to bring his crane round with its jib in line with the quay; he was then supposed to replace the slewing pin, luff full in and run up the ladder to replace the luffing pin; then wait for the power to be restored when the lock was filled or emptied. However, there was no signalling device to warn crane drivers of the lock master's intentions, so when the hydraulic power began to fail, the driver was forced to take any action he thought appropriate to forestall an accidents or damage to the crane or cargo, but unfortunately this could not always be avoided.

Bill Dyke was a large man. He had what the dockers called a ‘beetroot' or ‘moon' face because it was large, round and red. He was a jovial, lovely old man with a rustic sense of humour. He was one of the finest crane drivers in the port transport industry. That is, he was as careful, and considerate and as safe to work with as it was possible for any man to be. He never took chances with men's lives in an industry that had a horrendous number of accidental injuries and deaths. Dock working was always a dangerous game of chance.

Bill had been picked up in the Dock Labour Board compound as crane driver to a ship's gang working on a general steam short sea trader at number 5 shed, Tilbury Docks, using an antiquated hydraulic-powered quay crane to load cargo at the main hatch. Short sea traders were constructed with the bridge, crew's accommodation and engine room at the stern. This gave the crane driver good vision both of the quay and of the ship's hold. Two pairs of winches and derricks were close to midships so they could service both hatches. A mast, with a wireless aerial attached, poked up high above the bridge from between the winches.

The loading operation had gone well. The ship had finished taking on general cargo. The beams, hatches and hatch covers had been put in place and secured ready for sea. It remained only for a consignment of Scottish oakwood smoked kippers to be loaded for stowage into a cool chamber. Then the ship could cast off and sail out into the river into a golden sunset. Well, that was the theory.

The kippers had been brought down from Scotland by road. A lorry was standing on the quay. The quay gang loaded the boxes of fish onto a loading board and covered them with a cargo safety net. As most people know, boxes of kippers are quite small (about 18 inches long, 10 inches wide and 4 inches deep). There were, therefore, several hundred boxes on the set as Bill Dyke lifted it and began to slew the crane round the stern of the ship. His intention was to land the set on top of the hatches close by the cool chamber. However, fate played its hand. A ship entered the locks and the hydraulic power went off just as Bill slewed the set over the top of the funnel. As the crane lost power the set of kippers came slowly to rest on the edge of the funnel. Two of the hooks holding the cargo board came out. The boxes of kippers began to slide off the cargo board and plummet down the funnel into the engine room. The air was quickly filled with blasphemies, oaths and threats in a language that no parson within earshot would admit to understanding, let alone a bishop – well, at least not in a public place, that is.

It seemed a bit unreal at first, but everyone was soon brought back down to earth when the chief engineer, the second engineer, the donkey-man and the firemen came out of the engine room carrying boxes of kippers.

‘You're supposed to put these bloody things in the cool chamber,' shouted the chief engineer to the crane driver, ‘not down the engine room. What the bloody hell are we supposed to do with these?'

Bill shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Anybody hurt down there?' he asked.

‘No! Lucky for you there wasn't,' the chief replied.

Bill shrugged his shoulders again and said, ‘Keep a box of those kippers for the captain's tea. Tell him you've had a box or two on you, and so the crane driver said it's only fair the skipper should have a kipper or two on him.'

3

T
HE
T
EABOY
'
S
A
PPRENTICE

O
n a cold morning in April I found myself in Tilbury Docks Labour Board compound on the look-out for a single day's work. I got picked up by a Scrutton's Stevedoring Company Limited quay foreman to work as the crane driver to a delivery gang. The gang had been allocated to load barges with chests of tea that were to be sent to the tea auction rooms at Butlers Wharf Warehouse on the South Bank of the Thames, close by London's waterfront, just below Tower Bridge.

The tea we were to deliver had been brought to Tilbury Docks from Calcutta in India and Colombo in Sri Lanka via the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean Sea, the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel and the River Thames. It had come aboard the SS
Ma'hout
, a really old, worn-out vessel of the Brocklebank Line that was soon to be sent to a breakers yard to be cut up for scrap.

A port health motor launch making towards a deep sea ocean trading ship as it is about to enter the River Thames, 1950s.
(Author's collection)

The trade route the SS
Ma'hout
had followed had fascinated me since I was a very small boy, and not simply because of the large number of ships that sailed along that major seaway. My father, who had been a docker since his release from the British Army after the First World War, had occasionally spoken of the varieties of freight and exotic merchandise carried by ocean trading ships, but he had talked more of the vessels that traded with countries that had once been part of the British Empire; countries that were now self-governing free states within a democratically controlled Commonwealth of Nations (a real feather, if ever there was one, in Great Britain's cap).

Among the many different shipping companies that used the London to Far Eastern and Australasian sea routes were the Pacific & Orient (P&O) and the Orient passenger- and cargo-carrying lines, Blue Funnel Line, Clan Line, Brocklebank Line, City Line and P&O cargo ships, and there were also numerous foreign-owned tramp steamers. (These are vessels that trade anywhere they can or are contracted to pick up consignments of freight; they do not run to a set schedule, as is the case with liners, and they are mainly employed on charter party terms and conditions by merchants wishing to ship bulk cargoes, or by major companies for the shipment, or trans-shipment, of small consignments of freight to ports not on their liner-specified trade routes.)

Between them, the shipping line vessels carried hundreds of thousands of tons of freight every year to and from India, Ceylon and the Far East, and to Australia, New Zealand, many ports along the East African coast and the island of Madagascar. On the outward voyage, they took with them every conceivable type of manufactured good, and quite often even the ship itself was an export, too. The vessels that traded with Far Eastern and Australasian countries bought home with them exotic cargoes of herbs and spices, ivory and wines, precious metals and gemstones, as well as all those things essential to everyday living, including tea from the gardens of Assam in northern India and Sri Lanka (formerly known as the island of Ceylon).

The men I was due to work with were a tea-delivery gang. The crane drivers to such gangs invariably worked pro rata, which meant they could be paid off when their specific task was completed. In fact this arrangement was quite often a ploy by ship workers to retain the services of their crane drivers when they were expecting a vessel to berth: no work aboard ship could be carried out without crane drivers' or winch drivers' expert knowledge.

Quay delivery gangs comprised twelve men: two barge hands, two pitch hands, two men to load the wheelbarrows and six wheelbarrow men to push the tea chests from the transit shed onto the quay. There they were placed onto a cargo board or a tea board to be lifted or slid into the stowage bay of a barge. When the time came to make tea for the gang, one of the wheelbarrow men was delegated to carry out this task, and that obviously reduced their number to five, with the subsequent loss of two chests of tea on each run from the tea beds in the transit sheds to the pitch on the quay. During the course of a single day this could amount to 100 chests of tea, and at the time of this tale, the piecework rate was £1 5
s
5
d
per hundred chests of tea. Divided between twelve men, this was equal to 25½
d
per man per day. It was general practice for the wheelbarrow men to carry two, and sometimes three, chests (each weighing approximately 140 pounds) from the tea beds in a transit shed to their stowage, and this was more especially so if the gangs had a long walk between the shed and the lighter or barge that would be berthed alongside the dock quay.

The daily productivity target for the tea-delivery gangs, set by the men themselves, was 300 chests of tea per man, to be moved from the transit shed into a barge between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m., 3,600 chests of tea a day. As a result, they were very keen to press the pro-rata man into making the tea.

I had been standing in the crane cabin after removing the stern beam of a barge, waiting to hoist the first half-dozen sets of tea from the quay pitch by cargo board into the stern bay of an empty craft. There were no seats in any of the cranes, unless the driver struggled up three separate 20-foot vertical steel ladders with an old orange box or some other suitable packing case. We dockers invariably worked a ten-hour day, so you might think that providing a seat for the crane operators would not have been beyond the financial capability of the vehicles' owners, but the Port Authority would not be persuaded that, even from an ergonomics point of view, seats should be installed in the 80-foot high-flying cranes. For, it was strongly emphasized by management, the Port Authority could not afford the cost of putting seats in cranes. However, it did not go unnoticed by the crane drivers that Port Authority administrative staff were not required to stand at their desks for their seven-hour day, five-day week.

One sometimes wondered what was in the minds of the people who had been given responsibility for running the busiest port on this earth. After all, it could not have been business acumen, because management always appeared, to me at least, to be totally devoid of any business sense at all. Therefore, one had to ask oneself, was it some idiotic form of class prejudice that dictated management policies, especially as they related to the lack of the most basic facilities. These decisions and policies brought about inefficiencies in work practices and physical discomfort because of the lack of welfare amenities for all workers, particularly those dockers and stevedores employed as casual labour by shipping lines and stevedoring contractors. Was this the result of class prejudice? Who can tell. But if it was, I find it extraordinary that such petty-mindedness and childish snobbery from even the lowest members of Port Authority staff should have been allowed to stand in the way of the port's industrial progress. The truth of the matter is that the responsibility for such industrial arrogance in labour relations and mean-mindedness in welfare provisions stemmed from the policies emanating from the Port of London Board, an authority set up in 1908 to administer all the docks in the Port of London (with the exception of the Regent's Canal Dock), their wharves, warehouses and transit sheds, policing and river dredging. But here comes the crunch: the Port Authority Board, which was principally made up of ship owners, barge and lighterage owners and merchants, also had two trade union representatives to voice the interests of dock workers. It has never been recorded that they ever served any useful purpose as far as port workers were concerned.

However, I digress from the story of the tea. The operation of putting the first two tiers of tea chests into a lighter or barge with the aid of a crane was called flooring out, as it raised the floor of the stowage by about 2 feet 6 inches per tier, after which the gang would use tea boards (short wooden boards with strong wooden blocks attached to them at one end that hooked onto the edge of a lighter or barge combing). This sped up the delivery operation simply because the barrowmen released their load directly onto the tea board. This cut out the need for the crane and temporarily made the crane driver surplus to requirements. Therefore, when flooring out was achieved, I was nominated teaboy for the morning break.