Austerity Britain

by David Kynaston

  The mining villages, and Ashton is certainly a good example, are among the ugliest and most unattractive places to live; they are dirty, concentrated untidily around the colliery and its waste-heaps, and lack the social and cultural facilities of nearby towns. Passengers on buses going through Ashton will invariably comment on its drabness, and the place is often quoted as an example of the backwardness of the mining areas. In conversation with strangers, men and women of Ashton will defend their town almost before it comes under attack on such grounds . . .

  In addition, the backwardness of welfare developments in the Ashton Colliery – there are no baths and only inadequate canteen facilities – is part of the reason for a general belief that Ashton is neglected and something of a backwater.

  One historical event still had, for the older miners, a particular resonance. This was the great strike of 1893, when the troops were sent in and two miners were shot dead and 16 others were injured. It was the moment in the history of ‘Ashton’ that, these older miners proudly believed, would never be forgotten.

  Ferdynand Zweig (who visited most British coalfields in the late 1940s) probably had it right about those who worked in the nation’s coal mines: ‘They all live in closely-knit communities where there is a strong projection of the group on the individual. Their life is firmly circumscribed by pit conditions. The pit and the village control their habits and rules of conduct . . .’ And again: ‘The miners, who often hate their jobs, have at the same time a deeply-felt affection for them, which is often expressed in the incessant talk about the pit.’ He added, tellingly, that ‘younger men often interrupt this talk with “Pit, pit, and pit again”’. Those younger miners included by 1953 the 15-year-old Arthur Scargill. Years later, he recalled his initiation into the industry at Woolley Colliery, just north of Barnsley:

  Melson [Alf Melson, the one-eyed foreman] used to stalk up and down a sort of raised gantry in the screening plant. He was just like Captain Bligh glaring at his crew. We were picking bits of stone and rock out of the coal as it passed us on conveyer belts. The place was so full of dust you could barely see your hands, and so noisy you had to use sign language. When it came to snap time, your lips were coated in black dust. You had to wash them before you could eat your snap [in his case a bottle of water and jam sandwiches] . . .

  There were two sorts of people in the section: us, and disabled rejects of society. I saw men with one arm and one leg, men crippled and mentally retarded. I saw people who should never have been working, having to work to live.

  ‘It probably sounds corny,’ this very atypical miner added, ‘but on that first day I promised myself I would try one day to get things changed.’5.

  Five years earlier, in February 1948, Picture Post’s focus was on a different but not altogether dissimilar sector of the economy. Six individual dockers, each pictured with a confident, smiling face, were selected as representative of ‘The Men Who Can Do It’:

  Walter Eagle. Forty-six, he lives at Forest Gate with his wife and three children. He has been a docker for over 25 years.

  Patsy Hollis. Nicknamed ‘Flash-bomb’, says he’s about 45, from Poplar, and one of the ‘pitch-hands’, who load ‘cargoes from ships’ on to hand-barrows.

  Wally May. Thirty-four, he comes from Becontree. In his spare time is a chicken-fancier, but spends most of his time loading ships.

  George Rutter. Thirty-five, married, with two sons, he comes from Manor Park. When he has time, he likes escaping to Epping Forest with the boys.

  Arthur May. Thirty-nine, married, with two children, he comes from Manor Park. He works in the holds of the cargo ships.

  George Moore. Sixty-two, worked in dockland for 37 years. Travels from Canning Town. He has two sons who follow his footsteps.

  A mainly historical piece about the dockers and their leaders, by the middle-class socialist (and man of parts) Raymond Postgate, accompanied the pictures and captions. It ended with Ernest Bevin, who had won national fame in 1920 as ‘the Dockers’ K.C.’ during a government inquiry. ‘Now he has international fame,’ wrote Postgate, ‘but he is still a docker. Study that stocky, sturdy figure – its faults and its virtues – its courage, its solidity, its short temper, its readiness to fight, its imagination, its patriotism, its loyalty – all these are typical of dockland.’

  The same issue also included a photo-essay and more critical piece on London’s docks and dockers. ‘Men Who Are Vital Links in the Nation’s Import and Export Chain Work at the Port of London’s King George V Dock’ began one of the extended captions. ‘After generations of industrial struggle, they now have a guaranteed daily wage of £1 0s 6d for a 5½-day week. Casual labour, which was the curse of dockland, ended last year. It is on men such as these that the quicker turn-round of ships, which can so help industrial recovery, depends.’ The disturbing fact, however, was that turn-round time in British docks had, far from improving, ‘fallen off badly’. ‘Can we cut out this serious delay, which is costing us so much, and get back at least to pre-war turn-round figures?’ asked Picture Post, identifying restrictive practices as the crux:

  The case can be quoted of six gangs on quay, all of which turned up one or two men short on a Saturday morning. These gangs would not manage to make five complete gangs, and they would not work shorthanded. So no work was done on the quay that morning, and the gangs on the ship could not work either. The dockers’ trade union leaders, responding to the Labour Government’s appeal, are now doing their best to end these restrictive practices, and the powerful Transport and General Workers’ Union has backed the Government’s export drive.

  ‘But the final answer,’ the piece concluded with no wild optimism, ‘is with the dockers.’6.

  Much would turn on how the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS), building on Bevin’s wartime reforms of dock labour and coming into effect in July 1947, played out. In addition to decasualisation (aimed at ensuring a regular, well-organised supply of labour) and a guaranteed daily wage, it involved a disciplinary mechanism to be administered jointly by employers and unions. After so many years of chaotic, even vengeful industrial relations in the docks, there seemed a real chance that a new, more productive, more harmonious era might begin. Such hopes were quickly dashed. Not only were there major, high-profile strikes in 1948 and 1949 (in both cases centred on London and Liverpool), but between 1945 and 1951 as a whole, more than a fifth of the 14.3 million working days lost to strikes in all industries were attributable to industrial action in the docks – even though those docks employed only about 80,000 men out of a national workforce of some 20 million.7.

  ‘To some of us,’ a bishop living in Eastbourne wrote to The Times during the 1949 strike (ended only by the government’s resorting to no fewer than 15,000 servicemen to act as strike-breakers), ‘it is all so desperately puzzling.’ He went on:

  We are told that the majority of dockers are decent men, yet their reasoning powers seem paralysed. How can it be right to sacrifice England, to attempt to starve her, and to upset our already over-difficult national recovery by any sectional action? Is there some deep cause we do not know, or is it just rather sheer stupidity or selfish sectionalism? We are told to admire the ‘solidarity’ of a section (even though England is victimised), but when employers were accused of a similar ‘common front’ we were told that it was a conspiracy to victimise the public. What is the difference?

  Nor did the NDLS seem to make much difference in terms of restrictive practices. ‘They have the very finest machinery,’ the President of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce told the Financial Times about the new ships for handling ore cargoes on Clydeside, ‘but meantime the dockers insist that the same number of men should be employed as in the old-fashioned ships, which means that in a gang of eight to twelve men only two do the actual work.’ When a few weeks later a government-sponsored Working Party on Increased Mechanisation in British Ports published its report, it revealed that union representatives ‘have told us that they are not prepared, except in certai
n circumstances, to depart from the present arrangements which call for certain numbers of men to be employed on stated tasks’ – and that in those situations where dockers were paid for standing by watching the machine do the work, ‘we have been informed that this is the only method in which machinery can be used without causing disputes and stoppages’. Or, as a report at about the same time by the British Institute of Management on the London docks flatly summed up the situation, ‘The refusal of the workers to agree to alter long-established rules seems now so much to be taken for granted that many technical improvements are not even seriously considered by the employers.’

  Probably the most militant dockers, certainly among London’s 25,000 or so, were the roughly 10,000 who worked in the so-called Royal Group of Docks in the south of West Ham: the Victoria, the Royal Albert and the King George V (always called KGV). Where these docks led, London’s other docks followed. ‘Anybody with a cap and a choker, on a bicycle, could ride round the West India Docks shouting “they’re out at the Royals”,’ one manager recalled in 1970. ‘Men would come trooping off the ships with no questions asked and no regard to agreements or current work.’ Defending piece rates and existing working practices – above all the size of gangs – lay somewhere near the heart of the prevailing militancy in the Royals, almost all of it channelled not through official unions like the TGWU but through the unofficial Port Workers’ Committee, renamed the London Docks Liaison Committee in the mid-1950s.

  ‘One of the protective practices was, if you loaded cargo in the centre of the hold and you got over 26 feet to walk your parcels in for stowing, once it went over 26 feet, you demanded pro rata, extra men because of the distance of walking,’ recollected in retirement the rank-and-file movement’s leading figure by the late 1950s – and, between then and the early 1970s, one of the most demonised figures in the country. This was Jack Dash. After an impoverished south London childhood, lengthy spells of unemployment, an early conversion to Communism and a war spent with the Auxiliary Fire Service, Dash was in his late 30s when he became a docker at the end of the war. By 1949 his role in that year’s major dispute led to him being one of six dockers disciplined by the TGWU, and from that point he did not look back. Nicknamed ‘Nature Boy’ on account of his penchant for stripping to the waist, he had undeniable personal charisma; a speaking style, at the countless unofficial meetings heralding countless unofficial stoppages, that skilfully combined humour and eloquence; and a political philosophy that may have been unsophisticated but was undoubtedly sincere. Dash believed that (in the words of his biographers) ‘there were two classes, the exploiters and the exploited, and that the downfall of capitalism would occur as Marx had predicted’. By a pleasing irony, he had got a permanent job in the docks – normally reserved for sons of dockers – only after an employer had recommended him for full registration on the grounds that he was ‘a good worker’.8.

  Why did the much-vaunted NDLS fail to transform industrial relations and instead lead to an explosion of unofficial militancy? Almost certainly, despite some name-calling on the part of government, it was not because the great majority of recalcitrant dockers were politically motivated. Indeed, the blunt verdict of one well-qualified historian about the 1945–51 period is that ‘political subversion had nothing to do with any of the main unofficial strikes’. Rather, the problem was that for many dockers the new arrangements did not represent a sufficiently attractive deal to persuade them to moderate their traditional occupational behaviour – indeed, the context of more or less full employment served only to encourage them to exacerbate it.

  The deal itself was well summed up in retrospect by a Liverpool docker (Peter Kerrigan) who had entered the industry in 1935: ‘The Dock Labour Scheme was a two-edged thing. At the same time as it gave the benefits of a guaranteed minimum sum if you didn’t work, you had to pay for it with a certain loss of liberty. The people who ran it were the officials of the T&G and the employers. The people who punished you were also the people who were supposed to be your representatives.’ In smaller ports, more dockers than not found the improved security provided by the NDLS broadly acceptable, but in larger ports, such as London, Glasgow and Liverpool, the reverse tended to be the case. Peter Turnbull and two other sociologists have put it most lucidly:

  Quite simply, for better-organised groups such as Glasgow dockers and London stevedores, the NDLS held few attractions, imposing restrictions on what was previously regarded as the worker’s ‘freedom of choice’ or established union procedures for the allocation of work. On the Thames, stevedores and the more skilled dockers, the so-called ‘kings of the river’, preferred irregular employment with the possibility of earning high wages when work was available, on the cargoes they liked best, rather than more regular but un-specialised work throughout the port. The NDLS was predicated on the latter, not the former.

  The direct result in London and other major ports was an inordinate number of small but cumulatively disruptive and damaging disputes over such matters as allocation, transfers or demarcation – disputes in which the TGWU and other unions were increasingly marginalised.

  The situation was not helped either by the nature of the work itself (the infinitely disputatious implications of variable payments depending on type of cargo, not to mention the frequent contrast between long working weeks and periods of short-time) or by the reluctance of the employers, customarily – and rightly – seen as reactionary, to invest in dock amenities. ‘It is not surprising that the men avoid the lavatories whenever possible and have a real fear of infection,’ noted a National Dock Labour Board report in 1950 on the latter aspect. Revealingly, in terms of their lack of knowledge, Board members were ‘amazed and nauseated by what they saw and smelled’; the report added, somewhat condescendingly, that a ‘general raising of standards’ was occurring on the part of the dock workers, in that they were now demanding better toilet and washing facilities ‘which but a few years ago would have seemed irrelevant in dock land’. And, of course, dock work in the 1950s remained as dirty and dangerous as it had ever been. A survey in 1950 found that although 41 per cent of accidents in the docks were, predictably enough, caused by handling, no fewer than 40 per cent were caused by being struck by a ‘falling body’, by ‘striking an object’, by falling or by what was rather sinisterly called ‘hook injury’. Dash himself would become leader of the rank-and-file movement in London after Wally Jones had been killed by a fall into a ship’s hold.9.

  One source gives us an array of contemporary voices – not from London or Liverpool but from the much smaller docks at Manchester. During the winter of 1950/51, social scientists from Liverpool University interviewed 305 dock workers there, out of a total labour force of 2,426. Although most of the workers were more or less in favour of the NDLS, their tenor across a range of issues was generally negative:

  Everyone round here ultimately drifts into the docks.

  People wouldn’t say that dockers were solid if they saw us in the ‘pen’ [ie the call-stand, resembling a cattle market, where jobs were allocated] squabbling like a lot of monkeys to do ourselves a bit of good.

  People get sent to jobs they cannot do. Young men are put in the sheds, old men in the ships. This is very unfair.

  Top management should get round a table with the men to discuss their problems.

  The damned twisters would rob you of a halfpenny.

  The branch meetings [ie of the union] are too dull and slow.

  Everything’s rigged in the meetings.

  When there is a dispute, the officials should try the job themselves, not just look at it and keep their hands clean.

  You have to have more skill and experience at this game than for any other job and yet road sweepers outside get more than us.

  The bare lick is no good with the present cost of living; I dare not take £5 home to the wife. You can’t be sure of overtime, although some men never seem to be on the bare lick.

  You practically have to sleep here to get a good wage
.

  Blue eyes get the bonus jobs.

  They twist us on bonus.

  Treated like animals, we are.

  I wouldn’t wash my feet in their canteen tea.