Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (75 page)

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’.
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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.
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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.

We should be supplied with clothes in the same way that platelayers are. I have to depend on cast-offs.
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It was the same in the Port of London. When my mother arrived from Germany in the spring of 1950, her ship berthing at the West India, what most struck her was the sight of the dockers wearing not work uniform but instead their ordinary heavy overcoats.

The third emblematic sector was altogether more modern. ‘The vitality of the British motor industry,’ the Minister of Supply, George Strauss, told the annual dinner of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders on the eve of the first post-war Motor Show in October 1948, ‘has confounded the wiseacres who foretold that the industry would die a lingering death in the post-war world.’ He added that ‘the main reason for our export success is that British cars are exceptionally good’. Next day, the
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agreed: there could ‘be no doubt that the industry has done very well, much better than its detractors can have thought possible’; if it had not managed to achieve ‘the visionary target of “one car, one firm” which has sometimes been urged upon it’, this was because ‘this target is both impracticable and undesirable, not because the industry is not aware of the need for standardisation’; and in general the temporary lack of competition in the export market was far from meaning that there was no ‘substantial underlying demand for British cars’ – indeed, ‘the quality displayed at the show should banish any doubt that they will be unequal to the opportunity’ when circumstances changed. Or, as a talk soon afterwards on the Home Service put it with due caution, ‘Britain, perhaps just for the time being, is the greatest motor-car exporting nation in the world.’

Nor had the situation changed by 1950, with the huge American motor industry still trying to satisfy its swelling domestic demand and Europe still recovering from the war. That year, the British motor industry enjoyed a staggering 52 per cent of world motor exports. In terms of overall production, whether for domestic or export purposes, the French, German and Italian combined total only just exceeded Britain’s 476,000. Japan, meanwhile, produced only 2,000 cars in the entire year. A report on the British motor industry did concede that it would not be a seller’s market for ever and identified Germany in particular as a potential future competitor of ‘permanent importance’, but that competition would not come from the Volkswagen, which the report reckoned ‘by British standards’ to be ‘uncomfortable and noisy’. Despite increasingly persistent, disobliging complaints from abroad that British cars were becoming a byword for unreliability, it would take a lot to shake the industry’s complacent assumption that British was still best.
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It was an industry clustered in five main places. Each had significantly different characteristics, but in all of them the conveyor-belt assembly line – ‘the track’ – was the relentless, remorseless, unforgiving nerve centre of operations.

Dagenham was the British home of Ford – a Detroit in miniature since the early 1930s. The works put a premium on continuous, integrated production and included a blast furnace, coke ovens, a powerhouse, iron and steel foundries, and fully mechanised jetties for loading and unloading that reached out into the Thames. ‘Ford has always applied the principle that higher wages and higher standards of living for all depend on lower costs and lower selling prices through increasingly large-scale production’ was how the British chairman, Lord Perry, summed up the Ford philosophy soon after the war. By 1948 Ford was the highest-volume as well as the most profitable car manufacturer in Britain, while by 1950 its production had trebled over the previous four years. There were also by the end of 1950 two new models about to come on stream – the Consul and the Zephyr, both very successful, heavily American-influenced family saloons – which for the time being most of the quarter of a million or more on Ford’s home-market waiting list could only dream about. Meanwhile, the barely revamped pre-1945 models (the Anglia, Prefect and Popular) still enjoyed huge appeal at the less expensive end of the market.

In general, coming into the 1950s, Ford had the most professional management, the most systematic product planning and a powerhouse leader in Sir Patrick Hennessy. A self-made Irishman, with drive and strongly held free-market views, he was more frustrated than most by what he saw as the Labour government’s congenital interference in the motor industry. ‘They tell us what to do, what to make, when to make it and what to do with it when we have made it,’ he complained to an American colleague in June 1948. Even so, when soon afterwards the Board of Trade tried to persuade him that the socially responsible way for Ford to continue to expand its production was by opening a new plant some 200 miles away in Kirkby (about to become an overspill area for Liverpool), he successfully stood his ground. ‘It is neither good economic or business judgement for this Company, or the Country, to upset the balance of the only integrated factory in the motor industry by so distant a dispersal,’ insisted a colleague on his behalf.
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Ford, more than any other British motor company, was focused on the bottom line.