Tales of London's Docklands (18 page)

‘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

‘R
ATS
,
RATS
,
AS FAT AS
TABBY CATS
'

S
he 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 3
s
and 6½
d
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 were 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.

‘What would we do without the tea ladies?' said old Percy. ‘They are our single light burning in a dark room. They are our bright little star shining in a pitch-black heaven.' Then, on a more serious note, he said, ‘If they weren't here to nag us during the day, we'd be out of practice for a good nagging when we get back home at night. We should count our blessings while we may. Come on, my team. Let's get back to work.'

We walked slowly, but purposefully, back up the catwalk onto the jetty, then onto the ship's gangway, which descended to the deck. We gathered round the lazaret from which a thousand tiny diamonds of light were sparkling.

‘Bloody hell! What are they?' said Les.

‘Rats,' said old Percy. ‘I told you. There are millions of them.'

‘Yes! We know! You had them in the trenches and on the battlefields in the First World War.'

‘Are you lot going back to work?' said Bill, in his authoritative foreman's voice.

‘I'm not going down there,' said Les. ‘Let's get the Governor here and ask for a price to do the job.'

After a short discussion among the gang, confirming the intention to wait for the Governor to turn up and appraise the job, the down-hold foreman approached the ship worker to explain about the rats. The ship worker was already aware of the problem after complaints from the other gangs on the ship.

‘I've sent for the Governor,' he said, ‘but you know what he's like. He won't turn up till the last gang has stopped work. Then he'll accuse you of being on strike and call in your union officer to negotiate. He won't offer you anything for the job. He'll say it's normal working. You may as well get back to work.'

‘We had better wait for the Governor to turn up,' said Bill. ‘Get the decision straight from the horse's mouth. Otherwise the lads will think I'm selling them down the river.'

‘OK,' said the ship worker, ‘have it your own way.'

As other gangs broke into their stowages in the various cargo holds on the ship, they, too, discovered rats were in residence. They, too, concluded they were entitled to something more than 3½
d
per ton per man – especially after they had been advised by old Percy that they could catch bubonic plague or Weil's disease, or both, from the rats. It was not long before the work on discharging came to an abrupt stop. Then the Governor finally condescended to put in an appearance.

The Governor was an Oxford University graduate, a man who had worked his way up to be the docks manager of the labour stevedoring company that had been contracted to discharge the cargo from this South American whaling vessel. He had achieved his exalted position by the simple tactic of marrying the president of the company's daughter – a sneaky, remunerative move into the higher echelons of the stevedoring and docking industry, and without his having to learn the facts about ships.

These are quite simple facts. For example, the stern is at the back and the bow is at the front and the keel runs along the bottom of a ship; the steel poles sticking up out of the deck are called derricks, and the drums revolving forwards and backwards are winch drums, implements used to raise and lower loads of cargo; those tall, mechanical monsters straddling the quayside are cranes; those rag-clad characters standing about the ship's deck covered in whale meal and sweat are men, human beings – a fact he never appeared, or wished, to understand. To him they were cannon fodder in wartime and wage slaves in peacetime. He was, in fact, through his upbringing and education, a social psychopath with megalomaniac tendencies that were solely derived from his exalted position within the port transport industry.

The dockers, looking down at the perimeter road from the whaler's deck, saw the Governor's car pull up. They watched as he got out and closed the door. They watched as he took his pipe and tobacco pouch out of his pocket and lit up with cool slow deliberation. (This act was contrary to Port Authority by-laws with a maximum fine of £2. But that law was used only for prosecuting the ordinary workers in the Docklands. People like the Governor were exempt from such punishment.) They saw the jetty office door open and the ship worker come out to join him. They watched as the two men moved up the catwalk onto the jetty then onto the gangway and onto the ship. They waited for him to open the conversation, although through long years of experience they were aware of what he was about to say – that is, what he always said when approached by the men: ‘Now what's the problem? Why are you on strike?'

‘Look down the hatch,' Les said. The Governor looked down the hold then back at Les.

‘What's the problem?' he said.

‘This ship is infested with rats,' replied Les. ‘All those bright little lights you can see down there are rats' eyes, not bloody diamonds. What are you going to do about it?'

‘Do? What do you lot expect me to do? There is nothing I can do about a few rats. Most ships carry rats. I've got rats at the bottom of my garden.'

‘Have you?' said Les. ‘Where do you live? I'll have the health inspector after you. And, while we're on the subject of health inspectors, I think our best bet to resolve this dispute is to call in the Port Health Authority and request this ship should be held in quarantine till it's fumigated.'