Free Tales of London's Docklands by Henry T Bradford Page A

having been picked up on the free call that very day.
    Doc was very quietly spoken, a likeable, inoffensive chap, who had no idea what he was letting himself in for when he became a docker. He was quickly given the nickname Doc when it had become known to his fellow dockers that he had been a nurse and had worked at the local hospital.
    â€˜Bloody psychiatric nurse,’ one man mumbled. ‘He must have been to volunteer for a soddin’ job like this. If you get dealing with a load of nutters for a long time it’s odds on you’ll wind up like them.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said his mate. ‘Is that your excuse, too?’
    â€˜It isn’t bloody funny, you fool. That loony business could be contagious.’
    All the down-holders in the ship’s gang turned and looked at him, then burst out laughing.
    â€˜It takes a bloody idiot to know one,’ the down-hold foreman said. ‘Come on, that’s enough of that nonsense. Let’s get on with this job.’
    Doc’s father-in-law also worked in the docks, and he was employed as an after-foreman for a stevedoring labour contractor that serviced P&O liners of the Far East and Australasian fleet. No doubt Dad had the intention of securing Doc a job with him as soon as an opportunity presented itself. (Nepotism was one of the endemic scourges of the port transport industry.) It was Dad who had advised Doc to give his attendance book to a ship worker. But he had not been in the Dock Labour Board compound to tell him who he should not ‘shape up for’. Consequently, poor Doc had got himself lumbered as a down-holder on this ship, a loading sugar boat, manned by a gang of pressed men. His only consolation was that he had not been picked to be a bargehand. That was a much more physically demanding job that would, as like as not, have finished him as a docker.
    Doc was tall, with light-brown hair and bright blue-eyes. He was pale of face and thin in body. He had less muscle on his arms and legs than could be found on a sea mollusc, a creature with a similar-sounding name. He wore thick, steel-rimmed glasses. He had a curious gait insofar as his slim shoulders stayed rigid while his knees appeared to be semi-stiff and jerky. It was as though he had had a partially successful fusing operation on both of his hips and knees. This may have been the reason for what was to happen to him shortly.
    The first set of sugar that came down the hold was lowered to the deck and made fast with two chocks of dunnage and a sisal rope, which was then lashed to a steel stanchion. The stanchion was welded to the deck floor and ceiling to support the ship’s upper deck when she was carrying deck cargo. The first set of sugar was used as a base for a table on which a cargo running board was placed, and when future sets came down the hold, they were landed on the running board, at the back of which the gang had laid two sacks of sugar. When the bottom sacks at the back of the following sets landed on the two bags of sugar, the set was tipped over, leaving all the sacks standing upright. The down-holders formed a line, then one by one they carried the bags on their backs to the stowage, where the down-hold foreman and his mate stowed them.
    Now, I must explain that gangs working over the jetty were made up of two crane drivers, one top hand, a down-hold foreman, a change-over man (who worked on the jetty and took the rope off one crane hook and placed it on the second crane hook), four bargehands and five down-holders. (One crane driver and the change-over man were paid pro rata to the gang’s piecework earnings.)
    The second set having been landed on the running board, the physical hard work of stowing the sugar cargo began. Most of the backers (the men carrying the sacks) had managed to get pieces of canvas or old paper cement bags to put over their shoulders to stop the sugar chafing the skin off their backs and drawing blood. The dockers formed