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

themselves into a line, and as his turn came, each one took hold of the ears of a bag and carried it to the stowage. Doc was the last in the line, having held back so he could see what the procedure was. He picked up his first 2-hundredweight sack of sugar and staggered forward across the deck to the stowage. His second effort saw him buckling at the knees. With his third bag, he stumbled a few yards, his knees gave way under him and he fell, face down on the ’tween deck hatches with the 2-hundred weight sack of sugar pinning him to the deck. Unfortunately, it looked quite funny, seeing him spread out, lying down there, looking like a huge tortoise whose shell was too heavy for it to carry about.
    The dockers went on working, walking round him to get to the stowage. One jokingly said, ‘I hope that lazy sod’s not on the tick note. He’s bloody asleep on the job already and we’ve only just started work.’
    Another one said, ‘By the way he’s lying there, do you think he’s bedridden?’ To which someone replied, ‘It looks more like sack-ridden, to me.’
    The gang continued to clear the sets of sugar as poor Doc lay prostrate, halfway between the landing table and the stowage. None of the gang spoke to him as they continued to carry the sacks of sugar to the stowage. It was some time before the barge bay was cleared and they removed the offending bag from his back. The down-hold foreman called up to the top hand and told him he was swapping Doc with the change-over man on the jetty. Doc objected bitterly, saying he would master the job if it should kill him, which it would have done. However, there was a compromise. Doc swapped places with one of the loaders on the landing table. He saw the job out to its conclusion and it was just as well for him that he did: the Docklands were no place to lose face.
    I N C ONCLUSION
    In the mid-1950s, the trade unions negotiated a rise in the piecework rate with the port employers for loading and discharging bagged sugar. It rose to 3 d per ton. The tabloids carried a story that went something like this: ‘Dockers demand an increase in the price paid for discharging sugar. Sugar prices are set to rise by a penny per pound.’
    Dockers and stevedores were awarded an extra 3 d a ton for their labour to share between twelve men; the sugar processors got an extra 237 d per ton. The media never did publish that piece of news. Well, they wouldn’t would they? Not to exonerate those ‘bloody dockers’.

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    A B EAUTIFUL
P ASSENGER
    T he Orient liner SS Orion was returning from its voyage to Australia. It was in the New Lock Entrance, Tilbury Docks. The ship’s captain and pilot were waiting for the lock to fill and the inner lock gates to open so that Port Authority steam tugs moored close to the dock side of the inner lock could cast off to assist the Thames river tugs, which had towed the ship into the lock from the river, to take her to her allotted berth.
    Baggage gangs had been picked up in the Dock Labour Board compound on the 7.30. a.m. free call to attend on the ship’s passengers, and they were standing by, ready with wheelbarrows, to carry passengers’ personal effects to their private cars or taxi cabs. (Those vehicles were parked in the space between two transit sheds.)
    A railway engine, with eight carriages, was on the track at the rear of the transit sheds, slowly hissing steam. It was waiting to take third-class passengers to Fenchurch Street station in the City of London, from where they would have to make their own way to their final destinations.
    Low tables, constructed from cargo running boards set on trestles (trestles that would soon be used for discharging the ship’s frozen meat cargo), had been put up in a cargo shed. On them, customs officers would examine the contents of passengers’ suitcases and any other such paraphernalia – packages that had either been carried ashore by