Memories of a Marxist docker

Issue: 185

Eddie Prevost

Eddie Prevost was a leading worker militant in the London docks from 1960 to 1989. This was a time of intense class struggle in Britain—and Eddie played a key role. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1950s, eventually leaving in 1972. This was after the dockers’ major victory over the Tory government, which had jailed five dockers under its new anti-union laws. He joined the International Socialists, the predecessor of the Socialist Workers Party. To this day, he remains an active member. Tony Phillips spoke to him at his home in Hainault, London, about 60 years of class struggle.


Tony: Eddie, tell me about your early life.

Eddie: I was born in Bethnal Green in 1935. My dad was a docker, his father was a docker and his father was a docker. Within a year, I was in the London Hospital with an abscess on the lung. I was supposed to have died four times, so I was a lucky so and so! Within six months of me finally coming out of hospital, we were at war. War became real in 1940, with the start of the Blitz.1 We were bombed out. We children were evacuated to Tonypandy in South Wales and lived with a mining family. My parents were poor, but they were poorer. They couldn’t feed us properly. My sister, who was four years older than me, wrote home and my mum and dad got us. My dad was working away all over the country, so we were on our own quite a lot. When we went to bed at night, we said, “better say goodbye because we might not see each other in the morning”. I suppose it was pretty scary. My sister and I were then evacuated to Cornwall. The people we stayed with worked on a farm and it was wonderful. When I was seven or eight, the bombing stopped, and we went back to Hoxton.2 It was a poor place, and I went to a really rough school. Every time I went into the playground, l got in a fight!

When I was 12, we moved to Hainault in Essex. I went to a wonderful country school. I thought I was in paradise coming from Hoxton! From the get-go, Hainaut was racially mixed with Irish and Jewish people living there. I passed the 14 plus exam at school, having failed the 11 plus, and was sent to a school called a tech with 2,000 kids.3 I felt anonymous and hated it. At this time, my mum started to develop mental health issues; eventually she was put in a mental hospital. I was becoming increasingly disturbed and causing mayhem at school.

My mate asked me if I fancied going to the Festival of Britain.4 On the street, there was a string quartet playing. It felt like a magic world! I found myself in a jazz club in this dive in Soho. I just loved it. We were skint and had to walk miles home to Hainault at three in the morning.5 If you want a lesson in class in Britain, walk down Newham, then go over to the Knightsbridge and if you can’t see the difference, you’re bloody blind!

Because my dad has Huguenot roots, we’ve always been a bit dissident in our family.6 During the war, we would be in a cinema, and they always played the national anthem. My dad used to say, “sit down! We don’t stand up for them.” My dad was an obstinate so and so. He was what we called down the dock a “rucker”. When I worked in the dock a few years after, I was in a queue to get a cup of tea and this bloke leaned towards me: “You see that bloke down there, he’s a nightmare to work with. He keeps stopping the job, wanting to go on strike.” I said, “that’s my dad!” He was an unusual dad being a docker. He was quite cultural and had wide interests. He liked classical and all types of music. I’ve imbibed those interests as well.

Tony: You left school in 1951, aged 15. What were your first jobs?

Eddie: My first job was in an office in Cornhill in the City. I hated that place. They were all a bit la de da.7 The manager sacked me for having a fight with another kid in the toilet. I ended up working in every tuppenny ha’ppenny job you could ever see—shit jobs. I worked in a rubber factory for a while. It was the worst job I ever had; it was filthy and unorganised. When I was 18, I was conscripted into the army.8 You can’t let it get to you, you have to be tactical. I played the idiot. When they explained a drill to me, they would ask, “do you understand?” I used to answer, “not really”. I made them feel very annoyed. They put me on the gate at a camp at Mill Hill. When the military police drove in, I would say, “Hold up—I’ve got to look over your vehicle”, so I would look over their vehicle, anything to mess them about. I used to let everybody else come and go.

After the army, I had all sorts of jobs. I put up marquees, I worked on the buildings and in the railway workshops at Temple Mills. There was loads of work, but not a lot of money. I turned up at 11 o’clock for one job. The foreman remarked something along the lines of “you’ve got a cheek turning up at this time, but better late than never” and put me to work. After I come out of the army, I was hard up for work, so I went back to the rubber factory. I started on a Monday and they were on strike for union recognition. While I was in the army, Asian workers, who were involved in the Indian Workers Association, had gone to work there, and they were all militant.9

Tony: How did you get involved in the Communist Party (CP)?

Eddie: I met a Jewish fella on one job who gave me the book The Guilty Men, which had been published in 1940, to read.10 He was a socialist in the Labour Party. He never let a governor talk to him badly, never let anything go.11 He was a big influence on me. I used to go on Ban the Bomb marches organised by the Committee of 100 and the CP.12

I ended up working at Briggs Motor Bodies from 1957 to 1960, based on the Ford site at Dagenham, a company which Fords eventually took over. It was when I was working at Dagenham that I became aware of the Communist Party (CP). I would see them outside the plant giving out leaflets and selling their paper, the Daily Worker. I started buying the paper and they asked me: “why don’t you come to a branch meeting?” The CP had a workplace branch at Dagenham. “Yeah, but I don’t want to sell the paper”, I replied. Of course, you end up selling it, don’t you? You feel a little bit embarrassed at first. I don’t feel embarrassed selling socialist papers anymore! I enjoyed the meetings and wanted to find out more about what I was joining. The CP had a bookshop in Ilford, which was our centre. I read their literature, then signed up for educational sessions. I loved it! I ended up on the CP London District Committee.

The motor industry was second only to the docks in terms of strikes. One worker at Fords stopped paying his union subs. I heard on the grapevine that the leaders of the Electrical Trades Union had threatened Fords: ”If you don’t get rid of this bloke, we will shut the plant”.13 The whole workforce went on strike. At the end of the strike, we marched round the plant in triumph. It was unbelievable—I have never experienced anything quite like that. They had to move him to the Fords plant at Basildon, but the workers there wouldn’t have him, so they moved him to Southampton. They wouldn’t have him either. In the end, they had to sack him.14

Tony: How did you get into the docks? What was it like working there in the 1960s?

Eddie: I knew was going to work in the dock as my dad had nominated me. In those days, you got preferential employment if your dad or another relative worked in the dock. I finally started at the Royal Group of Docks in April 1960. I was already married at that time.

In the docks, the workforce controlled their own work. The gangers got given a list of ships coming into the dock and we decided how we wanted to load or unload them.15 The supervisors did not have to do anything. We were on piece work, so management knew we wanted to get it done in the quickest time possible.16

Two things were critical about the docks to me. One was family. My dad and my cousin worked in the dock. Everybody’s brothers and uncles worked in the dock. It was a real family affair. It gave it a solidity that it otherwise wouldn’t have had. This was the case in all the ports and in other industries like shipbuilding. The other thing was the gang system. It was like a platoon in the army, but we never had any officers. We were self-managed; it was totally democratic. Each gang chose a ganger. They chose the most experienced man that knew the job and could work out the best way of doing it. You know what I mean? There was a sense of freedom. You worked hard, but you were in control.

It bred a kind of solidarity within the gang. You had to be good worker. The more you did, the more you earned. If a gang member came in and said, “my wife has run off with the neighbour. I need to look after the kids and make arrangements”, or whatever, the gang would answer: “Go away and get it sorted—we’ll cover for you.” If your car broke down, there would always be someone in the gang who could fix it, and we’d carry them while they fixed it. Management knew about it, but they couldn’t do anything. A bloke once asked me, “Ed, what do you mean by socialism?” I explained that “socialism is like how we run the gang.” The revolution is the first act of self-management by the working class.

When I went in there, I was in the CP, so I quickly slotted in. There was a CP workplace branch in the Royals.17 There were no shop stewards, and CP members were banned from holding positions in the Transport and General Workers Union at the time. However, there were rank-and-file Liaison Committees in all the docks, where they discussed key issues such as wages. Their origins were in an unofficial national dock strike in 1945.18 They involved members of both unions—the Whites (Transport and General Workers’ Union, TGWU; now part of Unite) and an older, smaller union known as the Blues (National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers, NASD). The main political rival to the CP in the dockworkers’ unions was Catholic Action. Most dockers were of Irish descent, although Church influence was dying away in London by the early 1960s.

I was asked to go on the Liaison Committee and got involved in strikes and how to organise them. There were daily strikes. You could get in and find that the ship’s been at sea and the cargo’s been shot all over the place.19 If it’s all stacked in columns, you can do it a lot quicker. You’d have to get the stewards committee in and argue: “We’re not doing it for that. We’re losing money.”

It was not like today when most strikes are official and organised by the bureaucracy. The union officers are not elected by the members. They become a self-sustaining clique within the union. The officers are supposed to represent the members, but they only represent themselves. They thought I was anti-union. Far from true! The thing is that we’ve got to create a fighting union not a bureaucratic union. Transport and General Workers Union leader Jack Jones had served on Joint Production Committees aimed at boosting production in the munitions industry in aid of the war effort. He was a bit of an actor. He used to drive about in his chauffeur driven car. When he came to meet us, he would put on his little workman’s hat.

Tony: Tell me about the 1967 dispute in the Royals and the impact of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of blood speech” on the docks.20

Eddie: This dispute was about control of the job. Management wanted to do away with the continuity rule. This was a local agreement in the Royals that gave the gang first choice to return to its original work if it was moved temporarily to another job. The employers wanted to end the agreement. We went on strike for six weeks but could not win support from the other London docks and the strike was defeated.

The defeat of the 1967 strike had a demoralising effect on some workers in the Royals. There were trains running through the docks that transported new immigrants from Tilbury, which for some workers reinforced Powell’s racist scaremongering that Britain was being flooded with black migrants. Some dockers had joined general union branches near where they lived, not branches based in the docks. Several of these branches included market porters. The meat markets in particular had a history of fascist influence. There were some, but not many black workers in the dock. Just like Keir Starmer today, the Labour government did not stand up to the racist outcry following Powell’s speech. If we don’t stand up to racism, the result is that it is reinforced.

A meeting was called by some workers in the Royals, who were not members of docks branches to discuss a walkout in support of Powell. I fell out with my gang as I said there was no way I am going to that meeting. I was not coming out on this issue. Other CP members said they were going to the meeting to argue against a walkout. On reflection, I was wrong not to go to the meeting, but I was so emotionally charged up that I could not see the wood for the trees. We had never experienced anything like this before and did not know how to react. In panic, one CP activist, Danny Lyons, invited a Catholic priest and a Church of England vicar to oppose the walkout, but the meeting voted to strike and march in support of Powell. Once there was a strike vote, the tradition was that you had to abide by it, but I went to work. I even had arguments with black workers in the dock. My view was: “if it was good enough for your grandparents to come here, it’s good enough for immigrants today to come here.”

We had black dockers coming into the dock when other wharfs closed down. After the Powell walkout, they thought they were coming into a hostile environment. We went over to see them and told them: “You’re not on your own, we’re here to support you.” Eventually, we got on top of it. In 1976, we put out a Dockers Against Racism statement signed by a good number of key militants in the docks, which appeared in Socialist Worker. When the fascist National Front started to win support, we set up Dockers Against the Nazis and raised it in The Dockworker. The International Socialists produced “They’re Welcome Here!” stickers, and we covered up NF stickers in the dock.21 We went up to support the Grunwicks picket line regularly.22

Tony: When did containerisation start to be an issue in the industry?

Eddie: Marx talked about the development of the forces of production and how machinery is used to replace labour. When the employers wanted to modernise the docks and increase productivity, they came up with a way of doing this. Whereas previously, dockers had unloaded and loaded general cargo in bits and pieces, containerisation meant that cargoes were loaded into standardised containers before they even got to the dock. They were then loaded onto specially designed ships which were a lot quicker to load than the old ships and less labour was needed.23 The Port of London Authority (PLA), which ran the docks, wanted to move the docks down to Tilbury. They wanted to use the sale of the land occupied by the London docks for development to pay for the expansion of the industry.24 Lots of people were going to make lots of money. Trade was gradually being shifted to container ports away from traditional methods in the centre of London. It altered the balance of class forces and gave the employer a weapon.

Tony: The Tory government, which was elected in 1970, introduced the Industrial Relations Act aimed at outlawing unofficial strikes and curbing the power of shop stewards. This led to a major confrontation with rank-and-file dockers in 1972 over secondary picking. Could you say a bit about the dispute that led to dockers being imprisoned in Pentonville?

Eddie: Unemployment was increasing in the industry due to containerisation. We started going to these inland container depots and picketing them. We would note down the registration numbers of the lorries going in and out and the firms they belonged to. We’d phone up the firm: “If you don’t pull your lorries, we won’t load them in the docks.” The newspapers were saying that these poor little firms were being attacked by these bully dockers. Yet, Socialist Worker journalist Laurie Flynn discovered that one of these companies, Midland Cold Storage, was part of Vestey, a big multinational.

The Industrial Relations Court issued an injunction to five shop stewards to stop picketing Midland Cold Storage.25 They refused to comply and were banged up in Pentonville.26 All the men walked out the gate and pretty soon there was an unofficial national dock strike.27 We held a meeting to decide what to do next. One of the stewards, Tony Delaney, realised: ”We’ve got to picket Pentonville!“ We didn’t know it at the time, but that was an act of genius. It became the focal point for the entire strike. There were mass meetings going on every day. IS were getting people to come down to the prison to support the picket. We had street theatre and everything—it was a festival of the oppressed!

Other workers were joining the strike. A lot of industries such as Fords and the pits had their annual holiday in August. Eventually, largely through the work of Micky Fenn, we got Fleet Street out.28 It was growing. We produced posters supporting the strike and a group of us went down Oxford Street putting them up. The Old Bill, which is how we used to call the police, complained: “Don’t put them up here, boys. Can‘t you put them up somewhere else?” I didn’t reflect on this at the time, but later, Tony Cliff told a story about Lenin when he was in hiding during the Russian Revolution.29 The worker he was staying with told him: “The bread is good—they are frightened of us”. The police officers did not arrest us. They had been told not arrest any more bleeding dockers.

The ruling class was getting agitated; there was talk of revolution in the papers. Then, they brought in the Seventh Cavalry, which was for them the trade union bureaucracy. Jack Jones was pressing for an emergency Trades Union Congress conference to debate calling a one-day general strike. The real purpose of this was to enable the union bureaucracy to grab the leadership of the strike away from the militants. They called the strike, but the government gave way and released the dockers. They were only inside for five days!

The union made our strike official. We were out for another three weeks until the officials called meetings at Tilbury and Southampton at 10:30 in the morning. This was before our meeting in the Royals, which was scheduled for 2:30 pm. Now, those two ports were not suffering unemployment. Jack Jones was confident: “Don’t worry, we’re going to sort it out.” They called their strikes off. The Tilbury workers were then bussed down to our meeting to vote again. The blokes who had been put inside from the Royals, Vic Turner and Bernie Steers, were in the CP and much closer to the union officials than we were. They were convinced: “We got out, we won, we won”. But we hadn’t won.

The strike was about beating unemployment and stopping those container depots developing outside the National Dock Labour Scheme.30 We argued those dockers should become registered dockers.31 However, we got no assurances about that. The union did not want the strike because there was no way they wanted the rank and file running anything. Who needs union officials if you can run things yourself? They did it in cahoots with the employer and in cahoots with the government as well. All three wanted the strike called off. Who were the losers? Us! How did I know the union had colluded with the employers and the government? How else can you explain the speedy availability of all those buses at Tilbury that brought dockers to take part in our vote in the Royals?32

Tony: Tell me about rank-and-file organisation in the docks

Eddie: My dad, during the war, travelled to different docks to work. In Cardiff, they uncovered a barge and got session money for that. When you covered a barge, you got more session money. If you get enough sessions, you get a decent wage. Gradually, all the best bits were spread. Everyone got to know each other and stayed in touch. The CP produced a dockers’ charter that included demands such as an end to piece work as it led to deaths and injuries on the job as workers had an incentive to work too fast. The Liaison Committees were replaced by shop stewards’ committees in every dock and by the National Port Shop Stewards Committee (NPSSC) at national level. This happened after the ban on communists holding positions in the TGWU was lifted in the late 1960s.

With the support of our rank-and-file group in the docks, IS members launched an unofficial rank-and-file paper, The Dockworker, in 1973. The print run was 5,000. We sold them all round the country, except Liverpool, which was controlled by the CP. It was written in the language of ordinary workers. It was irreverent and funny and included cartoons mocking Jack Jones, for example. It gave the rank and file a voice.

In 1975, we were on strike in London against containerisation again. Eleven of us took a minibus up to Liverpool docks. We said we were looking for a bit of support and were selling The Dockworker. Pat Docherty, who was chair of the Port of Liverpool Shop Stewards, chair of the NPSSC and a member of the CP, swept in: “What do you think you are doing? You’re not entitled to be here. Fuck off!” At the next meeting of the NPSSC, I moved a resolution of no confidence in the chair. Teddy Gates from the Royals was elected as the new chair.

We got a letter from dockers at Preston, a registered dock, saying that the local council, which ran it, was going to close. Of course, if they could close Preston, they could close everything. They organised a meeting and invited representatives of all the ports, including me. I told them that we needed to elect a strike committee and go for a one-day strike to see what we’ve got. We’d start with Hull as they would always come out, then Liverpool, then Southampton, then London. Teddy Gates went to speak in different places round the country, and it went well. We brought out a new issue of The Dockworker supporting the strike. The officials tried to stop it, but all 26,000 dockers came out plus 500 fish porters in Hull struck in sympathy. We held another meeting and Teddy told the press outside that in a fortnight’s time we were calling a national unofficial strike. Within a week, the employers agreed to keep Preston open. It was the most perfect strike I’ve ever been involved in!

Tomy: Why did you leave the CP and join the International Socialists?

Eddie: There were two things that stopped me belonging to the Communist Party. The first was they wrote a pamphlet called The British Road to Socialism.33 Where Marx had talked about the smashing of the state, a lot of people who call themselves Marxists leave that out. The smashing of the state was missing from the pamphlet but is absolutely critical to being a Marxist. It was also because of the Soviet Union’s 1968 attack on Czechoslovakia. I thought, “that ain’t right”. The implications of all this did not become clear to me until the ban on the CP in the TGWU was lifted. The CP had a ginger group approach to the union structures.34 Jack Dash was in the same gang as me and I knew him really well. He was a nice fella and a militant.35 He told me: “We’ve done a deal with Jack Jones. The Broad Left is going to support him in the election for union general secretary and in exchange he’s going to lift the ban on the CP. Then, he’ll introduce a system of shop stewards”.36

When he was young, Jones had fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, which gave him a lot of respect on the left. Now, he was the leader of the left bureaucracy in the union. Even a left-winger like Arthur Scargill can’t escape the bureaucracy and that was what limited him in the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5.

If you were to say to me, “why did I join IS, later the SWP, why have I been in it for 50 years?” I would say because of the philosophical and political underpinning of our party. Marx exposed the system and said we had to do away with it. Lenin developed Marxism on how you build a party and what its tactics should be. Leon Trotsky showed how to fight back against the far right. There would have been no Rock Against Racism or anything else if it hadn’t been for Trotsky. Add to that our position on the trade union bureaucracy. My experience confirmed that position. The bureaucracy is the reformist enemy, but the CP had forgotten that. Then, you’ve got Cliff’s understanding of state capitalism. Trotsky described Stalin’s Russia as a degenerated workers’ state. However, when something degenerates there is a point when it becomes nothing like what its original form was. When an apple degenerates, it becomes inedible.

Tony: Can you explain the National Dock Labour Scheme?

Eddie: The National Dock Labour Scheme was a war-time measure introduced in 1942 by the Government to end casual employment on the docks. Before that, gangs had to queue up for work at the dock gates on daily basis. A new scheme was introduced by the Labour government in 1947.37 My dad thought the 1942 scheme was better. During the war, the younger dockers had been conscripted into the armed forces, so they needed the older dockers and they needed to keep them sweet. If you were unemployed, you got put in what was called the bun house, and you got a normal day’s pay.38 Under the 1947 scheme, our day work money was less than what you got as an unemployed worker. It was the piece work that made our money up. It was now much harder to sack a worker. The Scheme was administered by the National Dock Labour Board and regional boards. The employers had half the seats on the boards and the workers the other half. The workers now had a real say in their industry.39

Tony: Tell me about Margaret Thatcher’s final assault on the Dock Labour Scheme in 1989.

Eddie: The PLA was a public authority and not allowed to make a profit. Thatcher came out with the argument that the private sector was more efficient than the public sector. Just have a look at the water industry today! The Social Contract introduced by the 1974-9 Labour Government had a demoralising effect on workers and they were less willing to strike.40 There were two strikes over the unloading of coal by non-Dock Labour Scheme ports during the Miners‘ Strike. The officials refused to turn the dispute into a fight to bring the non-scheme ports into the scheme and support the miners. Dockers were selling jobs that should have gone to our sons. The employers had increased the redundancy money to £36,000, nearly two and a half years of money that was tax free and very attractive.

We were in Tilbury now. I was no longer a steward, Bob Light was no longer a steward.41 Shop stewards had become full time and distant from the ordinary workers, so we went back in the labour.42 This meant that, when the attack on the Dock Labour Scheme happened, we weren’t able to influence it. We had some new stewards, and they weren’t equipped. They had come out of the Blue Union. This was a smaller union in which the officials had kept closer to the rank and file.43 We had an oppositional rank-and-file in the TGWU, but they didn’t. One of the stewards phoned me up and begged: “Ron Todd is coming to the meeting tomorrow, please don’t have a go at him”.44 Todd was his mate. If I had a mate like that, I would think I was doing something wrong! The union was useless. It was the first time the officials developed that tactic of keeping on having the strike ballots required under the new anti-union laws until they got the result they wanted. It wasn’t opposed by the union officials who said that these were Acts of Parliament that we couldn’t oppose, and this rendered us helpless. They wore us down with the ballots. When the first attack took place, Southampton had walked out of the gate en masse only for one of our stewards to phone them to encourage them to go back to work. It was all down to this relationship with the trade union officials. We went on strike to defend the scheme, but they sacked all the militants, including me. Our industrial power could have prevented this from happening.

Tony: What did you do after you left the docks? And what do you think about the prospects for socialism today?

Eddie: First, I went to East London Poly.45 I did a course in cultural studies. I loved it! It was the summit of Thatcherism, but my mates in the dock were more progressive than many of the students, which was annoying. Post-modernism was taking over the teaching. One of the tutors argued that “there is no such thing as truth.” “So, the Holocaust never happened?”, I asked. A Jewish student was furious with the tutor. One teacher called Marx deterministic. I said, “he spent half his life trying to build the International Working Men’s Association because he knew you couldn’t get revolution without human agency, so how is he deterministic?” Someone wrote on the board in the classroom: “Shut that Marxist docker up!” Of course, I took no notice. After that, I got a driving job with social services—but Marxism is still alive.

We’ve got to get all workers to that point where they are in control. We’ve got no rank-and-file movement now. It’s got to be rebuilt. The memory of the class is so important. Preparation for strikes is very important, but an inquest on the strike is just as important. You’ve got to learn how to do things better next time. We have all the elements necessary to get rid of this society. The level of crisis is increasing. The ways we manufacture everything and distribute everything are not aligned with each other. Workers die of diseases they should not die of. It’s only because we live in this irrational system. Capitalism produces Thames Water and Carillion and all these companies that they asset strip and ruin workers’ lives. We’ve got to get rid of this system.


Eddie Prevost was a leading worker militant in the London docks from 1960 to 1989. He joined the International Socialists, now the Socialist Workers Party, in 1972 and remains an active member to this day.


Notes

1 The Blitz was a major German aerial bombing campaign against London and other British cities in 1940 and 1941.

2 In London’s East End.

3 The 11 plus was an exam taken by school children at 11 years old to decide which type of secondary school they attended. It played a major role in determining whether children went into manual, white collar or professional jobs later in life.

4 The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition and fair that attracted millions of visitors from across the United Kingdom in the summer of 1951.

5 Skint is slang for having no money.

6 Huguenots were Protestant émigrés from France who had to flee to London in the 17th century because of religious persecution.

7 La de dah means posh or upper class

8 Military conscription was compulsory in the UK until 1960.

9 The Indian Workers Association was an organisation of migrant workers from the Indian sub-Continent associated with the Communist Party.

10 The Guilty Men (Penguin, 1998) was originally published anonymously in 1940, denouncing the British ruling class’s policy of appeasement of Hitler and Benito Mussolini in the 1930s.

11 Governor is slang for boss.

12 The Committee of 100 organised direct action against nuclear weapons installations in Britain.

13 The leaders of the ETU were in the CP at this time.

14 The 1960 anti-union propaganda film, The Angry Silence starring Richard Attenborough, was based on this dispute.

15 The ganger was like a foreman or leading hand. As Eddie explains, on the docks, the ganger was accountable to the workers, unlike foremen in other industries at the time.

16 Piece work is a form of payment by output common in British industry at the time as opposed to measured day working where workers are paid a fixed hourly rate regardless of output.

17 A group of three adjacent docks in Newham named after members of the royal family.

18 See Pennington, 1960.

19 Shot means the cargo had got strewn all over the hold of the ship while out at sea.

20 In 1968, Enoch Powell, senior member of the Tory Shadow Cabinet, gave a vicious racist speech threatening that there would be ”rivers of blood“ in Britain if immigration was allowed to continue.

21 The International Socialists (IS) were forerunners of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) with which this jourrnal is associated.

22 Grunwicks was an important strike by Asian women workers demanding union recognition.

23 Containerisation was a huge leap in the forces of production which meant that cargo did not need to be loaded and unloaded at each stage of its journey. It meant that every part of the logistics process could be standardised from trucks and depots to ships and cranes.

24 The river is deeper at Tilbury which is nearer the sea and therefore suitable for the new larger ships designed to carry containers.

25 An injunction is a legal order. The Industrial Relations Court had been set up to enforce the Industrial Relations Act.

26 A prison in North London.

27 An unofficial strike is one not sanctioned by the trade union.

28 Micky Fenn was an IS member and dock shop steward at that time. Fleet Street in central London was where all national newspapers were printed at the time.

29 Tony Cliff was the founder and a leading member of the IS (later Socialist Workers’ Party) until his death in 2000.

30 See below.

31 Registered dockers means dockers who were part of the Dock Labour Scheme.

32 For more on the Pentonville Five dispute, see Light and Prevost, 2022, and Darlington and Lyddon, 2001.

33 The new programme of the CP produced for the 1951 General Election. See CPGB 1951,Section V.

34 A ginger group approach means seeking to influence the trade union bureaucracy from within the machine, including getting left officials elected to key positions, rather than organising independently. This had been CP industrial policy since the late 1930s.

35 Jack Dash was a leading CP militant in the docks. He sat on the workers’ side of the National Dock Labour Board.

36 The Broad Left was the CP led left election vehicle in the TGWU.

37 This followed a six-week unofficial national docks strike in 1945 opposed by the CP. See Penningon,1960.

38 The bun house was a nickname for the social security office where unemployed dockers signed on for financial support. If you had to sign on at the bun house, it meant that you only got to eat bread not meat.

39 The scheme gave dockers jobs for life and guaranteed them a minimum income.

40 The Social Contract was an agreement between the Labour government and the union leaders, including Jack Jones, in which the union leaders agreed to hold back pay demands in return for increased public spending.

41 Bob Light was another SWP member in the Royals.

42 “Back in the labour” means the same as “back to the tools”, ie returning to ordinary work from full time union activity.

43 The Blue Union or NASD had by this time become part of the TGWU.

44 Ron Todd was TGWU General Secretary from 1985 to 1992.

45 Today, the University of East London.


References

Communist Party of Great Britain, 1951, The British Road to Socialism https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/brs/1951/51.htm.

Darlington, Ralph and Dave Lyddon, 2001, Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain, 1972 (Bookmarks).

Light, Bob and Eddie Prevost, 2022, “Brows Bound with Victorious Wreaths: The Pentonville Five and the ‘Glorious Summer’ of 1972”, International Socialism 175 (summer).

Pennington, Bob, 1960, “Docks: Breakaway and Unofficial Movements”, International Socialism 2 (autumn).