Seamen’s Quiet Leader

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31092, 22 June 1966, Page 13

Seamen’s Quiet Leader

[By SIMON KAVANAUGH] LONDON. Who leads the 62,500 British merchant seamen who are on strike ? He is a plump, balding Scotsman named Bill Hogarth a mildmannered, soft-spoken family man who lives in Clapham, has a caravan for a hobby and cannot sleep for worry. Bill Hogarth Is a man who holds the door open for you and goes shopping for his wife, a man of whom one irritated shipowner is reported to have said: “He's so damned reasonable you can’t be rude to him.”

“Reasonable,” of course, applied to his manner. The shipowners have called his demands “ridiculous,” “irresponsible” and “outrageous.” Bill Hogarth smiles shyly, and reluctantly turns the screw a little tighter. The processes which put

■ this singularly unaggressive man at the head of a powerful union of tough, outspoken men are somehow peculiarly British. The National Union of Seamen has had a chequered history. For many years it was an unofficial body, the giant Transport and General Workers’ Union claiming its members. Not In 1926 It drifted along in a haphazard way and managed to incur the wrath of the whole trade movement by failing to support the General Strike in 1926. Discipline in the N.U.S. is of necessity difficult to maintain, with up to half its members scattered around the world at any one time, and leadership has been an uneviable task. The executive have tended to be moderates, taciturn, slow-speaking deepthinking types, as good seamen often are.

But. the younger elements have been growing increasingly restive and more numerous in the last 10 years and have been vociferously impatient with their leaders. General secretaries, howi

ever, have been authoritarian, and it was perhaps this that ensured Bill Hogarth’s succession in 1962. For he is dedicated to the democratisation of his union,: unlike his predecessors, he accepts majority verdicts against him without argument or demur. He prefers to influence rather than control. It is perhaps reasonable to assume that in America a leader would have been found from the by-no-means-small minority who have been demanding a strike for five years. But in Britain the committee man won: “And Bill,” says one of his colleagues,, “is the best committee man; I have ever known.” Long Experience 0 His experience in negotia-j tion—and of the sea—is for-1 midable. Now aged 56, he started as a 50s-a-month deck-! hand at 16, sailing on rusty coasters out of his hown town, Glasgow. In the Second World War; he was a bosun in a troopship until he was appointed a full-time union official. In; 1960 he was London District Secretary, and two years later

i was at the top. i He has achieved much for his members: a complaints procedure for men at sea has been agreed: non contributory pension schemes will take effect soon, and, after much struggling, the N.U.S. is only one step away from achieving Hogarth's ambition of a shop steward in every ship. Friends say that he did not want a strike but that, forced to it by a majority, he is pursuing it with all the vigour at his command—a true democrat ■ )