THE LONDON DOCK LABOURERS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXII, Issue 8902, 19 September 1889, Page 5

THE LONDON DOCK LABOURERS.

HORRIBLE LONDON. HOW THE POOR LIVE. [By Georgs R. Sims.] To get an odd job at the docks is often the last hope of the labouring men who are out of regular employment, and to whom the acquisition of a few shillings for rent, and the means of subsistence for themselves and families, is a task fraught with as much difficulty as were some of the labours the accomplishment of which added in no inconsiderable degree to the posthumous fame of Hercules.

When it is borne in mind that sometimes at the West India Docks—taking one for example—as many as 2600 hands can be taken on in the morning, it will be easily understood that the chance of employment draws an immense concourse of men daily to the gates.

The time to see what I venture to think is one of the most remarkable sights in the world is an hour at which the general public is not likely to be passing by. Sometimes the hands are engaged as early as four, but it is generally about six o’clock that the quay-gangers ascend the rostrums or elevated stands which are placed all along the outside wall, and survey the huge crowd in front of them, and commence to call them out for work and send them into the different docks where the good ships lie, with their vast cargoes, waiting for willing hands to unload tncm. The pay is flvepence an hour, and the day's work lasts for eight hours. It is miscellaneous, and a man is expected to put his hand to anything in the shape of loading or unloading that the occasion may require.

Stand outside the dock gates any morning about six, and you will have plenty to study among the vast crowd of men, more or less dilapidated aud hungty-looking, who 'fill all the approaches and line the banks in front of tne rostrums.

Many of them are regular men, who are called “ royals,” and who are pretty sure to be taken on, their names being on the ganger’s list and called out by him as a matter of course. These men show signs of regular employment, aud differ very little from the ordinary labourer. The strangest part of the crowd are the ragged, wretched, woebegone looking outcasts who are penniless, and whose last hope is that they may have the luck to be selected by the ganger. Many of these come from the distant parts of London, from the North, and the South, aud the East, and the West. Some of them have tramped all night, and flung themselves down to sleep at the great dock gates in the early dawn, determined to be in the front rank, ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OR MEN. They are of all sorts,sizes,and conditions. Among them is the seedy clerk, the broken-down betting-man, the discharged soldier, the dismissed policeman, the ticket-of-leave man, the Jack-of-all-trades, the countryman, and the London rough. An enormous proportion of the regular men are Irish and of the ordinary labouring class, but now and then a foreigner or a negro crops up among the crowd. One man there is among them who wears his rough jacket and his old battered billycock with a certain air of gentility, and whose features are strongly refined when compared with the coarser lineaments of those around him.

In the docks they call him the “ nobleman.” He is a gentleman by birth and education; he can swear, 1 believe, in four languages; and as a matter of fact is the son of a baronet, and has a right to be called ‘‘sir” if he chose to demand it. Into the sad story which has brought about this social wreck it is no business of mine to enter, though to the friendly dock police and to the gangers the baronet is ready enough to tell it. The baronet can work, in spite of his pedigree, as well as any of his the fivepence an hour is a godsend to him. Strange are the stories of vicissitude which many of these men can tell. I have said it is the last haven of the outcast, and by that 1 do not mean to imply that all docklabourers are destitute; but that among the huge crowd of outsiders who come daily to take their chance are many of those who form the absolutely most helpless and most hopeless of the London poor. No character ia required for the work, no questions are asked; a man can call himself any name he likes; so long as he has two hands and is willing to use them, that is all the Dock Company require. Among these men are hundreds of those whose cases are so difficult to deal with in respect of house accommodation. They are the men who have to pay exorbitant rents for the filthy single rooms of the slums, and whose fight with starvation is daily and hourly. They are the men earning precarious livelihoods who are objected to by the managers of all the new industrial dwellings, which have swept away acres of accommodation of an inferior class. A man who is dock-laboner may earn a pound a week —he may earn only five shillings. Sometimes they get taken on every day in a week, and then for a fortnight they may have to go emptyhanded from the gates day after day. HOPES AND PEARS. Once fix on your mind the wear and tear, the anxiety and doubt, the strain and harass, the ups and downs of a life like this, count the smallness of the gain and the uncertainty of the employment, and you will understand why it is that the common body of men who are classed as “ dock labourers ” are reckoned as among the poorest of the London poor who make aa honest effort to keep out of the workhouse. "Watch the crowd—-there must be over 2000 present in the great outer circle. The gangers are getting into the rostrums —two tea ships have come in, and a large number of men will be required. Hope is on : many faces now; the men who have* been lying in hundreds sleeping on the bank opposite—so usual a bed that the grass is worn away—leap to their feet. The crowd surges close together, and every eye is fixed in the direction of the ganger, who, up in his pulpit, bis big book, with the list of the names of regular men, or “royals,” open before him, surveys the scene, and prepares for business. He calls out name after name—the men go up and take a pass, present it to the police at the gate, and file in to be told off to the different vessels. It is when the “royals” are exhausted that the real excitement begins. The men who are left are over a thousand strong—they have come on the chance. The ganger eyes them with a quick, searching glance, then points his finger to them, “ You—and you—and you —and you.” The extra men go through the usual formality, and pass in. There is still hope for hundreds of them. The ganger keeps on engaging men; but presently he stops. You can almost hear a sigh run through the ragged crowd. There comes into some of the pale, pinched faces a look of unutterable woe—the hope that welled up in the heart has sunk back again. There is no chance now. All the men wanted are engaged. NEVER A CHANCE !

As you turn and look at these men and study them—these, the unfortunate ones—you picture to yourself what the situation means to some of them. What are their thoughts as they turn a way ? Some of them, perhaps, have grown callous to suffering, hardened in despair. To-day’s story is but the story of yesterday, and will be the story of to-morrow. There is on many of their faces that look of vacant unconcern to everything that comes of long familiarity with adversity. They have the look of the man who came into the French Court of Justice to take his trial for murdering his colleague at the galleys, and who had branded on his arm his name—- “ Never a chance!” Never a chance when a man gets that branded, not ou his arm but on his heart; he takes bad luck very quietly. It is the good luck which would astonish and upset him. Some of the men, new-comers most of

these, and not used to the game yet, show a certain rough emotion. It is fair to Bay it generally takes the form of an expletive. Others, men who look as though they had sunk by degrees from better positions, go away with a quivering lip and a flush of disappointment. If we could follow the thoughts of some of them, we should see far away, and perhaps where in some wretched room a wife- and children sit cowering and shivering, waiting for the evening to come, when father will bring back the price of the day's work he ha* gone to seek. It mnst be with a heavy heart that his wife towards mid-day heart the sound of her footsteps on the creaking stairs. This advent means no joy. to her. That footstep tells its sad, oruel tale in one single creak. He has not been, taken on at the docks; another weary day l of despair has to be sat through, another night she and the little ones must go hungry to bed. It must not be imagined that the me* clear away directly who have not bean SB* gaged. Hope springs eternal ill tfebte human breast, and dozens of men still wait, on in hope. It sometimes happens that * ship comes in late, or something happens, and more men are required. Then thj», ganger comes out and picks them from among the remaining crowd. Dozens of them hang about on the off chance until two; after that it rarely happens any men are engaged, so the, last, brave few who have stood with wistful eyes for six or eijsjht hours at the gate, turn slowly on their heels and go—God knows, where!

Some of them, I believe, are absolutely homeless aud friendless, and hangabonb' street corners, getting perhaps a bit of tobacco from one or another more fortunate in this world's goods than themaelvee, and with it stave off the gnawing pangs of hunger. They bang about upside streets and round corners till night comes, then fling themselves down and sleep where they can, and go back once more at dawn to the gates of their paradise, to wait and hope, and be disappointed perhaps again. THE BRIGHTER SIDE. This is the dark side of the dock labourer’s story. It bas a brighter end better one inside, where on mi lee amt miles of wharf hundreds of men, package and bale-laden, are hurrying to and fro, stowing the produce of the world in shed after shed. Thousands of barrels of sugar are lying in one, and the air is perfectly sweet with it. The ground is treacly with it, and one's boots are saturated with it at one walks through a thick slime of what looks like toffee gone wrong in a s weetstuff window on a hot summer day. Thousand* of boxes of tea, just in from China, axe in, another shed, and their next-door neigh* boursare myriads of bags of wheat. Th* steam cranes are going as far as the ey# can see, whirling and dragging, and swinging huge bale after bale greedily from the good ships’ holds; lighters laden to the top are being piled higher still; whole regiments of men bent with precious burthen* are filing from wharf to warehousej th* iron wheels of the trolly, as it is pushed rapidly over the asphalted floor, make a music of their own; and the whole scene is shut iu with a background of shipping—argosies freighted with the wealth of the Indies, the produce of many a land beyond the seas; all AW* goes to make up a picture of industry and enterprise and wealth, which gives just a little pardonable pride to the Englishman, who contemplates it for the first time.. HOW THE DOCKS ARE MANAGED. The system in the docks is admirable* The strange men who are taken on are n*h taken entirely on trust. There is a uniform scale of pay for old bands and new, but there is an overlooker to see that all work well. If a man shirks or makes himself iiv any way objectionable, the process is short and summary: “Go to the office and take your money.” The man is discharged— he is paid for the time he has worked, hut no more; and he can leave the docks out of the question as a field for his talents, if he has shown himself a duffer. A mark is put against his name in the ganger’s book.

At the door every man who leaves, ths docks is searched. This is more of a pro* ventive measure than anything else. Th& men handle many packages o£ valuable commodities which have been broken in transit, and could easily extract some for their private use. It would not be hard for a gentleman brought face to face with a broken chest of tea to fill his pockets with a loose poon<s or two, for instance. The search at the gate stops that. Knowing that detection is certain, those men who would be die* honest if they could get a chance see the impossibility of escaping with their plunder, and so, making a virtue of necessity, respect the eighth commandment. The docks are in the custody of a special body of dock police, who maintain order, keep guard night and day over the goods in the warehouse, search the men, and check all the carts and vans passing out or in at the gates, and are generally responsible for everything. The boys employed as messengers between the Dock House in Billiter street and the docks themselves, and also the lads employed on the spot, are all dressed in a remarkably neat uniform, and add to the picturesqueness of the busy scene. All these boys are drilled, and come to attention and salute their superiors with the precision of old soldiers. I have given a little space to the inside of the docks because such numbers of the men whose homes we have visited in previous chapters are employed there, and it is there that unskilled labour finds the readiest market. HOW THE POOR BXISy. But it is outside that one must search for the misery which those who know them best acknowledge to be the commonest lot of the dock labourer. Inside, when the men are at work, the beer barrel on a stand with wheels is trundled merrily along at certain hours, and there is a contractor who supplies the men with food. It is outside that the beer barrel and the food contractor find their occupation gone. Poverty in its grimmest form exists here, and it is for these men, struggling so bravely and waiting so patiently for the work their hands are only too willing to do, that philanthropists might look a little more earnestly into the question of boose accommodation.

Looking at the uncertainty of employ* ment, it is not hard for anyone to see that a rent of 5b for a. single room is too much for these men to pay, and they cannot go out into the suburbs, where rents ate cheaper, because they could not get to the docks in anything like condition to work. These men must live within a reasonable distance of tbeir labour, and to do so they have to pay exorbitant prices for vile accommodation. They are kept in the lowest depths of poverty, because rent almost exhausts all the money—all that the luckiest can hope to earn. “ Honest sweat, the poet has told q«, is a very noble decoration to a man's brow, and these men are plentifully decorated before their task is over, I can assure yon. It is scandalous that having done all they can, risked life and limb (for dock accidents are numerous and keep a hospital busy), and done their duty in that state of life tot which it has pleased God to call them, they should have to creep home to fever dens and pestilential cellars. Half the money they pay ought to go for food , for themselves and their children, instead of into the well-lined pockets of those who are making fortunes out of the death-traps they call “House Property.” This short and hurried sketch of life ii) the docks is necessarily incomplete. Its one great feature connected with the subject of this book my readers can see for themselves at any time they like to take a long walk in the very early morning. No one who does not see the vast crowd can appreciate the character and pathetic elements it contains. I cannot write them With my pen; but I can gratefully ledge my indebtedness to Mr A. U Brownlow, of the London Offices, and Captain Sheppy, of the dock police, who# kindness enabled me to see nn#j :pequJiM advantages this phasaof How the Poor Live.