CELEBRATING ENGLISH DOCK STRIKE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 21 September 1936, Page 3

CELEBRATING ENGLISH DOCK STRIKE

WEST END BANQUET FOR SURVIVORS (By Air Mail—From a Special Correspondent.) LONDON, 15th August. Two hundred men will sit down to a sumptuous dinner in a London West End restaurant soon, and revive memories of the days when they lived on Salvation Army soup. They are survivors of the 75,000 dockers, who, in 1889, took part in Britain’s first great strike. They and their wives are to be the guests of Ben Tillett, the rugged little veteran of the trade union movement, who organised and led that strike. The vast majority of the strikers are now dead. Ben Tillett. who is 76, wants to meet those who still live.

“I’d spent eight years trying to organise those dockers,” Ben Tillett recalled this week. “Cohditions at the docks were terrible, brother, terrible. I remember a bunch of men walked through the night from London to Tilbury, got work at fourpence an hour, and at the end of half an hour were paid off with tuppence each.

.“Eight years it took before wc could form a union. When we did, I was appointed General Secretary at £2 per week. “For another two years I went round the docks, and got mostly kicks from the men. Then we called a strike. We won that strike, set up a new system for dockers, and that system has-been the basis of conditions for dockers ever since.

“None of us is young now— l’ll be 76 myself next month—but all who can get along I want to be my guests at a banquet worthy of the occasion.”