THE DOCK LABORER.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XVI, Issue 5578, 25 September 1889, Page 3

THE DOCK LABORER.

« HORRIBLE LONDON. Althotoh the dock strike is now over, the following from " How the Poor Live" will bo rend with interest by those who have not read (ieorge R. Sims' capital little book : — To get an odd job at the docks is often the last hope of the laboring men who fire out of regular employment, and to whom the acquisition of a few shillings for rent, and the means of subsistence for theniselvees and families, is a task fraught with as much difficulty as were some of the labors the accomplishment of which added in no inconsiderable degree to the posthumous fume of Hercules. When it is borne in mind that sometimes at the West India docks — taking one for example — as many as 2500 hands can be taken on in the morning, it will be easily understood that the chance of employment draws an immeuse concourse of men daily to the gates. The time to see what I venture to think is one of the most renuirkable 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 th« 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 them. The pay is tivepence 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 and hungry-looking, who fill all the approaches and line the banks in front of the rostrums. Many of them are regular men, who are called " royals," and who are pretty sure to be taken on, ther names being on the | ganger's list, and called out by him as a matter of course. These men show signs of regular employment, and differ very little from the ordinary laborer. The strangest part of the crowd is 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, and the East and West. Some of them have tramped all night, and (lung themselves down to sleep at the great dock gates in the early dawn, determined to be in the front rank. ALL :>OEX.-. AND CON'M'JIONS OF :i£X. There are 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, Jack-of-all-trades, the country man 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 ;t negro crop up among the crowd. One man there is among them who wears his rough jacket and his old battered billycock i with ii certain air of gentility, and whose features -ire strongly refined when compared with the coarser lineaments of tlio.se around him. In th c docks they call him the " nobleman." Ho is a gentleman by birth and education ; he can swear, I 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 abouc 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 mates, and t!ie hvepence 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 I do not mean to imply that all docklabourers are destitute ; but that among the huge crowd of outsiders who come d lily to take their chance are many of

those who form the absolutely most hel less and mosfc hopeless of the London poc No character is required for the work, i questions are asked ; a man can call hii self any name he likes ; so long as he h two hands and is willing to use them, th is all the Dock Company requires. Amoi these men are hundreds of those who cases are so difficult to deal with in re pec't of house accommodation. They a the men who have to pay exorbitant ren for the filthy Single rooms of the slum and whose tight with starvation is dai. and hourly. They are the men earnii precarious livelihoods who are objected 1 by the managers of all the new industri. dwellings, which have swept away acr< of accommodation of an inferior class, man who is a dock-labourer may earn pound a week — he may earn only tiv shillings. Sometimes they get taken o every day in a week, and then for a for night they may have to go empty-hande from the gates day after day. HOPES AND FEARS. Once fix on your mind the wear an tear, the anxiety and doubt, the strain an harass, the ups and downs of a life lik this, count the smallness of the gain an the uncertainty of the employment, hii you will understand -why it is that th common body of men who are classed a ' dock-labourers " are reckoned as amoii: the poorest of the London poor whomak an honest effort to keep out of the work hoit.se. Watch the crowd — there must ta over 2000 present in the great outer circle The gangers are getting into the rostrum; — two tea ships have come in, and a largt number of men will be required. Hope i; on many faces now ; the men uiio hav< been lying in hundreds sleeping on tin bank opposite— so usual a bed that the grass is worn away — lea]) to their feet The crowd surges close together, am' every eye is fixed in the direction of tin ganger, who, up in his pulpit,his big book, with the list of the names of regular men. or " royals " open before 'him, surveys tlu scene, and prepares for business. He calU out name after name —the men go up and take a pass, present it to the police attht gate, and tile in to be told oft 1 to the different vessels. It is when the "roj'als ' are exhausted that the real excitement begins. The men who are left are over a 1000 strong — they have come on the chance. The ganger eyes them with a (piick, searching glance, then points hi.s 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. NBVKR A CHANCE ! As you turn and look at these men and study them — these the unfortunate ones — you picture to yoursalf what the situation means to some of them. What are their thoughts as they turn away ! Some of bhem, perhaps, have grown callous .to suffering, hardened in despair. Today's story is but the stoiy of yestei-dny, 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 ti man gets that brand, not on his arm, but on his heart ; he takes bad luck very (uieth/. It is the good luck which would istonish and upset him. Some of the men, new-comers most of :hose, and not used to the game yet, show i certain rough emotion. It is fair to say t generally takes the form of an expletive. Jthers, men who look as though they iacl sunk by degrees from better positions, go away with a quivering lip and a lush 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 chilIren sit cowering and shivering, waiting ror the evening to come, when father will bring back the price of the day's work he lias gone to seek. It must be with a icavy heart that this wife towards midlay hears the sound of her husband's footsteps on the creaking stairs. This advent neans no joy to her. That footstep tells ts sad, cruel tale in one single creak. He las not been taken on at the docks ; an>ther weary day of despair has to be sat ;hrough, another night she and the little mes must go hungry to bed. It must not be imagined that the men dear away directly who have not been engaged. Hope springs eternal in the human M'east, and dozens of men still wait on in lope. It sometimes happens that a ship ionics in late, or .something happens, and nore men are required. Then the ganger jomes out and picks them from among the ■emaining crowd. Dozens of them hang about on the off jhanee until two ; after that it rarely lappens that any men are engaged, so the ast brave few who have stood with blist"ul eyes for six or eight hours at the gate, ;urn slowly on their heels and go ---(Sod knows where ! Some of them, I believe, are absolutely liemeless and friendless, and hang about street corners, getting perhaps a bit of tobacco from one or another more fortunate in this world's goods than themselves md with it stave off the gnawing pangs of hunger. They hang about up side streets ;u id 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 laborer's story. It has a brighter and better one inside, where on miles and miles of wharf hundreds of men, package and bale-laden, are hurrying to and fro,

(Continued from third p<t{l*>) fctiwine fcha pi'oduco of the wovW in shad af r*r shod. Thousand* of Wrelft of sugav 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 as 0110 walks through a thick slimo of what looks like totfue'yonc wrong in asweetstuff window on a hot summer day. Thousands of boxes of tea, just in from China, are in another shed, and their next-door neighbors arc myriads of bags of wheat. Tho steam cranes are going as far as the eye cm see, whirling and dragging and swinging huge bale after bale greedily from tho good ship's hoM ; lighters laden to the top iire being piled higher still ; while regiments of men bent with precious burthens are going from wharf to warehouse ; the 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 in with a background of shipping —argosies freighted with the wealth of t'le Indies, the produce of many a land bayond the seas ; all this 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 MAX.VUKI*. The system in the docks is admirable. The strange men who .ire taken on are not taken entirely on trust. There is a uniform scale of pay for old hands and new, but there is an overlooker to see that all work well. If a man shirks or makes himself in any way objectionable, the process is short and summary : " Clo to the offtce and take your money." The man is discharged— he is paid for the time he has worked, but 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 the docks is searched. This is more of a preventive measure than anything else. The men handle many packages of 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 pound or two, for instance. The search at the gate stops that. Knowing that detection is certain, those men who would be dishonest if they could get a chance see the impossibility of escaping with their plunder, and ho, making a virtue of necessity, respect the eighth commandment. The doefks 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, aud 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 1 ids 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, find it is there that unskilled labor finds the readiest market. HOW THE I'OOK EXIST. But it is outside that one must search for the misery which those who know them best acknowledges to be the commonest 1)t of the dock laborer. 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 rind their occupation gone. Poverty in its grimmest form exists here, and ir is for these men, struggling 30 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 house accommodation. Looking at the uncertainty of employment, it is not hard for anyone to see that a rent of 5s for a single room is too much for these men to pay, aud they cannot go out into the suburbs, where rents are cheaper, because they could not get to the docks in anything like condition to work. These men must live within a reasonable distance of their labor, 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 us, is a very noble decoration to a man's brow, and these men are plentifully decorated before their task is over, I can assure you. 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 to 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 in the docks is necessarily incomplete Its <>ne 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 its contains. I cannot write them with my pen ; but I can gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr A. T. A. Brownlow,of the London Offices, and Captain Shoppy, of the dock police, whose kindness enabled me to see under peculiar advantages this phrase of How thk Pooh Livk.

PRUND & CG, AUCKLAND AND WELLINGTON,