5. The Dockers
Casual labour

Most dock workers were employed on a casual basis. Although some 'permanent' men were employed full-time by the dock companies, the vast majority were casual labourers taken on by the day, half-day or even by the hour.

Several times a day there was a 'call-on' at each of the docks when labour was hired for short periods.

The 'call-on' was a desperate business for if the men could not get work then they and their families did not eat.

B: 'Presently you know, by the stream pouring through the gates and the rush towards particular spots, that the 'calling foremen' have made their appearance.

Then begins the scuffling and scrambling forth of countless hands high in the air, to catch the eye of him whose voice may give them work.

As the foreman calls from a book the names, some men jump on the backs of others, so as to lift themselves high above the rest, and attract the notice of him who hires them.

All are shouting. Some cry aloud his surname, some his Christian name, others call out their own names, to remind him that they are there.

Now the appeal is made in Irish blamey - now in broken English. Indeed, it is a sight to sadden the most callous, to see thousands of men struggling for only one day's hire, the scuffle being made the fiercer by the knowledge that hundreds out of the number there assembled must be left to idle the day out in want.

To look in the faces of that hungry crowd is to see a sight that must be ever remembered. Some are smiling to the foreman to coax him into remembrance of them; others, with their protruding eyes, eager to snatch at the hoped-for pass.

For " many have gone there, and gone through the same struggle - the same cries; and have gone away, after all, without the work they screamed for.'

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861.

D: "You can imagine for a moment from 1,500 to 2,000 men crowded together, the front men forced up against the chain: the back men are climbing over the heads of those in front, and the contractor behind the chain is picking out the men, generally his own favourites.

I myself have had eight or ten men upon my shoulders and my head, and I have been hurt several times in a struggle for employment like that." "Unless a man is very strong,' says another witness, "there is a great possibility of his clothes being torn off his back."

The Times, 29 August 1889.

C: The call-on at London Dock: race for the chain, from the Iillustrated London News, 1885.