5. The Dockers
A Docker's Work

The work of the casual dock labourer in its simplest form depended on raw strength. Whether lifting, carrying or pushing, the work was physically demanding but involved little skill.

Some dockers, often the men with permanent employment, did specialise in particular jobs which required certain skills.

The deal porters (see Source B below) and the meat porters fell into this category. So also did the coopers who repaired and renewed barrels and casks, which might contain anything from tobacco and wine to oysters and sausage skins.

Although much of the loading and unloading work was carried out by gangs, other men were employed individually: such as the 'port marker', who painted on export goods the port to which the goods were going; the 'bedder out' who separated cargo on the floor of the sheds; and the 'box knocker' who opened cases for customs officials and re-nailed them afterwards.

B: 'Deal portering is heavy and dangerous work which cannot safely be undertaken by any save experienced men.

The shoulder of an experienced deal porter is said to develop a callosity [hardness] which enables it to bear the weight and friction of a load of planks. But even with a hardened shoulder the deal porter has an unenviable task.

To carry over a shaking, slippery plankway a bundle of shaking slippery planks, when a fall would almost certainly mean serious injury, is work for specialists,' New Survey of London Life and labour, 1928.

D: Henry Mayhew identified three basic types of work in the docks.

The work may be divided into three classes. 1.Wheel-work, or that which is moved by the muscles of the legs and weight of the body. 2. jigger, or winch-work, or that which is moved by the muscles of the arm ... [and 3.] truck work [pushing goods on a trolley]... Wheel-work is performed inside the wheel.

From six to eight men enter a wooden drum, and the men laying hold of ropes commence treading the wheel round.

The wheel is generally sixteen feet in diameter and the men treading it will often lift a ton, forty times in an hour ... Other men will get out a cargo of 800 to 900 casks of wine ... in a day and a half.

At trucking each man is said to go on average thirty miles a-day.'

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poot,W 1861-2, describing how a wheel crane worked.

E: The men run up and down like the inhabitants of an ant-hill, lifting, carrying, balancing on the back, and throwing goods on the quay.

It is true that in the discharging of grain and timber special strength or skill is required ...

Now leaving the dock quay we watch the warehouse gang. Here, again, it is heavy, unskilled work.

To tip a cask, sack, or bale on to a truck, and run it into a warehouse or down into a vault, or on to a platform of a crane, to be lifted by the hydraulic power into an upper chamber, is the rough and ready work of the warehouse gang.'

Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London, Vol. IV, Poverty, 1902.

A: Coal porters c1900

C: Dockers trucking in the East India Docks

F: A treadmill crane in a warehouse in the London Docks, 1897. This picture shows the walking treadmill that powered the crane.