Last week, I invited Richard Ince (6th generation umbrella maker of James Ince & Sons), Henry Jones (4th generation dairyman of Jones Brothers) and Paul Gardner (4th generation paper bag seller of Gardners Market Sundriesmen) along to the Bishopsgate Institute for a chit chat about family businesses in Spitalfields. Colin O’Brien took their portraits.
I’m Paul Gardner, a fourth generation paper bag man and scale repairer. My business started in 1870 in Spitalfields and it was my great grandfather – James Gardner, that began it, and he carried on until he died, when my grandfather, Bertie, went into the business. He was sent to the Western Front in 1917 and got called off the train because he was one of the only people who could do scales repairs in the area, and it saved him. He carried on until my dad, Roy, came into the business in the 1940s, he was in the Elite Air Arm in the Second World War. Slowly we diversified into selling paper bags, carrier bags, and things like that, shop sundries really. My dad carried on in the shop until 1968 when he died at forty-two and my mum had to run the shop and leave us to get ready to go to school by ourselves – until 1972, when I took over.
It was something I wanted to do really. On the first day of my school holidays, my mum said to me, “You’ll have to go up to the shop,” and that was it. I think she asked me, “Do you mind working the first Saturday? Just working six days a week to start with?” I said “Alright” and I was doing it for twenty-six years. I used to get to the shop at half five but I finished by one o’clock so that wasn’t too bad. It was always entertaining up there, you had all sorts of different characters coming in the shop. When the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market moved to the Hackney Marshes it was a big worry how we would continue, but slowly the area has improved for me in the last few years with lots of little markets opening up. I do want to carry on as long as I can because its something I’ve done all my life. And the other thing is that most of my customers are my friends now.
My name’s Henry Jones of Jones Brothers Dairy. My grandfather, Henry, started it in 1877. He came from the family farm in Borth, near Aberystwyth. They were cow keepers and they drove the cows up from Wales and kept them around the Barbican area, milked them and then bottled the milk and actually delivered it around the City and East End. My grandmother was Sarah and they had thirteen children and all lived beside Middlesex St, in Stoney Lane. They actually lived behind the business and you can appreciate how difficult it is to keep cows, run a business, deliver milk and have thirteen children.
When my grandfather passed away in 1921, he left my grandmother with five children under the age of six to bring up, as well as running the business. She did marvellously well and when she passed away in 1937, two hundred people went to Paddington station to see her off, because she was very good to the local community. She’s buried in Borth, same as my grandfather, back where our roots are.
The children each had shares, but my father Henry and one of his brothers bought the shares off the other siblings and that’s how the name changed to Jones Brothers. When my father and his brother went off to serve in the war and the girls ran the business, delivering the milk all around the city. After the war the brothers came back and, in 1968 when Stoney Lane was pulled down, we moved into the new shop, where we’ve been for forty-two years, in Middlesex Street. I’m fortunate my children follow in my footsteps – and I’m very proud, one of the proudest people around, that I’ve managed to keep my children involved.
I’m Richard Ince, sixth generation umbrella manufacturer. Circa 1800 or so, my ancestors came down from mid-Suffolk, round Cavendish way, moving to this part of town because silk was woven here and I imagine whalebone came off the docks – mainly out the front door, but maybe out the back door as well – for ladies’ carriage parasols.
Two or three Inces merged into James Ince & Sons, round about 1830. My father did all the research into the history and he just left me the umbrellas. So I do different research, buying old Ince umbrellas or finding some of the patents that my ancestors took out, I know of three. We had about half a dozen premises in Spitalfields including the one next door to the Bishopsgate Institute, plus we were based where Pizza Express are right next door and we were based in Norton Folgate too, I believe we were also in White’s Row at some point. But the biggest property was the corner of Spital Square, 298 Bishopsgate, where we were for about forty-eight years, manufacturing ladies umbrellas, gents umbrellas, what people call parasols these days but then were called garden umbrellas or sun umbrellas.
We had a big export trade through the NAAFI and Army and Navy Stores and organisations like that. We had a big staff, too up to about thirty people, but today I employ three, plus myself, and it’s been like that for the last fifteen years. Nowadays, we do niche work – umbrellas that perhaps you wouldn’t think of, flame retardant umbrellas for welders, lot of theatre props, film work. As Paul Gardner was saying, it’s never dull, every day’s different, and it’s always a challenge.
I’m fairly sure we’re two hundred years old. So we’re looking forward, but obviously we’re not sure what the next two hundred – no, next twenty years – will bring…
PAUL GARDNER: Two years!
RICHARD INCE: I think the biggest challenge will be staff, finding people who are interested in craft. We’re not a sweat shop, we pay proper money and you treat as you wish to be treated. That’s what my grandfather did and he drove the business through the war years.
HENRY JONES: I would say though it’s always difficult for an old business to come through. It is a success story – Spitalfields – without a doubt and it’s lovely to be involved in it, but if you’re a small trader, it’s very difficult because the rents are pushed up by the big companies coming in.
PAUL GARDNER: With me now, I’ve got Urban Outfitters and Tesco and Nandos more or less opposite me so that my last lease was quite hard to negotiate. I’m worried for the people in the Spitalfields Market, some of the rents for small shops are 90,000 pounds – it’s madness really. In Cheshire St, three shops moved out about a year ago and the places are still empty because they’re asking too much rent.
RICHARD INCE: I’m so surprised you’re still going, with respect Paul.
PAUL GARDNER: I know.
RICHARD INCE: It’s fantastic.
PAUL GARDNER: It’s a unique shop. You can get things off the internet, but once people come into my shop they find it different. It’s such a mess – you can hardly get in the door. It’s a selling point.
RICHARD INCE: But you know where it all is, don’t you? It’s organised chaos.
HENRY JONES: Do you sell predominantly paper still?
PAUL GARDNER: It’s gone full circle, I used to sell 50,000 carrier bags a week which were all plastic. I find that the people in the markets just go for the cheapest, but the shops now are going over to paper and I’ve had a few film companies, they buy them for extras in the films. I think there’s a film about Paul Raymond coming out in Soho …
HENRY JONES: Richard, you’re doing some umbrellas for films, aren’t you?
RICHARD INCE: We’ve done all the props for Singing in the Rain. Front three rows get wet, very wet apparently. We’ve done about four Harry Potter films with various props, Dumbledore’s Umbrella, Mrs McGonagall’s umbrella, Hagrid’s umbrella, background props…
PAUL GARDNER: That’s amazing, if you can do that.
RICHARD INCE: It’s being able to turn your hand to something no one else can do.
HENRY JONES: Something special?
RICHARD INCE: Indeed. We did all the props for the Mary Poppins shows. And that was a nice earner, because it went from the West End to Broadway, then touring the States, and there’s another one touring the Far East, Australia and Japan. So you thought one order was nice and then …
HENRY JONES: Can I get one of them umbrellas?
RICHARD INCE: What where she flies off? Do you know, the funniest thing about that was, when it first started in the West End, she was literally breaking one of those props every other night
PAUL GARDNER: Handy.
RICHARD INCE: Well it was for me, because they’d all come back for repair or replacement.
PAUL GARDNER: You know with your dairy Henry, do you go out delivering things all the time? Because that must be hard to now to get around London or do you still go out very early in the morning?
HENRY JONES: We start a lot earlier than what we used to – about 1 o’clock in the morning now.
PAUL GARDNER: Blimey, that’s not much fun is it really?
RICHARD INCE: Are we holding you up?
HENRY JONES: (Laughs) I’m used to it! It’s changed, we deliver to businesses, to schools, to cafes, restaurants, we haven’t any residential customers any more. We got through to the last two companies in the tenders to deliver to the Olympics. It’s hard, you have to go through such a long process today with all the paper work you have to fill in. The difficulty I find is I get to the top level and fill in all the paperwork and then they go, “Oh, you’re not on the list of approved suppliers,” so the difficulty for the small business is to get into these companies at all. And obviously, if you have a small profit margin, it’s nice to have that turnover – it pays your rent, pays your rates, lets you go into the pub and have a drink, doesn’t it?
PAUL GARDNER: Only once a week!
RICHARD INCE: The tender process for the Olympics is fantastic, you think “great opportunity” and yes, I was asked, and I can tell you about this because they’ve mothballed the idea and it’s too late to get 7,600 umbrellas, one for every athlete in the opening and closing ceremonies. You have to provide three years of profit and loss accounts, proof of professional indemnity, employer’s liability, and you have to have it all on computer so that you can upload it to them. So, thankfully, that tender went away because I…
PAUL GARDNER: Good job they didn’t need any paper bags from me then.
RICHARD INCE: It promised a lot didn’t it? The theory was great because we’re all within a stone’s throw of the Olympics.
HENRY JONES: I was able to fight through it, because I’ve got another generation below me that’s actually capable of doing the paperwork for me.
RICHARD INCE: Everything above 7000 pounds has to go through the tender process, so that’s a lot of tenders. Fortunately, I’m going through someone else now who’s already done the tender process and been accepted.
PAUL GARDNER: So you’re making some things?
RICHARD INCE: I’m not allowed to tell you too much because obviously they’d shoot me.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
QUESTION: Henry, just going back to what you were saying about your grandparents coming up from Wales, bringing their cows with them, obviously at that time it was a real feat? It would be a real feat now. Why did they do it?
HENRY JONES: They drove the cows up and milked them and sent them back again. I don’t know how they ever did it. At the time, London was a magnet for Welsh people to come and start dairies. I think a lot of Welsh people came up – D.H. Evans, John Lewis, Peter Jones, all the big stores.
QUESTION: Throughout the time that your families have been in the area have you ever been aware of any traders’ association existing?
RICHARD INCE: No.
HENRY JONES: I think it’s an excellent idea to be quite honest with you.
QUESTION: What would you like it to do?
HENRY JONES: My business is quite active, promoting ourselves but there needs to be more promotion for the likes of Paul Gardner, people need to know that he’s there. Obviously what we’re all after is getting customers and being introduced to larger businesses in the area, especially larger businesses, where they can be supplied from us.
PAUL GARDNER: We need to unite the small shops because, in the next few years, unless they stick together, they’ll all go – especially if the rents keep on going up – and the rates. I think my rates have doubled in three years. It is a worry for me, what’s going to happen in the next few years. So, it would be good if we could bring the small businesses together, so we have more of a voice. Because, you’re by yourself and you’re confronted by big rent increases… I’ve had it over the years where I was scared of answering the phone. Luckily, I came through, but it isn’t much fun when you’re on your own, so if we can unite the small businesses that would be a good idea, I think.
Portraits copyright © Colin O’Brien
Columbia Road Market 76
Carl Grover & his Uncle Bob
When Carl Grover was seventeen, he already had his own pitch at the market and, one Sunday in the late seventies, a photographer came along to take pictures, returning later with an envelope of black and white prints as a gift. This was long before photographers became commonplace in Columbia Rd, before the swarms of tourist with cameras that flock to the market today. Carl kept the pictures carefully in a cardboard file and although the photographer told him they had been exhibited, Carl never saw the exhibition.
Carl still has a pitch in Columbia Rd Market and last Sunday he showed me the cardboard file of ten by eight prints by the unknown photographer that it is my pleasure to publish here today. If you look closely at these fascinating pictures of Carl, his Uncle Bob, and pals Laurie and Lee at work, you can see they are selling plants without pots. In those days, Columbia Rd was still lined with furniture trades and the atmosphere on Sunday was relaxed enough for stallholders to enjoy a drink from the pub while they were at work, as Carl explained to me.
“I used to grow shrubs, and I went to auctions on Saturday and loaded up with plants, each with a root ball. By ten o’clock at night, I’d be driving up to the market to set up in my lorry, an ex-brewer’s articulated truck that had been used for transporting barrels. I started working at Columbia Rd on Sundays while I was still at school and and when I left it became my first job. We always sold cut flowers as well as plants but, when I sold off the nursery in the eighties, I switched over completely to cut flowers, which I sell today.
Laurie, the old man, he used to live in an ancient caravan close to the nursery where we grew shrubs and came along to Columbia Rd to lend a hand. He was an ex-navy man and sometimes on Sundays he liked to ride his bicycle on the wrong side of the road. He’d tell people, “On weekends, I cycle on the continental side, so I am ready for when we change over!” You can see him and my Uncle Bob with glasses in one of the pictures, they liked to have a drink from the Royal Oak.
At seventeen, I had a pitch between my dad Mick and my Uncle Bob, a little further down from where I am now. In those days, there were no lines to mark the pitches, we had to go by cracks in the pavement. Years later, the market authorities painted lines and we all got jiggled around.
At that time, we were selling delphiniums, lupins and hollyhocks – all the English cottage garden varieties – as bare root plants. We wrapped them in newspaper, there were no carriers or plastic bags in Columbia Rd then. We saved papers ourselves, and people used to collect them for us too and bring them along, the posh people used to bring the Times and the Daily Telegraph. When I think about it now, it was highly sustainable what we did.
The market wasn’t as busy then. It was a local market, not widely known as it is now and it was seasonal. We never saw a tourist, it was all real gardeners.”
It sounds a far cry from Columbia Rd today, lined with fashionable shops and cafes – a major attraction, drawing customers from across London and tourists from across the world. Yet Carl obviously still loves trading in the market and delights in the life it attracts. “Markets bring communities together.” he assured me, “Everyone’s equally welcome in a market, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got any money.” Anyone that knows Carl will recognise him from these photographs of more than thirty years ago – he is still lean and eager and smiling, one of the most popular traders in the market.
The young man in the centre is Lee Irvine who worked with Carl for many years.
Bob Grover
At seventeen, Carl Grover had his own pitch selling shrubs at Columbia Rd.
Uncle Bob & Laurie enjoy a glass from the Royal Oak while trading.
Laurie lived in a caravan, was partial to rum and liked to cycle on the wrong side of the road at weekends.
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Mick & Sylvia Grover, Herbsellers
George Gladwell’s photographs of Columbia Rd Market in the 1960s
Coffee Morning
For all those who were not able to make it to the book launch at the beginning of the month, I am hosting a Spitalfields Life Coffee Morning at Rough Trade East, Dray Walk in the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, next Saturday 31st March from 10am until midday.
It will be an opportunity to see the originals of the six drawings by Lucinda Rogers of the streets of Spitalfields commissioned for the book, and you can watch Lucinda making a huge new drawing live during the morning.
King Sour, Rapper of Bethnal Green, who made such a hit at the launch, will perform his poems and other people whose stories are in the book will be dropping by.
Please come along to join us for a cup of coffee and say “hello!”
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Philip Lindsey Clark’s Sculptures in Widegate St
Next time you pass through Widegate St, walking from Bishopsgate towards Artillery Passage on your way to Spitalfields, lift up your eyes to see the four splendid sculptures of bakers by Philip Lindsey Clark (1889 – 1977) upon the former premises of Nordheim Model Bakery at numbers twelve and thirteen. Pause to take in the subtle proportions of this appealing yet modest building of 1926 by George Val Myers in which the sculpture is integrated so successfully, just as at Broadcasting House which Val Myers designed five years later, placing Eric’s Gill’s figures upon the front.
In fact, Philip Lindsey Clark was a friend of Eric Gill – his work shares the same concern with illuminating the transcendental in existence, and from 1930 onwards his sculpture was exclusively of religious subjects. Born in Brixton, son of Scots architectural sculptor Robert Lindsey Clark, he trained in his father’s studio in Cheltenham and then returned to London to study at the City & Guilds School in Kennington. Enlisted in 1914, he was severely wounded in action and received a Distinguished Service Order for conspicuous gallantry. Then, after completing his training at the Royal Academy Schools, he designed a number of war memorials including those in Southwark and in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow.
The form of these ceramic reliefs of bakers – with their white glaze and sparing use of blue as a background – recalls religious sculpture, especially stations of the cross, and there is something deeply engaging about such handsome austerely modelled figures with their self-absorbed presence, preoccupied by their work. The dignity of labour and the poetic narrative of transformation in the baking of bread is made tangible by these finely judged sculptures. My own favourite is the figure of the baker with his tray of loaves upon his shoulder in triumph, a satisfaction which anyone who makes anything will recognise, borne of the work, skill and application that is entailed in creation.
These reliefs were fired by Carters of Poole, the company that became Poole Pottery, notable for their luminous white glazes, elegant sculptural forms and spare decoration using clear natural colours. They created many of the tiles for the London Underground and their relief tiles from the 1930s can still be seen on Bethnal Green Station.
Philip Lindsey Clark’s sculptures are those of a man who grew up in the artists’ studio, yet witnessed the carnage of First World War at first hand, carrying on fighting for two days even with a piece of shrapnel buried in his head, and then turned his talents to memorialise those of his generation that were gone. After that, it is no wonder that he saw the sublime in the commonplace activity of bakers. Eventually Lindsey Clark entered a Carmelite order, leaving London and retiring to the West Country where he lived until the age of eighty-eight.
So take a moment next time you pass through Widegate St – named after the wide gate leading to the ‘spital fields that once was there – and contemplate the sculptures by Philip Lindsey Clark, embodying his vision of the holiness of bakers.
George Val Myer’s former Nordheim Model Bakery with sculptures by Philip Lindsey Clark.
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A Night in the Bakery at St John
Dorothy Annan’s Murals in Farringdon St
Mick Taylor’s Walk
Almost every day, I exchange greetings with Mick Taylor who has been sitting outside the Beigel Bakery – off and on – for nearly fifty years. Over all this time, Mick has become famous for his personal style, emerging as a star player in the street life that he loves so much, celebrated as the Sartorialist of Brick Lane.
With the recent spell of fine weather – that Mick terms “a cockney summer” – we have been discussing taking a stroll together, and this week, over two days, Mick and I enjoyed a ramble round those streets which hold most meaning for him. Coming directly to the top of Brick Lane by bus each day, it was something of an adventure for Mick to walk south down the Lane to the familiar places of long ago. As he confessed to me, “When you have known an area so long, you begin to forget where you are.”
Leaving the environs of the Beigel Bakery which is Mick’s customary habitat, one afternoon, we turned left just before the railway bridge into Grimsby St where the newly constructed East London Line bridge of steel girders has replaced the shabby nineteenth century railway arches that stood here until recently. “You could find old things in the street and bring them down here and sell them, and people would always buy them and that way you were never without anything.” Mick assured me, casting his eyes affectionately over this former source of livelihood and screwing up his eyes in bewilderment as if somehow he could conjure it back into existence my focussing his attention. “They used to call me Mick the Finder.” he said, as we walked on.
Round the corner in Cheshire St, we paused outside the squat brick building that is Blackman’s, where the redoubtable Lee Knight sold shoes for years at rock bottom prices in a business continued now by his son Phil. This is a location of pleasure for Mick. He told me his beloved Gran bought him the pair of Italian pointed black shoes with cuban heels here, that he wanted for his seventh birthday, at a cost of two pounds, two shillings and sixpence. “My mother had twelve sons and two daughters, she didn’t have time to take care of us, she was too busy trying to find a husband,” he revealed, raising his eyebrows humorously, in partial explanation of why he came to be brought up by his grandparents.
Next day, we set out in the morning to venture further, walking down to the Truman Brewery where Mick worked as Drayman in 1963. “At half past seven in the morning it was busy here,” he recalled, rolling his eyes to evoke the chaotic drama as we passed the old iron gates. We turned the corner into Dray Walk where Mick arrived for work each day at quarter to seven. “You saw all the lorries backed up here,” he said gesturing to the invisible line of vehicles that once occupied the space where the shops are now,“We loaded them with barrels, hogsheads, firkins and crates.”
Yet before he started work Mick had to clock in and enjoy the two or three pints of maturing brown ale with his workmates, as was the custom in the brewery. “All the time I worked here I never saw any of the workers drunk,” Mick insisted,“You couldn’t afford to be drunk. You had to take it easy, because it was dangerous manhandling the kegs.” The foremen sent out the lorries making deliveries around London and by eleven o’ clock in the morning the draymen were finished. “We all met in the car park of the Ace Cafe on the North Circular. I’d be sat on the back of the lorry drinking pints from the keg.” Mick admitted to me with a delighted grin, “You lay the keg on its side and eased in the pointed handle of a file, and the beer poured out.”
“You had poor people here then, in those days most people wanted to get out of here,” he whispered to me as we moved on, pushing our way through the fashionable crowd,“Funny old world we live in isn’t it?” Glancing around conspiratorially as we passed the Spitalfields Market, “The villains used to come down here, and it wasn’t to buy fruit & vegetables,” he confided,“They used to do their business over a cup of tea and a sandwich, sit in a cafe and have a bit of a firm. They wore traditional gear, coat and scarf and a cheese cutter, and no-one paid any attention.”
Passing Burger King in Whitechapel High St, site of the legendary Blooms Restaurant, we arrived at the climax of our journey, Albert’s men’s clothing shop, still with its fascia of marble and red neon gothic lettering. A cut-price joint today, yet still charismatic for Mick as the place where he first cultivated his sartorial elegance. “I used to come down here when I had a bit of money, on Thursdays at three or four after I got paid. It was like going to the West End, I felt like I was famous.” he eulogised, “They sold cashmere suits and silk shirts. In those days, you had a lot of villains and benders came here, smart people. They all showed respect for each other.”
Walking back up the Lane towards the Beigel Bakery, Mick ruminated over the journey, thinking out loud, “It’s good that the young people are coming in and bringing money,” he suggested to me, “but I don’t think they care very much about the people who are here, they’re a bit selfish in that way.” And then he qualified the thought quickly, lest I think him ungenerous “People always treat me with respect and say nice things, they’re polite to me.” he confirmed with a weary smile. Both our energies were flagging now after this emotional odyssey through space and time, and we made for the nearest cafe to seek a perspective. “I haven’t had a walk like that in a long while, I think it’s done me good.” Mick concluded thoughtfully as we sat down together.
In his usual spot outside Brick Lane Beigel Bakery.
In Grimsby St – “You could find old things in the street and bring them down here and sell them, and people would always buy them and that way you were never without anything.”
At Blackman’s, Cheshire St – where Mick’s Gran bought him the pair of Italian pointed black shoes with Cuban heels that he wanted for his seventh birthday, at a cost of two pounds, two shillings and sixpence.
At Dray Walk, Truman Brewery – the doorway where Mick clocked in each morning and enjoyed two or three pints of maturing brown ale with his workmates at eight in the morning before commencing work.
At Albert’s, 88 Whitechapel High St – “I used to come down here when I had a bit of money, on Thursdays at three or four after I got paid. It was like going to the West End, I felt like I was famous.”
Mick Taylor – “You had poor people here then, in those days most people wanted to get out of here.”
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Colin Ross, Docker
Colin Ross has always been drawn to the river, though now it is the River Crouch at Hullbridge in Essex where he lives in retirement, rather than the Thames where once he and three generations of men in his family before him worked as dockers at the Royal London Dock. With his sharp bird-like features, deeply lined face, strong jaw and shock of white hair, Colin is an imposing figure with natural dignity and an open sociable manner. Above all, you sense a generosity of spirit. It is an heroic attribute in one who fought the long battles that Colin did – battles which proved to be unwinnable – to keep the docks alive and keep his fellow dockers in employment there.
Yet zeal was a quality that was never lacking in the Ross family, as demonstrated by his father Tom who was one of those who set up The Distress Fund. “There was no sickness benefit or compensation for injuries in the docks, and we had so many dockers who were dying and getting pauper’s funerals,” Colin explained, “Ten thousand people joined the fund at a shilling a week and if a docker died his widow got seventy-five pounds. The work they put in to collect that one shilling a week, but that was the kind of people East Enders were, we looked after each other.”
Similarly, Colin came up against a management that had no concern for the dockers’ welfare when manhandling sacks of asbestos. “They said it was perfectly safe,” he recalled with a frown, “and they told me I was troublemaker for objecting. But in 1967, we were the first workplace to ban it, when the union refused to touch it. I feared for the African dockers who loaded it in hessian sacks.”
Living modestly with his wife in an immaculately-kept mobile home surrounded by a small garden close to the River Crouch in Essex, Colin has found a peaceful haven and no longer comes up to London very often, but he was eager to speak to me of the conflicts surrounding the closure of the docks in which he fought with such courage and presence of mind.
“The Royal London Group of Docks was the largest enclosed docks in the world and I was the fourth generation of my family to work there – before me there was Tom, Jack and Archie, who came down from Scotland. My grandfather Jack was involved in the first great dock strike of 1889 that led to the foundation on the TGWU. The East End was absolute poverty then and the strike went on and on. Money was sent from all over the world to support the dockers. Randolph Hearst sent money, and in the end it was the intervention of the Catholic church and Cardinal Manning personally that got the ship owners to the negotiating table. My nan’s brother – his family were so destitute that his wife sold her body to make money and, when he found out after the strike, he killed her.
I joined the docks in 1965 at the age of twenty. At sixteen, I went to sea but if your dad was a docker it was expected you would work in the docks, and my dad’s reputation went before me. When you went to work, you earned good money – but most of the time you didn’t get to go to work. Jack Dash – the legendary union man – took me on one side to recruit me as union leader and said, “Son, there’s three people you want to avoid in life, ship owners, insurance agents and bankers.” I don’t think he was far off there.
People don’t realise the battles we had in our struggle to keep the docks open. We saw that containerisation was coming and we realised it was going to mash the East End to bits. There were 27,000 regulated dock workers and for every one of them another two workers dependent on the docks. 100,000 people relied on the docks for a living. We negotiated with the Port of London Authority and they said, “It’s no good standing in the way of progress.” But what’s the good of progress if it doesn’t benefit everyone? Our argument was – You have the docks in place and the rail links and the workforce, why can’t containerisation be done in the docks? Gradually, they weakened our cause with increased offers of severance pay and then, before we knew it, the asset strippers moved into the Royal London Docks – only they called them Venture Capitalists, they bought up the docks, closed them down and sold them as flats at half a million pounds each.
When I went into the docks, Charles Dickens would have recognised it. It was that antiquated because the ship owners never spent a penny on it. I thought, “Something’s wrong here,” because the shipping companies belong to the richest people in the country, and the wages were so low they could afford to keep 2,000 paid dockers in reserve to cover for the holiday period. It was the industry with the highest level of accidents in the country and you got no sick pay. The mortality rate was high and dockers did not expect to live beyond fifty-eight to sixty on average – this was in the nineteen sixties.
We never realised they were going to close down the docks until we met some American longshore men and they had experienced the same thing. But in America the union was so strong because it was run by the mafia, they got a deal we would die for. I went to Jack Jones at the TGWU and said “Can’t you see what’s happening?” We formed our own unofficial committee, the National Port Shop Stewards’ Committee. The problem was the same in Liverpool, Hull and Southampton and we decided to hold dock gate meetings. We picketed dock gates in London, saying to lorry drivers they would be blacklisted in every dock in the country if they crossed our picket line, and it was a roaring success. Ted Heath was Prime Minister at the time and they threatened to put us in prison, but they realised if they arrested us there would be carnage.
All the time we had viable propositions to keep the docks open, using the river and opening up rail links but the Port of London Authority didn’t want them. All of a sudden, five of our members were arrested and put in Pentonville Prison, so we created a picket line at the prison gate. And in my four or five days there I saw more of life than I’d seen in my life. The TUC called a General Strike in our support. All the unions, the carworkers, the steelworkers, they were with us. Our five members were released but they had smashed us. The dispute shifted from being our dispute to being a dispute about the Industrial Relations Act. The union backed me but my Dad said, “They backed you to take control, and they used it to get more severance money and send us back to work.” I knew then that the chips were down.”
In 1978, Colin Ross left the docks. He went to work at a container plant in Purfleet and his wages increased from £30 to £350 a week, but he found there was no camaraderie as he had known at the docks in the East End. Within two years, Colin left to run a fruit and vegetable at Globe Town Market Sq in the Roman Rd for the rest of his working life. “It was the saddest day of my life,” was how he described leaving dock work, after his personal history of struggle and the struggle of three generations behind him.
“We had it within our grasp to keep the docks open, they could have been working today.” he said to me, raising his hands and reaching out with visible emotion, “I’m not angry, what has happened has happened. I am not bitter but I am annoyed at how it happened. Canary Wharf may be beautiful, yet I can’t ever bring myself to go back to the docks anymore.”
The London Docks were closed by shipowners who wanted to move to new container ports as a means to break the unions and introduce casual labour, and make short-term profits by selling off their warehouse spaces. Yet the final irony lies with Colin, because anyone who has travelled upon the Thames – the silent highway, as they once called it – recognises the absurdity of the empty river when it is the obvious conduit for transport of goods as the roads grow ever more overcrowded. River transport linked to rail would be a much greener and more efficient option in the long term than the container ports and haulage trucks we are now forced to rely upon. With remarkable foresight, Colin saw all this forty years ago and he fought his best fight to stop it happening. So although he may be disappointed his spirit is intact – and his story is an important one to remember today.
Colin made the front page of the Daily Mail in 1970.
Colin’s pass book issued by the National Dock Labour Board.
Colin’s union membership cards.
Note number six, the rate for unloading bags of Asbestos.
Colin as a Shop Steward in 1976.
Colin Ross in his garden in Hullbridge.
Colin’s memoir Death of the Docks can be purchased here
You may also like to read about Colin’s daughter
Mr Pussy in Spring
In spite of the visible signs, I am almost superstitious to write of spring, lest by doing so I invite an onslaught of snowstorms, tempests and whirlwinds. Yet I do believe that the change of season is irrevocably upon us, as confirmed by a particularly unpleasant experience I had recently.
At dawn, it is commonly Mr Pussy’s habit to stand at the bedside by my pillow and claw at the sheet to wake me. A recurring trait which causes me constant frustration now that first light comes earlier each day, especially if I have worked late the night before and wish to sleep longer. As an attempt to pacify him without opening my eyes, I reach out a hand with a crooked finger to stroke him on the head, in the vain hope that he will be satisfied and leave me in peace.
At a recent daybreak, Mr Pussy woke me in the usual manner, clawing and crying in delighted excitement, and I stretched out my finger blindly. To my surprise, he did not lift up his head to meet my finger. Instead, my touch fell upon another furry surface, soft and silky, yet curiously inanimate. In my surprise, I rolled over and opened my eyes to see what it was. It was a huge dead rat. And Mr Pussy stood over it with a look of foolish pride like those game hunters in old photographs. He had brought his fresh catch as a gift to share with me.
The forlorn carcass of the brown rat lay in a foetal pose, looking strangely innocent with its fluffy pale belly – like an abandoned soft toy – and immaculately clean despite its reputation for for filth. But with its long teeth splayed at a gross angle, it was a sight that I did not choose to contemplate upon my bedroom floor at dawn, especially placed by Mr Pussy upon a pile of yesterday’s clothes and giving the credible impression of sleeping there. Much to Mr Pussy’s dismay, a dustpan and brush served to dispatch the rat into the bin and I threw the contaminated laundry into the basket. Then, to his surprise, I shut the bedroom door in his face and went back to sleep, ignoring his melodramatic plaintive cries of exclusion.
For the first time this year, the nights are sufficiently mild for a creature as conservative and protective of his own comfort as Mr Pussy to go out and prowl around in the dark. This is my incontrovertible evidence of spring and the rat was a harbinger of it. For the first time this year, I open the sash window wide and Mr Pussy sits upon the sill taking the airs. For the first time this year, I dig in my garden and Mr Pussy keeps me company. For the first time this year, I return to find him sunning himself on the wall. And, each morning since his banishment, I open my bedroom door to discover Mr Pussy sitting placidly outside, perched upon the couch. Ever gracious, he waits there as a sentinel, my guardian at the gate.
It is spring and now, after peaceful uninterrupted sleep I wake to enjoy the sunshine while, as the nights grow milder, Mr Pussy goes roving to satisfy his duties in vermin control.
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