Sailors, Ships & Stevedores: The Story of British Docks Timeshift

FOOTSTEPS

65 years ago,

this was the sound of docks across Britain waking up each morning.

An army of workers, their boots clattering on quayside cobbles.

Dockers, tallymen, kickers,

stevedores, hatch men and winch men, samplers,

grain porters, timber porters, teamers, tackle men,

yard master, shunters, pilots, tug boatmen, foyboatmen,

freshwater men, blacksmiths, weighers,

dock watchmen, dredger men, launch men, needle men,

jetty clerks, warehousemen, measurers, coal trimmers,

lightermen, lumpers,

and just as you think you've named them all,

up goes a crane driver to his seat in the sky.

These men were the engine driving the British post-war recovery.

Exotic goods, people from far-flung places

and new, exciting influences from across the globe ebbed and flowed

through the living, breathing, bustling docks in every city.

The docks was the city.

It was the lifeblood.

It was the pulse.

It was everything.

Around these docks grew waterfront communities.

A kaleidoscope of different cultures.

Maltese would be spoken on the corner, Portuguese the next street.

Arabic, Somali.

We were a community of seamen from these countries.

These were the first places to experience new styles and sounds.

Can you imagine? There were 25,000-plus seamen

in and out of Liverpool,

bringing music and records in.

In the 1960s, as Britain underwent a social and cultural revolution,

this world would be turned upside down by modern technology.

They've got 1,200 containers each trip

and there's not one of them been packed or handled by a docker.

Ultimately these changes would lead to the decline of traditional docks.

I never thought for one minute that the river would stop

as an artery of commerce.

The river became dead.

But within 20 years, these docksides took on a new life.

Today, they are no longer hubs of industry, but places of leisure,

culture, consumerism and, for some, desirable places to live.

You go to Liverpool today and it's a totally different city

to what I remember when I first started to work there.

It's beautiful.

This is not so much a story about the loss of our docks,

but their transformation.

One of Britain's biggest docks was Liverpool.

It exported more than any other UK port and was the main gateway

for transatlantic trade with North America.

The city was shaped by the sea

and depended on thousands of dockers.

Basically, every other house,

the dad was a docker, you know.

There were thousands, thousands of men on the docks.

There were always people walking, or on bikes, or buses full.

It was noisy, it was loud...

..and just busy, busy, busy.

This busy waterfront was the point of departure for anyone and everyone

who wanted to make the journey to America by sea.

This transatlantic link meant there were as many seafarers in the city

as there were dockers.

# You dreamboats

# You lovable dreamboats... #

In our day, every family,

or every second family, had someone who went away to sea.

And that was the main industry.

When you think of one industry with 20-odd thousand men

working for them...

Billy spent much of his career

working in the kitchens of Cunard liners.

# I'd follow you, darling

# To any shore... #

In the era of great liners, and by the end of World War II,

Cunard was the largest Atlantic passenger line.

Liverpool was the hub of the company's European operations.

The landing stage was very near half a mile long

and you were getting in those days two, three, four ships nose to tail.

Billy documented his voyages

to destinations such as New York and Montreal

on this rare 8mm footage,

using a brand-new American home-movie camera.

This is the original and first movie camera I bought

when I went to New York.

In England, you couldn't buy a movie camera.

It's a mechanical camera.

You wind it up...

CAMERA WHIRS

..and there it is. Still in full working order.

It not only takes 8mm movie, but it takes still shots.

Before the arrival of the passenger jet,

these liners were the choice of travel for the rich and the famous.

And Billy seems to have collected photographs of most of them.

This is Noel Coward and Debbie Reynolds.

That's on the Queen Mary as well.

Liberace, this is, signing autographs for the stewardesses.

Deborah Kerr helping herself to a drink behind the bar.

Seafarers like Billy returned to Liverpool

bringing with them the sight, sound and even the smell of the USA.

This made a big impression on the city's dockers.

You know on a Yankee boat, you know what you can smell?

Coffee.

You could smell this waft of fresh-ground coffee.

# Everybody

# Doing that coffee grind... #

I used to notice the seafarers, you know,

and I used to look at the quality of the clothes, like.

I mean, I was only 18 and I used to look.

And you couldn't help but notice it -

they looked really well dressed,

and you could see that this was a really rich nation.

And there's a poser. Just come home,

posing in my wife's back garden.

These self-confessed posers earned the nickname among the dockers -

the Cunard Yanks.

When we were travelling to join our ship of an early morning,

we'd go on the overhead railway.

And we're in our suits, going to work in our suits.

And the dockers would all say, "Oh, look at these.

"Couple of Cunard Yanks.

"Don't sit next to them, they smell like poof puffs,"

cos we had aftershave on and we smelt nice.

# You've either got

# Or you haven't got style... #

Some of the lads in the Market Diner in New York.

We were coming ashore at the landing stage in American suits.

A lot of the lads were posers.

They'd be flashing American dollars and after five minutes in New York,

they were speaking like, "Hello there," you know?

# You've either got

# Or you haven't got style... #

Along with their swagger,

they brought back all manner of American goods

for friends and family.

I was bringing my children

beautiful American...

My daughter, lovely American dresses.

She was running round, when we had a flat down in Smithtown Road,

in American dresses.

People were saying, "Oh, God,

"she's like a little princess," you know?

Although its transatlantic link gave Liverpool's waterside

a distinctly American twist,

sailors coming into port from other parts of the world brought rarer

and more exotic items with them.

Guys who went away to sea,

they'd bring these multicoloured parrots home.

I remember my nanny had one.

It swore like a trooper.

And when the priest used to come round once a month collecting,

and someone would have to run down the yard with the parrot

so it wouldn't swear in front of the priest.

Liverpool's transatlantic connection was the backbone

of both its passenger and cargo trade.

The volume of goods handled by the city's docks

was second only to that of London.

Its sheer scale made London the nation's biggest port.

London's docks had expanded to handle the global trade

that sustained the British Empire.

Perhaps the greatest of all the many assets of the Port of London

is the group of five separate enormous enclosed dock systems,

with nearly 36 miles of deepwater quay,

roughly 520 acres of warehouses.

Together they can provide berthage and cargo-handling facilities

for nearly 200 ships at the same time.

By the 1950s, the enclosed docks and riverside wharfs

that made up the port stretched all the way from Tower Bridge

right the way down to Tilbury on the Thames Estuary,

and they were handling around 60 million tonnes worth of cargo.

Once the capital of Empire,

in the 1950s the success of London's docks centred on swathes of goods

imported from across the British Commonwealth.

We had goods coming from all over the Commonwealth

into the Port of London.

So things like lamb from New Zealand, wool from Australia,

tea from India, grain from the Americas,

which actually was transported to this very dock

where we're at at the moment, which was the Royal Victoria Dock,

and behind me there you can see Spillers Millennium Mills,

which of course accepted an awful lot of the grain

that came into the port and made it into flour.

But warehouses along the banks of the Thames were treasure troves

of more unusual items, too.

The world market for ivory is centred in London.

Other rare and precious cargoes are housed here, too.

Ostrich plumes, for example,

to grace my lady's fan or her millinery.

And here is the complete floor of Cutler Street Warehouse

reserved for the storage of valuable carpets from the Orient.

Docker turned artist Terry Scales was the third generation

of his family to work the London quaysides.

He, like thousands of others,

handled the cargoes in the same way that dockers had for over a century.

It was hard, physical labour.

I was sent to help a crack stevedore gang to unload sugar.

I thought I'd never survive the day.

We had to carry these two-hundredweight bags

out of the coaming of the ship.

The sugar turned into treacle.

As you sweated, the treacle came down your back.

It was quite the worst job I ever did,

but it was incredibly well paid

and I earned £5 a day.

I went home with £25,

which was an enormous amount of money for that time.

With so much cargo on the move, dockers were in demand.

While some items were harder to handle than others,

difficult cargo provided an opportunity to earn even more.

Some cargo, such as bananas and fruit, had spiders in them.

If the cargo presented a danger to your health

there was an extra rate allowed, but this had to be negotiated.

So there was a little sort of hubbub between

the more experienced dockers and the manager,

who then decided how much you should get for...

..putting yourself in danger.

Although dock work was laborious,

being a docker gave Terry the opportunity

to use his artistic skills as well.

A magazine produced for the Surrey Commercial Dock workers

would give him the chance

to illustrate some of the dock's most well-known characters.

The editor, a stevedore, approached Terry for help.

The editor said, "I hear you've been to art school."

I said, "Yes." He said,

"Well, we'd like you to do portraits of our retiring veterans."

So I said, "Yes, I'd love to do that."

I did a series of portraits that had faces like tree trunks, you know?

Wonderful characters.

The faces of the dockers that Terry sketched

represented a type of worker that, to those beyond the dock walls,

was seen as a breed apart.

Dockers were in a unique position.

They were part of a distinct and closely-connected working community

with a long history,

yet they also had access to the world

through the global cargoes they handled.

Docks where unique because their quays would be lined

with these exotic goods and merchandise from across the globe

that simply wouldn't appear in any other part of the country.

But in Britain's docks,

it wasn't just cargo that arrived from all over the world.

People came, too.

One dockside community in South Wales embraced arrivals,

whichever corner of the world they came from.

# It was St David's Day

# When we docked in Tiger Bay

# And the skipper wouldn't give us any pay... #

Neil Sinclair's grandfather, a seafarer,

made Tiger Bay in Cardiff his home at the turn of the 20th century.

Often times, black seamen found themselves abused,

racially abused and what have you at that particular time in history,

but word was already out to all the ports around Great Britain.

Well, if you want to feel at home,

get down to Tiger Bay because that place, nobody sees the colour,

and so that's how my father's father actually ended up in Tiger Bay.

The docks were created to export record amounts of Welsh coal

around the world and Tiger Bay's streets were built with the profits.

But what made Tiger Bay special

was the multi-racial community that developed there

as these sailors and seafarers put down roots.

And I stepped out of 19 Francis Street into the street.

Maltese would be spoken on the corner, Portuguese the next street.

Spanish, Arabic, Somali, Malay.

Any language you can imagine was being spoken on the streets.

People lived on the street.

Our streets were like a communal living room.

My mother used to say,

"The League of Nations could learn a lesson from Tiger Bay."

Tiger Bay was a typical sailor town,

an area of the docks where seafarers from every country

could buy provisions, find lodgings and enjoy their own entertainment.

Most ports would have some sort of port area, sailor town,

with very, very distinctive characteristics,

sometimes seen as dark and dangerous

as well as exotic and interesting.

Not always welcoming strangers, undoubtedly,

but being a place where you might meet strangers.

Olive Sullivan met her future husband, Ali,

a young chef from the Yemen,

in a chance encounter when she took a wrong turn towards the dockside.

I must have been to the pictures in St Mary's Street,

came out and lost my way.

I was making my way to the docks rather than to the town.

I stopped and asked this boy then the way to Queen Street

and he said I was losing my way to the docks.

And we started talking.

I think we fell in love there and then.

We got married when I was 16 and three weeks, actually.

We had ten children - five boys and five girls.

Of course, when I got married, there was a great stir at home because...

The priest from the church even came and told my mother that

by marrying an Arab, I was marrying a heathen.

There was quite a stir at home.

# Ah woe, ah me

# Shame and sorrow for the family... #

The reaction of Olive's family was a common experience for women

who married into the different cultures found in Tiger Bay.

It wasn't the place to go and, in fact, well-to-do families,

if they couldn't get their kids to go to bed, used to say,

"If you don't behave yourself, I'm going to take you to Loudoun Square

"and leave you there," because the bogeyman was there.

But, God bless them, they missed out

on the most spectacular way to live, honestly.

They just have no idea of what it was really like to live here.

# Tiger Bay

# Tiger Bay

# It's just like a fancy dress ball

# And those who can't say that they've been down the Bay

# Well, they haven't seen Cardiff at all. #

Even the silver screen was drawn to the animated dockland community

of Tiger Bay.

J Lee Thompson's film of the same name opens with a sailor,

played by Horst Buchholz, returning home through Loudoun Square -

the heart of the community -

where we see gambling on a street corner.

Illegal gambling activity used to take place, so obviously

men would be there with their wages, gambling on the corner.

The bobbies might come around the corner

from the Maria Street police station

and then it was a situation of, "Heads up!"

And dice would disappear, money would disappear,

people would just mill around and then the police would come

and then they'd have to leave cos nothing illegal was going on

and when they disappeared around the corner at Loudoun Square,

life went back to normal.

In a later sequence down by the docks, Gillie Evans,

played by Hayley Mills,

gets into a scuffle with one of the local boys, played by Neil himself.

And I was the only extra from the local community that actually

had a speaking part and the only person in the entire film

that spoke with a Cardiff accent.

Who asked you to butt in? You're not playing with us.

-Yes, I am!

-No, you're not. We don't want you.

-Why not?

You haven't got a gun. That's why.

She said she had a little bomb, it was a cap bomb, and I said,

"Well, cowboys don't play with bombs.

"Anyway, get back to London, Gillie Evans, you don't belong down here."

-I've got a bomb!

-A bomb?

Cowboys don't use bombs.

Hey, give that back! That's mine!

-Give me it back!

-Go on, clear off.

Now, because the tide came and went,

every morning, it was leave a film of mud on the ramp,

so it took us about three weeks to do this five-minute scene

on the film because we'd have to run down there or we'd slip down

on the mud or whatever and so on. All this chaos going on.

I'm not a lady!

Give her back the bomb. Go on, give it to her.

Now, clear off and leave her alone.

The vibrancy of the Tiger Bay community

captured by J Lee Thompson's film

reinforced the public's perception of the life of a sailor town.

By the early 1960s,

dock communities were well-established melting pots

for different cultures.

Transatlantic travel and trade introduced glamour,

style and swagger into post-war Britain.

And our global connections were showcased in all manner of goods

traded with the world. But above all,

the fortunes of docks across the country depended on

the physical labour of working communities.

It was dirty, filthy...

..hard, soul-destroying labour.

Last year, dockers earned an average of £19 a week.

The work often meant hard labour,

perhaps handling meat carcasses

which tax a strong man's physical resources to the limit.

When it's pouring with rain down here,

every day we stand down here, every day long in the pouring rain.

And you work hard. What do you get for it? Nothing.

You couldn't get washed anywhere.

There was nowhere to wash yourself. You couldn't get a shower.

There were no proper toilets.

There were big sewage pipes with holes in,

with the holes in to bolt a pipe, you know,

the sort of thing you'd put in the main road in a housing estate.

For over 100 years,

getting daily work on the docks was an uncertain prospect.

Dockers turned up in the hope of being hired by an employer

from one day to the next. But there was no guarantee they'd go home

with a wage in their pocket.

Up until the 1960s, the majority of dock workers

in British ports were hired on a casual basis.

They would be hired to turn around a ship by a variety of employers

including stevedores, shipping companies, warehousemen...

There was an incredible amount of flexibility for employers.

They could hire dockers as needed depending on the volume of trade

coming into the port, but then they could discard them soon after.

The post-war Labour government had attempted to bring some order

to this casual labour system.

They created the National Dock Labour Scheme,

which added dock workers to a nationwide register.

Registered dockers were permitted to collect a minimum daily payment

from employers, even if they weren't required,

as long as they could prove

that they had come to the docks seeking work.

It issued every worker with a book about that large,

which was called a brief.

And if you were unsuccessful in gaining work,

on a particular day, you took your brief to the pool,

which was an enormous, great, hangar-like shed,

and the dockers called it the pen.

During slack periods,

all the dockers and stevedores would have their books stamped

and that guaranteed them half a day's pay.

And then they'd report again in the afternoon

and have their books stamped again,

which guaranteed the afternoon's pay.

Managers appeared to have all the power when it came to hiring

the gangs they wanted for their vessels.

It's a bit of a choker. You're standing here like an old dish rag.

Discarded. You're wanted, you're not wanted,

and, well, you're here to sell your labour to the highest bidder

sort of thing. It is near enough like a cattle market.

You got work because of who you knew,

not because of what you knew or whether you were a grafter or not.

Because I remember my dad saying sometimes how Ernie Roberts,

the ship's boss, he was a neighbour...

"I'll probably get work today."

You can see them coming across now.

They'll pick their gangs up.

So pick your gang up, Jack.

Your gang, Joe. And the odd men, they'll pick up themselves.

But dockers found ways to manipulate the system too,

ensuring they got the best jobs on offer.

A fella comes down the pen, he sees all these faces,

and he's got to hire, say, 150 men to discharge a ship.

Now, he wants the people who can do the job.

And the fella would touch you on the shoulder and you gave the timekeeper

walking behind...you'd give him your book, so you were hired.

But do you know what used to happen? As the boss touched the fella there,

intending to miss you,

you'd jump up and hit his hand with your shoulder

and you'd give the timekeeper the book and you'd bugger off

because then you were hired.

Yet, despite these tactics, they weren't always successful.

Er, well, I don't think there's a lot doing here now.

Well, the ganger, he's got them 13 books,

he'll turn round and give them to one of them men over there,

the ship worker, and he'll put them in the office.

Now I've got to go down to the docks

and see if I can get a way down there.

In the docks, shifts were long and the work backbreaking.

Occasional pilfering from cargoes was seen

as a well-earnt perk of the job.

Most guys were basically very honest,

but whisky in a Yankee boat was fair game.

And about three o'clock in the afternoon

there'd be thousands of cases of whisky.

They could hear people singing down below.

And all the dockers were drunk!

In fact, I'll tell you this about me dad.

He came crawling into the house and me mother went, "You drunken get!"

And he went, "Maggie, there was whisky going at the Yank.

"Everyone was drinking it!"

Hard graft and job insecurity led gangs of dockers to seek ways

to let off steam.

Come on, then, lads!

I've learned to like you.

The pub was a favoured retreat at any time of day.

This pub that we are in is open at six o'clock in the morning.

There's not many pubs in London the same, only in Covent Garden.

But in the old days, the dockers used to come in here a lot,

knowing they might not go to work.

A marked drinking culture was a part of life

in all dockside communities around Britain.

In Cardiff, Tiger Bay's streets were lined with nearly 100 pubs.

Each one was unique and had its own different atmosphere.

Some people would plonk along on the keyboard of the piano

and everybody would be singing along,

and you might be playing in the street with the kids

and the kids would go, "Ooh, come down the Westgate,

"your mother's singing!" And so we...

Cos we were kids and we weren't allowed to go in.

We'd have to climb on the windowsill and look over the frosted glass,

and the names of whatever was on the windows, and then you'd see

everybody in there. They were having such a good time,

you wished you could have been in there.

Dockside taverns didn't just echo to the sound of the piano.

APPLAUSE DROWNS SPEECH

# Well, I got a woman... #

Bars in ports like Cardiff and Liverpool gave dockers,

sailors and locals the chance to get hold of new vinyl records,

brought straight off the ships by seafarers returning home.

We were buying records for ourselves.

I mean, we were bringing the music back,

we'd go to a place in West Derby Road, and...

It's still there, actually.

And on a Friday night you'd go in with your records and they'd say,

"Oh, God, can you bring me one of them back, can you bring me this?"

You'd go back to New York or Montreal with a shopping list.

Many of these discs were still yet to hit the mainstream in the UK.

# When you walk

# Through a storm

# Hold you head... #

That album has never, ever been to England,

but the seamen were bringing it in.

And one of the chaps that brought this album home,

his name was Harry Chambers.

And he lent that record to Gerry Marsden, who started making...

..doing songs off it.

And he was doing a gig in Anfield...

..years ago, and Bill Shankly was standing at the back

and Gerry sang his version of You'll Never Walk Alone.

And Bill Shankly, when he came off, he said,

"Hey, lad," he said, "I want you to make a tape of that for me,"

he said, "so I can play it when my team run out onto the pitch."

And that, we believe, is how it came to Liverpool.

# Walk on

# Through the wind.... #

And can you imagine?

There were 25,000-plus seamen in and out of Liverpool

and bringing music and records in.

And sheet music,

a lot of them wanted sheet music for the groups were starting up,

so they could copy the likes of Chuck Berry and those people,

you know, Little Richard.

And this is a group of the lads on the afterdeck.

Me with the guitar.

Now, at that time, we didn't think anything about

whether we were having any influence on anything,

but it's only in later years

that we found out and we realised that all that music,

records, sheet music,

um, the ability to learn to play a guitar...

..all came from the lads bringing them in.

Ivan with the black Gretsch guitar.

This American guitar found its way into the hands

of one of Liverpool's most famous musicians.

A knock came to the door and this skinny kid with long black hair

and black plastic clothes -

and they weren't leather, they were definitely plastic.

"I believe you've got a guitar for sale."

So Ivan said, "Oh, yeah."

So he got it out the case, said, "Here it is."

And when this lad saw it, he was drooling at the mouth.

So he said, "How much do you want for it?"

So Ivan said, "£90."

He said, "Oh, I haven't got 90. I don't want to pay that money."

So he said, "OK," so he put it back in the case, and he said,

"I tell you what, I've got £70 here."

So I'd butted in then, I said, "Well, look..."

I had the customs receipt.

I said...

"Sign an IOU and come back with the £20."

So he said, "Oh, OK, I'll do that, then."

So he gave him a bundle of scruffy notes, £70,

and off he went.

We never saw him again.

And that scruffy lad was George Harrison.

How much is that receipt worth in today's money?

Do you want to run away on a cruise with me?

As well as being at the forefront of new music,

dockside communities were ahead of the game

when it came to the latest dance crazes.

Like, we even had the twist before Chubby Checker ever sang it

because Hank Ballard And The Midnighters played it,

so we'd learnt to do the twist a different way

than it came to be when it became more popular.

But we were always ahead of the game.

Along with these American imports,

Tiger Bay reverberated to other imported musical sounds,

such as calypso and jazz.

The Annexe was on Bute Street,

and of course I was supposed to be too young to go and I often

got in there, and, oh, there was a wonderful time,

the music was fabulous.

But if you couldn't get in, you'd go down this sort of alley

and you could look through the window and you could see them

jiving and jitterbugging.

People down Tiger Bay could dance, I can tell you that.

And then we had the Ghana Club,

cos when Ghana got its independence, Johnstone opened a club

to dedicate to it on Bute Street.

Dancers, the bay boys and the docks boys

used to dress immaculately.

Sartorial elegance par excellence!

For all the liveliness of the music and culture in Tiger Bay,

by the mid-1960s, two forces threatened the community's future.

The coal exports that had fuelled the docks' growth

and made Cardiff a wealthy city came to an end.

And the council decided it was time to demolish the old dilapidated

Victorian houses and replace them with modern flats.

# All the people are happy and gay

# They're building new houses in Tiger Bay

# But why are these people taking so long?

# This keeping us waiting is very wrong

# Hurrah, hooray They're pulling down Tiger Bay

# Oh, what a pitiful day

# When they pull down Tiger Bay... #

I could hear when I was in my bed,

I could hear the pounding of the pylons going into the square

to build the forthcoming tower blocks.

The strategy of the council was to build the tower blocks in the park.

Since nobody lived in the park, they could build these buildings

and once they were up,

they could then decant the people out of their houses,

knock the houses down and move people into the flats, of course,

and that's the strategy that was put in place,

which was supposed to be an improvement

of our slum-dwelling conditions,

as they told us we lived in slums,

but for the life of me I couldn't find the slum myself.

The creation of the new Butetown estate

produced mixed reactions in the community.

Wouldn't you rather live in a new house?

-Yes.

-No.

-Why not?

-All the old houses are very much warmer

and it takes ages to get warm.

I don't like the idea, really,

-of flats here.

-What's wrong with flats?

I mean, flats, for a start, they...

I mean, all the kids are together and I think it starts,

you know, like, gangs. Too many gangs.

Do you like living in these flats?

-Oh, they're lovely.

-What have you got?

Three bedrooms and two down.

-Where were you living before?

-Loudoun Square.

Er, in what sort of conditions?

-Oh, they were dirty.

-Have you got a bathroom?

-Yeah.

-Did you have a bathroom before?

-No.

-Did you have any running water before?

Only down the cellar.

# Hurrah, hooray! They're pulling down Tiger Bay... #

The unforeseen consequence of the new tower blocks was the break-up

of Tiger Bay's sailor-town culture,

as communities dispersed and street life vanished.

But the changes taking place on the streets of Tiger Bay

were a sign of things to come.

Transformations in technology leading to new ways of working

during the 1960s would entirely upend

the traditional working culture of docks across Britain.

The sense of optimism, booming trade and plentiful work

in fact masked deeper problems within the industry.

Working practices were largely unchanged in over 100 years.

This is the old way of loading boats.

There's 13 men in a gang, eight men down the hole,

one man on the hatch,

and he tells the crane driver where to place it down the hole.

Then we've got four men on the quay,

what they called pitch hands.

British docks were very run down.

The ports carried with them this legacy of the past -

they were very old-fashioned in terms of their organisation.

Dock work was still manual,

equipment was very aged and it hadn't been updated for decades.

British port authorities were very slow to modernise their ports.

These old-fashioned methods meant accidents were commonplace.

I was working in a barge with another young boy

who left his hand under the sling,

and as the crane took the weight of the set of bags

he lost a finger because it was trapped under the strop.

Of course, he went into a state of shock

and he was lifted out on a stretcher.

In Liverpool, Doreen knew the dangers of the dock first hand

when her father was involved in a terrible incident.

They were down in the hold of the ship and the hook came down

on the crane and caught my dad's coat and he was hoisted up.

And the other dockers were yelling, you know, to the crane driver.

It was that noisy down there and before he could lower it,

me dad's belt snapped or his coat ripped or whatever it was

and he went right down into the hold of the ship.

But he put his hands out to save himself

and that's what messed his wrists up.

But he...

He'd hurt his head, it broke every bone in his body, he was...

He was in hospital for an awful long time.

For dockers' families,

these accidents had a severe impact on everyone.

It was a very difficult time, you know, for my mum.

Three little girls, and I remember her getting a job

in Harland & Wolffs, cleaning.

And she used to go out at, like,

half five in the morning, um...

and she'd be home for eight to get us up for school.

Decades of inefficient and dangerous working methods

went hand in hand with an outdated form of employment.

For generations, under the casual system, dockers had worked

for a multitude of different employers from one day to the next.

Following the Devlin Report,

an extensive enquiry into the state of the nation's ports,

the Government decided to take drastic action.

In 1967, it introduced decasualisation

in docks throughout the UK.

Men were allocated to a specific regular employer

and paid a weekly wage.

For half a century, a dominant issue in the docks,

and now a major point in the Devlin Report,

has been whether the casual daily labour market

should be abandoned for the weekly contract

that most of industry uses.

The jargon word is decasualisation.

These proposals caused intense debate

among dockers around the country.

No, get this, Roy, cos I don't know where you are.

-No, look...

-Are we arguing against decasualisation...

-No.

-..or for it?

How do you feel about decasualisation?

-I'm all for it.

-How do you feel about it?

-All for it.

-Well, what are you bloody arguing about?

Surprisingly, some were less keen on the new system.

Well, we call it freedom.

So I'll say yes, I prefer freedom.

You see, Ernie Bevin fought for years for decasualisation

because he felt dockers wanted it, but it seems that you don't want it.

Well, I don't think we do. No, I don't think so.

I think a man...

..if he is a man, he'll earn his living.

He'll keep his wife and kids.

He'll go to work and he'll work.

It's strange, you'd expect dock workers to really,

"Oh, regular job, regular work,"

but the casual system was so deeply entrenched

in the culture of the docks,

it needed a knockout blow that Devlin could give it.

But, for many, including Doreen's husband,

the guarantee of a consistent weekly wage was a welcome step forward.

By the time my husband got on the docks, it was a good job.

Um, they had better pay.

They still had to fight for everything,

but there was better pay,

they had all-weather gear,

they didn't work in inclement conditions and they got dirt money,

danger money, all of those things that my father fought for.

Stephen Shakeshaft, a local newspaper photographer,

captured the moment decasualisation arrived in the Liverpool docks.

I used to love just going off when I had a few moments to spare

and wander around the dock and watch the dockers at work.

"Take a picture of so-and-so, he likes having his picture taken."

They'd wheel a docker out and he'd pose for me.

Dockers all looked the same.

You couldn't turn up in something unusual cos you'd be ridiculed.

They always wanted to know, "When will it be in the papers, son?

"Will you get my good side?"

Yet, as the Government's new decasualised system took effect

across Britain, an even bigger threat to the dockers' way of life

was on the horizon.

In 1967, new technology was about to fundamentally alter

the way cargo was transported.

Metal boxes, built to a standard size,

could be fitted onto ships, lorries and trains

in exactly the same way,

from North America to Continental Europe.

The container was a disarmingly simple concept.

The docks at Felixstowe in Suffolk have grown in 12 years

from a few rotting jetties

to the third-largest container port in Europe.

The men who work here, about 600 of them,

are highly paid and handle about two million tonnes of trade a year,

and last year, the company which owns the port

made a profit of half a million pounds.

The container revolution came in remarkably quickly.

Within about ten years the container became THE way to carry goods.

A container is grabbed out of the hold

and within 1.5 minutes dropped neatly by Martian-like machines

onto a delivery lorry on the quayside.

Work is done by gangs

which are smaller than are needed to do the same job anywhere else.

Suddenly the ports that could handle containers,

which tended not to be in the middle of great cities with road systems

like London, those ports had an advantage.

Felixstowe was an absolutely perfect example of that.

And shipping company after shipping company began to switch

their shipping to vessels that could carry the containers,

these great boxes.

These great boxes could be packed, shipped and unloaded in record time,

using unregistered men outside the National Dock Labour Scheme.

In Liverpool, dockers like Tony had seen the container coming

and guessed its impact.

Bobo Hammond, he said,

"I guarantee you, Tony, one of these days,

"eventually all the stuff will come in these big metal boxes

"and they'll just lift them off." He said,

"I've just been watching them unload the things off there."

Because of this, the container revolution posed a direct threat

to dockers' livelihoods.

Those ships, they've got 1,200 containers each trip,

and there's not one of them been packed or handled by a docker.

Dock workers considered their work and their occupation

as their birthright and they weren't going to let that go easily.

-TANNOY:

-We're on our way.

In 1972,

the threat posed by new technology and unregistered workers

sparked a national dock strike.

After just over a week,

the Tory government declared a national state of emergency.

Dockers were leaving their home ports and travelling

to these inland container depots and non-scheme sites,

picketing them, blocking lorries,

blacking containers and just basically disrupting the trade

of these ports and wharves as much as they can.

Although industrial disputes had been part of life on the docks

for almost a century, it was rare for a single strike

to cause disruption on this scale.

In general, industrial-relations problems

were more localised disputes, often,

almost invariably, not officially recognised.

National strikes were rare during Terry's time

working the London docks,

but he experienced many smaller, unofficial disputes.

It was the little strikes, the wildcat strikes,

which were a nuisance.

You know, if something was wrong,

some sort of hazard to health was wrong,

then a stoppage would occur.

Usually these little forages only lasted an hour or two

and then everything was settled.

For all those in favour to please show.

But 1972 was a watershed year for labour relations in Britain.

The country seemed beset by industrial unrest.

Groups, from coal miners to builders to the dockers,

walked out to safeguard jobs, pay and conditions.

The dockers' bitter dispute led to violent clashes and arrests,

and this image came to define the portrayal

of dock workers in the media.

The way that was portrayed was as the dockers as being kind of

industrial bullyboys, as this incredibly strike-prone group

which was overpaid and very lazy.

Against this backdrop,

the union and the employers struck a deal

guaranteeing an end to the use of unregistered dockers,

no redundancies, and ensuring all container work

happened within ports.

For all the efforts by unions,

management and government to protect jobs,

cargoes continued to move from traditional inner-city docks

to more modern ports further downstream.

The movement downriver is to deeper water as vessels got larger,

and of course more importantly there was more space for new types of

cargo-handling facilities, containers and so on.

Liverpool opened its own Seaforth Container Terminal in 1972,

but it didn't provide enough work for the numbers of dockers

still employed under the National Dock Labour Scheme.

7.30am, Hornby control on Mersey docks.

The men are reporting for work at the place they call the pen,

a throwback to the days of casual hiring and firing on the waterfront.

If it's a normal day, there'll be no work for 1,000 of the 5,000 dockers,

but under a national agreement, the employers can't

make them redundant - jobs for life.

The actual men in the control this morning was 170.

-How many of them will get work today?

-About half.

Is it always that bad?

Well, there are times when it's a damn sight worse, you know,

we sometimes sign 300.

By 1981,

only one employer of registered dock labour remained in Liverpool,

with 3,400 registered dockers on its books.

The impact this transformation had on the working community

of the docks was catastrophic.

The Dock Road was full of bars

and the seafarers used to use these pubs.

They'd go into town,

they'd be buying stuff to take home to their families,

and all of that stopped because they weren't in port long enough.

The now-obsolete inner-city docks became a ghost town,

but this derelict landscape still drew Stephen and his camera.

When I saw Albert Dock and the South Docks,

they literally did turn to ghost towns,

and no-one seemed to know what would happen to them,

and it became very lonely down there in those days.

That's a picture here of a fisherman sitting there mending his nets

in the '70s.

He was left by himself - everybody else had gone.

He was one of the ex-dockers.

I suppose he was going there, thinking about the times of the past

when he was lumping crates about.

The dereliction of the docks also provided the backdrop

for an iconic TV drama that exposed the damage

the early 1980s' economic recession wreaked on working communities.

In George's Last Ride, the final episode of Alan Bleasdale's

critically-acclaimed series Boys From The Blackstuff,

former docker George Malone recalls the working life he knew and lost.

It just seems like sodding yesterday.

Midday gun.

The women sandstoning the steps of the flags.

And the little kids playing ally-oh.

His final speech captured a mood of tragic defiance

in the face of the brute economics of Thatcherism.

They say that memories...

..live longer than dreams, but...

But my dreams...

..those dreams of long ago, they...

..still give me hope.

And faith in my class.

I can't believe that there's no hope.

Can't.

Boys From The Blackstuff presented its audience with a stark image

of dockland decline.

But, further south, a very different vision of the future

for Britain's docklands was being dreamt up.

In London there was this real air of optimism that started,

and the London Docklands Development Corporation

very much tapped into that feeling of can-do,

"We're going to create a new world, it's going to be fabulous."

There's a really good scene in the film The Long Good Friday...

Our country's not an island any more.

..where Bob Hoskins is travelling with some investors on a boat

down the Thames and he's showing the wasteland that is the Docklands.

That this is the decade in which London will become Europe's capital,

having cleared away the outdated.

We've got mile after mile

and acre after acre of land

for our future prosperity.

No other city in the world has got right in its centre

such an opportunity for profitable progress.

A year after the film's release, Michael Heseltine,

then Secretary of State for the Environment,

announced his intention to reshape London's Docklands.

The London Docklands Development Corporation was responsible

for finding a new use for 8.5 square miles of the former docks.

You had these vast acres of dereliction and decay.

The land is owned by the public sector,

by the local authorities and by the nationalised industries,

and only when the free-enterprise system is able to get ownership

of that land is it able to do its job.

The centrepiece of the redevelopment was Canary Wharf,

destined to symbolise the economy's new financial priorities.

Two and a half at four, what are you making now?

Britain was now ready for a different type of global trade -

in shares and capital instead of goods and cargo.

Ten years ago, it would not have been possible even to think

in such bold, ambitious terms.

And this is going to be the biggest commercial development in the world.

-But why does it need to be quite so high?

-Er...

It took many years for the redevelopment plans

to be fully implemented,

but along the way London became a model

for regeneration of other former dockland sites around the UK.

The former docks in Liverpool,

which a few years before had been the wasteland seen in

Boys From The Blackstuff, experienced a makeover of their own.

The city's original Albert Dock was reopened as a cultural quarter,

becoming home to the Tate Liverpool gallery in 1988.

It was a common theme amongst many ports that the docks and facilities

that were discarded following containerisation,

many of these areas were regenerated in the 1980s into things like

shopping complexes, residential areas and places of leisure,

so there was very much a shift on the waterfront

from being a place of industry to a place of consumption.

Yet the industry of the docks didn't die,

it simply shifted to a new home away from the heart of our cities.

Although radically transformed,

today, Britain's port industry is as busy as ever -

the second-largest in Europe.

Over 95% of the UK's imports and exports still pass through

the nation's ports, but where once we could see all this,

now it is largely invisible.

Up until the 1960s, maritime trade was on people's doorstep in ports.

They could see dock workers in the streets,

they could see fishermen going to sea,

they could see the cranes above the dock wall,

they could see rows and rows of cargo waiting to be shipped

or having been landed.

Nowadays, port activity takes place further downstream,

out of sight, at container ports, container depots.

This is the face of our docks in the 21st century.

Mechanised, efficient and still at the heart of Britain's trade.

But here and there, you may still be able to find a docker.

Though he won't be wearing a flat cap and greatcoat

but a hard hat and high-vis vest.

In a small independent port in South Wales,

Ron Yates is the third generation of his family to work on the docks.

My father, my brothers,

they all worked down the dock.

My dad worked there for 40-odd years -

he started in the early '30s,

'40s, whatever it was.

I started in '70, 1970.

65 years later -

I should be retired, but I'm still working.

Though there are only a few men in Ron's gang,

they're still loading ships by hand in the old way.

Just a short distance away in Cardiff,

the waterfront that the dockers left behind

has been completely transformed.

Before the turn of the 21st century, the National Assembly for Wales

and Wales Millennium Centre would take pride of place

in the former docks.

The residential area of Tiger Bay

was engulfed by a much larger leisure complex renamed Cardiff Bay.

I was born in Tiger Bay and as far as I'm concerned

I still live in Tiger Bay, even though there are people telling me

it's not there any more.

I'm thinking, "How can that be? How can you be born into something,

"still live in something, and it's not there any more?"

And in Liverpool the waterfront has utterly changed, too.

You go into Liverpool today

and it's a totally different city to what I remember

when I first started working there. It's beautiful.

The waterfront's lovely - glass everywhere, lovely buildings,

people living in multistorey apartments, penthouses.

Britain's docks now are as bustling and busy as they ever were,

but are no longer the beating heart of our cities.

Now, inner-city docks are not places for hard physical labour,

but spaces to relax.

They may no longer ring to the footsteps of an army of dockers

labouring over their cargo

but they still hum with the chatter of millions of us

who today choose to live, work and play down the docks.