Love,laughter and solidarity on the docks in Liverpool,c.1950s–1990s

Abstract

By focusing on love and humour, this article examines the role of positive emotions in the making and remaking of solidarity on the docks in Liverpool to demonstrate that solidarity was, and still is, embedded within power dynamics that shaped daily life. After outlining the persistent insecurities dock workers and their families faced due to the casual system of employment in place until 1967, the dangerous nature of work and the impact of containerisation, I assess how experiences during this period were remembered. A combination of oral history interviews and archival records of the National Dock Labour Board and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company are used to highlight the significance of family support, the dockers’ bucket and nicknames to understanding the emotional dimensions of class. Ultimately, I outline that solidarity action should not be understood as overt moments of political struggle alone as it was sustained by creating moments of happiness and joy.

During an interview in September 2019, I asked Carol whether she thought Liverpool’s renowned humour came from the waterfront, to which she replied, ‘it definitely comes from the docks, and you’ll never find a docker to say he didn’t love his job’. Carol had grown up in the 1950s with both her father and grandfather as dock workers and later married a dock worker herself. We spoke at length about how all three of these men in her life had endured physically demanding and dangerous work, which made me question exactly what there was to love about the docks. Nevertheless, my own interviews conducted between 2017 and 2020, as well as those from the Mersey Heritage Project (MHP) in the 1980s and accounts documented by Hunter in the 1990s, were all scattered with expressions of love towards family members, workmates, and the job itself. This love was tied intimately to positive, often humorous, memories of dock work and shared experiences of solidarity that spanned decades. From the 1950s onward, Liverpool’s dock workers were fighting for job security due to the transformative effects of decasualisation and containerisation. In this article, I focus on the emotional processes that made and remade working-class solidarity on the docks in Liverpool. By extending my focus beyond moments of industrial action alone, I demonstrate that solidarity must be understood emotionally and that doing so broadens our understandings of resistance.

Class relations have defined the historical development of the port in Liverpool, which rose to prominence in the eighteenth and nineteenth century when a mercantile elite enshrined its position of power in the city. Milne (2006) has outlined how Liverpool acted as the ‘gateway’ between raw materials in British colonies and the manufacturing industries in the north-west of England. The world’s first wet dock was built in Liverpool in 1715 and the city’s dock system grew in the following century, reaching seven miles in length. Much of this growth was made possible by profits from the slave trade in which Liverpool’s shipowners played a key role until the American Civil War in the 1860s (Towers, 2011). As the port grew, work remained entirely dependent upon the volume of trade and shipowners relied upon the casual labour of those who lived next to the docks to load and unload cargo. The Mersey Docks and Harbour Board (MDHB), which consisted of shipbuilders, merchants and industrialists, was established as a public utility trust in 1858 to manage the river and supply trade handling facilities to private traders and shipping firms. The MDHB effectively separated employment and management from ownership, which allowed the system of casual employment to prevail for so long (Phillips & Whiteside, 1985). The conditions of work and the proximity in which dock workers and their families lived to the port helped to nurture a strong sense of working-class identity and traditions of solidarity that form the focus of this article. In particular, I assess how these traditions were experienced and remembered from the 1950s to the 1990s. For most of this period, between 1947 and 1989, the jobs of registered dock workers were protected by the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS). However, despite this protection, the introduction of containers reduced the number of workers required dramatically due to new handling methods and use of equipment that ensured standardisation (Miller, 2012).

Following a discussion of my theoretical and methodological approach, this article is structured based upon the relationship between love, laughter and solidarity in the dock community in Liverpool. I argue that we must assess the nature of everyday relationships at work to understand the emotional malleability of solidarity as an ongoing process and the varied ways in which dock workers and their families experienced and expressed it. I also intend that this article provides historical context to contemporary studies of the emotions of class, and precarity in particular, to illustrate how the emotions of solidarity functioned and continue to function as a form of resistance (Gerrard & Farrugia, 2021; Patulny et al, 2020). These emotions have always been rooted in converging structures of power such as class, gender and race (Connell, 2005; Skeggs, 1997; Virdee, 2014). I begin by outlining the shared struggles of the dock community from casualism to containerisation. I then assess how and why dock workers loved their jobs by paying close attention to the shared values that defined understandings of solidarity. In this section, the significance of love and what was loved starts to outline the ways in which dock workers coped with insecurity and danger. Finally, I delve further into this argument by examining how humour was used as a form of ‘emotion-work’ central to day-to-day resistance through its ability to subvert power structures, maintain close relationships and regulate behaviour, all of which maintained solidarity.

The emotions of solidarity

Studies of solidarity in Britain’s port transport industry have often focused upon its visible manifestations such as strikes and stoppages (Hunter, 1994; Phillips, 2005; Turnbull & Sapsford, 1990). However, Featherstone (2012, p. 5) has demonstrated the importance of understanding solidarity as a ‘relation forged through political struggle which seeks to challenge forms of oppression’. The ongoing process of solidarity has also been outlined by Atzeni (2009) in reference to two factory occupations in 1996 at FIAT and Renault car plants in Argentina and by Kelliher (2021) in his study of the relationships formed between London and the British coalfields during the 1984–5 miners’ strike. I build upon these works here to argue that solidarity must be understood as an interpersonal emotional experience that is dependent upon collective feelings rooted in a sense of injustice. These feelings are not wholly negative. Jasper (2014, p. 209) has explained that two types of emotions keep groups together: ‘reciprocal emotions’ that members feel towards one another and ‘shared emotions’ that are directed towards something external. Jasper (pp. 211 & 209) has also emphasised that ‘combinations and sequences’ of emotions are key to understanding action. For example, those who perceive the ‘in-group as strong are more likely to experience anger and desire to take action’. Similarly, Gould (2009) explored the importance of desire to taking solidarity action in her detailed analysis of ACT UP, an LGBTQ+ organisation based in the United States that campaigned for increased awareness of and action towards the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Gould has demonstrated the importance of pleasure to maintaining activism, particularly the eroticism and humour at ACT UP meetings. Hence, solidarity cannot be examined only in moments of overt political action and instead should be understood as embedded within everyday forms of resistance. By everyday resistance, I mean the multitude of ways that people and communities cope emotionally with challenges of insecurity and danger on a daily basis.

Kevin, who had been a dock worker in Liverpool since the late 1960s to 1995, explained to me in July 2019 that ‘it’s about keeping each other buoyant, keeping ‘em up there, keeping ‘em happy, keeping ‘em joyful’. In this reflection, Kevin aligned himself with and against others based on a shared working-class understanding of what could bring happiness and joy. Emotions are psychological and physiological evaluations of the external world so are tied closely to the norms and values held by individuals and groups (Rosenwein, 2002; Scheer, 2012). These norms and values are therefore crucial to understanding the positive and negative emotions of solidarity. Kevin’s reflection also highlighted the active role that dock workers and their families had in creating positive emotions for themselves and others, a form of what Hochschild (1979, p. 561) termed ‘emotion-work’, the ‘act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling’. Whilst Hochschild’s (2012) later work analysed service sector employment in America and emphasised the ways in which emotional labour can result in new forms of alienation, the concept of ‘emotion-work’ is useful for understanding resistance. People seek to enhance positive experiences by orienting themselves towards the people and objects they value (Ahmed, 2010). Therefore, how the dock community actively created positive experiences in the face of continual insecurity not only helped to define experiences of solidarity but functioned as a form of resistance itself by creating moments of love and laughter during difficult times.

Willis (1977), Skeggs (1997) and Levine (2007) have previously acknowledged humour’s social role as a form of cultural resistance or coping mechanism in differing historical contexts. I deepen our understanding of humour by tying it explicitly to the history of emotions. Humour is a form of ‘interpersonal emotion management’ which ‘strengthens or restores the feeling norms of the situation and creates amusement in the self and others’ (Francis, 1994, pp. 154 & 148). Therefore, the motivations behind any form of orchestrated humour, as opposed to accidental humour, are important to understanding how people relate to one another. Humour depends upon the simultaneous perception of two incompatible frames of reference, so often by making a joke, dock workers or their family members were highlighting what was normal and abnormal whilst trying to improve the feeling of a situation (Watson, 2015). For humour to be successful, those involved in it must share at least some norms and values. Therefore, any analysis of humour provides an insight to the same ‘systems of feeling’ as experiences of solidarity (Rosenwein, 2002, p. 842).

Oral histories

Oral histories offer a unique opportunity to understand the emotions of the past and the present. In his seminal article, ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History’, Portelli (1981, pp. 99–100) explained that oral sources tell us ‘not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did’. Clifford (2012) has highlighted that oral sources and studies of emotion both emphasise the value of subjective experience with the former wedding itself to memory studies and the latter to social constructivism. As such, Clifford (2012, p. 211) explained that analysing the emotions of oral histories offers a way to understand how ‘individual life stories converge with, overlap and are shaped by collective narratives and experiences’. In this article, I focus on how the culture of the docks in Liverpool influenced individual lives and the ways in which dock workers and their family members understood their experiences. I pay attention to insights from memory studies which have shown that memories discussed within interviews depend upon the recollection process itself as memories, originally consolidated by their emotional impact, are recalled (Thomson, 2010). Additionally, I draw upon insights from narrative theory which has shown the importance of understanding the ‘velocity’ of the narrative, its rhythm, tone and time spent on certain topics (Portelli, 1981, p. 98). I contextualise these oral sources within the records of the organisational bodies that oversaw the employment of dock workers. I have referred to documents created by the National Dock Labour Board held in the National Archives in Kew and the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company (MDHC) in the Maritime Archives in Liverpool. The sources in these archives are crucial to understanding class relations because they allow me to analyse the relationship between official discourses and lived experience.

My use of three different collections of oral sources helps to demonstrate the importance of understanding solidarity as a process over time. I refer directly to four interviews I carried out between 2017 and 2020 as well as six from the MHP of the 1980s and two accounts of the 1995 to 1998 dock dispute recorded by Hunter. ¹ Goodwin and O’Connor (2015, p. 9) illustrated the usefulness of historical data in their work on Norbert Elias’s Young Worker Project; they explained that it enables an exploration of ‘continuities, change and transformations over a significantly longer period of time’. Bornat (2003) has also emphasised this particular benefit of revisiting historical oral history collections. However, Bornat (2003) warned not to divorce such sources from the context in which they were created because without this information the relationship between the past and the present becomes ambiguous. The MHP was created by the Mersey Heritage Trust, an organisation formed to revitalise Liverpool’s heritage during the difficult period of the 1980s. At the time, the NDLS was still operating but the south docks in Liverpool had been derelict for some time. The Albert Dock only officially reopened in 1984 as a tourist attraction. Hunter was a longstanding Trotskyist interested in supporting the men and women involved in the 1995 to 1998 dock dispute at a time when the mainstream media were paying them little attention. By the time of the interviews I conducted, most dock workers and their families no longer had a physical connection to dock work. Consequently, the interviews I refer to in the following pages allow access to emotional experiences at key intervals of change on the docks in Liverpool.

Struggle on the docks in Liverpool

Solidarity is entrenched in struggle. When discussing dock work in Liverpool with those who depended upon it for their livelihoods, the harm of casual employment which had prevailed until 1967 was described consistently. Dock work in Liverpool was shaped by the gendered division of labour and geographies of race and ethnicity which led to the occupation becoming largely the preserve of Irish, Catholic men (Belchem, 2007). I first met Kevin in July 2017, when he told me about his strong family connections to dock work. He spent time explaining that being a dock worker under casualism meant never having a job because men had to attend hiring stands twice a day in the hope of securing work. When we spoke again in 2019, Kevin stated explicitly that these stands were known as pens because men were ‘treated like animals’ in them. Manual workers had few alternatives in Liverpool until the 1960s when factories opened in the outskirts of the city (Ayers, 2004). Consequently, port employers were able to assert their power without depleting their workforce, which, Kevin explained, left workers ‘desperate’ in the pens. To illustrate how terrible this situation was, he shared one of his father’s stories with me about dock workers stepping over a man who had died in the pen to try to secure work themselves. Foremen would choose which dock workers to hire depending on their chosen pub, football club, religion or even whether or not they would allow the foreman to become involved with their wife. This latter point was a ‘fact of life’ according to Kevin and communicated how morally deplorable port employers could be because a man’s status was tied closely to his ability to provide for and protect his wife. This system cemented a notion of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the memories of dock workers.

The value of collectivism, as opposed to competition, thrived among dock workers because sons followed their fathers into jobs and work was carried out in gangs. Gang work meant working together produced the best financial outcome for everyone as pay was related to productivity (Turnbull & Wass, 1994). Moreover, casualism meant that people were willing to support others because they knew the following week it could be them struggling to get by. Since the formation of the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL) in 1889, which later merged with the National Transport Workers’ Federation and other unions to become the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) in 1922 the industrial action taken to improve working conditions and job security has been strikes (Taylor, 2012). The NDLS marked a significant moment in narratives of struggle, however it did not mark the end point of it. Introduced in 1947, the NDLS oversaw the registering, hiring and disciplining of men. Port employers and the TGWU had equal representation on the National Dock Labour Board (NDLB) which administered the scheme. However, dock workers still had to attend hiring pens daily. The Devlin Report of 1965 outlined that this partial decasualisation was the reason for continuing industrial unrest on the docks due to the lack of loyalties to particular employers and piecework. Consequently, a two-phase modernisation programme was introduced in September 1967. Phase one ended casualism by assigning dock workers to permanent employers, though the categories of supplementary workers and temporarily unattached workers were also created. Phase two occurred between 1970 and 1972 and ended piecework through local deals. In Liverpool, recently negotiated piecework rates meant that this type of work remained (Taylor, 2012).

Whilst talking to Hunter in the 1990s about his experience on the docks, Ted Woods explained that the bosses ‘meant nothing anymore’ after 1967 because they were just the person who ‘took your book off you’ and ‘all his power had actually gone’. Ted described the new system as ‘fantastic’ to Hunter (1995–8) because ‘everybody got their fair share of all the best work’. Moreover, shop stewards were recognised by employers following decasualisation, which was reported in the Port News as ‘the greatest thing that ever happened in the dock industry’ by Stan, a shop steward, because ‘it broke down a barrier between men and management which had hitherto proved almost impenetrable’. Stan explained that the bargaining was ‘just as tough’ but that, in the 1970s, the shop stewards got ‘tough round the table’ instead of ‘fighting each other at a long range’, which had been the case in the ‘the bad old days’ (Knowles, 1976, p. 5).

Negative experiences of work were never confined to employment structures alone. The accident rate for the port industry was high nationally, with one out of seven dock workers reporting having suffered a personal injury at work in 1969 (Denby, 1970). Almost 30% of all accidents were caused by the manual handling of cargo and just over 18% were caused by articles falling in 1970 (Denby, 1972, p. 1). In a MHP interview, WH0001 reflected on James Sexton as he explained Liverpool’s history of trade unionism (MHP, 1986, 1B, p. 5). Sexton was a dock worker in Liverpool who became General Secretary of the NUDL in 1893 and retained leadership for 28 years (Towers, 2011). Before this role, Sexton had suffered an accident at work that had permanently altered his physical appearance after he crushed his cheekbone, dislodged his eye and fractured his skull. This incident happened approximately 100 years before WH0001’s interview, yet he recalled it as though he had witnessed it himself and only once qualified that he had read about Sexton. WH0001 stated that the real ‘mark’ Sexton had been left with was that he became an advocate for trade unionism (MHP, 1986, 1B, p. 5). This reflection tied trade unionism and solidarity to industrial health and safety, which continued to be an issue at the time of the interview. The improved bargaining position of dock workers after decasualisation in 1967 ensured they were able to fight for better welfare provisions and safety in the workplace. For example, shop stewards had been on the Liaison Committee on Dock Catering during the redevelopment of the canteens (‘Lord Mayor drops in . . .’, 1971).

The emotional connections of solidarity extended beyond the dock gates and were shaped by the processes of containerisation, deindustrialisation and neoliberalism. Kevin Bilsborrow explained to Hunter (1995–8) that dock workers had been called the ‘millionaires of the labour force’ after 1967 but reflected that ‘it only lasted about four years’ before ‘the employers regrouped and began the attack with containerisation’. Following decasualisation, a six-week strike broke out in Liverpool, London, Manchester and Hull in part because modernisation included scaling down the workforce by as much as 90% due to the reduction of the working hours needed to load and unload cargo (Hunter, 1994). Seaforth Container Terminal opened in 1972 following lengthy negotiations with the shop stewards in Liverpool about staffing levels. The city’s dock workers had previously refused to handle cargo coming from Aintree Container Base in 1969 and supported the national strike in 1972 that aimed to free five dock workers imprisoned for picketing a container base in London (Taylor, 2012). The Aldington–Jones agreement of 1972 essentially secured permanent jobs for registered dock workers, but it also marked the start of years of voluntary severance schemes. The number of registered dock workers dropped in Merseyside from 11,530 in 1967 to 5202 in 1979 and then 1100 in 1989 (Hunter, 1994). By 1989, the National Association of Port Employers were able to argue successfully that the level of worker control in the NDLB was an obstacle to profits and the scheme was repealed. The success of this campaign was due to the restructured relationship between the state, the economy and the trade unions that had been orchestrated by the Conservative government since 1979 (Clement, 2015). The loss of the NDLS was so catastrophic for dock workers that between 1989 and 1992 approximately 80% left the industry nationwide opting for redundancy pay over working under tougher managerial control (Marren, 2016). This experience of loss echoed that of many other industrial workers in Britain and dock workers internationally.

More distanced forms of solidarity grew during the 1995 to 1998 dock dispute which centred on the sacking of approximately 500 men for refusing to cross a picket line. The lack of official support from the TGWU and lack of media attention led dock workers and their families to seek support further afield (Marren, 2016). When Carol shared her experience of this dispute with me, she stated that suffering ‘makes you more empathetic’, ‘you feel people’s pain because you know how it feels’ and you can ‘tune in’, ‘you’re more willing to help because you don’t want them to feel like that’. The international delegations that Carol attended shaped her understanding that what was happening on the docks was part of a much broader fight against the effects of an intensified phase of global capitalism. This understanding explained why Women of the Waterfront, a support group for sacked dock workers during this dispute, and the sacked dock workers gave their support to the women of Srebrenica, as well as Turkish citizens fighting for democracy, and how the radical ecologist and anti-corporate group Reclaim the Streets came to support the dock community’s cause (Bradley & Knight, 2004). Prior to this dispute, dock workers had taken political industrial action. For example, in 1973 dock workers refused to handle Chilean cargo because of the deposing of the democratically elected government of Chile by a military coup and the imprisonment of trade unionists (Body, 1973). In the 1980s, Rob, who had been a clerical worker on the docks since the early 1970s, explained how he and his workmates had refused to sign the necessary C88 form (which confirmed the origin of cargo to accept it into the Port of Liverpool) for uranium hexaflouride. This action stemmed from a United Nations imposed ban on the extraction of minerals from Namibia due to the ongoing South African Border Wars and anti-Apartheid struggle in the country at the time. However, these earlier examples of solidarity action were often framed directly through the rights to trade unionism (Jones, 2008).

For the love of what?

Understanding how and why dock workers loved their jobs is essential to understanding experiences of solidarity because these experiences were not simply an automatic response to persistent insecurity and danger. When I spoke to James, who had worked on the docks from 1959 to 1989, we discussed the lack of washing facilities prior to decasualisation for when men worked on carbon black, fishmeal and wet hides. I commented that dock workers must have been strong to carry out that type of work, to which he responded, ‘just one of them jobs, but I still loved it, I loved every minute of the docks’. James loved the docks despite these conditions, not because of them. The reason most dock workers gave for their love of work was rooted in the supportive relationships they had with their workmates. Rob explained to me that when he started working on the docks, he had ‘loved’ the history and politics that were openly discussed. In particular, he referred to how the ‘poor Irish’ had fought for better conditions over time after being ‘put’ on the docks during the 1800s (Belchem, 2007). Kevin was also very open about how much he loved the docks. He explained, ‘I learnt many, many, many things, some of the most beautiful people, intelligent, funniest, argh, people in the world, I’ve been to the best university of life working on the docks for thirty years, I would do it all tomorrow.’ On the docks in Liverpool, love was directed towards the people who made persistent insecurity and struggle easier.

These people included other dock workers but the repercussions of insecurity and danger at work were felt beyond the workplace. Both James and Rob explained how, despite all of its faults, dock work had supported their families. Family featured heavily as a reason for going to work and was used to frame negative experiences of casualism more than the working conditions themselves. In 2019, Carol shared her memories of her father coming home from the morning call in the hiring pens ‘drenched to the skin’. Her mother would put his coat on the guard around the coal fire to try to dry it before he returned for the afternoon call. Whilst Carol did not use the term ‘love’ explicitly, our previous discussions about family and work ensured that I understood how crucial it was to her memory. As well as demonstrating how familial love fed into the love of work, Carol outlined the gendered expectations of any action taken upon solidarity. Men went on strikes and demonstrations in the masculine sphere of dock work whilst women ensured that the effects of struggle were minimised at home. Carol reiterated these roles when she shared with me that she was told by other women to always keep six weeks of food in the cupboard in case of a strike.

The term ‘solidarity’ itself was used predominantly in relation to strike action, which is evidenced by its repeated use in Hunter’s accounts of the 1995 to 1998 dock dispute and limited use in the interviews I conducted and those created by the MHP. Without the presence of a dispute, the language of love, pride and support dominated accounts of dock work. WH0024, who had been a dock worker from 1954 to 1986, was interviewed by the MHP in July 1987. He explained the practice of ‘the dockers’ bucket’, which involved dock workers collecting money outside of hiring pens for an ill or injured workmate. WH0024 described this system as ‘embarrassing’ because the amount of money would fluctuate depending on how much work had been available. After decasualisation, a scheme created by shop stewards from the Port of Liverpool Stevedoring Company came into being in 1971 where 10 pence were taken from dock workers’ wages each week. WH0024 estimated that within ‘six or seven’ months ‘twelve or sixteen’ similar schemes had emerged in firms such as Smith Coggins and Ocean Port Services. When these firms withdrew from the port in 1972 and others closed in the following years, dock workers were reallocated to the then privatised MDHC so the multiple welfare schemes were amalgamated based on areas as opposed to firms. For WH0024, these schemes were ‘one of the greatest achievements on the dock’ because ‘looking after your mates’ was inbuilt, ‘you didn’t have to worry’ (MHP, 1987a). The value of supporting one another and the pride this brought when implemented should be understood as a key part of solidarity and the reason dock workers loved and enjoyed their jobs was tied directly to it.

Solidarity was never static or unchanging. Kevin was a shop steward and used to represent men at employment tribunals in front of the Liverpool Dock Labour Board. Kevin explained to me that with ‘vagabonds and your riff raff’ he would not put himself out ‘big time’ because he knew that they would not put themselves out ‘big time’ for the union and for the other men. Whereas, with someone he ‘really cared about’ who had made a mistake, he would ‘pull every stop out’ and ‘do everything to keep that man going’. He then said:

I’d give the same because I didn’t want to see anyone lose their job but if you can understand my love for the first guy is less than the second guy because the second guy was like a real good person, he wasn’t selfish, didn’t think just about himself.

In this memory, Kevin drew upon the value of collectivism and its relationship to the union to express how he felt about the men he was representing. In cases where a two-day suspension had already been secured, for example, Kevin remembered making the first man ‘sweat’ so he would not be as ‘selfish’ in the future. Kevin then drew upon notions of familial love to explain the case he put forward in the tribunal. He would tell the local Dock Labour Board that a man’s children and wife did not deserve to be punished for his actions. Kevin’s memories explained one of the many ways that the value of working together and, as a result, the reciprocal emotions of solidarity among the dock community were managed and reaffirmed.

The affection shared within memories was not always the same that was expressed at work. I asked Rob if the reason people who worked on the docks loved their jobs was because they worked with friends. He replied by underlining how important the ‘bond’ was between workers, though he did also explain that ‘obviously families come first’. Rob described to me the ‘beautiful’ actions of one particular gang that worked for the Harrison Line in the 1970s that ‘never’ let one of their members work because he had arthritis, they ‘looked after him’. This ‘philosophy’, as Rob called it, led him to say, ‘they’re the ones that I look up to now’, ‘ordinary working men who would die for you’. However, during the 1995 to 1998 dispute, Hunter asked Ted Woods, who had worked as a dock worker since the mid-1960s, why the solidarity on the docks had been so strong. Ted said that he had found a ‘home’ on the docks as there was a permanent kind of solidarity’ that was ‘in-built’, ‘like a smell’. He then explained how this solidarity was expressed by stating ‘there’s all kinds of snarling going on and you think people are going to murder each other, and under that there’s this kind of macho comradeship which is undeniable’ (Hunter, 1995–8). The emphasis on overcoming adversity contributed to this snarling as it was a way to keep one another going. The arduous and dangerous work enshrined a ‘tough’ masculinity that discouraged the expression of negative emotion and served to demonstrate to employers that men could overcome the conditions forced upon them (McIvor & Johnston, 2004). Humour was one of the ways that dock workers showed affection and it helped to maintain solidarity.

‘There had to be humour’

Before I examine the role of humour in relation to solidarity and resistance, I must share a statement that Rob made to me as we sat in the bar at The Casa, part of the Community Advice Service Association that was founded by the dock community following the 1995 to 1998 dispute (Mah, 2014). I started to ask about the well-known use of nicknames on Liverpool’s docks, when he said:

People come in here all the time and go ‘ahh you know dockers are funny’ but there’s the political angle to those people like supporting people, that’s the story I always want to tell. About how they were politically astute, and they were clever. They were clever. Real politics. Honestly, they were.

Until recently, this distinction between ‘real politics’ and everyday emotions, such as humour, is something that has characterised the history of industrial relations and social movements more broadly. In most western histories since the seventeenth century, emotions have been portrayed as the antithesis to rational thought (Gould, 2009). If demonstrators or strike leaders were emotional, they were associated with irrationality. I hope Rob forgives me for focusing on humour here because my argument is not devoid of politics at all. In fact, I demonstrate that the emotional knowledge that was passed down through generations of workers was the essence of political struggle.

Humour was one way this knowledge was passed on. By the time he was interviewed by the MHP in February 1987, WH0011 had held numerous clerical jobs on the docks since the Second World War. The interviewer asked (MHP, 1987b, 2A, p. 18) about the militant reputation of dock workers, to which he replied that ‘the reputation of the Liverpool docker has more to do with his humour than his militancy’. He said:

I’ve heard people say and I can vouch for it myself that I used to look forward to coming to work because it. . . although you worked very hard and you didn’t have much time to think about erm, er griping and grousing about the. . . although you did, but it’s like in the army you know the same sort of thing, you growl about everything. You have this er humour that went round and I think it [was] base[d] a lot on the sort of throw away unconscious Irish humour that, I mean many of us are descendants from Irish erm ancestry and er of course the Irish have always had a big influence here in Liverpool and this sort of unconscious humour erm w[h]ere they erm sort of reduce er chaos or er drama into the sort of everyday acceptance I, I think this probably is the basis of it because it was very funny and very spontaneous, it, it just happened, people would just say things, like the names they gave to dockers [. . .]. (MHP, 1987b, 2A, p. 19)

The ability to turn ‘chaos’ into ‘everyday acceptance’ is crucial in WH0011’s reflection as it highlights the role humour plays in making difficult circumstances more manageable and even enjoyable. The interviewer then prompted (MHP, 1987b, 2A, p. 20) to describe this humour in more detail by stating that to outsiders it would seem ‘almost bitingly cruel at times’. WH0011 explained that it was ‘caustic’ and people accepted it, ‘they wouldn’t think much of you if you didn’t’. The idea that humour was necessary was repeated by WH0010 who, when remembering his time as a crane driver and how gangs would play together, said that ‘there had to be humour because (er), they were hard days, they were hard days’ (MHP, 1987c, 1B, p. 16). These reflections share similarities with the humour among the white working-class mothers in the northwest of England in Skeggs’s (1997) study of respectability. Essentially, humour created an alternative form of value to the middle-class normative values the women were typically judged by.

The ability to create enjoyment at work was a key form of resistance on the docks and helped to foster a sense of solidarity. Nicknames were one of many ways dock workers found relief in what could be a monotonous job and, in 2019, Kevin recalled the spontaneous nature of their creation. The Urban Spaceman gained his name by always saying ‘I’m going to me ma’s for me dinner’ and similarly the Home Secretary was always ‘heading off home’. The stories of these nicknames travelled up and down the docks to provide entertainment for workers (Fortado, 1998). The memories of William Sanders, who worked in the Brocklebank area of the south docks between the 1930s and 1980s, recorded by his son and granddaughter refer to the same nicknames as WH0024, interviewed by the MHP in 1987, who worked predominantly in the north docks (MHP, 1987d; Sanders & Sanders, 2009). Sanders and Sanders (2009, p. 8) described a dock worker who continuously asked to leave for dinner a few minutes early to catch his bus saying, ‘ey lads, I’ve got to be away before twelve’. One day the united response was ‘CINDERELLA’ and the name stuck. WH0024 also referred to this nickname but in a slightly different context; he claimed that ‘Cinderella’ emerged from a dock worker who would say ‘I’ve got to go boys, I’ve got to be home for 12 o’clock’ each time the men went out drinking (MHP, 1987d). Whether the story behind this name has altered over the years in memory or whether the name caught on is not certain, but its presence in multiple memories demonstrates its significance within the shared humorous repertoire of dock workers. This type of quick wit helped to sustain a camaraderie that reinforced strong bonds in the dock community and made struggles at work easier.

Cinderella might have provided amusement, but the nickname also highlighted the expectations of behaviour at work. WH0024 named ‘The Lazy Solicitor’ who was always sitting on a case, ‘The Life Belt’ who floated if there was any hard work around and explained that every control had a ‘Handbags’ whose workmates had to carry him. Although WH0024’s tone of voice was more animated when he began to list nicknames, the emphasis on a lack of work highlighted the value of working hard together to receive higher rates of pay. Other nicknames relating to work ethic that WH0024 listed included ‘The Broken Boomerang’ who would not come back if he went to make a cup of tea, ‘The London Fog’ who would not lift and ‘The Reluctant Plumber’ who would not do ‘a tap’ (MHP, 1987d). Although remembered affectionately in oral histories, the impact of nicknames that aimed to regulate behaviour at work is difficult to decipher. Did ‘The Lazy Solicitor’ find his nickname amusing or would it have prevented him getting valuable work? In the Sanders (2009) family memoir, ‘Tommy Sad Tales’ is said to have been far from pleased when he learned of his nickname. Tommy had lost his wife whilst their children were young and would talk about how much he had to do after work – the cleaning, cooking and other childcare responsibilities. To ignore the possibility of jokes going too far would be to romanticise the tough masculinity that existed on the docks, exactly what Collinson (1988) criticised Willis’s (1977) analysis of humour among working-class boys in school for. Nevertheless, the overwhelmingly positive memory of nicknames serves to demonstrate their importance to enjoying dock work.

Humour was an emotional tool of collective resistance, which is why it appeared consistently alongside memories of togetherness, danger and insecurity. For example, Sanders and Sanders (2009, pp. 135–136) described a ‘spine tingling’ scream of ‘BELOWWWWW!’ during an incident in which a cable ‘lashed across the quay’. Three men managed to move out of the way before the cable swung by them through an open doorway and ‘blasted’ a panel off the roof. As ‘three white faces’ peered around the doorway, the hatch boss shouted ‘ye fuckin’ cowards’ and an ‘absolute explosion of laughter erupted’. This comment was humorous only because of the paradox that dock workers were supposed to be tough whilst simultaneously being consistently aware of the danger they were in (Watson, 2015). The hatch boss had intentionally changed the sense of fear this incident caused by creating a more light-hearted atmosphere through joking. Psychologists have consistently shown that humour is accompanied by pleasure (Watson, 2015). The fight for improved health and safety on the docks was made easier by decasualisation as men’s jobs were secure and they were no longer reliant upon preference to gain work. Many dock workers recalled the tensions that could arise between shop stewards who halted work on a dangerous ship and those wanting to work despite the danger to get paid. In the MHP, WH0007 explained that he, as a shop steward himself, believed there should have been no arbitration for danger (MHP, 1987e, 1A, pp. 7–8). As he described how he had ‘locked horns’ with a supervisor and explained having to convince 3000 men he had made the right decision, he injected a humorous image into the memory. He explained that to minimise danger, safety nets would be used on half emptied ships and men who fell would then be ‘Barnum’ doing ‘acrobats on the way down’. Though not necessarily a joke, this light-hearted image detracted attention away from the locking of horns to once again underline the positive relationships that existed on the docks.

The close relationship between love, laughter and solidarity on the docks emerged clearly when I spoke to Kevin in 2019. He shared his memory of ‘Harry the Liar’ who, true to his nickname, was telling one of his stories about The Beatles in the canteen. Harry claimed that he had once refused to go to Germany with the band and that he had advised John Lennon not to allow Ringo Starr to join. Kevin went into considerable depth recreating this conversation for me, ensuring that I understood the build-up, performance and humour surrounding it. He explained that sometimes ‘you’d be struggling to eat your dinner, you’d be listening like that hooked into it’. We were both laughing when Kevin repeated that Harry was ‘superb’, ‘absolutely brilliant’ and ‘absolutely fantastic’. Without any further questions from me, Kevin then explained that no matter what situation a dock worker was in at home, he could be ‘in the doghouse’, but at work they were ‘free’. If they were short of money, other dock workers would buy them lunch and maybe a pint. ‘That’s the way we did it,’ he said, ‘we looked after each other in that way.’ The close association between humour in the canteens and this more profound sense of a support system illustrated how intimately they were linked. This freedom at work certainly did not come from working conditions or the constant fight for job security: Kevin was referring entirely to the feeling he had with his workmates and the enjoyment this brought him.

There is no coincidence that a lack of laughter was discussed in oral histories when the dock community reflected upon negative changes that took place at work. When Carol explained the stress and anger caused by new contracts that introduced fluctuating daily hours on short notice prior to the 1995 to 1998 dispute, she stated, ‘all the laughter seemed to go’ (Marren, 2016). In the MHP interviews, the absence of humour was particularly poignant in reflections of how work had changed for those who stayed on the docks during the 1980s. WH0010, a crane driver, had followed his father on to the docks in 1940 and was still working at the time of his interview in 1987 despite considering leaving the industry during the 1970s when things had become ‘traumatic’ (MHP, 1987c, 2A, p. 21). When discussing the friendly relationship between gang members, he said:

. . . real characters every one of them, and it, it’s sad, when I go through those sheds now, the sheds are still standing, I look at marks on the wall and I know yes, it was Joe Bloggs with his crane that did that. I look at scrape marks underneath gateways and I know exactly who did that, and I can picture the whole teaming life in those sheds round the coastal area, and I look now, pigeons all gone. (MHP, 1987c, 1B, p. 17)

When the interviewer asked if looking back was nostalgic for him, WH0010 responded with more anecdotes of work before stating ‘their faces are still there, and you look about and it, it’s just all gone, just all gone’ (MHP, 1987c, 1b, p. 17). Towards the end of the interview, the interviewer asked what WH0010 missed about the docks; he replied: ‘the dock worker, the people I’ve mixed with over the years, the humour’. He then said that if he ever wrote a book, he would call it ‘Then They Were Gone’ (MHP, 1987c, 2B, p. 36).

Conclusion

In this article, I have shown that the emotions of solidarity were rooted in class-based conditions of employment and everyday life on the docks in Liverpool. As generations of dock workers and their families experienced the hardships of casualism, dangerous working conditions and then the insecurity brought by containerisation, they aligned themselves with one another and worked to counter the negative effects of manual work. The value of fighting collectively to improve working conditions took multiple forms and the expectations of who would take certain action were defined by the gendered division of labour. Yet these varied intergenerational memories of struggle provided important context to how the dock community, as Kevin explained, kept each other ‘buoyant’. Alongside shared negative experiences, ‘reciprocal’ emotions such as love and pride featured heavily in accounts of dock work and understanding these expressions was crucial to grasping the ways in which strong group identifications were maintained through interdependencies of struggle (Jasper, 2014, p. 209). This struggle extended beyond the dock gates to include industrial workers across Britain and others affected by injustices internationally, such as persecuted trade unionists in Chile in the 1970s. The emotions of solidarity were essential to driving any form of action taken on the docks, which demonstrates that when we examine solidarity, we cannot limit ourselves to moments of overt industrial action, such as strikes, which constitute its more visible outcomes. The ways in which dock workers coped emotionally with challenges of insecurity and danger should also be understood as a key part of resistance.

Consequently, this article has contributed to the literature on solidarity by putting the history of emotions in dialogue with working-class histories and labour history. The emphasis on solidarity as a relational process has outlined how it has to be continually made and remade (Atzeni, 2009; Featherstone, 2012; Kelliher, 2021). I have shown here that these relationships were always, and continue to be, dependent upon emotional evaluations and exchange which are often omitted in studies of industrial action. Instead of simply being by-products of struggle, emotions were central to it. Humour was one example of how dock workers and their families actively sought to challenge the insecurity and danger they faced daily. Humorous stories and nicknames were shared along the docks to provide relief in a difficult job and jokes were made to comfort those who had narrowly avoided injuries at work. For humour to be shared successfully, those involved must share perceptions of accepted norms and values to understand the incongruous part of the joke. Therefore, humour also reinforced notions of solidarity by socialising newcomers and outlining accepted forms of behaviour at work. Memories of humour prompted connections to love and solidarity as the story of ‘Harry the Liar’ demonstrated. A seemingly nostalgic recollection of lunch breaks in the canteen led Kevin to make a profound reflection on how humour, friendship and support helped to combat struggle at work.

This interconnectedness is what led Ted to describe solidarity as a ‘smell’ to Hunter (1995–8). The ‘inbuilt’, ‘permanent kind of solidarity’ pervaded the mundane, everyday tasks of dock work and family life just as much as large scale industrial action. This is evident in the different focuses of struggle and loss in interviews shared in the 1980s, 1990s and more recently. For example, the loss of the NDLS and the internationalism of the 1995 to 1998 dispute defined later memories of the dock community. However, the emphasis on love and laughter remained the same. The extension of solidarity and traditions of maintaining it extended to the context of the interviews themselves as they provided a way to demonstrate just how important these moments were. As an interviewer, I had to understand the significance of nicknames and jokes to grasp the value system and complex web of emotions they relied upon. Even though most members of the dock community in Liverpool have had little physical involvement in the port since the late 1990s, they continued to share the emotions of solidarity in other ways. A practice as essential to uplifting and supporting those facing injustices and oppression today as it was in the 1950s.