The Lessons of London’s Great Dock Strike
In 1889, during one of capitalism's prolonged crises, casualised dock workers in London came together in a 130,000-strong strike for better pay – and helped ring in a new wave of socialism and industrial militancy across the country.
A labour leader addresses dockers during the London dock strike of 1889. Painting by Dudley Hardy (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
In 1889, capitalism was in the midst of a prolonged and seemingly intractable crisis. The worldwide ‘Long Depression’ of 1873-1896 saw British agriculture, long in decline, shed hundreds of thousands of workers, and British industry fall dramatically behind that of the United States and Germany.
The result was an erosion of the security and number of jobs that had once provided a steady income and professional status for many workers, and a large and growing mass of unskilled labourers whose work was defined by precarity. Property ownership, meanwhile, was the privilege of a minute few, with private renters constituting 90 percent of all households.
At that time, workers had few industrial or political mechanisms to resist the crisis—much less dictate the shape of a different kind of economy. Competition for casual work among unskilled labourers and fierce professional and status resentments among skilled workers, together with religious and ethnic divisions in some areas, limited the potential for mass union membership or a unified ‘labour’ party in parliament.
For these reasons, many of the poorest areas of 1880s Britain—such as the docklands of Liverpool and London’s East End—were represented by Tory MPs. The next few decades, however, would bring the Left the kind of industrial and political clout it had previously lacked—and it was these bastions of working-class Toryism that provided the spark.
In 1889, the Great Dock Strike showed that precariously employed workers could organise, overcome status and ethnic divisions, and force their employers to concede real improvements in their rights and wages—lessons that we can and should carry forward, as our own moment of crisis snowballs on.
The Circumstances
In the late nineteenth century dock work was one of the biggest employers in Britain, with hundreds of thousands of men labouring on the wharves of East London, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, and other cities. But it was also a job beset with chronic insecurity—dependent on whether a ship came in, and whether you got to work on it—which mitigated against unionisation in the years before 1889. There had been a short-lived Labour Protection League, established in 1870, which organised a successful strike in 1872, but this soon fell into abeyance during the slump of the next two decades.
This wasn’t helped by the fact that there was a complex hierarchy among dockers themselves. Those who worked on the water—stevedores, watermen, and lightermen—were considered an elite, and those who worked on land were deemed inferior. Then, on the land, there were interminable levels of skilled workers—including corn porters, riggers, tallymen, warehousemen, and baulkers—and men who only handled one kind of good might refuse to socialise with those who didn’t specialise. At the bottom of the hierarchy were ordinary dockers, who were further divided between the regulars and the casuals. These distinctions were also observed by their wives, who segregated themselves socially along the same lines.
The crisis of capitalism at this time made dock work more hazardous and more casualised. But it also began to undermine these intricate hierarchies, as men who specialised in oranges could increasingly no longer afford to refuse to handle tea. Competition and the continued development of the railways led to ever more pressure on the dockers to speed up, and steamships and the telegraph moved shipping companies onto strict schedules.
These companies stopped renting dockside warehouses for lengthy periods and increasingly used independent contractors to hire men, similar to the self-employed managers of ‘facilitation centres’ dramatised in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You. Casual dockers were employed on a daily basis, and would often fight each other for access to the wharves—an antecedent of today’s fights among delivery workers for access to popular takeaway restaurants.
The changes also reduced skill. Stevedores did not have to load steamers with the same precision as sailing ships, and dockers of all ranks felt their markers of relative affluence threatened by both the de-skilling of labour and competition from an ever-growing pool of unskilled labour.
The surplus of ready labour had always mitigated against the economic security of and potential for labour organisation among dockers—but it had reached new levels by 1889. Between 1871 and 1891, two hundred thousand agricultural workers entered urban areas, fleeing the depression in the countryside; there was a steady stream of Irish immigration; and 10,000 Jewish refugees arrived into Britain each year. Then as now, most of these incomers gravitated towards London, then as now attracted by the size of its casualised economy.
The Dockers’ Leader
In what became the Great Strike of 1889, the London dockers were led by Ben Tillett. Tillet was born in Bristol in 1860 to an Irish mother and English father, after seven older siblings; the Tilletts also shared their house with another family, meaning 14 people in total living at the address.
At six years old he started work in a brickyard, before running away to join Old Joe Barker’s Circus when he was seven. At 13 his father forced him to enlist in the Royal Navy, where he learned to read and write.
Culturally, Tillett was almost a cartoon caricature of the gambling, hard-drinking, patriotic authoritarian that was a fixture on the right of the labour movement—in the unions and the Parliamentary Labour Party—until way into the second half of the twentieth century. On one occasion before a speech at the TUC he had to be led to the rostrum because he was too pissed to find it. At a Labour conference in the 1920s, he entered the foyer of the fancy hotel serving as the party’s HQ, ‘where in the lounge sat Ramsay MacDonald, Arthur Henderson, Philip Snowden and other self-righteous leaders’ with ‘one of the gayest birds in town, and went straight upstairs with her’, according to one witness.
He was also an effective organiser who literally fought the fight. After leaving the Navy he settled in the East End and took work as a docker—by 1887 he was a trade union activist, attempting to organise the tea carriers on Tilbury Docks. On different occasions, company goons broke his nose, cracked his ribs, and ruptured his spleen. On one trip to organise workers in Antwerp, he was arrested and held in a filthy cell for over 24 hours, still managing to punch one of his jailers. He had a debilitating stammer as a child but overcame it to become one of the most celebrated orators of the time—drinking whiskey mixed with raw eggs to preserve his voice.
His speeches, which combined emotional references to the crushing poverty of the time with dark predictions of revolution, often resulted in prosecutions for libel or sedition. In one, he questioned whether it was ‘murder to rise up and cut the throats of the rich’, when the rich could ‘torture the poor with the vilest agonising death of all, that of starvation?’ and warned ‘there must come a day when the poor cut some throats’. On another occasion he threatened to shoot Lord Devonport, chairman of the Port of London Authority, and called for God to strike him dead.
The Strike
The spark for the strike came on 13 August 1889, after a disagreement over the amount of the bonus payment due to the dockers unloading the Lady Armstrong, a cargo ship in the West India Dock. The so-called ‘plus’ payment was awarded for completing work quickly, yet under pressure from competition, the West India Dock had lowered the normal rate. 2,500 dockers in the south basin of the West India docks, where the Armstrong was moored, all walked out, and on 14 August were joined by over 100,000 other men.
The principal demand of the strike was for the ‘dockers’ tanner’, meaning a minimum rate of sixpence an hour, up from the four or five pence a casual worker might usually earn. Pickets were established at the dock gates, mass meetings were held on nearby Tower Hill, and marches organised through the City of London.
The success of the action relied upon the support of the whole port, including all grades of dock worker. Tillett won the aid of stevedores, lightermen, rope makers, corn porters, and gas workers, among many others. Sympathy strikes then broke out in factories and workshops throughout the East End. From August 20 the entire Port of London was closed, and it was estimated that by 27 August over 130,000 men were out.
The dock workers also demanded an increase in the overtime rate, in addition to the abolition of the contract and ‘plus’ systems. Furthermore, the dockers insisted that men should be hired for at least four hours per day and that the ‘call on’ should occur only twice a day.
The strike was mostly peaceful, with little police interference—whether due to the size of the strike, or sympathy with the dockers. And the broad public support for the strike was essential to its success. They received over £11,700 for the strike fund from the UK, while fellow dockers in Australia and other countries sent over £30,000.
This support enabled the dockers to stay out, and was vital to the success of the strike. In early September 1889, the Lord Mayor of London formed the Mansion House Committee, charged with reaching an agreement between the dock owners and the workers. The latter were represented by Tillett and fellow dockers leader John Burns, and the negotiations were mediated by Cardinal Manning, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster.
The Committee persuaded the bosses to accept the majority of the dockers’ demands, including the pay increase to sixpence per hour, the famous ‘dockers’ tanner’, which would be implemented from early November 1889.
The last large demonstration of the strike was held in Hyde Parkbon 15 September, and the next day the dockers returned to work, victorious. Their success established strong trade unions among London dockers, the most important of which was Tillett’s Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union—later merged into the Transport and General Workers Union in 1922, which in turn went on to form part of Unite the union.
Those subsequent decades of trade union growth and amalgamation have their origin in the dock strike. Along with the strike by match-girls at Bryant and May the previous year, and the successful organisation of London Gasworkers, it showed that successful strikes and unions would no longer be restricted to the ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled tradesmen: in March 1890, Liverpool dockers struck for higher wages, as did workers at the deep-water docks of Tilbury in August 1890.
These initial successes were not sustained throughout the 1890s, though, with setbacks in attempted strikes in Bristol and Hull during 1892-3. Nonetheless, the growth of so-called ‘New Unions’ of unskilled and poorly paid workers meant union membership grew from 750,000 in 1888 to over 2 million by 1899, reaching four million by 1914.
The newfound industrial strength of the workers fuelled determination to acquire political power, with the formation of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893 and the Parliamentary Labour Party itself in 1900.
This was the period in which socialism, in the words of historian Jonathan Schneer, ‘grew from the creed of several small sects, with little impact on the bulk of the working class, into an important political force with broad support in the trade unions… during which the British working class forged and strengthened its modern organisational forms, and developed an ideology which continues to inform its world view.’
Legacy
That ‘world view’, however, is why some see the dock strike not as a glorious beginning, but as a tragic missed opportunity. At the founding conference of the ILP in Bradford in 1893, Tillett distanced himself from European socialists, denouncing the ‘chatterers and magpies of continental revolutionists’. His anti-intellectualism, nationalism, and pronounced cultural conservatism led Tom Nairn to designate him ‘the authentic spirit of labourism: proudly anti-theoretical, vulgarly chauvinist’. By this Nairn referred to the strand on the Left which, as he saw it, had an excessive focus on parliament, was content to merely to reform, rather than abolish, capitalism, and exhibited authoritarian philistinism on cultural issues.
But the ‘labourism’ of Tillett and the other union leaders of the time can also be overstated. Two weeks before the Bradford conference, he told striking dockers in Bristol they ‘must not finish at trade unionism’—must not finish until the workers ‘command absolutely the whole machinery of the state, the whole machinery of government, of production, control and distribution.
And Tillett himself was in reality a more complex character than his public image. Despite his railing against Nonconformist charlatans, he was himself a Congregationalist; despite his warring against feminism, atheism, and vegetarianism, he was in close correspondence with figures as diverse as Beatrice Webb, Annie Besant, and Charles Bradlaugh.
Whatever we think about the revolutionary potential of the British working class, or the wisdom of extra-parliamentary action via constitutional reformism, the victory of 1889 vitalised the industrial and political Left in Britain. A glance at the constituencies won by the Labour Party in the years between its founding and the First World War reveals common features: either high levels of Nonconformist Christianity, skilled unions, or both. The dock strike and the radicalisation of casual labourers that followed were crucial to spreading the appeal of the Left from the workers of South Wales, West Yorkshire, and the Durham coalfield to the casualised culture of the East End and Merseyside.
Perhaps more vitally, the Dock Strike also showed the potential of workers to organise during a crisis of capitalism, in a context of decreasing affluence, increasing casualisation of labour, amid ethnically and religiously diverse societies with high levels of immigration.
Today, the British working class spans a huge range of demographic groups—cultural conservatives, libertarian socialists, atheist liberals, people from all religious backgrounds among them. It will be harder to find common cause on cultural issues today than it was a century ago. Instead, then as now, we should focus on the threats that we all face: climate degeneration and energy scarcity; the casualisation and de-skilling of work; and the hoarding of property by an increasingly rapacious rentier class. Even as the working class continues to grow and change, there is, as it is so often said, more that unites than divides us.