THE LOST WORLD OF DUBLIN’S DOCKERS
From ‘beeros’ to mixed marriages, welcome to...
MIXED marriages were rare, but not unknown, in Ireland in the mid-20th century. But while the term summons up images of being forced to exchange vows before a disapproving priest behind closed doors in a church sacristy, on the Dublin docks mixed marriages had a different connotation.
They involved star-crossed lovers, not from different religions, but different banks of a river. For a Ringsend docker, it meant seeing your child marry a stranger from a distant place in the East – by which they meant the East Wall.
The ceremony took place in the bride’s parish church, but arrangements for the reception were more complex. The River Liffey lacks one geographical landmark which might have brought a certain harmony to those docklands communities – a small island half way between the south and north quays. Such an island might be difficult to reach, but its blessing was that the difficulty would be equal for dockers and their families on both sides of the river – two tight-knit, fiercely proud communities who did not like to yield.
Both communities agreed on the need to build a dockers’ social club for important family occasions. Earnest committees even tried to realise this dream. But efforts foundered on the question of which side of the quays it should be located on. Therefore shared social events like Christmas parties had to alternate, year by year, between venues on both sides.
This suspicion rarely spilled over into fisticuffs. In the pubs, it spilled over into singing contests, with – as Aileen O’Carroll and Don Bennett note, in a wonderfully evocative new book about the working lives of Dublin dockers – ‘forces of Northside baritones, tenors and basses marshalled against their Southside vocal battalions’… with O’Connor’s pub on the North Wall a prime location for this ‘battle of the lungs’.
THE mutual wariness wasn’t just based on the fact that Southsiders – who gravitated towards unloading coal boats – felt that Northsiders shied away from such backbreaking shovel work, while Northsiders, who tended to unload the cattle boats or heavy cargo, felt that Ringsend was infested by the virus of snobbery so infectious on Dublin’s Southside that no known antidote has yet been founded to inoculate against it.
Perhaps such chariness also stemmed from how the menfolk of both communities needed to compete for the same work and – until the introduction of a unionised button system in 1946 – had the same lack of job security at the mercy of foremen who might not pick them on any given morning.
Yet, whether from Ringsend or East Wall, the dockers possessed a shared sense of solidarity against the outside world. As one former docker recalls in this new book, dockers ‘would call each other all the names under the sun but they wouldn’t let anyone else do it’.
When stevedores deliberately overlooked one docker because of his union activity, his fellow dockers at the morning ‘read’ (as these daily hiring fairs were called) came to his defence, announcing: ‘If he doesn’t f***ing work, nobody else is going to work.’
With Dublin port now essentially located out of sight, it is hard for early-morning commuters on the Dublin quays to imagine men clustering at dawn at Customs House Quay and City Quay and right down to the Point Depot in their daily search for work.
Now on summer evenings The Point Depot (rechristened The 3Arena) is besieged by eager concert goers, keen to arrive early to gain wristbands to enter the stage pit. The men who gathered there at dawn for six decades during the 20th century possessed a similar desire to be chosen, but one tinged with anxiety because if they were not called their chance of a day’s wages were over.
They would have to head home disappointed or hang around the dockside pubs, into which the dockers chosen to shovel coal would arrive at 10.30am for the ‘beero’. This was their tea break, but tea was rarely consumed.
This way of life would be swept away by the advent of the container truck, with scores of men no longer needed to discharge cargo. But, until 1970, the dockers’ life had – with small modifications – remained unchanged for decades. Charles Darwin needed to sail to the Galapagos Archipelago and Tahiti to formulate his evolutionary theory about the survival of the fittest. But he might have reached the same conclusions by standing at the ‘read’ on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, where the gasometer created a wind tunnel in which men huddled while waiting for a foreman to shout out the nicknames of the chosen men: ‘Big Bob’, ‘Salt Box’, ‘Heave-Ho Daly’, ‘Beat-the-Dark Geoghan’ or ‘Turnaround Hawkins’.
OFTEN the men chosen knew they needed to return the favour by buying drink for that same foreman when he paid them in pubs at the end of their shifts.
Dockers had to have not just enormous strength, but also what one supervisor called ‘enormous antennae’ to know in advance what ships were due and what cargo they carried. Such information was vital, because most dockers only got the chance to attend one ‘read’ each morning.
Before dawn, they often gathered at Butt Bridge to scan the quayside and see which shipping companies had new vessels moored. Or else they visited ‘early house’ pubs in case anyone had left word about which companies were hiring that morning.
We see zero hours contracts as a modern phenomenon, but this concept summed up life on the quays, especially for dockers who were not unionised. If unsuccessful at their first ‘read’, there might be a second chance if they reached another ‘read’ on time.
The docks were also often a makeshift playground for children who, sent down with hot dinners for their fathers, lingered to play games amid stockpiled goods. One small girl could not believe her luck at once spying Judy Garland pass along the quays. When she begged Garland to sing, the star told her minders that she would sing, but ‘for this small girl on her own’ – unaware of how a coal-boat docked nearby was packed with silent black-faced dockers gazing up in wonder.
Such memories might have vanished if ex-dockers and locals had not established the Dublin Dock Workers Preservation Society, to collect the legacy of dockside life and campaign for the establishment of a docklands museum.
When they staged their first exhibition by a keen local amateur photographer who had captured everyday life there for decades, many attendees were transfixed to find photos of their fathers and grandfathers at work in what was once a closed world.
Photos from their ever expanding archive enrich this book, which uses oral testimony to recapture a lost way of life. It will hopefully be a stepping stone in the ongoing fight by locals to establish a docklands museum.
Let’s hope they can agree which side of the river to locate it on.
The Dublin Docker: Working Lives of Dublin’s Deep-Sea Port, by Aileen O’Carroll and Don Bennett, Irish Academic Press.