1951 Waterfront Dispute
The 1951 Waterfront Dispute was so bitter that children were made to eat lunch on the other side of the playground. Tom Hunt reports.
Six years old and ostracised, Graham McCready’s sister caught him above the left eye with an axe. The accident – the blood streaming down his face, the trip to the doctor – would lead to one of the few moments of kindness in a brutal dispute.
The 1951 Waterside Dispute started on February 13, 1951 – 66 years ago this month. It lasted 151 days, cost the country £42 million, and resulted in one million working days lost in industrial action. It would go down in history as New Zealand’s biggest industrial dispute.
In January 1951 the Arbitration Court awarded a 15 per cent pay rise to all workers covered by the industrial arbitration system but, nzhistory.net.nz says, this did not apply for wharfies, who were offered only 9 per cent.
The Waterside Workers’ Union refused to work overtime so shipping companies refused to hire them unless they agreed to work extra hours.
‘‘When no agreement could be reached, union members were locked out. The nation’s wharves soon came to a complete standstill.’’
Prime Minister Sidney Holland declared a state of emergency on February 21 and the following day declared that New Zealand was at war. The army, navy and police went on to the Auckland and Wellington wharves to load and unload ships.
McCready – who these days is known for his litigation-based activism – has fond memories of growing up in Thorndon, central Wellington, in the early 1950s.
He recalls sledging down the pine needles on Tinakori Hill, playing hide-and-seek in Kirkcaldie & Stains, and ‘‘screaming down the halls of Parliament pursued by the Clark of the House’’.
But, there among the happy memories, is the likely spark of his activism. He was a union wharfie’s son at a time union wharfies were demonised.
Holland, leader of the National Party, had taken extreme measures to break the wharfies’ strike.
Strict censorship was imposed and people were banned from helping the strikers to the extent even giving food to their children was banned.
So it came to lunchtimes at Thorndon School.
As the children ate lunch, children of the strikers were sent to the other side of the playground to eat so the others could not share their lunch with them.
McCready remembers eating dripping sandwiches for lunch.
‘‘If we were assisted in any shape or form the principal could be arrested.’’
It was amid this Cold War-era insanity that the McCready family moved to Pipitea St, Thorndon, and Graham’s older sister invited him to come and help her chop down a tree in the new section.
‘‘She missed with the axe and it me above the eye.’’
As she carried the young boy – blood streaming down his face – across the road to get help there came the prime minister, a fellow Pipitea St resident, and arguably the strikers’ biggest enemy, Sidney Holland.
Holland called his chauffeur and limousine and ordered the young McCready taken to the doctor.
The next day his father went to thank the new neighbour and prime minister for his help and, when asked, said he was a wharfie.
Holland asked, ‘‘how are things going down there, Mr McCready?’’.
‘‘My father said, ‘shithouse’,’’ McCready recalled.
It was indeed.
Despite supporters’ subversive help – members of a Tararua Ranges hunting club would go out especially to secretly deliver meat to the stigmatised families – it still left 22,000 workers from a population of less than 2 million out of work.
Press restrictions were strict, union funds were frozen and union meetings outlawed. Demonstrations were broken up by riot police, most infamously on June 1, aptly known as Bloody Friday.
It was Queen St, Auckland, where police moved in on about 1000 marchers. One victim suffered a suspected fractured skull, and 20 others had to be treated for lacerations, concussion and bruises.
On April 30, a railway bridge near Huntly was dynamited. Train drivers were warned in advance and no-one was hurt, but coal supplies were disrupted. Holland denounced it as an ‘‘infamous act of terrorism’’.
The Government’s unyielding position on militant unionism finally won through and workers headed back to work in July 1951.
Holland called a snap election for September 1951.
National won with an increased majority while the once-powerful Watersiders Union dissolved.