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00:0065 years ago, this was the sound of docks across Britain waking up each morning.
00:27An army of workers, their boots clattering on quayside cobbles.
00:33Dockers, tallymen, checkers, stevedores, hatchmen, winchmen, samplers, grainporters, timberporters, teamers, tacklemen, yardmasters, shunters, pilots, tugboatmen, foyboatmen, freshwatermen, blacksmiths, weighers, dockwatchmen, dredgermen, launchmen, needlemen, jetty clocks, 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.
00:55These men were the engine driving the British post-war recovery.
01:00Exotic 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.
01:25The docks was the city. It was the lifeblood. It was the pulse. It was everything.
01:33Around these docks grew waterfront communities, a kaleidoscope of different cultures.
01:41Maltese would be spoken on the corner, Portuguese, the next street, Arabic, Somali. We were a community of seamen from these countries.
01:50These were the first places to experience new styles and sounds.
01:56Can you imagine there were 25,000-plus seamen in and out of Liverpool bringing music and records in?
02:04In the 1960s, as Britain underwent a social and cultural revolution, this world would be turned upside down by modern technology.
02:19They've got 1,200 containers each trip, and there's not one of them being packed or handled by a docker.
02:25Ultimately, these changes would lead to the decline of traditional docks.
02:30I never thought for one minute that the river would stop as an artery of commerce. The river became dead.
02:39But within 20 years, these docksides took on a new life.
02:45Today, they are no longer hubs of industry, but places of leisure, culture, consumerism, and for some, desirable places to live.
02:55You go into Liverpool today, and it's a totally different city to what I remember when I first saw it where it's beautiful.
03:03This is not so much a story about the loss of our docks, but their transformation.
03:08One of Britain's biggest docks was Liverpool.
03:26It exported more than any other UK port, and was the main gateway for transatlantic trade with North America.
03:33The city was shaped by the sea, and depended on thousands of dockers.
03:42Basically, every other house, the dad was a docker.
03:45You know, there were thousands, thousands of men on the docks.
03:50There were people walking or on bikes, or buses full.
03:54It was noisy, it was loud, and just busy, busy, busy.
04:01This busy waterfront was the point of departure for anyone and everyone who wanted to make the journey to America by sea.
04:09This transatlantic link meant there were as many seafarers in the city as there were dockers.
04:17You dream boat, you lovable dream boat.
04:22In our day, every family, or every second family, had someone who went away to sea.
04:29And that was the main industry.
04:32When you think of one industry with 20-odd thousands men working for them.
04:38Billy spent much of his career working in the kitchens of Cunard Liners.
04:49In the era of the Great Liners, and by the end of World War II, Cunard was the largest Atlantic passenger line.
04:57Liverpool was the hub of the company's European operations.
05:00The landing stage was very near half a mile long.
05:05And you were getting those days, two, three, four ships, nose to tail.
05:13Billy documented his voyages to destinations such as New York and Montreal,
05:19on this rare 8mm footage, using a brand new American home movie camera.
05:24This is the original and the first movie camera I bought when I went to New York.
05:36In England, you couldn't buy a movie camera.
05:39It's a mechanical camera.
05:42You wind it up.
05:45And there it is, still in full working order.
05:48Not only takes 8mm movie, but it takes still shots.
05:54Before the arrival of the passenger jet, these liners were the choice of travel for the rich and the famous.
06:01And Billy seems to have collected photographs of most of them.
06:06This is Noel Coward and Debbie Reynolds.
06:09That's on the Queen Mary as well.
06:11Liberace, this is signing autographs for the stewardesses.
06:15Deborah Kerr helping herself to a drink behind the bar.
06:19Seafarers like Billy returned to Liverpool bringing with them the sight, sound and even the smell of the USA.
06:30This made a big impression on the city's dockers.
06:34You know, on a Yankee boat, you know what you can smell?
06:39Coffee.
06:41You can smell this waft of fresh ground coffee.
06:45Everybody's doing that coffee grind.
06:50We're doing the contract!
06:52I used to notice the seafarers, you know.
06:54And I used to look at the quality of the clothes.
06:56Like, I mean, I was only 18 and I used to look and you couldn't help but miss it.
07:00They looked really well dressed.
07:02And you could see that this was a really rich nation.
07:06And there's a poser, just come home, posing in my wife's back garden.
07:11These self-confessed posers earned a nickname among the dockers, the Cunard Yanks.
07:19When we were travelling to join our ship of an early morning, we'd go on the overhead railway.
07:26And we're in our suits, going to work in our suits.
07:29And the dockers would all say, oh, look at these, a couple of Cunard Yanks.
07:33Don't sit next to them.
07:34They smell like Poof Puffs.
07:36Because we had aftershave on them.
07:38We smelled nice.
07:40You've either got or you haven't got
07:45Got or you haven't got
07:48Some of the lads in the Market Diner in New York,
07:52we were coming ashore at the landing stage in American suits.
07:55A lot of the lads were posers, they'd be flashing American dollars.
08:00And after five minutes in New York, they were speaking like,
08:03well, hello there, you know?
08:05You've either got or you haven't got
08:12Along with their swagger, they brought back all manner of American goods for friends and family.
08:18I was bringing my children, beautiful American, my daughter, lovely American dresses.
08:26She was running round when we had a flat down in Smithtown Road.
08:30In American dresses, people were saying, oh, God, she's like a little princess, you know.
08:34Although 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.
08:48Guys who went away to see, they'd bring these multicoloured parrots home.
08:56I remember my nanny had one, it swore like a trooper.
09:00And when the priest used to come round once a month collecting,
09:04and then someone would have to run down the yard with the parrot so it wouldn't swear in front of the priest.
09:10Liverpool's transatlantic connection was the backbone of both its passenger and cargo trade.
09:22The volume of goods handled by the city's docks was second only to that of London.
09:30Its sheer scale made London the nation's biggest port.
09:34London's docks had expanded to handle the global trade that sustained the British Empire.
09:44Perhaps the greatest of all the many assets of the Port of London is the group of five separate enormous enclosed dock systems,
09:52with nearly 36 miles of deepwater quays, roughly 520 acres of warehouses.
09:58Together they can provide berthage and cargo handling facilities for nearly 200 ships at the same time.
10:10By the 1950s, the enclosed docks and riverside wharves that made up the port stretched all the way from Tower Bridge,
10:18right the way down to Tilbury on the Thames Estuary,
10:21and they were handling around 60 million tonnes worth of cargo.
10:25Once the capital of empire, in the 1950s the success of London's docks centred on swathes of goods,
10:34imported from across the British Commonwealth.
10:37We had goods coming from all over the Commonwealth into the Port of London,
10:44so things like lamb from New Zealand, wool from Australia, tea from India, grain from the Americas,
10:50which actually was transported to this very dock where we're at at the moment, which was the Royal Victoria Dock,
10:56and behind me there you can see Spiller's Millennium Mills,
10:59which of course accepted an awful lot of the grain that came into the port and made it into flour.
11:04But warehouses along the banks of the Thames were treasure troves of more unusual items too.
11:11The world market for ivory is centred in London.
11:15Other rare and precious cargoes are housed here too, ostrich plumes for example, to grace my lady's fan or her millinery.
11:20And here is the complete floor of Cutler Street Warehouse, reserved for the storage of valuable carpets from the audience.
11:30Docker turned artist Terry Scales was a third generation of his family to work the London Quaysides.
11:37He, like thousands of others, handled the cargoes in the same way that Docker's had for over a century.
11:44It was hard, physical labour.
11:48I was sent to help a crack stevedore gang to unload sugar.
11:53I thought I'd never survive the day.
11:56We had to carry these 200 weight bags out of the combing of the ship.
12:01The sugar turned into treacle as you sweated.
12:06The treacle came down your bag.
12:09It was quite the worst job I ever did.
12:12But it was incredibly well paid and I earned £5 a day.
12:17I went home with £25, which was an enormous amount of money for that time.
12:26With so much cargo on the move, dockers were in demand.
12:30While some items were harder to handle than others, difficult cargo provided an opportunity to earn even more.
12:39Some cargoes, such as bananas and fruit, had spiders in them.
12:46If the cargo presented a danger to your health, there was an extra rate allowed.
12:52But this had to be negotiated.
12:56So 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.
13:09Although dock work was laborious, being a docker gave Terry the opportunity to use his artistic skills as well.
13:18A magazine produced for the Surrey commercial dock workers would give him the chance to illustrate some of the dock's most well-known characters.
13:27The editor, a stevedore, approached Terry for help.
13:30The 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.
13:42So I said, yes, I would love to do that.
13:45I did a series of portraits that had faces like tree trunks, wonderful characters.
13:52The 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.
14:06Dockers were in a unique position.
14:09They were part of a distinct and closely connected working community with a long history.
14:15Yet they also had access to the world through the global cargoes they handled.
14:19Docks were unique because their keys 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.
14:34But in Britain's docks, it wasn't just cargo that arrived from all over the world. People came too.
14:40One dockside community in South Wales embraced arrivals, whichever corner of the world they came from.
14:52It wasn't David's day when we docked in Tiger Bay and the skipper wouldn't give us any pay.
15:03Neil Sinclair's grandfather, a seafarer, made Tiger Bay and Cardiff his home at the turn of the 20th century.
15:14Often times black seamen found themselves abused, racially abused and what have you at that particular time in history.
15:22But word was already out through all the ports around Great Britain.
15:28Well, if you want to feel at home, get down to Tiger Bay because that place nobody sees the colour.
15:33And so that's how my father's father actually ended up in Tiger Bay.
15:36The docks were created to export record amounts of Welsh coal around the world and Tiger Bay streets were built with the profits.
15:47But what made Tiger Bay special was the multiracial community that developed there as these sailors and seafarers put down roots.
15:58And I stepped out of 19 Francis Street into the street.
16:06Maltese would be spoken on the corner, Portuguese the next street, Spanish, Arabic, Somali, Malay.
16:15Any language you can imagine was being spoken on the streets.
16:19People lived on the street. Our streets were like a communal living room.
16:23My mother used to say the League of Nations could learn a lesson from Tiger Bay.
16:36Tiger Bay was a typical sailor town.
16:39An area of the docks where seafarers from every country could buy provisions, find lodgings and enjoy their own entertainment.
16:47Most ports would have some sort of port area, sailor town, with very distinctive characteristics, sometimes seen as dark and dangerous, as well as exotic and interesting.
17:00Not always welcoming strangers, undoubtedly, but being a place where you might meet strangers.
17:06Olive Salomon met her future husband Ali, a young chef from the Yemen, in a chance encounter when she took a wrong turn towards the dockside.
17:17I must have been to the pictures in St. Mary Street came out and lost my way.
17:24I was making my way to the docks rather than to the town.
17:28I stopped and asked this boy then the way to Queen Street.
17:34And he said I was losing my way to the docks.
17:37And we started talking. I think we fell in love then and then.
17:40We got married when I was sixteen in three weeks actually.
17:45We had ten children, five boys and five girls.
17:49Of 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 marrying an Arab I was marrying a heathen.
18:01There was quite a stir at home.
18:03The reaction of Ollie's family was a common experience for women who married into the different cultures found in Tiger Bay.
18:19It wasn't the place to go.
18:22And in fact, well-to-do families, if they couldn't get their kids to go to bed, just to say,
18:27if you don't behave yourself, I'm going to take you to Loudoun Square and leave you there because the boogeyman was there.
18:33But God bless them, they missed out on the most spectacular way to live.
18:38Honestly, they just have no idea of what it was really like to live here.
18:41Tiger Bay.
18:47Tiger Bay.
18:51It's just like a fancy dress ball.
18:54And those who can't say that they've been down the bay,
18:59well they haven't seen Cardiff at all.
19:05Even the silver screen was drawn to the animated Dockland community of Tiger Bay.
19:12Jay Lee Thompson's film of the same name opens with a sailor, played by Horst Buchholz,
19:18returning home through Loudoun Square, the heart of the community, where we see gambling on a street corner.
19:28Illegal gambling activity used to take place, so all the seamen would be there with their wages, gambling on the corner.
19:34The bobbies might come around the corner from the Mariah Street police station and then it was a situation of heads up and dice would disappear and money would disappear and people would just mill around and then the police would come and then they'd have to leave because nothing illegal was going on and when they disappeared around the corner at Loudoun Square, life went back to normal.
19:52In a later sequence down by the docks, Gilly Evans, played by Hayley Mills, gets into a scuffle with one of the local boys, played by Neil himself.
20:03And 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.
20:13She said she had a little bomb, it was a cat bomb, and I said, well, cowboys don't play with bombs. Anyway, get back to London, Gilly Evans, you don't belong down here.
20:29I got a bomb! A bomb? Cowboys don't use bomb!
20:33Hey, you have a bomb! Give it! Go on, clear off!
20:37Now, because the tide came and went, every morning it would leave a film of mud on the ramp.
20:45So it took us about three weeks to do this five minutes of scene on the film because we'd have to run down there or we'd slip down on the mud or whatever and so there was chaos going on.
20:56Give her back the bomb! Go on, give it to her! Now, clear off and leave her alone!
21:06The vibrancy of the Tiger Bay community captured by Jay Lee Thompson's film reinforced the public's perception of the life of a sailor town.
21:17By the early 1960s, dock communities were well-established melting pots for different cultures.
21:25Transatlantic travel and trade introduced glamour, style and swagger into post-war Britain.
21:34And our global connections were showcased in all manner of goods traded with the world.
21:40But above all, the fortunes of docks across the country depended on the physical labour of working communities.
21:48It was dirty, filthy, erm, hard, soul-destroying labour.
21:56Last year, dockers had an average of £19 a week. The work often meant hard labour, perhaps handling meat carcasses, which tax a strongman's physical resources to the limit.
22:06When it's pouring the rain down here every day, we stand down there every day long in the pouring the rain. And you work hard, what do you get for it? Nothing.
22:13You couldn't get washed anywhere. There's nowhere to wash yourself. You couldn't get a shower. There were no proper toilets.
22:18There were no proper toilets. A big sewage pipe with the holes in with the holes into bolter pipe to it. You know, the sort of thing you'd put in the main road in a housing estate.
22:26For over 100 years, getting daily work on the docks was an uncertain prospect.
22:32Dockers turned up in the hope of being hired by an employer from one day to the next.
22:37But there was no guarantee they'd go home with a wage in their pocket.
22:43Up until the 1960s, the majority of dock workers in British ports were hired on a casual basis.
22:49They would be hired to turn around a ship by a variety of employers, including stevedoles, shipping companies, warehousemen.
22:57There was an incredible amount of flexibility for employers.
23:00They could hire dockers as needed, depending on the volume of trade coming into the port.
23:05But then they could discard them soon after.
23:08The post-war labour government had attempted to bring some order to this casual labour system.
23:14They created the National Dock Labour Scheme, which added dock workers to a nationwide register.
23:21Registered dockers were permitted to collect a minimum daily payment from employers, even if they weren't required,
23:28as long as they could prove that they had come to the docks seeking work.
23:33It issued every worker with a buff book about that large, which was called a brief.
23:39And if you were unsuccessful in gaining work on a particular day, you took your brief to the pool, which was an enormous, great hanger-like shed.
23:54The dockers called it the pen.
23:56During the slack period, all the dockers and stevedores would have their books stamped, and that guaranteed them half a day's pay.
24:06And then they report again in the afternoon, and have their books stamped again, which guaranteed the afternoon's pay.
24:13Managers appeared to have all the power when it came to hiring the gangs they wanted for their vessels.
24:20A bit of a choker. You're standing here like an old dishrag. Discarded. You're wanted, you're not wanted.
24:25And, er, well, you're here to sell your labour to the IS bidder, sort of thing. It is near enough like a cattle market.
24:33You got work because of who you knew, not because of what you knew, or whether you were a grafter or not.
24:39Because I remember my dad saying sometimes how, Ernie Roberts is the ship's boss, he was a neighbour, and I'll probably get work today.
24:49You can see them coming across now. They've picked their gangs up. Say, pick your gang up Jack, your gang Joe. And the odd men, they pick up their self.
24:57But dockers found ways to manipulate the system, too, ensuring they got the best jobs on offer.
25:04A fellow comes down in the pen, he sees all these faces, and he's got to hire, say, 150 men, someone to disload the ship.
25:12Now, he wants the people who can do the job.
25:16And the fellow would touch you on the shoulder, and you gave the timekeeper, walking behind, you'd give him your book, so you were hired.
25:25But you know what used to happen? As the boss touched the fellow there, intending to miss you, you'd jump up and hit his hand with your shoulder,
25:34and you'd give the timekeeper the book, and you'd bug it off, because then you were hired.
25:39Yet, despite these tactics, they weren't always successful.
25:44Well, I don't think there's a lot of doing here now.
25:48All the gang, he's got them 13 books here, turn around and give them to one of them men over there, the ship worker, and he'd put them in the office.
25:55Now, I've got to go down to the box and see if I can get a way down out.
26:03In the docks, shifts were long, and the work back-breaking.
26:08Occasional pilfering from cargoes was seen as a well-earned perk of the job.
26:13Most guys were basically very honest, but whisky in a Yankee boat was fair game.
26:19And at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, there's been thousands of cases of whisky.
26:24They could hear people singing down below, and all the dockers were drunk.
26:29In fact, I'll say this about my dad.
26:31He came crawling into the house, and my mother went, yeah, John can get.
26:36And he went, Maggie, there was whisky going at the Yank.
26:40Everyone was drinking it.
26:42Hard graft and job insecurity led gangs of dockers to seek ways to let off steam.
26:54The pub was a favoured retreat at any time of day.
27:01This pub that we are in is open at 6 o'clock in the morning.
27:07There's not many pubs in London the same, only in Covent Garden.
27:11In the old days, the dockers used to come in here a lot, knowing they might not go to work.
27:18A marked drinking culture was a part of life in all dockside communities around Britain.
27:29In Cardiff, Tiger Bay streets were lined with nearly a hundred pubs.
27:34Each one was unique and had its own different atmosphere.
27:38Somebody would plonk along on the keyboard of the piano, and everybody would be singing along.
27:43And you might be playing in the street with your kids, and the kids would go,
27:46oh, come down the west, get your mother singing.
27:48And so, because we were kids and we weren't allowed to go in,
27:51we'd have to climb on the windowsill and look over the frosted glass
27:55and the names of whatever was on the windows,
27:58and then you'd see everybody in there, oh, they were having such a good time,
28:01and you wish you could have been in there.
28:03Dockside taverns didn't just echo to the sound of the piano.
28:07Yeah, I got a woman...
28:15Bars in ports like Cardiff and Liverpool gave dockers, sailors and locals
28:20the chance to get hold of new vinyl records
28:23bought straight off the ships by seafarers returning home.
28:27We were buying records for ourselves.
28:30I mean, we were bringing the music back.
28:32We'd go to a place in West Derby Road, Marsh Shores,
28:37and it's still there, actually.
28:39And on a Friday night, you'd go in with your records,
28:43and they'd say, oh, God, can you bring me one of them back?
28:47Can you bring me this?
28:48You'd go back to New York or Montreal with a shopping list.
28:52Many of these discs were still yet to hit the mainstream in the UK.
28:57When you walk through a storm, hold your head...
29:07That album has never, ever been to England,
29:09but the seamen were bringing it in.
29:11And one of the chaps that brought this album home,
29:15his name was Harry Chambers,
29:18and he lent that record to Gerry Marsden,
29:23who started making... doing songs off it.
29:27And he was doing a gig in Anfield years ago,
29:31and Bill Shankly was standing at the back,
29:33and Gerry sang his version of You'll Never Walk Alone.
29:37And Bill Shankly, when he came off, he said,
29:41Hey, laddie, he said, I want you to make a tape of that for me.
29:45He said, so I can play it when my team run out onto the pitch.
29:49And that, we believe, is how it came to Liverpool.
29:53Walk on through the way...
30:03And can you imagine there were 25,000-plus seamen
30:08in and out of Liverpool
30:10and bringing music and records in?
30:12And sheet music.
30:14A lot of them wanted cheap music for the groups that were starting up,
30:17so they could copy the likes of Chuck Berry
30:21and those people, you know, Little Richard.
30:24And this is a group of the lads on the after deck,
30:27me with the guitar.
30:29Now, at that time, we didn't think anything about
30:33whether we were having any influence on anything,
30:35but it was only in later years
30:37that we found out and we realised
30:40that all that music, records,
30:43sheet music, the ability to learn to play guitar,
30:49all came from the lads bringing them in.
30:53Ivan with the Black Gretsch guitar.
30:56This American guitar found its way
31:00into the hands of one of Liverpool's most famous musicians.
31:04A knock came to the door
31:06and this skinny kid with long black hair
31:08and black plastic clothes,
31:10and they weren't leather, they were definitely plastic.
31:12I believe you've got a guitar for sale.
31:16So Ivan said, oh, yeah.
31:17So he got it out the case, said, here it is.
31:19And when this lad saw it, he was drooling at the mouth.
31:22So he said, how much do you want for it?
31:25So Ivan said, 90 pounds.
31:27He said, oh, I haven't got 90 pounds.
31:29I don't want to pay that money.
31:30So he said, OK.
31:31So he put it back in the case.
31:32And he said, I'll tell you what, he said, I've got 70 pounds here.
31:35So I'd butted in then.
31:38I said, well, look, I had the customs receipt.
31:42I said, er, sign an IOU.
31:47I said, and come back with the 20 pound.
31:49So he said, oh, OK, I'll do that then.
31:52So he gave him a bundle of scruffy notes, 70 pounds, and off he went.
31:59We never saw him again.
32:01And that scruffy lad was George Harrison.
32:06How much is that received worth in today's money?
32:11Do you want to run away on a cruise with me?
32:18As well as being at the forefront of new music,
32:21Dockside communities were ahead of the game
32:23when it came to the latest dance phrases.
32:28Like, we even had the twist before Chubby Checkered ever sang it,
32:32because Hank Ballard and the Midnighters played it.
32:35And so we'd learn to do the twist a different way than it came to be
32:38when it became more popular.
32:40But we were always ahead of the game.
32:42Along with these American imports,
32:44Tiger Bay reverberated to other imported musical sounds,
32:48such as calypso and jazz.
32:50The annex was on Butte Street.
32:53And, of course, I was supposed to be too young to go
32:55and often got in there.
32:57And, oh, there was a wonderful time.
32:59The music was fabulous.
33:00But if you couldn't get in, you'd go down this lot of alley
33:03and you could look through the window and you could see them jiving
33:06and jitterbugging.
33:07People down Tiger Bay could dance.
33:10I could tell you that.
33:12And then we had the Garner Club,
33:14because when Garner got its independence,
33:16Ben O. Johnson opened a club dedicated to On Butte Street.
33:20Dancers and the Bay boys and the Docks boys
33:24used to dress immaculately.
33:26Sartorial elegance.
33:29Par excellence.
33:31For all the liveliness of the music and culture in Tiger Bay,
33:37by the mid-1960s,
33:39two forces threatened the community's future.
33:42The coal exports that had fuelled the Docks' growth
33:46and made Cardiff a wealthy city came to an end.
33:50And the council decided it was time to demolish
33:55the old, dilapidated Victorian houses
33:58and replace them with modern flats.
34:03All the people are happy and gay
34:06They're building new houses in Tiger Bay
34:09But why are these people taking so long?
34:12This keeping us waiting is very wrong.
34:15Hoorah! Hooray!
34:18They're pulling down Tiger Bay
34:21Oh, what a pitiful day
34:24When they pull down Tiger Bay
34:28I could hear, when I was in my bed,
34:29I could hear the pounding of the pylons
34:32going into the square to build the forthcoming tower blocks.
34:36The strategy of the council was to build the tower blocks in the park
34:41since nobody lived in the park
34:43they could build these buildings
34:45and once they were up
34:46they could then decant the people out of their houses
34:49knock the houses down
34:50and move people into the flats, of course
34:53and that's the strategy that was put in place
34:56which was supposed to be an improvement of our slum dwelling conditions
35:01as they told us, we lived in slums
35:04but for the life of me, I couldn't find the slum myself
35:07The creation of the new Bute Town estate
35:10produced mixed reactions in the community
35:13Wouldn't you rather live in a new house?
35:15Yeah
35:16No
35:17Why not?
35:18The old houses are very much warmer
35:20and they take ages to get warm
35:22I don't like the idea, really, of flats here
35:25What's wrong with flats?
35:27I mean, flats for a start, they...
35:29I mean, all the kids are together
35:31and I think it starts, you know, like gangs
35:35too many gangs
35:36Well, how do you like living in these flats?
35:38Oh, they're lovely
35:39What have you got?
35:40Three bedrooms and two down
35:42Where were you living before?
35:44Loudoun Square
35:45In what sort of conditions?
35:46Oh, they were dirty
35:48You got a bathroom?
35:49Yeah
35:50Did you have a bathroom before?
35:51No
35:52Did you have any running water before?
35:54Only down the cellar
35:55The unforeseen consequence of the new tower blocks
36:05was the break-up of Tiger Bay's Sailor Town culture
36:08as communities dispersed
36:10and street life vanished
36:12But the changes taking place on the streets of Tiger Bay
36:18were a sign of things to come
36:21Transformations in technology leading to new ways of working
36:25during the 1960s
36:27would entirely upend the traditional working culture
36:30of docks across Britain
36:32The sense of optimism, booming trade and plentiful work
36:42in fact mask deeper problems within the industry
36:46Working practices were largely unchanged in over a hundred years
36:51This is the old way of loading boats
36:55There's 13 men in a gang
36:57Eight men down the hole
36:58One man on the edge
37:01And he tells the crane driver
37:03where to place it down the hole
37:06Then we've got four men on the quay
37:10What they call pity hands
37:12British docks were very run down
37:17The port carried with them this legacy of the past
37:20They were very old-fashioned in terms of their organisation
37:24Dock work was still manual
37:26Equipment was very aged
37:28And it hadn't been updated for decades
37:31British port authorities were very slow to modernise their ports
37:38These old-fashioned methods meant accidents were commonplace
37:43I was working in a barge with another young boy
37:47who left his hand under the sling
37:51And as the train took the weight of the set of bags
37:56He lost a finger
37:58Because it was trapped under the straw
38:00Because he went into a state of shock
38:02And he was lifted out on a stretcher
38:07In Liverpool, Dory knew the dangers of the dock first-hand
38:11When her father was involved in a terrible incident
38:14They were down in the hold of the ship
38:17And then the hook came down on the crane and caught me dad's coat
38:25And he was hoisted up
38:27And the other dockers were yelling, you know, to the crane driver
38:31But it's that noisy down there
38:33And before he could lower it, me dad's belt smack
38:36Or his coat ripped wherever it was
38:38And he went right down to the hold of the ship
38:41But he put his hands out to save himself
38:43And that's what messed his wrists up
38:46Where he hurt his head
38:49He broke every bone in his body
38:51He was in hospital for an awful long time
38:57For dockers' families, these accidents had a severe impact on everyone
39:02It was a very difficult time, you know, for my mum
39:05Three little girls
39:07And I remember I getting a job in Holland and Wolves Cleaning
39:10And she used to go out at like half five in the morning
39:15And she'd be home for eight to get us up for school
39:22Decades of inefficient and dangerous working methods
39:25Went hand in hand with an outdated form of employment
39:29For generations under the casual system
39:33Dockers had worked for a multitude of different employers
39:36From one day to the next
39:38Following the Devlin report
39:40An extensive enquiry into the state of the nation's ports
39:44The government decided to take drastic action
39:47In 1967, it introduced decasualisation in docks throughout the UK
39:53Men were allocated to a specific, regular employer
39:58And paid a weekly wage
40:00For half a century, a dominant issue in the docks
40:03And now a major point in the Devlin report
40:05Has been whether the casual daily labour market
40:08Should be abandoned for the weekly contract that most of industry uses
40:12The jargon word is decasualisation
40:15These proposals caused intense debate among dockers around the country
40:20No, wait a minute
40:21No, wait a minute
40:22Because I don't know where you are
40:23No, not
40:24No
40:25Are we arguing against decasualisation?
40:26No
40:27We're arguing about
40:28No
40:29How do you feel about decasualisation?
40:30I'm all for it
40:31How do you feel about it?
40:32All for it
40:33Well, what are you bloody arguing about?
40:34No, you're not arguing
40:35Surprisingly, some were less keen on the new system
40:39Well, we call it freedom
40:41Well, I'll say yes, I prefer freedom
40:45You say, Ernie Bevan thought for years for decasualisation
40:48Because he felt dockers wanted it
40:50But it seems that you don't want it, do you?
40:52Well, I don't think we do
40:53No, I don't think so
40:55I think a man
40:57If he's a man, he'll earn his living
41:00He'll keep his wife and kids
41:02He'll go to work and he'll work
41:04It's strange you'd expect dock workers to really
41:09Oh, you know, regular job, regular work
41:11But the casual system was so deeply entrenched in the culture of the docks
41:17It needed a knockout blur that Devlin could give it
41:23But for many, including Dorian's husband
41:28The guarantee of a consistent weekly wage was a welcome step forward
41:33By the time my husband got on the docks, it was a good job
41:38They had better pay
41:39They still had to fight for everything
41:41But there was better pay, they had all-weather gear
41:44They didn't work in inclement conditions
41:46And they got dirt money, danger money
41:49All of those things that my father fought for
41:54Stephen Shakespeare, a local newspaper photographer
41:58Captured the moment decasualisation arrived in the Liverpool docks
42:02I used to love just going off when I had a few moments at Spare
42:07And wander around a dock and watch the dockers at work
42:11Take a picture of so-and-so, he likes having his picture taken
42:14We'll wheel a docker out and he'd pose for me or whatever
42:18Dockers all look the same
42:20You couldn't turn up there and see something unusual
42:22Because you'd be ridiculed
42:23They always wanted to know
42:25When will it be in the papers, son?
42:27Will he get my good side?
42:30Yet as the government's new decasualised system took effect across Britain
42:35An even bigger threat to the dockers' way of life was on the horizon
42:39In 1967, a new technology was about to fundamentally alter the way cargo was transported
42:48Metal boxes, built to a standard size
42:51Could be fitted onto ships, lorries and trains
42:54In exactly the same way
42:56From North America to continental Europe
42:59The container was a disarmingly simple concept
43:04The docks at Felixstowe in Suffolk have grown in 12 years
43:09From a few rotting jetties to the third largest container port in Europe
43:13The men who work here, about 600 of them
43:16Are highly paid and handle about 2 million tonnes of trade a year
43:20And last year, the company which owns the port made a profit of half a million pounds
43:25The container revolution came in remarkably quickly
43:29Within about 10 years, the container became the way to carry goods
43:36A container is grabbed out of the hold
43:38And within one and a half minutes
43:40Dropped neatly by Martian-like machines onto a delivery lorry on the quayside
43:44Work is done by gangs
43:46Which are smaller than are needed to do the same job anywhere else
43:52Suddenly, the ports that could handle containers
43:55Which tended not to be in the middle of great cities with road systems like London
43:59Those ports had an advantage
44:01Felixstowe was an absolutely perfect example of that
44:04And shipping company after shipping company began to switch their shipping
44:08To shipped vessels that could carry the containers, these great boxes
44:12These great boxes could be packed, shipped and unloaded in record time
44:17Using unregistered men outside the national dock labor scheme
44:21In Liverpool, dockers like Tony had seen the container coming
44:27And guessed its impact
44:29Bob O'Hammons, he said, I guarantee you Tony, one of these days
44:33Eventually, he said, all the stuff will come in these big metal boxes
44:37And he'd just lift them off
44:39He said, I'm just watching them unloading the things off there
44:41Because of this, the container revolution posed a direct threat to dockers' livelihoods
44:47Those ships, they've got 1,200 containers each trip
44:50And there's not one of them being packed or handled by a docker
44:53Dock workers considered their work and their occupation as their birthright
44:59And they weren't going to let that go easily
45:03We're on our way
45:05In 1972, the threat posed by new technology and unregistered workers
45:10Sparked a national dock strike
45:15After just over a week, the Tory government declared a national state of emergency
45:20Dockers were leaving their home ports and travelling to these inland container depots
45:26And non-scheme sites, picketing them, blocking lorries, blacking containers
45:32And just basically disrupting the trade of these ports and wolves as much as they can
45:38Although industrial disputes had been part of life on the docks for almost a century
45:44It was rare for a single strike to cause disruption on this scale
45:48In general, industrial relations problems were more localised
45:52Disputes, often almost invariably not officially recognised
45:56National strikes were rare during Terry's time working the London docks
46:01But he experienced many smaller, unofficial disputes
46:05It was the little strikes, the wildcat strikes, which were a nuisance
46:09You know, if something was wrong, some sort of hazard to health was wrong
46:14Then a stoppage would occur
46:16Usually these little forages only lasted an hour or two
46:19And then everything was settled
46:21For all those in final, to please jump
46:25But 1972 was a watershed year for labour relations in Britain
46:30The country seemed beset by industrial unrest
46:34Groups from coal miners to builders to the Dockers
46:39Walked out to safeguard jobs, pay and conditions
46:45The Dockers' bitter dispute led to violent clashes and arrests
46:49And this image came to define the portrayal of Dock workers in the media
46:54The way that was portrayed was as the Dockers as being kind of industrial bully boys
46:59As this incredibly striped for a group which was overpaid and very lazy
47:05Against this backdrop, the union and the employers struck a deal
47:10Guaranteeing an end to the use of unregistered Dockers, no redundancies
47:15And ensuring all container work happened within ports
47:19For all the efforts by unions, management and government to protect jobs
47:25Cargoes continued to move from traditional inner city docks
47:29To more modern ports further downstream
47:33The movement downriver is to deeper water as vessels got larger
47:38And of course, more importantly, there was more space for new types of cargo handling facilities
47:44Containers and so on
47:45Liverpool opened its own Seaforth container terminal in 1972
47:51But it didn't provide enough work for the numbers of Dockers still employed under the National Dock Labour Scheme
47:587.30am, Hornby Control on Mersey Docks
48:03The men are reporting for work at the place they call The Pen
48:07A throwback to the days of casual hiring and firing on the waterfront
48:11If it's a normal day, there'll be no work for a thousand of the 5,000 Dockers
48:16But under a national agreement, the employers can't make them redundant
48:20Jobs for life
48:22The actual men in the control this morning was 170
48:26How many of them will get work today?
48:28About half
48:29Is it always that bad?
48:30Well, there are times when it's a damn sight worse, you know
48:33Waste from time sign 300
48:36By 1981, only one employer of registered Dock Labour remained in Liverpool
48:42With 3,400 registered Dockers on its books
48:46The impact this transformation had on the working community of the Docks was catastrophic
48:52The Dock Road was full of bars and the seafarers used to use these pubs
48:58They'd go into town, they'd be buying stuff to take home to their families
49:02And all of that stopped because they weren't in port long enough
49:07The now obsolete inner city Docks became a ghost town
49:11But this derelict landscape still drew Stephen and his camera
49:16When I saw Albert Dock and the South Docks
49:19They literally did turn into ghost towns
49:22And no-one seemed to know what would happen to them
49:25Or what would do
49:26And it became very lonely down there last day
49:28There's a picture here of a fisherman sitting there mending his nets
49:32In the 70s
49:34He was left by himself, everybody else had gone
49:37And he was one of the ex-Dockers
49:40I suppose he was going there thinking about the times of the past
49:43When he was lumping crates about
49:46The dereliction of the Docks also provided the backdrop for an iconic TV drama
49:52That exposed the damage the early 1980s economic recession wreaked on working communities
49:59In George's last ride, the final episode of Alan Bleasdale's critically acclaimed series
50:06Boys from the Black Stuff
50:08Former docker George Malone recalls the working life he knew and lost
50:13It just seems like sudden yesterday
50:16The midday gone
50:19The women sandstorming the steps and the flags
50:23And the little kids letting alley-o
50:28His final speech captured a mood of tragic defiance
50:31In the face of the brute economics of Thatcherism
50:34They say that memories are longer than dreams
50:45But my dreams
50:49Those dreams of long ago
50:51They still give me hope
50:55And faith in my class
51:01I can't believe that there's no hope
51:06I can't
51:13Boys from the Black Stuff presented its audience with a stark image of Dockland decline
51:20But further south, a very different vision of the future for Britain's Docklands was being dreamt up
51:27In London, there was this real air of optimism that started
51:32And the London's Dockland Development Corporation
51:35Very much tapped into that feeling of can-do
51:39We're going to create a new world, it's going to be fabulous
51:42There's a really good scene in the film The Long Good Friday
51:45Our country's not an island anymore
51:48Where Bob Hoskins is travelling with some investors on a boat down the Thames
51:52And he's showing the wasteland that is the Docklands
51:56This is the decade in which London will become Europe's capital
52:02That's right
52:03Having cleared away the outdated
52:06We've got mile after mile and acre after acre of land
52:11For our future prosperity
52:14No other city in the world
52:17Has got right in its centre
52:20Such an opportunity for profitable progress
52:24A year after the film's release
52:37Michael Heseltine, then Secretary of State for the Environment
52:41Announced his intention to reshape London's Docklands
52:45The London Docklands Development Corporation was responsible for finding a new use for 8.5 square miles of the former docks
52:55You had these vast acres of dereliction and decay
53:00The land is owned by the public sector
53:02By the local authorities and by the nationalised industries
53:04And only when the free enterprise system is able to get ownership of that land
53:08Is it able to do its job
53:10The centrepiece of the redevelopment was Canary Wharf
53:17Destined to symbolise the economy's new financial priorities
53:22Britain was now ready for a different type of global trade
53:30In shares and capital instead of goods and cargo
53:34Ten years ago
53:36Ten years ago
53:37It would not have been possible even to think in such bold, ambitious terms
53:45And this is going to be the biggest commercial development in the world
53:50Why does it need to be quite so high?
53:53It took many years for the redevelopment plans to be fully implemented
53:58But along the way, London became a model for regeneration of other former Docklands sites around the UK
54:05The former docks in Liverpool, which a few years before had been the wasteland seen in Boys from the Black Stuff
54:12Experienced a makeover of their own
54:15The city's original Albert Dock was reopened as a cultural porter
54:20Becoming home to the Tate Liverpool gallery in 1988
54:24It was a common theme amongst many ports
54:28That the docks and facilities that were discarded following containerisation
54:34Many of these areas were regenerated in the 1980s
54:38Into things like shopping complexes, residential areas and places of leisure
54:46So there was very much a shift on the waterfront
54:50From being a place of industry to a place of consumption
54:54Yet the industry of the docks didn't die
54:57It simply shifted to a new home
55:00Away from the heart of our cities
55:07Although radically transformed
55:09Today Britain's port industry is as busy as ever
55:13The second largest in Europe
55:15Over 95% of the UK's imports and exports still pass through the nation's ports
55:22But where once we could see all this
55:25Now it is largely invisible
55:27Up until the 1960s, maritime trade was on people's doorstep in ports
55:34They could see dock workers in the streets
55:36They could see fishermen going to sea
55:39They could see the cranes above the dock wall
55:42They could see rows and rows of cargo waiting to be shipped or having been landed
55:47Nowadays port activity takes place further downstream, out of sight
55:52At container ports, container depots
55:56This is the face of our docks in the 21st century
56:01Mechanised, efficient
56:03And still at the heart of Britain's trade
56:06But here and there, you may still be able to find a docker
56:13Though he won't be wearing a flat cap and great coat
56:16But a hard hat and high vis vest
56:19In a small independent port in South Wales
56:23Ron Yates is the third generation of his family to work on the docks
56:27My father, my brothers, they all worked on a docks
56:31My dad worked there for 40-odd years
56:34He started in the early 30s, 40s, whatever it was
56:37I started in 70, 1970
56:4065 years later
56:42I should be retired
56:44I'm still working
56:47Though there are only a few men in Ron's gang
56:50They're still loading ships by hand in the old way
56:53Just a short distance away in Cardiff
56:58The waterfront that the dockers left behind
57:01Has been completely transformed
57:04Before the turn of the 21st century
57:07The National Assembly for Wales and Wales Millennium Centre
57:11Would take pride of place in the former docks
57:14The residential area of Tiger Bay
57:17Was engulfed by a much larger leisure complex
57:20Renamed Cardiff Bay
57:22I was born in Tiger Bay
57:24And as far as I'm concerned
57:25I still live in Tiger Bay
57:27Even though there are people telling me
57:28It's not there anymore
57:29And I'm thinking
57:30How can that be?
57:31How can you be born into something?
57:33Still live in something
57:35And it's not there anymore
57:38And in Liverpool
57:39The waterfront has utterly changed too
57:43You're going to Liverpool today
57:44And it's a totally different city
57:46To what I remember when I first saw the weather
57:49It's beautiful
57:50The waterfront's lovely
57:52The waterfront's lovely
57:54Glass everywhere
57:55Lovely buildings
57:56People living in multi-storey apartments
57:59Penthouses
58:02Britain's docks now are as bustling and busy as they ever were
58:06But are no longer the beating heart of our cities
58:09Now inner city docks are not places for hard physical labour
58:13But spaces to relax
58:15They may no longer ring to the footsteps of an army of dockers labouring over their cargo
58:21But they still hum with the chatter of millions of us
58:26Who today choose to live, work and play down the docks
58:36On BBC Two now
58:37The fate of Wessex and its princess lies in Uhtred's hands
58:42One almighty battle in the series finale of The Last Kingdom now
58:45Comedy to come here on BBC Four
58:48As Arena celebrates the genius of Ken Dodd
58:52Happiness next
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