The London dock strike

English-language chronologies of the Second World War carry a brief note under 29 October 1943: troops replaced striking dockers in the Port of London. No source is given for the note, and it has not been confirmed. The Hansard records of the House of Commons for October and November 1943, in which MPs regularly questioned the Minister of Labour about every stoppage of any note, contain no mention of a strike in the London docks or of soldiers being sent there. The only question about the ports in those weeks, on 4 November, concerned a shortage of labour, not a strike. Troops replacing striking London dockers is, by contrast, well documented two years later, in October 1945, and the note under 1943 may be an echo of those events. What is certain is that the autumn of 1943 was a period of markedly rising strike numbers in Britain, even though strikes were banned in wartime.

Strikes banned by law

After the fall of France, in July 1940, the Minister of Labour in Winston Churchill’s government, Ernest Bevin, formerly the leader of Britain’s largest trade union, issued the so-called Order 1305 (the Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order). It banned strikes and lock-outs unless the dispute had first been reported to the ministry and 21 days had passed without its being referred to the National Arbitration Tribunal, whose awards were binding. In return the trade unions gained a guarantee that employers would observe agreed rates, and a place on many state bodies. Bevin preferred negotiation to repression and rarely used the sanctions the law gave him, although at the same time he wielded almost unlimited power over Britain’s workforce, including the right to direct people to specified work.

The limits of this system were shown by the miners’ strike at Betteshanger colliery in Kent in January 1942. A court then fined more than a thousand miners and sent three union officials to prison. When the strike continued, the officials were released after a few days, and almost no one paid the fines. From then on it was clear that the strike ban could not be enforced against a whole workforce that chose to ignore it.

The docks in wartime

The Port of London was one of the most important points of British supply and at the same time one of the most heavily damaged places in the country. From the first day of the Blitz in September 1940, German bombs set fire to warehouses and wharves on the Isle of Dogs, in Rotherhithe and in the Surrey Docks. Because of the threat from the air and from the sea, much of the shipping was diverted to the western ports, above all Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow.

Before the war dock work was casual: men were hired by the shift or by the day, which bred poverty and mistrust of the employers. Bevin, who had begun his union career among the port workers of Bristol and in 1920 had made his name as the dockers’ advocate before a state wages inquiry, introduced in 1941 a system of registration for dockers, an obligation to work in the port and a guaranteed weekly wage. An order on dock labour of 30 July 1943 allowed men from outside the register to be directed to unloading in cases of urgent need. As Bevin told the House of Commons on 4 November 1943, such permission had been granted eleven times since July, for eight ports. In addition, soldiers worked permanently in the ports: the army had its own port companies, being prepared to operate captured ports abroad, which trained in British docks. Men in uniform at work on unloading did not therefore necessarily mean strike-breaking, which makes the note of 29 October even harder to assess.

The wave of strikes in the autumn of 1943

The number of strikes in Britain rose with every year of the war. According to official Ministry of Labour statistics, about 1.8 million working days were lost through stoppages in 1943, considerably more than in 1940–1941, and about 3.7 million in 1944. Most of these losses were in coal mining, but the unrest also spread to shipyards and munitions works. The causes were similar: weariness after four years of war, long working hours, pay disparities between plants and industries, a sense that wage disputes dragged on for months, and a belief that after the victories in Africa and Italy the threat of invasion had passed.

In the autumn of 1943 a wave of so-called unofficial strikes, called without the approval of union leaderships, swept the country. At the turn of September and October shipwrights in the yards on the Clyde came out, as did workers at the Vickers-Armstrongs works in Barrow-in-Furness. The mood is captured by a question put in the House of Commons on 14 October by a Conservative MP: did the minister intend to punish those responsible – “whether employers, workers or outside persons” – with death or life imprisonment? Bevin replied that he had nothing to add to his September statement. The only Communist MP, William Gallacher, argued the same day that it was the employers who dragged out negotiations until the workers lost patience.

Communists against strikes

A paradox of those years was the position of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Until June 1941 it had presented the war as a clash of imperialists, but after the German attack on the USSR it became the war’s most ardent supporter. The Communists, strong among shop stewards in the munitions factories, called for higher output, set up production committees and condemned strikes as harmful to the Red Army. The strikers were backed instead by the small groups of Trotskyists, which the government and the Communists exploited to portray unofficial strikes as the work of subversives.

Significance

Whatever happened in the Port of London on 29 October 1943, tension in British industry was rising fast. In March 1944 tens of thousands of miners in South Wales and Yorkshire went on strike, and in April Bevin introduced a regulation providing for up to five years’ imprisonment for incitement to strike in industries essential to the war. Several Trotskyist activists were soon charged with supporting an apprentices’ strike on Tyneside.

Soldiers did replace London dockers in the autumn of 1945, after the war. During an unofficial strike in the ports, the Minister of Labour in Clement Attlee’s Labour government, George Isaacs, told the House of Commons on 15 October 1945 that more than 39,000 dockers were on strike, over 10,000 of them in London, and that further army units were being sent in to unload food. The Labour government used troops in the docks several more times, including in 1948 and 1949. Order 1305 remained in force until 1951. Bevin’s wartime compromise – a strike ban combined with compulsory arbitration and a strong position for the unions – outlasted the war, but did not remove the dockers’ mistrust of the authorities. That mistrust was among the most enduring tensions of post-war Britain.