Language, Labour and Migration by Anne J. Kershen

Author:Anne J. Kershen [Kershen, Anne J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780754611714
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2000-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Black Waterfront Life in London: in the Docks and in the ‘Dock’

Eighteenth-century London dock workers were engaged in prolonged, large scale struggles against employers, property owners and the state.46 What dock workers regarded as customary perquisites supplementing irregular cash wages, the state through the ever-expanding ‘Bloody Code’, defended as the property rights of merchant capital. Theft of such property was made punishable, according to defined criteria of its value and the spatial circumstances of its appropriation.47 The penalties included transportation for longer or shorter periods (never less than seven years) and hanging (often commuted to transportation for life, especially late in the century). Thus the shipyard worker who continued (as many did), to take away ‘chips’ - often substantial balks - the waste product of processing timber into masts, futtocks, treenails, keelsons and the many other constituent components of a wooden ship, was criminalised. The same was true of lumpers who took perquisites/ stole from the cargoes of vessels they were unloading. Linebaugh nicely distinguishes two meanings of ‘to lump’ in this sense; ‘to contract to unload ships or to pilfer around the docks.’48 Lumpage dues mainly accrued to the master lumpers who recruited and paid lumper gangs, while job redefinition expanded the range of tasks required of lumpers themselves. Thus the lumpers acquired intensified motives for taking retaliatory compensation through pilferage while simultaneously defending customary ‘rights’ as they understood them. For some incoming commodities, notably slave-produced sugar, pilferage became so extensive that owners called it plundering.49

Further, there are striking connections between the birth of the modern prison, in the sense used by Foucault in Discipline and Punish and new late eighteenth-century ideas and practices concerning dock security. The Panopticon concept came not from Jeremy Bentham but his brother Samuel, who managed a chaotic, violently disorderly new dockyard in Russia for some years from 1779. Jeremy visited this shambles in 1786 and wrote approvingly of Samuel’s idea of a round inspection house from which all the dock workers could be scrutinised - or at least feel so. Later on back in London, Samuel constructed model panopticons, Jeremy industriously refined their specifications.50 Simpler technologies had long sought to protect naval dockyards from pilferage and plundering, by surrounding them high with solid walls, as at Chatham and Deptford since the seventeenth century.51 The mother of all securitised wet docks for berthing, loading and unloading merchant ships, however, only began to take shape at the turn of the eighteenth-century. London’s huge West India Docks, which required the raising of £1,750,000 of capital (vastly more in real terms today), was completed in 1802. ‘Its perimeter was guarded by a gap of 100 ft between it and the nearest building; a moat 6 ft deep and 12 ft wide; and a wall 30 ft high.’52 Such arrangements greatly facilitated the policing of all persons and goods entering or leaving. They did not, however, entirely foil the ingenuity of waterfront men of any colour. In the nature of things, though, far better information is available on

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