People, Place and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront by Graeme J. Milne

Author:Graeme J. Milne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Conclusion

It was obvious to any seafarer arriving in a major seaport that he was about to encounter great pressures. His labour, especially if he was an experienced sailing-ship mariner, was valuable, but not in the sense that a shipowner would pay him a large wage for it. Instead, crimps were keen to manoeuvre him onto his next ship as quickly as possible, and if necessary persuade him to desert from his current vessel to make that feasible. If he was arriving at a paying-off port, his wages were attractive to many people. His own interests were complex, and usually in some conflict. One commentator noted that the mercantile community would never have tolerated a port that levied a tax on shipping equivalent to the average costs of paying off crimps; such a tax would ‘be considered an outrageous imposition upon the subjects of a friendly power’. The author had answered his own question, however, by observing that most of a seaman’s wages never reached him. In effect, the sailor paid the ‘tax’, explaining the lack of outrage from the shipowners.163 The Liverpool Shipowners Association asked the Board of Trade in 1902 whether there was any prospect of the US government taking definitive action against crimping; if not, the association would recommend that its members reach an agreement with the Portland crimps. Unconcerned with any abstract question of law or morality, its priority was to have some predictability in the fees its captains would face when visiting the port.164

The rise of the steamship, and especially the tramp steamer, paradoxically created new opportunities for crimps, who proved readily adaptable. Deskilling the maritime workforce in the age of steam prioritised the labourer’s strength over the sailor’s nautical knowledge. Crimps could offer captains a crew-recruitment service without the old theatrics of passing men off as experienced seamen who had been several times round the Horn. When waterfront employment was scarce, shovelling coal on a steamship was evidently as desirable a job as anything else. Some cases in Cardiff from the early 1890s, for example, have a strange unreality to them, with all concerned happy to acknowledge that men were going to sea with no experience, and that it did not matter. Daniel Coughlin, a crane driver, was accosted by a runner called Gregory near the shipping office in Cardiff and given a job as a ship’s fireman; Joseph Scott, a labourer, was even signed as an AB following a similar encounter with Gregory, and found that all the captain wanted from him was to keep the crew in order, which he did.165

The crimp, then, was a complicated character, and one who became profoundly entangled with the seafarer and the shipping industry. It is also clear even from this chapter that he became a target of state and charitable interventions in sailortown, not least because he claimed to be providing a home for the seafarer, challenging those seeking to reform the sailor by placing him in a suitable domesticated environment. Those conflicts, and the spaces in which they were conducted, are the subject of the next chapter.

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