In
Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist
International-Take Five- A Worker’s Dread
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
They, the murky union leadership, the dockers’ leadership,
if that was what you could call it, wanted to call the whole thing off, call
all hands back to work just when they, the rank and file, had shut everything
on the waterfront down, and shut it down tight. Just because Lloyd George, that
bloody Liberal Party Welshman, called their bluff, called their number and they
came up short, the leadership so-called came up short. They didn’t have the
guts to take things into their own hands and so they were parlaying what to do
next. Hell, not a damn ship was moving, not a damn ship was being unloaded,
nothing. Tom Jackson could see as he looked out on the Thames that in the year
of our lord 1919 that there were more ships, ships from every port of call,
than he had ever seen filling up each and every estuary. And with a certain
pride he looked out just then because he had been the delegate in his area that
had responsible for closing most of the port down, and having those beautiful
ships, ships from each port of call as he liked to say to the boys over a pint
at the Black Swan after a hard day of
unloading those damn cargoes, sitting idle, sitting idle upon a workingman’s
decision that they stay idle. And now the damn leadership wanted to give up the
game.
Tom Jackson had been a union man, a dockers’ union man, for
all of his twenty –seven years, or at least since he knew what a union was, and
his father before him (that was how he got the job as a casual that started his
career) and the Jackson clan had been working men since, since he reckoned
Chartist times when old Ben Jackson led his clan out of Scotland to raise hell
about the working man’s right to vote, something like that, Tom wasn’t always
clear on the particulars of that history although he knew for certain that it
involved the Chartists of blessed memory.
Most of the time he had been content to be a union man, pay
his dues, and support any actions that the leadership proposed. And have a pint
or two with the boys at his beloved Black
Swan and then go home to Anne and the two little ones. But the damn war of
unblessed memory had changed things. He had been lucky enough to be exempt
since the government desperately needed men to unload the massive loads of
materials to be eaten up by the war. They had worked twelve, fourteen, sixteen
hour shifts to whittle down the backlog. At the same pay. And no one, no one
least of all Tom Jackson, complained while the war was on. They, he, saw the
work as their patriotic duty. But now, now that war was over the dock owners,
the shipping companies, and their agents wanted to keep all the dough for
themselves and keep the steady dockers working at that same damn rate. And
hence the strike.
Tom Jackson was also a Labor Party man, although unlike in
the union he held not office nor was he active in his local branch. He just
voted Labor, like his father before him (and before that Liberal when Gladstone
of father’s blessed memory was alive). The party was also ready to call it
quits, call all hands back. Tom Jackson was in a quandary. His assistant steward
(and pint or two companion in sunnier times), Bill Armstrong, was a headstrong
younger man who had been a member of the Social-Democratic Federation before
the war and since had been tinkering with the small groups of communists that
were running around London of late. Bill had told him that the Labor Party
would sell them out, the union leaders would sell them out but that a new
group, a group headed by the Bolsheviks over in Russia, the same ones they, the
dockers, had previously helped by not loading military equipment the government
wanted to send the White Guards that were fighting a civil war against those
same Bolsheviks, a grouping called the Communist International would not sell
them out.
Tom listened to what Bill had to say but dismissed it out of
hand. He was not going to get involved, get Anne and the two kids involved in
international intrigue. No, something would happen and things would work out.
Something did happen a couple of days later. The strike was officially called
off with nothing won. Tom was angry for a time but then, with a shrug of his
shoulders, he said he could not abandon his union, his Labor Party or his Black Swan for some new adventure…
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