from Liverpool Tales by John Williams
Down by the Riverside
It’s only lately, through writing about Liverpool, that I have become aware of the part played in my life by the River Mersey. It is my fluid umbilical cord, forever connecting me to anyone who was born on or even simply visited its all-embracing shores.
As a small child I used to gaze at it and wonder where exactly in the world my father was and when would he next sail, homeward bound, across the Mersey bar. I can remember accompanying my mother to Garston docks to collect my father’s ‘allotment’ – his monthly allowance to her.
It was just after the Second World War, when austerity refused to abdicate its dominion and many everyday things were impossible to obtain, so you can imagine my shock when I saw, on the quayside where the Elders and Fyffes boats discharged their cargoes of bananas, tons of the precious fruit lying heaped in a tangled mass of red, green and yellow, like a funeral pyre for the victims of some dreadful plague.
My mother told me that they were to be rendered into polish, and while that may have been true, the sight of such conspicuous waste took the shine out of that day’s outing.
The Mersey was the point of departure for my short career as a seaman; a career that despite its brevity took me to some fabulous places. The river was also the means by which I was able to enjoy the delights of the Wirral, with New Brighton and Moreton our most frequent destinations. However, the most life changing effect of the river’s nurturing flow occurred when I was in my mid-twenties.
At the time I was working in an engineering firm on the Dock Road where the working conditions where, quite simply, dangerous. You see, after I stopped working on the buses I trained as a fitter at a government training centre and left there equipped with some questionable qualifications, which would always be derided by those engineers who had served bona fide apprenticeships. Nevertheless, I had worked in enough places to know that having iron girders stacked higgledy-piggledy in the middle of the working area was not conducive to safety.
Whenever somebody wanted a piece of metal he had to drag it out of the precariously balanced pile. It was like playing the children’s game Ker-Plunk! with one’s own life in the balance. The firm’s nickname was ‘the bus stop’ – because everybody was waiting to move on.
I had been recovering from severe depression even before I got the job in the ‘bus stop’ and one morning I found myself staring at its near windowless facade, filled with an overwhelming sense of despair. After a minute or so of internal debate I turned on my heel and walked towards the Pier Head and the Woodside ferry. I know it was an irresponsible thing to do, but I couldn’t face another day amid the rusting gloom of Vulcan’s enclave.
As it turned out it was the best move I ever made, because when I got off the ferry I wandered into Oliveira’s Café and met a man who shouldered a boulder into my life-stream and diverted its course forever. His name was Alan Kendrick Hughes, a.k.a ‘Yozzer’ and on that beautiful May morning he signed articles as helmsman to my foundering craft and steered me away from the doldrums where I might have been forever becalmed.
Yozzer was tall, bullish, self-confident and, to use his own phrase, ‘As rough as a bear’s arse.’ However, his gruff bearing disguised an innate generosity and that morning, after he’d heard my tale of leaving the ‘bus stop’ without benefit of a bus or even a valid ticket, he determined to find me some work.
I don’t know what he would have said had he known that my qualifications were shaky to say the least, but that very evening he knocked on my door and told me to meet him at a bakery in Anfield the following day. The extraordinary thing was that he lived in Moreton, miles across the River Mersey and had made a detour just to let me know.
The bakery job, known as a ‘shutdown’ because the work had to be done while the normal workforce was on holiday, was only temporary, but within weeks of working with ‘AK’ – as Yozzer sometimes referred to himself – I had gained enough confidence to find a reasonable job working for John Smith and Bob Crawford, who had a contract to maintain plant at the Bidston factory of Pilkington’s Fibre Glass division and who were decent enough employers.
A few months later Yozzer walked onto the site and started working for the same firm as me. He was, without doubt, one of the most wickedly funny men I’ve ever met. Even people who didn’t enjoy his lacerating brand of humour rarely objected, as he was an old fashioned hard case too. One day we were working together, preparing the way for John Smith to remove some Platinum bushes, which helped spin the fibreglass and which were worth a fortune. As we ‘surveyed’ the job – or to use Yozzer’s expression ‘gave it a good coat of looking at’ – a security guard sidled onto the platform where we were standing. His demeanour spoke, or rather droned, of self-importance and pomposity. Clearing his throat noisily and pointing to the platinum bushes he said: "They don’t arf swell up with the heat yer know."
Yozzer, who was a trained engineer, asked deadpan: "Oh really? And what’s the co-efficient of the linear expansion?"
The furiously blushing guard gestured like a fisherman estimating the size of the one that got away before scuttling out of sight. I don’t know if he has ever recalled Yozzer’s question, but every word has been etched into my memory ever since.
Incidentally, a few weeks later ten of the platinum bushes, worth £120,000 at 1970 scrap prices, disappeared, and were later found in the house of an old age pensioner! Perhaps there is a case for raising pensions to a decent standard.
Yozzer’s bullish outlook came to my aid months later after the job at Bidston had panned out. He called to tell me that Cammell Lairds were taking men on and said that I should get over to their shipyard the following day at 8 o’clock.
I duly turned up and was ushered into an office where the hirer asked me if I had been sent by the dole, as that was the main criteria for this particular intake. Befuddled by nervousness, as I knew I had no real place there, I replied that I hadn’t and I was dismissed.
When Yozzer found out what I’d done he went berserk and told me to get back inside and say that I had been sent by the dole. More afraid of upsetting AK than of being rumbled as a ‘dilutee’, which was what government trainees were scathingly referred to, as they diluted the strength of apprenticeships, I did as he said and was taken on.
The three years that followed were among the happiest of my life as I worked with some of the funniest and cynically worldly-wise people I have ever encountered.
In ancient Greece a philosopher called Diogenes was so appalled at the tyrannical state of the world he decided that since most people were being treated like dogs he might as well live like one and promptly went off to live inside an empty barrel. Since the Greek word for dog was Kunikos he and his followers were called cynics, and it is a shame that his noble sentiments have, over time, become distorted to mean something bitter and mean-spirited.
My reference to ancient Greece is not entirely misplaced, given the historical dimensions of Cammell Lairds shipbuilders. Even before I’d ever set foot within a mile of the yard I’d come across a mention of it in Thomas Armstrong’s King Cotton, a saga of the suffering that Liverpool and Lancashire people had endured when the American civil war closed down the cotton industry. I had been surprised to read that the Confederate Gunship Alabama had been built in Birkenhead at Cammell Lairds. Lairds had also built the world’s first all-welded ship, and then, ironically, had been virtually wiped out when the Japanese appropriated the technique to build super tankers. The Ark Royal aircraft carrier had also slipped out of Lairds and into the bosom of the Mersey.
In 1939 a submarine called Thetis was built there and on its trials, just 40 miles away off the North Wales coast it sank and ninety-nine men were lost, the overwhelming majority of whom were civilian workers from the yard. Men who were just like my new comrades, Billy Audley, Yozzer, Jacko, Roscoe, John Poole, Davey Garlic and Paul Flynn. Between them they introduced me to a camaraderie I had never known, even in the close confines of a merchant ship.
Audley, an ex-Merchant Navy engineering officer was clever, funny and singularly eccentric in that he moved in his own orbit without regard for the frantic circling for position practised by most of his peers. He wore his thick curly hair short, at a time when even grandfathers felt somehow compelled to ape the contemporary fashion for long hair. His clothes – blue check shirts, jeans and denim jackets – were worn winter and summer, year in year out, regardless of trends toward loons, kipper ties and platform soles. Like the steel of the ships he helped build, he was mentally tough and impervious to the fickle winds of change.
One day as we were sitting in the dinner hut, made available to us by the desertion of the rats who refused to endure its shabbiness when there were perfectly good sewers to be had, a young livewire of a kid called Brian began reading aloud from a tabloid.
"D’yer know," he asked in amazement, "that the Thetis holds a world record?
He was of course referring to the fact that more men died aboard the ill fated submarine than any other similar tragedy, but before he could make that point, Audley, his jaw muscles working with indignant rage at the tabloid’s trivial treatment of the event, snapped, "What for? Staying down the longest?"
Nobody laughed.
On another occasion, as we waited for a pub to open its doors, young Brian almost swooned in admiration as a flash sports car sped past us and gasped, "Did you see that!" to which Diogenes mark II, pointing to the pub railings, replied, "It’s only that iron fence in another shape lad." A commonplace remark but it was the first time I’d heard a man question material values when he had the wherewithal to buy his way into consumer heaven.
By complete contrast Paul Flynn was a quiet, easy-going young man who simply laughed when I nicknamed him ‘the oaf’ because of his oddly medieval hairstyle. I remember one night taking him and his wife to the old boxing stadium to see David Bowie’s first Liverpool concert. That night Paul met the other, underground, side of Liverpool and he loved it. His delight was obvious from the way he kept dancing, even when there was no music playing.
I suspect such activity would have been frowned on by Roscoe, who was intensely politicised and the possessor of a piratical beard as well as an appetite for Emile Zola. I remember the first time I met him, it was on the morning I started working at Lairds. We were walking along, after having slipped out of the yard to have breakfast at a cafe in Green Lane, something that astonished me but certainly not the proprietor, who was apparently well used to guys scaling the perimeter wall simply to build an appetite, when Roscoe said, "If only we had bread!"
I was taken aback because he’d just demolished a plate of toast smothered in bacon and eggs. Roscoe, a.k.a. Keith Ross, simply smiled and explained that he was quoting from Zola’s novel, Germinal. Now I’d read a lot, but not what you’d call classic literature, and I was so intrigued by his enthusiasm for Zola that I later got hold of a copy and read it myself. You could say that Roscoe pushed me in the direction of great literature and ultimately university. I have heard since that he owns a delicatessen. I hope he has plenty of bread in both senses of the term.
Although I only spoke to him once, old Jacko will always represent to me the old Merseyside spirit before it was bludgeoned to death by Thatcherism and voodoo economics. I first saw him when I was going with ‘the Aud’ for an evening aperitif in the Queen’s in James Street. He was about sixty and was wearing a flat cap and one of those silk scarves that conjure images of the great depression. As we passed him, leaning against a wall, Billy asked him how things were going on a particular job that Jacko had been lumbered with. Jacko’s expression was one of utter contempt as, on one of the few occasions I ever heard him actually speak, he conveyed his hatred of the bosses.
"They keep tellin’ us to work ’arder, but if they spent some friggin’ money on modern gear we could work more efficiently!"
His wisdom is indelibly printed in my scrapbook of scrapped working class heroes.
Soon after that I was given a job for which I was not at all suited. It involved the installation of some rather delicate looking valves. As the charge-hand dispensed the job, my heart sank, but I needn’t have worried, because Jacko, apparently as part of some unspecified punishment, was allocated to show me the ropes. The job was on a ship that was in the fitting out basin and was due to embark on sea trials in Faslane near Glasgow. Tucking his silk scarf into his boiler suit, Jacko led the way. When we got to the engine I enquired of him what we were supposed to do with the gleaming, stainless steel valves. By way of answer he simply placed one of them in the locating hole and hit it with a Lairds’ issue two-pound hammer. He then repeated the process eight times, four at either side of the engine, pulled out a pocket watch and indicated that it was knocking off time. Not once did he utter a word to me.
When the ship returned from its sea trials I enquired of one its complement, a fat unpleasant bastard who had insinuated himself into our hovel, how things had gone. He replied that, apart from the fact that none of the injector valves worked and had undergone emergency repair at sea, everything had gone well.
It was then I decided to go back to school and learn something well enough to be confident when I was working with it. I wanted to be a bona fide anything with no more hiding from exposure as a fake. It was at that juncture that Davey Garlic, a self assured young man who would have looked equally at home in a student demo, assured me that I would be alright as I had ‘a good head on my shoulders’. How he divined that from our hovel-bound discourses about ale and football I’m not at all sure but I was a grateful for his encouragement nonetheless.
When I look at what has happened to Cammell Lairds, recently swindled out of £40,000,000 by some Italian crooks that reneged on a deal, I am almost glad that John Poole can’t see it. I say almost because John, whom I barely knew but who possessed one the friendliest and dazzling smiles I’ve ever seen, went progressively blind. He was a good man and a conscientious worker but now he is almost sightless.
Perhaps Jacko was right. There is no point in working yourself to death when all most people can expect is a cheap burial in an overcrowded cemetery when perhaps we all deserve a Viking funeral on the Mersey.
I will end with a story which sums up the character of the shipyard workers. Some time in the seventies an ex-British submarine, which had been sold to the Chilean navy, was being refitted. It was berthed in a huge basin and one day an unarmed torpedo was accidentally fired. The missile streaked the length of the basin before leaping a quay wall, where it demolished a workman’s hut. There was a deadly silence all around, but then a huge wave of laughter and relief echoed on the water as, from the debris of the hut, a white shirt was raised and waved in surrender.
Funny yes, but yet another example of the workforce being torpedoed by their friends.
copyright 2004 ~ John Williams ~ all rights reserved
