The union bureaucracy was also strengthened by the way in which the scheme was used to guarantee contributions to the TGWU. On Merseyside and in Manchester registration books (without which no docker can be accepted for work) were issued only on production of a clear TGWU card. Thus the union was guaranteed its members no matter how little activity was carried on in their interests. The vast majority of dockers in these two cities stamped up their union cards only at the six-monthly intervals when the registration books were issued. They looked on the union not as an organization for the defence and betterment of their conditions but as an ‘overhead charge’ for the maintenance of their job. The official could ignore the worker’s dissatisfaction with the way the union was behaving, secure in the knowledge that union dues would still be paid each April and October.

The TGWU official machine was quite generally detested by the dockers. Officials made agreements with the employers behind the backs of the men. Men were disciplined with the consent of union officials and often saved only by ‘unofficial’ strike action.

A group of students who investigated conditions on Manchester docks in 1950-51 reported: ‘There is no doubt that there is widespread dissatisfaction with their union among dock workers in Manchester. Relations with the union were criticized more than any other aspect of employment.’(4) In their interviews these investigators heard repeated often a story which summed up the attitude of the full-time union officials, who, of course, are not elected by union members but appointed by the union leadership. One official, it seems informed the dockers at a branch meeting that he did not care what they thought about him. He had himself and his job to think of first and if he had to choose between being popular with them or standing in well with the high officials, he would not hesitate to choose the latter.

Most of the leaders of the mass resignations from the TGWU to join the ‘blue union’ had been members of the TGWU for many years. There were ex-branch committee men and ex-lay officers among them, and all had put up a prolonged fight inside the union against the officers. But, secure in their appointments, the officials could afford to ignore the demands of the rank-and-file members, to ignore votes of censure and votes of no confidence. Thus rank-and-file dockers who sought to further the interests of the men with traditional militancy and solidarity continually collided with the bureaucratic apparatus of the TGWU. The desire for a national, democratic portworkers’ union in these conditions inevitably grew and matured.

Ever since the war real working-class leadership on the docks has been in the hands of unofficial committees which sprang up in every dispute. In every major strike, too, one section of the workers had proposed a break from the TGWU. But always the leaders of the unofficial committees put forward the alternative of transforming relations inside the TGWU and wresting democratic rights from the entrenched union apparatus. Finally however, in 1954, in the words of one rank-and-file leader, the bankruptcy of this policy of staying in the TGWU became clear and led to the ‘biggest prison break in all history’.

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THE PRISON BREAK
The ‘prison break’ first began in Hull, at the end of August 1954. Four thousand Hull dockers had come out on strike on August 16 against an antiquated and dangerous method of unloading grain known as ‘hand-scuttling’. Men had to stand up to their waists and deeper in loose grain in the hold of a ship and shovel grain into sacks with big metal scoops. Even the secretary of the National Dock Group of the TUWU described hand-scuttling as ‘a rotten, dirty, underpaid job that should have died with Queen Victoria’. To be sure, his statement was made after the strike had been on for six days and after his union’s attempt to break the strike had signally failed. The TGWU had actually tolerated hand-scuttling for years. But, significantly enough, what the TGWU had tolerated the militant but unofficial action of Hull dockers abolished. This strike however had much wider repercussions. All the frustration and seething discontent felt by these docker members for the Transport and General Workers’ Union at the set-up in their union came suddenly to a head. A mass meeting of striking dockers on August 22 decided almost unanimously to apply for membership of the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers. A few days later a leaflet was issued by their strike committee and sent across to Merseyside. It summed up their feelings in this way:

For many years we dockers of Hull have resented the way the Transport and General Workers’ Union has handled our disputes. Time after time we have reported our grievances to the TGWU only to receive the reply: there is nothing we can do, our hands are tied.
We of Hull believe the time has come to do some untying: that is, to untie ourselves from the TGWU and enter the blue union. We also believe that the experiences of the Merseyside dockers in the TGWU are the same as ours in Hull
We therefore call upon you to defend your interests by joining with us and supporting us in our attempt to achieve the unity of dockers within the democratic structure of the blue union.

Four weeks after the Hull meeting a thousand Birkenhead dockers packed themselves into Birkenhead Town Hall and enthusiastically agreed to follow Hull’s example. All but a tiny handful of Birkenhead’s 2,000 dockers subsequently applied to join the NASD. Manchester followed soon after and by the end of the year dockers were flocking into the ‘blue union’ from every group of docks on the Mersey waterfront.

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THE BLUE UNION
This was not the first time that a great body of dockers had broken with the TGWU. The Scottish Transport and General Workers’ Union exists today as a result of a breakaway in 1932 embracing all the dockers in the ports of Glasgow and Campbeltown. They broke from the TGWU on whether their branch had the right to elect its eight full-time officials annually or whether they were to be appointed by the union’s official leadership. The branch won a judgment in the courts confirming its right to elect its officials. Ernest Bevin, general secretary of the TGWU, promptly changed the rules of the union. In response, the dockers of Glasgow formed their own union.

The Dockers’ Section of the NASD was itself formed by a break from the TGWU. In June 1923 40,000 dockers came out on strike against an agreement signed between the TGWU leaders and the port employers accepting a reduction of wages. As a result of this sell-out by Bevin and his colleagues, thousands of London dockers and lightermen left the TGWU and joined with the Stevedores’ Protection Society (a union of long standing which did not join in the amalgamation of dockers’ and other unions which led to the formation of the TGWU in 1922) to form the National Amalgamated Stevedores, Lightermen, Watermen and Dockers’ Union.

The new union was expelled from the TUC, since the trade union leaders were anxious, as ever, to protect the growing power of the TGWU bureaucracy. In 1927 the new union divided to form two separate organizations, the Watermen, Lightermen, Tugmen and Bargemen’s Union and the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers.

It was the latter union, by now a member of the TUC, that the northern dockers joined when in 1954-55 they marched out of the TGWU like a previous generation of dockers thirty years before. At the time of the Hull strike the NASD had 7,000 members – 3,000 in the Dockers’ Section and 4,000 in the Stevedores’ Section. It operated only in London. The militant and democratic traditions of the ‘blue union’ attracted the northern men. Traditionally, in the NASD all major issues were referred back to the rank and file for final decisions. So it was necessary for the applications to join the union from the dockers of Merseyside, Manchester and Hull to be discussed by the rank-and-file members. The London meetings of the NASD came out overwhelmingly in favour of accepting these applications. The ‘blue union’ began to enrol the new members.

As in 1923, the General Council of the TUC immediately gave its support to the bureaucrats of the TGWU and the NASD was suspended from the TUC for ‘poaching’. But the ‘blue union’ continued to expand in the North. Offices were set up in Hull, Birkenhead, Manchester and, finally, Liverpool. The TGWU leaders threatened dockers with loss of jobs if they joined the blue union. In September 1954 the Birkenhead branch of the TGWU posted notices inviting 1,000 men to register at once to fill their waiting list for jobs on the dock and thus to replace dockers who wanted to join the NASD.

But in April 1955, when the dockers in Merseyside and Manchester applied for their new registration books, the threat to deprive ‘blue union’ members of their livelihood was decisively defeated. When ‘blue union’ men were refused registration books because they could not produce a TGWU clearance card, the men of the Manchester and Birkenhead docks struck, together with 13,000 of Liverpool’s 17,000 dockers, completely paralysing the three ports. After a two-day strike the Manchester Dock Labour Board capitulated and the Merseyside Board followed suit. The first attempt to bludgeon men back into the TGWU had failed—miserably.

In the early months of 1955 large mass meetings of dockers were held in Hull, Manchester and Liverpool. Branches and regional committees of the NASD were rapidly set up. By March 1955 there were five branches in Birkenhead, twelve in Liverpool, two in Manchester and seven in Hull. Full-time officers were operating in all these northern ports.

The popular nature of the movement was shown in the large attendances at branch meetings. Hundreds of dockers were swept into trade union branch activity for the first time in their lives. Many, acting as branch officers and committee members, gained their first experience of organizing administration and meeting procedures. That first great organizing of the dock labourers sixty years before must have resembled, in many ways, these virile, raw but energetic forces which thronged the union meeting rooms. What a startling contrast to the tiny branch meetings of the TUWU! Apathy disappeared. In its place Came enthusiasm. Dockers felt not just that they ‘belonged’ to the union. The union belonged to them.

Meanwhile opinion was hardening that it was time to begin negotiations for the recognition of the NASD by the employers in the northern ports. Finally a delegate meeting in London at the beginning of May 1955 resolved to propose strike action as from May 23 if recognition was not granted. The recommendation went before mass meetings in London, Hull, Manchester and Merseyside. In Hull only twenty-two men, in a meeting of 1,500 voted against the strike ultimatum. It was the same in all the ports. Everywhere the recommendation was endorsed by absolutely decisive majorities.

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THE RECOGNITION STRIKE
Over 20,000 dockers stopped work on the Monday the ultimatum expired. Several thousand TGWU men came out in sympathy with the ‘blue union’. Surveying the beginning of that strike now, it is clearer than ever that there was every chance of victory. The strike had solid support in the ranks of the NASD.

The employers placed the onus for non-recognition on an ‘inter-union struggle’, stating that recognition was a matter for the unions to settle among themselves. In this way the employers left themselves a way retreating. There was also a great measure of put opinion behind the ‘blue union’ dockers on the issue of their fight to belong to a union of their choice. This feeling was reflected in a sympathetic editorial in Manchester Guardian. Sympathetic action by dockers in other ports could have been developed. The TGWU leadership was desperately afraid of the spread of strike. Mr A. E. Tiffin, general secretary of the TGWU was later to reveal how near they felt the NASD came to success. Speaking to a Docks National Committee in August 1955, and dealing with the resistance of union to the demand of the blue union’ for recognition, he declared: That battle could have been lost. In my opinion it was one of the greatest crises we have had to face for a long period of time.’ A statement issued by the TGWU on the eve of the strike testified to a state of near-panic. It called on its docker members to remain at work, and declared that only ‘a reign anarchy and terror’ could result from the ‘blue union’s’ action.

The TUC condemned the strike and demanded the ‘blue union’ should hand back the northern men the TGWU. What the 10,000 workers concerned thought about it all was apparently felt to be unimportant in Smith Square. Then, as now, the matter was for the TUC leaders merely a question of making ‘suitable’ arrangements at the top. The ranks could be herded around and bartered.

When the strike started, leaders of the TGWU declared that they were willing to spend £9 million break it. Such prodigality with union funds was unheard of when it was a matter of a wages application being rejected by the employers. Here it was a question of defending the power of the union apparatus. There were no barriers now to releasing the full financial resources of the union and the energy of officials, all of which had usually remained securely under lock and key in fights against the employers.

The campaign the TGWU launched failed—at least so far as the rank and file were concerned. Officials in Manchester, who boasted they would lead the men back to work, waited at the dock gates—alone. When national officers of the union called their members to a meeting in Liverpool 3,000 dockers gave them such a rough handling that they had to call in a police escort before they could leave. As they left they were pelted with crusts of bread—a reply to an earlier threat of one official that the strikers would be forced to eat crusts.

The strike lasted six weeks. The men received no strike pay and suffered very real hardship. But in the end it was not a break in the militancy of the rank and file which prevented victory. If the outcome had rested solely on that there is no doubt that the ‘blue union’ would have won. Success can never be absolutely guaranteed in any working-class struggle. There were, however, many essential ingredients for success present at the beginning of the recognition strike. Why then did it fall? The answer lies partly in the lamentable weakness which quickly showed itself among a section of the London leadership of the NASD. They had welcomed the northern men into the union. They ended, not only by letting down the men in the north, but also by flouting the whole democratic traditions of the blue union.

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THE ROLE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
But lack of firmness, of understanding, of loyalty to the ranks on the part of individual leaders is not the whole answer. For that we need to consider the part played by the leaders of the Communist Party. In the months before the strike for recognition, Communist Party leaders opposed the development of the ‘blue union’ in the provincial ports. When Hull dockers joined. Harry Pollitt attacked their action and called for ‘unity in the fight to democratize the Transport and General Workers’ Union’. In fact however the Stalinist
policy aimed only to secure by any means (and certainly not by principled methods) the lifting of the ban on communists’ occupying official positions in the TGWU.

The official line of the Communist Party towards the ‘blue union’ movement was not accepted by its own dock members without many misgivings and much opposition. Nevertheless in the days before the Khrushchev speech this did not prevent the ‘line’ from being carried through. As a result, not only did the Communist Party help to defeat the recognition strike, but in the process its own influence and membership on the docks were almost completely destroyed.

On December 31, 1954, an article by Vic Marney, a well-known docker member of the Communist Party appeared in Tribune. Tribune, incidentally, gave a sympathetic treatment to the ‘blue union’. Marney, at this time, was secretary of the ‘Liaison Committee’, an unofficial committee of TGWU members, influenced by the Communist Party. He declared in his Tribune article that the Liaison Committee had decided ‘under no-circumstances will they be involved in any struggle for the recognition of the NASD in the outer ports’. This was clear notice of an intention to blackleg. But when the strike began docker members of the Communist Party refused to become blacklegs. Unfortunately the Communist Party undermined the strike more effectively than if its members had openly crossed the picket-line.

The strike had not been on more than a few day when the Liaison Committee, together with the executive of the lightermen’s union, met the London executive committee of the NASD and demanded they call the strike off. The pressure which they continued till the end of the strike on the London leadership of the NASD was supplemented by the Daily Worker whose reports played down the numbers on strike and the possibility of support in other ports. This paper continually gave the impression that the strike was about to be called off.
A fortnight after the strike began the London executive of the ‘blue union’ pushed the Liaison Committee’s recommendation through at a conference between the executive and delegates from the northern ports. To achieve this the chairman, an officer of the union who had recruited men in the North and who, a year or so later, was to join the TGWU, used both his ordinary vote and a casting vote. The recommendation was carried against the united opposition of the northern representatives. Members of the London executive were not so desperate as to break with the democratic practices of the NASD and they did put their recommendation before the rank and file. Mass meetings in London and the North rejected the proposal. They gave similar treatment to another recommendation for a return to work a fortnight later.

But the damage was being done. However near the employers came to giving way in face of the determination of the rank and file, they still held back in the hope that the opponents of the strike inside the trade union movement would succeed in their efforts to break it. The national delegate conference was forced to spend hour after hour, day after day, discussing formulas for capitulation, when a vigorous campaign to win support for recognition of the ‘blue union’ had every chance of a quick and overwhelming victory. The closing stage was reached when the delegate conference agreed to go before a disputes commission set up by the TUC. At the disputes commission the NASD was represented by the chairman and two national officers—both of whom were leaving their jobs at the end of the month.(5)

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THE BETRAYAL
Then came the last act, a betrayal of the democratic traditions of the ‘blue union’, of the loyalty of the men in the North and of the London rank and file.

The TUC disputes commission demanded the expulsion of the northern men from the ‘blue union’. In return the suspension of the NASD from the TUC was to be lifted. Excluding northern representatives from the vote, the London executive met on Friday, July 1, and carried a resolution moved by a Communist Party member to accept the demand and to instruct the strikers to return to work the following Monday. This action was directly contrary to the procedure which had always been operated in the union. Previously rank-and-file meetings had always had the final word in beginning or ending strike action. The following weekend meetings called by northern leaders were held in the northern ports. Rank-and-file leaders called a meeting in London.

Despite the defections amongst the London leaders morale remained high in the ranks. But the northern committeemen had to take into consideration the length of the strike, the necessity to preserve forces and the added strain, after the repudiation of the North by London executive of the TGWU members who had supported the strike. They therefore recommended return to work—but as members of the ‘blue’. Six thousand dockers meeting in Liverpool reiterated their intention of remaining in the ‘blue union’. They announced that, while returning to work, they would carry on the fight for recognition as a united force with their brothers in other ports and would continue this struggle against ‘all those who opposed and under mined our fight for recognition’. In Birkenhead a great number voted against a return to work. A picture of the spirit of the men in the North was given by the Manchester Guardian reporter who attended the Manchester meeting:

As in Merseyside (and, it seems, in accordance with the new general policy of the ‘Blue Union’ in the Northern ports) the retreat was made in good order and the language was as firm and militant as it has been at any time in the last six weeks. No one, from the cheerfulness of the crowd, would have guessed that it was the end of a six week strike.

In Hull the strikers marched back to work, as they had marched through the city several times while the strike was on.
In the following week the secretaries of ‘blue union’ branches in the North received letters from the acting general secretary of the NASD coldly informing them that they were excluded from the union as from July 6. It was in this way that a majority of the union’s members were expelled.

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NOT DEFEATED
But the NASD leaders who carried through this action, and the TUC leaders who sponsored it, were to find that the account was not closed. As always, they underrated working class tenacity. ‘Oh yes, I’m certain the men will return to the Transport Workers’ Union.’ With these words, spoken in a graciously patronizing manner, a representative of the General Council of the TUC dismissed a warning of a northern leader. This official and his colleagues spoke too soon. But prudence was never a virtue of trade union officials, who appear congenitally unable and unwilling to understand the feelings of the men on the waterfront. The men did not return to the TGWU. In fact, absolutely amazingly—or so it must have appeared to Transport House and Smith Square—the ‘blue union’ organization in the North refused to be killed. The northern men continued to pay their subscriptions to maintain their branches, their committees and their full-time officials. They kept up the offices in Liverpool. Birkenhead, Manchester and Hull, which remain there today. They decided to fight their expulsion in the courts.

The six-weeks recognition strike demanded great sacrifices from these dockers, Since its betrayal they have fought a war of attrition which has imposed even greater strains on them. Legal proceedings dragged on for nine months. On the docks ‘blue union’ militants were disciplined for the smallest offence. Recognition was still denied. But the movement remained and was capable from time to time of showing its teeth. In October 1955 10,000 Merseyside dockers responded to a call for a one-day stoppage and won the reinstatement of two ‘blue union’ members sacked after an allegation that at a bus stop they called another docker a ‘scab’.

In March 1956 their ‘test case’, Spring versus National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers, came before the Liverpool court. The courtroom was crowded with dockers. A few days later judgment was given. Spring was declared wrongfully expelled. The northern men were back in the NASD.

But their fight was stilt not ended and it is not ended yet. Despite the fact that the northern men have established their right to be members of the ‘blue union’, both legally and by their stubborn determination, the TUC and the TGWU leaders still drag out discussions with the NASD On their future. TGWU officials continue their attempts to drive men back into their union. The TGWU leaders propose that the men in the North should retain their NASD cards, but with the TGWU ‘servicing’ them. This farcical proposal has been rejected both by London and northern dockers, for it is obviously the first step to eliminating the ‘blue union’ entirely in the North—and later in London. For while the ‘blue union’ exists at all it attracts dockers in struggle.

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BLUE UNION
Undoubtedly the ‘blue union’ movement in the northern ports was a progressive development. Perhaps the biggest task in the trade union movement today is the reassertion of rank-and-file control. It is foolish to think that this can come about without shake-ups in trade union structure and without explosive movements.
For in the heavily bureaucratized, and often corrupt, unions of Britain today rank-and-file ‘democracy’, like democracy in the capitalist society in which they exist, is often just an expensive farce. Democracy is not simply a question of balloting, resolutions and waiting for enlightenment and a change of heart among the leaders.

If the bureaucratic apparatus ceases to be a servant of the members, if it preserve itself as master over the ranks, to perpetuate itself by a system of ‘appointments’ rather than elections, if it constantly beats down militant workers and groups, then expulsions are inevitable. So, too, struggles in which the workers have to fight against both the employers and the trade union leadership are inevitable. Moreover, given the right circumstances, large groups of trade union members will seek to break out of what has for them become a union ‘prison house’ in which all workers’ initiative, all attempts to express their own ideas on the defence of their interests, remain caged, canalized or simply suppressed.

Trade unions are essentially instruments of the working class. The value of their organizational structure can be measured only in relation to how that structure serves the interests of the working class. Of course no serious trade union militant will, lightly, propose a break with even the most bureaucratic workers’ organization. He will seriously consider the worker’s traditional loyalty to his union and the extreme difficulties of setting up new trade union organizations. But the mass walk-out of the ‘blue union’ cannot be regarded as in any sense artificial. It corresponded to long-acting processes deep within the TGWU. In 1954-55 these long-active forces burst out, an explosion of working-class struggle parallel to the explosion of the Hungarian workers against ‘their’ bureaucracy.

The fight for the ‘blue’ will be recognized by Labour historians as one of the most important developments in post-war trade union history. Many thousands of dockers have remained steadfast, with the aim of building a militant portworkers’ union, despite attacks and continuing pressure from inside and outside the Labour movement. Their spirit will yet win recognition and will yet create in the ‘blue union’ that national militant democratic union which they desire. In this they will provide many more important lessons for the working class on how to defeat parasitic Labour bureaucracies which have fastened themselves upon the world Labour movement.

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