Social History In 50 Objects Number 2. - Dockers Brass Tally

 


My Granda Haggerty worked as a docker for a period after the war, so today's object is my dockers brass tally which originally comes from East London.

Yesterday I wrote about Cardinal Manning's involvement in the Temperance movement here in Greenock.

Manning was also instrumental in resolving the London Dock’s strike of 1889; many of the Dockers were Irish, whereas lots of the shipyard workers at Thames Ironworks in East London were Scots mainly from Dundee, while Germans were mostly employed in the Sugar refineries in places like Whitechapel.

Indeed, Cardinal Manning’s sincere empathy for the Irish poor informed his political outlook and his strong support for workers rights and trade unions.

This brass tally of mines is a 'Docks and Inland Waterways Executive' brass tally from 1948 following nationalisation of the Docks by Attlee's post-war Labour Government.

Before the Dock Labour Scheme was created in 1946, bringing with it at least some guarantee of pay, dockers were each given a brass tally, like this one.

Many dockers were still casual labourers up until the late 1970s. They would turned up for work in the morning and employers would hire the men they needed for the day but you needed to be given a brass tally at the gate to get work for the day.

Dockers would gather in the morning at East India docks in Blackwall in East London try and get a brass tally, there are lots of stories of tallys being knocked out of dockers hands or grabbed by other dockers

Getting a tally meant getting work for the day, dockers would often come to bitterly resent the foremen with the power of life and death over casual workers, giving out the brass tallys each morning. We should never return to these days of  casualisation, zero hour contracts and the so-called 'gig economy'. Join a trade union!

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