Tales of London's Docklands by Henry T Bradford

stone. He would often joke that when he weighed himself on a set of talking scales they would say to him, ‘Don’t play about. One of you get off, or one at the time please.’
    These men were the dockers tug-of-war team – seven men plus one reserve and Big Dave, who was the team’s anchor man.
    The Tilbury Dockers’ Social Club always entered teams in sporting events on Regatta Day at Gravesend promenade. The tug-of-war team practised anywhere on anything that was considered immovable, pulling with their combined weight and strength in order to achieve unity of purpose, both physically and mentally.
    There were also dockers’ rowing crews who trained on the river off Gravesend in whalers. Whalers, for the benefit of the uninitiated, are large, heavy, clinker-built rowing boats of the type that were once used for whale hunting in the southern oceans. Whale hunters worked in similar open boats equipped only with oars and rowlocks, harpoons, boat hooks and long lengths of coiled rope that were used in pursuit of harpooned whales.
    Although it may be difficult for any reader of this tale to believe, or for that matter to accept, dockers’ teams didn’t treat training for entry into sporting events in the Gravesend Regatta as a boozing spree. They operated under a strict code of discipline, both the men in the tug-of-war team and the boat crews. They went all out to win once they arrived on the battlefield (or, as sportsmen prefer to call it, ‘the sporting arena’), and, as has already been explained, they trained hard.
    When the tug-of-war team were in the docks training for Regatta Day, they could often be seen attempting to pull the cast-iron quayside bollards out of the concrete and granite dockside walls. Such training performances would most certainly have engendered in any intrepid stranger the thought that they were watching a party of escaped lunatics, especially as there may have been a ship tied onto the other end of what was, after all, nothing more than a mooring rope or spring.
    Another of the implements the tug-of-war team used in training was an old railway shunting engine that rested on a track behind the Port Authority rolling stock repair sheds; the engine was being slowly dismantled by the authority’s own railway engineers, who were cannibalizing the parts to repair other engines of the docks’ antiquated, clapped-out rolling stock. The tug-of-war team could actually pull that engine along on its track, against its own dead weight, and over the virgin rust that had encrusted the unused railway lines. Believe me, that really did take a combination of weight, great physical strength, brute force and, above all, will-power, qualities the team did not lack. But, as one of their number was heard to remark after a strenuous session under their redoubtable trainer, Eddy L., ‘It’s a good job they’ve not taken the steel tyres off that engine yet, isn’t it?’
    To which another of the team was heard to reply, ‘Haven’t they? I thought they bloody well had!’
    Unfortunately, there seemed to be no other tug-of-war team who trained near the docks against whom they could pit themselves. If there was such a team, they kept firmly to themselves (some people are far more intelligent than one gives them credit for).
    Of course, who other than the redoubtable Eddy L. could have been the self-appointed talent-spotter, selector, trainer and manager of such a team. However much anyone might have wished to criticize Eddy’s motives or methods, it reluctantly had to be admitted (I have to emphasize the ‘reluctantly’ bit because the team’s success did appear to increase Eddy’s head size) he was the best man for the job for three reasons: first, no one else ever offered their services; second, it is doubtful if anyone else in the docks could have done the job; third, and more importantly, he enthused a passion into his men