The summer of 1911 was the hottest in Britain for a generation and it produced the most intense wave of industrial action the country had seen since the 1890s. Seamen, dockers, carters and railway workers struck across British ports from May to August. Southampton was a central node in the disruption, not only because of its scale as a port but because the White Star liner traffic made any stoppage immediately visible and immediately expensive.
The Southampton dockers’ grievances were consistent with those of port workers nationally: casual employment that left men dependent on daily hire with no security, wage rates that had not kept pace with the rising cost of living, and the practical indignity of the call-on system, in which men gathered each morning at the dock gates for the foreman to select the day’s workforce from the crowd. The system gave foremen arbitrary power over individual workers and had the deliberate effect of preventing collective organisation.
Tillett and Mann
Ben Tillett and Tom Mann were the two most prominent figures in the British dock workers’ movement. Tillett had led the London dock strike of 1889, which had established the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers’ Union and was considered the founding moment of New Unionism – the organisation of unskilled workers who had previously been considered unorganisable. Mann had a similar background in organising transport workers and had spent time in Australia and New Zealand where he had observed different models of industrial organisation.
Both men came to Southampton in 1911 to speak at mass meetings and support the organising effort. The Southampton dockers had a union presence but it was weaker than in London or Liverpool, partly because the White Star trade employed more skilled maritime labour – stewards, engineers, deckhands – than the pure cargo-handling work that dominated other ports, and the distinctions between occupational grades complicated solidarity.
The Strike
The Southampton action in June and July 1911 paralysed the port for several weeks. Liners sat in the dock unable to sail because the coal they needed to move could not be loaded. The White Star Line brought in workers from other ports, which extended the dispute rather than resolving it. The local press reported confrontations at the dock gates and the arrival of police reinforcements from London.
The strike ended in August 1911 with a settlement that gave the Southampton dockers modest wage improvements and some regularisation of the call-on system. The gains were partial and were eroded over subsequent years. The more significant outcome was the strengthening of union organisation in Southampton’s docks that persisted through the subsequent decades, providing the organisational base for the interwar labour movement in the city.
Southampton’s radical labour tradition is not as well documented as Liverpool’s or the Welsh coalfields’, but the 1911 strike is a thread that runs through the city’s working-class history. The dockland communities of Northam and Chapel, the same communities that would lose hundreds of men when the Titanic sank the following year, had been organising for better conditions the year before. The two events – the labour action of 1911 and the disaster of 1912 – sit close together in Southampton’s working-class memory.
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