Now This is a Very True Story. Jimmy Jones
a Ford. The back seat used to lift up and of course whenever I used to go over the coal fields I’d lift up the back seat, fill it up with coal and take it home.
I once had a whole barge load of salmon away. I didn’t actually physically nick it but I put the barge where someone else could. Because rationing hadn’t long ended there was a ready market for pretty much anything that we could get our hands on.
I was a right little thieving bastard to be truthful, but a lot of us were. We were a proper bunch of tea leaves. There was one fella we used to call Batman cos he couldn’t go home without Robbin’. It was common to nick 500 gallons of diesel. I needed to because I had kids around me. It was a way of life. Everyone turned a blind eye to it. I even had a Customs officer take me to one side and ask if there was any chance of me getting him a bottle of Scotch.
I was working on the oil installation, the boats used to come in and we’d unload them. I learnt to drive a crane and, after a little while, I became jetty foreman. Being the foreman was great because I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to. But it meant I was responsible for the jetty.
One day we had a boat coming in called the Good Gulf that needed to have so many hundreds of tonnes of oil unloaded from it in a certain time otherwise it would have settled on the bottom. So we’ve got all the cranes up in the air with all the pipes ready so that as it landed we could bolt it up, the tanks were empty and they could start pumping straight away.
So I’m standing there with a crew of fellas and I could see this Good Gulf coming up, and I said to them, ‘It ain’t half coming up fast.’ All of a sudden it started to turn and I thought, that’s never going to be able to turn in the time that it’s got, so I just turned round and shouted to everybody: ‘Get off the jetty!’
And of course the jetty was 50 or 60 yards long so everybody started to leg it. I stood there until the very last minute and then I scarpered and of course the boat hit, and it ploughed itself into the jetty a good 15 foot. Crunch!
The impact was so great it actually moved the offices which were on shore. Anyway, I was in charge of the jetty and there was this boat stuck 15-foot into it, so when the managing director of Samuel Williams, Mr Carmichael, came huffing and puffing along I was the one he wanted to talk to. He could see the cranes and everything else and it was obviously all completely buggered now. He asked for the foreman. I stepped forward, and Carmichael said, ‘Did you see this?’
‘Yes, I did sir,’ I replied.
‘Well, what did you see?’
‘I saw this big boat coming up the river, guv, and I said to the boys, “He’s coming up too fast,” and when I see him starting to turn I thought he’s never going to be able to swing that boat round ’cos he was coming in at high tide and I told everybody to get off the jetty.’
Carmichael shook his head. ‘And what steps did you take?’ he asked.
‘Big ’uns,’ I replied. ‘And fucking plenty of ’em!’
Well, he didn’t think that was funny at all. I got a reprimand over that, and I was suspended for two days even though the collision had had nothing to do with me and I’d probably saved some lives or at least saved men from injury. But all Carmichael was worried about was that the jetty was out of work. People were replaceable, profits weren’t. And profits were all he cared about.
* * * *
I was always singing in the docks, because we had the tanks there that we kept oil in and if you sang in them when they were empty you had the best echo system that you ever heard. And the other blokes always made me feel good with encouraging words like, ‘He’s only fucking singing again’, ‘What a fuckin’ racket!’ and ‘Put a fuckin’ sock in it, Albert.’
All the time I was working in the docks, I never stopped doing my cabaret act. Every other night I’d be out singing and whistling in different pubs all around the area and the East End, only now I would slip in the odd joke between the songs.
The blokes I worked with were a funny crew. One was called Phil the Pram ’cos his wife was pregnant every year. They were all nice enough guys and we had a great time but they were all married and most of their wives were at work too, and none of them wanted to do Sundays because that was the only day they could have with their missus. So I always used to volunteer to do the Sundays ’cos they were a doddle. On a Sunday you had to load ten, maybe 12 lorries. You’d go in at 8am and you’d be finished by midday. Plus you got double time for working on Sundays. So it was a result. And then I’d have Mondays off ’cos my wife was at home with the kids.
But even though I was doing them all a favour, there were complaints made because I never worked on a Monday so I got dragged in front of Mr Carmichael again and he said, ‘I notice you have quite a lot of Mondays off.’ I said, ‘That’s right, I have sir’, so he said, ‘Is there a reason for it?’ I said ‘Yes, I don’t mind working for double time and having single time off.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked. I said, ‘Well, have a look down the list at all the blokes who are moaning about me, none of them will do Sundays, I’m the only one who will come in on a Sunday, so I work Sundays and have Monday off. But you give me double time for Sundays, so I don’t mind working for double time and having Mondays off.’
He thought about it and he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you, I make you right but I’ve got to be seen to be punishing you, so I’m going to put you on four days suspension with pay, starting from today.’ And he told me to go back to my locker, pack and tell them I had the four days suspension but not to mention that he was paying me.
So I went back to this lobby and I said to the crew, ‘You bastards have just buggered up this job. Because of your moaning and groaning, Carmichael will now go to shift work and he will do a seven day a week shift, and that will bugger you up completely.’ And lo and behold, less than a month later he brought in shifts: 6am-2pm, 2pm-10pm, and nights; which meant that I had to do night work again which inevitably interfered with me going out singing, and I knew that it would be the beginning of the end for me and the docks.
ONE DAY I was working down at Dagenham docks and there was a phone call for me from Bob Wheatley, the publican, offering me a full time job. It was 1960 and I was 22.
Turned out the Royal Standard at Walthamstow were looking for a compère as they’d just sacked the old one, a very good Cockney comic called Charlie Smithers. I wasn’t working that night so Bob invited me along to try out and offered me the job permanently. I decided to try it out for a couple of weeks first.
That first week was fine as I was working the early shift, but the second week I was working 2-10. Obviously I couldn’t be in two places at once, so I had to be a bit crafty. I decided that I’d go to work at 2pm as I was supposed to, but at 7.30 I’d do a runner and drive over to Walthamstow to do the show. Then I’d either come back at 11 or get somebody to clock me off. It was perfect. I was getting away with it, too, but there was one guy on the crew who was very jealous of me. His name was Roy Finch and he’s dead and buried now, the dirty, no-good, grassing bastard. He knew what I was doing and he set out to drop me in it.
Finch wanted to get me the tin tack and he came up with a cunning plan worthy of Blackadder’s mate Baldrick to stab me in the back. He went up to the management looking all concerned and told them that I had gone missing and that he was worried in case his good friend Albert had fallen in the Thames and drowned. It was Oscar-worthy stuff.
That started a panic and the management sent out people to look for me. They were so convinced I was brown bread they were talking about draining the dock to find the corpse. But before they did someone had the bright idea of phoning my Grace indoors on the off-chance that I