The Box - Marc Levinson [112]
Numerous government commissions had studied ways to make the ports more efficient. An inquiry in 1966 had called for a reduction in the number of stevedore companies, in the expectation that the survivors would be larger, more professional, and better able to finance equipment for efficient cargo handling. In return, the government promised that automation would not lead to redundancies among dockers. Given time, perhaps a deal could have been struck: on both coasts of the United States, the union agreements that opened the way for containerization had taken half a decade to arrange. No time was available in Britain, because technological change was forcing its way onto the docks. In March 1966, United States Lines carried the first large containers, along with other freight, on a voyage from New York to London. The following month, Sea-Land’s Fairland steamed across the North Atlantic to Rotterdam, Bremen, and the Scottish port of Grangemouth, carrying only containers. With barely a year’s notice, Rotterdam and Bremen had lengthened docks, deepened channels, and begun installing container cranes. London had not—and Fairland did not bother to call.26
London’s formidable docks, it was obvious, were not well suited for container shipping. The docks were grouped in sheltered enclosures off the Thames that were difficult even for conventional ships to navigate; large vessels had to unload into lighters nearer the mouth of the river. Labor issues aside, transferring huge cargo containers from oceangoing ships to lighters made no economic sense, and the prospect of hundreds of lorries hauling 40-foot loads through the narrow streets of East London was a nightmare. Liverpool’s aging docks had similarly few attractions for container operators. The British Transport Docks Board, the government’s oversight agency, turned to consultants McKinsey & Company for advice. McKinsey predicted that container shipping would quickly consolidate around a few companies using gigantic ships carrying standardized containers. Ports, it said, would need to be very large to gain economies of scale in transferring containers between ships, trains, and trucks at high speed. Containerization could cut Britain’s ocean freight bill in half, McKinsey found—but only if a single huge port were to handle all cargo to and from North America and then use unit trains to link the port to other parts of the United Kingdom. A simultaneous study by consultant Arthur D. Little predicted that in 1970, ships would carry the equivalent of 1,800 20-foot containers each week from America to Britain, and 1,580 from Britain to America. Every aspect of these findings represented a threat to the power of the Transport and General Workers Union: there would be fewer ships, fewer ports, and fewer workers at each port. An important part of traditional dock work, the loading and unloading of cargo, would move to warehouses miles inland, where dockers surely would not be employed.27
The British Transport Docks Board and local port agencies agreed on major investments that would total £200 million ($550 million at the 1967 exchange rate) between 1965 and 1969. The largest was the Port of London Authority’s £30 million ($83 million) container complex at Tilbury, a longtime port twenty miles down the Thames. Away from the traffic congestion of central London, and with populous southeast England at its doorstep, Tilbury had the potential to become Europe’s premier containerport, or so the government hoped. There were to be five deepwater berths for containerships, each with