Communist made at sea and in port: Maritime class relations during the Second World War

Introduction

New Zealander Gordon Harold Andersen, better known as Bill Andersen, joined the Merchant Navy (MN) when he was eighteen. He left New Zealand waters on the captured Finnish sailing ship Pamir in 1942 and then crewed on Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch and British merchant ships for the remainder of the Second World War. In interviews given across his working life and an unfinished autobiography entitled ‘60 years of struggle’, Andersen reflected back on the class relations he discovered at sea and witnessed in port that gave rise to his radicalism. He wrote:

The relentless dislike of the ship owners plus the extreme poverty of nearly all Middle East Arabs made me think a lot. I had heard some references to communists and communism, so I bought some Marxist books in England and spent a lot of time reading them when off watch at sea … The more poverty I witnessed and the more I got involved in union and political matters on board the vessels I sailed on, the more I studied the make up of current society and the class struggle … ¹

In his writing and interviews, Andersen continuously positioned himself within ‘a network of class relations’. ² The coming of age story he tells, and retells, is rarely historically specific. Andersen does not name the merchant ships he crewed on or name the masters or officers he found so oppressive. ³ Andersen describes the conditions of Arab dockworkers and children he witnessed as poor, and interprets this as super-exploitation: imperialism produced hierarchies where indigenous workers and their children were even more oppressed than the white working class; Aden dockworkers and Abadan children do not have names, just places of encounter. ⁴ Andersen understood his own desire to struggle against capitalism as born out of the violent class relations he experienced at sea and in port, and in 1944 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in Newcastle upon Tyne to demonstrate his commitment to this struggle. This article furnishes Andersen’s objective examination of class relations with some historical context, placing class structure and class meaning in conversation, to unpack the experiences that sparked Andersen’s commitment to communism. ⁵

Sailors’ discovery of class relations at sea is not new. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker use the term hydrarchy to explore the dialectic between ‘the organization of the maritime state from above, and the self-organization of sailors from below’ in the eighteenth century. They argue, like Bill Andersen does two centuries later, that ‘[d]iscipline and resistance were … two sides of a dialectic’: the greater the domination of capital (and the harsher the discipline exerted upon ships’ crews and dockworkers), the greater the impetus for workers to recognise discipline as injustice and organise to resist such injustice. ⁶ Moreover, there are many twentieth-century accounts of seafarers becoming radicalised at sea. ⁷ New Zealander Fintan Patrick Walsh ran away to sea during the First World War and jumped ship in the United States where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He returned to New Zealand in 1920, bringing IWW tactics with him into the New Zealand Seamen’s Union (NZSU), and helped form the New Zealand Communist Party. ⁸ Welshman Gerry Evans, who settled in New Zealand in 1964, describes why he became a socialist:

I’d spent ten years on British ships, which were rigid with class. They’d had a stultifying hierarchical system, which even effected [sic] the menu, with officers’ menus, petty officers’ menus, and crew menus. Life in the crew on a British ship would have made Margaret Thatcher a socialist. ⁹

What has received less attention, however, are those seamen who became radicalised during the Second World War. In fact, Tony Lane claims that seamen in the MN were apolitical and unorganised during the war. Drawing on a wealth of documents and oral interviews, Lane argues that the British Ministry of War Transport’s punitive disciplinary regime enacted upon the MN during the Second World War should be, in part, attributed to the seamen themselves ‘who were unable to organise in their own defence’. Lane also faults a compliant National Union of Seamen for this. ¹⁰ He posits that the continuous turnover of crew – ‘casual employment, unemployment and short spells ashore between ships’ – taught seamen very little about ‘conducting a persuasive argument, developing a strategy and planning tactics’. ¹¹ Lane drew this conclusion from his interviews with seafarers which revealed that very few of them knew or thought much about the war; from this, Lane concluded most seamen were apolitical. ¹² There were brief moments of solidarity over specific issues, he opined, which fizzled out when the issue was lost.

Andersen’s account of the war leads me to contest Lane’s findings. I would suggest that seafarers’ opinions on the state of the war do not indicate how politicised they were. Because of the secrecy of wartime shipping routes, radio silence and night-time blackouts, the merchant seamen did not often know where their own ship was going, let alone the status of the war. ¹³ Rather, the extent to which seafarers interpreted and handled the conditions they experienced on board ship and in port, under the Ministry of War Transport’s regulations, should be the test of their politicisation. And while crews were constantly changing, the way class relations were enforced on board ship, in pool committees, by military police, courts and prisons during the war, did not. What, then, did it mean to become ‘politicised’ at sea?

Because most historical sources have been written or transcribed by those policing wartime regulations at sea, the solidarity that underpinned a representative challenge to shipboard conditions often went unrecorded. This article draws primarily on seafarers’ accounts to produce a history from below. Bill Andersen’s history is evidenced by two letters he wrote to his sister Dorothy (Doll) McElwain during the war, as well as the interviews and autobiography referred to earlier. Andersen’s letters are candid, historically specific accounts of his experience. Here Andersen’s Marxist-Leninist autobiographical account has been juxtaposed against fifteen oral histories of other New Zealand merchant seamen, edited by New Zealand historian Neill Atkinson. None of these seamen admitted taking a Marxist left-turn, but they certainly experienced harsh conditions on board ship and the internationalism of ship and port life.

In what follows it is argued that individual actions and individual punishments can be read as signifiers of worker solidarity and demonstrate class understandings of ‘us’ and ‘them’, despite the fact that such actions did not often change shipboard conditions. Seafarers were under enormous patriotic pressure to put up with poor and unsafe shipboard conditions for the greater good of the war effort, but they did resist, despite a lack of support from union headquarters. Andersen’s description of a union official selling him out at Immingham docks in 1945 is in keeping with Lane’s description of National Union of Seamen (NUS) officials as ‘compliant’ during the Second World War. ¹⁴ I suggest Andersen was open to class consciousness due to his family background, experiences on New Zealand coastal vessels and as a cadet on the Pamir in 1942. The remainder of the article traces Andersen’s realisation of class relations at sea, in port at Aden, Abadan and Algiers, and his efforts to resist class exploitation aboard ship that led to his imprisonment, his commitment to communism and time on ‘the pool’ in Newcastle.

A seafaring family

Gordon Harold Andersen was born in 1924. He was the youngest child of Danish sea captain Hans Andersen and New Zealand-born Minnie Boneham. ¹⁵ Andersen credits his parents for his initial political thinking: ‘I inherited my mother’s feeling for the underpriviledged and my father’s anti-authority stance’. ¹⁶ The latter was evidenced in Andersen’s early work experiences. He lied about his age to join the army in 1940 but did not last long; he found the parade ground drill intolerable and went AWOL. ¹⁷ Next, he signed on as an apprentice at Mason Brothers’ engineering works, but gave this up to work on scows before becoming a fireman on the steam paddle tug PS Lyttelton in 1941. ¹⁸ It was here that Andersen became very active in the union. Despite his tender age of seventeen, he was elected secretary of the Kauri Timber Company Employees’ Union, and the crew gained better conditions in their collective agreement that year. ¹⁹ Andersen’s commitment to trade unionism may have blossomed in opposition to his father’s views on such matters. Andersen described his father as ‘a strange mixture of political conservatism and anti-authoritarianism’. ²⁰ Hans left his home in Esbjerg, Denmark and began working as a deckhand on British ships in 1902. In a letter to his parents, Hans described avoiding strike activities in Grimsby by moving to London to find work before the strike began. ²¹ In 1905, Hans jumped ship in Auckland and worked for the Union Steamship Company until he became a Master Mariner in 1912. He was master of the PS Lyttelton for many years, including during 1932 when the tug was declared black for refusing to pay union wages. ²²

Minnie Andersen died from an asthma attack in November 1941 and Andersen’s sense of home died with her. He reflected:

The war meant I lost my home. I lost my mother at the beginning of the war, my sister [Doll] went into the Air Force, my father fought with the Americans and I floated round from place to place. That sort of life was frowned upon in those days. And you have to be independent to survive as a seaman. You have to learn to fight. ²³

Hans was commanding ships for the United States Navy in the Pacific, Andersen’s brother Roy was away in the New Zealand Air Force and his brother Jack was with the New Zealand Armed Forces in the Middle East. In 1942, effectively homeless, and by then a member of the New Zealand Federated Seamen’s Union, Andersen signed on as a cadet with the four-masted barque Pamir. ²⁴

The Pamir had been seized by New Zealand authorities as spoils of war in 1941 (Finland was regarded as ‘territory in enemy occupation’) and Andersen was part of the first youthful New Zealand crew. ²⁵ Andersen wrote to his sister Doll from Kings Wharf in Wellington, describing his initial experiences on board. First he explained that they would not be leaving for another ten days because no able seamen would take a job with the Pamir. Andersen identified possible reasons for this: ‘The 1^st Mate is not all there and does his block at the least little thing’. ²⁶ ‘Living conditions are not too good at present’, he told his sister. However, he was enthusiastic about living with the ‘four Finns and a Dane’ – Lars Dalstrom, Ake Liewendahl, Karl Nystrom, Holger Stenlund and Svend Andersen – who were retained from the ship’s original crew for their experience and skills in sailing the ship. ²⁷ Bill Andersen voiced a strong desire to learn to speak Swedish with them and admired their sea craft. He wrote later: ‘The four Finns and the one Dane on board really carried us because they were … experienced “square rigged” men … I saw the ship’s carpenter (a Finn) splice wire with his bare hands’. ²⁸

Andersen’s accounts reveal a seafarer’s university – life aboard ship educated seafarers about diverse cultures as well as shipboard organisational hierarchy. ²⁹ As Diane Kirkby has found in her history of the Seamen’s Union of Australia, seafaring made seafarers internationalist in outlook. Fo’c’sle living quarters on board were ‘like being in the United Nations because you had seafarers of all nationalities, of all cultures, different religions’. ³⁰ Given his ancestry, it is easy to understand why Bill Andersen enjoyed the company of the original Pamir crew, but it is still curious that he wholeheartedly supported their plan to hold up the ship on various conditions; given Finland’s war status, this action would have been interpreted as pro-fascist. In 1995 Andersen recalled that Fintan Patrick Walsh, president of the New Zealand Seamen’s Union (NZSU), came down to the Pamir and instructed the crew to ‘go to sea’. ³¹ Walsh had risen to power in the NZSU as a Marxist militant in the 1920s, but over time became a moderate, pledging himself to industrial harmony to support the fortunes of the first Labour government. Walsh was party to New Zealand’s emergency wartime legislation which prohibited strikes and lockouts and he reported seamen for military service if they deserted ship. ³²

Reflecting later on his first voyage on the Pamir to San Francisco, delivering wool and tallow, Andersen described the journey as ‘hard’. ³³ The Pamir left Wellington ‘poorly prepared’ with only a .303 rifle to shoot mines. After a few days at sea the auxiliary refrigerating motor broke down, which meant there was no meat for the crew for the rest of the voyage. He describes working in bare feet, having to complete his tasks at a run and being short of drinking water. Working aloft in bad weather was difficult, dangerous and painful because the canvas was almost too cold to handle, but rum was distributed generously after such a spell. ³⁴ Andersen was hospitalised for two weeks in San Francisco with appendicitis in September 1942. He recalled: ‘I was not welcomed back to the “Pamir” on account of being a “trouble maker” according to the ship’s officers’ and he was ‘shipped back to New Zealand as a passenger’, arriving on 28 August 1942. ³⁵

Andersen had been raised in a seafaring family and his own experiences of sailing the Lyttelton taught him that solidarity amongst the crew brought better conditions. His mother’s death and his family’s commitment to the war effort left him homeless and he made a new home amongst the original crew of the Pamir on its first voyage under the New Zealand flag. His efforts to build solidarity and secure better conditions earnt him the label ‘trouble-maker’ from the Union Steamship Company, and he returned to New Zealand homeless once more. These experiences prepared Andersen for his discovery of class relations at sea.

Class inequality at sea

‘I went deep water on various ships’, Andersen wrote, but British ships were the main subject of his recollections. ³⁶ There were about 3000 merchant seamen working the New Zealand coastal, Tasman and Pacific Island routes but they were ‘dwarfed by tens of thousands of visiting deep-sea sailors’. ³⁷ In 1939, eighty-four per cent of New Zealand’s exports went to the United Kingdom by sea and long-distance shipping routes were largely controlled by four British shipping Companies – the Conference Lines – Shaw Savill & Albion, the New Zealand Shipping Company (and affiliated Federal Line), the Port Line and the Blue Star Line. ³⁸ Crew were employed in Britain, but replacements were often required in New Zealand when sickness or desertion left a cargo-liner short handed. Andersen was one of at least a thousand New Zealanders who crewed deep-sea ships during the Second World War. ³⁹ Britain’s shipping industry was controlled by the government and naval authorities during the war. Expedient measures such as war-risk bonuses, continuity of employment (seafarers were no longer automatically laid off at the end of a voyage) and paid leave improved seafarers’ pay and terms of engagement. American, New Zealand, Panamanian and Norwegian ships still paid better than British, however, under labour regimes which remained much the same as they had before the war. As Atkinson writes: ‘this story is as much about continuity – the persistence of pre-war patterns of work and behaviour – as it is about the dramatic changes brought by war’. ⁴⁰

Wartime attacks at sea and in port made seafaring extremely hazardous. Almost 4800 Allied and neutral merchant vessels were casualties of the war, killing about 60,000 seafarers, and more than half of those vessels were flying the red ensign of the British Empire and Dominions. ⁴¹ Andersen recalled:

It was a dangerous occupation, working the North Atlantic in wartime. There was always a constant tension that you might get whacked or torpedoed (which I didn’t). There was a fear that there was someone around, you didn’t know where they were, or when they might try. ⁴²

To replace casualties, the British Essential Work Order was brought into effect in 1941, and 11,000 British seafarers were directed back to sea. ⁴³ Seafaring was also an essential service in New Zealand. The MN resourced the war and they were put under enormous pressure to work loyally without complaint, despite poor conditions, labour shortages and fast turnaround times in port. ⁴⁴

Before the Second World War, seamen were fined (docked pay) for absences without leave, desertion, drunkenness, insubordination, assaults and refusal of lawful commands. Discipline was meted out by shipmasters under the 1894 British Merchant Shipping Act. Offences were recorded in the shipmaster’s official logs and if deemed serious enough, used as evidence in magistrates’ courts in the United Kingdom or empire ports to impose heavier fines or imprisonment of up to three months. Naval courts could be summoned in foreign ports if the need arose and British seamen were imprisoned in foreign jails. ⁴⁵

The scope of these powers was extended by Defence Regulations under the British Emergency Powers Act 1940, which enabled the Ministry of War Transport to prosecute seafarers over and above shipmasters, and officers of the armed forces policed these powers in foreign countries. Local tribunals were also set up in 1941 in the United Kingdom, made up of employers, trade union officials and an independent chair to mediate shipboard complaints. They were known as ‘pool committees’. Pool committees were supposed to reduce the number of cases going to court, but they did not. The records of naval courts show that only three were convened between 1930 and 1939, while 505 were held between 1939 and 1944, 415 of these between May 1943 and June 1944. The overwhelming majority of the courts were held in the Mediterranean-Middle Eastern theatre; Andersen’s naval court hearing was in Algiers in 1944. ⁴⁶ The cases most frequently heard were absences without leave, desertion and refusals to obey lawful orders. No formal pool system operated in New Zealand, but Andersen certainly took advantage of Merchant Navy Reserve Pools in England, deserting and ‘going on the pool’ rather than putting up with poor shipboard conditions in 1945.

Shipboard hierarchies were demarcated by officers’ absolute authority aboard ship and the differences in quantity and quality of food and accommodation between officers and crew. ⁴⁷ Atkinson writes:

Living conditions at sea varied enormously with the size, age and trade of the ship, and the status of officers and crew. The worst accommodation was in old British liners and tramp steamers – seamen were in tiered bunks in damp and dark communal fo’c’cles, sometimes on straw mattresses. ⁴⁸

Accommodation on Norwegian ships could be just as bad. Thor Larsen, the son of a Norwegian father and a New Zealand-born mother, in 1944 made a ‘pierhead jump’ ⁴⁹ onto the SS Carola, a Norwegian ship flying the Panamanian flag. He slept in the open fo’c’sle up in the bow: ‘Christ, you can imagine it, with 14 or 16 men in there, all farting and belching and snoring and swearing. Terrible, bloody terrible! All bunks too high. Port side was for the seamen, starboard side for the firemen’. ⁵⁰ Lane writes of conditions during the war: ‘In the miniature society of the ship, where the different social classes lived cheek by jowl, it seemed that the physical separations of dining arrangements needed to be emphasised by varying the quality and quantity of the food’. ⁵¹ British vessels had the worst reputation for food with some still measuring out provisions on scales, and the quality of food and preparation varied wildly. Wellington-born John Montgomery, a cleaner on the British ship Uruguay, complained about the lack of food: he only received two meals a day. ⁵² He explained that under Board of Trade regulations you had to make a tin of condensed milk last two weeks. The crew were not allowed to have meat unless they had offal, so the crew were given a big chunk of old ox liver and a small strip of bacon. Eggs were available only twice a week. ⁵³ In 1942 Les Watson, from Dunedin, signed on as steward to an old coal-burner, the Shaw Savill & Albion Raranga. Raranga was called a ‘blood ship’ because conditions were so bad, no-one stayed on board for more than one trip and this was the reason Watson got his job. ⁵⁴ As a steward, Watson got better food than the crew, but he described the results of the poor food: ‘when the firemen and trimmers used to come out after their watch they looked like skeleton wrecks. They were just bones. The conditions were shocking, but they survived’. ⁵⁵

Andersen described his experiences as an ordinary and then able seamen on board British ships as an education in class relations: ‘When the Chief Steward on a British ship weighed up your ration of tea and sugar on his scales, and gave you two tins of condensed milk every twenty-one days you knew what mean bastards you worked for’. ⁵⁶ He recalled ‘vicious swine of ship-owners who would starve people’. ⁵⁷ While Andersen does not furnish historical specifics, Watson and Montgomery do, and these support Andersen’s account. For Watson, it was about surviving terrible conditions aboard ship during the war; for Montgomery and Andersen, it incited their anger and desire to resist. Andersen’s epiphany came when he docked in Aden for the first time.

Poverty in Port Aden and Port Abadan

In 1969, journalist Tony Reid reported on Andersen’s ‘coming of age moment’:

After serving on all sorts of ships from all sorts of countries … Bill Andersen sailed into Aden and experienced the great catharsis, the great turning point of his life. ‘We were travelling on a coal-burning ship,’ he said. ‘Young boys on the waterfront were working 72 hours a week building tiers of huge sacks of coal. They were paid £2/10/- for that. I was so moved … so shocked … I gave them nearly all my clothes. I had to give them something. I was repulsed and angry. And in the middle of my rage the truth stared me in the face. In those days I was inexperienced and young – but I knew that any system which could allow this sort of inhumane exploitation must be an intolerable system’. ⁵⁸

For Andersen, these conditions were the products of British imperialism, but he does not elaborate. Aden, on the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, was colonised by the British in 1839 as coal depot. British officials sponsored immigrants from India, both convict and free workers, and, once that labour supply was exhausted, sought Arab workers from the highlands north of Aden. The main work available was coaling steamships and labouring on public works projects. ⁵⁹ Arab brokers, sometimes called Muqqaddams, controlled this process. ⁶⁰ Brokers recruited workers from villages in the Western Aden Protectorate and the Yemen, and sub-contracted them in gangs to dock employers. Employers paid to the broker the wages for each person in the gang. From these wages, the broker deducted the cost of food, accommodation, any loans made, remittances back to the men’s families and any other deductions they saw fit. Economic discontent was rife due to broker practices such as overstating the number of workers in the gang, which forced the gang to work harder and enabled a greater profit for the broker. ⁶¹

In 1920, an oil-bunkering depot was established and visits from oil-burning vessels steadily increased in the 1930s. ‘By the time [the Second World] war broke out, Aden was primarily an oil-bunkering port in a world of mainly oil-fired ships’. ⁶² There was less need for coal heavers, but more work available to build the town’s infrastructure. However, wartime economic controls led to price inflation and workers found it increasingly difficult to survive on their wages. ⁶³ In 1943 there was a terrible drought and people poured into Aden from famine-stricken Yemen, ‘subsist[ing] on the charity of the government and private persons’. ⁶⁴ This is the Aden that Bill Andersen would have witnessed. He did not see it, but rebellion was in the making. By 1948 Adenese labour unrest was so strong that British officials were forced to establish a Labour Office, foster trade unions and make moves to abolish the broker system. ⁶⁵ By that stage Andersen was leading militant actions in New Zealand waters.

Andersen explained that it was witnessing large numbers of impoverished Arab dockworkers who were more exploited than he was, and realising they were subjects of the same oppressive capitalist system, that sparked his class consciousness. Both seafarers and dockworkers had an intimate relationship with global capitalism. For example, Adenese coaling companies, backed by London capital, negotiated with visiting ships to supply labour and goods. ⁶⁶ Andersen’s final voyage as a merchant seaman in 1945–1946, confirmed his ‘intense dislike for the oil barons’ who exploited Arab workers. ⁶⁷ In port at Abadan, Andersen went to a company hospital to have his eyes examined. He described what he saw:

The strain of being a helmsman, continually looking into a binnacle (during blackout) with a weak orange light, had taken a toll. When I got into the doctor’s chair he asked me if I would wait in the chair while he directed a line of patients to various departments and I readily agreed. Then I saw a long line of poverty, bitter poverty, and the resultant diseases. Many children had trachoma with their eyes like running sores, malnourished, ill-clad and very distressed. I was very angry at seeing the physical results of the oil globals[’] imperialist activities at such a close distance. Here I was on a British ship taking away about 14,000 tons of petroleum product worth a huge sum on the world market and leaving the real owners terribly poor and suffering. Everything said by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin clicked with that experience. ⁶⁸

Witnessing human suffering, especially of those young in age, led Andersen to seek an analysis of what caused such suffering and how it could be eradicated. He wrote about how he and other seamen witnessed ‘how the so-called developed countries (the imperialist countries like the US, Great Britain, France and Portugal etc.) have exploited, robbed and viciously treated the indigenous peoples of many lands’. ⁶⁹

In 1944, Andersen spent several weeks in Algiers waiting for a ship. The French colonial administration managed civil society alongside British and American military administrations with overlapping jurisdictions in Algiers. Andersen recalled that he became friends with a left-wing British seaman who had worked for British intelligence in France in the early part of the war. ‘Jack’ would translate what the Algiers locals were saying about them to Bill, to demonstrate how much the British were disliked. ⁷⁰ Despite this, Andersen reported, ‘I enjoyed my stay in Algiers, got into some “scrapes” with some authorities there as I did in various ports in the Middle East, particularly with the US Military Police’. ⁷¹ On one occasion when he got locked up in a local Algiers jail for the night for brawling in a local hotel, his friend ‘Jack’ arranged to get himself arrested in solidarity and brought his guitar. ⁷² Andersen reflected:

No doubt as a cheeky young seaman in my late teens and early twenties I was the architect of my own clashes with authorities, but it taught me about the nature of the state forces from another angle, and how unjust the justice system really was. ⁷³

Lane describes the poor morale of seafarers in Algiers during the war. Invasions of North Africa, Sicily and the Italian mainland made Algiers the central and major source of supply between 1942 and 1944, and ship congestion was ‘staggering’. ⁷⁴ Long waits in port, with inadequate facilities, poor administration and a shortage of food, produced discontented sailors. Patrick Fyrth, second mate of the Harbour, described how food shortages, ‘the hostility of the Arabs, the black market, the locusts which ate the harvest and the bubonic plague in Algiers’ almost broke the morale of the merchant navy. ⁷⁵ Seamen got drunk, into fights, deserted ship and attacked civilians and their property. The authorities, rather than attending to seamen’s welfare, put them in jail for trivial offences. ⁷⁶ Lane writes:

In Algiers … it must have seemed as if the milieu of anarchic license which typified the sailortown quarters of the worlds’ ports, but was always understood to be confined to them, had absorbed the whole society into its ambience. ⁷⁷

Andersen did not describe going hungry or the anarchic conditions in Algiers, but did recall becoming ‘very friendly with the Arabs. Almost without exception they responded to my friendly attitude to them, even offering to loan me money at times’. ⁷⁸ Possibly Andersen’s clashes with military police gained him some local respect or, perhaps more likely, Arab brokers were simply inviting him in to their brokerage networks. Diane Kirkby found that because seafarers docked in the poorest parts of town, they made contact with working people from all over the world and compared conditions of work; they witnessed huge disparities in wealth. For some, this shared internationalism developed into socialist principles. ⁷⁹ This was certainly the case for Andersen and he documented his efforts to resist.

Discipline and class struggle

The way wartime regulations were enforced aboard ship and in naval courts also encouraged Andersen’s radicalism. Strikes were outlawed during the war and condemned by the National Union of Seamen as undermining the war effort (as they were in New Zealand), but they did occur. The best known were organised by Indian, Chinese, African and Arab seamen, who were paid a fraction of European wages, discriminated against in terms of where they were employed on ships – as firemen, cooks and stewards on coal-carrying ships – and excluded from the NUS. ⁸⁰ Indian seafarers spearheaded a wave of simultaneous wildcat strikes across the globe from 1939 to 1940, and doubled their wages. ⁸¹ Between 1940 and 1941, Chinese seamen went on strike or deserted en masse to assert their opposition to lesser pay, the lack of war-risk bonuses and shipboard discrimination. ⁸² As a result, in 1941, Chinese seamen gained a fourfold wage increase. ⁸³ Lane offers one example of Arab firemen instituting a one-day strike to protest against inadequate food on the Glenpark and Marika Sherwood has documented strikes by African seamen in the early years of the war. ⁸⁴ In order to argue that European seamen were also capable of organised resistance during the war, we need to broaden the definition of resistance and draw on oral evidence.

In his study of Indian seafarers, Gopalan Balachandran encourages us to chart a range of resistances: flight (desertion), boycotts and mass walk-outs, as well as strike action. ⁸⁵ We should also take into account that the process of grumbling, when seafarers articulated a sense of injustice and discovered a common feeling, may in itself have prepared the ground for more overt action later on. New Zealander’s recollections give access to everyday acts of resistance, individual or collective, that took place on their vessels. Montgomery recalls being on the Uruguay, which brought the first shipload of American troops into Auckland in June 1942. He joined some Australian crewmates to complain to the captain about the lack of food. Montgomery reflected: ‘the captain didn’t even know we were on board, that’s how much he knew’. ⁸⁶ Retribution for their complaints was swift: they were all dismissed once they docked in Auckland. Another collective action was thwarted on the Ruahine in 1943, as Montgomery remembered:

We had a bit of a dispute with the second engineer there once, and he just turned around to these jokers and said, ‘Are you going to turn to?’ They couldn’t do anything, because their wives were depending on their money. When we got into Melbourne the engineers said, ‘Back-ends and tubes in the morning.’ Crikey dick, we’ve got the fires going flat out. Cleaning backends and tubes was a ‘job-and-finish’, because it was that blimin’ dirty. And we still had steam on, it was as hot as anything, and the fires still had sparks in them. ‘Crikey, we’re not going to do that, are we?’ ‘Oh yeah, what can you do, Kiwi?’ ⁸⁷

These recollections demonstrate that collective actions occurred but they brought about dismissals or punishments on the job, rather than resolution of the underlying issues. As a result, seamen acted individually to bring about better pay and conditions. Neill Atkinson suggests the great number of seafarers deserting from British ships – over 3000 were reported between 1942 and 1943 – should be read as a sign of industrial conflict. ⁸⁸ North America, Australia and New Zealand were the most popular places to jump ship and often it was to ship out with American, Norwegian or Panamanian vessels where the wages and working conditions were so much better. ⁸⁹ As part of their repertoire of protest, Chinese seafarers deserted at US ports in order to gain higher wages. ⁹⁰ Montgomery spent two weeks in Mt Crawford prison for desertion after he went to visit his family in Auckland without permission. ⁹¹ He found the class distinction on British ships so repellent that he joined an American ship in Auckland, where the pay was better and he was not treated as such a social inferior. ⁹²

Andersen described how repression fed his desire to resist:

I was late back one night from ashore and when I challenged the standover bosun to fight I got ‘logged’ – i.e. fined so many days pay. Repression does not itself cause revolt and revolution, but if you don’t accept injustice it helps you to react when you are faced with the British ship owners’ organised repression. ⁹³

Andersen provides evidence that seamen acted as delegates or shop stewards during war to ‘negotiate’ disputes. He wrote:

We … adopted some aggressive tactics in industrial disputes [on board ship] … This attitude also included a conflict with two ships officers regarding their refusal to pay us some wages in advance when we were in a Dutch ship (in British convoys) in Bizerta (north Africa) in the Mediterranean in 1944. The refusal of a sub (a part payment of wages) led to a physical situation on board, (I was a ship’s delegate) and that led to my being arrested by British Military Police for allegedly assaulting two ship’s officers, and then being tried by a British Army Court in Algiers. ⁹⁴

It may seem surprising that Andersen described himself as a ship’s delegate given that it took until 1962 for the NUS to agree to shipboard representation. ⁹⁵ However, delegates operated on New Zealand coastal vessels and Andersen may have been influenced by the Seamen’s Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain. ⁹⁶ Communists had been active inside the NUS since the 1920s, assisting in the formation of rank-and-file ‘vigilance committees’ in most major ports to democratise the union and challenge its autocratic leadership. ⁹⁷ Out of these efforts emerged the Seamen’s Minority Movement (SMM) in 1924, led by communist George Hardy. By 1932, the SMM had one thousand members and black activists such as Barbadian seafarer Chris Braithwaite brought together African, Arab and Asian seamen to establish the Colonial Seamen’s Association (CSA) in 1935. ⁹⁸ The CSA sought to bring all black workers into the NUS, despite its racism, to defeat ship owners’ and governments’ divide and rule tactics. ⁹⁹ British seamen’s rank-and-file committees, descendants of the SMM, re-emerged at the end of the Second World War, and may have influenced Andersen in his militant efforts to improve shipboard conditions. ¹⁰⁰

Andersen was held individually responsible for the collective action that took place on board a Dutch ship in British convoy, and Andersen was tried for assault in a British Navy court in Algiers. Like Walsh, Charles Jarman, the acting general secretary of the National Union of Seamen (NUS), took a hard line against ‘defaulters’ – seamen who disobeyed orders – describing them as drunk, incapable or lazy during the war. ¹⁰¹ Complaints about shipboard hardships were given short shrift and Andersen, like other seamen, had no recourse to union funds for legal defence in his naval court trial. ¹⁰² As a result, Andersen spent seven weeks in a British army jail in Surcouf. He recalled:

We were miles out in the desert in large tents surrounded by high barbed wire, but they had a line of concreted small single cells for solitary confinement and the PD 1 [bread and water] and PD 2 [rice added] treatment. Being locked up on your own twenty-four hours a day gives time to think about life, take stock of one’s attitude, do regular exercises and plan about life after you get out. ¹⁰³

Andersen’s experiences of harsh conditions and discipline at sea, and the poverty he witnessed, inspired his anti-capitalism. He discussed his growing idealism with older seamen, read Marx and Lenin off-watch, and, in 1944, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in Newcastle. Andersen explained:

I realised the books were not only a way of interpreting the world but of changing it … I know that sounds a big sort of statement … to think I could play a part in changing the world. But in those days I was angry and dedicated enough to believe it. ¹⁰⁴

Andersen does not reveal any instructions he may have received from the CPGB in 1944, but he describes one further moment when he attempted to act as a delegate as a rank-and-file member of the NUS. Andersen wrote to his sister Doll McElwain on 1 August 1945:

At present I am on the Pool again and I guess you are wondering why I left the last ship. Well I had a dispute with the skipper because he would not supply us with a full set of eating utensils & as a result, packed my bag and walked ashore just as he was about to sail. I have to appear before the Pool Committee here but do not expect more than a fine. Don’t go crook at me because I shall always follow my principles Doll & nobody can stop me. ¹⁰⁵

This dispute took place at Immingham docks when Andersen attempted to gain a knife, fork and spoon for each of the crew, and was defeated when the local Seamen’s Union official did not support the crew’s protest. ¹⁰⁶ In response, Andersen deserted ship and went on the pool in Newcastle, using his time ashore to continue his study of Marx and Lenin. ¹⁰⁷ He continued his membership of the NUS until November 1945, and returned home, via Port Abadan, by this time a member of the New Zealand Seamen’s Union. ¹⁰⁸ Andersen arrived in Auckland on the Omana in May 1946, a card-carrying communist, committed to the class struggle, suspicious of union officials but committed to trade unionism, and with a hatred of racism and imperialism.

Conclusion

Bill Andersen began working in New Zealand coastal shipping in 1941 and he experienced the rewards of shipboard trade unionism. After his mother died, Andersen went to sea on deep-water vessels in 1942. He found international solidarity with the original Finnish and Danish crew of the Pamir and then was removed from the ship by the Union Steamship Company for his efforts to improve conditions aboard. His experiences of going hungry on British ships and the poverty he witnessed in ports such as Aden and Abadan fuelled his anger about unequal power relations, and he read Marx and Lenin in an effort to explain what he was experiencing. The strict discipline and harsh punishment aboard ship incited Andersen’s desire to resist, which led to his actions as a shipboard delegate and his membership of the CPGB in 1944. On both occasions when Andersen represented a collective as a delegate he was punished as an individual, imprisoned in Surcouf in 1944 and fined for desertion in 1945. Andersen’s radicalisation at sea is not an unusual account, except that it occurred during the Second World War, when workers in British allied countries were under huge pressure to put up with poor conditions for the greater good of the war effort against fascism. Andersen’s account provides evidence that some white seafarers were not prepared to put up with harsh treatment and just survive the war, and they were politicised as a result.

Andersen’s situation changed considerably after the war when he returned to the New Zealand coastal trade. He would rarely have sailed with the same person twice on deep-water ships, but in New Zealand it was rare not to know members of the crew. Andersen joined the Communist Party of New Zealand and became close friends with a group of communist seamen, Ronnie Black, Tommy Heptinstall and George Humphries. During the war, most New Zealand seamen had put up with poor working conditions, but this was not the case once it was over. ¹⁰⁹ Andersen led a series of wildcat strikes to gain better wages and conditions from ship owners in the immediate post-war years, much to the chagrin of the NZSU leadership who continued to advocate support of the government’s economic stabilisation policies. Andersen was expelled from the union for unconstitutionally holding up the Kartigi in 1948, which effectively ended his career as a seaman. ¹¹⁰ Instead, Andersen became a powerful union leader of the Northern Drivers’ Union. He remained a communist until his death in 2005.