4th July 2012
Chris Ellmers, Group President
Introduction
This text presents an extended version of the talk given to the Docklands History Group meeting on Wednesday 4th July 2012.
Two of my previous DHG talks had explored both early cargo handling processes at the West India Docks and the distinctive soundscape and smells which were to be found there. Coopers who worked at the West India Docks contributed to both elements of those stories.
This talk explored elements relating to the history of London’s dock coopers in the 19th century. Its main focus was on the West India Docks and the London Docks, although it briefly touched on coopering at some of the other docks, coopering in the port before the building of the enclosed docks, as well as London coopering in general. It did not deal with the related field of ships’ coopers, who voyaged as crewmen on many types of vessels.
It was highly appropriate that this talk took place in one of the basements of Warehouse No.1, which was built and completed between the end of 1802 and early 1804. The West India Dock had opened – as London’s first purpose-built enclosed trading dock – to much fanfare and praise, on 27th August 1802. Warehouse No.1 – which was one of the Import Dock’s three initial ‘low warehouses’ – however, was even storing cargoes before the fabric of the building was actually completed. In November 1803, for instance, Warehouse No.1 already housed 200 casks of sugar and 500 casks of rum. The rum casks would have been stored in the basements of the building. So, over 200 years ago, the space that the Museum of London Docklands’ education rooms now occupy would have resounded to the noise of barrels being rolled around, to the shouts of the housing and delivery gangs, and to the sounds of work being undertaken by the coopers.
Before explaining the work of dock coopers, however, it was necessary to understand their work in the wider context of the London coopering trades, and to look briefly at how their work was undertaken before the coming of the enclosed trading docks. The talk would then explore: coopering work at the West India Dock, including labour relations; coopering work at the London Docks; coopering work at the other docks. En route, the audience would be introduced – or perhaps re-introduced – to some interesting dock and coopers’ slang phrases, including ‘sucking the monkey’ and ‘having a waxer.’
It was also noted that the presentation would focus primarily on the economic and social aspects of the dock coopers’ work. It would not be looking in detail at coopers’ training, their tools and equipment, or how casks were made and kept in repair. It was noted, however, that the Museum’s Warehouse of the World Galley has a full size reconstruction of part of a dock cooperage – along with an interpretative and explanatory panel – which he and his team had put together.
London Coopers
To properly understand the one time importance of coopers – including dock coopers – it is essential to understand the historic significance of what are now generically described as barrels and casks. Ken Kilby, the cooper and coopering historian, is in no doubt that what he calls ‘the humble barrel’ has a strong claim to be ‘the greatest invention of all time.’ As Kilby rightly observes:
‘...for thousands of years most commodities were moved, shipped or kept in barrels...Without the barrel most goods would have remained right where they were made, or not have been made at all. Few inventions have stimulated such enormous, widespread demand over so many centuries.’
Writing in 1850, Henry Mayhew reckoned that the total number of coopers working in London – then a far smaller administrative area than today’s metropolis – amounted to around 4,000 persons. He noted that the 1841 census had given a total of 3,489 coopers – 3,089 of whom were adult men; 369 of whom were men and boys under the age of 20; and 22 of whom were females. The females were most probably amongst the 300, or so, employers of coopers – women often assuming the management of businesses on the death of their husbands.
Mayhew – along with numerous other commentators – identified four main groups in the London trade: wet coopers; dry coopers; white coopers; and general coopers:
‘The wet (or tight) cooper makes every kind of vessel used for the reception of liquids – such as wines, spirits, beer, vinegar, oil, and water. The dry cooper, on the other hand, makes the casks used to contain dry goods – such as sugar, bottled wines, cement, linens, biscuits, and for dry packages generally. The white cooper forms tubs, pails, churns, and similar articles; while the block or general cooper, is practised in all of these branches.’
Many of London’s large manufacturing industries – especially vinegar distilleries, breweries and blacking factories – employed significant numbers of coopers to make and repair their casks and barrels. A good number of wet and dry coopers were also engaged at the Royal Naval Victualling Yard, Deptford.
Mayhew, however, also listed other groups of coopers, including ‘runlet’ coopers and those who worked for small masters in what he called the ‘slop’ part of the trade. Runlet – or ‘rundlet’ coopers – made small casks, with capacities between 1-20 gallons. Much of their work was done for London gin distillers, and some made small canteens. Other small casks were made for dry goods, including oysters, colour and flour. By the 19th century, many of the latter were made either by single working coopers, or small masters working in the ‘slop’ part of the trade.
Mayhew also singled out the wet and dry dock coopers for special attention. Before exploring these, however, it should be noted that there were fairly fluid boundaries between the different groups of coopers mentioned above. Whilst dry coopers are unlikely to have found work as wet coopers, the latter would have had no problem – in principle – on working on casks for dry goods. Also, dock coopers – with very few exceptions – would have been men who had served apprenticeships and worked in outside commercial cooperages before entering the docks. Some dock coopers also found the opportunity to do extra work, either by working for commercial cooperages or by working on their own account – usually by making small dry goods casks – after the completion of their working day at the docks. The latter work especially attracted older coopers, of all sorts, who found it kinder on their ageing bodies.
Before moving on, it is worth quoting some of the apposite words which Henry Mayhew wrote in 1850: ‘The dock cooper is the repairer, re-adjuster, or refitter of the full casks unshipped at the dock. This labour requires no little practice and no little skill.’ Mayhew’s observation on the skill of dock coopers presents an interesting counterpoint to some later writers, who saw dock coopers, essentially, as being less skilled than those working at the block and in breweries. The latter are sometimes held up as the most skilled of coopers, although it should be remembered that most of their work – like that of the dock coopers – actually comprised the repair, rather than the making, of casks.
Port Coopers Before the Docks
Before the coming of the new trading docks, at the beginning of the 19th century, port coopers undertook exactly the same range of activities as did their later dock counterparts. There had been the same basic division between wet and dry coopers, with some noticeable sub-divisions within each. By the end of the 18th century, the most populous group of dry coopers were the sugar coopers. The largest group of wet coopers were the wine coopers, who also worked on ports, sherries and brandies. Other important groups of coopers worked on tobacco, rum and oil cargoes. Also working in the port were specialist fruit coopers and anchovy coopers. Some men were also described as ‘oil and anchovy coopers.’ Given, however, that an enormous range of wet and dry cargoes actually came into the port in casks, large and small, some of the specialist coopers must also have handled these. Thus, sugar coopers would most probably have also handled casks of West Indian coffee and cocoa.
Master sugar coopers, master rum coopers and master wine coopers mostly had their premises close to Upper and Lower Thames Street, and around Tower Hill and the Minories. These locations were very convenient for the Legal Quays, town warehouses and sugar bake houses. Many of the master coopers grew to be very wealthy and powerful men. The author of A Book of English Trades (1804), for instance, stated that:
‘The Cooper derives large profit, and great part of his employment, from the West-India trade. The puncheons and hogsheads are used in the voyage out to the Islands, for packing coarse goods, as coarse woollen cloths, coarse hats, &c. Whence those vessels return filled with rum and sugar.’
The ‘coarse goods’ mentioned would have included cheap clothing intended for the 400,000 or so enforced plantation slaves who toiled there, in the harshest of conditions, producing luxury commodities for British consumption. Some successful master coopers purchased shares in London ships. The great Samuel Enderby (1719-1797), who was to become the earliest – and for a considerable while – the largest owner in the South Sea Whale Fishery, had originally been an oil cooper in Lower Thames Street.
To some extent, there was something of a distinction between those sugar, rum, tobacco and wine coopers who worked mainly onboard ship and those who worked on the quays and in the warehouses. Coopers working onboard of ships in the port surveyed casks before discharge – under close supervision of the Revenue – and undertook any vital repairs before cargoes were slung overside into lighters. Those working on the quays assisted Revenue officers and wharfingers with weighing, gauging and sampling. They also undertook running repairs to casks – especially those which might have been damaged during discharge from lighters. Coopers working in the warehouses, assisted with the stowing and breaking-out of cask cargoes, checked and repaired them, and took samples for merchants.
Patrick Colquhoun, writing in 1800, estimated that there were 120 master coopers engaged in London port work, employing 750 journeymen coopers. Before the establishment of the Thames Marine Police, Colquhoun reckoned that 400 of the journeymen coopers were ‘delinquent’, and engaged in everything from minor theft to major plunder of cargoes. Colquhoun suggested that the level of ‘delinquency’ was much greater amongst those coopers working onboard ships. Colquhoun’s figures of London port criminality have been seriously questioned by some modern historians. Not only did Colquhoun deliberately ignore the complexities of the labour market – which had some significant and lawful reliance on perquisites, rather than cash payments, for some areas of work – he also had his own political agenda for criminalising and controlling port labour.
Contemporary court records, however, do not reflect Colquhoun’s grossly exaggerated claims. Also, it is clear that coopers – as well as other ship, wharf and warehouse workers – were actually subject to stop and search by Revenue officers, foremen and wharf constables, long before the creation of the Thames Marine Police in 1798. The ‘rub down’ was as much a part of 18th century portwork as it was of the later enclosed docks.
Such was the powerful position of the leading master sugar coopers and the leading master wine coopers that some of them were included in the list of those eligible to make claims – to the Port of London Compensation Commission – for compensation payments for lost business when their trades were transferred from the Legal Quays to the new enclosed monopoly trading docks.
West India Dock Coopers
From the outset, coopers played an important role in the life of the West India Docks. The simplest way of appreciating this importance is to consider the sheer volume of cargoes that entered the docks, in barrels and casks, annually. Fortunately, very detailed breakdowns of the cargoes imported across the period 1803-1821 have survived. Across that time, a yearly average of 500 ships entered the docks. The average size of these sailing West Indiamen was 302 tons. These 500 ships carried an average yearly total of: 164,268 hogsheads and 15,042 tierces of sugar, along with an unknown number of smaller barrels, which probably totalled in excess of 10,000; 32,073 puncheons and 530 hogsheads of rum; 31,973 casks and 3,823 barrels of coffee (also imported in bags); 1,133 casks of cocoa (also imported in bags); and 43 butts, 1,318 pipes, 470 hogsheads and 114 quarter casks of Madeira wine. Some ginger and pimento were also imported in casks. Out of all of these casked cargoes it was only Madeira wine – which was also carried to London by some East Indiamen and other ships – that was not the product of British West Indian slave plantations.
Their enabling Act of Parliament conferred very wide and comprehensive powers to the West India Dock Company. Not only was it given a valuable 21-year monopoly on the import of all West India cargoes – except tobacco – into the Port of London, but it gained direct responsibility for the employment of all of its labour force. For its ship, quay and warehouse labourers – and for its coopers – this removed merchants, ships husbands, master lumpers, Ticket Porters, Tacklehouse Porters, gangsmen and master coopers from the employment equation. As a result, dockwork became more regimented and controlled. The West India Docks kept regular hours, opening at 8.00 am and closing at 4.00 pm. This was strictly regulated by HM Revenue. Pay and employment were also, initially at least, more regular. The West India Dock Company employed a small nucleus of permanent dock labourers and permanent coopers, paid at set weekly wages. ‘Extra’ labourers and coopers were employed, by the day, whenever the press of ship discharge or delivery demanded it. Thus, wages replaced the old time honoured piece work payments for portwork. Perquisites – including the occasional benefit of cargo sweepings and leakages – which had increasingly become part of portwork payments during the 18th century, were banned in the enclosed docks.
In planning for their new dock, the West India Dock Company reckoned that they would need 240 permanent labourers and 40 permanent coopers to work the North Quay Warehouses and adjoining quayside. In addition, they estimated that 6 lumpers and one ‘superior’ cooper would be needed to ‘work out’, or discharge, each ship. The latter were not regarded as part of the normal permanent establishment. In addition, 6 extra coopers were seen to be needed to repair and help weigh and sample the casks landed from each ship. By June 1804 the North Quay Warehouses gave employment to 175 permanent labourers, 24 foremen and 46 coopers. The labourers were paid 20 shillings a week, the general working coopers 28 shillings and the foremen 31 shillings and 6 pence. The Foremen Coopers would have been paid the same rate as the other dock foremen. At that time, Warehouses Nos. 1 & 2 – then run as one operational unit – had a Foreman Cooper, two ‘Coopers 1st Class’ and two ‘Coopers 2nd Class’ already stationed there.
As we have already noted, however, busy days demanded the employment of lots of ‘Extra’ foremen, labourers and coopers. Sadly, the original Dock Company records which would have enabled detailed employment patterns to have been reconstructed have long been lost. There are, however, some surviving statistics for 1805, when the 30th July was one of the busiest of the 14 recorded summer days. On that day, 2,618 ‘casks’ were landed and delivered by 101 foremen, 1,054 labourers and 155 coopers. The bulk of the enumerated coopers would have been sugar coopers, who were essentially dry coopers, apart from when they worked on casks of molasses. In addition to the sugar coopers, there were the rum coopers, who were wet coopers. Although the records are unclear on the matter, the rum coopers were also most probably responsible for work on the casks of Madeira wine, rather than men who had previously worked as wine coopers in the pre-dock port. As well as these men, who worked at the Sugar Quay or the Rum Quay (the latter opened on the south side of the Import Dock in 1806), some coopers also worked in the Dock Cooperage itself, where they were mostly engaged in the work of repairing and remaking casks. Thus, unlike work at the various operational Warehouse Departments, work in the Cooperage involved more traditional and heavier work, known as being undertaken ‘at the block.’ The Dock Cooperage originally occupied fairly makeshift buildings at the western end of the Import Dock, beyond the Hibbert Gate, the surrounding railinged area and security moat. When the Rennies’ Quadrangle Workshops were constructed, in 1824-1825, they contained a purpose designed and very large ‘Cooperage’ at their centre. Work at the Cooperage was sometimes undertaken on a piecework basis by the men who usually worked there. All permanent and extra coopers worked under Foremen Coopers. Above the Foremen Coopers were two Surveying Coopers, who were responsible to the Head Cooper.
Once berthed alongside the North Quay Warehouses, a West India ship could only break bulk, or discharge, once the cargoes had been inspected for any damage incurred in transit. This work was initially undertaken by the Foreman of the Hold, with the support of a Foreman Cooper where casks were involved. This could be a major challenge, given that the average size 302 ton West Indiaman carried an average of 389 casks of sugar and 65 casks of rum, besides 64 casks of coffee and 1 cask of cocoa. Sugar casks were particularly prone to damage. This was especially true of the larger hogsheads – which might have weighed between 15 cwts and 20 cwts – which formed the ‘ground tier’ at the bottom of the hold. In a single decked ship’s hold, this tier would have borne the weight of the tiers of sugar casks and other cargoes stowed above. Even in a ship with an extra or intermediate deck in the hold, there would still be two tiers of sugar casks above the ground tier. Also, to help maximise stowage space, sugar casks were often ‘screwed down’ in the various West Indian ports. This was done by using giant screw jacks beneath the deck beams. To help facilitate this, the cask hoops were often slackened off to make the casks more pliable during stowing. Sometimes, casks were even sawn down to maximise a tight stow.
In addition, of course, it was also the ground tier sugar casks – on the very bottom of the hold – that were most at risk by being ‘washed-out’ and contaminated by seeping bilge water. All of this meant that the state of the ground tier casks usually necessitated a great deal of additional work by the dock coopers. In 1850, Henry Mayhew noted that:
‘After a stormy voyage, sugar casks, for instance, are landed in all possible shapes. Some have been compared to an old hat which has been subjected to the operation known as ‘bonneting’; they are crushed into irregular flatness. Some are rudely triangular, others are as rudely quadrangular; indeed they present every shape except their original rotundity.’
Mayhew quoted one of his interviewees as describing such casks as ‘“crippled nondescripts.”’ As noted, these casks demanded the greatest attention. Wherever possible, the dock coopers working on the ships would have made them secure enough to have been hoisted out of the hold and landed on the quayside. Where this was not possible the sugar was shovelled onto special boards for discharge. Once on the quayside, the sugar coopers set about repairing the damaged casks by re-adjusting, or renewing, the iron hoops and replacing any damaged staves. The casks would then be ready for weighing – along with the good sugar casks – on the transit shed beam scales, in the presence of a Customs Weigher and Dock Company Cheque Clerk. Wherever sugar needed to be entirely re-packed, the coopers would put it in new or refurbished casks sent over from the Cooperage. Once the casks had been weighed, the coopers removed samples, from their bung holes, with long sampling irons.
From the transit sheds, the casks of sugar were trucked to the warehouses and stowed on account of the shippers and merchants. Sometimes the coopers took further samples for the merchants. When the casks were called for eventual outward delivery, the coopers made sure that the casks were in good condition and the hoops tight.
The rum coopers, at the West India Docks, were wet coopers. Like the sugar coopers, they undertook work on board ship, on the quayside and in the warehouses. Like the sugar coopers, their main work related to the repair and maintenance of casks, albeit ones containing liquid. Usually, rum casks survived the voyages from the West Indies in relatively good order, although some did arrive in a ‘squeezed’ condition. Wherever possible, ships’ captains ensured that rum casks were very carefully stowed and kept separate from casks of sugar. This stowage would have been in the peaks of the holds, on the between decks – if the latter were present – and even on the open top deck.
Similarly to sugar cargoes, a Foreman Rum Cooper checked all rum and Madeira wine casks before their unloading. The foreman would sound out casks for leakages with a ‘flogger’, which was a sort of large flat headed, long handled, mallet. Any seriously leaking casks would have been temporarily repaired and then ‘dipped’ with a specialist wooden measuring rod, to provide a basic gauge of their contents, before coming ashore. Once ashore, the coopers would have decanted any rum or wine found in seriously damaged casks into spare repaired ones from the Cooperage. This process was known as ‘racking.’ Once racked, these rums and wines could be properly gauged for quantity. The rum coopers would also have laid out the sound casks and hammered large wooden wedges – known as ‘Scotches’ – underneath them, to stop them rolling around. They then assisted the gaugers in their work by removing the cask bungs. This was done by skilfully banging the bung stave, at the correct point, with the flogger to make the large wooden bung jump up out of the stave. Gauging was a very skilful process. Before rums were moved across to the Rum Quay, in 1806, they were gauged on the North Quay. After that date, they were still landed at the North Quay, where they were initially dipped, before being lightered over to the Rum Quay, where the full gauging took place. On landing, rum was gauged at least three times. The first gauge was made by the Excise Gaugers, the second by the Customs Gaugers and the third by the Dock Company Gaugers. For the first couple of years of the dock’s life the third gauge had been taken by the City Gauger. After 1806 the merchants were allowed to appoint their own gauger to check on the gauges of the other parties. The Dock Company eventually banned the City Gauger from their docks and never really accepted the Merchants’ Gauger. The Revenue Gaugers and the Dock Company Gauger were often in dispute with each other about both under and over gauging. Within ten years of the dock opening, merchants were complaining that frauds were being carried out at the docks, which short-changed them by a couple of gallons per cask on final outward delivery. Some of these complaints focused on the work of dock and contract coopers who were said to have provided casks with over thick heads and extra thin staves opposite the bung (gauging) stave, etc. Other frequent complaints of merchants were the charges which the Dock Company made for coopering work and for the provision of associated materials.
Once the casks had been gauged, the coopers would have assisted with taking samples for the Excise and merchants. After gauging, the hoops of the casks and barrels were tightened by being driven down by coopers using their heavy driving adzes and driving irons. The casks were then rolled and craned, by dock labourers, into the warehouses for stowage. Whilst in bond, the rum coopers’ main job was to keep constant watch on the casks for leakages. This was done by visual inspection and by sounding the casks with floggers. If casks were in store for any considerable length of time, they would have had their hoops retightened every six months, or so. The driving down of hoops, however, represented a delicate balance between tightening them sufficiently to prevent leaks, but not over tightening them to such an extent that they would have provided an over gauge on any re-dipping through the bung hole. This was one of the possible ways in which illicit rum might be drawn off, fairly unnoticed, by the not too scrupulous. Most rum coopers - and especially the permanent men – however, appear to have been honest workers. Another source of loss which the rum coopers would have looked out for was the unauthorised tapping of casks by other dockworkers. This was done by using gimlets to bore fine holes through the heads or staves of the casks, so as to release the rum, and then to stop the holes with tapered hardwood spills. Dock coopers seem to have been quite good at spotting such ‘plundered’ casks, usually because the culprits made a very poor job of hiding the new spills. This process of pilfering was colloquially known as ‘sucking the monkey’ – a phrase which is supposedly traceable back to Chaucer – or ‘sucking the Admiral’, which has more recent naval antecedents associated with the corpse of Nelson in his cask of brandy.
Between 1802 and 1812, the Dock Cooperage made up all of the repaired casks needed to rack the rum and Madeira wine from badly damaged landed casks. This process was known as ‘cobbling.’ It mostly involved adapting old staves – together with some new ones – along with new and repaired heads and hoops. Once re-coopered, the cobbled casks would have been as good as new. They would have been tested, in the Cooperage, by the age old method of quarter filling them with boiling water and then turning them. From 1812, however, the work of cobbling casks was sent out to three outside firms of contracting coopers. The West India Dock Company provided them with damaged rum casks. In 1814 it was estimated that these contractors were providing the docks with around 5,000-6,000 cobbled casks a year.
After the loss of cobbling work, the management of bonded casks remained the mainstay of the rum coopers work. The West India Dock rum and wine cooper, William Hart, had begun working there in 1803, and became Under Foreman at North Quay Warehouse No. 7, where he worked in the cellars. On the move of the rum and wines over to the Rum Quay, Hart was transferred – in September 1806 – to Warehouse No.1 there. The Napoleonic wars were a period of high shipping volumes and intensive stowage in all of the dock warehouses. Later in his life, Hart reflected that: ‘Here we had much work, having such great importations of wine and rum. One year we had 47,000 casks of rum, besides wine. I had 12,000 under my charge.’
William Hart had an eventful life at the docks: in 1804, he narrowly missed being sacked for refusing to serve in the West India Dock Regiment of militia; in 1810 he was one of the permanent rum coopers who petitioned for parity with the pay advance recently made to sugar coopers; in 1812 he was amongst other foreman rum coopers accused of ‘iniquitous practices’ by a disgruntled recently sacked rum foreman; in 1817 he was temporarily suspended – along with four other foremen – following an outbreak of drinking in the vaults, and the discovery of illicit bottles buried beneath the coopers’ berths; and in 1821, he became the unwitting banker for some of the funds used to support the striking North Quay sugar coopers.
The 1821 coopers strike is too complex an event to cover here. Shortly after the end of the strike, however, the Dock Company established a class of Preferable Labourers and one of Preferable Coopers. These men were given preference over the extra men, and stood a good chance of being promoted to Permanent Labourers and Permanent Coopers when vacancies arose. The Dock Company issued silver work badges to their coopers. The one for preferable rum coopers depicted rum puncheons, whilst those for the preferable sugar coopers bore hogsheads of sugar. Despite the niceties of their badges, however, the level of control and discipline of workers at the West India Docks was the harshest in the port. In 1821 one striking sugar cooper, Thomas Farnsworth, polemically described the conditions at the West India Dock call-on for the extra men ‘a disgrace to the slave-markets in the West Indies.’
Although dock coopers earned less than ‘town coopers’ – working beyond the dock gates – their hours of work were only 8 hours a day, compared to the 12 worked by the former. This provided dock coopers with both the possibility of working overtime in the docks, when extra hours were permitted by the Revenue, or working – as William Hart sometimes did – at outside local cooperages. Interestingly, Henry Mayhew interviewed an Irish cooper who had worked at the West India Docks as an extra cooper for 14 years. Presumably the man worked as a sugar cooper, as he had previously worked in the provision coopering trade in Ireland – which traditionally employed dry coopers. This cooper had his own one man business making oval tubs from home. He did this after his work at the docks, or whenever there was no demand there for extra coopers. On average the man reckoned that he only worked the equivalent of ‘about three months out of twelve’ in the docks – so he would have needed some extra employment.
London Dock Coopers
When the London Dock opened in 1805 it employed even more permanent and extra coopers than the West India Docks. This was due partly to the fact that it had a 21-year port monopoly on the handling of all European wine, port, sherry and brandy, and partly to the fact that a much wider range of other cargoes were also handled. As a result, a huge variety of wet and dry cask cargoes were discharged, worked, warehoused and delivered outwards. By 1850, Mayhew reckoned that there were 50 permanent, 20 first-class and 150 second-class coopers there besides extra men. By that time, however, much of the work relating to discharging and landing casks was undertaken by gangs of 6-7 contract coopers, working on piece work rates, rather than on day rates.
Wine and spirit coopers were the largest and most skilled group of coopers. At the outset, they undertook exactly the same range of tasks as the rum coopers at the West India Docks. Thousands of casks were laid out on the North Quay Gauging Ground – just inside the Dock’s Main Entrance – for inspection, gauging and sampling. In the vaults and sheds, mile upon mile of casks were stowed and managed under the watchful eyes of the foremen and permanent coopers. It was this group that effectively acted as wine vault coopers – undertaking much the same range of functions as did those who worked in the merchants’ town warehouses and vaults around Tower Hill. It was the vault coopers at the London Docks who became known to writers and other visitors through their facilitation of wine tasting. Although this was a strictly regulated affair – with visitors having to be in possession of a legitimate tasting ticket from a merchant – it was sometimes abused with forged tickets being in circulation. These coopers also managed to keep a supply of extra alcohol in their departmental berths which became the supply point of ‘waxers’ for favoured dock labourers, dock officials and even Revenue officers.
In the early 19th century, there were some even more specialised coopers at the London Docks. These could be very well paid. In 1812, for instance, the London Dock Company’s permanent oil coopers received 33 shillings a week, compared to only 18 shillings for their permanent dry coopers. The latter would have included the tobacco coopers, who assisted at the discharge, weighing and sampling in the great Tobacco Warehouses.
Other Dock Coopers
The other main early dock to employ significant numbers of coopers was St. Katharine’s Docks. Here work was something of a mirror of that at the London Docks. Numbers, however, were far fewer. Mayhew reckoned that the dock employed about 20 permanent coopers and 30-40 preferable men, besides the extra coopers. Employment of the extra men, however, was generally better here than elsewhere, and they were issued with numbered tickets – as were the preferable coopers – and employed on rotation to try and distribute the available work fairly.
Interestingly, only St. Katharine’s Dock Company ever appeared to have recruited and trained its own apprentice coopers. These boys worked in the Bonded Wine Department. As elsewhere, the St. Katharine’s dock coopers represented something of a labour aristocracy within the docks. Henry Mayhew remarked that London coopers were intelligent men who could all read. Just to prove the point, perhaps, the ‘Coopers employed in St. Katherine Docks’ were one of the great many groups of artisans – from around the metropolis and other towns – who petitioned Parliament in 1836 for the repeal of stamp duty on newspapers. Their petition was received at the same time as those from the ‘operative watchmakers of Clerkenwell’, the ‘twine spinners of Rotherhithe’, and one of the groups of Bethnal Green silk weavers.
Whatever anyone else might have thought of them, the St. Katharine’s Dock Coopers – like those elsewhere in the port – clearly saw themselves as part of an articulate aristocracy of London labour.
Postscript
As long as barrels and casks continued to be imported into the Port of London, there was work for coopers in both private cooperages and the enclosed docks into the 20th century. Coopering work, however, progressively declined, especially in the postwar period, with the introduction of new types of containers and the move away from handling piece cargoes to handling cargoes in bulk. As docks and berths closed, the old working cooperage areas were generally abandoned – readily providing for the collecting activities of the Museum of London’s Museum in Docklands team. Amongst their rich pickings were equipment and a large number of hand tools bearing the stamps of pre-Port of London Authority (PLA) dock companies. Some of these tools actually bore stamps dating back to the early years of the 19th century. In the 1980s, the PLA, employed only one cooper, John Ardley, who travelled between the West India and Millwall Docks, the Royal Docks and Tilbury Docks depending on the work.
© Chris Ellmers
July 2012 and December 2025
Selected Bibliography
Whilst much of the detail of this talk reflects my own in-depth personal research into the extensive dock company archives, held at the Museum of London Docklands (now the London Museum Docklands), the following printed works have also been of general help and are recommended:
Bob Gilding, The Journeymen Coopers Of East London: Workers’ Control in an Old London Trade, (History Workshop, Pamphlet Number 4, 1971);
Pat Hudson and Lynette Hunter, 'The Autobiography of William Hart, Cooper, 1776–1857: A Respectable Artisan in the Industrial Revolution', London Journal, VIII (1982), 63–75;
Kenneth Kilby, The Cooper and His Trade, (Linden Publishing, 1990 illustrated edition);
Kenneth Kilby, Coopers and Coopering, (Shire Album, 2004);
E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo, editors, The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the ‘Morning Chronicle’ 1849-50 (Pelican Books, 1973), 500-517, being Letter LXIX, on London coopers, 12 September 1850;
George Pattison, ‘The Coopers’ Strike at the West India Dock, 1821’, Mariner's Mirror, 55:2 (1969), 163-184.