Back to index of Nerve 11 - Winter 2007

John Nettleton: an appreciation

By Tony Wailey and Ron Noon

We were sorry to hear of the death of John Nettleton the other day (Echo 31st July). He was a long time Liverpool seaman and ferryman, a good laugh and a great storyteller. When he was “deep sea” he was known as a ship’s lawyer, a phrase offered with great distaste by the prevalent bureaucracy of Seaman’s Union and Ship-Owners alike that operated together as part of an owners’ charter, with the first “closed shop” in Europe between the 1920s and the 1960s. Because of the way seaman’s lives were governed by more laws than any other worker, – owing to that close relationship between Merchant Navy and Royal Navy and epitomised in the Maritime state – John, like many from this city who went away, was always looking for the ways of the chance, the pause, the gap, the angle by which he could get recognition for the rights and issues of the below deck seamen.

A good example of this was when he was aboard a Clan Line cargo boat in Cape Town. An irascible captain had denied the crew a sub from their wages – hoping to keep them from going ashore, an act of petty vindictiveness for which the Captains of Merchant ships were famed. Across the harbour was a Royal Naval Destroyer. Well understanding his Articles of Engagement – that any merchant seaman had the right to petition a commander of her majesty’s fleet – John walked around the harbour and asked to be let aboard, citing the arcane clause of representation.

After consultation he was issued forth – under guard – and rose slowly deck by deck, first to the Petty Officers, then to the Chief Petty Officer, then to the Lieutenants in that most rigid of command structures. Finally – accompanied by an Officer of the Fleet bearing a raised sword and in full naval apparel – John in Tee shirt, flip flops and cut down KDs, was issued into the Commander’s ante chamber.

He explained the situation and the Commander nodded – the 1894 Shipping Laws beside him on a lamp table. Polite messages were exchanged with the captain of the Clan Line but the skipper remained intransigent. Numerous requests were made until the Commander, growing tired, gave the order for guns to be trained: his final warning boomed across the harbour, “Sir, agree to these men’s demands or I shall blow your ship out of the water.” They got their sub.

He was one of that breed that came of age with the Seaman’s Reform Movement in 1960, a movement that fundamentally changed the autocratic National Seaman’s Union and replaced it with something like democracy. Even the Daily Telegraph noted that if the series of strikes that summer did any good, “it was to shake up the leaders of the seaman’s union who had been resting on their oars too long”. Liverpool played its full part in that movement and John spoke well at the Centenary of the Seamen and Dockers’ unions held at Transport House in Islington twenty years ago.

He was always the seagoer – and a great reader – but like most Scousers he was idiosyncratic and loath to cut his sails. On being interviewed for a place at Ruskin College Oxford, he noted that everything was going well and he looked to have been accepted when he asked for the time. When told, he muttered, “Oh Christ, ‘ad better be on me way I’ve left me tart waiting in the car park.” Raphael Samuel, the great historian, tried to plead that this was no more than an oral use of expression particularly common amongst seamen in Liverpool but the interview panel were of one mind. He didn’t get accepted.

It was the same historian who published him earlier in the 1980s History Workshop Journal when he received a manuscript from John and that other sorely unrecognised working class historian from Liverpool, Alan O’Toole, detailing the facts of how they pursued the Liverpool records and churches to find out where Robert Tressell was buried. The author of the, as then, rejected manuscript, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was passing through the city on the eve of the great Transport strike of 1911 – en route to New York to be with his daughter – when his tuberculosis occurred and he died in one of the local city wards and was buried in a pauper’s grave. It was Alan and John that researched the records and pursued the trail that led to the grave being located, cleared and duly celebrated, which paved the way for the article’s eventual publication.

As in everything, the event came accompanied by a story. After they had finally found the grave, they went to the Labour Club for a drink and thinking they would not find it again came back with some petrol to burn off the huge overgrowth of unkempt grass and weeds. As the flames started to dance at the churchyard in Walton, the law made a sudden appearance. Quick as a flash John took off his jacket and threw it down over the fire, shaking his head and muttering, “them scallies, no respect,” and pointed in the distance to some young lads running with a ball. He even showed the Police the lemonade bottle, which they had used to store the petrol. It was a typically flamboyant gesture by which both himself and his city have come to be known.

Forty years ago E.P. Thompson wrote of working class historiography that concerned 18th and 19th Century Britain and stated, “we need to know more of the bars and the taverns and the ports and the men and women who worked and lived in them”. John was a 20th Century man but he would have agreed with those sentiments. Now we do know more about the cultural life of the Liverpool Dockers and Seafarers and of the Mari–time and it is a world apart in social history from the life of the Calder Valley or Midlands working class. John was part of that bigger Liverpool – even on a Wednesday afternoon in Winter when the Ferry had about 20 people on it, he would be talking with the other deckhands of New Zealand and Latin America. I can still hear him laughing. It didn’t spoil for one moment the pleasure he took in his own city and it raises a familiar question: why does Liverpool produce more narks, dramatists, writers, singers, comedians, civil rights activists and union leaders, than anywhere else? You’d have to go to Naples, to Marseilles or to New York to find that out. Port cities are different from the characteristics of their own Nation-States. John Nettleton’s life was steeped in that difference. He will be missed.

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Comment left by Steve Murphy on 6th June, 2011 at 15:49
Brilliant, I can still John in his own unique way, relating the stories that were wide and varied. Aborn comedian, wit, wordsmith, socialist and life long Trade Unionist. RIP John Nettleton gone but never forgotten.

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