By Bernard Place
BEN Shenton’s column (JEP 5 November) on trust in the public sector drew on the world of Jersey’s docks to make a wider moral point. It is a story worth hearing – but also worth examining carefully, because the history it invokes was far from benign.
Mr Shenton often writes with conviction and clarity about what he sees as the fading of trust between the public and those who serve it. His pieces remind readers of the virtues of personal responsibility, enterprise, and plain speaking – qualities that helped shape Jersey’s civic and commercial life. He is at his very best when urging us to think harder about the standards we set for those in authority.
It is in that same reflective spirit, not in opposition, as a historian that I want to examine one of the stories he used to illustrate his argument. He described the dockside “shape-up”, when men waited to be chosen for a day’s labour, and contrasted that culture of hard work, trust and accountability with what he sees as evasiveness in today’s public service. The comparison was vivid, but it also carried a quiet nostalgia that risks blurring the harder truths of that earlier world.
Across Britain and its ports, the system of daily hiring was known as “The Call” or the “call on”. In London, this practice was also sometimes known as “standing on the stones”. Each morning, dockers would queue at the gates, hoping for a nod from the foreman. Those selected worked that day; the rest went home empty-handed. There was no sick pay, no holiday, no recourse if you were injured or simply not picked. To fall out of favour was to fall into hunger.
The arrangement offered flexibility to employers but insecurity to workers. It turned neighbours into competitors and made obedience a condition of survival. By the mid-20th century, after years of protest, the system was replaced on the mainland through the Dock Labour Scheme – not to dampen industriousness, but to curb exploitation and restore dignity to work. In Liverpool and London, men who had spent their lives at the gate were the loudest voices calling for reform. They understood that insecurity is not character-building; it is corrosive.
Jersey’s smaller scale gave the same practice a more familiar face that tempered the harshness of the relationship between hirer and hired. Stevedores knew the men who hired them and vice-versa and the relationships could appear paternal rather than cruel. Yet the imbalance remained: favour, not fairness, determined the day’s wage. To speak up about safety or mistreatment was to risk being left off tomorrow’s list. Families budgeted not by the week but by the tide.
Seen from a distance, that system can acquire a kind of moral glow – the dignity of labour, the pride of the self-reliant man. But for many it meant exhaustion and anxiety that were simply borne in silence. When such arrangements are remembered only for their work ethic, we risk mistaking endurance for justice.
That is why the metaphor deserves a second look. The story was not wrong – but it was incomplete. The dockside “shape-up” is a poor model for a healthy relationship between any group and those who lead it, whether in government or business. Trust cannot flourish where insecurity rules. When authority is exercised without reciprocity, it breeds compliance, not confidence.
The same lesson applies in reverse: citizens do not trust public institutions that appear defensive, self-protective, or indifferent. But the cure for bureaucracy’s opacity is not a return to the arbitrary exercise of power. It is transparency joined with respect – a system that earns trust through fairness rather than fear.
We can see faint echoes of that older world in today’s labour market. Zero-hours contracts, gig work, and heavy reliance on agency staff all carry the same promise of flexibility and the same hidden cost of insecurity. In some sectors of Jersey’s economy – from hospitality to care – workers live again with uncertainty about hours, work contracts, housing, and income.
And there is a phrase we all know well that still circulates, quietly, in those circles: “There’s a boat in the morning.” It sounds almost benign until you hear it in context – a way of telling someone who complains that they can always leave. It is the modern whisper of the old dockyard logic: gratitude is expected, protest is punished, and power can be exercised without dialogue.
Such habits of thought, whether in employment or administration, corrode the mutual trust that Mr Shenton so rightly prizes. They belong neither to good management nor to good government.
The deeper issue here is how we use history. Nostalgia is comforting because it converts hardship into virtue. It allows us to admire the self-reliance of our forebears while quietly forgetting the structural unfairness that shaped their lives. In a small island, memory is both currency and inheritance; but partial memory can also mislead.
When we invoke the past to make moral points about the present, we owe it the courtesy of accuracy. The docks of old Jersey embodied endurance and community, yes – but also insecurity and dependence. To recall only the first half of that story is to sentimentalise struggle and risk repeating its injustices in new forms.
We can honour our history without mythologising it. We can recognise the integrity of hard work while rejecting the systems that cheapened it. And we can rebuild trust in public life not by romanticising obedience, but by demanding honesty, accountability, and respect on both sides.
History’s real value lies not in nostalgia but in understanding. When we tell it whole, it teaches us how to preserve what was good – and how never again to confuse exploitation with virtue.
A registered nurse for nearly 40 years, Bernard Place has been a clinician, teacher and researcher in intensive care units. From 2012 he managed departments in Jersey’s healthcare system and from 2015 to 2019 was the clinical project director for Jersey’s new hospital.
