Since the 1920s there had been an underlying shift of the axis of UK manufacturing industry away from the North of England, Scotland and South Wales to the South-East, so attempts to attract factory-based employments had always gone against the national trend. The Liverpool Daily Post reported in 1954 that, although nearly 60 non-Merseyside firms (including Dunlop, GEC and others) had opened factories and created jobs for 27,000 people, this had not been sufficient to alter the economy of the area radically.48 Five years later Mr John Rodgers, MP, Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, said that no area of similar size anywhere in the UK had remotely comparable employment problems. He went on to say that, although new factories were being built, progress was still not good enough.49 The outlook had not improved in 1962 when the North-West Regional Board for Industry said: ‘The amalgamation and rationalisation of firms on Merseyside was resulting in a loss of employment opportunities in an area where unemployment was a serious problem.’50 The car industry, then arriving, was to provide only temporary relief. The port and its related processing industries therefore continued to provide the city’s core. Although the number of jobs centred on the port steadily shrank during the 1950s and 60s, it could still appear to be the one area of economic activity that was deeply rooted.
Until the mid-1960s the Port of Liverpool’s share in the national totals of imports and exports had remained more or less constant. Liverpool’s prominence came from cargo liners and these, of course, were precisely the type of ship that were soon to be replaced by the container ships.
The movements of manufacturing industry, population and wealth to the South-East inevitably made that region’s ports more attractive to shippers of goods. The coastal ports of south-eastern England, being tidal, were also much cheaper to use than Liverpool’s enclosed dock systems, which were expensive to maintain. At the same time the decline of Commonwealth countries as trading partners and the rise of EEC countries left Liverpool marooned on the wrong side of the country. Between 1966 and 1994 Liverpool’s share of all ship arrivals in the UK was halved, while Dover’s share increased four-and-a-half times. By 1994 the East coast ports had totally eclipsed the importance of those to the West. The following league table of UK ports in 1966, 1994 and 2011 provides a neat illustration of the transformation of Britain’s patterns of seaborne trade.
Table 1: Ten largest UK ports, 1966, 1994 and 2011*
| 1966 | 1994 | 2011 |
| 1 London | 1 London | 1 Grimsby and Immingham |
| 2 Liverpool | 2 Felixstowe | 2 London |
| 3 Tees and Hartlepool | 3 Grimsby and Immingham | 3 Felixstowe |
| 4 Manchester | 4 Tees and Hartlepool | 4 Dover |
| 5 Clyde | 5 Liverpool | 5 Liverpool |
| 6 Hull | 6 Dover | 6 Tees and Hartlepool |
| 7 Newport (Mon.) | 7 Medway | 7 Southampton |
| 8 Bristol | 8 Port Talbot | 8 Belfast |
| 9 Port Talbot | 9 Hull | 9 Hull |
| 10 Grimsby and Immingham | 10 Southampton | 10 Medway |
Source: National Ports Council (1967) and Department of Transport (1995 and 2012)
*As measured by volume of foreign and domestic non-oil traffic for 1985 and non-fuel traffic for 1966.
Between 1966 and 1994 the relative importance of East and West coast ports was reversed. In 1966 there were only four East coast ports in the top ten, whereas in 1994 there were only two West coast ports. Dover and Felixstowe, which together handled one-ninth of the volume of Liverpool’s goods in 1966, were handling 20 per cent more than Liverpool in 1994. By 2011 Liverpool was the only West coast port remaining in the top ten. Containerisation went in parallel with the shift of traffic to the East coast, although the timing of the two movements was largely a coincidence. The impact on port and shipping operations of the containerisation of cargoes was swifter and greater than the transition from sail to steam. Until the 1960s ships carrying frozen or manufactured goods were loaded in much the same way as furniture removal vans – giving due consideration to stability, items were packed in accordance to shape and with a view to minimising lost space. In 1927 it was reckoned not surprising to see in the list of cargo of a ship loading for the Far East:
a ton or two of bicycles, a ton of metal polish, three tons of sewing thread, two of boracic acid, nearly a ton of blotting paper, ten tons of biscuits, a hundred of soap, twenty of whiskey or stout, and as much as four tons of assorted chocolates.51
If the list was perhaps slightly different by the 1960s, a comparable variety was nevertheless packed into the same space. Even homogeneous cargoes like cane sugar were still coming into the port in bags until the early 1950s – and the description which follows of moving from bagged to bulk sugar stands as a useful analogy for the transition from handling individual goods to stowing containers:
The first bulk cargo of raw sugar was received in Liverpool, in the S.S. Sugar Transporter, in August 1952, and, once bulk receiving started, the amount in bags gradually decreased to vanishing point, taking with it the old-fashioned method of weighing at the docks, the trailer wagons that carried the bags to the refinery and the gangs whose job it was to open and empty the bags in the silo bays, which now stand generally idle. Gone, too, was the livelihood of the man who made sack hooks.52
The containerisation of general cargoes was first successfully introduced in the 1950s on the West coast of the USA, where it showed spectacular savings in the time ships spent in port. One US study showed that where it took 10,584 working hours to load and unload 11,000 tons of general cargo it took only 546 working hours to load and unload 11,000 tons of containers.53
The capital cost of containerising general and frozen cargoes was simply enormous; special ships had to be built; quays and cargo-handling equipment reconstructed and replaced; stocks of steel boxes built up; compensation paid to dock labourers whose considerable skills were being made redundant. This gave a premium to new port sites like Felixstowe, where there were no costs involved in scrapping obsolete equipment and no compensation to be paid to displaced workers.
The most visible consequence of containers, and the one the public knew about, was the large reduction in the number of dockers’ jobs. Less visible, because hardly publicised, were the effects on seafarers and those who serviced ships. Container ship operation became almost identical to that of tankers, which had for long been accustomed to port turn-around times of less than 24 hours. This mode of operation meant that most ship maintenance was done by ships’ crews rather than by ship repair firms who had previously swarmed over vessels during their lengthy stays in port. For their part, seafarers were plainly affected by a type of ship that on the Australasian routes, for example, halved the voyage time once normal (from five months to two-and-a-half), could carry the equivalent of six traditional cargo liners and needed only half the crew of one of them. These ships, too, were now completely