'Chum, You've 'Ad It"

For 25 hours last week Britain's mammoth liner Queen Mary lay at a Southampton wharf as helpless as a beached whale. Her promenade decks and immense saloons crawled with distinguished passengers in mink wraps and Homburg hats.

On the great ship's bridge, gold-braided, choleric Commodore Cyril Gordon Illingworth paced restlessly. "We'll sail at 3 p.m.," he had said confidently the day before. But for once the Queen Mary's well-disciplined crew paid no heed to their commander's orders. In a strike meeting in a drafty wharfside shed, they were listening instead to the passionate oratory of a thin, febrile man in a cheap blue raincoat and a dirty white shirt.

"'E Knows." Few of the Mary's crew had ever heard of Pat Murphy before he stood up to address their meeting. "'E's a Liverpool man," was all one pimply-faced steward could say about him. Others knew that Murphy had come down from Merseyside the day before, after having helped organize a wildcat strike whose aims were to tie up Liverpool and oust the rather tame leadership of the National Union of Seamen. '"E knows what we want," an oiler told a reporter.

Official union leaders at the meeting wanted the ship to sail. Murphy's immediate demands (for more representation from the rank & file at union negotiations) were only a smokescreen for his major aim: to hold the Mary at Southampton for at least a day, regardless of the cost. If he could do that, he might inject some hope into the fading Merseyside strike.

"Let 'Er Lie." As the last favorable tide began to ebb, the union leaders made one desperate final effort to win the men back from Murphy's sway. "Listen," one of them shouted, "if you'll take the ship out on the tide, you can turn this meeting into an executive session and elect your representatives now." But Murphy shouted him down. There'd be no election, he cried, until tomorrow, "and we'll let the ship lie there tonight." The pimply-faced steward looked at the tall ship and cried gleefully: "Well, chum, you've 'ad it." The men laughed.

Next day the meeting on the green took but a few minutes. The union had surrendered; the rank & file now had their representation. Then Murphy spoke: "They said I had no control over you. Well, we will throw that back at them. I say you are going back to the ship and you'll take her out this afternoon. Will you?" The response startled the birds in the trees overhead and several men raised clenched fists. "All right," said Murphy, "go back to the ship."

The men, shouldering seabags or paper suitcases, started for the gate in a formless mob. Then Murphy had an inspiration. "Wait!" he yelled. "We'll go back in order. Form in lines of six each." Standing at the foot of the gangway, Murphy shook hands with every man as he went aboard.

As the last man went up the gangway, Murphy's face turned upwards. His glance traveled up the steep steel cliff with the pleasure of a man savoring something infinitely pleasant. And when the braying of the whistle announced Commodore Illingworth's impatience to be off, Murphy grinned. Then, a celebrity, he went off with the newsmen.

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