Unite and Fight
He was once the most revered — and reviled man — in New Zealand. Jock Barnes, the uncompromising Watersiders leader of 1951, talks to Peter Malcouronne and tells him revolution is coming.
They stand there in fedora hats and gabardine overcoats, reverently staring at the star. He’s looking away to nowhere, really, but the faraway look is well rehearsed. Practised that morning while having a shave.
The black and white photo betrays that, but it hides much more. You can’t hear the fiery words of the master orator, or the throaty cheers of angry men. And you can’t see why they called Harold ‘Jock’ Barnes — workers’ hero, waterfront wrecker — the Strawberry Bull.
He was 15-stone then, the same weight he was when he played flanker for Auckland. Strong, keg-chested, with a jaw like a hapuka. His flaming hair was in sympathy with his convictions.
“My father’s mother was called McGregor — she was a direct descendant of Rob Roy McGregor. The greatest revolutionary of them all. That’s where my red hair came from.”
It’s grey now, and Jock Barnes, at 91, is physically half the man he was. “The bloody legs are stuffed,” he says, of limbs both recently broken and not quite mended.
Frail he may be, but still very much alive. Kevin Ireland found that out a couple of years ago after prematurely consigning Barnes to the great picket line in the sky. A writer to the Sunday Star said he had seen Barnes a few days before, atop a pub table leading the masses in ‘Solidarity Forever’. Barnes chimed in with his customary tact and lreland apologised.
Above, covering two walls of the living room of his tiny Ellerslie flat, are photos of Barneses of every size imaginable. “Do you know why they’re all so fit and healthy?” he asks. “Because they’re bred and fed on revolution!”
Now, nearly 50 years after the 1951 waterfront dispute that defined him, Jock Barnes, to his surprise and delight, is becoming fashionable again. He had a cameo role in Dean Parker’s TV drama Share the Dream, and a tape from his old demagogic days recently aired on National Radio. A play starring ‘Harry’, ex-watersiders’ leader, and “a grumpy old bastard” is in progress, and Barnes’s memoirs, Never a White Flag, have just been published. A copy sits on a valve radio, by a green soft-toy croc and Barnes’s framed ’51 loyalty certificate. Above, covering two walls of the living room of his tiny Ellerslie flat, are a hundred 6x4 snaps of a life. “Not a bad gallery, eh?” he says proudly. His late wife, Freda, an unfairly overlooked activist. Their race horses. And the future. “Nine grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren and more coming… a couple of the greats have got, you know, that look in their eye.
“Do you know why they’re all so fit and healthy?” he asks. “Because they’re bred and fed on revolution!”
Barnes laughs Muldoonishly and pours himself a cup of tea. Sugar? “Bugger that. I’ve never had sugar, not since ’34, when the bloody sugar company sacked me.”
Ah! The critical event in the young man’s past that determines his destiny. Well no, that actually happened nearly 20 years before.
“When I was nine I did a Star run with my brother Arthur. We were living in Mt Albert — which in those days was right out in the country — and we wouldn’t finish till really late at night. We told them that if they didn’t get the papers to us earlier, we wouldn’t bloody deliver them.”
The papers were late and the Barnes boys were true to their word. However, two older paperboys showed less solidarity and loaded up their saddlebags. “So Arthur gave one a hiding and I gave the other a hiding and then they decided they’d knock off. That was my first blow for bona fide trade unionism, I guess,” muses Barnes.
“I wondered why good, honest, working people suffered, while others who did no work lived in luxury. I couldn’t understand it. It didn’t make any sense. Where’s the justice?”
Even if exploitative newsagents hadn’t stoked the young Barnes’s revolutionary fires, it’s unlikely he would’ve been seduced by the dark side. In his book, Barnes recounts that one of his earliest memories was of his mother, Catherine, washing clothes by candle-light after working all day.
“I wondered why good, honest, working people suffered, while others who did no work lived in luxury. I couldn’t understand it. It didn’t make any sense. Where’s the justice?” He pauses for a moment, then gives hope to biologists trying to isolate a revolutionary gene. “It was born in me. It couldn’t be any other way. I just hated their fuckin’ guts and I always have.”
A neighbour’s gift of Marx’s Das Kapital — “both volumes on the bookshelf over there” — gave the teenage rebel a theoretical substructure to his natural instincts. The Great Depression merely confirmed what he already knew. “Proud men begging, broken… Women selling themselves to feed their children.”
That desperation exploded one night in Auckland. “The Queen St riot of ’32. After the police bashed Jimmy Edwards, it was all on. The police couldn’t do anything — just too many hungry men.”
Barnes himself didn’t take part, but “the old man did. He got this box of cigars — Cuban — just the bloody best. He was smoking cigars for months. Blokes were in shops trying on clothes. You had relief workers turning up to work in suits instead of rags.” Barnes chuckles at the memory of what might have been. But there was no revolution in New Zealand in 1932, nor would there be 19 years later.
He refers to it simply as ’51. It was the defining moment of his life, his Rumble in the Jungle, his Ninth Symphony. It dominates his memoirs; the second half of his life warrants just a chapter.
1951 seems so distant; the players from another age; the canvas, another country. Too long ago to really matter. But, for those whose conception of history stretches only to last week’s South Park episode, remember this.
Remember Prime Minister Holland, the “senator from Fendalton”, whose grovelling would have made Jim Bolger blush. See how proud he was to sit US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at the Cabinet table.
Remember how people were detained for using the word “scab”: remember the men who sentenced Jock Barnes to nine months’ jail, hard labour, under an obscure law never used before or since.
Remember the National government’s emergency regulations that made it a crime to assist a watersider’s family. Or to print and distribute pamphlets supporting their cause. Better to err on the safe side and advocate, as the Auckland Star did, that the police shoot the unionists.
God defend our free land. But the government could never have succeeded without the acquiescence of ordinary New Zealanders. They were happy enough to look the other way: happy enough to be to be told who the baddies were.
“I’ll never forget the day Jimmy Hamilton died. He was standing just in front of me, when a gangway collapsed. Crushed him. He was a good lad, Jimmy. Left behind a wife and two kiddies. I had the job of going and telling them they wouldn’t see their father again.”
The Herald’s cartoonist, Gordon Minhinnick, depicted the wharfies as thick-necked, bulbous-nosed thugs. Swap their fedoras for a yarmulke and you have history’s ultimate villains. Elsewhere the wharfies were lambasted as lazy, their work easy.
“It was hard work, dangerous work. Every year men were killed. I’ll never forget the day Jimmy Hamilton died. He was standing just in front of me, when a gangway collapsed. Crushed him.
“He was a good lad, Jimmy. Left behind a wife and two kiddies. I had the job of going and telling them they wouldn’t see their father again.”
Hamilton’s death merited three lines in the paper. The watersiders’ contribution of £4,357 over five years to the Hospital Comforts Fund was not newsworthy either. Nor was their presentation of an ambulance to St Johns.
“It was more than just a union: it was a community. Everything for everyone, and nothing for ourselves.” Barnes looks across the room, remembering. Memories of league teams, silver bands and picnics at Pt Chev beach. He puts his glasses on and works his way through the Watersiders’ Lockout Committee photo. “Sam Gorman, Johnny Connor, Steve Wahene (he captained the Kiwis later on), Jim Knox — all good men …
Memories of then, dreams of tomorrow. More specifically, dreams of revolution.
“That’s the answer. It’s inevitable — the stupid bastards bring it on themselves. Like the Bourbons, like the Romanovs, they never know when to stop. They’re going to get their coffee.”
But surely good old-fashioned revolution has no place in the modern global economy. It can’t happen here.
“It’s all speculation, paper money. Illusory. Nothing’s being made, nothing’s being done. It’s like sticking a couple of dollars on a horse and you get the ticket for it. Might be worth something after the race, might be worth nothing. It’s just paper.”
“It’s happening now. Just like in the ‘30s when you had stockbrokers jumping out of skyscrapers. Except it’s on a bigger scale than before. They’re too bloody stupid. They don’t learn from history. And they’ll pay for it.
“It’s all speculation, paper money. Illusory. Nothing’s being made, nothing’s being done. It’s like sticking a couple of dollars on a horse and you get the ticket for it. Might be worth something after the race, might be worth nothing. It’s just paper.”
It would be unfair to expect a man who talks of “spies” and the “rank and file” to fully appreciate the impact technology has had on production. Yesterday’s workers are today’s couriers, clerks and computer operators. Has the information age killed the working class?
“There’s some truth in that. When men are all working together manually, they might talk and get organised. There’s not that much dialogue going on nowadays.
“That’s why I was hoping they’d go ahead and make them work for the dole. That would have got the unemployed organised. I think someone woke up to the fact that that wasn’t a good idea.”
Certainly, Barnes has little faith in the trade union movement’s ability to represent workers. “What’s it called? The CTU — the Collaborating Trade Union. They have the guts of a disembowelled whitebait and the morals of a marauding tomcat.”
A police helicopter clatters overhead, chasing a rogue jaywalker. Barnes waves defiantly. “And you’ve got to have voluntary membership. Loyalty and principles have to come from inside — they can’t be imposed. You can’t make someone a trade unionist.”
Barnes makes other observations on prominent New Zealand unionists, all grossly libellous. He’s firing now. Shakespeare, Shelley, Frost and Burns are quoted effortlessly, GST translated as the Great Swindle Tax.
Then he goes quiet and looks again at his photos. He points at a picture of three men standing, bound together like a front row. “That’s me, Waka Tait and Watene Burton.”
Ten years ago, Barnes’s best mate, Con Doyle asked him to go down to Wairoa to mediate in a dispute between local Maori.
“They invited me up to their pa, and we had a long talk. About Longfellow’s ‘Song of Hiawatha’ — how he unified the Indian tribes. I went down to the Wairoa library — they had a copy — and I said, ‘Bloody read it. Get united. Unite and fight against the boss class. They’re the ones who are oppressing us.’ It did the job — no more fighting. For once in my bloody life I was a peacemaker.”
First published in the New Zealand Listener, 5 September 1998. Part of my Qantas Award Junior Feature Writer of the Year portfolio (where I was the unsuccessful finalist).
