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A recent TV programme discussed the development of container transport and how this has revolutionised our world. Until the late fifties and early sixties goods were transported in a very slow manner. Hand to hand operation was required to load ships, with cranes used for larger items. Boxes were piled into nets which were hoisted aboard and stacked by hand in the holds. Slow, labour intensive, hard toil, expensive and costly in both breakage and theft. I know about theft! As a dumb fifteen year old office boy I filled out, in unreadable scrawl, the dockets for whisky sent to places as far apart as Australia, South Africa and the USA. A thousand cases would be loaded, by hand, onto a 'British Road Services' lorry and would trundle down the A1 to London Docks where the majority of the load would, with difficulty the drivers would report, be unloaded and then packed onto the ship. I say the 'majority' as it is amazing how many boxes would have a hole in the bottom when they arrived in New York! London was one of the least appreciated docks the drivers told me, Southampton one of the best.
However at that time we began to use another lorry firm, name forgotten, to deliver the new 'Sealand' containers to the container depot somewhere in England. At first there was one of these in London and I think Hull also had such facilities, however the strikes, very common in docks, led to the opening of Felixstowe as the main container depot for the UK. This revolutionised the transport of goods and aided development of the economy of many nations. The success of transporting one thousand cases of whisky with no loss, no damage and therefor less cost soon became popular with all other goods. The strife in dockland, understandable as the conditions were hard, dirty and the management shocking, led to many strikes in the early sixties. By 1970 the docks had died and container transport was all! A handful of men now load and unload ships in a few hours whereas before it could take days. Specially designed container ships saw the end of the 'tramp steamer,' and the speed of movement aided the increase in produce transported. It did annoy sailors however as the three or more days spent in port now have become a few hours!
Today vast amounts of goods of all description travel around the world making us more interdependent than ever. It also enables factories in China to manufacture socks at a price cheaper than those made at home and send them to the UK daily. There is at least one town, name unknown, which contains nothing but factories making socks for the world markets! China has, because of containers, become the 'workshop of the (cheap) world.' The point that comes to mind however is that this traffic, bringing TV's, socks, fashion, gardening equipment, cameras, foodstuffs and anything else we take for granted continues daily and we never see it happen! It was possible in the past to watch goods unloaded at dockside and observe what arrived or departed, not any longer. Lorries once trundled through the streets with goods lashed to the back open to public eye, not any more. All these goods appear to arrive in the shops as if by magic and we take it for granted.
Food arrives in brightly covered plastic packets. Butchers shops have meat neatly arrayed on the counter however when I was a lad sides of beef and, half pigs would hang all around the shop, with sawdust on the floor to catch any blood! We would often play with these dead beasts as we waited for mum to be chatted up by the butcher. The only real health concern then was the butcher never took money. He wrote the price on a note which was handed to the customer. This was presented to a woman sitting in a small both at the end who took the cash and offered change. Game birds hung for days in the shop window, their feathers standing out from the skinned meats all around. Now they lie frozen in a deep white freezer, shrink wrapped in plastic. We knew as kids where our food came from, we could see it hanging there, this is not possible in supermarkets today. They joke that kids do not know where their lunch comes from and maybe they are right. We live in a pre-packaged society, almost a false society. Until around the middle of the19th century society in the west was predominantly agricultural. After that is was dominated by town and city. Recently I did a short study of biblical agriculture, wheat, barley and other foodstuffs. It struck me just how close to the land these people were. The weather played a huge part in their lives and the seasons dominated the working day. When the daylight was available you worked, when it grew dark you went to bed. If the harvest was good you ate, if it was bad starvation and death arrived, just as it has in north eastern Africa this year. Not that we care to watch this on TV, not when Libya is much easier to stomach, and anyway those Africans are always starving aren't they?
We are not just too far from the land, we are too far from the manufacture of the goods around us. Food manufacturers fill our grub with many chemicals that 'enhance' the life of the product, the additives encourage us to eat more but this does not actually lead to healthier bodies. Much of our foodstuff now comes from abroad, often by aircraft usually by boat. The world economy governs us more than our leaders, good and bad. As the economy of the west struggles to recover it would take little to upset that of the east. Living cocooned in our brightly lit, centrally heated, homes, minds numbed by television created by con artists, and lied to by a grasping media we are lulled into a false security, content with our lot and unaware of how close disaster is at hand. It was ever thus. We look no further than the end of our noses. As long as we are OK few look into the future, preferring to leave that to others while we enjoy our soap operas and shiny things made in the far east. Is there a better way?
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