Every port keeps two archives. One sits in the records office, in crew lists and cargo manifests and photographs of ships that no longer call. The other lives in the heads of people who worked the quay, and it is walking out of the gate a little more every year. The men and women who handled breakbulk cargo through the 1960s and 1970s are now in their seventies and eighties. Ask them the right way and they will give you the smell of a hold, the rhythm of a winch, the exact insult a hatch boss used when a sling came up short.
What follows is not a script. It is a checklist built for the kitchen table: ten questions worth asking, a few habits that make the answers usable, and some notes on what to do with the recording afterwards. If you are working with a local history group, a museum, a school project, or just your own family, it will hold up.
Prepare Like You're Going on Shift
Turn up with less than you think you need. A phone that records cleanly, a spare battery, a notebook for the names and dates that fly past too fast to catch, and one page of prompts. Reading questions off a sheet turns a conversation into an interrogation. Learn the ten questions well enough that you can ask them sideways, in the middle of a story about something else.
Ask for an hour and expect forty minutes. Ask where they would rather sit. Most people talk more freely at their own table than in a meeting room, and a plate of something on the table does more for an interview than a good microphone. Bring a photograph of the docks if you have one, or a ship of the right era, or a union card, or a piece of kit. Objects start stories that questions cannot reach.
Before you press record, say plainly where the recording will go and who will hear it. Then ask again on tape, so the permission is in the file. If they want to stop, stop. If they say something and then ask you to leave it out, leave it out.
The Ten Questions
These are ordered roughly from easy to difficult. Skip around as the conversation allows.
- Walk me through one shift, from the gate to the gate. Not the job — the shift. What time you arrived, where you waited, what you did first. This one question usually fills twenty minutes and gives you the whole architecture of the day.
- What was in your pockets and your bag? Gloves, bait money, tea, a stub of pencil, a spare shirt. The contents of a kit bag tell you what the work physically cost.
- Who was in your gang, and what made the best hand you worked with good? People describe skill through other people. Listen for the names, then ask what happened to them.
- What did you call things that outsiders wouldn't understand? Follow up with: what did the office call it, and what did your father call it? Versions matter.
- What was the worst weather you worked in, and how did the job change? Weather is a safe door into danger, cold, exhaustion and the small tricks people invented to get through.
- What did the change to containers actually feel like on the quay? Ask about the first time they saw the boxes, who lost work, who learned the new machines, what disappeared first.
- What was the first job you were given, and what did you get wrong? Nearly everyone remembers being corrected. The correction tells you the rules of the place.
- Where did you eat, drink and wait? The canteen, the pub, the bus stop, the corner by the gate. These places are gone and the geography of them is worth recording street by street.
- What did you know about the cargo that the paperwork didn't say? Smells, sounds, weights, the way a load settled. This is the knowledge that no manual contains.
- What should someone who never worked the docks understand about the job? The closing question. Leave it long. Do not tidy up the answer.
Capture the Language, Not Just the Story
Slang is the first thing to go, because it lives in the group rather than the individual. When a word surfaces, stop the story and get it properly. Ask for the word used in a full sentence. Ask what an outsider would have called the same thing. Ask who used it — the older hands, one particular dock, one trade — because a stevedore, a tally clerk and a crane driver did not speak identically, and a glossary that flattens them loses more than it keeps.
Write the word down as it is said, not as you would spell it. Keep a running list from every interview and add to it. If two people give you different words for the same thing, keep both; the disagreement is the record.
Daily Routine Is Where the Detail Lives
People rehearse the dramatic stories — the near miss, the strike, the ship that nearly went over. They have told those before. The unphotographed ordinary detail is what nobody has asked for, and it is the hardest to reconstruct later.
Ask what it smelled like and you will get a different answer than if you ask what happened. Both are worth having.
Push gently on senses and sequences. How long the walk from the gate to the berth took. What the winch sounded like before it started and after. Where you hung your coat. What you did in the twenty minutes when the ship wasn't ready. Whether you went home dirty or showered at the dock. Whether the canteen had a particular thing that everyone ordered.
When the Answers Come Slowly
Silence is part of the work. Count to five before you fill it. People often add their most useful sentence after a pause they expected you to interrupt.
If a subject shuts down — a serious accident, a death on the quay, a bad injury — do not pursue it in the moment. Move to food, weather, the walk home. Some rememberers will come back to it themselves ten minutes later, having decided you can be trusted. Others never will, and that is allowed. Do not promise confidentiality you cannot deliver, and do not press someone into an account they did not offer.
If answers are thin, get specific instead of getting louder. Ask about one named day rather than the general past. Ask what they had for dinner on a night shift. Ask what a particular ship looked like coming in. Concrete questions are easier to answer than broad ones, and they pull the general along behind them.
After the Recorder Stops
Transcribe or at least index within a week, while you still remember who was speaking. Name the file with the date, the place and the person's name. Note the ship names, street names and nicknames you could not spell — those are the details a future researcher will need and cannot guess.
Send a copy back. A printed transcript, a USB stick, a link — people like to hold the result. Ask then, in writing, whether the recording can be used for a project, an archive or a website, and note the answer. If it can be, offer a copy to the local library or maritime museum. Then go back for a second session, six months later, with the glossary in hand. The second interview is usually better than the first, because the first one taught you what to ask.
Record the ordinary while you still can. The extraordinary has a way of looking after itself.
Photo: pasja1000 / Pixabay