unite Life
As the dirty old river keeps rolling, Unite’s John Dwan takes away the city’s rubbish, like his father before him
The lighterman’s tale BY MIKE GERBER
Like many crew on the Thames’ boats, Unite member John Dwan has family links going back generations. In fact ‘lighterman’ John, for such are they known as, has ancestral working connections to Father Thames, stretching back to his great grandfather. Leaving school at 15, John (pictured) was apprenticed to his
grandfather. “He was a sailing barge skipper, my grandfather was. My other grandfather was a Thames sailing master. My father, brother, his two sons, my uncles, cousins – we’re all lightermen.” John’s employed by Cory Environmental, one of Britain’s
leading waste management companies, as a tug skipper. The tugs haul barges stacked with containers full of London’s rubbish to the company’s recently opened energy-from-waste plant at Belvedere, east of the Thames Barrier. At the plant, collected waste is processed with capacity to
produce enough electricity to power some 66,000 homes. Any residual ash is boated further downriver to Tilbury where it is recycled into construction aggregate and breeze blocks. And because the transportation is done by river, over 100,000 lorry journeys are saved each year. “It’s the ideal way to get rubbish out of London,” says John,
who’s “done most things on the river – sailing barge, hydrofoils, lighterage, pleasure boating.” Each year, newly licensed Thames boatmen get the chance to
34 uniteWORKS July/August 2012
row in the annual Doggett’s race, to mark completion of their apprenticeship. And this July, John’s son Merlin, also in Unite, is in the race. “If he wins, we’ll be the largest, most successful existing family of Doggett’s winners,” says John. Before the advent of containerisation forced commercial
shipping out to Tilbury, the lighterage boats that serviced seabound vessels were a common sight in London’s now skyscraper-strewn and trendy docklands. On today’s Thames passenger craft predominate, while Cory,
whose boating operations are masterminded from riverside offices at Charlton, is the largest remaining lighterage operator on the Thames. Reflects John, “When you look at it it’s a shame, because you’ve
got 500 licensed lightermen on the river, and that’s all the work that’s out there. “It would be nice to see more work on the river. As they close
the wharfs down, they convert them into luxury apartments, making it harder to find the places to load your cargo. “But people seem happy for us to take their rubbish away down
the river, keeping it off the roads. Most quite like it. I know when I do a bit of work on the pleasure boats, how people look at the barges and watch it all being done, because it’s something different. It makes the river look alive.”
Mark Thomas
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