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Great Pompey Myths Debunked - No 1 The Origin of Scummers
at 15:59:17

The earliest recollection I have of the SCUMMERS handle was actually in 1976, just after the Saints won the Cup and pre dates the Thoresen/P&O Ferry move to Pompey in 1983/4 which, to my mind had little to do with the SCUMMER story.

As mentioned in one of the earlier posts Southampton had a very unionised and large Dockers contingent
Portsmouth's commercial port was smaller than it is now but had begun to expand from the Albert Johnson quay area into what is now the Ferry Terminal.
Meanwhile Brittany Ferries (which had been started by French farmers to get their produce to the UK market) had commenced a largely freight only service into Plymouth
The Soton Shop stewards ran a South Coast Dockers Steering Group (all TGWU members) led by Ritchie Pierce which included the ports of Soton, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Poole and Weymouth.
There was an agreement that the fledgling Brittany Ferry service would not move out of Plymouth to Portsmouth, which was not part of the highly unionised National Dock labour Board
The Portsmouth men initially agreed to this then, for some reason, reneged on the agreement and agreed to take the Brittany ship.
To support Plymouth the Soton Dockers picketted the Portsmouth Commercial port towards the end of November 1976
This can be verified by looking in the archives of the Soton Daily Echo and the Pompey News.
So this is fact not conjecture and was fairly high profile news in both papers
The picketing went on for 3-4 days and the police had to be called in to rescue the Pompey Dockers as the Soton men turned up in force.
There were several arrests including the brother of Bob Charles who played in goal for Saints in the 1960's.
As I say the story of strike breaking by the mythical Soton Company of Union Men seems to have started from this time.
I once spoke to a journalist at the Pompey News about this particular event and he reckoned the accusation of strike breaking by Soton Union members was fabricated by a Pompey FC fan by the name of Hughes (who was working in Pompey Docks at the time and was known as 'Docker' Hughes) to overcome the embarrassment of having to call the police for protection against Soton Dockers on 'home soil'
Certainly the facts about the Ppmpey Dockers strike breaking is a matter of public record if anyone wants to research the story
Unlike, of course, the Pompey 'Scummers' story which is pure fantasy and fabrication.
Hopefully someone will have the time to visit the Soton/Pompey libraries where copies of the local papers are kept on mico filche to verify this

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