'The area forecast for the next 24 hours.
'Viking - westerly six to gale eight backing south-westerly four or five, occasionally six later.
'Rain or showers, good.
'North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.
'Westerly backing south-westerly, 5 to 7...'
On a small stretch of shingle on Suffolk's North Sea coast,
a handful of people have gathered.
It's a pilgrimage of sorts.
A line of cars,
a scattering of cameras, binoculars and notebooks.
These are the ship-spotters.
Most days, it's chock-a-block with people coming down.
Photographers take an interest, people listen to ships.
That is a new ship. It's just a fascination of the ships, where they come from, what they carry,
where they're going next...
I like to come and watch the container ships because they are...
big!
They ARE big.
Larger than any battleship or passenger liner,
container ships are some of the greatest moving structures ever made by man.
They are built to carry as many as 14,000 containers of cargo.
Boxes that have changed our world.
You try and guess amongst yourselves what's actually in each box.
It could be paper, it could be ornaments, it could be food.
The interest just goes on and on and on and on.
These daily deliveries sustain our modern lives.
Yet the boxes have been arriving at our shores for little more than 40 years.
The shipping container turbo-charged world trade
and kick-started the modern age of consumerism,
bringing value, choice and luxury beyond our wildest dreams.
It has changed the face of industry and altered our communities and coastlines forever.
This is the story of how a simple metal box has transformed our lives.
The British have always looked out to sea.
It's at the heart of our identity and our culture.
In the days of the Empire, it was also the provider of our prosperity.
At the turn of the 20th Century, Britain was the maritime power in the world.
Britain had 50% of the world tonnage
and carried 60% of ocean-going cargo.
ON FILM: 'The city of ships is the heart of our trade.
'The dock roads and railways its arteries,
'which circulate our vital commerce to and from every corner of Britain.
'500 million pounds weight of tea.
'Wool for the baby's jacket.
'Bananas for small boys.
'Saturday's picnic or maybe the monkeys at the zoo.'
Before the invention of the shipping container, the millions of tonnes of cargo arriving in Britain
were unloaded by hand.
It could take weeks for dockers to move one ship's load of cargo.
In Liverpool, as many as 50 would be in port at one time.
In them days, you're talking a hundred people working on it.
You've had six gangs of men, you've got 18 men in a gang
and then you had the shore gang, the carpenters,
the office staff, the plan men, checking..
all being in involved in one ship,
more or less floating factories coming into the port.
The whole port area would be thousands of people.
In the 1960s, Britain's biggest docks - Liverpool and London -
were still major world ports.
But their international standing was fast coming under threat.
For while ports in America and Europe were adopting new technology,
Britain's had seen little investment since the Second World War.
Here, dock workers relied on rather more traditional equipment.
Well, you've seen it, haven't you? Curvy thing with a big handle on.
That hook was your help.
You'd be lost without it.
You'd be putting your fingers into a bag trying to lift it up, you know?
Dock work was a family affair and older practises were passed down the generations, like hooks.
This is actually me granddad's one.
Because me dad was still working in there, I couldn't have his one.
They always used to carry them about and get on buses and trains.
Whereas it might be called a dangerous object now
so they might not let you walk about with them.
This antiquated way of working was slow, labour intensive and tough.
Very, very hard.
Physically very hard. I mean, I can remember the first time I got home
and I worked on the West India Dock then,
and I'd been working on bags of sugar,
and I got home and me dinner was put in front of me
and I fell asleep on the table
and it was as simple as that.
The worst loads?
The bird's mess, so to speak, and it's used as a fertilizer.
And the smell was unbelievable. So if you was on that, you didn't get a bus home or that, you walked, basically.
You go home stinking.
No, you've go the right word. We've got nowhere, you've got one little lavatory up there, you go in there,
there's no soap, there's no towel, there's nothing to use at all.
When it's pouring rain you stand there all day long
and you work hard and what do you get for it? Nothing.
The hard work and poor conditions took their toll.
Dockers' life expectancy was among the shortest in the country.
Sickness and accidents slowed work even further
and built deep resentment between dockers and their employers.
They were young men and they were old
because of the effects that this had on their health.
You know, rheumatism,
arthritis, lung infections, asbestos
and all this sort of thing.
These poor conditions helped turn Britain's 130,000 dockers
into one of the most unionized workforces in the world.
But their jobs remained unpredictable and insecure,
exacerbating their grievances.
Each morning, employers waited inside the dock gates.
They lined up for the so-called free call to select workers.
The men paraded themselves for hire.
It was called the cattle market.
The young, the brawny, usually had no difficulty in getting a job.
If there was no work, they received a fall-back wage of £9 a week,
but few knew if they would make £9 or £20 in a week.
Your fathers fought for work.
Your mum didn't know whether that week she'd be borrowing money or lending it.
By the 1960s, revolution was in the air.
Relations between the dockers and their employers had hit rock bottom and frequent strikes and stoppages
brought Britain's ports to a standstill.
The cocktail of industrial deadlock and crumbling infrastructure
was now earning Britain's once-great ports a new reputation
for being the slowest in the modern world.
But the stalemate was about to be broken by a box from across the sea.
The era of modern containerization began with Malcolm McLean who was a
trucker from North Carolina
who'd made a fortune with McLean Trucking Company,
a company he founded in the Depression
and built up into one of the largest motor carriers in the country.
In post-war America, dockers called "longshoremen" also lifted cargo piece by piece.
Known as handball or break-bulk cargo, this slow process frustrated trucker Malcolm McLean.
One long autumn day in 1937, he had an idea that would change the world.
Malcolm had driven from North Carolina
to Hoboken, New Jersey right over here.
And he had to sit all day in his truck,
watching, waiting for the longshoremen
to get around to unload his cotton.
There was maybe 40 bales...
of cotton.
40 bales of cotton yarn.
And they weighed about 400 or 500 pounds a bale,
and I rolled 'em off one by one, and they picked it up with a hook and put it on the ship.
I said to myself, "Why don't we put that whole thing on the truck?" That was my first thought.
I just...
knew that if you picked it up 40 bales at once,
it would be a lot cheaper than picking it up one at a time.
HE CHUCKLES
Over the next 15 years, Malcolm McLean grew his family trucking business
into one of the biggest in the country.
But his ambition was to work out a way of getting a whole truck's cargo onto a ship in one go.
Malcolm knew what he wanted to do with the container.
He didn't know how the heck to get it on the ship, how to lock it on the ship,
how to handle it on and off the chassis.
After a number of failed designs, the breakthrough came in 1955
when he began to work with an engineer called Keith Tatlinger.
Together, they drew up the blueprint for what would become the modern shipping container.
It's simplicity is its genius.
A corrugated steel box,
around eight foot wide, and eight foot tall.
Today, it comes in two main sizes - 40 foot
and 20 foot.
The walls are just 25mm thick,
yet the box can carry upwards of 25,000 kilograms of cargo.
That's the equivalent of 22 Mini Coopers.
The container is lifted using a twist-lock system
that allows the crane to grip and release the box securely and quickly
from its four corners.
It's kind of amazing to me
to look at all these boxes here
and these were all designed by Keith Tatlinger back in 1956
and they had patents for all of these and he convinced Malcolm McLean to give the patents to the industry,
so that meant everybody could come in the thing with the same twist-locks, same corner posts
and it was an amazing system.
By giving up his patents, McLean made it easier for rivals
to copy his design than to develop their own ones.
This encouraged standardization, meaning that today any container
can be handled at any of the world's major ports without any problems of compatibility.
In April 1956, the first of these containers was lifted onto the deck
of a modified World War II aero tanker called the Ideal X.
The service would quickly assume the name of McLean's original concept -
Sea...Land.
The Ideal X ran from Port Newark with 58 containers to Houston
in the first trial run and that was the start of cellular container ships.
MUSIC: "Somewhere Beyond The Sea" by Bobby Darin
# Somewhere beyond the sea
# Somewhere... #
The Sea-Land service went from strength to strength.
By the mid-1960s, Malcolm McLean's container ships had become so popular
that many other shipping lines had begun to offer services of their own.
Dedicated container terminals were springing up around America.
The next step was to take on the Atlantic.
The customers who used us in domestic
and realised what the savings were were waiting for us to go to Europe.
So, the first ships that we put out to Europe were over-booked the very first week.
In 1966, Sea-Land unveiled a fleet of trans-Atlantic all-container ships.
The first would leave New Jersey fully loaded, but in order to make a profit,
Sea-Land would have to find customers in Europe
willing to take a leap of faith into the containerized world.
The first European port of call was Rotterdam.
The ship later went to Bremen, Germany and on the way back,
stopped in Grangemouth in Scotland to pick up, among other things, whisky.
# Oh, whisky is the life of man
# Whisky
# Oh, I'll get whisky where I... #
In the days before the shipping container, scotch importers were
accustomed to losing up to a third of their shipments in transit.
Carried in wooden crates, the glass bottles were easily broken,
often on purpose by thirsty dockers.
Don't mention whisky!
We loaded a lot of whisky.
And drank a lot of whisky.
You can imagine when they're knocking off at seven o'clock,
everyone's got a smile on their face, yeah. Very good.
The shipping container cut theft and breakages,
slashing insurance premiums, sometimes by as much as 90%.
It allowed whisky to be shipped in cheap thin cardboard boxes instead of expensive sturdy crates
and it could be loaded in a fraction of the time.
For the industry, it was one major step change in the whole business.
You've one lift, your container's off and you've got 20 tons of whisky
onto a vessel, whereas before, you'd probably have about maybe
30 dockers involved to get that same 20 ton on.
You've one man doing it now, so a huge cost saving.
When the first box loads of whisky arrived in America 100% intact, the container doubters were won over.
They can be stubborn until price comes along and then they're
the most cooperative people in the world.
They got a better price.
While whisky distillers set about making their factories container-ready,
shipping agents were employed by the American container lines to spread the word and convert the masses.
Premises were a bit antiquated so we had to educate them
on how to load containers.
They had to knock walls down
and put in loading bays to be able to load them.
So yes, it was a very interesting time.
The container revolution had arrived in Britain.
It was extremely exciting because we had something new.
It must have been like going from sail to steam.
Ships were in port for hours instead of days.
Big difference.
For sailors used to long periods in port while they waited for their cargo to be loaded,
it was a rude awakening.
Our peaceful existence suddenly changed. It was all go.
And whereas before it was, "Shall we have a game of golf?"
it became, "Have we got time to go ashore for lunch?"
They were marvellous ships to drive, they were very manoeuvrable and fast
and I think most of us eventually grew to love them.
They were ugly damn things.
You cannot say a container ship is any way a pretty object.
Ports interested in bringing these new container ships in needed two things,
open space and open minds.
Liverpool and London's docks offered neither.
Crammed in the centre of busy cities and hamstrung by poor labour relations,
they were not attractive to the new container lines.
Instead, Malcolm McLean chose to base his British operations elsewhere -
in a little known port called Felixstowe.
This berth two years ago was no more than a strip of shingle.
Now it's the port of the future.
It uses modern machines, gives its dockers security and makes money.
Ten years ago, their headquarters
was this quaint little clap-board building.
Today, the company has an impressive new office block.
Felixstowe has become one of the most successful independent ports in the country.
Felixstowe's rural location didn't worry Malcolm McLean.
He knew that he could unload five ships' worth of cargo in containers
and drive them all the way from Felixstowe to Liverpool
in less time than the Merseyside dockers would take to unload one ship.
Felixstowe's proximity to the main shipping lines was the important thing.
Roads and railways would do the rest.
The local workers, drawn mostly from surrounding farms, were glad of the work brought by the containers,
and their employers rewarded them well for their enthusiasm.
Here at Felixstowe, the dockers proudly tell you that they've never had a strike.
A recent productivity deal negotiated directly with the company
gave them a minimum weekly wage of £21 ten shillings
but most of the 400-odd ship workers, as they prefer to be known,
take home between £40 and £50.
In Liverpool and London, it was a different story.
The dockers were reluctant to accept containers.
But as they watched their cargo begin to flow to Felixstowe, they had no choice but to concede.
They weren't happy to handle them, but they had to handle them
because it was their work, it was cargo,
but you done it with a bit of a heavy heart.
The unions turned their focus to negotiating for better pay and conditions
in return for handling containers.
Dockers are not Luddite-minded. We welcome machinery
but in having machinery, we want the benefit to man of a shorter working day
and not at the cost of a reduction in labour.
As usual, the more profit made
wasn't put down to the workers,
it was put down to other people.
As regards an easier job, all they done was extend your hours anyway.
So it was never any better for the people working down there in the end.
Those men who did make the transition
found the atmosphere in the container terminals was very different
to the one they had been used to.
It was a lot different.
Basically, you're on your own up a crane for X amount of time, loading, discharging, what have you.
So, all the...
fun, if you want to call it,
had gone out of the job in that time.
Industrial action continued for many years.
Containers were routinely "blacked", meaning that they would not be moved
by dockers in dispute with their bosses.
When a group of men say that container is staying there, in them days, it stayed there.
It wasn't going anywhere.
The dockers of Hull have been blacking cargos from two of the area's
30 container companies for the past eight days.
It's no longer a case of wildcat strikes making news.
If a few days go by without a stoppage of some sort, then that's an event worthy of comment.
Desperate to reduce costs and keep their freight moving, cargo companies began to think
"outside the box", setting up new container depots inland where non-unionised men could work.
This provoked a furious response and the conflict came to head
in the autumn of 1972, when dockers picketed the new depots.
Shop Steward Vic Turner was among their leaders.
The picket was about
stopping the inland container ports doing our work.
But the men working inside called on the police to intervene.
Five weeks ago, these dockers come down here and said that this was their work.
This firm has been open three-and-a-half years.
Feelings here in the new look dockland or "containerland" as some people call it
are that a new chapter in the long history of British trade unionism may soon be written here.
As the picketing intensified, Vic Turner and four other
shop stewards were arrested and taken to Pentonville Prison.
Outside, an angry mob of dockers demanded their release
and called on the support of every worker in the country.
We are recommending that a complete withdrawal of labour
to commence at 9 o'clock tonight
until all proceedings are dropped
against dock workers protecting his living.
With support growing across the country, Britain was on the brink of shutdown.
It was going to turn into a national strike if
them men hadn't been released and the government of the day took it to
the wire and eventually, they could see what was going to happen and the next minute, the men were released.
Behind the scenes, an obscure act of Parliament was invoked
to speed their release and the men walked free to a heroes' reception.
This was a rare victory won in a 30-year fight to stop men being replaced by metal boxes.
But it was a war they were destined to lose.
One by one, London's docklands were closed.
London, King George, Albert,
Victoria, East India,
West India,
Tobacco,
Regent's,
Surrey,
St Katharine, Millwall.
It's like seeing your best friend die.
My last day...in 1984...
My last day.
My last time on the dock.
I woke up the next morning and...
..I looked at me hook behind the door and I thought,
you're redundant, that hook.
CHANTING
Liverpool's docks survived.
But they went through a painful transition to containerization.
In 1995, a dispute on overtime turned into Britain's last major dock strike.
This time, however, the dockers were not supported by their trade union
and Mersey Ports simply sacked them.
Everyone that was locked out,
that was it. For two-and-a-half years on a picket line and we never went back to work down there.
On that spring day in 1966, when the first container ship
arrived at our shores, there were 129,000 dockers in Britain.
30 years later, on the day the Liverpool dockers gave up their fight, just 11,000 remained.
The dockers may have gone from the docklands but the cargo hasn't.
Felixstowe moved over 27 million tonnes of cargo last year,
about 40% of Britain's total container freight.
The ships docking here today are so laden with boxes that they have to
be guided into port by specialists who know the local waters.
I'm a marine pilot
and my job is to bring the ships
either from the sea into port safely
or take them out from the berth to the pilot station.
These ships are so deep that ports around the world have had
to dredge channels to make estuaries big enough for them to come in.
Basically, we navigate in a ditch.
It's a man-made ditch, and we drive these things through a ditch.
Cheers! OK, Bob. Have a good one.
See you. Cheers.
This ship is one of more than 4,500 vessels carrying upwards
of 10 million containers around the globe each year.
As the number of boxes has increased,
shipping companies like Maersk have built bigger and bigger boats.
Boats that, in the last decade, have more than doubled in size,
to the delight of ship-spotters.
This is the Emma Maersk.
This is one of the largest container ships in the world
and as far as I know, it still is the largest ship.
If you imagine a 400-metre athletics track
stretched out longways, it'll give you some idea of the size and scale.
I like how many containers they have.
But the ships are now so big, they are reaching technical and physical limits.
A 5,000 TEU ship,
built to carry 5,000 20ft containers, won't fit through the Panama Canal.
The biggest container ships are more than twice that size
and there are plans for a new class of vessel almost double the size again.
The next major constraint might be the Straits Of Malacca off Singapore.
It's estimated that maybe a 22,000 TEU ship would be the maximum
that would fit through the Straits Of Malacca.
I think history has taught us that it's a very dangerous game
to predict how big container ships might get.
With so many boxes on board these ships,
their tiny 13-strong crews can have no idea what they contain.
We do not know, it's too much.
I mean, um...
if you make all the papers available for us, I mean,
we would not have time for reading it.
0-0-5. 0-0-5.
Each person working in the global container supply chain
concentrates solely on doing their job to move the box as quickly as possible to its next destination.
It's so efficient that this ship may be gone by tomorrow.
You bring in 700, 800 containers.
A few hours afterwards, you leave again.
Felixstowe receives shipping schedules from its customers just a few hours in advance.
Planners then work out where to dock the ships and which order to load and unload all the boxes.
It's a huge, logistical jigsaw puzzle.
Unsurprisingly, they have computerized assistance.
All the work sequencing is automated now so each piece of equipment has a computer screen in its cab.
The computer will look forwards.
It will decide which is the next best job for that
piece of machine and allocate that machine to a particular job.
What that does is it makes much more efficient use of our equipment, it means that nobody's delayed unduly
and that we can better allocate resources to the urgent jobs.
In the past, this work would have needed tens of thousands of men.
Today, the smooth running of the whole quayside operation is overseen by just one man.
I think on a good day, we could be talking about 7,000 boxes in a 24-hour period.
About a week of 40-44,000 boxes.
That's a lot of boxes.
It doesn't always go to plan.
The supervisor has been called out to a problem with one of the cranes.
It can be a difficult place to drive around because
you've got traffic coming from every angle, including above your head.
You have to just look absolutely everywhere all the time.
A crane sensor has warned that one of the containers it lifted from the last ship was overweight.
It means the crane now has to be tested to check it's safe to continue work.
But that could delay unloading by up to 20 minutes.
It doesn't seem like a lot, 20 minutes,
but when you're talking about a 14,000 TEU cargo ship, running that for 20 minutes costs a lot of money.
You know, I think about 30,000 an hour is about an average for something like that.
So if you put it in monetary terms...
Like they say time is money and down here, time is a lot of money.
We're doing a crane shuffle.
We're taking the crane which we have a potential problem on and we're just
moving it off the ship and we're going to bring on another two cranes.
So, instead of using 12 and 13 which you can just see moving off,
we'll use 10 and 11 instead.
Modern container ports work to such tight timetables that solving problems quickly is vital.
Each ship, crane and lorry is crucial
to keeping the global conveyor belt of container cargo moving.
It means any small problem has the potential to turn into a big one.
It just starts a kind of chain of delays which at times can be impossible to get out of.
We don't want a ship to sail with some cargo on it that should
have come off at Felixstowe and actually ends up having to go back to China or wherever it came from.
To see why this is so important, you only need to look a bit further up the supply chain.
Retailers like ASDA no longer have big depositories or shop storerooms.
Instead, they use shipping containers as mobile warehouses.
We very much have a supply chain that's about flow rather than
keeping stock in various different places.
Our focus here is on how accurately can we predict
what sales are going to be in the next few days to make sure
we have only the right amount of stock at each point of the chain.
This distribution centre is one of 26 used by ASDA
to keep its stock moving as quickly as possible around Britain.
The maximum length of time any one item would normally be kept here is two weeks.
Some of these products will stay for just a few days.
The shipping container is absolutely fundamental to this process.
It gives us speed, it gives us efficiency and it gives us security.
So dramatic is the step change in efficiency brought by the shipping container that it has
unleashed powerful economic forces,
accelerating world trade and helping ignite a modern consumer revolution.
In the days before containerization,
a small vessel, maybe a tenth the size
of an average container ship today, would have 200,000 separate items.
Just think for a minute about the dock workers
loading each one of those 200,000 separate items by hand.
Think of the volume of trade we have today. It's not conceivable
that we would have trade on this scale without the container.
It couldn't happen.
In the 1960s, freight costs often accounted for 30% of the price of foreign goods.
The shipping container reduced those costs to less than 1%.
It caused a boom in global trade and a revolution on the high street.
I can remember when you would go into a shop in Britain and there were
damn few products to buy, there wasn't much on the shelves.
When the container came in, the British diet was famously dull -
you couldn't buy garlic, people didn't drink fresh fruit juice.
Everyday households had very few consumer goods.
The television was a major luxury.
Few people had it and it was shared, like a swimming pool would be today.
You would want to go round and use your friend's.
The container has brought products that were once the preserve of the rich within the reach of the masses.
We sell something like 350,000 items.
You can pick off the shelf, probably, a quarter of a million of them.
Years ago, some of those items - bringing a rug from India or a piece of furniture from Brazil -
would have cost an enormous sum of money
and taken a long time to get here. Whereas today, they can be here
in five or six weeks and they can be here relatively cheaply.
Take a walk around your local department store
and you can instantly see the influence of the shipping container.
Amazing stuff. Incredibly good value.
In China, there are entire towns and cities that only make socks.
There's Sock Town in China,
and they have enormous factories with 20,000 employees each,
and they make socks.
And they make them quicker, cheaper than anyone else in the world.
The guy we know as Buzz Lightyear,
but he's also Buzz L'Eclair for the French market
and Karatekampfer Buzz Lightyear in Germany.
Karateka, Faz Karate, and he's even in Greek here.
I'm afraid my Greek isn't up to it, but he's for the full European
market here and you can imagine a 40ft container
absolutely jam packed with collectables from Toy Story.
All perfect standardized commodities that can be very easily packed into a container, you can get hundreds
and hundreds of these TVs into one container and they'll all arrive in good condition, ready to be sold on.
Containerization is so efficient that it costs less to ship goods to Britain from China than it does
to drive them up the motorway to the nearest town or city.
The economics of this are really incredible because the delivery cost
of shipping a flat-screen TV from halfway round the world from Asia to the UK
is less than the delivery cost of taking it from the store to your house in the UK.
The more products the shipping container has delivered
to our shores, the less visible the process of delivery has become.
Because most container ports are outside our main towns and cities,
these huge ships slide in and out of our shores without most of us ever noticing them.
Even if we did, it's hard to appreciate the volume
and variety of goods being delivered
when they are concealed in anonymous steel boxes.
It's changed our relationship with the sea
because the cargo is no longer seen, we just don't see what comes and goes
by sea and how important sea transport is to Britain.
Three years ago, when the container ship Napoli was beached off
the coast of Devon, we got the chance to take a rare peak inside the boxes.
With the storms and the weather, containers were thrown
onto the shore, were broken up and contents were spilled.
People began to see that and all of these people came rushing down
and as there was more of it shown on television, yet more people rushed down to help themselves.
REPORTER: All day it's been a cross between Whisky Galore
and the January sales.
Locals ignoring the listing Napoli in the bay
to fill up with whatever they could find.
Most plan to sell it on the internet,
from Lyme Bay straight to eBay.
This man found a brand-new BMW motorbike among the wreckage and he wasn't the only one.
It took about eight, ten of us to lift each one out and as each one
came out we put the front wheels on
and then they were taken over the cliffs and away.
The pictures beamed around the world sparked fierce debate
over the morality of the modern-day wreckers,
but also wonderment at the bizarre array of products contained within the boxes.
It really did bring home to people just what is carried
in these anonymous containers on these great big anonymous ships.
Shipping containers are sealed after packing.
Once en-route, the only way to find out what's inside the box is by referring to its unique code.
Every container in the world has one and it is used as a reference by the shipping company,
the sender and the customer, so that boxes don't get lost or mixed up.
This code can also be used to find out what's inside the box.
Although most of the time, it's not necessary
for the people moving it to know, unless the cargo is hazardous.
The anonymity of the shipping container is at the heart of its efficiency.
But it can cause problems, too, for the contents aren't always what they claim to be.
We believe criminals see containers as an excellent way of smuggling because of the high volumes.
They all look the same and it's not too difficult
to bring them through the port
without the smuggled goods being recognised.
The UK Border Agency has the job of policing the boxes.
With more than 40,000 containers travelling through a port
like Felixstowe at any one time, they can't check them all.
Unfortunately, all containers tend to look the same.
Apart from being a different colour, they all look the same so there's nothing you can do visually
from the outside of a container.
So we have to use our profiles, our knowledge of smuggling routes and risks and we use intelligence
and information that comes to us in order to select the relevant containers for scan and examination.
Giant X-ray machines are used to monitor suspect containers.
We're trying to detect Class A drugs and we're trying to detect
cigarettes and tobacco products
and, particularly, counterfeit goods coming very much
from the Far East and we find many counterfeit goods coming in from the Far East to this port.
Sometimes, the X-ray images immediately show that the box contains things it shouldn't.
But smugglers often try to disguise their cargo so officers
are trained to spot tell-tale signs and send suspicious containers to be checked the old-fashioned way.
You may get a few rows of legitimate goods and then it's cigarettes, counterfeit goods, drugs, whatever.
But also, we find goods that may be smuggled in the floor
or in the ceiling of the container and we find goods that are actually hidden within a product itself.
As an example, we had one just a couple of weeks ago
in Felixstowe and it was some electric fans
and the cigarettes were inside the fans themselves.
Protecting the shipping-container supply chain is vital because we are so utterly reliant on it.
Not only do containers deliver many of the consumer products we now take
for granted, they also transport the parts needed to make them.
In modern manufacturing, people talk about supply chain.
And the supply chain is a chain of containers going from one place to another.
Many factories are now completely dependent on the shipping container.
Its speed and reliability have given rise to an innovation which has transformed manufacturing -
just-in-time production.
Developed by Japanese car manufacturer Toyota,
this philosophy has now been widely adopted around the world.
Instead of stockpiling components on production lines until they were needed,
Toyota developed a system whereby each car part was made and supplied just in time for it to be fitted.
This reduced factory floor space, released capital previously
tied up in components and dramatically cut waste
on the production line.
The container added another powerful dimension...
It used to be that you had car makers with all their component manufacturers under one roof.
With containerization, it wasn't necessary to do that any more. They were able to break this process up.
Some things they make close to their factory, some far away,
some things they can make across the ocean and they can bring all the pieces together
on a fairly reliably schedule to make the finished vehicle.
Today, shipping containers carry many more unfinished goods than finished ones.
Each part of a product can be made in the cheapest or best place, then shuttled across the sea
to the next factory and the next one until complete.
Complex electronic goods are often made in a production line spanning five or more different countries.
Even seemingly simple products have gone global.
# Barbie, you're beautiful... #
Barbie used to be made in one place.
But with the container, Barbie was broken down into components -
you had pigments, you had plastics,
you had hair,
you had clothing.
All of these things could be made in different countries,
wherever they could be made most cheaply,
and then all shipped to one location for final manufacturing.
This ended up being China. So even Barbie has her own supply chain.
The container has played its part in a 50-year overhaul of global industry.
A revolution that has seen many of the world's factories
moving en masse from Europe and America to Asia.
When the first container ship arrived in 1960s Britain,
almost half of the country's workforce was employed in manufacturing.
Today, it's less than 15%.
Manufacturing workers have been pretty serious losers.
Nobody thought of this when the container came, but the people who worked
in all of those factories, they're sort of the secret losers,
they simply had to go away and find a new world.
In the years since the arrival of the container,
Britain's industrial heartlands have changed beyond recognition.
It's difficult to believe today but 50 years ago,
Manchester was the world leader in the manufacture of raincoats.
The cotton would have been woven in Lancashire,
brought to Manchester, rubberized,
made up into coats, and they would have been exported
all over the world as the very best cotton you could buy.
REPORTER: Although machines are used to produce the vast amounts of cloth needed each year,
what eventually appears depends very largely on the skill of those people who can sew
one piece of cloth to another to produce anything from a ball gown to a balaclava.
Raincoat factories employed more than 70,000 people in the North West of England.
Textiles was the industry in this area and all the people
who were rich and famous were all raincoat manufacturers.
And at the time, there were hundreds of them.
The step-change in costs brought by the shipping container made it possible for factories in
the Far East to manufacture goods for markets in the developed world for the first time.
Their cheaper labour costs gave them an immediate advantage over their British competitors.
In the early years of containerization,
governments protected British industry by levying
heavy duties on foreign imports, but when Margaret Thatcher came to power, she pursued a new policy.
When she came in, she took import duty off so that imports could come in without any duty on,
encouraged imports and put the VAT up which squeezed the retailers to wanting to look further afield.
Britain's textile houses had once been powerful economic players.
But now the market was flooded with cheap foreign imports, retailers held the trump cards.
They could afford to cut prices AND take a higher profit margin at the same time.
When I started, the retailers were working on doubling up,
so if I sold something at £9, it would be £19.99.
Now something at £9 from China might be £130.
They've just taken the view of buying ever cheaper and selling ever dearer.
Manchester's coat-makers simply couldn't compete in the new containerized world.
Some relocated to Asia, taking their skills and machines with them.
Others simply went out of business.
We've probably got just less than 70 people now
and I think we're the very last in the area doing what we do.
And I think we've survived on a little bit of determination and a little bit of luck over the years.
To keep going has been very difficult.
Many British car, motorbike and electrical manufacturers have suffered similar fates.
With fewer goods going out than ever before, the shipping container has contributed to Britain's biggest
industrial trade deficit since records began.
The UK now has an import-led economy.
Virtually all of the containers that we're discharging
that come into the country are coming in laden with goods.
Of those going out, something like a half are going out empty.
Our biggest single export through here is fresh air.
Through four decades of containerization, Britain changed
from a nation of manufacturers to a nation of office workers.
Today, our modern service economy is headquartered on the site of London's once famous docks.
This redevelopment swept away years of decay and helped London become
one of the world's financial centres, creating tens of thousands of new well-paid jobs.
If you know where to look, you can even find a few of the old dockers among the bankers.
But they're a dying breed.
As progress moved on, the only thing that changed was the cost of the land
so in other words, my children can't afford to buy it.
So when they got married, they had to move out.
A lot of the people that I grew up with have
either died or moved on, their families have certainly moved on.
Liverpool has clung onto its port, but it too has been changed by the container.
Well, you can see the port is still busy,
the port is still doing a lot of business, but it's containers now.
Before, there was loads of character, loads of people and you just don't
see them any more, it's like a ghost road compared to how it was.
The changes have left visible scars on Liverpool's Dock Road.
Over here is the Sandon Lion,
and at this time of the day, it would be heaving.
It used to do really good business.
Well, I hope you don't fancy a cup of tea.
I think this cafe's closed as well.
Few here celebrate the invention of the shipping container.
I know you can't stop progress, but it depends on your perception of progress.
From a capitalist's point of view, containerization,
because he can make more money, is progress.
But to the working class where you lose your job,
your livelihood and not much prospects of anything else,
it isn't progress, is it?
You've taken a backward step.
But not all on the Mersey believe that the metal boxes have wrecked the area.
When you were in the port of Liverpool in the '80s, you couldn't
see the future as being as bright as what it was in the 1960s.
But in time, those areas that were previously handling general cargo
that at one point became redundant
because the cargo had moved into containers and moved to the South
have actually now turned into other berths handling other cargos.
They've given the port of Liverpool an even brighter future.
I've got to admit, it's got to be a good invention.
It's done away with a lot of work but they're carrying more cargo,
aren't they? Than what when they had the general cargo.
After years of decline, Liverpool's port is growing again.
Its owners are investing in a new container terminal that they hope
will help win back business from the world's biggest shipping lines.
We have the permission to do it, the business case is now being drawn up for it and I would hope that
within the next three or four years, we'll see the terminal in operation so that we can see ships
coming in from China and the Far East now coming back in to their traditional port, Liverpool.
The Port of Felixstowe is investing too so it can handle more of the world's biggest ships.
Both in Felixstowe and in the UK as a whole, we only have a limited
number of berths that can accommodate these bigger ships.
As more and more of these ships come on stream, we're going to need bigger facilities to ensure the UK
retains its status as a main line call for the big intercontinental container ships.
Last year, the global recession caused the first fall
in world trade since the invention of the shipping container.
But the box is weathering the storm.
Once again, trade routes are beginning to thrive
and the containers are moving, supplying the lifeblood of a modern economy.
There are millions of containers out there travelling around the world.
Nobody even knows the exact number, there are so many of them.
I don't think we could do without the container for more than about a day.
It's progress, you can't stop progress.
That's it.
Day and night,
week after week, the lorries load, the cranes heave
and the ships come and go.
The metal box is always on the move.
And we move with it.
The container has delivered Britain into the modern consumer society.
Because of it, our world seems smaller and our aspirations are ever greater.
The box has changed our lives for ever.
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