16 NOVEMBER 1951, Page 7

The psychology of dockers is something by itself. Workers in

no other industry display quite the same characteristics. In the Royal Victoria Dock in London, it appears, a new grain elevator, costing £150,000, is standing idle because the dockers think it works too fast and its operation may throw some of them out of employment. Notylong ago there was the same opposition to the mechanisation of coal-mines, but that would seem to have largely died down. If, at a time when an increase of efficiency in every sphere of the national life is imperative, workers are to regard machinery in the same way as the hand- weavers in Lancashire did a hundred and fifty years ago, hope for industrial recovery may as well be written off.