George Town, 12 June — The Marine Police say three hundred and twelve people were found before dawn on Saturday in a single motorised tongkang midway in the North Channel, headed for Weld Quay under a low awning with the fumes caught under it. Several men were down when the launches came alongside. The official note calls the smugglers’ methods reckless. The note does not say who pays for the recklessness when it is worked into the head charge by the legal operators and into delay by the Harbour Board.
Dawn arithmetic
The legal ferry posts a limit and charges Str$0.06 a head for the short run to the Beach Street end, and the operators have asked since April to lift it to Str$0.08, citing life‑belts and lamps. The Board has deferred the request twice. At Sia Boey yesterday a foreman shut the gate on eight men when the Butterworth lorry missed the first ferry under police eyes. The tongkang on Saturday carried more than two boats’ worth and no tickets were sold. What looks like a few cents on paper becomes a half‑empty gang and a pour pushed off a day.
The Board’s emergency committee met yesterday morning on Light Street. The chairman, Mr Colin F. McEwan, turned down a third attempt at a temporary relaxation of the Mainland Ferries (Licensing) Rules, and resolved to request the Police to continue dawn sweeps for unlicensed craft off the Butterworth Jetty approaches. In the room and unappeased sat Mr Ong Siew Teik of Eastern Consolidated Builders, who holds the fender repairs at Swettenham Pier and the Sia Boey shed’s new roof. Between them is a plain risk: if the early ferries are held or the small boats kept off, Ong’s crews drift into overtime and the Str$15 and Str$25 a day penalties on the shed and pier works.
Who holds the Channel
At the Combine’s chalked board by Berth 5 yesterday a small petrol boat that usually loads hands for the market was struck out for the early tide after a dawn boarding the day before, and its skipper, who works on cash trips and borrowed fuel, watched a Combine lighter take his slot. He said his concrete job at Sia Boey would go short by a line of men, and the foreman indeed turned a dozen away by seven o’clock. One rule drives the morning: when the Police board a crowded boat at first light, the insurers mark the craft and the clerk who allots the berths takes the hint. The Combine says higher costs and more gear must be passed through to the fare or the boats will tie up. Independents say the pass‑through is a tax in another coat and that the boarding reports have become the tariff’s lever.
It is not sentimental to observe who loses a berth when the Board tightens. Independents outside the Combine, who live on cash trips before dawn and carry both sacks and men, are the first to be boarded and fined. Licensed recruiters who lodged their bonds after the slump, and who complain of brokers who run unbadged gangs through the mangroves, might cheer the sweeps. A dock‑pass pinned to a shirt is a cost as real as a tin of petrol. In private, the recruiters want the cost on their rivals; in public, it is safety.
The chair’s case is neat. He says the Board can neither condone law‑breaking nor substitute itself for the ferry firms; that any relaxation underwrites recklessness; that the Combine is answerable for standards, and standards cost. He circulates a typed table to members showing two capsizes and a man missing since January, and he has the Police logs to back him. He does not circulate the tender books where a fortnight’s delay brings a penalty clause down like a portcullis.
A crackdown will make lawful what the Combine could not secure at the table: a rise in the head price.
Mr Ong, who has reason to fear a fortnight, left the room on a formula. He told this paper he never directed how a man crossed the Channel and that he would comply with whatever the Board required and adjust schedules accordingly. Adjust to what, he did not say; only that his supervisors were keeping up.
My contracts are proceeding on programme. If the Board alters ferry arrangements, we will price the new conditions and comply. I do not instruct men on their movements before dawn.
He says less than he knows and more than suits the facts. A man on his Beach Street steps on Monday, red mud to the ankle, said the pier fender crews were already short two lines of hands because the first ferry did not clear under police observation until twelve minutes to five. Twelve minutes may seem like nothing on paper; it puts a pour off by a day if the concrete goes to waste.
Tender margins
The 1933–34 tenders that put Mr Ong’s firm on the pier fenders and the market shed were cut when tin was poor and rubber worse. The Board borrowed cheaply and wrote in the usual penalties: Str$15 for a day’s delay on the shed, Str$25 on the pier. None of this is ruinous if ferries run to clock and the Combine keeps its tariffs flat. The fear in Beach Street is that every hearing dressed as safety will smuggle a price rise into the head of every man stepping off the ferry and into the last line of every contract.
There is a case for asking the Board to hold the line on licences for a month, issue temporary tickets for small craft with capped heads at the ferry’s posted limit, and turn the policemen’s lanterns onto overloading, not onto the existence of the boat. A temporary ticket prints no magic money; it moves a cost from the backstairs to an office window and keeps the Combine from harvesting a price the market would not bear unaided. The free‑port lives on low friction more than on sermons about order.
Chartered Bank, which half‑funds the pier works through a bill line, is already marking its margins. A manager there spoke of 'harbour risks' in the guarded way that means insurance premia and Board fees. If a hearing this month ends in Str$0.02 more per head for the ferry and a stricter sweep on unlicensed boats, the bank will allow for it on Beach Street the day after.
Surcharges at the quay
Eastern & Straits Mutual says the Police logs are a 'central datum' in its quarter‑to‑quarter schedule. That phrase covers a change already felt. A lighterman with a small petrol engine says his premium is up by Str$0.50 for the half‑year and that his berthmaster warned him off after the Combine meeting. He is an unquoted man; his receipts are small. The Combine will say he is a menace. The Board says the Police must board. Everyone agrees three hundred and twelve is mad. Between the madness and the meeting sits a number on a chalkboard by the ferry gate.
They call to ask if the launch is waiting, and Butterworth says the first ferry will be held. The men say the queue is long and the brokers say the tide is good. It is dangerous when they pack them in, and yet if there is no work they cannot eat. The rules keep order, but if you shut the gates people find another gate.
A Board alarmist will call this a plea for chaos. It is nothing of the sort. It is the life of a channel town where a legal crossing at Str$0.06 still conjures a shadow trip that charges the same and pays no berth, until a policeman boards and then everyone pays more. The Board’s emergency powers are meant to steady the quay, not to assist the Combine in turning a police report into a tariff.
Early tide economics
At the corrugated shed by Weld Quay on Monday, a constable stood in the shade while a pair of lightermen counted notes by a petrol tin and a coil of rope. Fuel is steady‑to‑soft; timber is down a little on last month. A man in that line who does not belong to the Combine survives on the 4 a.m. tide and a foreman’s trust. The dawn sweep takes both. The Combine’s berthmaster shrugs and says safety. The foreman waits one more day and tells a mason his pour is off.
The Combine charges the head money by another name. Give temporary tickets to the small boats and cap the heads to what the ferry carries; that will drain the brokers in a week.
Mr Lim married into a Chew Jetty family and speaks the waterfront’s bookkeeping without a ledger. He is wrong about the speed — nothing drains in a week — but right about the direction. Cap the heads, permit the boats, and the illicit brokers lose their margin because a legal seat at Str$0.06 becomes certain. Keep the sweeps and raise the posted fare and the illicit brokers will simply load the next tongkang to the awning again, now with one more cost to dodge.
Mr McEwan’s committee fears that a temporary ticket is a moral hazard. The hazard lies elsewhere. The Combine, whose recognition is a thirty‑year‑old convenience at the quays, grows fond of emergencies that justify new fixed charges. A Board which prides itself on balanced ledgers can serve that habit by accident. There is courage of another sort in telling the ferry firms that their Str$0.02 can wait, that the Police will board for heads and fumes, and that the small petrol boats, inspected and numbered for a month, will have their pass so long as they hold to the posted capacity.
A ratepayers’ petition asking the Board to disclose unit rates and contingency lines on the pier and market shed sits on a clerk’s desk in Light Street. It grew from rancour at favouritism; it now carries a fear that dock policy is writing profit into the wrong corners of the waterfront. Disclosure would not clean the Channel. It would tell the public where the Str$15 and Str$25 per day in penalties really fall when ferries idle in police sight.
There is talk of a test case the Police would like to bring against a Butterworth broker under the labour ordinance. One case will not move three hundred men at dawn. A posted limit on heads, enforced without fear or favour; a temporary month’s permit for small petrol craft to carry workers to the pier and to Sia Boey at the legal capacity; a refusal to lift the ferry head fare until the insurers bring their surcharge down again — this is the dull programme that keeps concrete from setting in the mixer and keeps a man from fainting under an awning.
The Board will meet again under the emergency rubric before the month is out. The Police will go on launching at Butterworth while the tide runs. At Beach Street, Mr Ong will go on adjusting to conditions and saying he does not order the dawn. At the switchboard the light for Butterworth will go up when the launches leave the shed, and it will go down when the ferry leaves the jetty.
When the horn blows and they move, the switchboard quiets; when the launch turns them back, the lights stay lit to noon.
By late afternoon the Board clerk had pinned a notice to the Light Street board fixing the emergency committee for Tuesday, 19 June, at three o’clock, with ferry head charges and temporary tickets on the agenda. If the committee holds its line on fares and authorises a month of inspected small‑boat passes, the pier pour can resume on Wednesday; if it does not, the penalties start to click on the shed and the fender crews keep waiting at the gate.