Port Chicago 1944 – A Black and White Situation: The Naval Disaster

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Military history, Racial politics, Regional History, Society & Culture

Progressive advocates and activists for a more just and equal society in the US view the Port Chicago❈ naval disaster and mutiny in July 1944 as a crucible for the cause of civil rights. African-American seamen, the majority still in their teens, revolted against the entrenched discriminatory practices they encountered in the Navy during WWII, and although vilified and punished by White authority at the time, their stand was to be a key factor in the eventual decision to abolish segregation in the US armed forces[1].

Devastation on the PC pier after the explosion

The catalyst for the subsequent ‘mutiny’ (as the Navy and White society generally characterised it – see also the follow up blog) was a catastrophic series of explosions whilst two naval carrier vessels were being loaded at the naval dock with ammunition for transportation to the Pacific theatre of war. The mega-blast killed 320 sailors and civilians (the bulk of the sailors were African-Americans), plus a further 390 personnel were injured❧. It was the worst home front disaster of WWII (the cost included nearly $9.9m worth of damage to dock, ships and buildings). The fireball engulfing the Port could be viewed from miles away, triggering a quake felt as far away as Boulder City, Nevada. Such was the force of the explosion that one 300lb chunk of steel was ‘cannonballed’ a distance of 1.5 miles, landing in the main street of the Port township[2].

The disproportionate toll of African-American enlisted men in the disaster was the result of the Navy assigning them to the most menial, labouring jobs as stevedores, basically “pack mules” loading the munitions. The Navy made casual racist assumptions about their ‘limited’ vocational capacity, despite the fact that at the Navy boot camp the black sailors had each completed specific training for one or other of the naval rating occupations[3].

Navy double standards
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the Navy treated of the two groups of seamen involved markedly differently – the White officers and sailors were given a 30-day “survivor’s leave”, whereas all the Black sailors (despite being severely shaken and traumatised by the incident) were denied the leave – despite it being standard procedure in such instances. This proved a very sore point for the African-Americans at Port Chicago. African-American seamen enlisted in the US Navy, aside from motives of patriotism, for the promise of recognition as full American citizens – a chance to escape the South’s Jim Crow segregation policies or the North’s institutionalised “second citizenship”[4]. Unfortunately what they found, and Port Chicago was no exception to elsewhere in the military, was that they were still segregated and marginalised, despite the fact they were serving in the defence of their country.

Adding insult to injury: Compensation for African-American victims watered down
That the loss of Black lives in the Port Chicago catastrophe was of diminished importance in American society at the time was even more starkly underlined in the subject of restitution. The Navy asked for $5,000 to be paid to each of the families of the 203 dead African-American sailors. Extraordinarily, after a vigorous and forthright protest from Mississippi Democrat representative, John Rankin (a White Supremacist sympathiser) that the sum be reduced to $2,000, Congress caved in to his pressure and awarded the families $3,000 each[5] … a brazenly unequivocal acknowledgement from the authorities that Black lives in America at the time were not worth as much as White ones!

The Naval Board of Inquiry
The Inquiry into the explosion would give the surviving Black seamen (and the victims’ families) more cause for grievance. The report never established the cause of the disaster❖, but implied that an error by the enlisted men may have led to the explosions. As for the white officers and the base commander, they were all absolved of any blame for what happened[6]. The Naval Board effectively ‘white-washed’ the whole episode, choosing not to cast a critical eye over the glaring pre-conditions that contributed to the disaster. Both training and safety was lax at Port Chicago Naval Magazine. Deeply significantly, the Black assigned stevedores were not given instruction in ammunition loading. Training deficiencies were in fact common at Port Chicago – the White loading officers themselves had only minimal training in supervising enlisted personnel and in handling munitions. As well, the Port’s commander Captain Merrill Kinne himself had no training in the loading of munitions and very little experience in handling them[7].

Diagram of pier & the two cargo carriers prior to the explosion

Sowing the seeds of catastrophe
Safety requirements were not observed and unsafe practices abounded: there was a complacency about the maintenance of key operational equipment; safety regulations were not widely distributed for the staff to familiarise themselves with. The practice at Port Chicago was to force the stevedores, working around-the-clock, to load the explosive cargos[8] at a pace that would imperil safety – the rate was set at 10 short tons per hatch every hour (higher than commercial stevedores✾). Facility commander Kinne encouraged a climate of competitiveness between the different crews (which they called ‘divisions’) by keeping a tally of each crew’s hourly tonnage on a chalkboard … leading to the junior officers surreptitiously laying bets on which crew would win the “speed loading contests”[9].

PostScript: Was the explosion a nuclear detonation?
In the early 1980s investigative journalist Peter Vogel postulated the hypothesis that the explosion at Port Chicago was likely to have been a nuclear one. Vogel noted the continued secrecy surrounding the naval base site and pointed to the specific characteristics of the fireball (as described by eyewitness accounts) – a “brilliant flash of white” and the mushrooming effect of the explosion’s dispersion (ie, a Wilson condensation cloud). Vogel also asserted that the force of the actual blast was greater than the reported 1,780 tons of high explosives on board the two Liberty carriers (E.A. Bryan and Quinault)[10].

Whilst Vogel’s theory would hold obvious appeal for conspiracy theorists, it has been not gained traction among historians. Its detractors, especially nuclear historians Badash and Hewlett, point to Vogel’s lack of hard evidence to support his claim, and his inability to explain why the US Government would want to detonate a nuclear device on populated home soil. Badash and Hewlett have noted in particular the absence of any residual radioactivity and resultant harm to the local community – which suggests that only conventional weaponry was involved[11].

______________________________________________________________________
❈ the town of Port Chicago, now called Concord, is located about 30 miles north of San Francisco on the Sacramento River
❧ toll for Black Navy servicemen: 203 dead, 233 injured – representing 15% of all African-American casualties for the entire war
❖ it was a bad time for the Navy, PR wise. Just two months prior to the Port Chicago disaster, another calamitous explosion at West Loch (Pearl Harbour) resulted in the death of 163 seamen and hundreds injured … and like Port Chicago the disaster remained unexplained
✾ the quota set on the main base at Mare Island for instance was only 8.7

[1] President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order officially desegregating the American armed forced, United States of America Congressional Record (106th Congress), Vol 146-Part 4 (April 3, 2000 to April 25, 2000)
[2] 430 miles to the south, ‘Port Chicago Mutiny (1944)’, www.blackpast.org; ‘Port Chicago disaster’, Wikipedia, http://Wikipedia.en.m.wikipedia.org; ‘A Chronology of African American Military Service. From WWI through WWII.’ (U.S. Army, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. History), www.redstone.army.mil/history/integrate/chron36.htm
[3] RL Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny: The Story of the Largest Mass Mutiny Trial in U.S. Naval History, (1989)
[4] ibid.
[5] M Moorehead, ‘The Port a Chicago Mutiny’, (Workers World), Feb 1995, www.hartford-hwp.com
[6] Allen, op.cit.
[7] ibid.
[8] The White officers used wilful deception to gain acquiescence, lying to the Black loaders as to the inherent dangers of the work – telling them the ammunition was not live which was catastrophically wrong, I Thompson, ‘Mare Island mutiny court-martial changed Navy racial policies, Daily Republic (Solano County), 23-Feb-2014, www.dailyrepublic.com
[9] Allen, loc.cit.
[10] Vogel, P (1982). THE LAST WAVE FROM PORT CHICAGO. The Black Scholar, 13(2/3), 30-47. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41066881
[11] L Badash & RG Hewlett, cited in ‘Port Chicago disaster’, Wikipedia, op.cit.

Port Chicago 1944 – A Black and White Situation: The Naval Mutiny and its Ramifications

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Military history, Racial politics, Retailing history, Society & Culture
San Francisco Bay

On 17th July 1944 a catastrophically massive explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California resulted in the loss of 320 lives, the majority African-American sailors. Less than four weeks after the worst wartime disaster on American home soil, the Navy, without regard for the sensitivity of the situation, instructed the surviving Black sailors to resume loading munitions onto the USS Sangay standing at the dock. 258 of them refused, contending that the conditions at the dock being still unsafe, and commenced a work stoppage. Threatened with court-martial (and a possible death penalty) 208 of the sailors eventually backed down. The navy authorities subsequently took punitive measures against these seamen (forfeiture of pay, pension entitlements curtailed) and they were eventually returned to service elsewhere[1].

The remaining 50 were charged by the Navy with mutiny. The defence counsel and the African-American men themselves denied this charge all through the proceedings, arguing that at no time were they attempting to seize control from the frontline commanders or overthrow the authority of the Navy (as argued by the prosecution team), but were refusing to work in what was clearly an unsafe environment, a protest against their being used as “guinea pigs”[2]. As Robert Allen explained, the mutiny charge was levelled against the defendants because the rightful description of what they were doing, striking against deleterious working conditions, only applied to the civilian sphere[3].

The trial of the “Port Chicago 50”
A court-martial was arraigned to be held on the Navy’s administrative facility at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The conduct of the trial was a travesty of equality before the law for the African-American servicemen involved … the accused black sailors were ridiculed as ‘primitive’ in their intellectual abilities, and “unreliable, emotional, lack(ing) capacity to understand or remember orders or instructions” (as the official ‘Finding of Facts’ stated[4]. The court hearings disintegrated into a shambles at times, eg, the judge fell asleep during the testimonies. After a six-week trial and a deliberation of only 60 minutes, a verdict was reached with unseemly haste – all 50 of the accused were found guilty of mutiny. The 50 convicted seamen were sentenced to between eight and 15 years imprisonment with hard labour as well as being on the receiving end of dishonourable discharges from the Navy[5].

Treasure Island court-martial site

One keen observer who attended the day-to-day court proceedings was NAACP❈’s Thurgood Marshall (later to become the first African-American judge on the US Supreme Court). Marshall was publicly critical of the trial, announcing: “This is not 50 men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy towards Negros. Negroes in the Navy don’t mind loading ammunition. They just want to know why they are the only ones doing the loading!”[6]. In 1945 the NAACP produced a pamphlet entitled ‘Mutiny? The Real Story of How the Navy Branded 50 Fear-shocked Sailors as Mutineers’. Marshall and the NAACP focussed the issue very squarely on the racial dimension … the treatment of the convicted men was symptomatic of a broader pattern of discrimination by the Navy against African-Americans – by mid-1943 there were 100,000 Black men serving in the Navy, but not a single Black officer among them[7]. Marshall organised an appeal on behalf of the 50 prisoners, however in June 1945 the original verdict was reaffirmed by the naval authorities.

Aftermath and consequences of the mutiny trial
The Port Chicago mutiny had an immediate punitive outcome for the 50 Black sailors who were prosecuted, but in the long run it was a Pyrrhic victory for scientific (sic) racists and White supremacists (covert and overt) both inside and outside the military. The whole episode served in the long run to raise national consciousness about practices of racial discrimination within the US military forces. And it was to prove a catalyst and inspiration for the postwar Civil Rights movement[8]. For the Navy the ramifications of Port Chicago made itself felt in short time. By the end of the World War the Navy had, in piecemeal fashion, initiated its own reforms of discriminatory practices, anticipating President Truman’s official decreeing of desegregation of the American armed forces – which did not come into law until 1948. With the world war over the Navy found it untenable to justify the continuing incarceration of the Port Chicago 50 … in January 1946 all of the men were released and assigned to other details overseas. Significantly though, none received pardons for their ‘crimes’, the convictions remained on the books[9].

A dangerous job – for White servicemen!

The Port Chicago episode – a closed book reopened?
As Erika Doss has noted, “for decades the full story of the Port Chicago disaster of July 1944 was declared “classified” information and rendered virtually absent from historical narratives of the “good war”, as patriotic Americans like to call WWII[10]. The egregious treatment of African-American seamen remained an inconvenient chapter in America’s war history, one best forgotten (Port Chicago’s subsequent name change seems intended to support this objective of burying the thorny facts of the episode).

By the 1990s the whole shameful business had started to become more openly addressed … in 1994 a memorial to the Port Chicago 50 was created on the former base’s site. But in the same year these good intentions were turned on their head by a fresh Navy inquiry which found (unbelievably) that “race was not a factor” in the 1944 court case – a finding that would not be out-of-place in the annals of the “Flat Earth Society”!

Port Chicago Naval Magazine

(Photo: National Park Service)

A number of the convicted African-Americans then still alive agitated for a just resolution, a reversal of the wrongs perpetrated against them. One of “the 50”, Freddie Meeks was talked into requesting a pardon which was finally granted in 1999 by President Clinton[11]. However five others including Joe Small refused to request the same, steadfastly insisting that as they had committed no criminal act, they was no question of seeking a pardon.

PostScript: High hopes for justice with Obama
The continued denial of justice for the Port Chicago 50 led it to become a cause célèbre in the US. This remains the case in 2017 despite the fact that all of the convicted African-American sailors are now dead. Their relatives were among those calling on the Black president, Barack Obama, to exonerate “the 50” and overturn their verdicts. Disappointingly, Obama’s outgoing powers of presidential pardon, recently enacted, did not include any of the Port Chicago 50 in its number – though this was more to do with the Obama administration’s inability to find a legal mechanism to make this a reality, rather than any lack of will on the part of the president[12].

﹌﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹋﹌﹋﹌﹌
❈ National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

[1] ‘Port Chicago mutiny’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org
[2] Joe Small, one of the survivors of the disaster and labelled as a ‘ringleader’ by the Navy, summed up the position taken by the 50 defendants,
“(we) weren’t trying to shirk work. But to go back to work under the same conditions, with no improvements, no change, the same group of officers…we thought there was a better alternative”, E Doss, “Commemorating the Port Chicago Naval Magazine Disaster of 1944: Remembering the Racial Injustices of the ‘Good War’ in Contemporary America’, American Studies Journal, Number 59 (2015), www.asjournal.org
[3] B Bergman, “War, ‘mutiny’ and civil rights: Remembering Port Chicago”, Berkeley News, 10-Jul-2014, www.berkeley.edu
[4] A Gustafson, ‘The Port Chicago Disaster: Race and the Navy in World War II’, (Turnstile Tours), 29-Aug-2014, www.turnstiletours.com
[5] Bergman, loc.cit.
[6] Marshall, quoted in NA Hamilton, ‘Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States’, (2002)
[7] Doss, loc.cit.
[8] ibid.
[9] US Secretary of the Navy James V Forrestal and Admiral Ernest King, working together, were instrumental in getting the wheels of integration in the Navy going forward, S Sundin, ‘Port Chicago – Desegregation of the US Navy’, (Sarah’s Blog), 28-Jul-2014, www.sarahsundin.com
[10] Doss, op.cit.
[11] C Nolte, ‘Clinton Pardons Wartime ‘Mutineer’ / Port Chicago black sailor of 50 in infamous case’, (SFGate), 24-Dec-1999, wwwsfgate.com
[12] ‘Full list: Obama pardons these 78 people, shortens 153 prisoners’ sentences’, (Pix 11), 19-Dec-2016, www.pix11.com

John Clarke, A Satirist for All (Australian) Seasons: To Daggdom and Beyond

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Biographical, Cinema, Media & Communications, Performing arts, Popular Culture, Society & Culture, Sport

John Clarke: Trail-blazing Parodist, Lodestar, Daggstar

John Morrison Clarke died, most unexpectedly, in the Victorian wilderness a day-and-a-half ago. An ordinary looking man with an ordinary (unremarkable and yet distinctive) voice, but an ‘Everyman’ with a towering gift for communicating parody and travesty with coruscating clarity!

John Clarke, born and raised in Palmerston North, New Zealand, but domicile in Melbourne, Australia, for the last 40 years, was a uniquely talented satirist, TV comedian, comic writer and actor. The word ‘genius’ gets carelessly bandied around way too much these days, but in appraising the oeuvre of Mr John Clarke it finds a true home.

Daggstar completely out of the box

Whilst in New Zealand Clarke developed and refined the character of Fred Dagg, a stereotypical, blunt-speaking farmer from the North Island, with long straggly hair and perpetually clad in a black singlet and gumboots. Fred Dagg got Clark’s idiosyncratic brand of humour into the spotlight of New Zealand television. By 1977 Clark had outgrown both NZ and (so it seemed) Fred Dagg and moved to the bigger canvas of Australia❈. Clarke wasn’t however quite done with Fred Dagg – in Australia Fred resurfaced as a real estate ‘expert’ with his guide for would-be home buyers providing the “good oil” on avoiding the pitfalls inherent in the spiel of property agents – as the following “bullshit-busting” sampler of his trenchant wit testifies:

• a “cottage” is a caravan with the wheels taken off

• “genuine reason for selling” means the house is for sale

• “rarely can we offer” means the house is for sale

• “superbly presented delightful charmer” doesn’t mean anything really, but it’s probably still for sale!

• “privacy, taste, charm, space, freedom, quiet, away from it all location in much sought-after cul-de-sac situation” means that it’s not only built down a hole, it’s built at the very far end of the hole

• “a panoramic, breathtaking, or magnificent view” is an indication that the house has windows, and if the view is “unique”, there’s probably only one window

Fred Dagg AKA John Clarke was no admirer of the realty and property game and the proclivity of estate agents to be “fast and loose with the truth”, and he gave us the following memorable job description of what they really do:

“The function of the agent basically is to add to the price of the article without actually producing anything” (gold!)

(and how to recognise an actual estate agent when you see one)
“If you’ve got gold teeth and laugh-lines around your pockets, you’re through to the semis without dropping a set”.

There was so much to the creative output of Clarke comma J, and so much variety too … screenplays, film acting, radio, stage work, television, songs, books. Clarke’s art didn’t fit into any one particular mould, he was, to use Martin Luther’s expression, an “irregular planet which cannot be fixed among the stars”, always inventing, moving on and reinventing, exploring something new that had piqued his interest.

My personal favourite John Clarke masterwork is the Complete Book of Australian Verse⌖. This nugget of gold is a series of early Nineties recordings in which Clarke audaciously and imaginatively reinvents the “Canon of Great British Poets”, relocating it to regional and outback Australia. Clarke ‘discovered’ the existence of an Aussie poet “laureate-hood” comprising “dinky-di” Australian poetry ‘greats’ with Antipodean-sounding names like ‘Shagger’ Tennyson, ‘Stumpy’ Byron V.C, ‘Gavin’ Milton and “Fifteen Bobsworth” Longfellow⊛.

Clarke’s sublime riff on these fictional masters of Australian poetry is incisively, deeply humorous, and both wise and pretentious-sounding at the same time! Absurdly funny stuff, especially when uttered in John’s wonderful flat, disinterested, monotone voice (“he was sentenced to three years jail for insulting a lobster in a Sydney restaurant”) … Clarke’s clinical dissection of (then) Leader of the Opposition John Howard is a devastatingly savage takedown the future PM…to paraphrase playwright Simon Gray, it “made me laugh so much that I was prepared to overlook its essential cruelty”. Clarke’s poem entreats Howard—who had failed twice to win the top job in Canberra—to change his vocation:

‘To a Howard’ by Rabbi Burns
Wee, sleekit, cowerin, tim’rous beastie,
I know tha’s probably doing thy bestie,
…………………….
Thou’ll try wi’ th’ gunnery up at the range,
Thou’ll no have much truible, thou’ve dun it afore,
Thou’s an expert for a’ that; look, ‘Wanted: Small Bore’.

With ‘A Child’s Christmas in Warrnambool’ Clarke produces a poetic tour de force by turning Dylan Thomas’ classic winter-scene ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ on it’s head, transforming it into a children’s nostalgic celebration of Australian summers past:

“The smell of insect repellant and eucalyptus and the distant constant bang of the flywire door”/”the fridge of imperishable memory”/”the wide brown bee-humming trout-fit sheep-rich two-horse country”/”some middle-order nephew skipping down the vowel-flattening pitch and putting the ball into the tent-flaps on the first bounce of puberty”.

The Complete Verse‘s eclectic compilation includes a coruscating if excruciatingly painful piece by “Sylvia Blath” which is both riotously funny and disturbingly harrowing at the same time. Clarke weaves into the poem Sylvia’s harangue of her dead father who “danced upon my cradle, as I Annexed the Sedatenland” and ends with an unexpected and wicked twist (a crossed-phone line channelling of Germaine Greer!!!): “Daddy Daddy I’m through, Hello? Germaine … I can hardly hear you, this is a very bad line.”

Since the 1990s Clarke had been an on-screen constant feature with his famous series of mock political interviews (“two-handers” with Bryan Dawe as the straight-man ‘innocently’ asking questions which were fodder for Clarke’s witty retorts) … the one-liners just rolling off Clarke’s golden and acerbic tongue, skewing high-profile politicians left, right and centre:

(pricking at the bluster of an overbearing state premier)
“I’m not interested in doing the most intelligent thing … I’m JEFF KENNETT!

Prime Minister Hawke’s robust “Alpha male”, over-enthusiastic response to the question of how fit he was after a recent op:
(I’m so fit that)
“I’m a danger to shipping!”

Clarke was a wordsmith that other satirists and comic writers in Australasia must have looked at with a mixture of admiration and envy … he simply had such a razor-sharp, punchy, economical and hilarious way with words.

And there was much more to John Clarke’s stellar CV – such as his ‘invention’ of the cliché-ridden ‘sport’ of farnarkeling for The Gillies Report, and not to forget the manifold brilliant riffs on finance, business, the economy, the public service and the environment (“the front fell off (and) we towed the ship outside the environment”). Clarke was a trail-blazer in television comedy … his “on the money” take on the crazy, shambolic world of Olympics bureaucracy The Games was a template for other later projects which explored the thorny terrain of corporations and officialdom (such as Utopia) and it informed the BBC’s contribution to the 2012 London Olympics campaign.

John Clarke’s sudden, most untimely death leaves a Sydney Opera House-sized hole in Australian and New Zealand satire – and I shall never forget that voice – as with Billy Bragg’s, so distinctive, and as with Joe (Dragnet) Friday’s, so deadpan matter-of-fact … or his trademark mischievous grin and the sparkle in the eyes.

⚜⚜⚜
Vale John Clarke … thank you for entertaining and delighting us for so long and enriching the lives of so many people all the way from Palmerston North to Perth and far beyond. John’s song lyrics were wrong in one respect … there are countless people in the two Trans-Tasman countries that he lived and worked in who do know “how lucky” they were to have him, albeit for too short a time✥.

Footnote: I didn’t realise until now that Clarkey was responsible for introducing that quintessentially Australian term “budgie smuggler” into the vernacular lexicon of the nation, to the regret of one former PM (not Howard) and the joy of everyone else!

╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾╼
❈ his unusual accent didn’t really fit the clipped English speech pattern of “Nu Zillunders” anyway
⌖ the success of which was followed up by the Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse
⊛ other ‘Oz’ poet-luminaries include b.b.hummings, TS (Tabby Serious) Eliot, Ewen Coleridge, Ted Lear and many more
✥ one of the incomparable Fred Dagg’s best-known songs was entitled “We don’t know how lucky we are”

The Mass Appeal of Woolworths: A Brand Name Worth Copying

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Commerce & Business, Financial history, Popular Culture, Retailing history, Social History, Society & Culture

The seeming ubiquity of Woolies?
Woolworths is an internationally known name synonymous with traditional merchandising budgeted within the reach of the average consumer. When I was a kid I thought that the Woolworths variety store-cum-supermarket chain in cities and towns strewn all around Australia and New Zealand was an offshoot of the famous pioneering Woolworths “dime and nickel” company in the US. Until I actually went to South Africa I wasn’t even aware that there was Woolworths in that country as well. When I did discover its existence travelling around the RSA garden route I initially assumed that it too was a spoke in the far-reaching American F W Woolworth imperial retail wheel.

Imperial Arcade, Sydney: Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement, 1924

ೃ

Only much, much later did I learn of the total absence of any business or corporate connection between the three ‘Woolworths’ entities (sometimes displayed in singular form, sometimes plural, sometimes with an apostrophe). Both the retail chain in Australasia and the one in South Africa got the name ‘Woolworths’ through the same legalistic loophole. When a collection of businessmen began the Australian retail enterprise they acquired the name because the original American company had not registered the name in NSW (or anywhere in Australia). Thus the first store in Sydney CBD’s Imperial Arcade in 1924 was called Woolworths Stupendous Bargain Basement. The transition to the eventual nomenclature used (simply ‘Woolworths’) was not quite that simple. Before settling on ‘Woolworths’, the first notion that came to Percy Christmas (Woolworth’s inaugural CEO) and his directors was to call it ‘Wallworths Bazaar’, a pun on the American retailer’s name[1].

Somerset Mall ‘Woolies‘
Western Cape RSA

ೃ

Similarly, the South African ‘Woolworths’ acquired the name because there was no legal trademark impediment to it using the name in South Africa. Founder Max Sonnenberg and his son Richard started the first Woolworths store in Cape Town in 1931, and like the Australian namesake it has never had any financial connection to the prior existing F W Woolworth Co business. Woolworths South Africa-style was a different sort of retail animal, modelling itself on the upmarket British Marks and Spencer rather than the F W Woolworth bargain basement store concept[2].

Woolworths ground zero: Creating the retail template
The American phenomenon started in 1878 when Frank Winfield Woolworth, son of a poor potato farmer, started his first store in Utica, New York, the basis of his business strategy was to sell a wide selection of items at low price (initially all the merchandise was set at 5 cents each). The store was poorly located and failed abjectly but Woolworth persisted, opening a second dry goods and variety store the following year in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the formula eventually caught on. The entrepreneur expanded his store concept to a “five-and-dime” one (items set at 5¢ and 10¢ each).

The early F W Woolworth & Co

ೃ

Woolworth’s brother Charles (known as ‘Sum”) got in on the business, starting up his own retail stores soon after his older brother’s. Frank expanded F W Woolworth Co into a chain by mergers and partnerships with his cousin Seymour Knox I and with other relatives and friends❈. By gathering together a little club of owners Woolworth could purchase large quantities of goods directly from the manufacturers. As the US stores multiplied and prospered, Frank, remembering his own disadvantaged childhood, took pride in the fact that the “ordinary man” could afford to buy from Woolworth stores[3].

From 1890 FWW would embark on annual (sometimes biannual) large-scale buying trips to Europe, always paying the suppliers in cash on principle. Exposure to European manufacturers promoted awareness of market potentiality in other countries and may have prompted Woolworth’s eventual decision to branch out internationally. Anglophile Frank had his eye firmly on Britain as his 1890 trip diary indicates: “a good penny and sixpence store, run by a live Yankee, would be a sensation here”[4]. The chain had already extended north to Canada and subsidiaries were launched in the UK, Germany, Austria, Mexico and Cuba. The UK Woolworth sub-set itself opened stores in the Republic of Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, the British West Indies and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

FW Woolworth store in Glasgow (Source: Pinterest UK)

ೃ

British F W Woolworth
Woolworths came to Britain in 1909 with the first store, selling clothing, stationary and toys, opening in Liverpool in northern England (family cousin Fred Moore Woolworth was the British arm’s first managing director). The pricing strategy matched the US “five-and-dime” one with items selling at 3d and 6d. The British chain flourished from the 1920s on, becoming a household name through the UK, so much so that most consumers in Britain and Ireland believed that their ‘Woolies’ shops were a local invention, “where sixpence once went a long way”[5].

Like the parent company in America, British Woolworths proved a retail innovator. The Liverpool store introduced lunch counters (followed by Blackpool and other large UK stores)回, which were the precursor to the standard food courts which became integral to shopping malls later in the 20th century[6]. The Woolies restaurants also adhered to the 3d and 6d price formula, although by 1941 there had been some increases, eg, a split lobster salad had risen to the princely sum of one shilling (12d or 1/-)[7].

Woolworth UK’s rise and fall
The 1930s marked a high point for Woolworth in the UK … outside of the Christmas season the chain was opening a new store every five days! During the price inflation of the late 1930s the Woolworth giant kept the sixpence limit on its prices by asserting its buying power to coerce suppliers into accepting lower margins for their goods¤. By 1958 F W Woolworth Co had amassed 1,000 branches in Britain[8].

The first signs of the downturn in Woolworth UK’s fortunes can be traced from the 1960s, the parent company forced the British arm into introducing Woolco, a series of one stop shops usually located out-of-town. These did not succeed, as they had in America because the UK lacked the US’s higher car ownership which suited out-of-town shopping. This was also an unwise move away from Woolworth UK’s strength, its high street stores. The UK business’ problems continued in the 1970s – Britain’s decimalisation in 1971 caught Woolworth unprepared because unlike other retailers it had resisted the move to self-service. The upshot was costly to Woolworth (£5 million and a five-year process trying to replace their over-abundance of store cash registers. Also in the 1970s a number of Woolworth stores in Britain and Northern Ireland burned down, attributed at least in part in incompetent and short-sighted management … resulting in brand damage to the trusted F W Woolworth name from which it never entirely recovered[9].

Closing down: Bromsgrove store (Worcs.)

ೃ

British elements (principally Kingfisher plc) finally gained a controlling interest in the UK enterprise in 1982, but Woolies, this British institution on the retail landscape ultimately fell foul of intense competition from cut-price retailers … many customers defected to British supermarket giants Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Falling sales❀ and a cash-flow crisis affected its entertainment arm. The downturn was exacerbated by the adverse effects of the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. In 2007 Britain’s Woolworth Co experienced its first trading loss in 95 years … and much worst was to come. Over Christmas 2008 807 stores in the UK closed. With Deloitte’s administrating, the whole Woolworth chain had a complete shutdown over a 41 day period (months short of what would have been 100 years of operation in the UK). The carve-up saw restructure specialists Hilco Capital acquire the retail business and the Shop Direct Group (owned by the Barclay brothers) taking over the online retail sector … this too however was closed down in 2015[10].

Rise and fall of the prototype organisation
The America parent Woolworth company was spectacularly successful in creating a chain of “cash-and-carry” dime stores. By 1977 there were 3,414 stores in the US, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and 1,884 outside of the US[11]. The pioneering merchandising methods of F W Woolworth with the founder’s emphasis on sales and customer service, and direct purchasing, established a solid base to enable his successors as CEO to continue to sustain and grow the Woolworth retail empire. However after WWII there was shift in the nature of shopping propelled by the burgeoning car culture … retailing in America and elsewhere moved on from the high street stores which had been the mainstay of Woolworth to the new malls located in the suburbs. Woolworth tried slowly to adjust but found itself less able to adapt to this change than its major competitors.

Woolco, Canada (Photo: Reddit)

ೃ

By the 1960s the original five-and-dime stores had morphed into other commercial entities: whilst the Woolworth flagship was retained there was a move into speciality stores and the large discount retail chain Woolco, which had a measure of success. Through the eighties and into the nineties the ailing FWW giant lingered on.

La Crosse (Wisconsin) store, 1992 (Source: La Crosse Tribune)

ೃ

In 1997 F W Woolworth Co in the US folded, following years of diminishing competitiveness with its rivals (the chain in 1996 posted a crippling loss of $US37 million). The Venator Group took its place and F W Woolworth ceased to be a trading name. Venator’s retail focus fixed on the foot ware market with Foot Locker and Kinney Shoes. This was a sudden end to a gradual process by which Woolworth Five-and-Dimes were overtaken by the likes of more dynamic enterprises, Wal-Mart, Kmart (formerly Kresge), Target and other commercial players who adapted to change far better than the veteran Woolworth[12].

F W Woolworth Co ultimately suffered the same fate as the British Woolworth – an accumulated obsolescence. As Jennifer Steinhauer summarised its plight, it had “faded in the collective memory of a nation warmly nostalgic for old stores but not willing to shop in them”. The pioneering retailer had become increasingly irrelevant to American consumers … the advantage of convenience it once possessed (where shoppers could get “lipstick, diapers and a milk shake at a discount, all under the one roof”) was now all-too-easily available at the abundance of handy drugstores, supermarkets and discount stores popping up everywhere[13].

PostScript: South Africa and Australia – Higher and Higher
Whilst the Woolworths brand name no longer decorates the urban commercial landscape in the US and Britain, the Woolworths name in the Southern Hemisphere is a different story. Over the last 20 years both Woolworths Holdings Limited (RSA) and Woolworths Limited (Australia) have experienced impressive growth through expansion and diversification.

Woolworths Holdings Ltd (WHL) achieved a net income of R3.12 billion in 2015 as a provider of clothing, footwear, accessories, groceries, beauty products, home wares and financial services. WHL has pursued an aggressive campaign of expansion, taking over companies in South Africa (Mimco, Trenery) and Australia (David Jones stores, Country Road, Witchery).

Woolworths Casula (NSW)

ೃ

Woolworths Limited (WL) made a net surplus of A$1.2 billion in 2016 with its variety stores (Big W), supermarkets (Countdown, Food For Less, Safeway, Flemings, etc), grocers (Thomas Dux). Part of the company’s impressive growth has come from diversification – into petrol stations (Caltex-Woolworths) and into liquor stores (taking over BWS and Dan Murphy’s), hotels and gambling (Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group)[14]. The Aussie Woolworths brand currently maintains a presence in Australia, New Zealand and India▤. Business success aside, it has not been all smooth sailing for the RSA and Australian companies … both WHL and WL have been embroiled in controversies in their home countries from time to time. In 2010 WHL removed Christian magazines from its shelves (a financial decision by Woolworths), provoking a huge outcry from the powerful Christian community in South Africa with WHL having to back down[15]. WL’s move into alcohol has been extremely profitable (together with Coles it is estimated to account for ¾ of Australian liquor sales). Allied to this is Woolworths’ impact on poker machine gambling … through its ALH arm it has in excess of 12,650 pokies in pubs. Anti-gambling campaigners have accused WL of targeting children to push up pub sales by offering loyalty reward cards to frequent gamblers (and placing “Kid’s Club” playgrounds close to the poker machine areas in its hotels)[16].

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
❈ FWW’s mergers absorbed Knox & Co, Kirby & Co, Charlton & Co, C S Woolworth & Co and Moore & Co
回 the concept was an elaboration on F W Woolworth’s ‘Soda Fountain’ introduced in his Lancaster (US) store in 1907
¤ a similar bullying practice to that used by Woolworths Australia (and its rival Coles) this decade against local manufacturers
❀ one exception being the old Woolies favourite, the pick ‘n’ mix confectionary lines
▤ in 1989 Industrial Equity Ltd (IEL), part of the AdSteam Group (Adelaide Steamship Company), successfully took over Woolworths Australia … however the Woolworths company was subsequently publicly floated several years later

[1] ‘Woolworths Limited’, Wikipedia, http://em.n.wikipedia.org
[2] after WWII the South African firm actually had a business relationship with Marks and Spencer for a number of years, ‘Woolworths (South Africa)’, Wikipedia, http://em.n.wikipedia.org
[3] One incident in particular resounded with him, being unable to afford an item in a Watertown store as a child, ‘Biography of F.W. Woolworth’, (Woolworths Museum), www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[4] J Robinson, ‘Woolworths: the rise and fall of the departmental store giant’, The Guardian (London), 20-Nov-2008, www.theguardian.com
[5] ‘Christmas Past and Christmas Presents’, (Woolworths Museum), www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[6] ‘The British Lunch Counter 1938-41’, (Woolworths Museum), www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[7] ibid.
[8],’A potted history of F.W. Woolworth’, (Woolworths Museum), www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk
[9] ibid.;’Preparing for decimalisation “D-Day” on 15 February 1971′, in ibid.
[10] ibid.; Robinson, op.cit.
[11] J N Ingham, Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders, Vol. 4
[12] F W Woolworth also tended to cling to outmoded lines, eg, in its toy department old-fashioned puzzles and no action figures, J Steinhauer, ‘Woolworth’s Give Up the Five-and-Dime, New York Times, 18-Jul-1997, www.nyt.com
[13] Woolworth Co’s competitors ultimately offered more choice of products, quicker checkouts and often lower prices,ibid
[14] Woolworths’ move into hardware stores via Masters Home Improvement was far less successful with the retail giant getting badly singed, E Stewart, ‘Masters: Five reasons Woolworths is pulling the plug on struggling hardware chain’, 18-Jan-2017, ABC News, www.mobile.abc.net.au
[15] ‘Woolworths (South Africa)’, op.cit.
[16] L Mulligan, ‘Woolworths under fire from anti-poker machine groups for introducing gambling rewards card in pubs’, ABC News, 17-Sep-2015, www.abc.net.au