A shipyard is a place of schedules too. Keels laid, plates cut, a launch date on a board, and a gantry crane moving over the slipway all day like a very slow and very patient clock. The Gdansk yard, then named for Lenin, had built merchant ships for years, and the woman who ran one of those cranes was Anna Walentynowicz. In August 1980 she was dismissed, a few months short of retirement, and her workmates stopped work over it. Lech Walesa, an electrician, climbed the fence to join them. The demands went up on the gate where anyone walking past could read them.
The photograph below is that gate: the crowd outside, people up on the roof and the walkway, banners and notices hung where the sign says STOCZNIA GDANSKA im. LENINA. Strike lists pinned to a fence are not a timetable, but they work the same way. They tell you what has been agreed and what has not, and everyone can check.
On this day in 1980, delegates from strike committees all over Poland came to Gdansk and merged them into one national union, Solidarity. It was the first independent trade union in a Warsaw Pact country to be recognised by the state. What I keep coming back to is the ordinariness of the starting point: a crane operator, a gate, a list. The yard kept its slipways. The rest went out from there.
Harold, the list on that gate ran to twenty-one demands, and they sat side by side in a way I have always found moving: free trade unions independent of the party, and also Saturdays off. Registration in the courts took until November, which is how these things go — the fence comes first, the paperwork follows.
Harold, the memorial that went up outside that gate in December 1980 was designed by a shipyard worker, Bohdan Pietruszka — three steel crosses, over forty metres, with anchors hung on them. Made by the people who knew how to weld high steel, for their own dead. A monument built by the yard, out of the yard's own material and skill.