Stevedore

Someone who loads or unloads commercial ships' cargo. An overseer of dockworkers.

“I could see exactly what must have happened. Insert a liberal dose of mixed spirits in a normally abstemious man, and he becomes a force. He does not stand round, twiddling his fingers and stammering. He acts. I had no doubt that Gussie must have reached for the Bassett and clasped her to him like a stevedore handling a sack of coals. And one could readily envisage the effect of that sort of thing on a girl of romantic mind.”

P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves (1934).