Alfred Holt & Co. (Blue Funnel Line)

(Est. 1865)

Alfred and Philip Holt established the Blue Funnel Line in 1865 to run steamers, equipped with Alfred's own design of compound engines, from Liverpool to Asia. After initial difficulties the company achieved success when the Suez Canal was opened in 1869. The Suez reduced the long voyage and gave Blue Funnel steamships an advantage over their sailing contemporaries, to which the Suez Canal was not accessible.

In the 1870s the Holts developed the service further with the assistance of Butterfield and Swire, agents in Shanghai, and were instrumental in establishing the Far Eastern Conference in 1879.

Blue Funnel continued to expand, for example, into Sumatra and the tobacco trade, and later a Dutch subsidiary was established to run a direct service from Amsterdam to Indonesia. By 1901 a direct UK to Australia service commenced.

By 1911 Blue Funnel Line had acquired ownership of numerous previous competitors and owned between sixty and seventy ships. The First World Ward did, however, cost Blue Funnel twelve vessels and the 1920s witnessed such reduced demand for the Australia service that a joint service was established with the White Star Line. In the 1930s the Holts acquired control of the Elder Dempster Line (1932), the Glen and Shire Lines (1935) and the Straits Steam Ship Co.

The Second World War proved extremely costly for the Blue Funnel Line, with a loss of forty-one ships. Peacetime services utilised Liberty Ships for many sailings until A-class replacements were delivered between 1946 and 1953.

The Blue Funnel Line maintained its dominant position in Asia until the 1970s, their stability due, in part, to participation in the Overseas Container Lines consortium, set up in 1965. In 1965 four of the major British shipping companies, including Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), Furness Withy Group, British & Commonwealth Group and Ocean Steamship Co., jointly set up Overseas Containers Ltd. (OCL) to provide a container service on the Europe to Australia route.

Overseas Containers Ltd (OCL) was the largest British container consortium and was formed in 1966 by British and Commonwealth Shipping Group, Furness Withy Group, Ocean Transport and Trading Ltd (Alfred Holt Group) and the P&O Group. The aim of the consortium was to develop and operate container services on those trade routes in which its partners operated, with the intention of preserving a major British interest in these trades. The United Kingdom/Australia trade was the first to be containerised in 1969 and this was followed by the Far East trade. These will soon be followed by the containerisation of the New Zealand trade and the United Kingdom/Europe/South African trade as well as three trades in the Pacific basin.  In 1986 all the partners were bought out by P&O Group and the operation was renamed P&O Containers Ltd. In 1996 this was merged with Nedlloyd Line and formed P&O Nedlloyd. This was later transformed into a stand alone company as Royal P&O Nedlloyd and finally in 2005 was bought entirely by the A.P. Moller-Maersk Group and merged with Maersk Sealand to form Maersk Line.

OCL began operations in 1969. Within a few years its Australian service was showing a profit, and it had joined a still larger international consortium to containerize the Europe-Far East route. At this point in the early 1970s, Ocean Steamship Co.'s stake in OCL grew to 49 percent, and its Blue Funnel fleet became largely superfluous and this famous company was discontinued.

Thus Blue Funnel was another famous British shipping company that disappeared as a result of the container revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the end of an era as traditional shipping gave way to containerisation.