By the
early 19th
century Britain
had achieved the commercial supremacy it had pursued over the previous
century;
and it no longer needed to protect its trade in the same way. The
doctrine of
laissez-faire, based on “The Wealth of Nations” of 1776 by Scottish
economist
Adam Smith and widely adopted by politicians suggested that government
interference
should be kept to a minimum and free trade would encourage competition,
to the
benefit of all. The Navigation Acts, which had regulated British trade
since
the 1650s, were largely abolished in 1849, and the requirement to have
British
crews on British merchant ships ended in 1854. At almost the same time,
the
government felt it necessary to legislate to ensure that there were
qualified
officers on each ship, and to pass various regulations for safety at
sea. The
monopoly of the chartered companies was no longer acceptable, and the
East
India Company’s monopoly was abolished in 1833. Shipping routes were
fully
opened to competition.
The
British government
opened the Post Office packet service, the world’s largest mail
service, to
private enterprise (the term “packet” is derived from packets of
mail”). A mail
contract demanded a regular service in good time. It guaranteed a
certain
amount of revenue on a shipping route, which could be supplemented by
carrying
passengers and freight, but penalties for late delivery were severe. In
1839,
Samuel Cunard , who had won the transatlantic contract, agreed to pay
£500 for
every 12 hours his ships were late. In 1837 Arthur Anderson set up a
steamship
service between Falmouth and the ports
of Spain and Portugal.
His Peninsular &
Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) was founded in 1840 and
soon
extended its services to India,
with passengers travelling overland across the Isthmus of Suez, which
separated
the Mediterranean Sea from the Red Sea and the Indian
Ocean
beyond.
In a
separate development,
shipowners began to use special flags, their house flags, to identify
their
ships. This began at the Lloyds station near Liverpool
in 1771, which would hoist a signal to alert an owner that his ship was
about
to arrive in port, and house flags became common during the Napoleonic
Wars.
They were virtually universal by the mid 19th century, and
in 1882
Lloyds issued the first edition of its “Book of House Flags”. The
design and
colours of the house flag had even more relevance to steamship lines
when they
began to apply it to their funnels, and the funnel attained great
symbolism by
the end of the 19th century. Alfred Holt & Company,
based in Liverpool, was commonly
known as the Blue Funnel Line and
had one of the strongest identities of any cargo shipping company. The
distinctive red funnels with black bands of Cunard Line became a
favourite
marketing tool in the company’s advertisements.
By the
second half of the 19th
century, the British steam shipping lines had lost some of their
dominance. The
largest German line, Hamburg Amerika, started in the transatlantic
trade in
1847, and by the 1880s it was building some of the largest ships in the
world.
The other great German company, Norddeutscher Lloyd, began in 1856 with
operations from Germany
to Hull and London.
In the 1860s and 1870s, it expanded with services to the USA.
The Dutch
line Holland America
was founded in 1873 under a
different name. By its 25th anniversary, it had carried
90,000 cabin
and 400,000 steerage passengers to the USA, as well as five
million tons
of cargo, mostly the traditional Dutch exports of flower bulbs, gin and
herring. The French Messageries Maritime grew out of the state postal
service
in 1835 and took the form of a major shipping line, sponsored by
Emperor
Napoleon III, in 1853. Its horizons expanded in 1857, when it took on
the main
services from Bordeaux to Brazil
and the
River Plate. By 1900 it had 60 ships and was the sixth largest in the
world.
The
opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had
an immediate effect on world
shipping. It shortened the distance from London
to Bombay
by
7,125km (4,425 miles). It made a steamship voyage to the east much more
practicable, for it was largely in the sheltered waters of the
Mediterranean
and Red Seas. The same waters,
especially those
of the Red Sea, had unreliable winds
and were
unsuitable for sailing ships. As much as any technological innovation,
the Suez Canal ensured the dominance
of the steamship on long
distance routes.
Although Britain was not involved in building
the canal,
the country’s interests in India
and Australia
meant that it could not afford to ignore its effect on trade routes.
Soon
two-thirds of the shipping passing through the canal was British. In
1875, as
the Egyptian monarchy faced bankruptcy, the British government, led by
the
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, bought seven-sixteenths of the
shares. The
canal became a major factor in the trade, colonial, and foreign
policies of Britain
and France
over the century after its
construction. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt,
largely to secure the canal,
and it remained a British protectorate until 1922.
If the
Blue Riband liners of
the North Atlantic captured the imagination and made the headlines, the
ocean
liner was equally important on the long distance
“mail” routes linking Britain
and Europe with their colonies,
dominions and
overseas possessions. Indeed the steamship
entrepreneurs such as British India Line’s MacKinnon, Castle Line’s
Currie and
others played vital roles as empire builders. In many cases the Red
Duster
preceded both the Union Flag and the White Ensign. Little wonder that
the
mailship assumed great symbolic importance. They also gave the English
language
a new word – posh – which came from the initials on tickets POSH
meaning the
traveller was entitled to that most coveted cabin location in the era
before
air conditioning “Port Out (to India and the Far East) Starboard Home”
i.e. the
shady side of the steamer.
The
colonial mailship was a
rather different vessel from her North Atlantic
cousins. Most ran on heavily subsidised mail routes operating under
fixed
government contracts and plied by one or two shipping lines rendering
them
indelibly associated with their destinations.
The nature
of these routes
discouraged adoption of technical innovations. British India Line’s Amra, Aronda and Aska completed in
1938 for the Calcutta
to Burma route were
coal
fired and reciprocating engined, whilst the England
to Cape Town
record won by the Scot in 1893 lasted
for 35 years. But these colonial steamers had their own quirky
characteristics,
reflecting the need to carry four or more classes of passenger, often
“native”
deck passengers and troops, mails, cargo, livestock, railway
locomotives and
generators. And even more than the big transatlantic liners, they
figured
prominently in the lives of generations of expats taking children off
to school
in England or
bringing a new
family car or gramophone or the first export crop of maize from Kenya.
The
P&O liners summed up the British Empire
in
their dignified “stone and black” livery. Even curry on the menus
reflected
their route. Rotterdam Lloyd’s Indonesian stewards were barefoot and
wore the
Dutch interpretation of “native” attire.
Mailships were
floating microcosms of colonial
social hierarchy and the ethnic and religious differences that
characterised
many colonies. First Class was the preserve of the burra sahibs, the
top
echelon of colonial administrators, governments, military and the
clergy.
Second Class was favoured by the lower status civil servants and
missionaries.
“Natives” travelled deck class, squatting, sleeping and eating around
their
bundles of possessions in the “tween decks”. On the British India Line
ships,
Muslims were berthed forward and Hindus aft with separate galleys and
diets for
each faith.
The
colonial mail routes
networked into a complex web of interconnecting lines, a precursor of
today’s
airline hubs. Passengers arriving in a British India Line or Union
Castle Line
steamer at Durban could change ships to
services
to the smallest East African ports, Seychelles
Islands or Bombay. From
there the aptly named “Gateway
to India”, there
were
services to the Persian Gulf and, of course, the doyen of all mailship
routes
P&O Line’s Bombay Mail to England.
Where ships could not go, dozens of special “boat trains” met arriving
steamers
at the port, for example at Mombasa to
travel up
country in Kenya.
Or at Beira for Rhodesia,
and most notably at Cape Town for
travel on the
Union Express or Union Limited to Johannesburg
and Pretoria.
Most experienced travellers going East via Suez could avoid the rough
and time
consuming Bay of Biscay passage, by taking special express boat trains
to
Marseille to embark on the waiting mailship.
In the
early 1900s, ships
began to be fitted with wireless telegraphs, the invention of Guglielmo
Marconi. On 24th January 1909, the wireless proved its worth
to
shipping when the Italian steamer Florida
collided with the White Star liner
Republic in a thick fog about 275 km (170 miles)
east of New York.
The Republic’s Marconi wireless
operator Jack Binns sent the distress signal CQD (“come quick, danger”)
which
was received by the White Star liner Baltic.
The Republic sank, but 1,700 lives
were saved. Marconi enjoyed further success in July 1910, when the
captain of
the westward bound Montrose asked his
Marconi operator to telegraph Scotland Yard with the message that he
suspected
that the London
cellar murderer Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was among the saloon
passengers
onboard. Crippen and his accomplice were arrested by a detective when
the Montrose docked in Montreal.
The late
1920s and 30s
witnessed a new generation of larger and more technically advanced
ships. Many
were exemplars of the best in naval architecture and engineering of the
day
including the Viceroy of India (1928), England’s
first
turbo-electric liner, Dominion Monarch (1939),
the largest British built motor ship, and Capetown Castle (1938),
the fastest British motor ship.
If Nieuw Amsterdam of 1938 was Holland’s largest
transatlantic liner, Nederland Line’s Oranje
and Rotterdam Lloyd Line’s Willem Ruys of
1947 were no less noteworthy Dutch liners. America’s Panama class trio
of 1939 was just as pace
setting although built for the prosaic Panama Canal supply route from
the USA.
To suit
these warm weather routes the tropical mail ships were the first in the
world
to feature air conditioning, first introduced at sea in 1931 by the
Italian
liner Victoria on the Italy
to Egypt
and later Orient route. Many
American liners of the period featured air conditioning starting with
Matson
Line’s Mariposa, Monterey
and Lurline on Hawaiian and Australian
routes. Sadly the Second World
War stopped the growth of empire.
After the
Second World War the great liners
returned to their peacetime trades soon after 1945, and for a time they
boomed.
The Second
World War stopped
the global empires but the tropical liners adapted to the new postwar
age.
Indeed, they found their most dynamic expression in the 1950s and 60s
as
emigration expanded well beyond the Old World – New
World
axis. Many shipping lines, especially P&O-Orient, expanded their
routes to
intricate round the world services catering for migration to Australasia, South Africa
and elsewhere. This was the heyday of the ocean liner as millions of
displaced
persons from war torn Europe started
new lives
in far away continents. With few fixed mail contracts, the new liners
reflected
the traditional economics of shipbuilding, build the largest and
fastest
possible ship for the route that could take the place of two or more
smaller
ships.
Heralding
this new era were
such ships as Rotterdam Lloyd Line’s stylish and streamlined Willem Ruys (1947) on the Indonesian and
later round the world route. Her novel profile was achieved by placing
the
lifeboats very low in the superstructure and two very squat funnels.
Most
radical of all was Shaw Savill & Albion Line’s Southern
Cross (1955) which daringly redefined the tropical ocean
liner. She carried only one class, no cargo and, to provide maximum
passenger
space, had her machinery placed aft.
The 1960s
was the brilliant
but brief heyday of the large express ocean liners on the
non-transatlantic
routes. Ships such as P&O Line’s Canberra
(1961), Orient Line’s Oriana (1960),
Lloyd Triestino Line’s Galileo Galilei and Gugliemo Marconi (1963) and Costa
Line’s Eugenio C. (1966) rank as
among the fastest and largest ocean liners to serve on their respective
routes
and were in no way inferior to their transatlantic cousins. Indeed, far
more
large express ocean liners were built for non-transatlantic routes in
the
postwar era, and they were far more innovative. No British designed
transatlantic liner represented such a daring synthesis of modern
concepts as Canberra. None of her hallmarks – court cabins,
radial designed forward staterooms, turbo-electric machinery and twin
funnel
uptakes – were novel, but for the first and only time they were
incorporated to
great effect in a single 45,000grt vessel, the largest ever built for a
non
transatlantic ocean liner route. She is best remembered as Britain’s
most
popular cruise ship.
The ocean
liner figured much
longer on the non transatlantic routes and operation continued well
into the
1960s on routes initially unaffected by aeroplane competition. If one
could
cross the North Atlantic in a dozen or so hours by piston-engined
airliner, it
was a rather more protracted affair to get to Asia or Africa.
And sometimes it was impossible by air. As late as 1974 the Seychelles Islands
had no airport and British India Line’s Karanja (1948)
continued to maintain a principal link along her Bombay
to Durban
route. The same shipping line’s Dwarka
served on the Bombay to the Persian Gulf route until withdrawn in May 1982.
Another remnant of such
services was Shipping Corporation of India’s
Chidambaram which sailed regularly
from Madras to Singapore.
Even she had a past,
being the last Messageries Maritimes liner, Pasteur. Passenger
vessels continued to play and important role in the
annual Haj to Mecca
required
of every Muslim.
The age of the
overseas mail ocean liner can be
said to have ended in 1977 with the almost simultaneous withdrawal of
Lloyd
Triestino’s round the world, Africa and Asia services, those of
Chandris Lines’ Australaris (formerly known as America)
and, most poignantly, Union Castle Line’s fabled Cape Mail
route.
When
the RMS
Windsor Castle sailed from Cape Town
for the
final time in September 1977, she was bringing to a close a most
distinguished
era in the story of the ocean liner – the era of the colonial mailships
linking Britain and
Europe with their colonies,
dominions and
territories
overseas.
Ironically,
the England to
Cape Town route is still plied by the very last of her kind, RMS St Helena (II) which links the
remote South Atlantic island of St Helena (which has no airport) with
Ascension
Island, Cape Town and Britain. Like the first of the colonial mailships
and her
other predecessors, she is very much a lifeline and today offers one of
the
most rewarding ocean voyages available. Sadly
on the 7th September 2004 this last
vestige of the
ocean liner era will fade forever as the RMS
St Helena will leave Portland in
the UK on her final
voyage via St Helena, Ascension
Island and thence to Cape Town.
After this date she will no longer sail on the traditional route from
the UK on a regular basis and
instead will only sail on a much truncated route from Cape Town to
Ascension
Island and St Helena calling at Luderitz and Walvis Bay with cargo from
the UK
being trans-shipped through Cape Town. However she still continues to
make occasional voyages from the UK. So the mailship legacy lingers on
yet.
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