British
India Steam Navigation Co. Ltd.
Started originally by Argyllshire Scotsmen Robert Mackenzie and
William Mackinnon in the 1840s, the early generations of management were Scots:
mostly from Glasgow. Taking advantage of the spirit of the new age of ‘free
trade’ and the crumbling of the ‘Honourable East India Company’, soon
business expanded, with goods from Glasgow to India and on to China and
Australia. When the remaining parts of Burma were seized by the
British in the 1850s,
unsurprisingly
this company got involved there too. In 1856 the company was named the Calcutta
and Burmah Steam Navigation Company. Six years later it became the British
India Steam Navigation Company Limited.
This was most definitely a business which expanded with the
Empire. Providing vessels for service to the Crown in trooping for the Maori
wars in New Zealand during the 1860s and the Zulu War of 1879, commercial
opportunities soon followed. Mail contracts were important in this (being paid
state subsidies) and the company also reached into the Persian Gulf and down
East Africa’s coast in the 1870s. Of course, the opening of the Suez Canal in
1867 was highly significant in opening up these regions to economic activities.
As the company expanded rivals were taken over where necessary.
Again H.M. Government was supported in trooping during the Second Anglo-Boer
War 1899-1902 and in the Boxer Rebellion in China during 1900 - with new
commercial contracts in their wake. However, their main competitor was P &
O. Although it has been maintained that this was an amalgamation, without
digging deep into company records it is not unlikely that this was a case where
all out commercial conflict would have been highly costly, if not fatal to one
or both parties. Anyway, from 1914 until after the Second World War the British
India Steam Navigation Company Limited operated ‘independently’ within the P
& O group of companies.
Less well covered than P & O, the historical information in
this section was found in Duncan Haws’: The Merchant Fleets: British India S.N. Co (Burwash, TCL Publications, 1897).
Within the surviving company documents there are officers’ records
books that deal with seamen officers, engineers (and others from technical
branches), medical officers and clerks (that must have been the company’s
designation for pursers) for significant periods. There are also others that
are far more limited for the hotel branches and also cadets.
Go to the Orient S.N.
Co. Ltd. page