The
Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company -
P & O
In 1815 Brodie McGhie
Willcox, a Shetlander with no social advantages,
opened a shipbroking office in Lime Street, London. His
clerk was Arthur Anderson. By 1822 the two were partners in a concern
unsurprisingly named Willcox and Anderson. During a
prolonged uprising against the Portuguese monarchy, this small company
supported the royalists by running guns between 1824 and 1826 in a schooner.
The rebellion having been put down in 1833 normal trading was resumed, with Willcox and Anderson receiving the blessing of royalty.
Short voyage steamships were chartered from the Dublin and London Steam Packet
Company. After further political problems in Spain, which subsided in 1835, the
Dublin and London S.P. Co. were encouraged into starting a regular steamship
mail service: which Willcox and Anderson ran for
them. These two men had already been trying to put such a service together and
with building of better suited vessels in 1836, they officially became the
Peninsular Steam Navigation Company about a year later. At this time they also
operated in the Mediterranean as far as Malta and Alexandria.
By this time, the once commercially mighty ‘Honourable’
East India Company was in a financially straightened position. Having lost its
monopolies and heavily involved in the administration of vast areas of
territory as a something of a proxy government for the Crown, it had become far
from capable at fighting off efficient ‘interlopers’. So, gaining both from
others’ commercially unsuccessful experiments in steamer services and also a
mail contract to Calcutta in 1839, there was large-scale capital investment in appropriate
steamers and a name change to the Peninsular and Oriental S.N. Co. Ltd. to
reflect their enlarged activities in 1840.
Further potentially lucrative mail contracts followed, including
the Ceylon to Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong route in 1844. Five years later
Shanghai became a feeder for Hong Kong. In 1852-53 a route to Australia
followed. Not that it was all plain sailing. There was still competition from
the East India Company and also shortages of coal in the early 1850s created
major problems. As well as mail contracts, there was other government work in
the form of trooping for the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny. In 1864 a run from
Shanghai to Yokohama was begun. By 1871 the Suez Canal brought further
problems, rendering most of their vessels out of date. In response new vessels
began to be built from 1873 onwards.
There had been further wartime trooping for the Egyptian
adventure of 1882. All this experience may well have put them in good stead in
government circles. Due to naval trooping vessels being scrapped, P & O
vessels were chartered for the annual moves during the 1890s and this became a
regular task Of course, P & O also attracted their share of trooping work
during the Second Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902. Increasing their market share, the
assets and goodwill of the Blue Anchor Line were acquired in 1910, with further
entry into Australia from South Africa. The summer of 1914 brought take-over of
the British India S.N. Co. Ltd., which they previously enjoyed good business
relations with. (Corporate histories tend to call this an amalgamation, but
while this looks to genuinely have been the case, nevertheless, the new board
had twelve old P & O directors, to B.I.s eight.) Anyway, British India’s
trading patterns acted as feeders for P&O.
War or not, in 1916 there was the acquisition of the New Zealand
Shipping Co and the Federal S.N. Co. The next year, at a time when many
companies ceased to exist, the Union Steamship Company of N.Z., the Nourse Line and the Hain S.S. Co.
followed into P & O. In 1919 the Khedivial Mail Line was bought (but
ditched five years later). Also, in the same year a large, but minority, share
holding of the Orient Line was acquired. A North Sea short trading arm was
added in 1920 with the acquisition of the General Steam Navigation Co. Fifteen
years later brought the Moss-Hutchison Line into the group.
Nevertheless, the group had had its share of both war and
peacetime tribulations. Even if wartime losses had been made up by government
compensation there was still the not insignificant problems
in rebuilding lost business. After the Second World War there was the added
complexity of air travel as increasingly serious competition.
In 1958 there was a short-lived name change for the passenger
liner operations, followed two years by another: to the P & O and Orient
Lines (Passenger Services) Ltd. In 1965 the group finally got full control of
the Orient Line and a year later the company became P & O, dropping the
‘Orient’ name. The group continues to trade, but the ‘great’ liners have now
gone.
This is a commercial entity that has attracted a number of
corporate histories. Among these are Duncan Haws: Merchant Fleets in Profile: The Ships of
the P&O, Orient and Blue Anchor Lines (Cambridge: Patrick
Stephens, 1978); David and Stephen Howarth: The Story of P&O (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1994); and Boyd Cable: A Hundred year History of the P.&O.: Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (London: Ivor
Nicholson and Watson, 1937).
The company records loaned to the National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich are voluminous and contains surviving personnel records. Those for
officers of deck and engineering departments appear to be almost complete.
There are significant gaps in the registers relating to stewards and a small
number for the deck branch that strangely, included bits and pieces from other
non-technical branches.
Go to the British
India S.N. Co Ltd. page
Go to the Orient S.N.
Co. Ltd. page