Scotland and the Sea. Nick Robins
also aided efficiency. The iron hull introduced in the late 1830s reduced a ship’s weight by 50 per cent over an equivalent wooden hull, and mild steel, which was introduced in the 1870s, made a further reduction in weight of 10 per cent.
But what did the Scots contribute to this? In short, they designed and built the ships, engineered the propulsion systems, and put up the money to build and operate the steamship fleets. The Scots were not alone, of course, as merchants in Liverpool, Belfast and northeast England were soon to follow, but Scottish involvement with these maritime centres was all-pervading. Scottish-built ships, Scottish managers, Scottish crews and officers penetrated the south and eventually the entire global merchant navy. In the 1930s, for example, every passenger vessel on the Egyptian-owned Khedevial Mail Line’s eastern Mediterranean routes was captained by a Scot.
Scotland’s maritime industry owed much to the Scottish emigrants. First were the poor crofters displaced by the Clearances and later the skilled craftsmen and businessmen looking for a better life overseas. These men and women helped develop agriculture in numerous countries, they developed the transport system to get produce to port and they developed the port infrastructure to handle ships ready to bring primary goods back to the UK. Some trades were dominantly Scottish, the jute trade from Bengal to Dundee being just one example.
Ben Line of Leith carried its archetypal, and to many unpronounceable, Scottish names around the world: Bencleuch (1949) is seen approaching Ocean Dock Southampton, 1 February 1969. (Author)
Scotland, with just one-tenth the population of England and Wales, represented over half the maritime expertise in Britain by the mid nineteenth century. Where would German-born Canadian national, Samuel Cunard, have been without the resources of George Burns and David MacIver, the latter a Scot exiled in Liverpool, and the engineering skills of Robert Napier working on the Clyde? There are many other great names: Aberdeen, Albion, Anchor Line and its founder Thomas Henderson, along with brothers David, John and William Donaldson (John and William Donaldson), Paddy Henderson – Patrick and brothers Thomas, Robert and George, Thompson’s Ben Line of Edinburgh and tramp-shipowners such as ‘Hungry’ Hogarth of Ardrossan, Maclay & McIntyre of Glasgow, and the quaintly named Raeburn & Verel. Brothers in business were a common start to many early Scottish companies. G & J Burns of Glasgow, for example, was founded by the brothers George and James, although James was the driving force in shipowning. James and Donald Currie, another example, worked together in the established Hull & Leith Shipping Company in the 1850s, before Donald opened new routes, first to Calcutta and then to South Africa with his Castle Line, later amalgamated with the Union Steamship Company to create Union-Castle.
Scottish shipowners catered for the emigration of their own people, as Commander Vernon Gibbs described in his book Western Ocean Passenger Lines and Liners:
The prevailing theme of Scotland’s story since pre-steamship days has been the outward drain of her people and the Anchor Line carried more Scots overseas than any other line. The main Anchor service was always between Glasgow and New York without likelihood of attracting English traffic, but the outflow of Scottish migrants seemed endless … Search for additional emigrant traffic took small Anchor steamships to Italian ports long before other British lines dreamed of entering the Mediterranean trade, and a Genoa–New York service commenced late in the 1860s. The Anchor Line became a public company, Anchor Line (Henderson Brothers) at the end of the century, and then reconstructed its Glasgow–New York fleet, but the size of the new ships illustrates the trade’s limitations. The Columbia of 1902 and three later vessels averaged little over 9,000 tons, compared with the 18,000 to 24,000 of the Cunard and White Star intermediate steamers from Liverpool.
British India Steam Navigation Company was a London-based company but its roots were undeniably Scottish; Kenya (1920), a product of Alexander Stephen & Sons, was typical of the many proud passenger liners that once served the company.
There has been a succession of Scottish managers guiding otherwise English companies such as P&O, British India, a Scottish company to the core until its relocation to London, the Orient Line, and even London’s own General Steam Navigation Company, the latter working on the Home Trade and Mediterranean runs. This penetration of the industry by Scots is paralleled to this day in the finance sector (now somewhat tarnished by the 2008 banking crisis), in which the City of London has always had its Scottish school, the honest and canny Scot being respected as a trusted broker. It is reflected also in modern-day television adverts for the same industry, which invariably feature a Scottish voice-over, and perhaps even a Scottish widow!
The Nelson Line of London imported meat from Argentina to London and strangely clad itself in tartan with its Highland fleet nomenclature; typical was Highland Warrior (1920); they were all fine-looking ships.
Tankers Limited, London, operated a tartan nomenclature: three of its ships are seen laid up in the Depression, from right to left, Scottish Minstrel (1922) and Scottish Chief (1928) and behind them Scottish American (1920). Elder Dempster Line’s New Brooklyn (1920) is laid up to the right. (John Clarkson)
The honest Scot, or so it is perceived, has caused a number of English companies to masquerade under the Scottish banner. The Nelson Line of Liverpool had its distinctively Scottish ‘Highland’ ship nomenclature, even after its ships had been adsorbed into the Royal Mail Line in 1913. Tankers Limited, formed in London in 1920 to service the burgeoning oil tanker charter market, applied a distinctive ‘Scottish’ prefix to its twelve-ship fleet until it sold out to the Athel Line during the Second World War. Tankers Limited operated twelve 10,000-ton deadweight classic engines aft, bridge amidships vessels, a mix of twin-screw motor vessels and steamships.
James ‘Paraffin’ Young is yet another Scot to be celebrated, although a man of little maritime ambition. It was he who looked at the oil shale in Midlothian, and realised that something could be done with it that might even compete with the dominance of coal. He developed a low-flash liquid fuel, which, when pressed and refined into liquid paraffin, was suitable for lighting and heating when burned. It was also suitable for burning in a confined cylinder, in which the pressure of the burnt fuel pushed a piston away to create enough force to be harnessed in a circular motion – the internal combustion engine. Dr Diesel, a German, was the pioneer in the technology that led to the marine oil engine, but early marine engines were fuelled by petrol, a fuel that was disliked at sea because of its high flashpoint, and later by paraffin. In the early twentieth century, the first passenger vessels powered by the internal combustion engine, and as it happens fuelled by paraffin, were Comet, Scout and Lochinvar, owned and operated by David MacBrayne & Company on a network of inter-island and island–mainland services within the Western Isles of Scotland.
Lochinvar (1908) was a pioneer paraffin-engined passenger ferry operated by David MacBrayne. Her prototype paraffin engines were replaced by diesels in 1926. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
The thread continues in many and diverse directions. The Scots pioneered the concept of the cruise ship, with early cruises to the Scottish Isles from 1827. Patrons included Queen Victoria, the artist J M W Turner, the poet William Wordsworth and the composer Felix Mendelssohn, who all visited Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Meanwhile, the first cruise round the Nore Light in the Thames estuary was offered to Londoners only in April 1830 – but what a tame venture that was, compared with the rigours of the Minches, even though the struggling and smoky steamer might be of the same genre!
Ships like David MacBrayne’s Iona (there were three) and the Columba