Читать книгу Scotland and the Sea - Nick Robins - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe Start of the Steamship Era
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO Britain’s global dominance of the High Seas from 1815 onwards is summarised by Archibald Hurd in his book The Triumph of the Tramp Ship:
The close of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 found Great Britain in an unchallengeable position at sea. Her maritime progress had been overshadowed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the great fleets of the Hanseatic merchants and those of the Italian republics; it had been outstripped in the sixteenth century by the immense maritime expansion of Portugal and Spain; it had secured, in the first place, independence and then definite ascendancy in the last decade or two before the opening of the seventeenth century; and this ascendancy it preserved first against the Dutch, and then against the French during the 150 years before Waterloo. There was no other navy in the world even remotely comparable with that of Great Britain, while in respect of her mercantile marine, this country emerged from the depredations of the French and American privateersmen stronger than ever in her history.
Hurd also underlines the important role of the American merchant fleet on the Atlantic until after the American Civil War. He describes the Americans as the only serious competitor to the British during the first half of the nineteenth century. From then on, iron and propeller replaced wood and sail. With only one yard in America then capable of working iron into frames and hulls, and with virtually no capability of rolling iron into plate, the Americans had a steep learning curve to rematch British maritime engineering technology.
Hurd also provides a less than glamorous account of life at home as the Napoleonic wars came to an end and the steamship voyage began:
The country [UK] was still predominantly agricultural; its population since the days of Elizabeth had little more than doubled, and was still under 11 million. Most of what are now main roads were little better than earthen tracks, beaten more or less hard by traffic. The journey by coach from London to Edinburgh or Glasgow was still a matter of days. Though a beginning had been made on the construction of canals, the inland transport of goods was inefficiently carried on in the main by rough wagons or pack horses. The principle of the steam engine had been discovered, and the enormous possibilities of the latent coal and iron resources of the country had begun to draw on Man’s imagination, but the development of these, which the nineteenth century was still to witness, was still at the stage of infancy.
The Scottish coastal trades were maintained by cutter-rigged sailing packets and cargo smacks at the turn of the nineteenth century. The east coast packets were armed with carronades and pistols should they chance upon Napoleon’s raiders. The packet routes included the prestigious Leith to London service and services north to Wick, calling at ports large and small, and there were numerous west coast routes from Greenock to Ayr or west to Campbeltown and beyond to the wild and isolated Western Isles. The sailing schedules were haphazard and depended entirely on wind and weather; the sailing packets could not compete with the incoming stage coaches even though sea travel offered an easier journey, unless, of course, the weather was really severe. If only the timetabling and scheduling of the sailing packets could be regularised then they would be better placed to compete with the new overland routes. This was accomplished to a certain degree on the more prestigious routes, such as the east coast packet service to London, by providing standby vessels should the arrival of the packet be delayed. But this was an expensive practice that the passenger fares inevitably reflected.
On the sheltered waters of the Upper Clyde were the fly-boats. These were wherry rigged boats with four oars that could carry about eight tons. They had benches along the sides for the passengers, and an awning, or fly, aft to protect the lucky few from the rain. The fly-boats could take up to ten or twelve hours for the journey between Greenock, via the winding and undredged channel of the Clyde, up to the Broomielaw, hardly a satisfactory journey time with few passenger comforts on offer. Andrew Rennie, the town drummer at Greenock, was part-owner of a fly-boat and decided that he might speed things up by equipping a new boat with experimental side paddles that could be driven by hand. The drivers of the paddle wheels, it would seem, were to be driven on to greater effort by the beat of his drum. It worked, but was stopped by the lack of volunteers to turn the paddles, once the blisters had burst and the novelty had worn off.
Although a number of attempts had been made by Scottish engineers and designers to put the land engine onto a boat in order to propel it, the first acknowledged commercially successful steamship in the UK was Henry Bell’s Comet. Bell went to shipbuilder John Wood in Port Glasgow and together they conceived Comet which was launched with steam up in early August 1812, her brick-lined furnace supporting the boiler. It appears that thirteen-year-old David Hutcheson was present at the launch, inspiring the boy with the romance of the steamship, and no doubt inspiring him towards his destiny of champion, if not hero (certainly of the islanders), of steamer services to the West Highlands. David Hutcheson, of course, preceded David MacBrayne in this same role.
Robert Fulton’s Steam Boat or Clermont (1807), ‘which poured forth volumes of smoke in the day and showers of sparks at night, filling the minds of onlookers with apprehensive calamities’.
The Americans were slightly ahead of the game at this stage as they already had Steam Boat (sometimes referred to as Clermont) running on the Hudson River above New York from 1807, and the French were not far behind them. Back at home, William Symington had tried his luck earlier on the newly opened and sheltered waters of the Forth and Clyde Canal. Had it not been for vested interests, he should, by all rights, have taken the prize for the first commercially successful steamship; and that before the likes of Robert Fulton, John Stevens and others had set to work in New York and Bell in Glasgow. It appears that the committee of management, chaired by Lord Dundas, which was funding Symington’s experiments, recognised that its own towage fees and its herd of mighty horses that walked the towpaths were in serious jeopardy of being undercut on its own patch. But more seriously, there was also the issue of Symington spending the committee’s money without prior request – by all accounts Symington was a committed inventor but a poor communicator.
Comet was placed in service almost immediately after her trials, running down from the Broomielaw to Greenock and Helensburgh in just three and a half to four hours. Comet was really too small even for the Greenock to Helensburgh run, so Wood lengthened the little ship by twenty feet. Bell then took her via the Forth and Clyde Canal to Grangemouth to be reboilered and after a brief sojourn in the east Bell next spread his wings to the West Highlands. The problem was that others had seen the potential that Comet purveyed, and larger steamships were being commissioned for competitive service both on the Clyde and on the Forth.
Bell’s West Highland steamer service commenced in 1819 and was the pioneer coastal steamship service in Europe and it is this role for which Bell should rightly be remembered. When the little steamship was wrecked in December 1820 near Craignish, the larger steamer Highland Chieftain was brought in to take up the service.
The floating of the steam engine cured much of the uncertainty in sea travel and ensured greatly improved schedules for passenger and the mails. Geoffrey Body in his book British Paddle Steamers wrote:
The Comet had been followed by the steamers Elizabeth and Clyde and Glasgow in 1813. In 1814 came the first signs of a boom, with nine steamers being added to the Clyde fleet … The following year, 1815, Dumbarton Castle started on the Rothesay run and services were also extended from Dunoon to Inveraray. Between 1815 and 1819 a total of twenty-six vessels appeared on the Clyde waters while in the 1820s thirty-two steamers were built.
Meanwhile, just six steamers were registered in London during 1818, a further seven in 1819 and nine more in 1820. By the end of 1818 (all steamships had then to be registered) the aggregate tonnage of steamships on the Clyde amounted to some 3,000 tons burthen. There was a steamer service between Leith and Stirling by 1814, operated by Stirling, and the steamship service between Perth and Dundee commenced the following year. Even the Isle of Wight ferry out of Southampton remained subject to the vagaries of the weather until 1820, when the Solent’s first steamer, which had been built in Lincolnshire in 1817, was set to work between Southampton and Cowes. Where the Clyde shipowners led, it seems those on the Thames and elsewhere followed.
Many of the established shipowning companies resisted the newfangled steam technology to let others experiment with the over-complicated and expensive single-cylinder expansion engines. Others did champion the smoky wooden-hulled paddle steamers and soon took their sooty sails beyond their sheltered estuaries to the rougher seas of coastal voyaging. In those early days the steamers were laid up in the worst of the winter weather, awaiting the calmer days of spring – once again the sailing smacks would reign supreme. But it was not long before improved and more powerful engines were developed, allowing larger hulls to carry them. These in turn reduced the risk of being overwhelmed in a heavy sea so that the steamers eventually became all-weather boats.
A steamer service was inaugurated from the Clyde to Belfast from 1818 by David Napier’s Rob Roy. She was soon joined by the Clyde Shipping Company’s steamer Rapid, which was later sold in 1825 to the General Steam Navigation Company for service between London and the Continent. The link between Dublin and the Clyde was started only in 1823, when the St George Steam Packet Company managed the Emerald Isle on the route, basing her at Greenock.
Within a short time, a host of coastal, rather than cross-channel, steam packet services developed. These included a stagecoach connection to the shallow riverside quay at Dumfries for the steamer to Liverpool and services such as the Leith & Aberdeen Steam Yacht Company, and its steamer Tourist, running twelve-hour voyages between Leith and up to eight intermediate ports of call to Aberdeen from 1821 onwards. The Aberdeen, Leith & Clyde company commissioned the steamer Velocity for the same service shortly afterwards. The fare between Leith and Aberdeen was an expensive 21s saloon and 12s steerage as there was little viable alternative, with river crossings making the overland route much longer in miles than the journey by sea.
City of Edinburgh started running between Leith and London in 1821. Owned by the London & Edinburgh Steam Packet Company which was established by a group of local merchants, she was soon joined by Mountaineer, and a direct competitor, the steamer Brilliant. The competition was resolved when the Steam Packet Company bought Brilliant, placing the ship on Leith to Dundee and Aberdeen duties for which, in fact, she had originally been designed.
As the reliability of the coastal steamers increased, so merchants and passengers transferred their allegiance to the steamship. The fruits of the recent industrial revolution provided cargoes aplenty, with many goods destined for onward transhipment at the port of destination. Sail remained in use alongside steam, and the London & Edinburgh Shipping Company (rather than its former competitor the Steam Packet Company) commissioned a series of sailing ‘clippers’, built in Aberdeen, as late as the 1840s. The so called ‘Aberdeen Clippers’ replaced the old schooners; they had wonderful names such as Nonsuch, Rapid, Dart and Swift. Indeed, these magnificent little sailing ships were the forebears of the larger full-rigged ships that later undertook the tea races from the Far East.
The Dundee & Perth Shipping Company and the competing Dundee & Perth Union Shipping Company had twelve smacks trading to London, offering four regular sailings per week from 1824 onwards. The smacks reigned supreme until 1832 when two Glasgow-owned paddle steamers, Liverpool and Glasgow, appeared on the scene. A belated decision was made by the board of the Dundee, Perth & London Company to go into steam, and more immediately, to charter the paddler London Merchant to face the rivals head to head immediately. In so doing, the passage time was reduced to just thirty-eight hours.
The new purpose-built ships, predictably named Perth and Dundee, were initially the fastest and best-appointed on the east coast, the Dundee owners taking delight in overtaking rivals from Edinburgh and Aberdeen (the inaugural steam sailing between Aberdeen and London was taken by Queen of Scotland in 1827). The Perth, with its figurehead of the Fair Maid of Perth, and Dundee, with Neptune on the prow, initially called at the fishing ports of Great Yarmouth and Scarborough, but speed was all-important and these calls were dropped after 1836. The pair were ordered from Robert Napier with hulls built by John Wood and the saloons decorated by the celebrated artist Sir Horatio McCulloch. Napier lost heavily on the contract – a fixed price of £36,000 was inadequate for the work undertaken. They took nearly two years to build and were delivered in 1834. But even then, the steamship service was still discontinued in the winter months when the vessels were laid up and sailing ships resumed duty.
Steamer services from the east coast to destinations across the North Sea did not develop for some time. The Leith & Hamburg Shipping Company was created in 1816 with a fleet of sailing brigs. The successors of this company, eventually to become the Currie Line, did eventually promote steamers on its service to Hamburg, but not until 1848. The Leith, Hamburg & Rotterdam Shipping Company, managed by George Gibson, remained true to sail until 1850. James Rankine & Sons worked the Glasgow to Amsterdam route with schooners, until the steamer Therese was introduced on a new route between Grangemouth and Amsterdam in 1854. The sailing ships ceased on the Glasgow service in 1861, when a sharing arrangement was made with George Gibson on the Dutch sailings from Forth ports.
Further afield the concept of long-distance steamer voyages, or rather steam-assisted sail voyages, had been proven at a very early stage – not by the British but by the Americans. The first transatlantic crossing by a steamship took place in 1819 when Captain Moses Rogers sailed Savannah from New York to Liverpool and via various north European ports to St Petersburg and back to New York. Although designed as a sailing ship, she was bought on the stocks by the Savannah Steam Ship Company, inspired by the sight of pioneer paddle steamer, Charleston, steaming into port in 1817. Savannah took twenty-five days to cross the Atlantic. The little auxiliary steamer only used her engines for eight of them, as weather conditions prevented her from making better speed under sail with the paddles shipped inboard.
A second long-distance experiment followed in 1825 when the Honourable East India Company commissioned Enterprise for an experimental sailing from Falmouth to Calcutta. Their Lordships were not impressed by the 103-day passage time, hindered by gathering fuel on the way, which served only to reinforce their preference for the old-style wooden-walled sailing ships.
Scotland came back into the frame when Canadian Samuel Cunard visited the UK to articulate his vision of developing a regular transatlantic steamer service. Robert Napier agreed to build three wooden-hulled paddle steamers for Cunard for a total of £90,000, although Napier soon realised that larger and more powerful vessels would be needed to maintain the reliability of service stipulated by Cunard’s client, the Admiralty. Napier insisted that a four-ship service would be needed in order to satisfy the Admiralty requirements.
Samuel Cunard (1787–1865), founder of the British & North American Steam Packet Company.
George Burns (1795–1890), of G & J Burns, shipowners, a God-fearing man who was conferred a baronetcy a year before he died.
Introductions were made to George Burns and David MacIver in Glasgow who were soon able to guarantee Cunard 50 per cent of the enhanced capital outlay required for the four-ship service. £100 shares in units of £5,000 were offered to Glasgow businessmen, the first taker being Mr William Connal, who was persuaded by George Burns and responded simply by saying, ‘I know nothing of steam navigation, but if you think well of it I’ll join you’. A total of twenty-nine Glasgow businessmen invested in what became The Glasgow Proprietary in the British and North American Steam Packets. Samuel Cunard placed orders for the ships in May 1839 as specified and designed by Robert Napier, who in turn instructed four shipbuilders: Robert Duncan to build Britannia, John Wood, who had earlier built the hull of Comet, to build Acadia, Charles Wood, Caledonia and Robert Steele, Columbia.
The faith of Samuel Cunard and his client, the Admiralty, in the Scottish shipbuilders was rewarded by a reliable four-ship service to Halifax and Boston. The relationship between Cunard and its subsequent proprietors with Glasgow and the Clyde remained amicable throughout the entire existence of the Cunard Line, with many of its subsequent mainline steamers being Clyde-built. Indeed, the entire Cunard fleet was registered in Glasgow until 1878, when its business forced it to adopt Liverpool as its home port, Liverpool having become the company’s centre of operations.
Scottish shipowners did not enter the ‘long-haul’ steamer business until much later. For some it was the opening of the Suez Canal, which put steamships at an advantage over the sailing ships, that precipitated a move into steam, for others it was the increasing efficiency of steam propulsion which eroded the preference for sail. Examples of long-haul Scottish companies include the Donaldson Line, founded in 1855 by brothers William and John, with their straightforward vision of trading to South America with chartered sailing barques. Their first steamer was ordered in 1870, and shortly afterwards they changed allegiance to a new, more profitable service from the Clyde to Montreal and Quebec, although they retained an interest in the refrigerated meat trade from South America until the company’s demise. Thereafter the North American route became the core business and was operated in direct competition with the Allan Line (see chapter 12).
Patrick Henderson, with his three brothers from Pittenweem in Fife, founded P Henderson & Company in 1834. Such was the energy of ‘Paddy’ that the business took his name, despite his early death at the age of thirty-three, just seven years after the foundation of the company in Glasgow. Like so many other Scottish companies it started by taking Scottish coal to Italy and importing Italian marble to Scotland. Venturing further afield, it eventually made Burma its main overseas destination, having earlier found difficulties with return cargoes from New Zealand, which had been its original target. Other famous west-coast companies include the Glen Line, established at Glasgow in 1867 by Alan Gow, becoming part of the London Scottish school (see chapter 5), and ultimately part of the Alfred Holt empire trading to the Far East, and even ‘Hungry Hogarth’, a firm noted for its tramp steamers registered at Ardrossan, and founded there in 1868 by Hugh Hogarth and James Goodwin.
In 1825 George Thompson of Aberdeen started to run sailing ships to Canada in the lumber trade. This became the famous Aberdeen Line, running passenger-cargo ships to Australia, and which eventually merged with an Australian company to become the Aberdeen & Commonwealth Lines. William and Alexander Thomson set up a company at Leith in 1839, specifically to import Italian marble, this time as the nucleus of the famous Ben Line of Steamships trading eventually to the Far East.
A host of new Scottish steamship companies were created to trade to all parts of the globe by the mid nineteenth century. But not all of the ships had Glasgow as their port of registry, as the merchants of Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen were set for their share of the profits of shipowning as well. Besides, the east coast was the obvious location to develop trade both to Europe and along the shorter sea passage from Scottish ports to London.
By the late nineteenth century nearly all the ports on the globe that offered favourable trading conditions were served by a Scottish-owned liner company. The Donaldson Line traded to Canada from the Clyde and the Anchor Line to the United States. Andrew Weir set up farther afield in the Indian Ocean, and eventually focused on a round-the-world service. And although it became a company that based itself at Liverpool, Cunard always had a large proportion of Scots among its deck and engineering officers, a reflection of the respect held for the seafaring and engineering talents that these men offered. Masters of the two great Queen liners, it seems, were more often than not Scots seafarers – an indictment of Scouse talent, or rather a tartan compliment?
The Scottish legacy extends far wider than locally registered shipping companies. Both the Orient Line and Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company had distinctly Scottish roots, as also did the British India Steam Navigation Company. Shaw, Savill & Albion, of course, incorporated the Albion Line, formerly owned by Paddy Henderson and based at Glasgow.
But not all steamships flew the Red Ensign. The steamship slowly but surely populated the merchant navies the world over. As the steamers developed in size and power, so too higher-value parcels of cargo began to be carried. In due course, iron-hulled screw steamers with greater deadweight allowed bulk cargoes, such as coal and grain, to be transported on the high seas.
Scotland should take pride in the men who took up the development of infrastructure, not only in Scotland but on the wider front, prescribed by the massive incoming development of industry and international trade. Hurd again:
The names of two great Scottish engineers, Thomas Telford and John Rennie, emerge … To Thomas Telford, the son of a shepherd, and himself in early life a herd boy, Great Britain owed the construction of the Caledonian Canal, the harbours of Dundee and Aberdeen, the construction of nearly 1,000 miles of road, as well as some 2,000 bridges … The construction of St Katharine’s Dock in London, finished in the year 1828, was also due to Telford. We trace to the engineering genius of John Rennie – the son of a farmer, and, like Telford, educated in a Parish school – the great system of the Kennet and Avon Canal, many bridges including Southwark and Waterloo bridges across the Thames, the construction of harbours at Grimsby, Hull, Holyhead and Kingston [Dun Laoghaire], as well as the improvement of Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham and Sheerness dockyards.
Currie Line of Leith – home trade, Baltic and Mediterranean
It is easy to overlook the unglamorous home trade and near-Continental services, despite their being an important part of the Merchant Navy. There are several compelling reasons for their importance. East-coast Scottish ports were strategically best placed for trade with Scandinavia, the Baltic, Germany and Denmark. Trade to southern Europe was promoted by the Victorian need for Italian marble with which to mark their wealth, and this led to a thriving trade with the Mediterranean. Additionally, there was a need for fine wine, port and sherry and this provided a nucleus for trade with Portugal and southern France.
A number of the famous long-haul shipping companies started in the European trade, notably P Henderson & Company working from Glasgow, and Arthur Anderson’s Peninsular Steam Navigation Company in London, both initially focused on trade to the Mediterranean. Other companies evolved from coastal services and trade across the North Sea. The Currie Line was one such, going back to the days of sail when the Hull & Leith Shipping Company was established in 1800. Various mergers with other coasting companies took place until in 1848 the company became the Leith, Hull & Hamburgh Steam Packet Company [sic] on commencing a service to Hamburg. The new route was the outcome of an expanded fleet while the company was led by Thomas Barclay, shipbuilder of Glasgow, and Leith entrepreneur and businessman Robert Cook.
In 1862 James Currie joined the firm, providing a firm link with the Castle Line trading to South Africa under the direction of brother Donald Currie. James Currie maintained regular passenger and cargo sailings to Hamburg, Copenhagen and Stettin, with an extensive array of cargo services to the Baltic. James Currie soon needed extra capacity, and rather than replace his modern fleet of steamships he sent them to Granton one by one to be lengthened. Six of the fleet were so dealt with. All Currie’s ships were, in any case, sturdily built to withstand the rigours of the North Sea. The rebuilding programme was followed in the 1870s by a progressive replacement of the engines with the new and more efficient compound system, while six brand new steamers were also commissioned. Business was indeed buoyant. The fleet survived the subsequent late-Victorian depression but twelve ships spent a lengthy sojourn in a backwater at Leith Docks for the duration, although the fleet had recovered by 1895 to a total of forty-one ships.
During the Great War the basic European trade of the company was suspended; three of its ships were detained in German ports at the start of hostilities. Post-war, Donald Currie’s Liverpool-based Liverpool and Hamburg Line was absorbed into the Leith-based interests and the service suspended until conditions improved in the early 1920s. The important European emigrant trade, with connections in the UK for transatlantic routes, had virtually ended by the 1920s, but passenger berths were still on offer and were of an elegance that attracted the more discerning traveller away from the arduous Dover and Calais train links to Germany. Four Dutch cargo steamers, Haarlem, Hague, Helder and Helmond, were purchased to replace war losses, bringing their characteristic Dutch names into the fleet. In 1923 four ships were bought from the Khedivial Mail Steamship Company of Egypt. These were all given names ending in -land, eg Sutherland, Finland, and this nomenclature was preferred thereafter, except for the two new ships for the Copenhagen service delivered in 1928 which were given Viking names Hengist and Horsa. By 1930 the Leith, Hull & Hamburgh Steam Packet Company, James Currie’s Currie Line, provided two departures a week from Leith to Hamburg, a weekly sailing to Copenhagen and Christiansand, and occasional services to other Continental ports.
The Hamburg service also received new tonnage when the twelve-passenger Courland and Gothland were commissioned in 1932. Sister ships, Courland built by Barclay Curle, and Gothland by Henry Robb of Leith, were then delivered for the Hamburg service. They were splendid examples of North Sea steamers built between the wars. Driven by one set of triple expansion engines with steam generated by twin oil-fired boilers at 185 psi (pounds per square inch), their service speed was a little under 14 knots. They were most attractive yet strong-looking ships, complete with modern cruiser sterns, gentle sheer and balanced profiles with central island accommodation. The all-riveted hull was ice-strengthened and built to a shelter deck design with a full length ’tween deck and a lower ’tween deck in the forward hold. There were four holds served by an array of derricks including a 10-ton heavy-lift derrick that plumbed no. 2 hold.
Accommodation was provided for twelve passengers in twin-berth cabins on the shelter deck and there were two single-berth cabins on the boat deck. The cabins were sold as staterooms and were comparable with the staterooms on offer aboard any of the crack transatlantic liners of the day. The dining saloon was panelled in mahogany and there was the obligatory stone fireplace complete, in winter, with an open fire. Above the saloon, and linked by an elegant staircase, was the oak-panelled smoke room which was adorned with leather armchairs in the style of a contemporary gentleman’s club.
In 1933 the company bought M Isaacs & Sons of London and in so doing entered the Mediterranean trade. It rebranded itself as Currie Line in World War II when all its regular services were again suspended as it had suffered the ignominy of having correspondence opened by the authorities and censored! Twelve of its fleet of twenty-seven ships were lost in the Second World War, while one replacement was acquired in 1942, although this ship was lost to a torpedo a few months later. Gothland suffered bomb damage lying alongside at London in September 1940. Six months later Courland, under the command of Captain R Smith, was sunk by torpedo while in convoy approximately four hundred miles off Gibraltar. Three of the crew of thirty were lost; all the survivors were rescued by Currie’s Brandenburg which was also in the convoy. Sadly, all but one man, a passenger, were lost the following day when Brandenburg was sunk under similar circumstances – a grim couple of days for the Currie Line.
Gothland was requisitioned in November 1941 for conversion at Plymouth into a Convoy Rescue Ship. The vessels selected for this role were all fast, low freeboard coastal ships with existing passenger accommodation. They attended to casualties in convoy so that the convoy escorts could concentrate on the attacker. This required good seamanship and adept use of the ship’s boats. There was also a trawl boom and net that could sweep swimmers out of the water when the sea was too rough to launch a boat. Gothland was mainly employed on North Atlantic convoys to St John’s, Newfoundland, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, but did attend occasional convoys down to Gibraltar. Between commissioning in February 1942 and the end of World War II Convoy Rescue Ship Gothland undertook twenty voyages and saved 149 persons from seven sinkings and one aircraft ditching.
Gothland resumed civilian duties post-war, this time on the Leith to Copenhagen route, but in the late 1950s her owners were beginning to concentrate on the bulk cargo trade and the North Sea services were run down; Gothland was sold for further service in 1958 and was scrapped three years later.
The first Currie Line motor ship was Scotland which ran from London to the Mediterranean from 1946 until she was sold in 1967. All passenger carrying ceased in 1958 but the cargo services persisted in partnership with foreign partners such that the Liverpool to Hamburg and Grangemouth to Finland services were entirely foreign flagged by 1964. Interestingly, the company ventured into the deep-sea tramp market in 1959, seeing an opportunity for the carriage of vegetable oils. Three ships were commissioned, the oil carrier Roland, working to West Africa, the bulk carrier Gothland and the conventional break bulk cargo ship Highland, the latter chartered for much of her tenure with Leith registry to the Shaw Savill and Alfred Holt joint cargo service to Australia. She was sold to the Anchor line and renamed Elysia in 1968 when Walter Runciman & Company, then owners of Anchor (see chapter 12), bought the entire Currie Line holding and its goodwill. The Currie Line ships were replaced by chartered tonnage in the 1970s when the focus slowly changed to storage and road haulage.
Typical of the smaller traders in the Leith, Hull & Hamburgh Steam Packet Company fleet in the twentieth century was Haarlem (1917), one of a group of four steamers purchased from Dutch owners in 1922, seen at a frosty Danish port unloading a cargo of coke.
The first motor ship in the Currie Line was Scotland (1946) which, with sister ship England, maintained the Mediterranean sailings.
