The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company
There was a time when P&O Ferries had a rather more ornate name and sailed past Calais all the way to to Hong Kong. Peter Moore explains all.
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If you step back and think about it for a minute, the speed with which the British have recoiled into their post-colonial shell is really quite impressive.
100 years ago the world looked very different. The British Empire stretched like a blanket from Melbourne to Montreal, covering half of Africa and the whole of India in between. Boys from Eton and Harrow were despatched to distant outposts where they waved wooden sticks at locals, drank gin and shot elephants for supper.
From a London office in 2009, it all seems quite unreal.
But for all the ills of the Empire (and there were many), this 19th century world does seem far more colourful and exciting. And while we are sat at our desks, worrying about Excel spreadsheets and SMART targets, it’s always worth remembering the Victorian explorers and adventurers that got on perfectly well without ever having heard of a self-help business book.
P&O Ferries played a part in this world. They weren’t, of course, known as P&O Ferries then but rather more grandly as the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company – a glorious name that I wish they’d bring back.
While P&O Ferries concentrate their attention today on the shipping routes between Dover and Calais, Hull and Rotterdam or Zeebrugge and Portsmouth and Bilbao, their scope back in the mid-19th century was much wider.
The following extract gives you a flavour of the routes seven of their steamers took back in the mid-19th century.
“A contract was made, 1st January 1845, with the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company for a line of similar steamers, seven in number, from England to the East Indies and China, at £160,000 sterling or $800,000 per annum.”
“This line passes from Southampton, via Gibraltar and Malta, to Alexandria, in Egypt; thence the route continues overland to Suez, at the heart of the Red Sea, from whence the steamers again start, touching at Aden, Bombay, and at Point de Galle, in the island Ceylon, from whence they proceed to Singapore and Hong Kong.”
(From a report by the American Colonization Society to the House of Representatives in August 1850)
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image credit: Norman D Leventhal Map Centre at the BPL
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