Southampton to Durban on the Union Castle Line: An Imperial Shipping Company and the limits of globality c. 1900–39

UC’s maritime capital field

UC as a company, its ships and the ports which it used, formed around them what may be described as a maritime capital field. By this, I mean a set of enduring, spatialised and patterned ways in which activity as a seaborne capitalist enterprise is transnationally embedded in a set of forms of social power. The very mobility of ships can create the illusion that they can easily and simply be deployed in new directions. In fact, the establishment of enduring structures of trade between different points on the globe requires the building of immensely complex ensembles of stable commercial and shipboard expertise, and the alignment of these with the constraints of prevailing forms of social power. This cannot be achieved solely through the operation of market mechanisms. ¹⁰

At its core, UC was of course a profit-making venture. However, in order to last across the decades as it did, the company had to build strong and stable political relationships with the British state and its imperial offshoots. It also had to find its place in the military-strategic calculus of the British empire. Dependent on imperial trade and a stable system of world communications, requiring commandeered tonnage in time of war, the British state needed a cooperative shipping industry. Similarly, UC had to navigate the rapidly changing forms of settler state configuration in southern Africa. As the arrival of the Armadale Castle shows, UC was also dependent for its success on the local development of port facilities. Even an enterprise of UC’s size could not simply order the appropriate harbours into existence. And the international rise of labour politics generated important, unforeseeable, political upheavals. As all this suggests, analysis of shipping as a business cannot focus too exclusively on the City of London, despite its enormous power. To survive, UC’s Fenchurch Street head office had to be alive to the realities of Whitehall, colonial politics, union halls and the daily life of the world’s docksides. The specific shape which its maritime capital field took, was formed by its need to accommodate other types of power – political, military and ideological. ¹¹

UC was the creation of the shipping magnate, Sir Donald Currie. Like most of the leading figures in the British shipping industry in his time, Currie was not a scion of one of the financial dynasties of the City of London, but came from the aspirant commercial worlds of the ‘Celtic Fringe’ and northern England. ¹² Such men had to fight for social acceptance in the metropolis, and none succeeded in this more comprehensively than Currie. Born on the Clydeside in 1825, he had worked for Cunard in Liverpool, before branching out on his own with the formation of the Castle Line, running between Liverpool and Calcutta, in 1862. It was only a decade later that Currie found Castle’s economic niche: a steamship service to southern Africa.

The move followed the start of Southern Africa’s ‘Mineral Revolution’, with the opening of the Kimberley Diamond Fields. By 1887, one year after the discovery of the Rand gold fields in the Transvaal, Castle had twelve steamers serving Cape Town and Durban from the UK and seven ‘intermediate’ ships going between southern African coastal, Atlantic and Indian Ocean destinations. Currie became heavily involved in the politics of the region. As a Liberal, he was keen to avoid conflict with the Boers. He successfully negotiated a British boundary dispute with President Brand of the Free State and acted for Whitehall as go-between with the Transvaal government. Currie’s Liberalism did not, however, extend to opposition to state economic intervention, at least when it came to his own interests.

Currie sought a symbiotic relationship between his company and the British and Cape Colonial states. The only significant competitor on the Cape run was the Union Line, which held the Colony’s lucrative mail contract. Currie launched a political campaign in the Cape for the government to split the contract between the two companies, which he achieved in 1876. He was also well able to exploit late nineteenth-century British fears about maritime security. During the 1870s, he urged the need for a telegraph line to southern Africa, a position which resonated well with the British military establishment’s views. Currie argued for the importance of the British merchant marine as a manpower reserve for the Royal Navy and that it should be made easier to employ retired naval officers on civilian shipping. He was successful, from the 1880s, in gaining a subsidy for the construction of liners configured for conversion for wartime use as gunships. By the 1880s, Currie owned his own castle in Scotland and was hosting the British and German royal families on his vessels. ¹³ The company had built a great and patriotic reputation. To a journalist writing in 1887, Castle liners represented ‘British solidity, British comfort and British thoroughness’. ¹⁴ In 1900, Currie moved to absorb his rival, the Union Line, and the era of UC began. The distinctive lilac-painted hulls of the company’s ships and the naming of the vessels after British and Irish castles ‘branded’ the company in the imperial public mind.

The expansion of Southampton and of Durban were both examples of the tendency of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for the growth of a few mega-ports and the reduction of the significance of the multiple small ports of the sail era. ¹⁵ For colonial ports in particular, this process of consolidation was linked to a global system of energy organisation. A successful port had to be a place where ships could take on coal, a ‘coaling station’ in the parlance of the time. The capital investment needed for this could not be evenly spread. It is noteworthy that it was sometimes local, and not metropolitan capitalists that took the lead in this process of port consolidation. ¹⁶

The dock facilities at Southampton, with their quick and convenient rail link to London, were crucial to the development of UC. Southampton developed a very different profile from other British ports because of the heavy concentration of employment in the ocean liner sector. The modernisation of the harbour was initiated by the father and son team of Francis and Alfred Giles in the 1840s. This development enabled the Royal Mail Steam Packet (RMSP) company, which was the premier service to the Caribbean, to establish itself there. RMSP later became important on the South American routes. In 1892, the docks, which were in financial trouble, were bought by the London and South Western Railway (LSWR), which invested in a significant extension of the port. In 1907 the White Star line started using Southampton for its liners to New York. ¹⁷ Hamburg Amerika Linie and Norddeutscher Lloyd also called at the port. ¹⁸ After the First World War, Cunard and Canadian Pacific moved their main services to Southampton. ¹⁹ In 1924, LSWR fused with several lesser companies, and the new Southern Railway took over the port and further expanded its services. ²⁰ P&O, Rotterdam Lloyd, Nederland and US lines were also prominent in the harbour. ²¹

Durban became a viable port for UC as a consequence of development which took place there at the turn of the century. This was not only a matter of the essential deepening of the channel which enabled the Armadale Castle and ships like it to sail in. It required the transformation of Durban into a coaling port, which was made possible through the opening of significant coalfields in northern Natal during the 1890s and the completion of the rail links serving those fields. ²² Also vital to Durban’s economic viability was the long-delayed connection of the rail route to Johannesburg, now the region’s largest and most dynamic market, in 1895. ²³ None of these developments were the work of UC, nor were they primarily carried out by City of London interests, although the City did largely provide the capital. Rather, they were driven by Durban’s local bourgeoisie of merchants, shipping agents and sugar barons, both through private initiatives and through the sway they exercised over the Natal state. ²⁴

UC did not adopt the pattern of cosmopolitanism portrayed by Miller as a global norm. As of 1906, in the Durban offices of UC, the heads of the freight, passenger and claims departments and the Marine Superintendent were all white Natalians and the accountant had been born to British parents in India. The shipping agents in the city were almost all Scottish or English, with only a few, white, exceptions like Prussian-born Alexander Denks. ²⁵ The great constraints on the development of African capitalism in southern Africa and the strong racial boundaries in Natal meant that there were no African entrepreneurs likely to be chosen as partners by shipping companies. Dada Abdulla, the one Indian shipowner in the pre-Boer War town (it was he who brought MK Gandhi to Africa, to act as his lawyer), no longer seems to have been an important factor in the industry. There were very occasional cases of companies using Indian agents. For example, during the First World War, Mohammed Cassim Anglia, a wealthy and politically active merchant, worked in the docks as sub-agent under the W. Dunn company. The exception proves the rule though, for Dunn’s was placed under great pressure to break off the relationship by the port’s Principal Immigration Officer, G.W. Dick, who thought that Anglia was challenging both his immigration policies and the accepted racial hierarchy. ²⁶

Inevitably, UC was going to change as a company with the departure from the scene of its autocratic founder. While UC had a number of shipbuilders, its most important one was Harland and Wolff (HW) of Belfast. HW was internationally renowned for the quality of its ships and notorious for the Protestant sectarianism of its employment practices. Lord Pirrie, the company’s presiding genius, had a long financial relationship with Currie. After Currie died in 1909, UC was in danger of losing direction. Pirrie was financially involved with Sir Owen Philipps, who led the enormous Royal Mail Shipping (RMS) group. Together, RMS and the interlocking Pirrie–Philipps-owned company, Elder Dempster, made an offer to buy each existing UC share at three times the going price. In April 1912, UC accepted. The buyers then also bought out the management company, Donald Currie, at £700,000. The total value of the transaction was £5.48 m of which £3.48 m was provided by Elder Dempster and the rest borrowed from City banks. Owen Philipps became chair of UC, and Pirrie was a board member. HW became heavy investors in UC. At the time UC had forty-four vessels representing a total of 319,514 tons. Questions were already being raised as to whether the RMS and HW were perhaps overextending themselves and had become excessively reliant on loans. ²⁷

With the creation of the new, unified South African state in 1910, it became crucial for UC to develop a set of stable political relationships with the Pretoria government. That they would be able to do so was by no means certain, given Afrikaner nationalist resentment of imperial authority. However, the arrangement between UC and South Africa, entered into in 1912, was one with major benefits for both parties and set a pattern which survived the dominance of Afrikaner nationalists in government from 1924 to 1939, and indeed their return to power from 1948. UC dominated the ‘conference’ of shipping companies trading with South Africa, and in the agreements made between the Union of South Africa and the conference, UC was the only commercial player that really counted.

The conference agreed to offer significant reductions in freight rates for South African agricultural exports and to abolish ‘deferred rates’ – a kind of customer loyalty discount. In exchange, the government gave UC the lucrative contract for carrying mail between the UK and South Africa and a five-year monopoly on carrying government cargo. The agreement established an enduring pattern of trading the mail contract for shipping industry help to South African agriculture. The lines could recoup low outbound charges with high import charges. ²⁸ Most importantly, the government gave earnest of its willingness to treat the UC as the premier shipping line and to protect it from the competition of international companies. This was significant at time when German lines were making an impressive challenge to UC, the Deutsche Ost Afrika Linie (DOAL) on the Durban route and the Woermann line to Cape Town. ²⁹ (The American Consul in Durban had noted in 1911 that the DOAL’s three weekly sailings in both directions had enabled Germany to overtake the USA as an exporter to Natal in the last five years. ³⁰ )

Although UC’s image was primarily as a passenger and mail service, both through its major liners and its smaller boats, the company was also deeply involved in cargo traffic to and from South Africa. From Britain, textiles, heavy machinery, hardware, vehicles and luxury goods were sent. From South Africa, the ships brought chiefly agricultural products and – via Cape Town – the Bank of England’s supply of gold bullion from the Rand. Especially important was the South African export of fruit; by 1934 five million boxes a year arrived in Southampton. ³¹ The perishable nature of this cargo meant that the extensive cold storage and good rail facilities in Southampton were essential in getting the product to the British markets. ³² In 1933, Southampton was receiving over 70 per cent of South Africa’s total exports to Britain. ³³

UC’s maritime labour field

Linked to this maritime capital field was what one might call a maritime labour field, a parallel spatialised and patterned field of labour recruitment and movement. Labour recruitment is always shaped by a set of contingencies and political decisions which cannot in any simple way be pinned down to an economic logic. The unusual nature of seaborne work, with its long absences from home, tends to create very specific forms of personal trajectory, community and labour identity into which workers have to be drawn. These forms change with technology and socio-political circumstances; although seaborne work in the steam era did not (except in officer and specialist positions) require as long an apprenticeship as the time of sail, for employers the finding and organisation of a pool of labour was never simple. Maritime labour recruitment patterns, once established, tended to take on an embedded nature and were not easily changed. Although British merchant marine workers at the time were notably diverse in their national origins, UC never seriously attempted to internationalise its labour force, recruiting most of its workers, at least on the routes to the major South African ports, from within England, and a majority of them, from the immediate area of Southampton. UC had, like other European employers of its era, to deal with the emergence of the labour movement, which took on a very specific trajectory in the maritime world. The company’s maritime labour field was to be shaped by a very particular labour history.

The relation of the UC workforce to global space might be described as an ‘encapsulated’ one. Its workers tended to maintain very strong links to their home base, and this was reinforced by the extremely hostile immigration enforcement regime which they encountered in South Africa. ³⁴ The workforce were anything but cosmopolitan. Every few months they would journey across the world, but they would mostly return to their starting point, which was their most meaningful social location. One-dimensional versions of economic globalisation do not account for the social, cultural and political relationships which produce such paradoxes of localism within globalism. Remarkably few UC workers seem to have deserted in southern African ports. Those who did, were likely to quickly be picked up by the police, and sentenced under the British 1894 Merchant Shipping Act. ³⁵ Planned attempts at desertion, like that of the Italian, Henri Bettoni, who left the Kinfauns Castle in Durban in 1909 with the help of a fellow-countryman, and turned up working behind the bar of His Majesty’s Hotel, were rather exceptional. ³⁶ As an immigrant worker in Britain, Bettoni probably did not have the local connections pulling him towards Southampton that his shipmates did.

As UC constructed steady, long-term links with South African ports, it required its own labour system. In this, the formation of Southampton as a liner port had a special significance. Dedicated liner ports offered a stability in labour relationships that benefited both workers and employers. Tramp steamer workers typically were extremely mobile. To take one tramp steamer seaman at random, James Ernest Altern, a Durban man of Norwegian descent, left his home town in 1923 and over the next three years travelled, successively, to Marseilles, Charleston, New York, Antwerp, Galveston, Hamburg and Ardrossan on multiple ships of various nationalities, with his voyages being interspersed with shore work, hospital treatment and imprisonment. ³⁷ This kind of mobility made any kind of stable life impossible. It was difficult for such men to form families and their life trajectory was uncertain. Ports specialising in tramp steamers were tough, poverty-wracked places. ³⁸ Such a workforce was not a desirable one for a company like UC, whose reputation rested on its respectability, reliability and efficiency.

Whereas tramp steamer workers were forced to sign on for long voyages of uncertain direction and duration, the regular schedules of the liners enabled workers to establish a domestic life of some certainty and continuity. This was especially the case if they could find steady employment with a specific company or a specific ship. The United Kingdom–New York run was particularly favourable for this stabilisation, because of its short duration – in our period, round trips of less than three weeks were possible. Even in the case of the much longer Southampton–South Africa run, by the 1930s it was possible to establish a regular schedule of seven weeks on board, followed by twelve days off at home. ³⁹ This was relatively attractive to maritime employees. In the 1930s there were about sixteen thousand shipping employees working out of Southampton, out of whom about half lived in the city. Another 10 per cent lived in nearby Portsmouth. Many of the rest were resident in the London area, an easy train ride away. Stewards and catering staff were particularly drawn from the metropolis, as of course London was the centre of the hotel trade. ⁴⁰ Southampton had a reputation for orderliness unusual in a port, and the maritime workforce was better integrated into shore society than was the case with their counterparts in tramp ports. ⁴¹ Thus, the city could provide the kind of workforce UC required; a large concentration of the company’s workers lived in the Southampton suburb of Totton. Although, like other shipping companies, UC did not enter into long-term contracts with seamen, it established a practice whereby reliable individuals, especially in the more skilled or supervisory positions, would customarily be taken on each of a ship’s regular voyages.

The stability that could be attained in this social world can be illustrated in the case of Joseph Jones. Jones was first employed by UC around 1903. From around 1910 until at least 1918, he was on the Balmoral Castle, where he held the position of engine room storekeeper. ⁴² At the beginning of the 1930s, he was still a storekeeper with the company, now on the Winchester Castle. Jones, who had grown up in Southampton, was a respected figure, a member of the Oddfellows fraternal organisation and a trade union representative on his ship. There was a strong sense of approval in Southampton trade union circles for someone who showed this kind of steadiness. Such service could also become a family asset. One UC catering worker recalled that ‘It helped with the Union Castle, having a father who had been a steward’. ⁴³ This job security offset the downsides of working for UC, such as the crew’s food, which was notoriously worse than on the other liners. ⁴⁴

There is, however, plenty of evidence of movement between companies as well. And those who transgressed against the company could expect little mercy from UC. Bob James worked for the company for many years, eventually as a Shore Donkeyman (pump operator). He was fired and blacklisted by UC after a 1909 labour dispute. In the First World War he sailed on the RMSP ship Almanzora, which was converted into an armed cruiser, and was decorated for his military services. ⁴⁵

Typically, the early twentieth-century Able Seamen, firemen and trimmers working for UC seem to have come from Hampshire or elsewhere in southern England, and to have been the sons of large families, the father a general labourer, docker, seaman or agricultural worker. ⁴⁶ Crew on UC ships often started young. Herbert Gallichan, himself the son of a seaman, first sailed on the Gloucester Castle in his early teens. His very first trip took place during the Russian Civil War, when the ship was diverted to Crimea, to help rescue the remnants of General Denikin’s counter-revolutionary army. At the age of eighteen, on the Kildonan Castle, he was promoted from Able Seaman to Quarter Master. Herbert was interned in Cape Town during a 1925 strike. From the late 1920s he spent six years as Quartermaster on a Bibby Line troopship. He then returned to Southampton in 1934, where he became an organiser for the Nation Union of Seamen. Two years later, he moved to Falmouth where he worked for the NUS for many years. Gallichan’s career was an example of how the unions could serve as a career path for older sailors. ⁴⁷ The ending of careers at sea could come late in life. With limited opportunities to move to less physically strenuous work, some employees on the UC ships served in the arduous job of Able Seamen in their late fifties and into their sixties. For example, 59-year-old John Draper, who worked in that position on the Balmoral Castle, died of heart attack soon after leaving port in 1917. ⁴⁸

Workers of colour appear to have been relatively rare on UC ships. Unlike British tramp steamer ports, Southampton seems to have had a low proportion of black maritime workers. Exceptions though, came from recruitment on the African coast. For example, during the First World War an African American resident of Durban, Kidd Walcott, worked on the Durban–Cape Town part of the UC route. Walcott seems to have been unusually successful in evading Durban’s vigilant immigration officials. A prize fighter from Pittsburgh, he was using the work on board to supplement what he earned running a boxing school. Walcott infuriated the Durban CID not only because of his occasional petty crimes, but also because he breached Natal racial decorum by living with a white girlfriend. In July 1916, he got into a punch-up with a fellow crewman on the Balmoral Castle, James Walker, putting the man in hospital, but was not prosecuted, as the authorities regarded it as a ‘fair fight’. ⁴⁹ Durban’s principal immigration officer, G.W. Dick was anxious to expel Walcott from South Africa, claiming that ‘his conduct and behaviour cannot but have a bad effect on the native mind’. ⁵⁰ Walcott appears to have moved on of his own accord, sailing away on a tramp steamer.

UC did not employ significant numbers of South African workers. The pool of white or black South Africans willing to work at sea was small, for reasons that have not been adequately explored. Although, in time, some white officers were recruited from the South African training ship General Botha, there was a strong British prejudice against these colonials as lacking in the right stuff for seamanship. ⁵¹

There was one UC experiment with African labour recruitment for its Durban operations, which was brief, and became a political embarrassment. In 1898 – in other words at the time when the arrival at Durban still required off-shore unloading into lighters – Donald Currie established the African Boating Company (ABC), in order to provide this service to the then Castle Line and other ships. ⁵² The continued viability of African subsistence agriculture in Zululand and other neighbouring areas meant that there was however, a shortage of labour. So the ABC used workers imported from the East African coast. For example, in October 1903, an Italian labour broker called Corigliano transferred 161 labourers to the ABC. These men had been recruited for Maby Brothers of Durban by Corigliano at Zanzibar, on a license issued by the Natal Colony government. The pool of recruits which Corigliano drew on apparently originated on Zanzibar itself, in the Belgian Congo, and in Portuguese East Africa. ⁵³ Other Durban firms also brought in East African labourers to work in the port, railway building and mines. ⁵⁴

The men’s experiences were appalling. There were high mortality rates, shocking examples of abusive treatment and failures to pay the workers, which resulted in vigorous protests to the Natal government from the Belgian and British representatives on Zanzibar. ⁵⁵ Natal officialdom met such complaints with derision. Natal’s Protector of Immigrants, Harry Smith, defended the companies’ conduct, upheld the right of employers to have workers imprisoned for refusing to work and callously blamed the health problems of the workers on themselves. For him, the workers were ‘wretched specimens of humanity, physical wrecks, largely suffering from Phthisis and other vile diseases which make them a danger to the community … They knock up quickly in cold weather and seem to die on the slightest provocation …’. ⁵⁶ By the middle of the decade though, the need to import labour from East Africa disappeared, as the imposition of a poll tax in Natal (violently enforced in the crushing of the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion) and declining subsistence agriculture productivity forced Natal and Zululand African men onto the job market. The lighter business declined with the improved port facilities, and UC showed no interest in recruiting Natal workers for its international operations.

UC did not become involved in the transport of indentured labourers from India; that trade was left to Bullard King’s Natal Direct Line, which had a monopoly contract, until the practice was ended in around 1911. However, UC was implicated in an iniquitous incident in April 1907, when the Berwick Castle carried 2235 Indians from Durban to Lobito in Angola. The group included 1175 male labourers, who were to work in railway construction, and the remainder, including a large number of children, were their family members. In Angola, the group was devastated by disease: 386 of the men died or disappeared. When the Berwick Castle, Cluny Castle and Alnwick Castle returned the survivors to Durban early the next year, it appears that only 1595 of the original emigrants were left alive. Seventeen of those died on the voyage back. ⁵⁷

A union revolt in Southampton and its global effects

As the world entered the second decade of the twentieth century, Southampton’s maritime workforce – and thus that of UC – became shaped by a remarkable and very locally specific trade union movement known as the British Seafarers Union (BSU). The rise of seamen’s unionism in the United Kingdom, had been dominated by the extraordinary personality of J. Havelock Wilson, who created the National Sailors’ and Firemens’ Union (NSFU) during the last years of the nineteenth century. ⁵⁸ In its initial stages the NSFU made some real impact in improving the lot of seamen. This militant phase culminated in the 1911 transport workers strike, organised in conjunction with the International Transport Workers Federation, led by Hermann Jochade in Berlin. This was arguably the first truly international strike in world history, bringing British shipping to a halt, and having significant effects in Dutch and Belgian ports as well. ⁵⁹ Wilson was, though, already showing signs of problems that would dog the NSFU over the next decades. He ran the NSFU in a manner which increasingly resembled a personality cult, with his doings and utterances constantly extolled in the union newspaper. The union’s enemies, referring to the colour of the paper on which the journal was printed, and indirectly to its penchant for personal attacks on rival trade unionists, liked to refer to it as ‘the green spew’. ⁶⁰

Wilson was a cantankerous personality, his temper fed by martyrdom to arthritis. He had a thuggish group of enforcers, headed up by one Ned Tupper, who claimed the bogus rank of army captain and was to develop ties with British intelligence. Also manifesting itself was the start of a drift by Wilson and his union towards right wing populism. The NSFU became obsessed with the supposed threat of cheap Chinese labour to British seamen and developed a hysterical racial rhetoric on the subject. Wilson, who served in parliament, represented the Liberals and not Labour, and was increasingly to the right of a labour movement influenced by Syndicalism. After 1914, Wilson took a harshly right wing position on international affairs, calling obsessively for the post-war punishment of Germany. He also entered into a close collaboration with the owners’ Shipping Federation which lasted through the 1920s, and increasingly yielded to them in negotiations.

The NSFU branch in Southampton was, at the beginning of 1911, a small organisation of only about four hundred members. However, in the lead up to the strike it achieved a remarkable transformation under the leadership of its President Thomas Lewis. ⁶¹ Lewis was a local man, a sometime watchmaker and jeweller, who had been an activist of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation before becoming a Labour City Councillor. Southampton was the very first port to go on strike in 1911, and the results were spectacular, with thousands of new local members being recruited, turning a largely unorganised harbour into a de facto closed shop in a matter of weeks. This led to the collection of about £1000 in dues, and under the rules of the union this sum had to be turned over to the head office. By this time Lewis and his colleagues had become suspicious of Wilson, and especially of his lack of financial transparency. After much conflict, this resulted in the Southampton branch deciding to break away and forming a new organisation, the BSU. ⁶² Shortly thereafter, an organiser of the Glasgow branch of the NSFU, a Jewish former tailor by the name of Emmanuel Shinwell, got into a similar dispute with Wilson, and also led a breakaway, which then joined the BSU. These two local nodes remained the core of the BSU throughout the eleven years of its existence, but they both had a powerful impact in their very diverse settings. The Glasgow BSU became a bastion of the strong syndicalist trend that emerged in the war years, with Shinwell a notable leadership figure in the wave of regional militancy that became known as the Red Clyde.

An important early test of the BSU was the mass fatalities of its Southampton members in the 1912 Titanic disaster, which Lewis handled with great dignity, and the union gave very effective support to survivors and the relatives of the deceased. ⁶³ A great outpouring of support for the families of the Titanic victims demonstrated the remarkably solidaristic culture which existed within the port and which was able to flourish in the BSU milieu. Under Lewis, the BSU became a very strong force in Southampton, drawing a significant proportion of liner workers into a cohesive and culturally rich local labour world, with its own educational, sporting and family entertainment activities. The BSU also produced a monthly magazine of outstanding quality, the British Seafarer. Lewis, a lifelong bachelor and teetotaller, gave an apparently monastic devotion to his work, and enjoyed enormous personal loyalty. Part of his success was his ability to draw of the skills of both sympathetic members of the middle class, like Mrs E. Palmer, who chaired the Southampton Board of Guardians, ⁶⁴ and experienced labour organisers, such as Matthew Connor, who had moved to Hampshire after union work and Independent Labour Party activism in the tough world of Harland and Woolff’s Belfast shipyard. ⁶⁵ Both served on the BSU board of trustees. Though the BSU was sometimes critical of the use of Asian crew (more so in Glasgow than in Southampton) it did not engage in the rabid racism and chauvinism of the NSFU. The British Seafarer sometimes portrayed workers of colour in a positive light, ⁶⁶ and BSU leaders took a relatively conciliatory attitude towards the German working class, both during and after the war.

An example of the day-to-day work of the BSU is its role in taking up the cases of workers whose careers were interrupted by injury and who faced the difficulties posed by an inadequate welfare system. Obtaining compensation required lobbying of the company, and frequently, recourse to the courts, so effective union representation was crucial to the outcomes. For instance, Joseph Loades was working on the Walmer Castle in June 1913, when he had an accident to his hand. The 54-year-old Loades had four subsequent operations. He lost a finger and a knuckle, and then blood poisoning set in. UC initially paid him compensation and then stopped. Loades subsequently went on two voyages on the Edinburgh Castle, during which he was put on light work, and on the second voyage he suffered psychological collapse. He applied for work with the company onshore and was refused. However, he did briefly get renewed compensation and received further hospital treatment. His hand remained as bad as ever though, and Loades was hospitalised for depression for most of 1915. The BSU took Loades’ claim for long-term compensation to court. There, UC opposed the application, claiming that it was still possible to work with the type of injury that Loades had, and that his incapacity was due to drink. The judge found in favour of Loades and awarded him a payment of 10 Shillings a week from the company. ⁶⁷

The ‘global’ impact of this union upsurge was that, just before the First World War broke out, it placed very considerable new organisational power in the hands of the Southampton labour force. When the state took extensive new powers to shape the shipping industry into its hands at the outbreak of war, Southampton maritime workers were in a position to maintain their established claims on employment by UC and other lines based in the port, in ways that they might not otherwise have been able to do. As we shall see, the union enforced the preservation of the existing maritime labour field, in circumstances in which the UC management might well have been tempted to reconstruct it.

UC and the war – Openings and closings

The First World War did not close down the Durban–Southampton relationship, but it did modify it. The British government needed to requisition a significant proportion of UC’s tonnage for troop transports, hospital ships and use as armed cruisers. These ships were then dispersed to other British and foreign ports. UC liners were deployed in their new roles in the Mediterranean, on the routes across the North Atlantic, and elsewhere. The government also needed to keep enough ships sailing on the regular South African service to maintain mail services, food imports and war-related passenger movement. However, Southampton became the main port of embarkation for British troops going to France and was wholly given over to this enormous logistical operation. So the UC ships that did keep to their normal routes to South Africa, now operated out of other docks – particularly London’s Tilbury. ⁶⁸

These changes potentially threatened Southampton’s established position as the source of labour for UC ships; men could have been recruited for the ships in other ports. The BSU was largely responsible for saving the jobs of their members through arrangements with UC and RMSP in which the union would provide crews for their ships. This was crucial to the success of the union, and it helped preserve the cohesion of the Southampton working class during the war. Southampton crews travelled by train to their embarkations at different harbours. ⁶⁹ The BSU extended in its activities geographically, with modest success in the Thames docks. ⁷⁰ Voyages inevitably became longer and more unpredictable. ⁷¹ As the BSU executive explained in June 1918: ‘The war has completely changed the character of the work of the members of the Union, for whereas the bulk of the men were engaged on regular-running lines sailing from different ports, they are now engaged in a variety of ships and are scattered all over the world.’ ⁷² At least though, the employment of Southampton seamen with the established companies continued. The existing pattern of the maritime labour field, which might otherwise have been disrupted, was preserved through the strength of the union.

The BSU vigorously fought for the interests of the workforce, taking advantage of the government’s urgent need to keep the ships running. It won wage increases ⁷³ and represented the UC crews on standard union issues, such as the quality of food. ⁷⁴ It obtained pensions for the dependents of men killed in sinkings. ⁷⁵ The union complained against the vindictiveness of Southampton’s magistrates, who were handing out sentences of three month’s hard labour for brief absences from ships. ⁷⁶ It ensured that the men got compensated for their train trips between Southampton and the ports from which their ships were sailing. ⁷⁷ Union representatives were assiduous in visiting the UC ships in their ports. ⁷⁸

The men managed to maintain a remarkable esprit de corps. The crew of the Gloucester Castle crew won a local football league in Port Said, victorious in nine out of ten games. ⁷⁹ A notable feature of the worker culture in UC was the continuing generosity of crews to needy or deserving fellow crewmen and their families, with frequent collections for ill or retiring members and for the families of deceased ones. ⁸⁰

Although the ships on the South African run sometimes took a long diversion west of St Helena in an attempt to avoid submarine attack, this imminent threat seems to have impacted relatively little on passengers’ consciousness. A Belgian army officer who travelled second class to Durban on the Walmer Castle in 1916 gave a remarkably upbeat description of life on board, praising the comfortable cabins and the very good food, and revelling in the Crossing-the-Line ceremony. ⁸¹ The relatively free availability of quality food in South Africa probably allowed a standard of cuisine that besieged Europeans were no longer used to.

The war was enormously traumatic, as ship after ship went down to enemy attack. In May 1917, the British Seafarer reported the loss of the Gloucester Castle, the Alnwick Castle and three other ships on which the union had members. A greaser on the Gloucester Castle, T. Rutherford, who had been through a previous sinking, survived three days in a lifeboat. ⁸² In the same sinking, another greaser, A. Miell, suffered through six days in a freezing open boat with twenty-nine others, of whom five died. ⁸³ In April 1918, the British Seafarer reported that the Glenart Castle had gone down with heavy loss of life, ‘about 15 only of our members being saved’. ⁸⁴ The sinking of the Llandovery Castle in July 1918 was particularly gruesome: the vessel was serving as a hospital ship, and the attacking submarine rammed lifeboats and fired on those escaping the sinking vessel, in an attempt to destroy the evidence of its breach of the law of war. ⁸⁵ In October of the same year, the British Seafarer reported that thirteen union members were amongst the heavy loss of life on the torpedoed Galway Castle, on its way to South Africa. The BSU played a crucial role in ensuring that families received death benefits. ⁸⁶

A not untypically catastrophic experience was that of the Bendell family. They were children of a general labourer in Itchen on the edge of Southampton. The parents had nine children out of whom eight survived. Before the war, Frank Bendell was a fireman on the Kildonan Castle, then signed for the Titanic and died in the disaster. Brother Frederick was torpedoed on the Britannic in 1916, but got away with his life. Another brother, Bertie, was on the Galway Castle when it went down, and died. ⁸⁷

Perhaps predictably, the ending of the war brought a surge of militancy. The British Seafarer reported in October 1918 that ‘Seamen are becoming very restive and all over the country requests are being made for higher wages.’ ⁸⁸

Survival

The coming of peace and the subsequent return to its Southampton base allowed UC to rise to new levels of dominance on the southern African run. In Durban in particular, this was manifested in UC buying out, in 1919, its old, now minor, rival in the Durban passenger trade, Bullard King’s Natal Direct Line. Bullard King did, however, continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of UC. This made for a more complicated set of UC-linked maritime labour fields, as Bullard King’s services, now focused on East Africa and India, had exclusively Indian ‘lascar’ crews under British officers. ⁸⁹ (The complex, racially shaped British and imperial legislation on manning had the effect of tending to restrict the employment of Indian crews to lines with regular services to the subcontinent). The immediate post-war period saw challenges to UC from the Holland–Africa Line, the US Shipping Line and the remarkably resilient DOAL. However, in 1924–5, the three rivals were all brought into the South African conference in positions which gave them scope for profitable activity, while institutionalising UC’s premier position. ⁹⁰ UC’s access to political power in Britain and South Africa acted to stabilise its maritime capital field.

After enjoying a UC voyage to South Africa in 1922–3, Owen Philipps was inspired to market the country to upper middle class Britons as a tourist destination. ⁹¹ This project was quite successful, supplementing the existing business travel trade, and offsetting the rather low levels of British emigrant traffic resulting from the South African government’s negative attitude to immigration. ⁹² UC was aided in this endeavour by the South African Railways’ development in the mid-1920s of luxury train travel services for tourists. ⁹³

In one of his plays, Noel Coward included a scene in which it turns out that the complicated emotional lives of the characters have led them all to decide to travel to South Africa. The main character, Garry, a Coward self-portrait, remarks dryly: ‘It’s certainly a big day for the Union Castle Line.’ ⁹⁴ The joke is incomprehensible to most people today, but Coward’s intended fashionable West End audience in 1930s London would have got the point immediately: UC was virtually synonymous with stylish voyages to South Africa. An almost entirely unresearched component of the UC workforce, which expanded with the tourist trade, were the stewardesses who worked on the line. The sisters Cis and Dot Ambler, who were stewardesses on the South Africa run, may be representative. They were the daughters of an archetypally respectable northern artisan who had moved to London, and were exactly the sort of aspirational workers for whom UC could provide an exciting alternative career, given the limited options open to women. (Cis was remembered by her nephew for bringing exotic treats from Durban. ⁹⁵ ) Also little known is the social world of gay catering workers on UC. After the Second World War, there was a large proportion of gay men in this sector on the company’s boats. ⁹⁶ It is unclear whether this was the case before the war. It seems likely, yet even researchers who have specifically pursued this question for the interwar liners have found material on gay life on the ships in this closeted period hard to obtain, as compared to a more open presence in the post-war years. ⁹⁷

In 1923, Owen Philipps was raised to the peerage as Lord Kylsant. This signalled his immense prestige, and that of UC, within the British establishment. By now, Kylsant was possibly the most powerful single shipowner in the world. And South Africa was locked into UC’s company’s strategic role; there was no viable rival that had the specialised shipping resources and political clout to play the same role for the South African economy, even though South African politicians occasionally ineffectually huffed and puffed about going to another company with the mail contract. ⁹⁸ Re-engineering the maritime capital and labour fields constituted by UC was beyond the capacities of the South African state.

The success which the BSU had achieved in organising UC crews was not to be sustained. Still largely confined to its Southampton and Glasgow strongholds, the union was under considerable attack from the NSFU. Havelock Wilson’s union sat on the powerful state-instituted National Maritime Board and ensured the exclusion of the BSU. In 1921, Wilson fell out with the cooks and stewards union led by Joe Cotter and the National Transport Workers Federation. These bodies now supported a new union in which Cotter’s union would fuse with the BSU, and this came to pass, with the founding of the Amalgamated Marine Worker’s Union (AMWU). However, Wilson had a very effective counter-strategy. He had secured the employers’ agreement to the institution of a document known as the PC5, which would be required to get employment on ships and had to be endorsed by the owner’s Shipping Federation and the NSFU. Although the scheme’s uneven implementation gave the AMWU some space in which to operate, the squeeze was on. And Cotter proved a poor leader. ⁹⁹

In desperation, and hoping to outflank Wilson from the left, the AMWU, in conjunction with the Communist-led National Minority Movement, in 1925 launched a strike against wage cuts. ¹⁰⁰ Though rather ineffectual in the United Kingdom itself, the strike took off in Australasian and South African ports, seriously impairing the imperial transportation system. Because of the union’s strength in Southampton, the strike was especially effective on UC ships. There may have been a deliberate Minority Movement strategy to trigger the strike in South African ports. This is suggested by the case of Richard Mooney, the key initiator of the strike in Durban, a Liverpool Irishman (and suspected by the authorities as a Communist and Sinn Feiner) who had previously worked on other lines, and who was on his first trip on a UC ship, aboard the Sandgate Castle. ¹⁰¹

Large numbers of seamen were interned in Cape Town. In Durban however, the strike received an enormous amount of public support, largely because Kylsant threatened the use of lascars from Bombay to replace the strikers, thus inflaming the anti-Indian racism of white Durbanites. ¹⁰² In the end though, the AMWU was defeated. Exhausted by the strike, the union suffered a legal defeat the next year, when Wilson got a court ruling declaring the amalgamation of the BSU and Cotter’s organisation invalid. It was the end of the AMWU. A legacy of the BSU though was the consolidated link between UC and the Southampton workforce. The death of Wilson in 1929 and the lack of any other effective maritime union allowed the left to slip back into the NSFU, and by the 1940s the organisation (which became known as the National Union of Seamen) was to become something more like a conventional British Labour Party-aligned union. Nevertheless, the by now deeply grooved pattern of labour recruitment by UC in Southampton and southeast England remained intact: the maritime labour field retained its stability.

UC was technically unadventurous. Although oil-burning technology was viable before the First World War, the company was still building coal-powered liners – the Llanstephan Castle and the ill-fated Llandovery Castle – in 1914. UC only launched its first steam turbine ship – the new Arundel Castle – in 1921, and its first diesel liner, Carnarvon Castle, in 1926. ¹⁰³ This turn to oil, obviously, started to bring to an end the age of the fireman and the trimmer on UC. Slowness in making the change was typical of British shipowners; in the mid-1920s it was the Scandinavian countries that were the front-runners in oil-fired merchant shipbuilding. It is possible that this reluctance was connected with the importance of coal in the British economy, and especially the export trade, and the overlapping interests of shipowners with that industry. ¹⁰⁴

As a brief period of optimism about the shipping market at the start of the 1920s faded, it became clear that there was going to be a long worldwide glut of shipping capacity. RMS propped up the share prices of its companies by getting the richer ones to buy the shares of their less well-performing brethren. Pirrie died in 1924, leaving behind a considerable mess at HW, especially in regarded to loans made earlier to the company by the Lloyd George government. Kylsant had to take sole responsibility for trying to keep the RMS group and HW solvent. He did so by moving money around between his shipping companies and adopting a relentlessly expansionary policy. This culminated in RMS’s purchase of the White Star Line in 1927, for £9 m, of which UC took £1 m in shares. ¹⁰⁵

By 1928 the whole enterprise was headed for disaster. In that year, UC’s balance sheet showed a profit of £137,000, but this was the product of transferring reserves – in fact it had made a loss of £99,000. ¹⁰⁶ White Star was in debt to the tune of multiple millions. ¹⁰⁷ The year 1929 was a bad one to be in this situation, for the group’s troubles came to a head just in time for the crash of the New York Stock Exchange. Kylsant had begged Prime Minister Baldwin and Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill to help with HW’s problem in dealing with its debts, but they refused, leading to the company’s default. Disastrously, Kylsant then clashed with his brother, the financier Lord St. David’s, over the management of RMS’s accounts. St. David’s went fratricidally public with his criticisms of Kylsant. Kylsant was simultaneously challenged by a board member of RMS-owned Lamport and Holt, who alleged the company was in danger of insolvency. Kylsant was forced to admit to a Treasury Committee that RMS’s debts were unpayable. RMS collapsed, and Kylsant was to serve a short prison term. ¹⁰⁸

Somewhat amazingly, UC managed to survive as a separate company. ¹⁰⁹ Crucial to this was the capacity of the company’s new leadership to maintain its connections to both the British and South African states. They were aided by long existing ideological investment of Whitehall and the City in the enterprise. In the struggle to save the company, the notion of UC as an essential British strategic interest played a great role. A restructuring campaign saw free use of patriotic rhetoric to attract support and to see off attempts by foreign capital to buy into the company. ¹¹⁰ In South Africa, UC also proved adept at taking advantage of the rapprochement between Hertzog and his pro-imperial rival, Jan Smuts, leading to the coalition ‘Fusion’ government in 1933. In 1934, after returning from a visit to South Africa during which he had landed a ten-year freight agreement for government cargo and perishable produce, ¹¹¹ the company’s chair, Robertson Gibb, was able to claim, that relations with the South African government ‘had never been better’. ¹¹² Together with a new mail contract won by Gibb from South Africa in 1936, this provided the basis for the company’s extensive building programme, with fourteen liners and cargo ships coming into service between 1935 and 1939. ¹¹³

The leading institutional leadership role in the rebuilding of the company was played by Sir Vernon Thomson, an investment banker who became a director of UC in 1932 and later, long-term managing director and chairman. Thomson was well connected in Whitehall and the City. He had a key part in the British government’s attempts to regulate the tramp steamer industry in the mid-1930s. He chaired the Chamber of Shipping in 1936–7 and became senior shipping advisor to the Ministry of War Transport from 1939 to 1945. ¹¹⁴ A revived UC, entrenched within the British establishment, was to retain something like its existing form for more than forty years, until the very last voyage in 1977. Ideological and political power were parlayed by UC into economic power: the integrity of its maritime capital field was maintained, in the most unfavourable of possible circumstances.

Conclusion

Approaching the history of UC from the point of view of currently accepted versions of globalisation, one would expect to find – at least for some periods – an expansive world of global connection. That is not, in reality, what one encounters, either in its labour system or its organisation as a company.

UC crews were part of a remarkably shut-in British social world, a community, as it were, extended to southern Africa and then retracted homeward on a regular basis. The ‘encapsulated’ UC workforce always remained very much part of the British working class world. They benefited from the development of the welfare state over the course of the twentieth century, and they defended their interests through their unions. They were it is true, sometimes better off than the majority of other seafarers, because of the relative regularity of employment that the liners provided. Still, they experienced hardships not shared by land-based workers. Their long absences from home were disruptive and peace-time accidents and wartime sinkings scarred or destroyed their lives. They did not all sail gracefully into the sunset.

UC was an imperial, rather than a truly global enterprise. Enormously successful, despite the near-disaster of Kylsant’s crash, it was no product of an ever-opening global market. Rather, its survival reflected the ability of the company to come to terms with the very specific needs and requirements of the British and southern African states, and to manage the pressures of trade unionism. Rather than being open to the global economy, UC played the cards of patriotism, protectionism and imperial defence. The company and its workforce were part of a world that was closed in at least as many ways as it was open – both before and after the First World War.