More and more of the big jets are coming into operation, whistling their pampered passengers across the world. Catch a Comet at London Airport on Sunday afternoon and you are in Sydney before lunch on Tuesday. The Boeing 707 gets you there even sooner. Against this, the fastest sea liner takes about a month for the same journey, charging a first class fare—between £240 and £385 —which is roughly the same as the airlines’ £371 to £381. The airlines are selling their speed very successfully; B.O.A.C.’s scheduled services, for example, carried over 20 per cent. more passengers in 1959 than in 1958.
For cargo, air carriage is not so attractive. Only for the small, expensive, urgently needed shipments are the airlines in their element, enabling cheaper packing and insurance. But the absence of competition from aircraft does not mean that the sea liners are having it so good on their freight shipments. Ten years ago, the lines running from the United Kingdom to Australia had a month long waiting list of cargo. Now, their ships often sail only part full. Sir William Currie, the retiring chairman of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, had this to say at the Company's recent Annual General Meeting:—
There are still many new ships coming forward, both in this country and abroad, but little sign that the owners are rushing to scrap their older ships. It is difficult to see, therefore, how the present surplus of tonnage, which is at the root of the depression, can come to a speedy end. For let us recognise that it is not shortage of cargoes that is bedevilling the freight market: fundamentally it is too many ships chasing too little cargo that keep rates where they are.
Have the steamship companies any answer to the double problem of a loss of passengers to the airlines on the one hand and a competitive scramble for freight on the other? Let us take a look at what the Peninsular and Oriental are doing about it.
The £40 million P. & O.—the largest shipping group, in Great Britain—was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1840. It now has a host of subsidiary companies, including such famous names as British India, General Steam, and the Orient Steam Navigation Companies. It also owns Silver City Airways Limited, several marine and general engineering companies and, through the Asiatic Steam Navigation Company—a British India satellite—it controls Delta Insurance. P. & 0. itself has 32 ships, totalling 431,360 tons gross: by its subsidiaries, it owns hundreds more. We could expect a group of this size to have a powerful reply to the challenge of the jetliners.
As a first step, P. & O. have taken over the outstanding minority of the ordinary shares of the Orient Line of which, since 1919, they have held a majority. This merger has set up Orient and Pacific Lines to maintain and develop the Pacific Ocean service which Orient Line have been operating since 1954. The new service will extend the Australia and New Zealand run to the West Coast of the U.S.A., calling at Fiji and Honolulu on the way. It will also push the service to Japan and Hongkong out to America's West Coast And it will operate a triangular service, from Australia to the U.S.A., to Japan and back to Australia.
At the moment, the Orient and Pacific can call on seven big ships for this service. These are of the Himalaya and Orcades class, about 22 to 29 thousand tons gross and capable of about 22 knots.
These boats were built in the ten years after the war, when they were comparatively cheap. At today’s prices, however, it would not be profitable to build such ships. Any new craft, to pay its way on the new, longer, Pacific route, must be two sizes larger and two sizes faster than before, which also means that it is two sizes more expensive. At the same time, it must not be so large that it cannot use the Suez Canal. It must be able to carry the highest possible number of passengers and be economical in operation and maintenance. In their two recently launched ships—Oriana (40,000 tons) and Canberra (45,000 tons) P. & O. think they have fulfilled exactly these calculated requirements.
Oriana was launched in November, 1959. Canberra, which went down the shipway at Harland and Wolffs yard in Belfast in March this year, is the largest ship to be built in the United Kingdom since the Queen Elizabeth. The design lakes full advantage of the fact that the speed which can be reached without using excessive amounts of fuel increases with the length of the ship. Canberra's superstructure is almost entirely of aluminium, which saves about 1,500 tons in weight and allows extra passenger accommodation. £500,000 worth of plastics have been used, reducing weight, smoothing the hull’s water resistance and almost eliminating the need for interior redecoration.
Canberra will carry over 2,000 passengers and will cut the journey from Britain to Australia to 25 days.
P. & O. are not content to leave it to Oriana and Canberra merely to assert the graciousness of sea travel against the modern scramble of the jet liner. They are ready to turn these ships into passenger tramps, taking on their passengers wherever they can find them.
We can all admire the beauty of the new ships and the skill and patience which has gone into their making. But the fact is that, typical of the products of capitalist society, Oriana and Canberra have been built only because they have profitable prospects. True, the prospects are rather uncertain—together the ships cost £30 million—and to justify this they must have a profitable life into the 1980’s. If they don’t justify this investment, then probably no more ships like them will be built.
If P. & O. are taking a gamble, it is one which few other shipping companies are willing to take. As a result, the outlook for British ship-building is gloomy. On the day of Canberra’s launching, Lloyds List and Shipping Gazette carried this report from the shipyards at Belfast:—
. . . . the splendour of the occasion is diminished to the extent that there is no follow-on liner contract and that the builder’s order book is now running down at a rapid rate. Nor is there any early prospect of additional entries which will ensure that there is not a severe reduction in employment next year.
Perhaps there are so many ironies in capitalism that everyone is becoming inured to them. But surely somebody will notice it if, as Canberra and Oriana plough their fabulous way from one tropical playground to another, the men who built her in gloomy Belfast are begging for work at their local labour exchange.
Ivan
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