In the warmer months of 1935, my great-aunt Dorothy James and three companions embarked on a P&O Mediterranean cruise. The photo album she made of her voyage recorded the various ports they called at, the tourist sites they visited, as well as the vessel they sailed on, one of P&O’s newest ocean liners, the RMS Strathaird. These pages look at the eventful history of this ship and her four sisters, known collectively as the ‘Straths’ or the ‘Beautiful White Sisters’.
P&O’s origins date back to the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the setting up of the Peninsula Steam Navigation Company to run a regular service between England and the Iberian Peninsula. The P&O flag was also conceived at this time, its quadrisections representing the colours of the royal houses of Spain and Portugal (remembered with the rhyme ‘blue mast, white sky, yellow deck, red fly’). In 1840, the company was awarded its first government mail contract; earning its ships the prefix RMS; and by the middle of the century, it was operating mail services to Italy, Egypt, India and the Far East, and in 1852, Australia as well. In addition to mail and freight, the company also transported passengers, mostly civil servants, missionaries and military personnel throughout Britain’s burgeoning empire. By the mid-20s, after a series of mergers with rival shipping lines such as the British India Steam Navigation Company and Orient Lines, P&O was the largest commercial shipping operation in the world.
The man at the helm during this period of expansion was James Lyle Mackay. The son of a sea captain from Arbroath, Mackay was a businessman and former colonial administrator in India. In 1911, for his maritime enterprise and political services he’d been made a baron, taking the name ‘Inchcape’ after the notorious Bell Rock off the coast of his home town. (He would eventually rise to the title of earl.) Mackay had become chairman of P&O shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, only to see two-thirds of his fleet requisitioned for military purposes such as troop transports and hospital ships. Inchcape helped rebuild the fleet after its wartime losses and also oversaw its switch from coal to cleaner oil-burning engines.
In 1903, the Southampton-based company opened new port facilities at Tilbury, from where it initiated its first ‘pleasure cruises’, taking advantage of the ‘off-season’ when passenger numbers on its ocean mail steamers were lower. Initial voyages were around the Mediterranean and the Baltic. P&O’s new business model was threatened in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash. Shipbuilding was one of the industries hit hardest by the global economic crisis with an estimated 90% drop in orders, so the construction of new vessels represented a significant financial risk for the company. Strathnaver and her sister Strathaird were the first P&O ships to be constructed during the Great Depression. Their immediate predecessor RMS Viceroy of India had been completed in March 1929 at a cost of one million pounds, the equivalent of £50m today.
The Viceroy had introduced a new type of propulsion that would be adopted by the Straths. This system used a steam turbine to power electric motors, which in turn drove the screws. Turbo-electric propulsion had a number of advantages over conventional triple-expansion and steam-turbine propulsion systems. Firstly, it required less boiler space and removed the need for a complex gearing mechanism to control speed or reverse the engines. Secondly, it reduced engine noise and vibration, thus improving passenger comfort. In addition to driving the propeller shafts, the electric motors also supplied all electrical power to the ship. Owing to an improved design of water-tube boilers, the Straths were also significantly more powerful than their predecessor. As a result, despite being around 10% heavier than the Viceroy of India, they were actually around 10% faster.
The Straths had several other features that set them apart from existing P&O vessels. Modern propulsion systems usually required only one funnel for waste gas emissions. However, at the beginning of the 1930s, multiple funnels were still regarded as desirable for aesthetic reasons and promotional purposes; more funnels being perceived by the public as equalling more power and reliability. While most of the P&O fleet carried one dummy funnel, the Straths were given two. This three-funnel profile made them highly distinctive upon their introduction. Even more distinctive was their livery, white hulls and buff funnels replacing the black hulls and buff superstructure of existing vessels. This darker livery had once been necessary to mask the accumulated filth of coal-fired ships. This more reflective ‘tropical’ livery was claimed to reduce interior temperatures by as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit.
The two ships also had taller and more substantial super-structures than their P&O predecessors. These incorporated no fewer than eight passenger decks. This reflected the company’s prioritising of passengers over cargo for the new ‘tourist’ era. As a result, cargo-related apparatus such as winching cranes was reduced, allowing more deck-space for sports, games and the new pastime of ‘sunning’. As built, the Straths could accommodate 498 first-class and 668 tourist-class passengers, a massive increase in non-premium accommodation compared to previous P&O ships. For the first time, all cabins had portholes and running water.
At 22,200 GRT, the Straths were on commissioning the largest passenger ships in the P&O fleet. However, they were still dwarfed by existing transatlantic liners. The French Normandie, for example, which would be launched in October 1932, weighed almost 80,000 tons, and at just over 1,000 ft was 40% longer than the largest P&O liners. Like all ships built to serve India and Australia, the Straths had to be able to pass through the Suez Canal, which then had a draft limit of only 34ft. This practicality placed limits on a ship’s draft and hence its overall size.
All of the Straths would be built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in Furness. This company had come about in 1927 through a merger of Vickers and Tyne-based Armstrong. The deal with P&O seems to have been struck between Inchcape and Sir Basil Zaharoff, a colourful former arms-dealer and then-member of the Vickers-Armstrong board. This order would have come as a great relief to the shipyard, which in addition to the Great Depression had also seen its business hit by the recent London Naval Treaty signed on 22nd April 1930, which had placed further limitations on the construction of British naval vessels (following on from the Washington Treaty of a decade earlier). Vicker’s Barrow yard, which had previously constructed dreadnoughts for the Royal Navy, was by 1930 only building submarines. The metallurgical artisanship and colossal industry of constructing such a ship at Barrow can be seen in Shipyard, a 1935 documentary filmed by Paul Rotha. The subject of this film is the RMS Orion, an Orient Lines steamer of marginally larger dimensions to the Straths that would serve the same oceanic routes.
The hull of the Strathaird, already sporting her white livery, was launched into the Irish Sea on 18th July 1931, some five months behind her sister Strathnaver. Christening the ship was Lady Margaret Shaw, one of Inchcape’s four daughters. Her launching came three years after the disappearance of Margaret’s sister Elsie while attempting a transatlantic flight. Before her death, the talented and trailblazing Elsie – she’d been one of Britain’s first female race-jockeys – had helped design the luxury interiors for the Viceroy of India and the preceding R-class liners. This design work had evidently been carried on by Margaret and her mother. The fitting out of the two ships’ interiors took place at Barrow’s Buccleuch Dock.
The ship’s name, like those of her sisters, celebrated Inchcape’s Scottish origins – a ‘strath’ being a wide and shallow valley (as opposed to the deeper more dramatic ‘glen’). Strathaird was named after a peninsula on the Isle of Skye but also paid tribute to the Scottish shipowner William MacKinnon – the 1st Baronet of Strathaird and Loup – whom Inchcape had replaced as head of the British India line in 1893. These Caledonian names were at odds with the colonial nomenclature applied to most previous P&O ships, and was another aspect that set them apart.
Like her sister, Strathaird undertook her maiden voyage to Brisbane, departing Tilbury on 12th February 1932, making intermediate stops in Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. Passing under the newly-opened Sydney Harbour Bridge to dock at Circular Quay, her gleaming-white hull was an arresting sight, captured by eager news photographers. In December of that year, she undertook a five-day ‘cruise’ from Sydney to remote Norfolk Island, one of the first leisure sailings ever organised in Australian waters. Such cruises would prove hugely popular with antipodeans during the 1930s.
This cruising craze was mirrored in Britain, where according to a 1934 newspaper report, more than 5,000 passengers embarked on seven cruise-liners at Tilbury in a single day. A 1935 advertisement shows that the Straths were among five P&O liners offering a total of 25 cruises to European ports and islands in the eastern Atlantic. My aunt’s cruise aboard the Strathaird was one of these, taking in the ports in the then Spanish Protectorate of Morocco (Tetuan, Ceuta), Italy (Naples, Civitavecchia, Rapallo) and Spain (Malaga) before returning to Southampton.
My great-aunt’s photo album gives several hints as to her activities aboard ship, presumably as a tourist-class passenger. One photo shows her sunning herself on deck, while another shows a game of deck tennis. There was no shortage of other outdoor leisure options available to 1930s passengers. According to the P&O Heritage website:
‘Lazy days at sea were punctuated by organised deck sports – tennis tournaments and knock out competitions of quoits, bluff and cricket. In addition, a daily digest of games, from sack races to scavenging competitions, tugs of war to threading needles, all were ‘relentlessly devised’ by the passengers themselves.’ [1]
The Straths were also equipped with swimming pools, dining saloons, veranda cafés, ballrooms and even a children’s nursery. My great-aunt, who had a literary interest, may have spent considerable time in one of the ship’s libraries, reading perhaps the latest novel by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, or P. G. Wodehouse. [2] The ships also possessed covered promenade decks for those simply wishing to ‘take the air’.
[1] https://www.poheritage.com/our-history/timeline
[2] Murder on the Orient Express had been published the previous year, as had Sayers’ The Nine Tailors. Wodehouse had recently released Thank You, Jeeves and Right Ho, Jeeves, his first full-length Bertie Wooster novels.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 