The Rime of the Modern Shipowner (Dedicated to Mr Plimsoll): The Phantom-bark made never a sound/ And the twain were casting dice:-/ “Let the crew be drowned for the sum is round,”/ Said he “and it’s worth the price!” (From Turner, Roads to Ruin).

The sailor’s friend who made ships safe

Samuel Plimsoll took on the vested interest of shipowners who cared nothing for drowned crew, writes Peter Gruner

The Plimsoll Sensation (The Great Campaign to Save Lives at Sea) by Nicolette Jones
Little, Brown £20 order this book

THE Plimsoll Line – a circle with a line through the middle, like the London Underground symbol – was drawn on the side of a ship. The line would disappear beneath the surface of the sea when a vessel carried too much cargo and was in danger of listing.
A simple enough device, but as Islington author Nicolette Jones relates in her excellently-researched book, The Plimsoll Sensation, safety was seen to eat into shipowners’ profits.
Ms Jones presents a welcome reappraisal of one of Britain’s long-forgotten heroes, Samuel Plimsoll, who fought for more than 20 years to improve appalling safety conditions for seafarers.
A former coal merchant, whose family owned outlets in Upper Street, Islington, and King’s Cross, he was a Liberal MP for landlocked Derby, who lived in Harrington Square, near Mornington Crescent.
Ms Jones lives in Plimsoll Road, Finsbury Park, and was inspired to write the book after coming across an old discarded Plimsoll pub sign in nearby St Thomas’s Road.
“This was a man who virtually single-handedly cut the numbers of people drowning in shipwrecks from hundreds a year, to maybe dozens,” she says. “Yet, most people only know that he gave the name to the Plimsoll, the now unfashionable sports shoe.”
Britain’s empire was largely based on its flourishing sea trade. In 1850 some 34,000 British ships carried £75 million worth of goods.
By the mid 1800s an estimated 300-400 lives were being lost at sea annually because of unseaworthy vessels that were crowded and crammed with cargo.
Mortality at sea was higher than in any other occupation, including mining. Shipowners and captains viewed the introduction of extra lifebuoys, for example, as verging on the nanny state.
“The prevailing attitude was that safety devices made sailors cowardly,” Ms Jones writes. “At the same time it was uncommon for Victorians to learn to swim. Sailors tended not to learn, believing that if they ended up in the sea, being able to swim would only prolong their agony.”
Men were often recruited without seeing a ship, and even if the vessel turned out to be a rust bucket, they were not allowed to change their minds. Between 1870 and 1872, 1,628 sailors were sent to jail for refusing to go to sea on ships they thought unseaworthy.
On top of that there were the insurance scams where owners cashed in on “coffin ships,” wrecks which were only really fit for the scrap heap.
Plimsoll launched a crusade to put pressure on Parliament, where many MPs were shipowners with vested interests.
He was widely denounced in Parliament by MPs who suggested that safety measures would make Britain less competitive.
Plimsoll was resolute, however. He declared: “I shall do all in my power to put an end to the unseaworthy ships owned by the greedy and the unscrupulous.”
But while he was a hero to the people and celebrated in newspapers and ballads, inside the Commons his Bill for a load line was being stalled.
In January 1871 he held public meetings and invited the tearful widows of sailors who had gone down in unseaworthy ships to vent their feelings.
In that same year 70 sailors drowned in the Great Gales of Bridlington Bay when 23 cargo ships carrying coals from Tyneside to London and Paris sank. The disaster, on a scale that spread its fame, intensified public concern about the plight of the merchant sailor.
The Leeds Mercury called on Plimsoll to step up his campaign, pointing out that there were no rocks in Bridlington Bay that could have been blamed for the wreckages.
“At the first strain of the sea, or at the first shock on the beach, they swamped like old tubs, or tumbled to pieces like rotten timber,” the paper wrote.
Plimsoll won the support of the trade unions but his Bill was rejected in the Commons three times. The MP for Hull, Charles Norwood, an opponent of government intervention in the shipping industry, told the Commons: “I can assure you that we require on board our large ships a barrister even more than a doctor. There are so many Acts under which we conduct our business that it is impossible for a ship’s captain to know how to act to keep to the four corners of the law.”
Plimsoll wrote a book called Our Seamen: An Appeal, in which he presented an impassioned case against overloading and unseaworthy ships. He quoted the testimony of widows and orphans. It included photographs of ships’ bolts eaten away by rust.
“Few books have ever moved a generation of British people so widely and deeply,” wrote one commentator. Even Queen Victoria was moved.
There were calls for a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate the shipping industry.
Then in 1873 the Board of Trade was given new powers to detain ships on the grounds of complaints by members of the public. Some 440 vessels ready for the scrap heap were stopped from sailing in the first year.
Finally, with support from another reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, and the Conservative Prime Minister Disraeli, Plimsoll got the Merchant Shipping act of 1875 through, which made it illegal to overload or sail an unseaworthy vessel.
Always a man with a thought for the underdog, Plimsoll also supported the trade unions in their battle for improvements in the mines and factories.
He took pity on the plight of second and third-class railway passengers, whose carriages were inadequately heated. And with an instinct for issues that now seem ahead of his time, he wrote a paper in 1863 supporting the nationalisation of the heavily privatised railways.