The Transformation of Maritime Professions: Old and New Jobs in European Shipping Industries, 1850–2000 3031272110, 9783031272110

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ECONOMIC HISTORY

The Transformation of Maritime Professions Old and New Jobs in European Shipping Industries, 1850–2000 Edited by Karel Davids Joost Schokkenbroek

Palgrave Studies in Economic History

Series Editor Kent Deng, London School of Economics, London, UK

Palgrave Studies in Economic History is designed to illuminate and enrich our understanding of economies and economic phenomena of the past. The series covers a vast range of topics including financial history, labour history, development economics, commercialisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, modernisation, globalisation, and changes in world economic orders.

Karel Davids · Joost Schokkenbroek Editors

The Transformation of Maritime Professions Old and New Jobs in European Shipping Industries, 1850–2000

Editors Karel Davids Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland The Netherlands

Joost Schokkenbroek Hong Kong Maritime Museum Hong Kong, Hong Kong

ISSN 2662-6497 ISSN 2662-6500 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Economic History ISBN 978-3-031-27211-0 ISBN 978-3-031-27212-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Vintage Images/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book started as a panel on ‘Old and New Professions in the Shipping Industry after 1850’ organised by the editors at the Seventh International Congress of Maritime History, which took place in Perth in 2016. The theme was further developed in a panel session at the European Labour History Conference held in Amsterdam in 2019. Most of the contributors to this book participated in one of these two meetings, or both. Others were invited to join the project later. The editors of this volume are most grateful to the authors, who shared their enthusiasm for the launching of a book on old and new maritime professions during one of the most revolutionary periods in the history of European shipping industries. All contributors generously provided their insights and results of solid research, thus creating kaleidoscopic overviews of changes in maritime labour in a wide variety of countries. Furthermore, the editors are indebted to Professor Richard W. Unger, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada), for his unwavering support, gentle guidance and critical editorial work on texts written in English by (mostly) non-native speakers. Karel Davids translated Nicolas Cochard’s essay from French into English. Gratitude is also due to the various institutions represented by the authors (listed in the Notes on Contributors) and the repositories that provided images for this book (mentioned in the Sources of the Figures). The cover image shows a captain standing in the engine room of a steamship, 1915. Finally, thanks to the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, for believing in this project. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a good managerial principle to have all others but the editors be praised for the good things in this publication, and—mutatis mutandis — have the editors (and no one else) be blamed for any mistakes the reader might find. Heemstede/Hong Kong November 2022

Karel Davids Joost Schokkenbroek

Contents

1

Introduction Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek

1

Part I Changes in Maritime Labour: Institutional, Technological and Spatial Contexts 2

3

4

5

The Human Element in Power-Driven Merchant Ship Propulsion Since 1850: The British Case Alston Kennerley Technological Change, Institutions and Maritime Labour: International Reforms and Their Reception in Sweden and Finland, c.1850–1939 Jari Ojala Changes in Maritime Labour in Greece During the Transition from Sail to Steam, c. 1850–1917 Alkiviadis Kapokakis and Apostolos Delis Seamen in the City. Origins, Residence and Standard of Living of Le Havre Seamen from c. 1800 to the First Wold War Nicolas Cochard

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65

95

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CONTENTS

6

Reading Shipboard Space: The Plans of Ships Serving the Netherlands East Indies, 1850–1914 Richard Guy

121

Part II Case Studies of Old Maritime Jobs 7

8

Reconfiguring Authority at Sea: Steamships and Their Captains in a Danish Context, c.1850–1950 Morten Tinning

147

Feeding the Fleet: Cooks in the Belgian Merchant Marine, c.1850–1930 Kristof Loockx

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Part III Case Studies of New Maritime Jobs 9

10

11

12

Elbowing Their Way: Ship’s Engineers in the Spanish Merchant Marine, c.1850–1950 Enric Garcia Domingo From the Captain’s Tiger to the Chief Steward. Career Patterns of the Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938 Sari Mäenpää Surfing the Waves. The Rise and Decline of Radio Operators in the Dutch Mercantile Marine in the Twentieth Century Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek

Conclusion Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek

Index

199

221

245

271

285

Notes on Contributors

Nicolas Cochard took his Ph.D. degree in Modern History at the University of Normandy, Caen, France. He has taught at the universities of Caen and Le Havre and is an R&D manager. His research studies the construction of maritime and port identities in a context of modernisation of navigation in the nineteenth century, especially in the area of English Channel. Karel Davids is Professor Emeritus of Economic and Social History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He has published on economic and social history, maritime history, the history of technology and global history. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Academia Europaea. Among his books in English is Global Ocean of Knowledge, 1660–1860. Globalization and Maritime Knowledge in the Atlantic World (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Apostolos Delis is a researcher in the Centre of Maritime History of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/ FORTH in Crete. His research interests lie in the maritime economic and social history, history of technology of the sailing ship and of the steamship, the shipbuilding industry, port history and the institutions of shipping business. He is author of a monograph entitled Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding. Economy, Technology and Institutions in Syros in the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill (2015), and co-editor of the collective volumes: Linkages of the

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Black Sea with the West. Navigation, Trade and Immigration, Black Sea History Working Papers, volume 7, (Rethymnon, 2020) and Mediterranean Seafarers in Transition. Maritime Labour, Communities, Shipping and the challenge of industrialization 1850s–1920s (Leiden: Brill, 2022). Enric Garcia Domingo is Director of the Museu Marítim de Barcelona, Spain. He has a doctorate in Contemporary History from the Universitat de Barcelona. He is member of the research group TIG Treball, Institucions i Génere (Labour, Institutions and Gender) of the Universitat de Barcelona. His research interest is maritime history at large and especially maritime labour. Richard Guy is an independent researcher working on the architectural history of ships and shipping, concentrating on inter-oceanic shipping of The Netherlands, from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries. He holds a Ph.D. in history of architecture from Cornell University, USA, and has served as the Crone Research Fellow at Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam. Alkiviadis Kapokakis is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Crete in joint supervision with the Institute for Mediterranean Studies. The subject of his thesis concerns labour relations in the Greek-owned fleet during the transition from sail to steam. The Ph.D. thesis is part of the research project ERC Starting Grant Seafaring Lives in Transition, Mediterranean Maritime Labour and Shipping, 1850s–1920s. His articles concern the seamen’s labour market and the operation of the Greek Seamen’s Pension Fund. Alston Kennerley trained as a navigating officer at sea, with a year’s service in a square-rigged sailing ship. A qualified Master Mariner, his numerous publications include The Making of the University of Plymouth (Plymouth, 2000) and co-editing The Maritime History of Cornwall (Exeter, 2014). His Bullen’s Voyages: the Life of Frank T. Bullen, Sailor, Whaler, Author appeared in June 2022. Kristof Loockx received a Ph.D. in History at the University of Antwerp and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2020 and now holds a postdoc research position at the Centre for Urban History (University of Antwerp), Belgium. His research deals with social and economic history during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular focus on maritime, migration and labour aspects.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Sari Mäenpää (Forum Marinum, Finland) has previously published on maritime women, the catering personnel and interactions between sailors and maritime animals. She is chair of the Finnish Association of Maritime History. Her recent publications include ‘To Kill an Albatross is Unlucky’ Journal for Maritime Research (2020) and an article on the Finnish sailors’ nature relations in Winds of Change and the sea: Cultural perspectives on marine studies (SKS, Helsinki 2020). Jari Ojala is Professor of Comparative Business History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He specialises in long-run maritime and economic history and has published extensively on these topics in major economic, maritime and business history journals and anthologies. Joost Schokkenbroek, Ph.D. (2008), University of Leiden, is Director of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum since 2021. Prior to his appointment in Hong Kong, he was Executive Director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum (2017–2021) and affiliated with the Kendall Whaling Museum in the USA (1988–1990) and Het Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam (1991–2017), where he worked as Chief Curator. He published widely on maritime history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Morten Tinning is a Ph.D. fellow at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics, and a curator at the Maritime Museum of Denmark. His previous work includes articles and editorial work on military and maritime history publications. His current research interests include entrepreneurship, the transition from sail to steam, maritime business history, maritime ethnology and the history of technology.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Bodies involved in formulating merchant marine engineer vocational training policy, in the 1940s (Notes AEU: Amalgamated Engineering Union; ATI: Association of Technical Institutions; ATTI: Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions; CGLI: City & Guilds of London Institute; EAPL: Employers’ Association of the Port of Liverpool; HMI: His Majesty’s Inspector [of schools]; IESS: Institution of Engineers & Shipbuilders in Scotland; IMarE: Institute of Marine Engineers; IMechE: Institution of Mechanical Engineers; NECIES: North East Coast Institution of Engineers & Shipbuilders; LSSOA: Liverpool Steamship Owners Association; MEA: Marine Engineers Union; MMSA: Mercantile Marine Service Association; MNTB: Merchant Navy Training Board; OMNF: Officers’ (Merchant Navy) Federation. Sources A.G. Course, The Merchant Navy: A Social History (passim); Ronald Hope, A New History of British Shipping, (passim); Alston Kennerley, ‘The Seamen’s Union, National Maritime Board & Firemen’) Kosmopoliet cabin plan (Source Collection of Rotterdam Maritime Museum, T966) Hindostan and Bentinck cabin plan (Source Barber, Overland Guide-Book)

25 126 127

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 8.3

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 11.1

Graph 3.1

Graph 8.1

Koning der Nederlanden plan (Source Collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam, inventaris L6 04.03.2.1–2; L6 04.22. a.k.a. LK 16 Ia 02) At sea and in port. Two contemporary photos of the 31-year-old captain Roland Mengelberg of the Danish three masted topgallant schooner Noah taken in 1919. In both photos the ‘captain’s cap’ is the only physical marker of his captaincy. His eyes, however, convey a stern, capable, yet empathetic authoritative character (Source Archive of the Maritime Museum of Denmark, 000045674 & 000045675, from photo album 2007:0252) “Ladies and gentlemen, I drink to your very good health”. The uniformed captain of an ocean liner offering a toast to his passengers. (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Illus. in AP101.P7 1904, LC-DIG-ppmsca-25848. https:// www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011645532/) Kitchen of the Red Star Line’s Lapland, c.1908 (Source Thomas Stewart Blair, Public Hygiene (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1911), 584–85) Galley of the Red Star Line’s Lapland, c.1908 (Source Thomas Stewart Blair, Public Hygiene (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1911), 584–85) Dinner menu of the Red Star Line’s Zeeland, 20 November 1901 (Source The New York Public Library, Rare Book Division, The Buttolph Collection of Menus) A Chief Engineer of the Compañía Trasatlántica, c.1880–1900 (Source Author’s collection) Radio-operator giving a message to an Indonesian steward aboard a Dutch merchant ship, 1943 (Source Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 2.24.01.05 Bestanddeelnummer 935–2945 [Public domain]) Share (%) of men hired for new steam-era occupations in selected Swedish and Finnish towns, 1850–1939 (N = 508,190 enrolments) (Source Seamen’s House database on selected Swedish and Finnish towns) Belgian merchant fleet, number of sailing ships and steamships, 1850–1930 (Source Baetens, ‘A Survey of Maritime Relations’, 248–49)

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159

161

180

181

185 204

257

42

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LIST OF FIGURES

Graph 8.2

Graph 11.1

Map 4.1 Map 5.1 Map 5.2 Map 5.3

Map 5.4

Belgian merchant fleet, share of sailing ships and steamships in net tonnage, 1850–1930 (Source Baetens, ‘A Survey of Maritime Relations’, 248–49) Number of radio operators employed by Radio Holland (blue columns) and the Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) (red columns), 1917–1976. (Source PDRH 50 jaar Radio Holland N.V .; PDRH Speciaal nummer 1916- 6 december -1976; Van der Klaauw and Houtkooper, Onsterfelijk alphabet ) Map of Greece showing principal places of origins of maritime population based on data of N.A.T., 1862 Plan of Le Havre, late nineteenth century Residences in Le Havre of seamen in the third cohort (green dots: fishermen, red dots: sailors) Residences in Le Havre of seamen employed on transatlantic packet boats, early twentieth century (red dots) Residences in Le Havre of engine room personnel, early twentieth century (red dots: first generation, greendots: second generation, blue dots: third generation)

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177

250

70 98 105

106

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 3.1

Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6

Table 4.7

Key features of marine engineer apprenticeship and vocational training schemes Number and share (%) of men hired for steam ships and sailing vessels in Sweden and Finland (selected towns), 1850–1939 (N = 434,741 enrolments) Share of seamen hired in different skills categories 1850–1939 in selected Swedish and Finnish towns Average age of men hired to serve aboard vessels in selected Swedish and Finnish towns 1850–1939 ILO Maritime Labour Conference recommendations ratified by Sweden during the interwar era Maritime workers in Greece 1862–1869, 1874, 1875, 1889, 1906 Population movement in maritime centres and communities in Greece, 1862–1889 Crew size, tons and forms of payment on Greek sailing ships in the nineteenth century Age of Greek steamships, c. 1900 Crew size on Greek steamships Monthly wages of deck crew on Greek sailing ships in the nineteenth century (in drachmas; Eleni Koupa in francs) Daily wages of workers in Greece, 1840–1875 (in drachmas)

31

41 44 49 54 68 71 73 75 76

79 80

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4

Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7

Table 5.8 Table 5.9 Table 10.1

Table 10.2 Table 11.1 Table 11.2

Average and range of wages per rank in steamships, 1898–1917 (in drachmas) Average daily and monthly wages of employees in Piraeus, 1917 (in drachmas) Monthly wages of crew members of the Hirondelle in 1834 (in francs) Wages of crew members of the Bléville in 1873 (in francs) Monthly wages of crew members of the steamer Guatemala in 1912 (in francs) Monthly wages of crews of international coastal shipping and long-distance steam navigation in France in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (in francs) Monthly wages of crew members of the steamer Neptune in 1844 (in francs) Wages of the crew of the steamer Finistère in 1898 (in francs) Indices of food prices and monthly wages of various groups of male workers in Le Havre, 1830–1910 (1872 = 100) Indices of wages of able seamen and stokers in France, 1840–1910 (1875 = 100) Prices of basic foodstuffs in Le Havre, 1830–1910 (in francs) Catering staff included in the census statistics of England and Wales compared to the total number of seafarers in 1861–1931 The average crew size on Cunard’s Atlantic liners 1861–1938 Radio operators on Dutch merchant ships: total number and new entrants per 5 years, 1919–1939 Turnover of radio operators on Dutch merchant ships, 1919–1939

82 85 108 109 110

112 112 113

115 115 116

223 223 262 262

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek

Changes in Merchant Shipping After 1850 Since about 1850, the merchant ship saw more radical change in a hundred years than in the five centuries before.1 The transition from sail to steam and from steam to oil, the replacement of wooden ships by those of iron and steel, the rise of specialised passenger shipping and the growing regulation by government authorities all led to drastic changes in labour conditions, labour relations and composition of crews. Ships became bigger and faster and the ratio of average gross registered tonnage (GRT) per man increased. Seamen, including captains, more and more turned into employees of shipping companies. Captains who owned their own ships became a rarity. Unlike in the heyday of sail, able-bodied seamen no longer formed the majority of the crews. On ships powered by

K. Davids (B) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] J. Schokkenbroek Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Hong Kong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_1

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steam or oil, their share dropped to 20–25%. Carpenters and boatswains decreased in number. Sailmakers at sea became a vanishing breed. However, merchant ships saw the appearance of new groups of employees on board as well. Engineers began to form a substantial part of the crews of merchantmen from the end of the nineteenth century onwards: some 10% on average. Firemen, trimmers and oilers made up 20–25% of all crews on steamships, making them as numerous as ablebodied seamen. Radio operators, initially called wireless telegraphists, were posted on merchant ships from the beginning of the twentieth century, too. Moreover, the share of catering and service personnel, such as pursers, cooks, stewards, stewardesses, doctors and nurses, increased significantly, especially on passenger ships. Moreover, seafarers were increasingly subject to government regulations aimed at enhancing the levels of knowledge and skills, notably in the fields of navigation, engineering and communication among crew members, at improving living and working conditions on board and at increasing marine safety.2 Changes in motive power, communication techniques and positionfinding technologies, together with the rise of passenger transportation as a separate branch of the shipping industry, thus led to the creation of new tasks and functions on board as well as to the marginalisation or disappearance of traditional jobs and skills. Much has been written about the effects of these major changes on trade routes, duration of voyages, transport costs and prices of commodities. Consequences for employment and the structure of wages as well as shifts in the social and ethnic origins of crews and the rise of seamen’s organisations and professionalisation processes have been the subject of various studies, too.3 It is remarkable, however, that the impact of those big changes on social relations on board and ashore has been far less investigated—not so much on a national level, let alone in a wider, international context. This is the very subject of the book before you, which deals with ‘old’ and ‘new’ jobs in European shipping industries between approximately 1850 and 2000. The impact on social relations will be studied in a variety of jobs, which represent different parts of the maritime labour force. Some of these jobs formed part of what might be called the ‘front office’ on board, namely the setting where crew members came in regular contact with passengers. Stewards, pursers and stewardesses are notable examples in this group. Other jobs can be considered as part of the ‘back office’, which dealt with navigation, maintenance and the propulsion and handling of the

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ship. Aside from masters and mates, this group included sailors, carpenters, sailmakers, engineers, firemen and trimmers. Finally, there were jobs that can be situated in-between ‘front office’ and ‘back office’, such as cooks, physicians and radio operators, or in-between sea and land, such as seamen employed in port services. The case studies are also spread over different branches of shipping and different countries. Working conditions on passenger liners were after all not quite the same as those on ships involved in bulk trade or tramp shipping and national contexts differed in various respects as well. This volume aims to address several questions concerning ‘old’ and ‘new’ jobs in European shipping industries after 1850. The most important ones are: What were the implications of the changes described above in terms of payment, recruitment, status, skills, career prospects or gender relations? How did relations between employees in ‘old’ and ‘new’ jobs develop over time? To what extent and in what ways did employees in ‘new’ or ‘old’ jobs experience a process of professionalisation? And what was the effect of changes on board on social arrangements ashore, for example, in terms of residential patterns or the establishment of training facilities?

New Dividing Lines, Fresh Tensions, Novel Opportunities According to the literature available to date, the appearance of new jobs on board merchant ships on the one hand generated new dividing lines and fresh tensions, but on the other hand also created novel opportunities.4 New jobs meant a disruption of the established order. The hierarchy on board became much more complex than before. While supreme authority continued to rest with the captain, the ship’s system of ranks assumed a multiform instead of a uniform character. Several hierarchies came to exist side by side. Alongside the hierarchy of navigation personnel and deck crew, there appeared a hierarchy of engineers and engine room personnel. The hierarchy of the back office was mirrored in the hierarchy of the front office. A hierarchy of female personnel emerged next to the hierarchy of male crew members. This proliferation of hierarchies went together with all sorts of rivalries, frictions and communication difficulties. Earnings, status and fringe benefits could vary widely according to the hierarchy in which crew members functioned. The friction between engineers and deck personnel, which

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revealed itself from the very beginning of steam navigation,5 continued to exist well into the twentieth century. Chief engineers were better paid than all other crewmen, apart from the captain. Due to a reduction in the number of ships during the transition from sail to steam, captains moreover saw their real earnings decline for a long time. Lower rank engineers usually earned more than the mates as well. Wages of firemen and trimmers mostly exceeded those of able-bodied seamen. On steamships registered in the Atlantic ports of Canada between 1891 and 1912, the share of engineers and engine room personnel in the total sum of wages amounted to 52%; the share of able-bodied seamen was no more than 18%, compared with 60% on sailing vessels. The National Maritime Board in the United Kingdom ruled in 1917 that standard monthly wages of firemen should be 10 shillings higher than those for able-bodied seamen. This regulation remained in force until 1950.6 It has been suggested that higher wages for engine room personnel were partly intended as compensation for poor working conditions.7 Labour in the engine room of a ship was hard and dirty. The combination of heat, dust, vapour and darkness could easily lead to diseases and injuries. A parliamentary inquiry in Britain in the early twentieth century revealed that suicide was a much more common occurrence among firemen and trimmers than among other crew members of steamships.8 For a long time, captains and other deck officers regarded engineers as ‘mechanics in overalls’ rather than as ‘real’ seamen. Sometimes they also considered them as a threat to discipline aboard because they were not so strict with manners. In Spain, engineers were not formally acknowledged as seamen until 1893.9 Moreover, communication between the bridge and the engine room in the early days of steam was poor, both due to failing instruments and misunderstandings in language, and also because of existing social barriers; it took navigation officers a long time to properly appreciate the expertise and responsibility of engineers. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that internal communication, at least from a technical point of view, was improved by the introduction of new equipment.10 Although engineers and engine room personnel thus enjoyed higher levels of pay than most of the deck crew and the navigation officers, that did not mean that the status of these newcomers rose accordingly, or that the different groups on board easily mixed. The introduction of exams and certificates for engineers in the 1860s and 1870s, following the example of similar regulations for masters and mates, was a clear sign

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of their increasing importance for merchant shipping, but it did not yet guarantee that they would be equal in rank with navigation officers.11 ‘Officers remained the ultimate authorities on ship’, Stephen Fox has written in his book on British passenger ships in transatlantic liner trades. ‘They enjoyed better quarters and food than engineers and ranked higher in social prestige, mingling at will with first-class passengers while engineers stayed below, covered in grease and grime’. Firemen, trimmers or oil men who showed up on deck were viewed as aliens who could best be kept at a distance.12 Engineers admittedly had cabins amidships close to the navigation officers, but the accommodation of the lower ranks of the engine room was strictly separate from that of the sailors. Sailors slept to starboard and firemen and trimmers to port or, on passenger ships, in an area below the waterline at the bow or stern.13 Catering and service personnel were not an entirely new category on board, but after 1850 they made up a much larger part of the crew on merchant ships than before. Steamships, especially passenger ships, carried more cooks, stewards, pursers or doctors than sailing vessels. While the share of these groups on British sailing ships between 1860 and 1914 amounted to no more than 9% of the entire crew, it rose to almost 20% on steamers.14 Unlike engine room personnel, these crew members had a more visible presence on deck and they met with passengers more frequently, too. Stewards and stewardesses cleaned cabins and lounges under the watchful eyes of pursers, they provided clean bedding and clean clothes, and they brought drinks and served meals several times a day that had been prepared by bakers and cooks on board. Their working hours were long and their wages were relatively low, but thanks to their place in the front office they were also able to enjoy a bonus: they sometimes received a tip at the end of a voyage. ‘Real’ seamen looked down on this practice and worried that such an extra source of income would be detrimental to discipline.15 Another important difference between deck crews and engine room personnel was that part of the catering and service personnel was female. Female engineers were a rarity before 1950 and female deck officers were still lacking.16 The share of women in the total seafaring population of England slowly increased from 0.2% about 1860 to 1% in the 1930s but was always somewhat higher among catering and service personnel. It amounted to circa 4% in the Interwar Years.17 As passenger shipping expanded, the number of places for women grew, too, although not as quickly as that of jobs for men. While a female in the middle of the

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nineteenth century could only find employment on merchant ships as a laundress or as a nurse for women and children in the lowest class of passengers, by the beginning of the twentieth century they could work as a stewardess, waitress, chambermaid, governess or nurse of first- and second-class passengers. After World War I, they gained access to positions such as hairdresser, typist, lifeguard or shop assistant. The larger the number of female crew members, the more women could serve in supervisory roles such as chief stewardess, too. Thus, women had some career prospects as well, even if the hierarchy of female crew members remained separate from, and subordinate to, that of males. Men were not supervised by women. Moreover, women in similar positions to men were always paid less. Accommodations of males and females on board were strictly separated.18 Apart from new dividing lines and fresh tensions, the big changes in merchant shipping from the middle of the nineteenth century also created novel opportunities. While ‘established’ seamen often felt their position or status threatened, other crew members saw opportunities which were previously absent, or at least barely present. Thanks to the transition from sail to steam in the shipping industry, engineers got more options: henceforth, they could seek employment either at sea or on land. Most engineers only worked at sea for a few years, but their maritime experience benefitted them in the rest of their careers. Working at sea made higher demands than employment on land. An engineer on a ship should have such an extensive and thorough knowledge of machines that he should have been able to solve every problem that occurred independently, without any outside help. Whoever possessed a certificate as marine engineer and boasted several years of experience on a ship could look forward to a higher position on land than before leaving for sea.19 Able-bodied seamen could in a way benefit from the transition from sail to steam, too. At the beginning of the twentieth century, these mariners could expect to earn more on steamers than on sailing vessels. They enjoyed a skill premium during the rise of steam shipping. One of the reasons for the higher payment of able-bodied seamen on steam ships may have been that, precisely because of their smaller numbers, every individual sailor on a steamer had to possess a broader spectrum of skills than their predecessor on a sailing vessel.20 For some groups, the new world in merchant shipping clearly had attractive sides.

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The Essays in This Volume This volume contains ten essays, followed by a general conclusion. These essays discuss changes in a range of maritime jobs in European shipping industries between the middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century. They cover Britain, France and the Low Countries as well as seafaring countries in Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. The articles are ordered in three parts. The first five contributions (Part I) examine changes in maritime labour in institutional, technological and spatial contexts: Alston Kennerley discusses the human element in power-driven merchant ship propulsion, Jari Ojala the relationship between institutions and technology and Apostolis Delis and Alkiviadis Apokakis changes in labour on cargo steamers, while Nicolas Cochard looks at seamen in the urban environment and Richard Guy at the use of shipboard space on passenger liners. Part II presents case studies on old maritime jobs (Morten Tinning on captains and Kristof Loockx on cooks), while Part III includes case studies by Enric Garcia Domingo, Sari Mäenpää and Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek on new jobs that arose in the ‘back offices’ and ‘front offices’ after 1850, namely engineers, catering personnel and radio operators. Besides covering a wide range of countries and a variety of ‘old’ and ‘new’ jobs, the essays also offer an extensive sample of methods, approaches and sources that can be used in a fruitful way to investigate this subject. Some authors employ a prosopographical or micro-historical approach (Cochard, Tinning), while others apply a spatial perspective (Guy), analyse business records (Delis), and materials from professional associations (Davids and Schokkenbroek) or distil information from large sets of quantitative data (Ojala). The concluding chapter, written by the editors, discusses the main findings of the contributions to this book, offers a long-term perspective on transformation of maritime professions and suggests a number of questions and lines of inquiry for future research.

Notes 1. This section is based on Davids and Schokkenbroek, ‘Voorbij de oude wereld’. 2. Sager, Seafaring Labour, chapters 3, 6 and 9; Van Rossum, Hand aan hand, chapters 2 and 3; Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, part II and chapter 6;

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

Miller, Europe and the Maritime World, chapter 2; Feys, The Battle for the Migrants, part I. Sager, Seafaring Labour, chapters 5, 7 and 9; Jeans, ‘First Statutory Qualifications’; Burton, ‘Making of Nineteenth-Century Profession’; Davids, ‘Technological Change’; Schuman, Tussen vlag en voorschip, 93–169; Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, chapters 5 and 6; Witt, Master Next God?, 75–83; Thompson, ‘Technological Change’; Chin, Juhn and Thompson, ‘Technical Change’; Van Rossum, Hand aan hand, 32–58; Enric Garcia Domingo, ‘Losing Professional Identity?’. The following section is based on Davids and Schokkenbroek, ‘Voorbij de oude wereld’. Campbell McMurray, ‘Technology and Social Change’, 45–6. Sager, Seafaring Labour, 247–8, Campbell McMurray, ‘Technology and Social Change’, 46, Chin, Juhn and Thompson, ‘Technical Change’, 575; Burton, ‘Making of a Nineteenth-Century Profession’, 110, 114– 5; Garcia, ‘Losing Professional Identity ?’, 464–9; idem, ‘Engine Drivers’, 260; Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers’, 204–5. Chin, Juhn and Thompson, ‘Technical Change’, 575. Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers’, 194, 217–8. Burton, ‘Making of a Nineteenth-Century Profession’, 109–10; Garcia Domingo, ‘Engine Drivers’, 252–3, 262–3. Gerstenberger and Welke, Vom Wind zum Dampf , 237–45. Gerstenberger and Welke, Vom Wind zum Dampf , 222–5, 229–30; Kennerley, ‘British Merchant Marine Engineer Licensing’, 193–200, 210. Fox, Transatlantic, 322–3. Sager, Seafaring Labour, 249; Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers’, 213. Sager, Seafaring Labour, 250, 252–3. Fox, Transatlantic, 319–20. Coons, ‘From “Company Widow” to “New Woman”’, 157–8, 172; Mäenpää, ‘Women below Deck’, 64. Mäenpää, ‘Women below Deck’, 61–2. Mäenpää,‘Women below Deck’, 60–7; Coons, ‘From “Company Widow” to “New Woman”’, 147–55, 159–62, 167–9; Feldkamp, ‘Die ersten Stewardessen; idem, ‘Die ersten Schiffskrankenschwestern’; Hermsen, Lankhorst and De Wijn, ‘Bevrouwing’, 46–55, 59–63. Kennerley, ‘Engineers in British Merchant Ships’, 5–7, 10–11, idem, ‘British Merchant Marine Engineer licensing’, 210; Gerstenberger and Welke, Vom Wind zum Dampf , 222, 228. Chin, Juhn and Thompson, ‘Technical Change’, 577.

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References Burton, Valerie, ‘The Making of a Nineteenth-Century Profession: Shipmasters and the British Shipping Industry’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 1(1990), 97–118. Chin, Aimee, Chinhui Juhn and Peter Thompson, ‘Technical Change and the Demand for Skills During the Second Industrial Revolution: Evidence from the Merchant Marine, 1891–1912’, The Review of Economics and Statistics 88(2006), 572–8. Coons, Lorraine, ‘From “Company Widow” to “New Woman”: Female Seafarers Aboard the “Floating Palaces” of the Interwar Years’, International Journal of Maritime History 20(2008), 143–74. Davids, Karel, ‘Technological Change and the Professionalism of Masters and Mates in the Dutch Mercantile Marine, 1815–1914’, Collectanea Maritima V(1991), 282–303. Davids, Karel and Joost Schokkenbroek, ‘Voorbij de oude wereld. Nieuwe beroepen in de koopvaardij, 1850–1950’, in Reizen door het maritieme verleden van Nederland, ed. by Maurits Ebben, Anita van Dissel and Karwan Fatah-Black (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2015), 59–77. Feldkamp, Ursula, ‘Die ersten Stewardessen auf Bremischen Passagiersschiffen’, Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 21(1998), 83–100. Feldkamp, Ursula, ‘Die ersten Schiffskrankenschwestern’, Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 20(1997), 219–40. Feys, Torsten, The Battle for the Migrants. The Introduction of Steamshipping on the North Atlantic and its Impact on the European Exodus (St. John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2013). Fink, Leon, Sweatshops at Sea. Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Fox, Stephen, Transatlantic. Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘Engine Drivers or Engineers. Ships’ Engineers in the Spanish Merchant Navy (1834–1893)’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 19(2010), 249–70. Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘Losing Professional Identity? Deck Officers in the Spanish Merchant Marine, 1868–1914’, International Journal of Maritime History 26(2014), 450–70. Gerstenberger, Heide and Ulrike Welke, Vom Wind zum Dampf. Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Handelsschiffahrt im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (Münster: Westfalisches Dampfboot, 1996). Hermsen, Sacha, Daniëlle Lankhorst and Jan Willem de Wijn, ‘Bevrouwing. Vrouwelijke personeelsleden op passagiersschepen van de Holland-Amerika Lijn, circa 1880–1950’, Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis 33(2014), 39–65.

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Jeans, Clifford, ‘The First Statutory Qualifications for Seafarers’, Transport History 6 (1973), 248–67 Kennerley, Alston, ‘Stoking the Boilers: Firemen and Trimmers in British Merchant Ships, 1850–1950’, International Journal of Maritime History 20(2008), 191–220. Kennerley, Alston, ‘British Merchant Marine Engineer Licensing, 1865–1925’, in Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500–2000, ed. by Richard Gorski (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 185– 217. Mäenpää, Sari, ‘Women below Deck: Gender and Employment on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938’, Journal of Transport History 25(2004), 57– 74. McMurray, H. Campbell, ‘Technology and Social Change at Sea: The Status and Position on Board of the Ship’s Engineer circa 1830–1860’, in Working Men Who Got Wet, ed. by Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St. John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1980), 37–50. Miller, Michael B., Europe and the Maritime World. A Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Rossum, Matthias van, Hand aan hand (Blank en bruin). Solidariteit en de werking van globalisering, ethniciteit en klasse onder zeelieden op de Nederlandse koopvaardij, 1900–1945 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2009). Sager, Eric W., Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada 1820–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1989). Schuman, Peter, Tussen vlag en voorschip. Een eeuw wettelijke en maatschappelijke emancipatie van zeevarenden ter Nederlandse koopvaardij 1838–1940 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1995). Thompson, Peter, ‘Technological Change and the Age-Earnings Profile: Evidence from the International Merchant Marine, 1861–1912’, Review of Economic Dynamics 6(2003), 578–601. Witt, Jann Markus, Master next God? Der nordeuropäische Handelsschiffskapitän vom 17. bis zum. 19 Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Conent Verlag, 2001).

PART I

Changes in Maritime Labour: Institutional, Technological and Spatial Contexts

CHAPTER 2

The Human Element in Power-Driven Merchant Ship Propulsion Since 1850: The British Case Alston Kennerley

Introduction Before the advent of powered merchant ship propulsion, wind propelled vessels taking ocean passages had always included in their crews specialists who had been trained and educated ashore. Their skills contributed technologically to the well-being of the vessel and the well-being of the crew. Usually, they had completed apprenticeships and were journeymen of their craft. Examples of the technological group were shipwrights/carpenters, blacksmiths, sailmakers, riggers and gunners. Examples of the group with training to care for the crew and business of the enterprise included medical, religious and clerical personnel along with

A. Kennerley (B) University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_2

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stewards, pursers and supercargoes. Usually, the latter would be classed as day workers not keeping a watch. The manpower carried by a ship was not regulated in detail, and the skills engaged depended on the master and owner. Generally, only one person in a particular trade was carried, though there might be, for example, a carpenter’s, sailmaker’s or bosun’s mate. In this sense, there was nothing unusual in the carriage of manpower connected with a steam ship’s engine. What was different was that engines in continuous operation required numbers of watch keepers, officers and ratings, and further that responsibility for the operation of the power unit was taken from the deck crew (master, mates and sailors). Late nineteenth-century sailing ships, equipped with a donkey engine for assisting cargo handling and the like, carried an engine driver, but he falls into the same class as the tradesmen above. He was not an engineer. He had no intimate knowledge of the machine and the ability to repair engine parts, nor authority over engine and boiler room hands. Merchant ship engineers were more than engine drivers, though they often found themselves undertaking manual tasks like the ratings they commanded: the firemen and trimmers (stokers in naval parlance). Nevertheless, aboard ship engineers as officers gained a parallel status to mates and masters (deck officers).1 In Britain, the term ‘engineer’ is unregulated, whereas in European countries, it suggests high status, its usage similar to that of doctor. The prenominal ‘Dr. Ing’ is a common usage in Europe but is not found in Britain. There, a technician servicing a domestic boiler is referred to as ‘our engineer’ on the telephone, equating him with a leading engineer such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. High status engineers today use the term ‘Chartered Engineer’, confirmed through full membership of, say, the Institution of Civil Engineers (formed 1818). Manufacturers of ships’ engines refer to themselves as ‘Marine Engineers’, as do merchant ship engineers. Marine engineering is a specialism within mechanical engineering whose institution was formed in 1845. The engineering institutions, including the Institute of Marine Engineers (1888), have played a large role in developing training in engineering. To set a context for the discussions of ships’ engineers and hands, the first section offers a brief overview of developments in ship power propulsion since 1850. Consideration then turns to engineer officers with

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discussion of recruitment, duties, services licensing and training. The final section focuses on engine room ratings—the firemen and trimmers in coal-fired steamships, looking at their origins, conditions of work and behavioural and medical issues.

Advances in Merchant Ship Power Propulsion2 Before the 1850s, most steam engines and boilers were being installed in ships built of wood, and were inevitably placed amidships, owing to their size and weight and the need for the hull to absorb the forces generated by engines in propulsive operation. The need to carry sufficient reserves of fuel (coal), especially on longer passages, ate into the earning capacity of ships’ holds. Building larger hulls eased those problems, but the size limits of building in wood were soon reached. In the 1830s, constructing hulls in iron was proved practicable, permitting much increased hull sizes. Also affecting hull design was the ultimate output from ship’s engines. In British ships, paddle wheels mounted abreast the engine with a crankshaft at main deck level delivered propulsion. An alternative was a stern paddle wheel, as favoured in the United States. Numerous paddle engine designs resulted from the adoption of this form of output, and there was much experimentation with the design of paddle wheels and floats. But with the British design there was no avoiding, on ocean passages, the impact of the wind and waves repeatedly sinking one wheel deeper into the water while lifting the other out of the sea. Paddle propulsion worked very well in calm, sheltered conditions and was favoured for many years for towage in rivers and harbours. The demonstration, in the 1830s, that screw propulsion was superior to paddle soon led to the widespread adoption of the screw propeller and the relegation of paddles to special purpose vessels. Optimising the design of screws has been a research topic ever since. Also, to be overcome was the position of the screw in relation to the rudder at the stern of the vessel, the gland fitting where the tail shaft penetrated the vessel’s hull, and the quality of casting engine parts, of which propeller shaft sections were probably the largest. Propeller shaft fractures were a common cause of steam ship disablement in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The development of the Bessemer process of steel making had a major impact on ship and engine construction as the use of steel—lighter and stronger than iron—became the norm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

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It was also realised that ocean passages demanded more efficiency in the generation of steam and in the use of its expansive properties. The simple single expansion engines needed to be replaced with double expansion (compound) designs, and boilers needed improvement to deliver steam at higher temperatures and pressures. By 1890, the triple expansion steam engine, with three cylinders arranged fore and aft above the crank shaft, and the screw propeller as its final output, had become the standard for the generality of merchant steamships (e.g. tramps, cargo liners, tankers). Even during World War II this type of engine was fitted in numerous American-built Liberty ships. Ships’ boilers were also the subject of continuous design improvement. Owing to the number of explosions and other boiler accidents, ships’ boilers were made subject to government survey and repeat safety certification in the 1840s. Again, there were many designs, from which there eventually emerged a standard design termed the ‘Scotch boiler’. This was of circular construction, a stronger form than the earlier box designs. The furnace was still under the water chamber, but additional energy was extracted from the exhaust gases by passing them through a set of tubes fitted in the water chamber. Tall funnels created the natural air draft which drew the exhaust through the tubes. Larger boilers might be fitted with as many as four furnaces. The higher temperatures in use led to distortion of furnace casings, a solution being found in the invention of corrugated furnaces. Throughout the nineteenth century, coal was the dominant fuel supplied to steam ships, and a vessel design consideration was providing dedicated storage (bunkers), adjacent to the boiler room (or stoke hold), and of sufficient size for the planned voyages. The quality of coal was variable, and firing had to be adjusted to suit. Welsh anthracite was of the highest quality and thus most desirable. A further limiting factor, particularly for oceanic passages, was the distribution of coaling stations. Developing the network before the steam collier became well established, depended mainly on sailing vessels carrying cargoes of British coal in bulk, to supply hub locations ahead of demands from steamers. Ports in all British colonies, such as Gibraltar, Malta, Cape Town and Singapore, became ports of call for refuelling. Although mineral oils began to be produced later in the nineteenth century, the use of fuel oil as a boiler fuel did not become widespread until after World War I. Fuel oil, stored

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in double bottom tanks and similar limited access spaces, which could be pumped to the boilers, freed up useable cargo space and reduced the boiler room manning. Two important engine developments of the 1890s, the steam turbine and the compression ignition (diesel) engine, saw installations in merchant ships before World War I. But it was during the interwar years that, with the use of oil fuel, diesel installations became more widespread. Diesel propulsion did not become the dominant power unit in merchant ships until the third quarter of the twentieth century. As well as lingering on for triple expansion engines, steam power was also required for ships fitted with steam turbines. These ships, working best at very high temperatures, needed the most efficient boilers. Boiler designs using the water tube principle found favour for naval vessels, passenger liners and fast cargo liners. Steam power applications of increasing diversity and innovation took place ashore in parallel with those in ships. Thus, it is not surprising that quite early on auxiliary uses were found afloat for many engine and boiler improvements, and for tasks which, with increasing ship size, were becoming beyond human power. Devices which improved efficiency included surface and jet condensers (steam to water, for reuse), evaporators (freshwater from saltwater) and air pumps. Drives taken from the main engine powered, for example, bilge pumps and supplementary ventilation. Later, boilers were fitted with forced draught apparatus to increase the intensity of the fires and generate higher steam temperatures. Subsidiary boilers were installed in boiler rooms for steam supply while in port to power cargo handling engines (winches). The networking of the steam supply around ships powered the windlass (heaving the anchor), and the steering engine assisted the movement of the rudder in response to movement of the steering wheel by the helmsman. During the 1870s, both refrigeration and electricity were first installed in ships—adding to the number of auxiliary steam engines in the engine room and around the decks. Eventually, ships with sufficient electrical generating capability could power most devices formerly driven by steam, with electric motors doing all the works noted above. By the twentieth century, engineering technology had revolutionised the propulsion of ships, creating a new manpower section of ships’ crews. Technological developments were also impacting the duties of crew

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members above decks—at least in anchor handling, steering and cargo handling. The installation of electrical generation facilitated the fitting of a raft of new electrical and electronic navigation devices: gyro compass, echo sounders, radio direction finders, radar, hyperbolic navigation, satellite navigation, integrated ships’ bridge navigation systems—to name just a few. By the last quarter of the century, navigation practice had changed beyond all recognition, and the spread of bridge control of engines and increasing automation across all types of vessels brought the engine room closer to the bridge. The electronic transmission of engine operational data back to the owner’s head office was a factor in allowing engine rooms to become unmanned. With bridge control, the chief engineer was more useful on the bridge entering harbour, than in the engine room. The development of ship’s power propulsion technology since 1900 has been every bit as groundbreaking as that since 1800. A commonality between the two periods has been the need to design ships’ engines to suit the planned service role and the size of the ship. The massive increase in the size of ocean-going vessels, and the introduction of many specialised types (e.g. bulk, car, livestock, gas, chemical, cruise, container), called for engines of ever-increasing size and capability. The container revolution changed operating practices and made many traditional, smaller, tramps and cargo liners redundant. That change happened quite quickly, but many other developments took place over many decades. It is hard to believe that even in the 1930s, there still existed vessels without electricity or refrigeration, and that maintenance of ships’ engines by the engine room staff continued to be a regular task in the 1950s and 1960s, whenever ships were in port for more than a few hours. Also, it must be remembered that vessels could have service lives of twenty to thirty years, requiring staffing familiar with out-dated engine designs. Now, such is the reliability of modern ship propulsion machinery that operating unmanned ships is under serious consideration. Vessels have been in service for some years with unmanned engine rooms. A recent initiative by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is ongoing consultation to draw up operational criteria for unmanned vessel operation for which the term Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship (MASS) has been coined.3 This points to all seafarers becoming redundant at some date in the future, though trained marine engineers will find new roles in port-based engine servicing.

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Merchant Ship Engine Room Manning: Engineer Officers The earliest steam ships carried at least an engineer and a labourer to work the boiler furnace. The engineer, perhaps a journeyman fitter involved in assembling the engine, might be recommended by the engine manufacturer, and this was certainly still the case with the earliest paddle steamers designed for ocean passages. These ships, requiring round the clock engineer attendance, needed several engineers to take charge in the engine room in turn, who would be headed by the ship’s chief engineer.4 The four-hour watch duration, emulating long-established practice among ship’s deck officers, was also adopted. In 1839, on a transatlantic passage, S.S. British Queen carried a chief engineer and second, third and fourth engineers, numbers which suggest the use of the three-watch pattern (four hours on watch, eight hours off), with the chief engineer not keeping a watch.5 These job titles (capacity in official parlance) were thus in use very early in the steam age and persisted throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, that number of engineers was typical for tramp steamers by 1900. In contrast, a large passenger steamer of that later period might ship as many 40 engineers. By 1850, it was well established that merchant ship engineers should have served an engineering apprenticeship of at least four years in a mechanical engineering workshop and have practised afterwards for a short period as a journeyman fitter before being accepted in a steamship as an assistant or junior engineer. An apprenticeship of five years became the standard in the late nineteenth century and was maintained into the 1950s when shipboard apprenticeship/cadetship was introduced. Prior to the 1950s, all ship engineers had worked as mechanics in the engineering industry ashore from the age of about 15 until about 21 or more and were socialised into that industry. They were ill-prepared for sea life generally, and in the engine room totally unused to exercising the authority their status as ship’s officers gave them over engine room hands. Joining a tramp ship, a new junior (or assistant) engineer, relying on his workshop experience, could find himself in charge of the 8 to 12 watch (the fourth engineer’s watch) with the minimum of introduction.

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At sea with the engine running steadily at its service speed, the duty engineer had to remain reasonably near the controls, in case of emergency. Otherwise, the main task was monitoring the engine and boilers. Listening to the tune of the engine and watching other signs were skills which were developed with experience. Early in the steam age, engineers spent much time hand-lubricating the moving parts of the engine and feeling bearings for signs of heating. At the end of the watch, several readings had to be taken for recording in the engine room log: steampressure, vacuum-pressure, speed per minute, temperature of sea water, discharge water and feed water. Taking over the watch, all bearings had to be thumbed, water levels noted, gauges tried, and bilges, pumps, thrustblock, tunnel-shaft, stern-gland, all checked. In the boiler room, the work of the firemen had to be checked, and the trimmers instructed on which coal bunker was to be used.6 In many tramp ships, the junior engineer would discover that the afternoon watch (12 to 4) was not his free time, as he was expected to work a ‘field day’ to overhaul, for example, the winches. In port, he had to keep the night watch on the auxiliary boiler and by day work on parts of the main engine or mend leaking boiler tubes. Personal data on merchant ship engineers found in ships’ Agreement and Account of Crew (crew lists) have been sampled, which allows some characterisation of ships’ engineers. Throughout the period 1850 to 1950, typical merchant ships carried three to five engineers.7 The minimum age was 20 and the maximum 69, but the average age was in their early thirties. The data indicate that a significant proportion of serving engineers were under 40 years of age, by which age many were securing employment ashore. Analysing birth locations adds some support for the popular assertion that British ships’ engineers were likely to be Scottish. Data between 1850 and 1910 suggest that two-fifths of engineers were born in Scotland, mostly in the Clyde/Forth river belt. The other dominant birth region was the northeast of England, with many locations named in river valleys where shipbuilding was a main industry. All power-driven ships, regardless of size, carried a first or chief engineer with other engineers numbered upwards. This hides the scale of responsibility carried and the complexity of the mechanical installation in larger vessels. However, examination of monthly wage levels shows chief engineers in the most sophisticated and largest vessels being paid double the wage in small ships. In 1870, it was possible to find first, second,

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third, fourth and junior engineers in different sized ships all being paid ten pounds monthly. For the twentieth century, shipping company staff records indicate career duration. Between 1908 and 1949, the average Alfred Holt and Company (Blue Funnel Line) engineer, who rose to the rank of chief engineer, joined the Company aged 23. He spent 20.6 years climbing the engineer ranks, reaching chief engineer status on average at age 43.7 years. Wastage among engineers tended to be high. Examining Ellerman and Bibby company staff records shows that about 75% of engineers remained with those companies less than five years. That the shortage of merchant ship engineers was critical after World War II is shown by the percentage of serving engineers holding certificates of competency dropping to 36% in 1951 and 32% in 1970, down from over 50% in earlier sample years (1870, 1890, 1910, 1930). Until 1863, there were no qualifications for merchant ship engineers, but their introduction under the Merchant Shipping Acts (Amendment) Act, 1862,8 made it compulsory for British foreign-going steamers and home trade passenger steamers, to carry engineers holding the new certificates of competency (or of service).9 This marked a significant increase in the professionalisation and status of merchant ship engineers—aboard ship, equating them to the deck officers (master and mates), and ashore by creating the first license for any engineer, making marine engineers attractive as managers of factories and plants producing engines. Although engineers were vital for ship’s power installations, very little discussion of their employment supply, their training, their role and duties at sea, and their licensing, has been identified prior to the 1890s by which time the Institute of Marine Engineers began leading discussion. Parliamentary debate connected to the topic seems confined to the licensing section of the Bill prior to the 1862 Act. However, in the same period, the Royal Navy was getting used to employing engineers for its steam vessels and fitting them into their ranking, as petty officers classing them as Third, Second or First Class. Negative social attitudes towards engineers as officers persisted in the Navy for many years and were also to be found in merchant shipping. However, Parliament, concerned with the accident rate with passenger ship boilers, had legislated for the inspection and certification of ships’ boilers and engines at six monthly intervals and appointed two naval officers to undertake the surveys as early as 1846.

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These came under the remit of the Board of Trade and it seems likely that they had a major influence on the 1862 licensing provisions. In 1850, the state had already legislated for the licensing of masters and mates of foreign-going ships,10 which became compulsory on 1 January 1851. For the administration of merchant shipping matters, the same Act had created a Marine Department in the Board of Trade (BoT). By 1862, this Department had a decade of experience in the examination of mates and masters and the issue of government certificates of competency, as well as the issue of certificates of service to mates and masters who could show prior experience in those capacities. A similar system was drawn up for ship’s engineers. The 1862 Act specified two grades of certificate: first-class engineer and second-class engineer. It required steamships of 100 nominal horsepower and upward to carry first and second engineers holding a first-class certificate and a second-class certificate, respectively. Steamers of lower horsepower were only required to carry an engineer holding a second-class certificate. A voluntary superior certificate, first-class extra, was also offered for engineers who wished to prove their advanced knowledge of marine engineering. To sit the examinations, engineers had to prove their apprenticeship, plus twelve (later eighteen) months sea time responsibility for the watch. The examination comprised a viva voce (known as orals or verbals) test emphasising practical experience, with successful candidates being admitted to the five-hour written paper. Early on this exposed the limited literary attainments of many ships’ engineers. Since the 1860s, the syllabus has often been extended and the written paper broken up into several papers on named topics in steam engineering. During World War I, testing knowledge of diesel engineering was introduced by means of a parallel syllabus to steam with related experience requirements—a distinction continued to the present day. Examinations were offered frequently at the main ports around Britain and Ireland, and there was no requirement to undertake a specified course of study. These general arrangements were maintained until the late 1970s, when the IMO laid down new requirements under its Standards of Training and Certification and Watchkeeping Code of 1978 (STCW 1978), to which Britain was a signatory. Under the later revision, STCW 1995, provisions for engineer certification included engineer officer of the watch, second engineer, chief engineer and engine room watch rating.11

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Despite there being no course of study requirements in the examination regulations, experienced marine engineers began offering private tuition and publishing their own guides to the BoT examinations. The well-established private navigation schools in all major British ports were examples, and indeed, some included marine engineering in their subject list. One such was D. Thomson’s who advertised himself as teacher of navigation and engineering in Greenock. He published The Engineer’s Guide to the Naval and Local Marine Boards in 1864.12 Other examples of private tuition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included Lockie’s Marine Engineering Academy at Leith, McGibbon’s Engineering Academy at Glasgow, Sothern’s Marine Engineering Academy at Glasgow, the City Marine Engineering Academy in London and W.H. Thorn’s at North Shields, the author of Reed’s Engineers Handbook.13 During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, scientific and technical education was increasingly brought to the fore as well. Seeds were sown in the 1820s when the Mechanics Institute movement promoted classes in scientific principles. From the 1850s, the government’s Department of Science and Art promoted classes in, for example, navigation and mechanics through financial aid, and an examination system at secondary school and tertiary levels, while universities began to found departments of engineering. In 1881, the City and Guilds of London Institute supported instruction in trade (practical) subjects. In 1889, county councils were authorised to levy a penny rate in aid of technical education; in 1890, the government made some taxation funds available. Many councils built multi-purpose science, art and technical school buildings which by the mid-twentieth century had become the home of local technical colleges.14 While the BoT did not prescribe a marine engineering course prior to its certificate examinations, it did begin to encourage apprentice attendance at classes in mechanical engineering by recognising courses (mostly evening class) at over thirty colleges, for remission from part of the five year apprenticeship specified in its regulations, to a maximum of two years. From about 1900, marine engineering training became more closely linked than deck officer training, with developments in technical vocational training ashore. The need, highlighted in both world wars, to improve recruitment of trainees to become ships engineers, became the subject of serious debate in the 1930s with a remarkable number of representative bodies then becoming involved. The idea that a trainee

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engineer sea-going apprenticeship should eventually replace the shore workshop apprenticeship gained momentum, but World War II interrupted progress. The Alternative Entry (or Scheme), as it became known, was not introduced until 1952. The players in the debate included the Shipping Federation (SF), Liverpool Steamship Owners Association (LSSOA) and Employers Association of the Port of Liverpool (EAPL), representing shipowners; professional institutions included the Institute of Marine Engineers (IMarE), the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), the North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders (NECIES) and the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland (IESS); trade unions and societies included the Navigators and Engineer Officers Union (NEOU), the Marine Engineers Association (MEA), the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) and the Officers’ (Merchant Navy) Federation (OMNF); the Merchant Navy Training Board (refounded in 1942), the Mercantile Marine Department (MMD) of the Board of Trade and His Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools and Colleges (HMIs), representing the government departments; educational bodies included the Association of Technical Institutions (ATI), the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions ( ATTI) and City and Guilds of London Institute (CGLI).15 The relationship among all these bodies in the formulation of vocational training policy for sea-going engineers is set out diagrammatically in Fig. 2.1. The officials of the various organisations were in frequent contact with each other over many matters concerning the mercantile marine. Ultimately, the power to allow revisions to the traditional mode of entry was in the hands of the MMD through its statutory responsibility for safety at sea, and the licensing system as part of that. The scheme introduced in 1952 failed to give the new apprentice engineers early sea-going experience. However, the traditional four years in an engineering workshop was cut to about eighteen months in total. Those recruited were apprenticed to shipping companies, but the scheme placed them on a two-year Ordinary National Diploma (OND) course at selected technical colleges in port locations, where, if necessary, they lived away from home. A few colleges had training vessels, and in time, some engineer cadets were given a few days at sea during the OND course.16 College vacations were filled with workshop practice in the college engineering workshops. Only then did apprentices get to sea in the engine room for about eighteen months. They came ashore again for a year in

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Maritime Trade Unions

Engineering Professional Institutions

National Maritime Board

NEOU, MEA, AEU, OMNF,

IMarE, IMechE, NECIES, IESS

Engineer Officers Panel (wages & conditions) Shipowners organizations Shipping Federation LSSOA/EAPL

Merchant Navy Training Board

Technical Education Organisations ATI, ATTI SCHEMES FOR MERCHANT MARINE ENGINEER EDUCATION & TRAINING

Engineer Section

Board of Trade/ Ministry of War Transport Mercantile Marine Department Engineer Surveyors/Examiners

Consultation Membership

25

Educational Qualification Bodies Joint Committees, CGLI

Examinations for Engineer Certificates of Competency Regulations

Board/Ministry of Education & Scottish Education Department HMIs for Technical Education Scheme promoters Statutory authority

Fig. 2.1 Bodies involved in formulating merchant marine engineer vocational training policy, in the 1940s (Notes AEU: Amalgamated Engineering Union; ATI: Association of Technical Institutions; ATTI: Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions; CGLI: City & Guilds of London Institute; EAPL: Employers’ Association of the Port of Liverpool; HMI: His Majesty’s Inspector [of schools]; IESS: Institution of Engineers & Shipbuilders in Scotland; IMarE: Institute of Marine Engineers; IMechE: Institution of Mechanical Engineers; NECIES: North East Coast Institution of Engineers & Shipbuilders; LSSOA: Liverpool Steamship Owners Association; MEA: Marine Engineers Union; MMSA: Mercantile Marine Service Association; MNTB: Merchant Navy Training Board; OMNF: Officers’ (Merchant Navy) Federation. Sources A.G. Course, The Merchant Navy: A Social History (passim); Ronald Hope, A New History of British Shipping, (passim); Alston Kennerley, ‘The Seamen’s Union, National Maritime Board & Firemen’)

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selected shipyards or engine works before following the non-exempt parts of the second-class examination, assuming success in the OND course. The importance of the Alternative Entry Scheme was that for the first time the parties involved in merchant seafaring vocational education and training were brought together in a formal structure having the target of producing educated, trained and qualified officers. It was a model which would have a significant impact on the training of deck (navigating) apprentices and cadets. Shipowners could recruit engineer apprentices at 16 or 17 years of age and establish a relationship with future engineers five years earlier than with the traditional system. By the early 1950s, the shortage of sea-going engineers was at least as severe as in the 1930s. Although numbers entering the Alternative Scheme gradually built up from the 258 recruited by June 1952, shortages persisted.17 Annual recruitment to the Alternative Scheme reached 500 in 1960 and peaked at about 1000 in 1975. With compulsory tuition time in technical colleges, engineer cadets and deck cadets resided in the same accommodation and to a limited extent were mixed in classes and for practical training such as boat work.18

Merchant Ship Engine and Boiler Room Manning: Firemen and Trimmers From the very beginning, steam installations needed labouring manpower, principally to handle the coal fuel and tend boiler furnaces.19 In the navy, they were labelled ‘stokers’, a term which was also in use by some of the early steam navigation companies. However, the parallel terms ‘fireman’ and ‘trimmer’, probably adopted from usage in steam plants ashore, were also in use aboard merchant ships very early on. These terms emerged as the standard usage on seafarers’ documentation in merchant steamers. In 1839, the British Queen carried three head (leading) firemen, twelve firemen and 12 coal trimmers (coal passer was used in the United States).20 In this example, the leading firemen were almost certainly experienced steamer hands, but the other firemen could have been drawn from steam plants ashore. Doing basic labouring work, the trimmers could be novices. A century later there was little difference in the work experience of firemen and trimmers in coal-fired steamers. The trimmer’s main job was to deliver a continuous supply of coal from the bunker to boiler room floor, convenient to the fireman feeding his allotted group of furnaces. The progressive consumption meant that

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the coal in the bunkers was increasingly further from the furnaces, making the use of wheelbarrows essential. Late in the nineteenth century, a few ships were fitted with mechanical assistance including mechanical stoking devices, but these seem to have been exceptions. Work in the mostly unlit bunkers was dangerous due to the explosive gasses given off by coal and due to unpredictable falls of coal. Wheeling the barrows in rough weather led to trimmers being thrown from one side to the other in the bunkers with their shoulders becoming permanently bruised. At the end of each watch, trimmers had to help with getting ash and clinker up to the deck for dumping overboard, using large buckets and a mechanical hoist in an engine room ventilator trunking. Trimmers were not always employed. In tramp, ships there were many examples of men being engaged as ‘fireman and trimmer’, with all the firemen in turn acting as trimmers. The work of firemen involved keeping a group of, say, four furnaces, at optimum combustion. Working by the colour of the fire, a sequence was maintained of cleaning a fire dying down to remove clinker and ash, and improved ventilation through the fire, followed by adding a layer of coal spread over the surface. Furnaces could be several feet long and needed a poker (called a slice), of the same length, while there was considerable skill in heaving shovels full of coal to remote parts of the furnace. Lumps of clinker were raked out onto the furnace floor and cooled with buckets of sea water before filling an ash bucket. The furnace fire bar spacing had to be adjusted to suit the quality of the coal in the bunkers. Before opening a furnace door, furnace ventilation had to be blanked off, but firemen still faced the wall of heat from the fire while tending the furnace. They worked stripped to the waist, with their trouser belt buckles done up behind their backs, as those could get burningly hot. Firemen kept a sledgehammer handy to break up very large lumps of coal which could turn up mingled with smaller stuff. The disposal of clinker and ashes was a bone of contention which was never satisfactorily resolved. It could not take place at the end of the watch before the relief fireman had taken over the furnaces, which meant that the firemen and trimmers going off duty had to devote the last half hour of their watch below to the task. In some ships, overtime was paid for it. While trimmers might be classed unskilled, there can be no doubt that firemen were narrowly skilled and their attention to their task demanded some understanding of getting the best out of their boilers.21

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In tramp ships, the number of firemen and trimmers could roughly equal the number of deck hands, about nine in each department, and this number seems to have been about the average across all British shipping. However, faster and larger vessels could carry many more, with the passenger liner Aquitania in 1914 shipping sixteen leading firemen, 168 firemen and 100 trimmers. These fed perhaps a hundred furnaces in 25 boilers, while consuming 1000 tons of coal a day on a trans-Atlantic passage. As a group, most firemen and trimmers were aged between 20 and 39, with the mean for firemen being aged about 33 and that for trimmers about 27. A chief engineer might have his own nominees for employment in his ship, but another source of future firemen was the extensive boiler cleaning industry. Early ‘teenagers’ could get well paid employment owing to their small size, which allowed them to climb into the remotest parts of boilers where grown men could not go; when full grown, they became attractive at sea because of their familiarity with boilers. With long hours of work, noxious fumes and acidic water, their working conditions were appalling and of serious concern to BoT officials in the 1890s.22 There is no doubt that the work of firemen and trimmers was physical and extremely arduous and was made even worse in hot climates by extreme engine room temperatures. At the end of a watch, men could become badly dehydrated and could be found on deck collapsed while they recovered. The injudicious consumption of water could cause painful stomach cramps. As a group, they were the unruliest of ship’s ratings. They were most likely to fail to join a ship after signing on, most likely to appear in ship’s logs for disciplinary incidents, and particularly prone to drunkenness in port. In war time, they were most often arraigned before naval courts. At the end of the nineteenth century, the incidence of suicide or unexplained disappearance among firemen and trimmers became of such concern in the Marine Department of the BoT that they issued a special four-page report form to ship’s masters to complete. For the period 1907/1908 to 1913/1914, analysis of the returns showed that firemen and trimmers were four times as prone to suicide or become missing at sea than other engine room personnel, and three times as prone as all other steamship crew. There was no training provision for engine room hands before the twentieth century. However, in 1880, the British Seamen’s Protection

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Society and the Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union argued for certificates of competency for all ratings. They proposed for those in the engine/boiler room a first-class certificate for men demonstrating a knowledge of boiler feeding, surface blowers, blowing down boilers and cocks connected with bilges. For a second-class certificate, two years of sea service were suggested. The initiative was stillborn but was not forgotten. Manpower shortages in World War I led to firemen’s training schools providing a two-week course. An additional concern was the physical development of trainees. These schools were in various British ports and lasted into the 1960s when they were renamed Engine Room Training Schools. The regulatory changes at the end of the 1970s introduced formal grade titles, the same for both deck and engine ratings: seaman grade I, seaman grade II and seaman grade III linked with tuition and certification, exactly a century after the proposals of 1880.

Conclusion Well into the nineteenth century, there was no alternative for training seagoing engineers for the mercantile marine to the apprenticeship served in a workshop ashore, preferably one concerned with marine engines. Later in the century, larger ships probably had the capacity to handle engineer apprentices, but by then the tradition had become well established. However, in 1839, at least, the possibility of carrying engineer apprentices must certainly have been mentioned. When manning the engine room of the British Queen, Macgregor Laird, managing owner, commented23 : As to apprentices in the Engine Room, you can tell Mr. Johnson [chief engineer] none will be allowed as they are useless to the Ship, and worse than useless in the Engine Room…

However, this is an isolated, passing reference. Marine engineers of calibre were in that period largely self-trained and educated. Indeed, theoretical education in mechanical engineering subjects did not become widely available until the end of the century, and even then, educational improvement was left to individual initiative. Only in the twentieth century did college courses leading to the modern idea of a qualification become available, and it was past mid-century before achieving such

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qualifications became a general aspiration. But from 1862 the BoT engineers’ certificates were the only attestation to a man’s competence as an engineer, afloat or ashore the certificate remained a means of entry to engineering supervisory appointments ashore as well as at sea into the second half of the twentieth century, and was always a factor in wastage from sea employment. By the time serious thought was being given to the Alternative Scheme of entry for marine engineers, there were numerous organisations which had to be consulted, which certainly complicated and restrained the development of proposals. The BoT was undoubtedly in control, but its MMD engineer surveyors were willing to embrace external educational provision despite their insistence on the need for practical training—whether in a workshop ashore or on board. Tying in marine engineer training with the emerging national engineering qualifications became itself a problem, as the regulations drawn up by bodies such as the joint committees for national diplomas became another constraint to optimal sea-related training and education. An important outcome made possible by the Alternative Scheme was the joint vocational training of engineer and navigating apprentices/cadets in regional residential nautical colleges. These were developed in the 1960s and can be considered a significant social experiment in an industry where traditionally ‘oil’ (the engineers) and ‘water’ (the master and navigating officers) did not mix. Ironically, just when the world appeared to be moving towards imposing international standards for training and certification under IMOs STCW regime at the end of the 1970s, the shipping industries of Western nations were ruined by the mass flagging out of their national fleets to flag-of-convenience countries. Large numbers of ill-trained crew members were recruited from Southeast Asian countries supplying labour at all levels—this to the great detriment of the highly trained Western country nationals including many British. Many were forced out of the industry, while those striving to continue in sea employment had to accept offers from manning agencies and from badly manned and maintained vessels. There prospects were uncertain (Table 2.1).

Must inculcate officer-like qualities

Regional selection boards: entry at 16 9 months pre-sea on theory & practical work at same training institutions as navigating cadets 6 months at sea to include engineering training supervised by ship’s engineers, if possible in company training ships carrying instructors 2 years 9 months in approved workshop ashore; one day/week at college leading to OND standard

Sea career from outset

4½ year indentures

Year 1 Theory/practical in colleges ashore

Year 3 at sea

Year 2 at sea

Navigating & Engineer Officers’ Union, ca 1944

Alternative Entry Scheme, 1952

(continued)

After 3rd year training select small Practical training in vacations core of apprentices with OND for extra two years: 6 months sandwich training between workshop and technical college leading to HND award. College to be port located. Selection to be by owners/unions board

Add to rules qualifying workshop 2 years OND Mech. Eng. in service: 3 months welding technical college experience & max 1 year on electrical plant repair/maintenance

New scheme would be an alternative to the standard of four years in engineering works before going to sea Training of marine engineers Entry: age 16 and qualified should continue in workshops and to join OND Mechanical colleges ashore Engineering course Introduce workshop service 4½ year course record

Notes 1944 Education Act provisions for continuing vocational education

Merchant Navy Training Board, Engineer Section, 1945

Key features of marine engineer apprenticeship and vocational training schemes

Shipping Federation 14 March 1939

Table 2.1

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Retain 4 year workshop apprenticeship ashore for late applicants, with proof attendance at college on on day/week, plus OND, then 6 months sea training Route for firemen ratings ability

Year 4 at sea

Introduce engineers’ assistant grade as target for completion of all schemes. Engine room manning grades: ships engineer officers; engineer assistants; senior engine room ratings

Sea training in approved ships

Route for engine room ratings: 4 years sea service; 2 years college; 12 months engineers’ assistant at sea Argues for new engineers’ assistant grade; conditions to be worked out in NMB; MEA and AEU dissent

Promote correspondence courses

Merchant Navy Training Board, Engineer Section, 1945

Exemptions granted from knowledge subjects of second and first class engineer examinations but not from practical subjects

12 months special training in shipyard or marine engine works

18 months sea service as apprentice engineer

Alternative Entry Scheme, 1952

Sources TNA:PRO, MT 9/5878. MNTB Report (MNTB scheme), App.A (SF scheme), App.B (NEOU scheme), App.C (dissent); TNA:PRO, BT 238/160, M117 [Merchant Shipping Notice] Training of Engineer Officers for the Merchant Navy, April, 1952

Finance through levy on companies National board to supervise training Retain traditional mode of entry

Scheme for donkeymen & greasers: year in residential college, then exam; 3 years sea service as engineers’ assistant

Shore training in college workshops

½ Year in college ashore preparing for Class 2 examination

Navigating & Engineer Officers’ Union, ca 1944

(continued)

Shipping Federation 14 March 1939

Table 2.1

32 A. KENNERLEY

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Notes 1. The author’s original research on firemen and trimmers and later on merchant ship engineers was financed by two grants from the Nuffield Foundation, support which is gratefully acknowledged. 2. This overview is informed by the following works: Gardiner, ed., The Shipping Revolution; Gardiner, ed., The Advent of Steam; Gardiner, ed., The Golden Age of Shipping; Allington and Greenhill, The First Atlantic Liners; Griffiths, Steam at Sea. 3. Norris, ‘First Steps Towards MASS’, 6–7. 4. Milburn, ‘The Emergence of theEngineer’. This study shows that early in the steam age there was considerable variation in ships’ engineers job title. 5. Mould, Captain Roberts, 162. 6. McFee, Letters from an Ocean Tramp, 58–9. 7. Kennerley, ‘Engineers in British Merchant Ships’. This study offers a much more detailed examination of engineers’ social backgrounds. 8. Merchant Shipping Acts (Amendment) Act, 25 & 26 Vict., c. 40. 9. Kennerley, ‘British Merchant Marine Engineer Licensing’. The statistical data on licensing are explored more fully in this paper. 10. Mercantile Marine Act, 1850, 13 &14 Vict., c 93. 11. Maritime and Coastguard Agency, Marine Guidance Notice MGM 93 (M), Training and Certification Guidance—Part 3 Certificates of Competency—Engine Department. Southampton: MCA, April 2000, 15 p. 12. Glasgow Herald, 16 December 1864. 13. Thorn & Son, Reed’s Engineer’s Hand Book. Reed was a maritime publisher who added his name to text books he sponsored. 14. Kennerley, Making of the University of Plymouth. 15. Aspects of the interaction of these bodies appear in Course, The Merchant Navy and Hope, A New History of British Shipping ). The Marine Department of the BoT was renamed Mercantile Marine Department in 1922.The Institute of Marine Engineers is now named Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology (IMarEST); the duties of the Mercantile Marine Department are now in the hands of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA). 16. The author served as mate of the Plymouth School of Navigation’s training vessel Tectona in the late 1960s when groups of twelve marine engineer cadets were taken on short training voyages. 17. The [British] National Archive (TNA), ED 46/391. 18. Kennerley, ‘An Exercise in Social Conditioning?’. 19. Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers’. 20. Mould, Captain Roberts of the Sirius, 162. 21. Sothern, How to Keep a Watch, 68–70. This guidance devotes three pages to engineers’ duties on watch and ten line only to aspects of firemen’s work. Most textbooks are silent on firing.

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22. TNA, MT 9/M16440/1894. 23. Mould, Captain Roberts of the Sirius, 161: Laird to Captain Roberts (5 March 1839). Lane, ‘Masters and Chiefs’.

References Allington, Peter and Basil Greenhill, The First Atlantic Liners: Seamanship in the Age of the Paddle Wheel, Sail and Screw (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1997). Course, A. G., The Merchant Navy: A Social History (London: Muller, 1963). Gardiner, Robert, ed., The Shipping Revolution: The Modern Merchant Ship (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1992). Gardiner, Robert, ed., The Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship Before 1900 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1993). Gardiner, Robert, ed., The Golden Age of Shipping: The Classic Merchant Ship, 1900–1960 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1994). Griffiths, Dennis, Steam at Sea: Two Centuries of Steam-Powered Ships (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1997). Hope, Ronald, A New History of British Shipping (London: Murray, 1990). Kennerley, Alston, ‘The Seamen’s Union, the National Maritime Board and Firemen: Labour Management in the British Mercantile Marine’, The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 7 no. 4 (1997), 15–28. Kennerley, Alston, The Making of the University of Plymouth (Plymouth: University of Plymouth, 2000). Kennerley, Alston, ‘Engineers in British Merchant Ships, 1850–1970: Origins and Careers’, Journal of Marine Design and Operations no. B10 (2006), 3–13. Kennerley, Alston, ‘An Exercise in Social Conditioning? The Joint Education and Training of Engineer and Navigator Cadets for Careers as Officers in British Merchant Ships’, The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord 16 no. 4 (2006), 49–67. Kennerley, Alston, ‘British Merchant Marine Engineer Licensing, 1865–1925’, in Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500–2000, ed. by Richard Gorski (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 185– 217. Kennerley, Alston, ‘Stoking the Boilers: Firemen and Trimmers in British Merchant Ships, 1850–1950’, International Journal of Maritime History 20(2008), 191–220. Lane, Tony, ‘Masters and Chiefs: Enabling Globalization, 1975–1995’, in Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500–2000, ed. by Richard Gorski (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 235–59. McFee, William, Letters from an Ocean Tramp (London: Cassell, 1908).

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Milburn, R.G., ‘The Emergence of the Engineer in the British Merchant Shipping Industry, 1812–1863’, International Journal of Maritime History 28(2016), 559–75. Mould, Daphne D. C. Pochin, Captain Roberts of the Sirius (Cork, Ireland: Sirius Commemoration Committee, 1988). Norris, A., ‘First Steps Towards MASS’, Seaways: International Journal of the Nautical Institute (August 2021), 6–7. Sothern, J. W. M., How to Keep a Watch. Verbal Notes and Sketches for Marine Engineers; A Manual of Marine Engineering Practice (Glasgow: Munro, 1916). Thorn, W. H. & Son, Reed’s Engineer’s Hand Book to the Board of Trade Examinations (Sunderland: Thomas Reed, 20th Edition, ca 1900).

CHAPTER 3

Technological Change, Institutions and Maritime Labour: International Reforms and Their Reception in Sweden and Finland, c.1850–1939 Jari Ojala

Introduction The transition from sail to steam in the shipping industry is a well-known and widely researched topic.1 The focus in research has traditionally been on the productivity gains leading to an increase in international trade and, thus, to economic growth.2 Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson noted that the ‘transport revolution that took place across the nineteenth century … generated equally spectacular convergence in commodity prices’.3 These revolutions included both maritime and overland transports enhanced by the usage of steam power. Economic historians such as Douglass C. North, Charles K. Harley, Lewis R. Fischer and Jan Lucassen

J. Ojala (B) University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_3

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and Richard W. Unger4 have all stressed the productivity growth in international shipping caused by this technological change from sail to steam. Harley and North emphasise the technological change from sail to steam and from wood to iron and steel as the major source of the growth in productivity from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and, thus, of the declining freight rates and, consequently, the increase in international trade.5 Incremental technological changes were discernible, however, even before the transition from sail to steam and from wood to iron.6 As Joel Mokyr has stated,7 sailing vessels were completely redesigned between 1820 and 1860—and as Harley,8 among others, has noted, sailing ships were still developed during the late nineteenth century, even though steam had already gained a firm foothold in shipping. Thus, even in the major seafaring countries, the change from sail to steam took decades—or almost one hundred years.9 In the Scandinavian context, the topic of shift from sail to steam is well known as well, showing that the change from sail to steam occurred relatively late in these countries.10 The technological change from sail to steam also had a profound effect on maritime labour.11 Primarily, the number of men per ton declined, and this was the major cause for the growth in productivity. There were also changes in the composition of the crews. On the one hand, more highly skilled and educated men were needed as officers and engineers on board steamships, but on the other, there was also an increase in the demand for unskilled stokers (also called ‘firemen’ and ‘trimmers’).12 Other new occupations also emerged, especially on board passenger vessels offering more occupations for women.13 Yet women were still rarely found on board Swedish ships at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries: according to an inquiry made in 1911, less than 10% of the crew members were women, all of them serving on board steamers.14 There were, however, several old maritime jobs that vanished due to the introduction of steam, many of them related to tasks of medium-skilled, experienced deck hands on board sailing vessels.15 The earlier research on maritime labour during the era of transition from sail to steam mainly concentrated on the practical outcomes of technological changes, such as growth in productivity, the emergence of new occupations, changes in the skills required, wage premiums on board early steamers and the changing age structure of crews.16 In this article, I will first review these changes in the case of Swedish and Finnish merchant marines, roughly during the period from the mid-nineteenth

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to the mid-twentieth centuries. Thereafter, the article attempts to analyse the institutional responses to the transition from sail to steam in shipping. These changes were, by and large, related to ongoing overall improvements in working conditions in industrialising societies. These were also at the very heart of the political debates at the time, as the emerging labour movements played a more decisive role in rules and regulations regarding the working and living conditions of seafarers.17 I argue that the maritime labour legislation lagged behind of the technological developments for two overlapping reasons: first, the international nature of the industry required international collaboration on regulation. Second, this regulation was to a certain extent only a reaction to changes that had already occurred in the industry—in some cases decades before the legislation came into force. First, as the shipping industry is per se international, the regulation necessitated international collaboration, which was no easy task in an era of conflicting requirements. A series of attempts at international harmonisation of maritime labour legislation throughout the 1920s and 1930s did not fully succeed. However, the Nordic countries did indeed succeed in harmonising various aspects of their maritime labour legislation, as I attempt to show in this essay. Second, I argue that institutional regulation followed relatively late, reflecting the changes that had already occurred in the shipping industry. An example of reactive institutional regulation used in this article is the question of child labour. Following Carolyn Moehling’s arguments about the regulation of child labour in American manufacturing,18 I will show that child labour in the shipping industry was only prohibited when it was no longer widely used. But there were other notable regulations in the maritime industries, too. Changes in early twentieth-century labour legislation had a marked effect: for example, on age structure, education and manning practices in Sweden and in Finland, as well as on unemployment insurance, protection of seamen in foreign harbours, holiday legislation and the medical examination of seamen. Primary sources for this article are the reports of the Swedish social administration; for these reports, information from around the world on maritime and more general labour legislation was gathered. The data, with statistical overviews, were published monthly from 1913 on in the journal of the Swedish social administration, entitled Sociala Meddelanden. The reports included analyses of the situation of maritime labour in Sweden and abroad. Moreover, the changes in the legislation at home and abroad

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were reported in great detail. Among the items covered in these reports were descriptions of International Labour Organization Conference’s meetings and resolutions.19 Another important source is the extensive Swedish Seamen’s House database on seamen enrolments that show the changes in the composition of Swedish crews. This database relates to the period from 1752 to 1950.20 In the following, I first describe the transition from sail to steam in the Nordic shipping industries and how it affected certain aspects of maritime labour.21 After this overview, I discuss institutional changes, concentrating in particular on maritime labour legislation in Sweden and the effect of international regulation on maritime labour in the Interwar Era. In the discussion and conclusion, I attempt to tie the empirical evidence to the previous literature discussed above.

Transition from Sail to Steam and Its Effects on Maritime Labour Steam technology was first introduced in shipping in the early years of the nineteenth century, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that the technology became efficient enough for long-distance trades to relinquish the use of sail.22 The transition from sail to steam also occurred relatively late in all the Nordic countries and in Finland in particular. It was not until the 1920s that steam tonnage first exceeded sailing tonnage in Finland, even though the first steam vessel in Finland was built and launched as early as 1833.23 At the beginning of the 1920s, steamers still made up roughly one-third of Finnish tonnage, whereas by 1939 this share had risen to 91%.24 In Sweden, in turn, the first trial of a steampowered vessel at sea was conducted in 1816, but it was not until 1899 that steam exceeded sail in merchant tonnage. By 1907, steam tonnage was already double to sailing tonnage in the Swedish merchant fleet.25 The same was true for Denmark and Norway, which experienced the transition from sail to steam around the mid-1890s.26 The relatively late transition from sail to steam in the Nordic countries in general, and in Finland in particular, is a typical outcome of the so-called sailing ship effect; that is, outdated technology is still used and even developed, even though new, superior technology is available.27 In the Åland Islands, an autonomous part of Finland with a long maritime heritage, the use of sailing ships continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s.28

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Table 3.1 shows the evolution of the transition from sail to steam in Swedish towns included in the Seamen’s House database. According to these data, the transition did not gather speed until the first decade of the twentieth century; this is because the towns in this dataset were relatively small and continued with sailing ships longer than did the major shipping towns of Stockholm and Gothenburg, which, unfortunately, are not included in the database.29 During the first decades of the twentieth century, diesel-powered merchant ships also consolidated their position; in Sweden, even electric propulsion was used on a vessel mentioned in the Stockholm shipping statistics in 1903.30 The transition from sail to steam obviously had a tremendous effect on the demand for seamen on board these vessels. This change in demand was not only technology dependent; new types of ships also emerged, most importantly passenger liners with several new types of job opportunities.31 Graph 3.1 shows the increase in new occupations for selected Swedish maritime towns. Even though these towns did not particularly specialise in steam shipping, by the turn of the 1930s roughly one-third of the men were hired for steamship occupations. Just before World War II, this share rose to 40%. There was a particular need for stokers (firemen and trimmers), but there were also more opportunities for engineers. In these particular towns, passenger ships were not a typical phenomenon; thus, the share of catering workers remained relatively low. A survey Table 3.1 Number and share (%) of men hired for steam ships and sailing vessels in Sweden and Finland (selected towns), 1850–1939 (N = 434,741 enrolments)

1850–1859 1860–1869 1870–1879 1880–1889 1890–1899 1900–1909 1910–1919 1920–1929 1930–1939 1850–1939

Steam ( N)

Steam (%)

Sail ( N)

Sail (%)

Together ( N)

111 299 3,930 7,660 8,824 23,906 49,400 60,553 50,166 204,849

0.5 1.2 7.4 13.2 22.0 49.5 74.3 87.3 95.8 47.1

20,991 25,660 48,889 50,538 31,296 24,387 17,063 8,847 2,221 229,892

99.5 98.8 92.6 86.8 78.0 50.5 25.7 12.7 4.2 52.9

21,102 25,959 52,819 58,198 40,120 48,293 66,463 69,400 52,387 434,741

Source Seamen’s House database on selected Swedish and Finnish towns

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conducted in Sweden in 1911 showed that at the time roughly half of the men on steamships were deck personnel (i.e., traditional seamen), one-third engine room crew and one-sixth catering personnel.32 The demand for new professionals signified a dramatic decline in the old maritime professions, especially experienced deckhands (boatswains, carpenters and able-bodied seamen). Thus, the skills required changed. This changing need was also noted by contemporaries: the British Minister of Labour, George Barnes, noted in the 1910s that the ‘skilled worker feared the unskilled and both were antagonistic to the employer’.33 Barnes included all industries in his comments, although the question of different skills needed was at the time topical in the shipping industry due to the ongoing change from sail to steam. Earlier research has shown that the advent of steam had a deskilling effect on board both sail and steam vessels. In the case of sailing vessels, larger ships were used in international trades to compete with steamers. These larger sailing vessels, in turn, required proportionately more low-skilled men.34 This deskilling was also noted by contemporaries in Sweden. Both officers and crew called for clearer skill requirements on board ships in different size classes and with different means of propulsion 45 % 40 % 35 % 30 % 25 % 20 % 15 % 10 % 5%

1850 1853 1856 1859 1862 1865 1868 1871 1874 1877 1880 1883 1886 1889 1892 1895 1898 1901 1904 1907 1910 1913 1916 1919 1922 1925 1928 1931 1934 1937

0%

New occupations in total

Stokers (firemen and trimmers)

Catering personnel

Steam engineers

Graph 3.1 Share (%) of men hired for new steam-era occupations in selected Swedish and Finnish towns, 1850–1939 (N = 508,190 enrolments) (Source Seamen’s House database on selected Swedish and Finnish towns)

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(sail or steam).35 The authorities were concerned about the lack of skilled labour on board Swedish ships, as shown, for example, in a report written in 1916 by the head of occupational health and security in the Swedish Social Administration, Thorvald Fürst. The preponderance of unskilled labour was seen as a safety risk. The report notes challenges in recruiting skilled labour, especially for small steam vessels on the one hand and for large sailing vessels on the other. According to the report, less than a third of those working on board Swedish ships were fully skilled; the share of skilled men was 34% on board steamers and 22% on board sailing ships. Fürst acknowledged that the situation was far better in the UK, where less than 10% of such men were unskilled.36 As a reason for this low skill prominence preference in Sweden (and other Nordic countries), the report named reluctance among shipowners to hire skilled men, which might, in turn, lead to a situation where the skilled men would sign on with foreign ships or seek work on shore. Therefore, Fürst recommended raising the skill requirements for crew, preferably with Nordic cooperation due to the common job markets for sailors. Formal education, in turn, should be provided by the state by using, for example, school ships.37 The ILO maritime labour conference in 1929, in turn, also discussed skill requirements, especially for those responsible for the watch.38 Table 3.2 illustrates this change in skill. In this analysis, the new occupations such as catering positions on board passenger ships are not included; thus, the focus is on the professions required in handling the vessels as such. The division into skill categories follows roughly the contemporary view of skill levels. The reports of Swedish Social Administration usually referred to two skill levels, as officers were not included in the analyses. In their report of 1916, skilled seamen were taken to include boatswains, carpenters and able-bodied (matros ) seamen, whereas unskilled workers included ordinary sailors (lättmatros and jungman), deckhands and stokers. Here, however, I apply a three-level categorisation (high-, medium- and low-skilled). Thus, in my analysis, the contemporary ‘skilled’ sailors are defined as medium-skilled and ‘unskilled’ as low-skilled men.39 The high-skill group in Table 3.2 consisted of trained and educated men performing non-manual tasks on board. Officers—ships’ captains, mates and ship’s engineers—are included in this group. The mediumskilled group, in turn, consisted of men performing manual tasks, requiring intermediate skills acquired through long work experience. This second group included boatswains, carpenters and able-bodied seamen

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Table 3.2 Share of seamen hired in different skills categories 1850–1939 in selected Swedish and Finnish towns

1850–1859 1860–1869 1870–1879 1880–1889 1890–1899 1900–1909 1910–1919 1920–1929 1930–1939 1850–1939

Sail high (%)

Steam high (%)

Sail low (%)

Steam low (%)

Sail med (%)

Steam med (%)

Total (N)

15.7 18.2 18.2 19.0 17.8 12.4 7.2 2.3 1.0 11.5

0.1 0.3 2.1 2.5 4.8 10.8 15.2 18.7 23.5 10.2

52.8 51.6 49.2 48.8 44.3 32.8 18.4 7.5 1.8 30.7

0.2 0.4 4.3 5.9 12.2 25.2 41.6 61.2 64.4 28.5

31.0 28.9 24.2 21.3 17.3 11.7 7.6 2.4 0.5 13.7

0.1 0.7 2.0 2.4 3.6 7.1 9.9 7.9 8.9 5.4

16,027 12,643 38,399 49,623 37,085 34,946 38,226 48,406 41,648 317,003

Note Only cases in which the skill level and salary (in Swedish kronas) are known are included in the calculations. Obvious outliers are omitted (salaries over 1000 krona or less than 1 krona per month) Source Seamen’s House database from selected Swedish and Finnish towns

(matros ). The low-skilled group consisted of ordinary sailors (lättmatros, jungman), deck/cabin boys, ship’s cooks and engine room operators (firemen and trimmers) on board steamships. Ordinary sailors were a combination of young and inexperienced men performing manual tasks requiring little skill. Hynninen et al. show that the introduction of steam technology had new skill-demanding as well as skill-replacing aspects. The former manifested itself as an increase in the demand for skilled engineers and the latter in a decline in the demand for moderately skilled able-bodied seamen and an increase in the demand for unskilled stokers (firemen and trimmers). This change is conceptualised as a technology-based polarisation in which there was a shift in employment towards both the highest-skilled and lowest-skilled occupations with declining employment in medium-skilled occupations.40 This transformation is also shown in Table 3.2. The share of men in all skills categories serving on board sailing vessels started to decline from the 1890s onwards. However, this decline was especially dramatic and early among the medium-skilled men on board sailing vessels, thus showing a deskilling already emerging in the mid-nineteenth century—or

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in fact, even earlier, as shown in Ojala et al. This is confirmed by the fact that the share of low-skilled men was clearly higher on board steamers in the 1920s and 1930s than it was on board the sailing ships during the mid-nineteenth century. These medium-skilled men, typically having long experience but relatively little formal education, almost vanished when steam replaced sail: their share was still roughly one-third of the men serving on board sailing vessels during the 1850s, but their share on board early twentieth-century steamers was one-tenth at most. Their share declined even on board sailing ships, thus showing the deskilling of the crews of sailing vessels, presumably as a reaction to the competition from steamers.41 In the early twentieth century, all the Nordic countries still enjoyed cheap labour; Swedish seamen’s wages were roughly 60% of those paid in the UK, and in Finland, wages were considerably lower.42 The Swedish and other Scandinavian wage levels, however, caught up with those of many other countries during the first decades of the twentieth century, but Finland remained behind. The seamen’s wages in the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) were roughly at the same level during the 1920s with those offered in The Netherlands and in the UK— but lower than US wages and higher than those paid in Germany, France or Italy. Finland was an exception from the other Nordic countries: the seamen’s wages in Finland were roughly half of those paid in Sweden.43 According to the Swedish Social Administration, the wages of catering personnel in particular had increased from the late nineteenth century up to the mid-1920s, which was assumed to be associated with increased use of males instead of females in catering—this, however, was not analysed in detail in the reports.

Institutional Response to Technological Change Socio-economic changes after World War I had profoundly changed societies, with a new awareness of labour issues—and even possibilities for negotiations between employers and employees. Therefore, during the turbulent years after World War I, several attempts were made in various countries to develop labour legislation. It was also obvious that international harmonisation was needed. Not only technological change from sail to steam, but also that from wood to iron had changed the ships and created a need for a new kind of labour force, as noted above. Furthermore, the growth of global trade and transport increased the maritime

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labour force, and the shipping industry was seen as the key industry in the international economy. Thus, it was of the utmost importance for the economy (and the shipowners) to avoid labour disputes. Trade unions, in turn, seized the opportunity to show their power—also towards governments which, in turn, were afraid of the rise of communism and a recurrence of the revolution that had already happened in Soviet Russia. The International Labour Organization (ILO) was founded in 1919 as a part of the Versailles Peace Treaty as an autonomous part of the League of Nations.44 In accordance with the tripartite structure of representation, government, employees and employers were all represented at the meetings of the ILO.45 According to Leon Fink, this ‘tripartism’ was adopted from the British War Cabinet’s formula.46 According to Pauli Kettunen, the ILO came to reflect a notion of a ‘modern society in which organised capital and organised labour together with the government generate social regulations, settling the tensions between international economy and national society. ILO soon emerged as the central international information channel on work, labour relations and employees, and attempted to harmonize labour legislation in member countries’.47 This harmonisation of labour legislation was especially evident in the shipping industries, where the competition was international, and which had been profoundly affected by the technological, societal and economic changes during the previous 50 years. Therefore, right from the outset, maritime working conditions gained a particular weight in ILO negotiations with special maritime labour conferences establishing conventions on seafarers’ conditions.48 Indeed, the ILO’s first maritime labour conference was organised in 1920 in Genoa, one year after the first ILO general conference in Washington: maritime labour was seen as ‘an exception’ and, thus, maritime labour issues were considered the first issue for the ILO office to tackle.49 Besides being international, maritime labour also had another characteristic: seamen were also bound to the ship on which they served in terms of food and lodging, without the freedom enjoyed by their counterparts on shore. Thus, even before World War I, attempts were made to establish international recommendations regarding sailors’ accommodation and diet. This predates the founding of the ILO.50 Right from its founding, the ILO was also a forum for developing Nordic cooperation, although the Nordic countries had existing cooperation on social and labour issues even before the founding of the ILO, for example, in stipulating common skill requirements for maritime labour.51 Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden were all officially represented by

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their governments at the first conference of the ILO in Washington in 1919 and at the maritime conference in Genoa in 1920.52 The Nordic countries were also keen to implement ILO recommendations in their national legislation, although some Nordic contemporaries complained that as long as the major seafaring countries did not enforce recommendations in their legislation, the small countries really had little room to manoeuvre.53 Besides the ILO, other international organisations were established to discuss the topics related to seafaring that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a consequence of societal, economic and technological changes. The most important one was the Comité Maritime International (CMI). CMI was a more general committee tasked with contributing to the harmonisation of various issues in international commercial and maritime law, maritime customs, usages and practices,54 whereas the ILO was—as its name suggests—focused on labour issues. The CMI was established in 1896 and gained more importance during the first decades of the twentieth century. It was based on a society first established in Belgium.55 Labour issues, however, were merely discussed within the CMI during the 1920s and 1930s alongside other issues, for example, crew costs as a part of the costs of damage and collisions.56 The technological change from sail to steam as such was not discussed in the conferences organised by the ILO or the CMI. The technological change was, however, an underlying background variable and initiator of structural change in the maritime sector and had a profound effect on labour relations. The emerging labour unions were represented at ILO meetings. These maritime labour unions included also new occupational groups. In Sweden, there were, for example, separate labour unions for steam engineers, radio telegraphers, stewards and stokers—besides the more general seamen’s union.57 The Nordic countries were active in international discussions on maritime labour and within a specific Nordic committee established to discuss the harmonisation of legislation on seamen. Reformers were especially interested in health and safety at work, the labour unions were interested in wages, while shipowners were interested in the competitiveness of the industry. Governments, in turn, saw shipping industries as a strategically important line of business in foreign trade. According to Kettunen, governments deemed social and political reforms necessary to diminish threats to society—that is, labour disputes or even revolutionary movements. Moreover, in the internationalising

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economy, it was considered necessary at least to try to harmonise social policies to ensure the nations’ competitiveness. Henceforth, international economic competition was seen as the point of departure for international social norms. All in all, Kettunen argues that a national social policy was seen as vital to support the national economy by improving the quality of labour and productivity, and ultimately, in the end, by promoting economic growth. International competitiveness was the key point of departure for social legislation—and it was in the interests of all nations to harmonise this legislation both at a general level and especially in such strategic fields in the international economy as shipping.58 Therefore, it is no wonder that the maritime labour question was indeed topical in ILO negotiations throughout the interwar period.

The Question of Child Labour The abolition of child labour was among the nine principles regarding labour issues in the Peace Treaty of Versailles after the World War I and was also among the issues noted in the ILO Constitution.59 Thus, the question of child labour was also among the most debated issues at the first ILO maritime labour conferences, including the first special conference on maritime labour in Genoa in 1920.60 The other topics discussed at this conference included working hours at sea, employment services, unemployment and the prospects for international legislation on maritime labour. The question of the minimum age of stokers (firemen and trimmers) was discussed separately at the following ILO seamen’s conference in 1921. The legislation prohibiting child labour at sea followed the technological change that already had diminished the need for children and young people on board ships. During the sailing era, cheap and agile young boys were preferred. In the last days of sail, the average age of men on board Swedish and Finnish ships went down: more young, unskilled boys were hired for these vessels during the latter part of the nineteenth century.61 During the steam era, in turn, there was no need to employ children. On the contrary, the low-skilled work aboard steamers required more physical strength to shovel coal into bunkers than agility to climb masts. This made youngsters less than ideal for such work, though there might have been rising possibilities for children among emerging catering personnel.62 Table 3.3 shows that within the youngest age category (low-skilled men) those serving on board steamers were on average four years older

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than those working on sailing vessels. The big age difference in the 1860s, however, is more attributable to the small number of cases than to actual reality. Nevertheless, in both cases, the average age of low-skilled men was between 20 and 30 years. On average, then, child labour was not such an issue even during the age of sail. Moreover, Table 3.3 also shows that the average age of all men was rising during the first decades of the twentieth century. In fact, Ojala et al. show that in the Swedish merchant fleet the share of those aged from 11 to 15 years was only about 4% of lowskilled recruits in the late nineteenth century. This number diminished to below 2% in the early twentieth century because of the technological change from sail to steam and of the prohibition of child labour at sea. However, the age category from 16 to 20 was remarkably larger: over 50% of recruits to the low-skilled category in the late nineteenth and almost 40% in the early twentieth century were in this age cohort. Thus, seafaring was arguably a young man’s profession in which, however, youth labour was more typical than child labour.63 The child labour question was also related to the introduction of compulsory primary education and military service, alongside a more general change in opinion on the prohibition of child labour. Ojala et al. claim that compulsory education did not have a major role in increasing the average age of sailors as most of the low-skilled recruits to the Table 3.3 Average age of men hired to serve aboard vessels in selected Swedish and Finnish towns 1850–1939

1850–1859 1860–1869 1870–1879 1880–1889 1890–1899 1900–1909 1910–1919 1920–1929 1930–1939 1850–1939

Average age, all men

Average age, low-skilled sail

Average age, low-skilled steam

Difference in average age (steam − sail)

N

27 27 26 27 27 27 28 29 33 28

21 22 21 21 20 20 20 21 24 21

24 29 24 24 23 22 23 25 29 25

3 7 3 3 3 2 3 4 5 4

21,222 26,404 53,546 58,695 40,544 48,750 68,035 78,015 63,965 459,176

Source Seamen’s House database. The table includes only cases where the age is known. See also Ojala et al., ‘Young Lads’

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merchant marine came from the lower social classes that usually did not continue their education for more than a couple of years. Conscription, in turn, may have influenced cohorts of men of a certain age, around their twenties, in countries in which it was introduced—as in Sweden from 1901 onwards.64 By 1927, already 18 out of 36 ILO member countries had ratified the prohibition of child labour, thus making this recommendation the ILO’s most successful recommendation as regards maritime labour, and among the most successful of all recommendations made by the ILO in the 1920s.65 Why, then, was this particular recommendation so successful? The most obvious explanation is the fact that due to the technological change the use of child labour had already diminished on ships—as seen above. Moreover, in many countries, the use of child labour at sea was already prohibited. For Sweden, for example, it was easy to ratify the ILO recommendation of a minimum age of 14 years as early as 1921 since the Swedish Maritime Act of 1914 had already imposed this as the minimum age for seamen.66 The Finnish legislation also followed the suggestions of the ILO maritime labour conference, and the national legislation was harmonised accordingly. In Finland, it was also suggested that the minimum age for employing women on board vessels should be 18 years—and, as discussed in the ILO, men under 18 years should undergo a special medical examination.67 In 1938, the minimum age in Sweden aboard all vessels was set at 15 years; this, again, followed the recommendations of the ILO maritime labour conference of 1937.68 This decline is in line with the overall decline of child labour during industrialisation, especially noteworthy in the case of the UK from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.69 The minimum age of 14 years was not deemed acceptable for stokers (firemen and trimmers). Thus, in 1921, the ILO maritime labour conference suggested 18 years as the minimum age for these jobs.70 In Sweden, the minimum age for men working on board steamers in these physically demanding tasks was set at 16 years in 1922 and at 18 in 1925.71 In Finland, the minimum age for stokers was set at 18 years in accordance with the ILO recommendations of 1924.72 How successful was the international collaboration on harmonising maritime labour law? Kettunen argues that the early track record of the ILO was not exactly marked by success. According to him, the role of this international body was to exert influence on national legislation and social

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policy, and especially to disseminate information across the nations. The same can also be said of the CMI and its activities within a broad range of issues concerning international commercial and maritime law. The rules, for example, on salvage and rendering assistance were harmonised in accordance with CMI guidance early on in several countries.73 Although the Nordic contemporary commentators were especially critical of the slow pace of the ratification of ILO recommendations in general and those considering maritime labour in particular, some successes were also achieved. In the ILO conferences, there was a lot of disagreement on how much harmonisation was needed, and whether harmonisation should be sought on all issues or only on some selected topics.74 By the end of the 1920s, it had become evident that only a handful of countries—notably the Nordic ones—had implemented the ILO labour regulations on seamen in their legislation; several countries had not even started the work.75 By 1927, the recommendation for a minimum age (14 years) had been ratified by 18 out of 37 ILO member countries—the suggestion for employment services by 13, the minimum age for stokers (16 years) by 16 and for medical examinations for men under 18 years by 16. Thus, all these most successful recommendations were related to age structure and therefore emanated from technological change. However, by 1927, the suggestions for the harmonisation of seamen’s employment contracts and repatriation of sailors to their homeland had only been ratified by one member country (Belgium)—although both elements were being discussed in five other countries.76 Several of the reforms discussed in these conferences during the 1920s became law in various seafaring countries only after World War II. Perhaps the most debated issue was the question of an eight-hour working day (three-watch system) and 48-hour working week which had been on the agenda from the very first ILO maritime labour conference in 1920.77 The issue was still discussed at the 1936 and 1937 conferences, together with the harmonisation of annual holidays for seamen. Even though the discussions were positive and a number of countries voted for the reforms, it did not necessarily mean that the recommendations were ratified in respective domestic legislation.78 It took almost twenty years to reach consensus over the eight-hour working day: the main seafaring countries opposed the proposal.79 Sweden, however, already implemented the recommendation for an eight-hour working day in the new Working Hours Act before World War II, together with the legislation on annual

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holidays. The latter was also ratified in Finland, although the three-watch system remained unratified in Finland during the war years.80 Cracks in international collaboration were already apparent in the ILO maritime labour conferences from the mid-1920s onwards. In the Geneva Conference in 1926, for example, enforcing the recommendations of the 1920 Genoa Conference caused disagreement in various countries. The key issue was essentially how much harmonisation was really needed. There were even attempts to apply rules and regulations from the manufacturing industry to the maritime sector, which was, at least according to the Swedish officials, a mission impossible. The Swedes—and other Nordics—were also frustrated that certain other countries were less inclined to implement the ILO seamen regulations.81 The Great Depression further delayed the implementation of the ILO recommendations. The Swedish authorities reported from the maritime labour conference in 1935 that due to the Depression, countries rather tended to reduce the sizes of ship’s crews both quantitatively and qualitatively, even though one of the most important features of the legislation was to prohibit the under-manning of ships.82 The conference was seen as merely preparatory and technical in nature by the Swedish officials. There was also a rising conflict in tripartite discussions: employees perceived under-manning as a serious threat to safety at work, whereas shipowners claimed that the seamen’s demands would be detrimental to the competitiveness of the industry. Particularly, the British delegates were critical of developing new regulations for seafarers.83 However, the conference in 1936 was a successful one according to the Swedish participants: ‘for the first time the maritime conference came to positive results’, it was reported in Sweden. The number of participating countries was higher than ever, and two large countries, the Soviet Union and the USA, were represented at the conference—for the first time.84 Even though the processes were slow in these conferences, much progress was achieved, especially in the Nordic countries, in accordance with the ILO recommendations.85 According to Lagergren, the ILO recommendations did indeed have an important impact on the Swedish legislation on maritime labour during the interwar period, especially on the Seamen’s Act of 1922 and the decree of 1934. Moreover, after World War II, the new Seamen’s Act of 1952 and the third Seamen’s Act of 1973 followed the recommendations of the ILO.86 In Finland, the ILO recommendations were duly noted in the new Maritime Act of 1924 that

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replaced the old Act of 1873. Thus, the new law recognised the fundamental changes that had occurred in the industry and in the operating environment during the previous 50 years.87 Table 3.4 lists the reforms made in Sweden. As can be noted, however, some of the legislation suggested by the ILO and its conferences had in fact already been implemented in Sweden and in other Nordic countries. Most importantly, the new Swedish Seamen’s Act of 1922 integrated the ILO recommendations and harmonised the legislation with those of the other Nordic countries.88 Steam and sail technologies were mentioned in the law: although there were several overall improvements in the working conditions of seamen, there were still some minor, but nevertheless remarkable, differences for those working on steamers or under sail. For example, the men hired to work on sailing vessels had to remain on board for a maximum of four days after their contracts had expired and the ship had arrived in port, whereas with steamships this was only two days at most.89 However, centuries-old practices of hiring men from home port to home port were finally abandoned; this practice had led to situations in which men might have been bound even for years to their ship. The legislation on seamen in all four Nordic countries was created in close collaboration. This collaboration was deemed vital as in the 1920s the markets for seafarers were already seen as united in the Nordic countries. Even though most of the men hired to serve aboard Swedish vessels, for example, were Swedes, the second most important nationalities with relatively high shares were Finns and Danes.90 Therefore, the Swedish authorities closely monitored the legislative processes in other Nordic countries which, in turn, all adhered to the ILO principles laid down at the ILO maritime conferences from 1920 on. Moreover, the Nordic countries had a joint sea law committee to discuss harmonising the legislation.91

Conclusions The world of maritime labour changed profoundly around the turn of the twentieth century. The technological change from sail to steam and from wood to iron had a spectacular impact on the demand for seamen. This change also introduced a number of new occupations. Maritime labour was also affected by the overall societal and economic changes which were revolutionary. The technological, societal and economic changes also

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Table 3.4 ILO Maritime Labour Conference recommendations ratified by Sweden during the interwar era Recommendation

Year

Year of ratification in Sweden

Minimum age 14 years

1920

Wage for max 2 months for men unemployed due to shipwreck Employment service for seamen

1920

1914 and 1921 (already in Swedish Maritime law of 1914) 1934

Minimum age for firemen and trimmers, 18 years

1921

Compulsory medical examination for men under 18 years old

1921

Simplification of inspection of emigrants on board ships Note of weight to items under one ton (to help loading and unloading) Protection for accidents at work loading and unloading cargoes Annual holiday for seamen Working hours (three-watch system/8-hour working day)

1926

Already implemented as a part of employment services and other organisations 1925 (before minimum age for firemen 16 years and for trimmers same as for seamen 14 years) Already implemented under existing legislation, thus, no specific changes 1929 (initially rejected in 1927)

1929

1932

1929, 1932

1937

1936 1936

1939 (also in Finland) 1939

1920

Sources Molin, ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen’; Helomaa, ‘Lagen om sjömans semester’; Böös, Sjöarbetstidslagen; Kaukiainen, Ulos, 400–1

led to institutional changes, namely new rules and regulations for the maritime labour force. As the shipping industry was international, regulatory bodies needed, at least to a certain degree, to be international, too. These bodies were created at the turn of the century (CMI) and immediately after World War I (ILO). As was shown in this essay, the implementation of new institutional regulations was a slow and demanding process, as national governments were rather reluctant to implement the recommendations of the ILO. Moreover, some changes recommended by the ILO had in fact already occurred due to the advance of technology-related changes that had occurred prior to the recommendations, for instance in the case of child labour on board ship: the use of child labour was already diminishing as steamers did not have positions for very young boys.

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Most of the recommendations were more indirectly related to technological changes. One of the most arduous debates throughout the 1920s and 1930s was the question of the eight-hour working day and the 48-hour working week, that is, the so-called three-watch system. Several countries opposed this reform as it would increase labour costs by one-third—at least in theory. Even the change from the two to the three-watch system further accelerated the technological change towards larger and more efficient vessels, as the man-tonnage ratios were lower in larger ships. All in all, the technological change from sail to steam was a slow process that took more than one hundred years to be fully accomplished in merchant shipping. The institutional changes were equally slow.

Notes 1. See especially Graham, ‘Ascendancy’; Harley, ‘Shift’; Loockx, From Sail to Steam. See a review of previous literature especially in Williams and Armstrong, ‘Appraisal’. 2. Most recently, e.g., by Van Lottum and Van Zanden, ‘Labour Productivity’; Lucassen and Unger, ‘Shipping’; Van Zanden and Van Tielhof, ‘Roots of Growth’. 3. O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization and History. 4. North, ‘Ocean Freight Rates’; North, ‘Sources’; Harley, ‘Shift’; Harley, ‘Ocean Freight Rates’; Fischer, ‘The Great Mudhole Fleet’; Lucassen and Unger, ‘Shipping’. 5. Harley, ‘Ocean Freight Rates’; North, ‘Sources’. 6. North, ‘Ocean Freight Rates’; North, ‘Sources’; Ojala, ‘Productivity’. 7. Mokyr, Lever of Riches. 8. Harley, ‘Shift’; Harley, ‘Persistence’. 9. Williams and Armstrong, ‘Appraisal’, 48–9. 10. See special issue: ‘The Transition from Sail to Steam in Scandinavia’, in The Scandinavian Economic History Review 28 no. 2 (1980) and Kaukiainen, Sailing into Twilight. 11. For example: Thompson, ‘Technological Change’; Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers’; Hynninen et al., ‘Technological Change’; Loockx, From Sail to Steam. 12. Chin et al., ‘’Technical Change’; Hynninen et al., ‘Technological Change’; Armstrong, ‘Crewing’; Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers’, 191–200. 13. Mäenpää, ‘Galley News’; Mäenpää, ‘Women Below Deck’. 14. ‘Sjömansyrket i Sverige’. 15. Hynninen et al., ‘Technological Change’, 1–11.

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16. Loockx, From Sail to Steam; Chin et al., ‘Technical Change’; Thompson, ‘Technological Change’; Gorski, ed., Maritime Labour; Van Royen et al., eds., “Those Emblems of Hell”?; Ojala et al., ‘Deskilling’; Ojala et al., ‘Young Lads’. 17. For an analysis for contemporary maritime labour discussions, see especially Lillie, Global Union; Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, 145–70. 18. Moehling, ‘State Child Labor Laws’. 19. The original ILO documents (resolutions, records of proceedings, reports of the Director General) are available at ILO online archives (https:// www.ilo.org/); these have been consulted in this article, though they are not the primary source material for this specific article. 20. These data are explained in more detail in Ojala et al., ‘Deskilling’ and ‘Young Lads’. The Seamen’s House database covers the period from 1752 to 1950 with over 600,000 individual hiring cases from Sweden and Finland. The database was originally compiled by the Swedish National Archives project that combined data from Seamen’s Houses, nine Swedish and one Finnish. This original database has been enriched and modified by the author of this article and his team over the last 15 years. Besides Kokkola (1814–1914) in Finland, the database includes the following Swedish towns: Örnsköldsvik (1900–1939), Härnösand (1766–1940), Hudiksvall (1814–1939), Söderhamn (1819–1931), Gävle (1841–1907), Västervik (1806–1941), Visby (1752–1950), Oskarshamn (1912–1914) and Karlskrona (1853–1937). Thus, there is a varied amount of data on different time periods from each town. A major shortcoming of the database is that the major Swedish shipping towns of Stockholm and Gothenburg are not included, nor are most of the major Finnish ports. The towns included to the database comprised roughly 10% of all Swedish shipping tonnage in 1915–1938. 21. Although these topics are dealt with in a series of articles written with colleagues during the past decade, this is the first attempt to cover a longer period to compare hiring cases for steam ships and wages to those of sailing ships. 22. See especially Graham, ‘Ascendancy’; Harley, ‘Shift’. 23. Kaukiainen, ‘Transition’; Kaukiainen, Sailing into Twilight. 24. Kaukiainen, Ulos, 369. 25. Fritz, ‘Shipping’; Layton, Evolution; Swedish Official Statistics 1880; 1910; Kaukiainen, ‘Transition’; Kaukiainen, Sailing into Twilight. 26. Hornby and Nilsson, ‘Transition’; Gjølberg, ‘Substitution’. 27. Discussion and literature review on sailing ship effect, see especially De Liso et al., ‘The ‘Sailing-Ship Effect’’. 28. Kåhre, Den åländska segelsjöfartens historia; Kaukiainen, Ulos; Graham, ‘Ascendancy’; Harley, ‘Shift’. See also Kaukiainen, Sailing into Twilight; Gilfillan, Inventing.

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29. The selection of towns to be included in the database was made by the Swedish National Archive’s project in the turn of the Millennium. Exact criteria are not known for the author of this essay; most presumably Gothenburg and Stockholm were left out due to the large archives they have. 30. This 26-ton ship had 48 horsepower; presumably, it was a small passenger vessel. Sveriges officiella statistik E, sjöfart 1903 (Stockholm: kommerskollegii, 1905). 31. See especially Loockx, From Sail to Steam; Kivimäki, ‘Lagsförslagen’. 32. ‘Sjömansyrket’. 33. Alcock, History, 14. 34. Hynninen et al., ‘Technological Change’; Ojala et al., ‘Deskilling’. 35. ‘Sjömansyrket’. 36. The report did not, however, discuss whether there were different definitions in skill categories in UK in comparison with Nordic countries. 37. Fürst, ‘Socialstyrelsens yttrande’. 38. ‘Internationella arbetskonferensens trettonde sammanträde’. 39. Fürst, ‘Socialstyrelsens yttrande’. 40. Hynninen et al., ‘Technological Change’. 41. Ojala et al., ‘Deskilling’. 42. Hamark and Thörnqvist, ‘Docks and Defeat’; Bergholm, Halpatyövoimasta hyvinvointiin. 43. ‘Löneförhållandena inom sjömansyrket’; ‘De fartygsanställdas löneförhållanden i Finland’. 44. Alcock, History; Fink, Sweatshops at Sea; Thomas, ‘The International Labour Organisation’. 45. The Finnish Seamen’s Union was not represented at the first ILO conferences as the general assembly of Finnish labour unions voted against attendance. Bergholm, Halpatyövoimasta, 14. 46. Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, 150. 47. Kettunen, ‘The International Labour Organization’. 48. Kettunen, ‘The International Labour Organization’. 49. ‘Sjömanskonferensen i Genua’; ‘Internationella sjömanskonferensen i Genua’. 50. ‘Bostadsförhållandena ombord å den svenska handelsflottan’; Bergholm, Halpatyövoimasta, 3. 51. Fürst, ‘Socialstyrelsens yttrande’. 52. Kettunen, ‘The International Labour Organization’; Kaare Salvesen, ‘Co-operation’; Suviranta-Lehtinen, Suomi Kansainvälisessä Työjärjestössä vuosina. 53. Kivimäki, ‘Lagsförslagen’. 54. See, e.g., Xerri, ‘Contribution’; Scott and Miller, ‘Unification’; Schultsz, ‘Comité Maritime International’; Bower, ‘Comité Maritime International’.

58

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55. Berlingieri, ‘Work of the Comité Maritime International’; Von Ziegler, ‘Comité’. 56. Scott and Miller, ‘Unification’; Von Ziegler, ‘Comité’; Xerri, ‘Contribution’, 108–9. 57. ‘Socialstyrelsens utlåtande angående utbetalande av sjömans intjänta hyra’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 3 (1931), 206. 58. Kettunen, ‘The International Labour Organization’. 59. Alcock, History, 35. 60. ‘Sjömanskonferensen’, 889–93. See also O. Sciolla, Conferenza internazionale dei marinai (Genova, 1920). 61. Ojala et al., ‘Young Lads’. 62. Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers’. 63. Ojala et al., ‘Young Lads’. 64. Leander, Enduring Conscription; Ojala et al., ‘Young Lads’. 65. ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen (1928)’. 66. ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen (1928)’; Molin, ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen’. 67. Kivimäki, ‘Lagsförslagen’, 170. 68. ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen (1937)’. 69. Horrell and Humphries, ‘“The Exploitation of Little Children”’; Humphries, Childhood. 70. ‘Sociala frågor’. 71. Molin,‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen’, 448. 72. ‘Sjömanslagstiftningen’; Kivimäki, ‘Lagsförslagen’. 73. Kettunen, ‘The International Labour Organization’; Von Ziegler, ‘Comité’, 744—See also Fink, Sweatshops at Sea. 74. ‘Nionde internationella arbetskonferensen’. 75. ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen (1928)’. 76. ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen (1928)’. 77. ‘Internationella sjömanskonferensen’; Kivimäki, ‘Lagsförslagen’. 78. ‘Den förberedande sjöfartskonferensen’; ‘Internationella sjöfartskonferensens resultat’. 79. Kivimäki, ‘Lagsförslagen’. 80. Kaukiainen, Ulos, 400. 81. ‘Nionde internationella arbetskonferensen’. 82. Gunnarsson, Anställningsskyddets fyra pelare. The under-manning of ships had already been discussed in Sweden before the foundation of the ILO and it was seen as an international phenomenon. See, e.g., Fürst, ‘Socialstyrelsens’, 409–10. 83. ‘Den förberedande sjöfartskonferensen’. 84. ‘Internationella sjöfartskonferensens resultat’, 46. 85. ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen (1928)’. 86. Lagergren, ‘Influence’.

3

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

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Bergholm, Halpatyövoimasta, 13. Gunnarsson, Anställningsskyddets; ‘Sjömanslagen’. ‘Sjömanslagen’, 373. ‘Sjömanslagen’, 373–6. ‘Sjömanslagstiftningen’.

References Alcock, Anthony, History of the International Labour Organisation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1971). Armstrong, John, ‘The Crewing of British Coastal Colliers, 1870–1914’, Great Circle 20 (1998), 73–89. Bergholm, Tapio, Halpatyövoimasta hyvinvointiin. Suomen merimiesten ammattiyhdistystoiminta 1916–1996 (Turenki: Jaarli, 1996). Berlingieri, Francesco, ‘Work of the Comité Maritime International: Past, Present, and Future’, Tulane Law Review 57 (1982), 1260. Böös, G., Sjöarbetstidslagen med anmärkningar (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1938). ‘Bostadsförhållandena ombord å den svenska handelsflottan (Rapport till internationella kongressen för bostadshygien i Antwerpen sept. 1913, på K. Socialstyrelsens uppdrag utarbetad av aktuarien Otto Järte)’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 9 (1913), 707–18. Bower, G., ‘Le Comité Maritime International’, The American Journal of International Law 19 (1925), 573–7. Chin, Aimee, Chinhui Juhn and Peter Thompson, ‘Technical Change and the Demand for Skills During the Second Industrial Revolution: Evidence from the Merchant Marine, 1891–1912’, The Review of Economics and Statistics 88 (2006), 572–8. ‘De fartygsanställdas löneförhållanden i Finland 1930 och 1931’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 9 (1934), 613–61. De Liso, Nicola, Serena Arima and Giovanni Filatrella, ‘The ‘Sailing-Ship Effect’ as a Technological Principle’, Industrial and Corporate Change 30 (2021), 1459–78. ‘Den förberedande sjöfartskonferensen i Genève 1935’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 10 (1936), 31–5 Fink, Leon, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Fischer, Lewis R., ‘The Great Mudhole Fleet: The Voyages and Productivity of the Sailing Vessels of Saint John’, in Volumes Not Values: Canadian Sailing Ships and World Trades, ed. by David Alexander and Rosemary Ommer (St. John’s: University of Newfoundland, 1979), 117–55

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Fritz, Martin, ‘Shipping in Sweden, 1850–1913’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 28 (1980), 147–60. Fürst, Thorvald, ‘Socialstyrelsens yttrande i bemanningsfrågan’ Sociala meddelanden no. 4 (1916), 404–14. Gilfillan, S. C., Inventing the Ship (Chicago: Follett, 1935). Gjølberg, Ole, ‘The Substitution of Steam for Sail in Norwegian Ocean Shipping, 1866–1914. A Study in the Economics of Diffusion’, Scandinavian Economic History Review (1980), 137–46. Gorski, Richard, ed., Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). Graham, Gerald S., ‘The Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship 1850–85’, The Economic History Review 9 (1956), 74–88. Gunnarsson, Pär, Anställningsskyddets fyra pelare. En analys av det svenska anställningsskyddets utveckling 1970–2002 (Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet, 2003). Hamark, Jesper and Christer Thörnqvist, ‘Docks and Defeat: The 1909 General Strike in Sweden and the Role of Port Labour’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 34 (2013), 1–27. Harley, Charles K., ‘The Shift from Sailing Ships to Steamships, 1850–1890: A Study in Technological Change and Its Diffusion’, in Essays on a Mature Economy, ed. by Donald N. McCloskey (London: Methuen, 1971), 215–38. Harley, Charles K., ‘On the Persistence of Old Techniques: The Case of North American Wooden Shipbuilding’, The Journal of Economic History 33 (1973), 372–98. Harley, Charles K., ‘Ocean Freight Rates and Productivity, 1740–1913: The Primacy of Mechanical Invention Reaffirmed’, The Journal of Economic History 48 (1988), 851–76. Helomaa, I., ‘Lagen om sjömans semester’, Social tidskrift no. 1 (1939). Hornby, Ove and Carl-Axel Nilsson, ‘The Transition from Sail to Steam in the Danish Merchant Fleet, 1865–1910’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 28 (1980), 109–34. Horrell, Sara and Jane Humphries, ‘“The Exploitation of Little Children”: Child Labor and the Family Economy in the Industrial Revolution’, Explorations in Economic History 32 (1995), 485–516. Humphries, Jane, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Hynninen, Sanna-Mari, Jari Ojala and Jaakko Pehkonen, ‘Technological Change and Wage Premiums: Historical Evidence from Linked Employer–Employee Data’, Labour Economics 24 (2013), 1–11. ‘Internationella arbetskonferensens trettonde sammanträde’ Sociala Meddelanden no. 1 (1930), 18–22. ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 2 (1928), 138–9.

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‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 1 (1937), 46. ‘Internationella sjömanskonferensen i Genua’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 3 (1920), 320. ‘Internationella sjöfartskonferensens resultat’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 1 (1937), 46–8 Kåhre, Georg, Den åländska segelsjöfartens historia (Porvoo: Söderström & Company, 1940). Kaukiainen, Yrjö, ‘The Transition from Sail to Steam in Finnish Shipping, 1850– 1914’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 28 (1980), 161–84. Kaukiainen, Yrjö, Sailing into Twilight: Finnish Shipping in an Age of Transport Revolution, 1860–1914 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1991). Kaukiainen, Yrjö, Ulos maailmaan. Suomalaisen merenkulun historia (Helsinki: SKS, 2008). Kennerley, Alston, ‘Stoking the Boilers: Firemen and Trimmers in British Merchant Ships, 1850–1950’, International Journal of Maritime History 20 (2008), 191–220. Kettunen, Pauli, ‘The International Labour Organization as a Forum for Developing and Demonstrating a Nordic Model’, in Globalizing Social Rights. The International Labour Organization and Beyond, ed. by Sandrine Kott and Joelle Droux (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 210–30. Kivimäki, Toivo M., ‘Lagsförslagen angående sjömansyrket’, Social Tidskrift no. 3. (1923), 169–76. Lagergren, Stina, ‘The Influence of ILO Standards on Swedish Law and Practice’, International Labour Review 125 (1986), 305. Layton, Ian G., The Evolution of Upper Norrland’s Ports and Loading Places 1750–1976 (Umeå: Umeå universitet, 1981). Leander, Anna, Enduring Conscription: Vagueness and Värnplikt in Sweden (Odense: Syddansk Universitet, 2005). Lillie, Nathan, A Global Union for Global Workers: Collective Bargaining and Regulatory Politics in Maritime Shipping (Abigdon: Routledge, 2006). ‘Löneförhållandena inom sjömansyrket’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 9 (1926), 717–8. Loockx, Kristof, From Sail to Steam. Two Generations of Seafarers and the Maritime Labour Market in Antwerp 1850–1900. Ph.D. Diss., University of Antwerp and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Antwerp: University of Antwerp, 2020). Lucassen, Jan and Richard W. Unger, ‘Shipping, Productivity and Economic Growth’, in Shipping and Economic Growth 1350–1850, ed. by Richard Unger (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1–44. Mäenpää, Sari, ‘Galley News: Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938’, International Journal of Maritime History 12 (2000), 243–60.

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Mäenpää, Sari, ‘Women Below Deck: Gender and Employment on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938’, The Journal of Transport History 25 (2004), 57–74. Moehling, Carolyn M., ‘State Child Labor Laws and the Decline of Child Labor’, Explorations in Economic History 36 (1999), 72–106. Mokyr, Joel, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Molin, A., ‘Internationella arbetsorganisationen och svensk socialpolitisk utveckling’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 7–8 (1938), 445–52. ‘Nionde internationella arbetskonferensen i Genève (Den 7–24 juni 1926)’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 10 (1926), 755–70. North, Douglass C., ‘Ocean Freight Rates and Economic Development 1730– 1913’, The Journal of Economic History 18 (1958), 537–55. North, Douglass C., ‘Sources of Productivity Change in Ocean Shipping, 1600– 1850’, Journal of Political Economy 76 (1968), 953–70. Ojala, Jari, ‘Productivity and Technological Change in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth Century Sea Transport: A Case Study of Sailing Ship Efficiency in Kokkola, Finland, 1721–1913’, International Journal of Maritime History 9 (1997), 93–123. Ojala, Jari, Jaakko Pehkonen and Jari Eloranta, ‘Deskilling and Decline in Skill Premium During the Age of Sail: Swedish and Finnish Seamen, 1751–1913’, Explorations in Economic History 61 ( 2016), 85–94. Ojala, Jari, Jari Eloranta and Jaakko Pehkonen, ‘Young Lads and Old Tars: Changing Age Structure of the Nordic Sailors, 1750s–1930s’, Social Science History 46 no. 4 (2022), 861–86. O’Rourke, Kevin H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Salvesen, Kaare, ‘Co-operation in Social Affairs Between the Northern Countries of Europe’, International Labour Review no. 73 (1956), 334–57. Schultsz, J. C., ‘The Comité Maritime International, Some Informative Notes’, Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 3 (1972), 142–7. Sciolla, O., Conferenza internazionale dei marinai (Genoa, 1920). Scott, Leslie and Cyril Miller, ‘The Unification of Maritime and Commercial Law Through the Comité Maritime International’, International Law Quarterly 1 (1947), 482–97. ‘Sjömanskonferensen i Genua’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 10 (1920), 889–93. ‘Sjömanslagen’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 5 (1922), 373–6. ‘Sjömanslagstiftningen i Finland’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 7 (1924), 555. ‘Sjömansyrket i Sverige’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 4 (1915), 353–4. ‘Sociala frågor vid 1925 års riksdag’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 8 (1925), 652–3.

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‘Socialstyrelsens utlåtande angående utbetalande av sjömans intjänta hyra’, Sociala Meddelanden no. 3 (1931), 206. Suviranta-Lehtinen, Raili, Suomi Kansainvälisessä Työjärjestössä vuosina 1919– 1939. Finland in the International Labour Organisation (Helsinki: Ministry of Social Affairs, 1983). Thomas, Albert, ‘The International Labour Organisation—Its Origins, Development and Future’, International Labour Review 1 (1921), 5–22. Thompson, Peter, ‘Technological Change and the Age–Earnings Profile: Evidence from the International Merchant Marine, 1861–1912’, Review of Economic Dynamics 6 (2003), 578–601. Van Lottum, Jelle and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, ‘Labour Productivity and Human Capital in the European Maritime Sector of the Eighteenth Century’, Explorations in Economic History 53 (2014), 83–100. Van Royen, Paul C., Jaap R. Bruijn and Jan Lucassen, eds., “Those Emblems of Hell”? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870 (St. John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997). Van Zanden, Jan Luiten and Milja Van Tielhof, ‘Roots of Growth and Productivity Change in the Dutch Shipping Industry, 1500–1800’, Explorations in Economic History 46 ( 2009), 389–403. Von Ziegler, Alexander, ‘The Comité Maritime International (CMI): The Voyage from 1897 into the Next Millennium’, Uniform Law Review 2 (1997), 728– 57. Williams, David M. and John Armstrong, ‘An Appraisal of the Progress of the Steamship in the Nineteenth Century’, in The World’s Key Industry, ed. by Gelina Harlaftis, Stig Tenold and Jesús M. Valdaliso (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 43–63. Xerri, Allessandra, ‘The Contribution of the Comité Maritime International to the Movement for the Unification of Maritime Law’, Uniform Law Review 87 (1977), 87–113.

CHAPTER 4

Changes in Maritime Labour in Greece During the Transition from Sail to Steam, c. 1850–1917 Alkiviadis Kapokakis and Apostolos Delis

Introduction1 The history of maritime labour in Greece is a neglected subject. Few exceptions aside (mostly concerning the twentieth century), the nineteenth-century Greek seafarers’ story may be considered an untold one.2 Similarly, large quantities of data from nineteenth-century sources such as maritime workers registries, pension and insurance fund records, and crew lists and payrolls remained unexplored. Yet, the history of the Greek merchant marine before and after the creation of the Greek Independent State (1830) has been extensively researched in the past years. The size and the type of the fleet, the ship-owning firms, the maritime communities, the business networks and the shipbuilding industry are

A. Kapokakis · A. Delis (B) Center of Maritime History, Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Foundation for Research and Technology, Crete, Greece e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_4

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among the most explored topics.3 These studies have highlighted the international position and importance as well as the longevity of the Greek tramp shipping industry from the late eighteenth century up to the present day. However, research about the role and the impact the labour force has had on this growth and development remained up to now a desideratum. Therefore, this paper that comes as the result of an international research project with a strong focus on the effects of the transition from sail to steam in Mediterranean maritime labour explores and analyses the abovementioned unstudied sources on Greek seafarers.4 It presents the first responses to basic questions concerning the Greek maritime labour force covering the period from the creation of Modern Greece in 1830 to the early years of the twentieth century, which also coincides with the period of the transition from sail to steam for the Greek cargo fleet. These questions include an assessment of the maritime population, namely the number of people engaged in seafaring activities within the Greek Kingdom, and the areas of origin that made the largest contribution to the maritime labour force. The next section focuses on the size and the composition of the crews on sailing ships as well as on cargo steamers, along with the analysis of the ranks, the created hierarchies among the crew and the changes caused by the advent of steam. We conclude with a discussion about the wages and forms of remuneration in each working environment—sailing ships and steamers—which are also interlinked with the introduction of new professions on board and the creation of new hierarchies. These wages are compared to those in non-maritime professions in Greece.

Workforce in the Merchant Fleet Assessment of Maritime Workers The merchant shipping sector employed a significant number of workers for most of the nineteenth century, mainly during the period of the domination of sail. According to official state statistics, the number of employees in the Greek fleet increased from 19,000 in 1840 to 25,900 in 1850 and to 30,000 in 1855. From the end of the Crimean War until 1864, the number of seamen stabilised at between 23,000 and 24,000.5 The levels of employment in the Greek fleet reached their peak in the period 1865–1871. In these five years, the fleet seems to have employed

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67

a total of 31,000 to 35,000 seamen.6 From this point on, the workforce of the Greek fleet as well as the capacity of the sailing fleet shrank continuously.7 A more precise picture of the workforce in the nineteenth century is provided by the Seamen’s Pension Fund (in Greek Naftiko Apomachiko Tameio, from now on N.A.T.) reports.8 The data of these reports were based on inventories of N.A.T. and on income estimates from the insurance contributions of the maritime workers. For the administration of N.A.T., the correct registration of the service of the maritime workers was a crucial issue, as it was directly related to its financial survival. The income from employee contributions was for the N.A.T. the most important source of revenue and largely determined welfare policies for maritime workers.9 As Table 4.1 shows, in the 1860s, when the sailing fleet was in its heyday, maritime workers constituted 6% to 8% of the economically active population. According to the data, more than half of the maritime workers were employed as seamen (55.8%–58.6%), followed by trainee seamen and young sailors (15.7%–17.1%), and by the skippers of small vessels under 60 tons (10.7%–11.2%), and then followed the masters (5%–5.4%) and the boatswains (4.5%–5%). A very small percentage (1.7%– 1.9%) worked as pursers. Finally, the last category included boatmen, fishermen and divers (2.9%–4.1%). By the mid-1870s, the number of seamen was shrinking, which must be related to the decline in the shipping activities of the cargo sailing fleet and the prolonged shipping crisis of the period 1877–1884.10 According to official statistics between 1886 and 1894, 21,000 to 25,000 seafarers were employed in the Greek-owned fleet. The long-distance tramp fleet consistently employed 7500 to 9000 seamen, while the coastal fleet was served by 13,000 to 18,500 men.11 The reduction of seamen therefore primarily concerned the workforce of the long-distance fleet. As shown in Table 4.1, the number of skippers had increased by 1889.12 The number of sailors working on steamships was still relatively small: in 1887, about 1400 seamen worked in the steam-powered fleet, in all classes of steamships. Seven years later, the number of seafarers staffing the steamships had doubled. The majority of them, over 50%, worked in steamships over 800 tons. By 1890, the number of engineers and stokers was still small. Probably due to this, they are not mentioned in the statistics in Table 4.1. Many first engineers, during the first phase of

No data

No data

1090 35,550

1900 3810 1630 680 20,810 5580

1868 (estimates)

7.9

468,194

1240 37,000

1970 3950 1690 700 21,650 5800

1869 (estimates)

No data

32,400

1874

No data

30,147

1875

3.7

640,255

508* 23,679

11,011 6110

1104 4019 927

1889

2.9

678,718

20,000

1906 (estimates)

* This number only applies to boatmen, not fishermen and divers Sources For the year 1862 Journal of the Greek Government, no. 25, 17 June 1864, 151; For the year 1906 Skarpetis, Zarkos, Hadjigeorgiou, Batis (eds.), Iσ τ oρ´ια Nαυτ ικ oV´ , 64; For the rest General State Archive (GSA)/Athens, Archive of Ministry of Marine, Aπoμαχικ´o ταμε´ιo 1867–1870, ϕ. ´ : Nαυτικ´o Aπoμαχικ´o ταμε´ιo, 1890, ϕ. 78. 158; Συνταξεις

6.3

317,388

738 26,161

23,500

828 20,057

1864 1410 2818 1275 494 15,322 4104

1863 (estimates)

1007 2257 1003 347 11,191 3424

1862

Maritime workers in Greece 1862–1869, 1874, 1875, 1889, 1906

Masters Skippers Boatswain Purser Seamen Trainee/Boys Fishermen Boatmen Total of maritime workers (a) Total of economically active population in Greece (b) %

Table 4.1

68 A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

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CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

69

the transition, were foreigners (British) and were not recorded by N.A.T. Foreign maritime workers paid contributions to the fund only after 1896. According to N.A.T. data in 1906, when the transition to steamships has been completed, the number of employees had dropped to 20,000.13 Unfortunately, for this year, we do not have information about the ranks nor about the types of vessels (sailing ships, steamers) where these men were employed. It is estimated, however, that there were more than 5,000 employees in the steam-powered cargo fleet.14 The further decline in the number of insured seafarers in the early twentieth century was a major problem for the N.A.T. administration as it meant less revenue from contributions while pension costs were rising: in 1875, N.A.T. paid pensions to 1068 people, compared to circa 7000 in 1906. In 1874–1875, the number of sailors who paid contributions to the fund is estimated to have been around 30,000, while in 1906 it was estimated that it was only 20,000.15 The N.A.T. administration claimed that the main reason for this decline was the rapid contraction of the sailing fleet and the parallel expansion of the steam-powered fleet, which, as noted, employed a smaller number of seafarers.16 According to a state report published in 1899 on the overall situation of Greek shipping, drawn up by a committee appointed by the Ministry of Shipping, the decline of the sailing fleet caused a significant reduction in the number of seamen. Also, it is noted that only the sailing fleet can create numerous and skilful sailors, in contrast to the fleet of steamships that employed a small number of low-skilled sailors. Consequently, for Greece to be able to have a large number of sailors, it had to support its sailing fleet.17 In this context, various proposals for state support, backed by part of the Greek ship-owning class, for the sailing ships and shipbuilding, referring to relevant measures adopted in countries such as France and Italy in that period.18

The Origins of Seamen According to the N.A.T, in 1862, the majority of seamen came from the islands of the Aegean Sea, mainly from the traditional maritime communities of Greece such as Hydra and Spetses (see Map 4.1). Out of 20,057 maritime workers for the year 1862, 38.8% of them came from the ArgoSaronic Gulf, 18% from the Cyclades and 12.2% from the region of the North Aegean Sea. The rest of the maritime workers (21.2%) came from scattered coastal areas of the Peloponnese and from some small islands

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A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

which were not mentioned in the census of N.A.T. On the mainland, a significant number of seamen came from Galaxidi, a small coastal town on the Corinthian Gulf in central Greece forming part of the economy of the Ionian and Adriatic Seas.19 It is estimated that around 6500 seamen came from the Ionian Islands, but they are not included in this census since the Islands were part of the British Empire at that time. More than 50% of them (3415) were employed in long-distance cargo ships.20 A quarter of all Greek maritime workers, mostly with the ranks of seamen and apprentices, came from the islands of Hydra and Spetses. Captains and officers came mainly from ports with the biggest fleets, in particular Spetses, Hermoupolis, the port of Syros and Galaxidi. In the Ionian Sea, most seafarers of long-distance ships came from Cephalonia (2162), followed far behind by Ithaca (553). The decline of the sailing fleet and the transition to steamships caused changes in the port registries and in the composition and size of maritime population of many traditional maritime communities, thus pushing their

Map 4.1 Map of Greece showing principal places of origins of maritime population based on data of N.A.T., 1862

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CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

71

populations to emigrate and seek new professional activities (see Table 4.2).21 This phenomenon was more pronounced in areas where shipping and other related activities, such as shipbuilding, were the main form of employment. Push factors were also observed in maritime communities where the transition to steamships did not take place. These communities include Hydra, Spetses, Kranidi, Poros and Galaxidi. The inhabitants of these areas mainly headed to the port of Piraeus, which gradually emerged as the main port of the Greek state and the most important port of registry for the steam-powered fleet.22 In parallel to Piraeus, Hermoupolis in Syros, the first commercial and maritime centre of Greece already from the 1830s became the other very important registry port of steamships. In fact, Hermoupolis received immigrants from traditional maritime places like Santorini and other surrounding islands of the Cyclades.23 Along with Syros and Piraeus, the island of Andros and the two Ionian islands of Cephalonia and Ithaca benefited from the transition to steam navigation. The first group of Greek capitalists to invest in steamships in the 1870s and 1880s (Theofilatos, Stathatos, Vaglianos) came from the Ionian Islands. They were members of family business groups of the Greek merchant diaspora who were active in southern Russia and the Danube, mainly in the export trade of cereals. In 1882, however, Andros acquired the first steamship, which belonged to the shipowner Vassilios Embirikos and the merchant Skaramagkas, who lived in Taganrog. These Table 4.2 Population movement in maritime centres and communities in Greece, 1862–1889

Spetses Hydra Poros Kranidi Galaxidi Santorini Syros Piraeus

1862 % of total maritime workers

1861

1870

1879

1889

12.10 12.84 5.42 7.68 6.75 5.43 5.41 0.42

9843 9666 6682 6639 4151 15,448 18,511 6452

8443 7428 6035 7185 4127 15,454 20,996 10,963

6899 7342 514 5627 3936 13,362 21,540 21,055

5172 6413 5172 5550 4594 15,142 22,104 34,569

Sources: For the total of maritime worker Journal of the Greek Government, no. 16, 30 April 1863; ´ oς ; for the year 1879 Ministry of the for the year 1861 Bafounis (ed.), Στ ατ ισ τ ικ η´ τ ης Eλλαδ ´ oς . Πληθ υσ μ´oς ; for the rest years Petmezas, H ελληνικ η´, 148–52 Interior, Στ ατ ισ τ ικ η´ τ ης Eλλαδ

72

A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

shipowners employed captains and crews from their own place of origin, with whom they were often associated through kinship and personal ties.24

Crews on Sailing Ships and Steamers Size of Crews on Sailing Ships The size and composition of the crews on sailing vessels depended on many factors: the type of vessel, the form of remuneration (in wages or in shares) as well as the general social and economic conditions. The suppression of piracy and the end of the long wars between the European states in 1830 allowed the reduction in crews on merchant ships. Shipowners no longer needed large crews, nor firearms, nor weapons to defend their ships and cargo. Of course, the increased competition in the post-1830 period in maritime transport also played an important role in this development. Shipowners internationally tried to diminish their costs by reducing the number of men on board.25 This trend of reducing the costs is evident in the ship-owning management of cargo ships in Hermoupolis from the 1830s.26 This strategy probably allowed Greek shipowners to offer lower rates and to become more competitive in Mediterranean trade.27 Until the 1870s, Greek shipowners preferred to use brigs for longdistance trade and mainly for the transport of grain from the ports of Black Sea (Braila, Soulina, Odessa, Azov) to the ports of the Central and Western Mediterranean (Malta, Naples, Livorno, Castellammare di Stabia, Marseille).28 For most of the nineteenth century, the brig was the most widespread medium-capacity cargo sailing vessel in the merchant fleets in Europe, North Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.29 The brig was a small to medium-sized vessel, of low construction costs, and did not require a large number of sailors. In the shipyards of Hermoupolis—the largest in Greece and one of the largest in the Eastern Mediterranean—the brig was essentially the barometer of success or failure in the shipbuilding sector. In the period 1828–1866, 53% of the vessels built at the Hermoupolis shipyard were brigs, with an average capacity of 208 tons (a minimum of 64 and a maximum of 533 tons).30 The size of the crews in the brigs varied according to the tonnage of the vessel, the period and the form of remuneration. In the 1830s, in Hydra, for example, when the share system was still dominant, a brig between 50 and 95 tons had

4

73

CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

an average of 11 men, between 100 and 185 tons had about 15, while brigs between 220 and 325 tons employed 19–20 men.31 As shown in Table 4.3, on ships where the crew received a monthly salary instead of shares their number was smaller. The 312-ton Leonidas usually had a crew of twelve to fifteen men, consisting of a captain, a purser, a boatswain, a cook and eight to eleven seamen. On four voyages, one or two boys appear, taking the position of seamen. The number of seamen was larger on voyages where the ranks of purser and cook were absent. It is therefore possible that the responsibilities of purser and cook were transferred to seamen. The same happens on the Hydra brig Agios Charalambos, with a cook only on one of the eight voyages between 1856 and 1859. This ship was usually manned by a captain, a purser and a boatswain along with four or five seamen, while on two voyages one or two boys appear. However, the same composition is observed in the larger Syros brig Agios Antonios in 1859. The Hydra schooner-brig Tripolina apart from the officers and the cook was manned by four to seven sailors. Nine to eleven men, however, seem to have served in larger brigs such as Eleni Koupa and Stratigos Favieros between 1877 and 1884. Eleni Koupa had the same crew Table 4.3 Crew size, tons and forms of payment on Greek sailing ships in the nineteenth century Years

Ship name

Type

Form of payment

Tons

Crew size

1834 1841–1845 1856–1859

Agia Marina Leonidas Agios Charalambos Agios Antonios Tripolina Stratigos Favieros Eleni Koupa

Brig Brig Brig

Shares Wages Wages

126 312 163

11 12–15 8–9

Brig

Wages

211

9

Schooner-brig Brig

Wages Wages

186 362

9–11 10

Brig

Wages

276

9–11

1859 1861–1864 1877 1877–1884

Sources For brig Leonidas, Academy of Athens, archival collection Papastathis, “Kαταστιχ ´ oν τoυ oς”: http://repository.academyofathens.gr/keied/index.php/en/listItems/77435; For brigs πληρωματ ´ Agia Marina, Agios Antonios and Agios Charalampos, GSA/Athens, Archives of Ministry of Marine, ´ συνθηκαι ´ 1842–1847, f. 921; Stratigos Favieros from Private Archive of the Family Eμπoρικας of Nikos Zachariadis, Skopelos; for the rest brigs Private Archive of Evangelos Rafalias, Hydra, ´ oν των εξ´oδων και εσ´oδων” “Kαταστιχ

74

A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

composition as Tripolina, both owned by the same shipowner. On the Eleni Koupa, a first mate also served in seven out of the fifteen voyages, and a purser and boys appeared in the crew list on six voyages. In addition to the two officers, there were eight seamen and one boy on this ship. In general, Greek sailing ships must have had a smaller crew compared to other Mediterranean fleets. Medium-sized Italian brigs, which were involved in the grain trade of the Black Sea and sailed the Mediterranean Sea during the period 1853–1864, usually had a crew of ten to eleven men and Spanish ones a crew of twelve.32 For example, the crew on board the Italian brig Societa (237 tons), which followed standard trade routes (Danube ports to Constantinople, British ports to Constantinople) between 1861 and 1862, consisted of 12 men: a captain, a mate (Capitano secondo), a purser (Dispensiere), 4 to 6 seamen and 3 to 5 boys (mozzi). Crews on larger brigs (250–300 tons) ranged from twelve to thirteen people, while smaller brigs (110–179 tons) were manned by 9 or 10 men. Size of Crews on Steamships The introduction of steam technology caused significant changes. Steamships intensified the technical division of labour with the creation of new specialties and the disappearance, or reduction, of others. The number of seamen in general duties gradually decreased, while the emergence of new specialties (engineers and firemen) resulted in the overthrow of the old work structures and the creation of a new working hierarchy on board.33 In the engine room, a hierarchy emerged parallel to the one on deck. Skilled workers, engineers, firemen and trimmers formed a separate body of workers, working in a much harsher environment than the deck crew. The engine crew was in fact a new ‘industrial proletariat’ of the sea, which created a new class of workers with a different set of skills and tasks from the previous on sailing ships. On Greek steamships, the working environment was considered particularly harsh, mainly due to the age of the vessels. The older second-hand steamships of the first period (1885–1900), in addition to the fact that they consumed more coal, required constant maintenance and subsequently long working days for the crew.34 The issue of regulating the working hours of sailors on Greek steamships was one of the main demands of seafarers’ unions in the first decade of the twentieth century. This request was strongly expressed in 1909–1910 by the unions of

4

Table 4.4 Age of Greek steamships, c. 1900

CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

Age Above 30 years 29–25 24–20 19–15 14–10 9–5 4–1 Total

Steamships 3 7 14 16 40 21 9 110

75

Tons (nrt) 6084 13,867 31,116 41,956 131,102 83,301 37,330 344,756

Source Naftiki Hellas, n. 7, 27.5. 1901; Kardasis, Aπ o´ Toυ Iσ τ ι´oυ, 99

firemen and engineers (founded in 1890 and in 1907–1908) and was the main cause of long strikes that led to the immobilisation of ships.35 Table 4.4 lists the ages of Greek steamships about 1900. The fleet was updated after 1902, when Greek shipowners invested in the construction of new steamships. According to Table 4.5, old steamers such as Nikolaos Vaglianos in 1898—built in 1883—employed twenty men, of which only four were seamen, while slightly larger capacity steamers such as Michail, in the same period, had a crew of twenty to twenty-three men. Twenty to twenty-one men served on steamer Loula, registered in Syros in 1908. In such vessels, the workforce was divided into two categories: the deck and the engine department. The deck crew consisted of the captain, two mates (second and third), the carpenter and usually four seamen. In larger steamers, like the Ellin from Andros, the number of seamen could reach up to seven or even eight men. On cargo steamers over 1000 tons, almost half of the crew worked in the engine department. The engine staff consisted of three engineers of each rank (first, second and third) the donkeyman, the firemen and the trimmers. The first engineer oversaw the engine department and was the head of the staff, while the second engineer was responsible for the distribution of engine staff in shifts and for the general working of the machine. The third engineer and the cadet engineers assisted the second engineer in carrying out the work.36 Between the engineers and the firemen stood the donkeyman (chief fireman). The chief fireman supervised the work of the firemen and was accountable to the second engineer. The size of the engine crew

76

A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

Table 4.5 Crew size on Greek steamships Years

Ship name

Tonnage

Crew size

1898 1899–1903 1908 1908–1909 1908–1916 1911–1915 1913–1916 1913–1916

Nikolaos Vaglianos Michail Loula Andriana Georgios M. Embiricos Leonardos G. Goulandris Vasileus Konstantinos Ellin

1101 1423 1526 1769 2324 1312 2488 2780

1693 grt

nrt nrt nrt nrt nrt nrt nrt nrt

– 2958 grt 3636 grt 2123 grt

20 21–23 20–21 26–27 27–28 22–24 29–30 29–31

Sources For ss N. Vaglianos, Harlaftis, Creating, 137: Table 5.3; for ss Loula Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA), Athens, Nαυτoλ´oγιo Σ V´ ρoυ 1908, n. 13; for ss Andriana ELIA, Athens, Aρχε´ιo Σ V´ ρμα, Bιβλ´ιo Mισθoδoσ´ιας; for the rest of the steamships Kairis Library, Andros, Nαυτικα´ Aρχε´ια Eμπειρ´ικoυ, Box n. 1–6

varied, depending on the size of the ship and its technical characteristics. Larger capacity steamships, such as the Vasileus Konstantinos and Ellin, had four engineers and six to eight firemen, respectively, while the smaller steamships N. Vaglianos and Leonardos G. Goulandris had a smaller engine crew. In fact, the smaller number of firemen and trimmers on the N. Vaglianos and on the Leonardos G. Goulandris (3 and 2, respectively), compared to the other ships (Andriana 4 and 4, Georgios M. Embiricos 4 and 3), relates to the number of furnaces and boilers to feed which was proportional to the size of the engine. Due to the absence of specialised engineering personnel, Greek steamships were usually employed foreign engineers, mainly of British origin.37 British engineers worked on the Andriana and for some voyages on the steamships Ellin, Vasileus Konstantinos and Michail, while the steamer Loula had a first engineer of Greek origin from the Dardanelles. It is estimated that in 1900 the Greek steam-powered fleet employed at least 300 foreign engineers.38 The number must be considered large in relation to the size of the Greek fleet at the time: 110 steamships, with a total capacity of 344,000 tons. It should be noted that until the interwar period the Greek state did not provide any training for engineers.39 In the nineteenth century, the training of Greek engineers as well as boiler makers and related craftsmen took place in the Arsenal of the Hellenic Steam Navigation Company founded in 1861 on Syros.40 The first engineering schools were founded by trade unions in the city of Piraeus in the

4

CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

77

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their operation was based on the contributions of the members, on subsidies of the municipality of Piraeus and on donations from individuals, mainly from the shipping and manufacturing sectors. According to the minutes of the union of engineers ‘Prometheus’, the involvement of capital from the secondary sector in the schools through donations resulted in several of the graduate engineers seeking employment in factories and not on ships.41

Wages on Sailing Ships and Steamers Wages on Sailing Ships Regarding the levels of wages, the available data from crew lists (Table 4.9) and other evidence from Syros show that during the period 1840– 1860 the monthly salary of the captain had stabilised at 120 drachmas.42 It also seems that from 1840 to 1860 the monthly wages of sailors and other specialties increased significantly. However, in each specialty, there were variations that were clearly related to age and experience. Young sailors between the ages of 16 and 21 were paid less, as were trainee officers. On the brig Agios Charalambos, for example, the purser in his first voyage was paid only 40 drachmas since he was only 19 years old. On the brig Leonidas, in 1844, the salary of an experienced sailor even reached 50 drachmas, when the rest of the sailors were paid 38 to 42 drachmas. It should also be noted that after 1861, and until 1884, 3% of the seafarers’ salary was directed to N.A.T., as an insurance contribution.43 The revenue would cover the cost of the old sailors’ pensions as well as for the support of the unemployed and those who were unable to work due to an injury. In shipping, wage levels, as well as employment, appear to have oscillated sharply from time to time, due to fluctuations in international trade and in freights rates. According to French consular reports from the port city of Hermoupolis, during the Crimean War, the captain’s monthly salary had reached 140 to 150 drachmas and that of seamen 80 drachmas.44 This fact is also confirmed by the data regarding the brig Agios Charalambos —for the year 1856 in particular. In at least two voyages to the Black Sea, the sailors received a monthly salary between 60 and 80 drachmas, while the salary of the boatswain ranged from 70 to 100 drachmas. Usually, during wartime, wages increased. In Britain, for instance, seamen’s wages almost doubled during the Crimean War.45 The

78

A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

following year (1857), due to the fall of freight rates, wages returned to previous levels. The rapid decrease in freight rates after 1874 also seems to have affected wage levels. In 1877, on the brig Stratigos Favieros, the captain seems to have received a monthly salary of 100 drachmas, while the sailors only 45 drachmas. According to evidence from N.A.T., in the mid-1880s the monthly salary of captains in sailing ships was around 100 drachmas, while a steamship master earned twice that or more.46 In the period 1878–1884, the salary of the captain on the brig Eleni Koupa was between 100 and 120 francs, almost equal to the same amount in drachmas at the prevailing exchange rate. The information we have about the level of wages for different professions in Greece in the nineteenth century is fragmentary and often conflicting.47 We tried to summarise in Table 4.7 the salaries (per day) of factory workers and workers in the agricultural sector (‘land workers’) and compare these with the salaries of sailors. The salaries of the factory workers are indicative and follow the general trend of the wages in the big cities (Piraeus, Syros) of Greece, while the salaries of the land workers refer to the average of the agricultural wages for the whole country. For the salary of the sailors, we used the data of the ships mentioned above and from the brig Altana from Galaxidi.48 As Table 4.7 shows, sailors were paid less than factory and agricultural workers. Moreover, skilled workers were better paid than the captains and mates. According to the available data, in the 1870s the salary of skilled workers (artisans, engineers) started from 4 drachmas per day and reached 10 or even 12 drachmas.49 In the machine shops of the Hellenic Steam Navigation Company, in Syros, in the early 1860s, the monthly wages of workers ranged between 80 and 170 drachmas and that of skilled personnel and engineers (many of them foreign) from 120 to 843 drachmas.50 Workers and shipbuilders at Syros shipyards were also better paid than sailors and officers.51 However, as has been pointed out in the literature, seamen’s wages were not only based on monetary remuneration, but also on other forms of income.52 Some historians mention smuggling as a supplement to wages, without further explanation.53 We must also consider the factor of seasonality that characterised many professions in the nineteenth century. Agricultural labourers usually worked seasonally on large crops, for specific periods of time.54 Throughout the nineteenth century, several factories closed for long periods either due to fluctuations in demand for the products they manufactured, or as a result of the employer’s

Range of wages

Leonidas 1841–1845

Source See Table 4.3

120 61.6 82.75 52 61.87 30

40–80 75–100 52 40–85 30

Average

120

Average Range of wages

AgiosCharalambos 1856–1859

70 50 45–50 30

60 70 50 47.5 30

60 60–140 60–75 50–70 42–60 15–30

120

Stratigos Favieros 1877

82.5 70 56.4 56 18.5

120

60 45 10

45 10

100

60

100

120–144 96–144 70–120 89–96 55–72 42–78 18–48

132.5 120 94.3 80.6 70.3 65.3 35.5

Average

Eleni Koupa 1877–1884

Average Ranges Average Ranges of of wages wages

Tripolina 1861–1864

Ranges Average Ranges of of wages wages

Agios Antonios 1859

Monthly wages of deck crew on Greek sailing ships in the nineteenth century (in drachmas; Eleni Koupa in

Captain 120–122.2 120 Mate 72 72 Purser 46–73.65 61.4 Boatswain 33.48–52.8 43.3 Cook 34.68–40 37.67 Seamen 24–50.80 34.2 Boy 10–20 16.5

Rank

Table 4.6 francs)

4 CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

79

– Shipyards (Syros) Shipyards (Syros) Agricultural production Silk factory (Piraeus) Pasta Factory Flour mills Soap factories Machine Shop (Piraeus) Agricultural production Steam mill Shipyards (Syros) Machine Shop (Piraeus) Yarn factory Glass workshop

1840 1846–1847 1852 1856–1858 1859 1863 1863 1863 1863 1865 1874 1875 1875 1875 1875

2.23 3.35–9.2 4–5 2.90–3.04 2–2.5 2 2.5 3 4.4–5.5 2.85 3 9 4 2.5–3 3

– – – – 1–1.25 – – – 1.1–2.2 – – – – 1.25–1.5 2

Range of wage per day Women & children

0.3–0.6

1 0.7–1

0.6

1.5–2.8 1.4–2

1.3–2

Boy-trainee

0.7–1.7

Seamen

Sources For seamen’s wages, see Table 4.3; for factory workers in Syros and Piraeus, see Agriantoni, Oι Aπ αρχ šς , 212–14; for workers on shipyards of Syros, see Delis, Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding, 208; for land workers Mansolas, Π oλιτ ειoγ ραϕικα´ι, 55, 109

Unskilled worker Shipyard worker « Land worker Worker « « « « Land worker Worker Shipyard worker Worker « «

Range of wage per day Men

Place of employment

Year

Worker

Daily wages of workers in Greece, 1840–1875 (in drachmas)

Table 4.7

80 A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

4

CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

81

strategy.55 From this point of view, working at sea provided employment for longer periods, according to testimonies of the period. A report from Hydra in 1869 states that an experienced sailor worked over 8 months in the year.56 Wages on Steamships With the introduction of the steamship, changes in the technical division of labour led to changes in wage scales that were in force during the sailing period and led to reorganisations of seafarer’s labour. The monthly salary of a captain on a steamship was almost two-and-a-half times that of a captain on a sailing ship. The wages per rank reflect the hierarchy on board in all ships under examination. Table 4.8 shows the wage range and the average wage of the crews of eight steamships during the period 1898–1917. The appearance of engineers (mostly foreigners) and firemen changed the hierarchies on board. This is also reflected in the wage levels. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the wages of the first engineer, which are included with the officers in the senior crew, were equal to or sometimes even higher than the salary of the master. The importance of the engine crew versus the deck crew is reflected in the higher wages of the second engineer in comparison with the first mate, and of the third engineer compared to the second mate. Firemen received higher wages than the experienced seamen, which is mainly due to their very harsh working environment and the growing importance of the engine vis-à-vis the sails as a mean of motion power of the ship.57 The wages of the firemen were quite close to the salary of the boatswain, a middle-ranking officer on board. Comparing the salaries of all steamships in chronological order, from N. Valianos (1898) to Andriana (1908–1909), it seems that during the first decade of the twentieth century the average level of wages per month decreased. The reduction of wages, but also the general conditions that prevailed in Greece at that time, contributed to the radicalisation of the sailors. From 1902 onwards, one union and association of maritime workers of all specialties after another were founded while at the same time the first strikes broke out. The improvement of wages, food supply and working conditions were among the main demands of the first strikes.58 The regulation of working hours was also an important request. As recorded in the press of the time, engine workers (engineers and firemen) and those in lower ranks were strongly represented in the

72.7

40–80

65 65

90 90 90

90

90.7 90–95

141

145.6

146

85

85–90

126.8 85– 210 103.9 80– 150 112.3090– 170 105.6 70– 180

Cook

89.9

101.8 100– 150 110.9 90– 162.5 101.5 85– 150 93 70– 150

100

90

110

178

247

302

437.5

573

A

Chief Fireman (Donkeyman)

90

110

160– 170 150

387.8 350– 500 387.7 360– 425 246.3 200– 375 182.6 140– 250 145.7 120– 180

R

100

110 100– 120 75.575–80

150

161

362.2 350– 425 337.7 350– 450 182.8 115– 250 166.9 120– 250 138.5 100– 220

Av

Boatswain

119.1 100– 160 74.7 65–90

160 150– 170 100 80– 120

375– 378 225

375

R 425– 800 425– 450 275– 325 225– 300 175– 180 100– 170 140– 180 120– 170 125– 170 100– 165

R

Ellin 1913–1916

162.7

150

Third Engineer

151.9 130– 240

225

376

375

Av

G. M. Embiricos 1908–1916

150

200

First Mate

180 180

275 250– 300 300 300

R

L. G. Goulandris 1909–1915

Second Mate

250

Second Engineer

250– 375

Av

Andriana 1908–1909

118.5

400

First Engineer

313

Av R

Loula 1908

Forth/Cadet Engineer

400

Av

Av

R

Michail 1899–1903

N. Vaglianos 1898

Average and range of wages per rank in steamships, 1898–1917 (in drachmas)

Master

Rank

Table 4.8

150.5

149

140

156

106.5

153

236

274.5

401

420

A

120–200

90–180

87–175

90–180

40–175

85–175

137–275

137–312.5

212–437.5

375–450

R

V.Konstantinos 1913–1917

82 A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

90

70

60

Steward

Seaman

Trimmer

Sources See Table 4.6

Steward of the Officers

50

80

Firemen

Trainee Seaman (Nα V´ τ ης μαθ ητ ευ o´ μεν oς) Engine Steward/Servant/Cabin Boy of the Engineers Boy Cadet

90

22

27.5

49.2

58.7

62

80

82.6

Av

Av

10–30

20–40

30–60

45–65

50–70

70– 100 80

R

Michail 1899–1903

N. Vaglianos 1898

Carpenter

Rank

15 10–20

60 60

45 45

58.340–70

61.560–65

80 80

Av R

Loula 1908

75

80

85

R

50

60

30.6 30–35

50

60

64.80 60–65

75

80

85

Av

Andriana 1908–1909

30.6

28.8

43.6

59.8

80.1

82.7

90.2

83.7

Av

20–45

15–70

70– 163 40– 130 20– 160 45– 100 25–80

80–95

R

L. G. Goulandris 1909–1915 R

60

36.9 68.9

35.8

20–60 30– 130 60

20–60

103.8 75– 160 102.4 80– 150 92.4 75– 150 85 60– 140 65.4 45– 100 56.7 40–90

Av

G. M. Embiricos 1908–1916

45

46

50

78.5

123

118

137

144

A

40–50

30–65

25–80

120– 170 100– 175 40– 165 60– 150 75– 100

R

Ellin 1913–1916

40

49

56

98

118

128

133

134.5

A

40

30–75

37.5–75

75–137.5

75–150

60–175

87–175

87–180

R

V.Konstantinos 1913–1917

4 CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

83

84

A. KAPOKAKIS AND A. DELIS

demonstrations and strikes.59 In fact, in 1907, under the pressure of these strikes, the administration of N.A.T. introduced an insurance contribution from shipowners. Until then, only seamen paid contributions, which were deducted from their wages. The recruitment of foreign personnel, mainly in the engine room, was another field of conflict between shipowners and workers. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Greek shipowners replaced the highly paid Greek engineers (who gradually had replaced British engineers from 1900) with personnel from Turkey and Bulgaria. The extension of this practice resulted in extended strikes by the unions of engineers and other maritime workers in 1910.60 During the Balkan Wars and the First World War, the wages of all ranks seem to have increased, but this fact must mainly be attributed to the very high inflation of the period. In fact, wage increases did not follow rising commodity prices, especially during First World War, with worker’s purchasing power remaining at pre-war levels or even shrinking.61 During the war, the price of a unit of bread increased from 0.55 cents to 1.20 drachmas. At the same time, on the steamship Ellin, for example, the captain’s wage jumped from 450 francs in 1913 to 800 francs in the first two years of the war. In none of the other specialties, however, was there a similar increase in the wage.62 Statistical information published in 1917 by the Ministry of Economy for the workers in Athens and Piraeus can enlighten us about the development of wages on average during First World War.63 From the report’s statistical data (Table 4.9), it seems that the average wage of seamen, one of the most numerous groups of workers, was at the same level as the wages of tobacco workers, construction workers and tanners. It was also lower than that for other categories of workers, such as dockworkers and workers in machine shops and shipyards. The wage levels of the steward and firemen were close to the wage levels of the above mentioned professional groups. Not surprisingly, masters and engineers held the best paid jobs. Their wages on cargo ships were much higher than of the rest of the crew.

Conclusions Seafaring labour constituted an important part of the active Greek population, especially in maritime communities and ports, where shipping for a long time was the main source of income and wealth. Greek sailing ships,

4

CHANGES IN MARITIME LABOUR IN …

85

Table 4.9 Average daily and monthly wages of employees in Piraeus, 1917 (in drachmas)

Masters Ship engineers Firemen Stewart Seamen Fishermen Boatmen Sponge divers Dock workers Cereal dockers Shipyard workers Machinists and Blacksmiths Tanners Firemen Boilermakers Trimmers Tobacco workers Construction workers Quarry workers Unskilled workers Workers on chemical industry Weavers Millers

Number of workers

Average monthly wages

Average daily salary

287 372 926 369 1201 268 925 64 1186 527 187 1406

303.95 270.20 151.52 157.10 116.30 135.75 143.20 201.70 167.80 189.20 145.95 105.25

10.00 8.90 5.05 5.20 4.05 4.50 4.70 6.65 5.55 6.25 4.80 3.45

65 178 466 108 232 548 265 219 343

126.20 138.20 122.80 122.50 118.65 122.95 120.85 69.90 102.65

4.15 4.55 4.05 4.05 3.90 4.05 4.00 2.30 3.40

352 356

85.95 105.25

2.85 3.45

Source Ministry of Finance, Στ ατ ισ τ ικ α´ απ oτ ελšσ ματ α τ ης απ oγ ραϕ ης ´ , 1917

mainly brigs and mostly engaged in the Black Sea trade, were competitive with other Mediterranean fleets due to their smaller crews and lower costs. The importance of Greek seafaring labour in the age of sail was recognised by the state that created the first Greek labour insurance and pension fund in 1861, a period when few, if any, other professional categories had a similar welfare institution in Greece.64 In an economy where agricultural subsistence was the norm and there was almost no industrial working class before the 1880s, seafarers were the most substantial category of wage-dependent workers.

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However, the percentage of seafarers among the total of Greece’s labour force, which in the period of sail around the middle of the nineteenth century reached up to 8%, began to shrink at the end of the century. The gradual decline of the sailing fleet, which became an obvious trend from the 1870s, resulted in decreased wages for officers and able-bodied seamen. There were, as well, in public discussions in the press and among the engaged actors in the Greek merchant marine— the shipowners and state authorities—about the decline in shipping. The parallel rise of the steamship fleet, especially after the 1880s, caused a reduction in the number of seafarers. Steamships were far fewer in number than sailing ships and the skills of able-bodied seamen were less in demand on steamers. In fact, deskilling of seamen was an irreversible effect of the introduction of steamships and the subsequent technological transformation on the nature of maritime labour and on the composition of the labour force on board. The new specialties in the engine room were more crucial for the operation of the ship than working the sails and the rigging. This was also reflected in the wages of the ‘deck crew’ and ‘engine crew’. In terms of remuneration and authority, the captain and the first engineer set themselves apart from the rest of the crew. Skilled ranks such as firemen and stewards on steamers were better paid compared to men in other professional categories in Greece. Seamen, however, were no longer considered a skilled category as in the age of sail. In addition to nominal wages, longer periods of employment and additional unrecorded sources of income like smuggling or pacottiglia 65 may had offset the differences with other professions. The declining presence of the sailing ship and the transition to steamships also had multiple effects on traditional maritime communities that supplied most of the necessary labour for the manning of the ships, as well as for other related industries like shipbuilding. Push factors of the declining economies in these communities led to emigration to big ports and maritime centres like Piraeus. This port emerged after the 1860s as the most prominent port of Greece at the expenses of the previously, since 1830, developed commercial and maritime centre of Hermoupolis in Syros. This immigrant population constituted the proletarianised labour force in these port cities for the growing home industries as well as for the new industrialised environment on board the cargo steamers. In fact, the harsh working conditions on old and difficult to operate Greek steamers led to the first forms of radicalisation of workers on Greek ships.

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In the first decade of the twentieth century took place the founding of trade unions of maritime labourers in Greece—initially for the engineers and engine personnel and later for seamen. Simultaneously, the trade unionist sea workers did not hesitate to use strikes to claim their rights, which they did on various occasions between 1906 and 1910. Industrialisation in Greek shipping swept away the economies of the sailing ship in traditional maritime communities, based on local or regional capital, technical and labour resources and profoundly affected the nature of maritime labour as well as the social structures in big port cities, like Syros and Piraeus.

Notes 1. This paper is written within the project “Seafaring Lives in Transition. Mediterranean Maritime Labour and Shipping, 1850s–1920s” that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (SeaLiT grant agreement No. 714437). 2. Skountis, “Nαυτικη´ Eργασ´ια”; Tzoumanis, “H ελληνικη´ εμπoρικη”; ´ ´ Harlaftis, “H ακμη”, ´ vol. C1, 261–83; Harlaftis, Eλληνες Nαυτ ικ oι´. 3. There is an extensive bibliography on these aspects, especially by Gelina Harlaftis from which we cite a representative selection of works, among them: History; Greek Shipowners; Creating Global; Harlaftis and Papakonstantinou (eds.), H ναυτ ιλ´ια; Harlaftis and Vlassopoulos, Pontoporeia; Harlaftis, Beneki and Haritatos, Ploto; Theotokas and Harlaftis, Leadership. See also Papadopoulou, “Nαυτιλιακšς Eπιχειρησεις”; ´ Delis, Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding; Delis, ‘From Lateen’, 43–57. 4. For more information on the project, see http://www.sealitproject.eu/. Additionally, a forthcoming volume of the research is produced in this project. See Delis et al. (eds.) Seafaring Lives (in press). 5. In the nineteenth century, shipping statistics were provided by the Ministry of Marine. Statistics are also published by Greek and foreign scholars of the Greek economy of that period. For the years mentioned above, see ϒπoυργε´ιoν Oικoνoμικων, ´ Γ ενικ o´ ς Π ι´ναξ. Years: 1864, 1867–1868, 1869–1871; Strong, Greece, 146–61. 6. According to official data in 1871, the capacity of the Greek fleet reached its peak, approaching 420,000 tons. ϒπoυργε´ιoν Oικoνoμικων, ´ Γ ενικ o´ ς Π ι´ναξ . Years: 1869–1871. 7. For the decline of the Greek fleet in the mid-1870s, see Harlaftis, History, 118, 122. 8. The N.A.T. was founded in 1861 after long discussions regarding the insurance coverage of elderly and destitute seafarers. The foundation of the

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

N.A.T. was based on the French Maritime Code and the operating regulations of the Caisse de Invalides de la Marine established in 1618. It is the first and the longest lasting workers’ insurance organisation in Greece. The establishment reformed the inventory system of seafarers, as for the first time all those who served in the merchant marine, the Hellenic Navy but also in related maritime professions, e.g., fishermen, divers and boatmen, were recorded in a systematic way. See Liakos, Eργ ασ ι´α, 377; Doukakis, “Θεσμικη”, ´ 118–19. See also. Skarpetis, Zarkos, Hadjigeorgiou, Batis (eds.), Iσ τ oρ´ια Nαυτ ικ oV´ , 23; and Aggalopoulos, Koινωνικα´ι, 9. The fund, in addition to pensions, also provided emergency financial assistance (a small amount in the form of charity). According to the founding law, the fund allocated 5% of income to destitute seafarers and their widows and orphans, who were not entitled to a pension and who did not have other resources: Law X⌃Θ’, Journal of the Greek Government, no. 49, 5 September 1861. Harlaftis, History, 122. ϒπoυργε´ιoν Oικoνoμικων, ´ Eμπ o´ ριoν τ ης Eλλαδ ´ oς . Years: 1886–1894. The number of fishermen shows an increase, as other sources indicate at that time, a fact related to the development of the sponge industry. In 1891, the number of fishermen, divers and sponge divers was estimated at around 6000. See Bickford–Smith, Greece Under, 57–58, 60–61. Skarpetis, Zarkos, Hadjigeorgiou, Batis (eds.), Iσ τ oρ´ια Nαυτ ικ oV´ , 64. In 1902, the steam-powered fleet employed 3000 seamen on 186 steamships with a total capacity of 163,000 tons. See Loverdos, Eθνικ o´ ς π λoV´ τ oς, v. 2, 75. In 1906, the steam-powered fleet consisted of 286 steamships with a total capacity of 269,000 tons. See Hermoupolis’s Newspaper Π ατ ρ´ις [Patris ], 3 November 1907 (number 2170), 1–2. Skarpetis, Zarkos, Hadjigeorgiou, Batis (eds), Iσ τ oρ´ια Nαυτ ικ oV´ , 64. Ibid., 64. “Eκθ εσ ις π ερ`ι τ Áς κατ ασ τ ασ ´ εως, 9–10. Delis, Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding, 50–51. Galani, ‘From Traditional’. Kapetanakis, ‘H πoντoπ´oρoς’, 251–54. For example, the inhabitants of the Argo-Saronic Gulf, mainly from ´ εως, Hydra, shifted to sponge fishing. “Eκθ εσ ις π ερ`ι τ Áς κατ ασ τ ασ 40–41; Miliarakis, Γ εωγ ραϕ´ια, 184–87. Indicatively in 1883, 51 steamships with a total capacity of 24,000 tons were registered in Greek ports. Of these, 15 were registered in Piraeus and 18 in Syros. This is mainly due to the presence of three postal companies (Hellenic Steam Navigation Company, Goudi Steamship Company and Panelinion). Gradually, over the following two decades, Piraeus became

4

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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the main port of registration of the cargo steamer fleet and headquarters of Greek shipping companies. Kardasis, Aπ o´ Toυ Iσ τ ι´oυ, 146, 177; Papastefanaki, Eργ ασ ι´α, 44–45. For the movement of people from the rest of the Cyclades to its capital Hermoupolis, see Loukos, ‘Mερικšς επισημανσεις’, ´ 105–20. Kardasis, Aπ o´ Toυ Iσ τ ι´oυ, 145–53; Harlaftis, Creating, 35–38. Williams, ‘Crew Size’ 105–54. For the case of Greece see Delis, ‘Nαυπηγηση’, ´ 85–113. Delis, ‘Nαυπηγηση’, ´ 104–06. Greek ships were 10 to 15% cheaper in general. See Hadjiiossif, ‘Conjunctural Crisis. Delis, Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding, 144. Ibidem. Brigs are also used to transport grain from the Black Sea and for Italian shipowners from the Ligurian region. See Scavino, ‘Mediterranean Maritime Community’, 54–55. Delis, Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding, 144. General State Archives, Athens, King Otho Archive, Ministry of Marine, ´ [┌AK/Kϒ, Aρχε´ιo ⊓ερι´oδoυ Oθωνoς, ϒπoυργε´ιo Nαυτικων] ´ (from now on GSA, Athens) file. 42 (1–17). Processed data from database FastcatTeam. Data for Italian brigs Archivio di stato di Genova (ASGe), Direzione Marittima di Genova, Ruoli di Equipaggio (1853–1864); For Spanish brigs El Viso del Marqués, Archivio General de la Marina (AGM), f. CG, n. 1178; Museo Maritim de Barcelona, Collections (MMB-C), Certificado de tripulacion, n. 1823. For a bibliography on the emergence of new specialties on board, see Sager, Seafaring Labour; Garcia Domingo, ‘Losing Professional Identity’; Garcia Domingo, ‘Engine Drivers’; Williams, ‘Industrialization’; Milburn, ‘Emergence’. For the old technology of the first Greek steamships and discussions about their disadvantages, see the journal H Nαυτ ικ η´ Eλλας ´ [Maritime Greece], n. 1, 15.4.1901 and n. 4, 6.5.1901. Tzoumanis, ‘H ελληνικη´ εμπoρικη’, ´ 62–63; Kordatos, Iσ τ oρ´ια τ oυ Eλληνικ oV´ , 191–92; Syros Newspaper Π ατ ρ´ις, n. 2294, 10.4.1910. Harlaftis, History, 230–31; Garcia Domingo, ‘Engine Drivers’, 252–53. Harlaftis, History, 230. Embiricos, Π ερ´ι τ ης ατ μηρ oV´ ς, 46–47. Skountis, “Nαυτικη´ Eργασ´ια”, 165–66. Journal Π ανδ ωρα ´ [Pandora], vol. 16, n. 363, 1865, 82 and vol. 19, n. 400, 1868, 157; Syros Newspaper Π ατ ρ´ις [Patris ], n. 903, 19.11.1883, Syros Newspaper Π αν o´ π η [Panopi], n. 983, 22.11.1883. The Hellenic Steam Navigation Company was a state subsidized mail and passenger company founded in 1857 with headquarters at Syros. Tzoumanis, “Hελληνικη´ εμπoρικη”, ´ 62–63.

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42. Delis, ‘Le rôle’, 184. 43. For the contributions of employees, see Law X⌃Θ’, Journal of the Greek Government (Government Gazette), no. 49, 5 September 1861. 44. Agriantoni, Oι απ αρχ šς, 101. 45. Palmer and Williams, ‘British Sailors’, 104. 46. This estimate comes from an N.A.T. report: GSA, Athens, King George Archive, Ministry of Shipping, “Συνταξεις´ Nαυτικ´o Aπoμαχικ´o Tαμε´ιo 1890”, [“Pensions – Seamens’ Pension Fund”], f. 78. 47. Papastefanaki, Eργ ασ ι´α, 259. 48. The payrolls of brig Altana did not indicate the rank of the workers, but only the name and the wages. 49. Agriantoni, Oι απ αρχ šς, 214. 50. Mansolas, Π oλιτ ειoγ ραϕικα´ι, 109. 51. Delis, Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding, 209. 52. Rediker, Between the Devil, 126–27. 53. Harlaftis, History, 180. 54. Socratis Petmezas, H ελληνικ η´ αγ ρ oτ ικ η, ´ 293–96. 55. Leda Papastefanaki, Eργ ασ ι´α, 85–86. 56. Aναϕ oρ α´ Υ δρα´ιων, 10–11. 57. The work of the firemen was much harder and painful compared to the other specialties in the engine room. Garcia Domingo, ‘Engine Drivers’, 253. 58. Tzoumanis, “H ελληνικη´ εμπoρικη”, ´ 59, Hadziiossif, “H μπšλ επ´oκ”, 335; Syros Newspaper Π αν ωπ ´ η n. 1540, 23.6.1890 Syros Newspaper Π ατ ρ´ις n. 2126, 23.12.1906, n. 2294, 10.4. 1910. 59. Tzoumanis, H ελληνικ η´ εμπ oρικ η, ´ 59–63. 60. Ibid’. 61. For inflation and rising wages during World War I, see Leda Papastefanaki, Eργ ασ ι´α, 266; Hadziiossif, ‘H μπšλ επ´oκ’, 345. 62. Very often in the ship’s accounts, the nominal currency used was the French franc which was equivalent of approximately 1.10 to 1.13 drachmas in the period under examination. 63. ϒπoυργε´ιo Eθνικης ´ Oικoνoμ´ιας, Στ ατ ισ τ ικ α´ απ oτ ελšσ ματ α. 64. In 1861, the Civil Servants Fund was also established. At the same year, a 1% tax was imposed on the net product of the mines to form capital reserves for the care of the miners and their families in case of accidents. Liakos, Eργ ασ ι´α, 377–79. 65. A small amount of cargo the crew was allowed to carry and sell for its own benefit. An additional form of income to the wages. It was a widespread practice in the Mediterranean.

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References Aggalopoulos, Christos, Aι Koινωνικα´ι Aσ ϕ αλισ ´ εις (Athens: 1936). Agriantoni, Christina, Oι απ αρχ šς τ ης εκβιoμηχ ανισ ´ ης σ τ ην Eλλαδα ´ τ oν ´ (Athens: Katarti, 2010). 19 o αιωνα Bickford-Smith, Roanden Albert Henry, Greece under King George (London: R. Bentley and Sons, 1893). Delis, Apostolos, ‘Nαυπηγηση ´ και συνεταιριστικη´ διαχε´ιριση (συμπλoιoκτησ´ια) εμπoρικων ´ ιστιoϕ´oρων στην EρμoVπoλη ´ τoν 19o αιωνα’, ´ Mν ημων ´ 31 (2010), 85–114. Delis, Apostolos, ‘From Lateen to Square-Rig: The Evolution of the GreekOwned Merchant Fleet and Its Ships in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’’, Mariner’s Mirror 100 (2014), 44–58. Delis, Apostolos, Mediterranean Wooden Shipbuilding. Economy, Technology and Institutions in Syros in the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Delis, Apostolos ,‘Le rôle du capitaine et la figure du « directeur » de navires dans la marine à voile à Syra au milieu du XIXe siècle’, in Entrepreneurs des mers. Capitaines et mariniers du XVIe au XIXe siècle, ed. by Gilbert Buti, Luca lo Basso et Olivier Raveux (Paris: Riveneuve Editions, 2017), 179–192. Doukakis, Konstantinos, ‘Θεσμικη´ εξšλιξη της κoινωνικης ´ πoλιτικης ´ στo ελληνικ´o κρατoς ´ 1821–2008’(PhD Diss., Ionian University, 2010). Embiricos, Epaminondas, Π ερ´ι τ ης ατ μηρ oV´ ς ημων ´ ναυτ ιλ´ιας (Athens: 1900). Galani, Katerina, ‘From Traditional Maritime Communities to Maritime Centres. Urbanization, Social Hierarchies and the Labour Market in the Age of Steam. The Case Study of Galaxidi, 1850s–1910s’, in Seafaring Lives in Transition. Mediterranean Maritime Labour, Communities, Shipping and the challenge of industrialization 1850s–1920, ed. by Apostolos Delis, Jordi Ibarz Anna Syndorenko and Matteo Barbano (Leiden: Brill, 2022). Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘Engine Drivers or Engineers: Ship’s Engineers in the Spanish Merchant Navy (1834–1893)’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 19 (2010), 249–70. Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘Losing Professional Identity? Deck Officers in the Spanish Merchant Marine, 1868–1914’, International Journal of Maritime History 26 (2014), 451–70. Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘The Impact of Mechanization on Spanish Maritime Labour (1834–1914): From Seamen to Sea Workers’, in Seafaring Lives in Transition. Mediterranean Maritime Labour, Communities, Shipping and the Challenge of Industrialization 1850s –1920, ed. by Apostolos Delis, Jordi Ibarz, Anna Syndorenko and Matteo Barbano (Leiden: Brill, 2022). Hadziiossif, Christos, ‘Conjunctural Crisis and Structural Problems in the Greek Merchant Marine in the 19th Century: Reaction of the State and Private Interests’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 12 (1985), 5–20.

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Hadziiossif, Christos, ‘H μπšλ επ´oκ τoυ κεϕαλα´ιoυ’, in Iσ τ oρ´ια τ ης Eλλαδας ´ ´ Oι απ αρχ šς . vol. A1, ed. by Christos Hadziiossif (Athens: τ oυ 20oV´ αιωνα. Vivliorama, 1999), 309–45. ´ Harlaftis, Gelina, Eλληνες ναυτ ικ oι´ και ναυτ ικ oι´ και ελληνικ α´ ατ μ´oπ λoια ´ oυ Π αγ κ oσ μ´ιoυ Π oλšμoυ (Athens: Aegean τ ις π αραμoν šς τ oυ Π ρ ωτ Maritime Museum, 1994). Harlaftis, Gelina, A History of Greek-Owned Shipping: The Making of an International Tramp Fleet, 1830 to the Present Day (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Harlaftis, Gelina, Creating Global Shipping. Aristotle Onasis, the Vagliano Brothers, and the Business of Shipping, c.1820–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Harlaftis, Gelina, ‘H ακμη´ τoυ ναυτεργατικoV´ κινηματoς ´ της «Eλευθšρας Eλλαδoς» ´ στην διαρκεια ´ τoυ B’ ⊓αγκoσμ´ιoυ ⊓oλšμoυ»’, in Iσ τ oρ´ια τ ης Eλλαδ ´ oς τ oυ 20oV´ αι. B’ Π αγ κ o´ σ μιoς Π o´ λεμoς, vol. C1, ed. by Christos Hadziiossif and Prokopis Papastratis (Athens: Vivliorama, 2007), 261–83. Harlaftis, Gelina and Nikos Vlassopoulos, Historical Register ‘Pontoporeia’. Sailing Ships and Steamships, 1830–1939 (Athens: Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, 2002). Harlaftis, Gelina, Helen Beneki and Manos Haritatos, Ploto, Greek Shipowners from the Late 18th Century to the Eve of WWII (Athens: ELIA/Niarchos Foundation, 2003). Harlaftis, Gelina and Katerina Papakonstantinou, eds., H ναυτ ιλ´ια τ ων Eλληνων: ´ H ακμη´ π ριν τ ην επ αν ασ ´ τ ασ η, 1700–1821 (Athens: Kedros Publications, 2013). Journal of the Greek Government, no. 16, 30 April 1863, no. 25, 17 June 1864. Kapetanakis, Panagiotis, ‘H πoντoπ´oρoς εμπoρικη´ ναυτιλ´ια των Eπτανησων ´ την επoχη´ της Bρετανικης ´ κατoχης ´ και πρoστασ´ιας και η Kεϕαλληνιακη´ υπερoχη´ (1809/15–1864). Στ´oλoς και λιμανια, ´ εμπoρεVματα ´ και διαδρoμšς, ναυτ´oτoπoι και ναυτικo´ι, επιχειρηματικ´oτητα και δ´ικτυα, κoινων´ια και πλoιoκτητικšς ελ´ιτ.’ (PhD Diss., Ionian University, 2010). Kardasis, Vasilis, Aπ o´ τ oυ ισ τ ι´oυ εις τ oν ατ μ´oν. Eλληνικ η´ Eμπ oρικ η´ Nαυτ ιλ´ια (1858–1914) (Athens: Cultural Technological Foundation ETVA, 1993). Liakos, Antonis, Eργ ασ ι´α και π oλιτ ικ η´ σ τ ην Eλλαδα ´ τ oυ Mεσ oπ oλšμoυ ´ η τ ων κ oινωνικ ων ´ θ εσ μων ´ To Διεθ ν šς Γ ραϕε´ιo Eργ ασ ι´ας και η αν αδυσ (Athens: Historical Archive of Commercial Bank of Greece, 1993). Loukos, Christos, ‘Mερικšς επισημανσεις ´ για τoυς κατoικoυς ´ της EρμoVπoλης ´ ´ γεωγραϕικη´ πρošλευση εγκατασταση ´ στo χωρo, ´ τoν 19o αιωνα: επαγγšλματα, κoινωνικšς σχšσεις’, in Σ V´ ρ oς και EρμoV´ π oλη. Συμβ oλšς σ τ ην ισ τ oρ´ια τ oυ νησ ιoV´ , 15oς –20oς αι., ed. by Christina Agriantoni and Dimitris Dimitropoulos (Athens: IHR/NHRF, 2008), 105–20.

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Loverdos, Spyridon, Eθ νικ o´ ς π λoV´ τ oς, vol. 2 (Athens: 1902). Mansola, Alexandros, Π oλιτ ειoγ ραϕικα´ι π ληρ oϕ oρ´ιαι π ερ´ι Eλλαδ ´ oς (Athens: National Printing House, 1867). Milburn, R.G., ‘The Emergence of the Engineer in the British Merchant Shipping, 1812–1863’, International Journal of Maritime History 28 (2016), 559–75. Miliarakis, Antonis, Γ εωγ ραϕ´ια Π oλιτ ικ η´ ν šα και αρχ α´ια τ oυ ν oμoV´ Aργ oλ´ιδ oς (Athens: 1888). Palmer, Sarah and David M. Williams, ‘British Sailors, 1775–1870’, in “Those Emblems of Hell”? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market. 1570– 1870, ed. by Paul C. van Royen, Jaap R. Bruijn and Jan Lucassen (St. John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997), 93–118. Papadopoulou, Alexandra, ‘Nαυτιλιακšς Eπιχειρησεις, ´ Διεθνη´ Δ´ικτυα και Θεσμo´ι στην Σπετσιωτικη ´ Eμπoρικη´ Nαυτιλ´ια, 1830–1870. Oργανωση, ´ διo´ικηση και στρατηγικη’ ´ (PhD Diss., Ionian University, 2010). Papastefanaki, Leda, Eργ ασ ι´α, Tεχ ν oλoγ ι´α και Φ V´ λo σ τ ην Eλληνικ η´ ´ 1870–1940 (HerakBιoμηχ αν´ια. H κλωσ τ o¨Uϕαντ oυργ ι´α τ oυ Π ειραια, lion: Crete University Press, 2009). Petmezas, Socratis, H ελληνικ η´ αγ ρ oτ ικ η´ oικ oν oμ´ια κατ α´ τ oν 19 o αιωνα. ´ H π εριϕερειακ η´ διασ ´ τ ασ η (Heraklion: Crete University Press, 2003) Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Sager, Eric W., Seafaring Labour. The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). Scavino, Leonardo, ‘The Mediterranean Maritime Community of Camogli: Evolution and Transformation in the Age of Transition from Sail to Steam (1850s–1910s)’ (PhD Diss., University of Genoa, 2020). Skarpetis, Zarkos and Batis Hadjigeorgiou, eds., Iσ τ oρ´ια Nαυτ ικ oV´ Aπ oμασ χ ικ oV´ Tαμε´ιoυ (Piraeus: N.A.T., 1971). Skountis, Vassilis, ‘Nαυτικη´ Eργασ´ια και ελληνικ´o κρατoς. ´ Tασεις ´ εκσυγχρoνισμoV´ στo μεσoπ´oλεμo’ (PhD Diss., Ionian University, 2018). Strong, Frederick, Greece as a Kingdom. A Statistical Description of That Country from the Arrival of King Otho, in 1833 Down to the Present Time (London: 1842). Theotokas Ioannis and Gelina Harlaftis, Leadership in World Shipping: Greek Family Firms in International Business (New York, London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009). Williams, David M., ‘Industrialization, Technological Change and the Maritime Labour Force: The British Experience 1800–1914’, Collectanea Maritima V (1991), 317–30.

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Williams, David M., ‘Crew Size in Trans-Atlantic Trades in the Mid-Nineteenth century’, in Working Men Who Got Wett, ed. by Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St. John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1980), 105–54.

CHAPTER 5

Seamen in the City. Origins, Residence and Standard of Living of Le Havre Seamen from c. 1800 to the First Wold War Nicolas Cochard

Introduction Seamen in a port city are omnipresent in the urban landscape. Yet, the historical literature has largely defined maritime populations by their marginal position in relation to the population at large. Seamen are described as people whose culture set them apart from ‘landlubbers’. Still, the modernisation of shipping under the influence of the Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed the seaman’s profession. Next to the traditional crafts of the sailing ship appeared new jobs linked to mechanical propulsion. These changes made the workforce on board more heterogeneous than before. As time went on and ships became bigger, the share of traditional jobs on deck declined in favour of new jobs linked to the machine.

N. Cochard (B) University of Normandy, Caen, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_5

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This development directly affected the port of Le Havre which, albeit of military origin, became more commercial in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century. This case study concentrates on the position of seamen in an urban environment against the backdrop of the changes in maritime professions described above. To evaluate this position, we will use a number of indicators. First of all, we will examine the geographical and social origins of seaman, then their residence in the city and finally their earnings and standard of living. All the while we will distinguish between a range of old and new maritime jobs. In France, studies on the impact of the transition from sail to steam on maritime societies are as yet non-existent. This case study is thus a novelty in French historiography.

Method Tracing seamen in a port city is a difficult exercise because of the numbers involved but there is a source that nevertheless allows us to gain a unique insight: the Inscription Maritime. It was a juridical framework for French mariners. Its registers make possible the identification of the professional characteristics of seamen at an individual level. This administrative system was created by Colbert in the 1660s with the aim of managing human maritime resources in order to obtain a sufficient supply of seamen for the Navy. All mariners in France thus were enrolled in these registers throughout their careers regardless of the branch of shipping in which they were active. First and foremost, it was a system with a military purpose. We combined information from the Inscription with data from other sources such as civil registers or censuses for a prosopographical study of the maritime population over a long period of time. This prosopographical study concerns three cohorts of seamen, born within selected periods of ten years, which allows us to trace changes across different generations. Each ‘generation’ consists of a cohort of 150 seamen, chosen according to their date of birth in the pages of the registers of the Inscription. The order or appearance of seamen in the registers has no predefined logic. It is, not chronological, not alphabetical and not by age either. In fact, the registers consisted of individual folio-pages devoted to each of those enrolled in the Inscription. When a folio page lacked sufficient space and the seaman remained in the same rank, the record continued in another register with new pages to fill. Thus, a sailor’s career could be spread across several registers, and the same applied for someone who was unemployed. The resultant sample is as follows:

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– first cohort: 150 registered seamen born between 1805 and 1815, with careers mainly beginning between 1820 and 1840, – second cohort: 150 registered seamen born between 1840 and 1850, with careers mainly beginning between 1860 and 1880, – third cohort: 150 registered seamen born between 1865 and 1875, with careers mainly beginning between 1885 and 1900. The first cohort consists of mariners who worked at sea in a period when shipping was dominated by sail and wood, while mechanical propulsion and iron hulls were still in their early stages. The second cohort had rather different characteristics because increasing numbers of seamen from Le Havre worked on ships driven by machines and with metal hulls. Yet, sailing ships were still dominant in deep-sea shipping. The last cohort is that of mariners familiar with steam and iron, while sail and wood were in decline.

The Geographical Origins of Seamen in Le Havre Seamen have played a prominent role in the process of populating Le Havre, but origins of immigrants varied over time. Mariners in the first cohort mainly came from northwest France. The coast of the Channel supplied many seamen in the city, which confirms the common idea of geographical determinism among seafarers. Furthermore, 12% of all individuals hailed from other départements in Normandy (4% from Honfleur), which shows that Le Havre really was a dynamic space already in the first third of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, a rather large part of the mariners of Le Havre came from the city itself (31%) or its immediate surroundings (6%): in total 37% from the agglomeration as a whole. In addition, 18% of the mariners originate from the rest of SeineInférieure. Altogether, 56% of all registered seamen in the first cohort came from this single département, not just the agglomeration of Le Havre itself but also ports such as Dieppe or Fécamp and, to a lesser extent, Saint-Valéry-en-Caux or Etretat (Map 5.1). Still, it would be wrong to assume that the seamen born in SeineInférieure only came from the coastal area, because the interior in fact supplied Le Havre with mariners as well. The hinterland of Le Havre was also tied to this port city. Looking along the course of the Seine, it is striking that the recruitment area of Le Havre stretched towards Paris as early as the first third of the century. Actually, three individuals in the

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Map 5.1

Plan of Le Havre, late nineteenth century

first cohort were born in the département of the Seine, two of them in the capital, and although they represented only 2% of all mariners in this cohort, they illustrate a migration from Paris to the coast. Finally, three individuals from regions in the East of France are an interesting testimony of the attraction of a great port such as Le Havre on populations living very distant from the sea. The principal region of origin of the mariners we studied was indeed Seine-Inférieure but Brittany was well represented too. This confirms the strong impact of Bretons on the history of Le Havre. Of all seamen in the first cohort, 20% were born to the west of Rennes, with 12% representing

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the département of the Côtes-du-Nord alone. Thus, two thirds of the first cohort stemmed from the region of Le Havre and the coast of Brittany. The pattern observed in the first cohort is equally visible in the second one. The northwest corner of France was still overrepresented and almost one third of the mariners came from coastal communities. Seine-Maritime was once again dominant, with 24% of the seamen born in Le Havre and 15% in neighbouring communities, or 39% for the agglomeration as a whole. This proportion is roughly the same as in the first cohort, although it should be remarked that the faubourgs, which would be annexed to the city in 1852, were more strongly represented than before. About 7% of the mariners were born in other areas of Seine-Inférieure. The pull which Le Havre exerted on the population in the surrounding Seine region and other coastal areas is clear. Altogether, 46% of the mariners in the second cohort were born in Seine-Inférieure, almost ten per cent more than in the first cohort. The recruitment area of the seamen of Le Havre in the second cohort had definitely expanded. When we turn our attention to other départements of Normandy, it once again becomes evident that the Normands had a pronounced interest in Le Havre, with 18% of all mariners in the second cohort originating from four départements other than Seine-Inférieure, namely Calvados, Manche, Eure and Orne. While the majority came from the coastal region, notably Honfleur and the agglomeration of Cherbourg, interior areas of these départements were represented as well. Individuals who hitherto hardly had a maritime connection at all apparently could also follow the call of the sea. Another similarity between the first two cohorts resides in the continued importance of Brittany as a feeder area for Le Havre. With 17% of all registered seamen, Bretons and Normands together made up 82% of the mariners in the second cohort, as compared with 69% in the first. Although these two regions remained clearly dominant, the second cohort showed a greater diversity of origins than the first. While in the first cohort only three individuals came from regions in the East of France, their number rose to fifteen in the second, or 10% of the total. In the second half of the nineteenth century, links were woven between Le Havre and regions without any direct relations with the sea or with the Norman port city. The presence of mariners from Alsace, Lorraine or Bourgogne once again shows the attraction of Le Havre. Individuals familiar with the sea were joined by men from rural communities deep in the interior.

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In the third cohort, Normandy and Brittany were again predominant, with 72% of all individuals coming from the first region (a gain of 26 points compared with the preceding cohort) and 22% from the second one (a gain of four points). The characteristics of the maritime migrations at the end of the nineteenth century were the outcome of a development of several decades and the conclusion becomes ever more clear: most of the seamen in Le Havre came from the département la SeineInférieure with 52% from the city itself. The main special feature of this last cohort resides in the weak representation of seamen originating from other départements of Normandy: only 6% of all individuals, or a decline of 12% compared with the previous cohort. However, while the Normans apparently were less attracted to the port of Le Havre, individuals from regions far from the coast such as Bourgogne, the Ardennes or Mayenne continued to immigrate. Unlike the seamen belonging to the deck crew, who mainly originated from the traditional recruiting grounds of Le Havre, namely the coastal areas of Normandy and Brittany, the mariners employed in the engine room came from a greater variety of geographical backgrounds. In the first cohort, only 10% of all mariners worked at the engines; in the second and third cohorts, following the structural changes in shipping, this share increased to 40 and 39%, respectively. Although Normandy and Brittany continued to supply the majority of mariners in this category of the work force, many non-coastal départements were represented, too, and the recruitment area became larger. The principal cause of these migration flows was the level of wages. When individuals who previously lacked any connection with the sea turned to seafaring, an economic interest surely played a role. When steam power became an integral part of the shipping industry, the recruitment of seamen in the mercantile marine and the composition of crews became significantly more diverse. A man from Le Havre could work next to a man from Alsace, Brittany, the West-Indies colonies or another country. Stoker Joseph Louisy, born in Saint Pierre in Martinique on 10 January 1847, spent 384 months, or 32 years, at sea–all the time in coastal shipping. Foreigners could be found among engine personnel already in the first cohort. John Donnedey, born in Liverpool on 17 January 1808, completed 348 months as engineer at sea according to the registers of Le Havre. Undoubtedly, the presence of foreign engineers can to a large extent be explained by the head start of Britain in industrialisation. Some foreign personnel skilled in steam nevertheless came from

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unexpected places. For example, Marco Ferro, born in Passano in Italy on 5 September 1808, completed 234 months at sea as stoker registered in Le Havre. When we take a closer look at the geographical origins of personnel, it turns out that mariners mainly came from small provincial towns or rural areas which often were quite close to industrial regions. The settling of these individuals in Le Havre thus contributed to making the population of the city more heterogenous, as maritime historian René Labruyère observed in 1920. The new arrivals were in his view a force that gave a new dynamics to maritime professions: They passively perform the instructed tasks like sacred rites. They often do not try to understand their meaning. On the contrary, the young people who have chosen a job at sea of their own free will and who are selected in an industrial elite arrive on the ships, eager to sail. They adapt themselves in no time to this new job and they show a positive attitude and an enthusiasm which can be of benefit.1

These contributions from outside are remarkable even though the mariners from Normandy and Brittany still formed the majority of the engine crews. This is a fundamental finding of our study because it shows that the seamen from places traditionally attached to sailing ships were able to adapt to modernity by accepting the difficult jobs with machines. The département Seine-Inférieure remained strongly represented over time, with 48, 46 and 63%, respectively, of all individuals in the three cohorts. Le Havre alone supplied 23, 21 and 49%, with the communities in the immediate surroundings bringing in 6, 15 and 3.30%. These numbers may be tiring, but they reveal that local mariners did have a certain interest in engine jobs. Seamen born in Brittany and Normandy outside Le Havre, however, could hardly be found in the engine room, supplying only a mere 5 and 2% over the entire period. This inquiry into the places of birth allows us to identify several key elements for the understanding of the composition of the maritime population in Le Havre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While northern Brittany and the départements of Normandy were the primary recruiting grounds, they were by no means the only areas of origin. The maritime population became progressively more cosmopolitan, which nuances the views of contemporary observers who assumed a geographical or social logic in

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the call of the sea: not all sailors of Le Havre in the nineteenth century grew up near the sea in a seamen’s family. Thus emerges a more complex definition of the seaman than for example can be found in this mémoire from naval authorities in 1794– 1795: One needs men born in maritime cities. They need to inhale sea air from a early age, play so to say with the maritime element in the cradle. A man born on the edge of the sea is worth twice as much.2

Even though a process of professional diversification was well underway by the beginning of the twentieth century, there was still a persistent idea that competence at sea was partly geographically determined, as witnessed by this statement from historian Jacques Captier: Reviving the Inscription Maritime by enrolling factory workers? Don’t count on it. Attracting them to the fleet voluntarily, alright then, but do not think that you can force them. Soon enough you will find that they lack the feeling for the sea. They will be repelled by the maritime service and they will be afraid to be away from home. Then, the superiority of the seaman by profession will again unmistakably become clear.3

For Le Havre, the recruitment mainly took place north of a line between this city and Brest, but the modernisation of shipping and the widening of the maritime professions strongly contributed to changes in the recruitment areas. Let us now examine how and to what extent mariners became rooted in the local urban environment.

The Rootedness of Mariners in the Local Urban Environment For anyone who wants to inquire how a population fits into a particular environment, it is vital to know where exactly people lived. In the following, we will try to visualise the footprint of the mariners in the urban space and to determine whether they tended to live in the same neighbourhood. Although there are some missing data, most of the registers of the Inscription Maritime provide the addresses of mariners, albeit often without a house number. These data allow us to find the location

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of the individuals and to reconstruct their mobility in different periods of their lives, as each rank has a register and each register an address. The vast majority of the mariners we have traced were residents of Le Havre, and this is the more true if one includes those with an address in the neighbouring communities. Those men appear in the category ‘région du Havre’. Thus, even though the mariners came from very diverse origins, they nevertheless easily settled in Le Havre for evident practical reasons, which in turn facilitated their integration in the urban society. The pecentage of those domiciled in the city remained more or less stable at 80% in all three cohorts. If there was residential mobility, it essentially took place within the city itself. Changes of residence thus remained frequent but the distance between an old and a new address was relatively short. However, this general observation can be refined in several respects. For example, the second cohort differed from the other two in the sense that mariners who had retired from the sea more frequently lived in other départements than in the period when they still worked in the shipping industry. Half of these départements bordered on Seine-Inférieure, the others were in Brittany, in the north or near the Garonne. It were mainly seamen in deep-sea shipping who lived in Le Havre to be close to the place of embarkation but at the end of their career returned to their region of origin. With some exaggeration, one might say that many seamen came to the port city to sail a few years in deep-sea shipping and earn a higher salary. One of the characteristics of deep-sea shipping was in the duration of the voyages, alternated with periods on shore which were often sufficient to spend some time in the region of origin. But it was not always like that. Léopold Doutreleau, for example, born on 18 March 1844, after his retirement went to live far from Le Havre, namely in Nouméa, New Caledonia. It was there that he ended his career and died, although he remained registered in Le Havre while being engaged in coastal shipping in New Caledonia. In the first cohort, we find the case of Lud]wig Luhrs from Denmark born on 28 February 1804, who sailed in the fisheries and then in deep-sea shipping until about 1830, next married in Le Havre with a Havraise on 18 July 1833 and died on 13 March 1856, in Honolulu, where to he had moved shortly before, as a pilot. Georges Verrat, captain in deep-sea shipping, born in Rouen on 24 November 1850, died on 10 May 1900 in Saïgon where he worked as a pilot.4 As for residences, Calvados (with many people from Honfleur) and Eure were close to Le Havre and therefore housed a large number of

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mariners. The départements along the Channel and the Atlantic Coast such as those of Brittany, Normandy, the Vendée or Aquitaine were home to numerous sailors registered in Le Havre, too. A few lived in départements further away such as the Yonne, the Var, the Seine-et-Marne, the Indre-et-Loire, the Cher or the Aube. Over the whole period, 48.20% of the retired seamen resident in a département other than Seine-Inférieure were born in that same département, which shows an enduring attachment to their region of origin. These mariners who did not have a home in Le Havre formed the usual clientele of renters of furnished rooms. When we take a closer look at the département of Seine-Inférieure, we find that the residences of seamen were predominantly urban. More than 90.00% of them lived in cities, mostly middle-sized or big ones such as Rouen or Dieppe. Remember that the reference date for tracing these residences is the moment at which a seaman retired from service at sea, because from then on he was more ‘fixed’ in the urban environment, at least in the records. The data on the three cohorts also allow us to observe continuity or change in the habitat of seamen within Le Havre. During the whole period, mariners were mostly concentrated in the southern part of the city, especially near the oldest harbour basins. The quartier Saint-François remained by far the most densely populated neightbourhood and the maritime population has left a strong imprint on it. The concentration was most pronounced for the first cohort. In the other two cohorts, a growing number of seamen could also be found in the northern half of the city. Le Havre thus definitely knew a quartier de marins, corresponding with the neighbourhoods of Notre-Dame and Saint-François. There were even what we might call ‘sailors’ streets’ such as the quai Lamblardie and the rues Faidherbe or Dauphine in the quartier Saint-François, where we find five or six individuals in each cohort. A number of seamen active in merchant shipping or the fisheries lived south of the harbour, in the quartier de Leure, which in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced strong growth thanks to the layout of new infrastructural facilities for packet boats and industries. The mariners were thus more or less grouped in a semi-concentric pattern in the urban space. Nevertheless, that is not enough to speak of a kind of maritime community. The fact that fishermen and seamen engaged in merchant shipping lived in the same streets demonstrates that mariners, once they were established on land, in no way adhered to a socio-spatial

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segregation by type of shipping. Although mariners were concentrated in the southern part of the city, they left their imprint on Le Havre as a whole. This is illustrated in the following three maps. While the bulk of the mariners at the end of the nineteenth century lived in the southern part of the city (Map 5.2), this was less true for those employed on transatlantic packet boats (Map 5.3). Engine room personnel were present in the south of Le Havre, but also in other parts of the city (Map 5.4). From this analysis of residences of seamen in Le Havre, we can infer an essential characteristic of the evolution of the maritime population of this port city. For most of the professional categories, including those recently added to the maritime world, the pattern of residences was by and large the same. Despite the diversity of maritime professions, there was a real cohesion in the way they settled in the urban environment. Even if it is not possible to speak of the presence of a ‘maritime community’ (which requires the existence of shared values, ways of life and a degree of mutual

Map 5.2 Residences in Le Havre of seamen in the third cohort (green dots: fishermen, red dots: sailors)

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Map 5.3 Residences in Le Havre of seamen employed on transatlantic packet boats, early twentieth century (red dots)

solidarity), mariners of different kinds nevertheless lived near each other and frequented the same spaces.

Wages and Standards of Living Thanks to the rôles des bâtiments de commerce—documents that indicate in detail the crew on board, with their duties and salaries—of the maritime quartier of Le Havre we can get a quite exact picture of what seamen living in Le Havre actually earned, differentiated by deck and engine personnel.5 We will first examine the wages of crews in the merchant marine, using the muster rolls of ships engaged in long-distance shipping. We will then examine the evolution of earnings over time, against the background of mechanisation, ‘a slow, progressive transformation, which did not become manifest itself until the last quarter of the century’.6 Le Havre represents a good laboratory to study changes in the shipping industry. While sails and wood still figured prominently in the port landscape in 1830, metal

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Map 5.4 Residences in Le Havre of engine room personnel, early twentieth century (red dots: first generation, greendots: second generation, blue dots: third generation)

imposed itself from the 1880s onwards and sails gradually gave way to the thick smoke produced by the coal-fired steam engines. The following six tables show the wages of crew members on ships in three different periods.7 Table 5.1 illustrates the hierarchy of wages on board a typical sailing ship in the merchant navy in the 1830s. A captain earned 3.3 times as much as a sailor and a sailor 1.8 times as much as a cabin boy. Several aspects are important to take into account when interpreting these data. The wages may seem low relative to the amount of days and hours worked, but it should be kept in mind that mariners received food and lodging during the voyage and that the total rewards were thus larger. This applied all the more for unmarried men, who sometimes rented a furnished room during their stay on land, so avoiding paying rent while at sea. Also note that the cook and the carpenter earned more than the sailors, which gives an idea of the importance of their roles on board.

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Table 5.1 Monthly wages of crew members of the Hirondelle in 1834 (in francs)

Function Captain Mate Boatswain Cook Carpenter Able seaman Cabin boy

Monthly wage 150 120 70 70 65 45 25

Source Archives Départementales de Seine-Maritime (AD 76), 6P6 77: rôles des bâtiments de commerce de l’année 1835. Armement du 11 juillet 1834 au 15 janvier 1835. Rôle 83 247. Three-masted l’Hirondelle, built in 1823 in Le Havre, was a decked ship of 236 tons, belonging to Mrs Aymes frères, armed in Le Havre by Mrs Perquez & fils under the command of Captain Lescan. Armed for the long course, going to Buenos Ayres. Armament from 11 July 1834 to 15 January 1835. 12 sailors on board

The second muster roll concerns another sailing ship, this time from 1873 (see Table 5.2). This one allows us to visualise the salaries of the different categories of seamen for an entire period of 353 days. The monthly earnings of the captain amounted to about 120 francs as against 45 for an able seaman and the other amounts are more or less the same as those in the previous muster roll. The advances corresponded to about 20.00% of the salaries. They were mainly meant to cover the expenses related to the departure or needed for the support of families of seamen during their absence at sea. Considering the fact that captain earned 2.8 times as much as an able seaman and an able seaman 2.2 times as much as a cabin boy, the gap between the different ranks was slightly reduced compared to the muster roll of the 1830s. Let us now look at the branch of activity that undoubtedly had the biggest impact on the history of Le Havre until the middle of the twentieth century: the transatlantic transport of passengers on steamships. We have data on the wages of the crews of packet boats of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT). Did work on board these ocean liners, which contributed so much to the ‘golden age’ of maritime earnings in Le Havre, pay better than other branches of long-distance shipping? It should be noted that the salaries were revised upwards in the beginning of the twentieth century under the impulse of social movements led

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Table 5.2 Wages of crew members of the Bléville in 1873 (in francs)

SEAMEN IN THE CITY. ORIGINS, RESIDENCE …

Function Captain Mate Boatswain Cook Carpenter Able seaman Ordinary seaman Cabin boy

Total wage 1440 1344 864 671.50 768 528 480 240

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Advance on wage 300 420 180 170 160 110 100 50

Source AD 76, 6P6 367: rôles des bâtiments de commerce de l’année 1873. Armement du 1er octobre 1873 au 18 septembre 1874. Three-masted Bléville was built at Grangemouth, a ship of 668 tons belonging to Perquez et fils, armed in Le Havre by the owners and commanded by Le Buffe. Armament from 1 October 1873 to 18 September 1874. Departmental Archives of SeineMaritime

by mariners who were concerned with the deterioration of their conditions. The seamen of the big companies then received very decent wages, especially since they had an almost tenured position in the company. In fact, regular employment was a means used by companies to retain relatively scarce personnel. This even went so far that in the population census of Le Havre of 1911, one sometimes finds in the column ‘employer’ the name of a company, although a seaman in the Inscription maritime theoretically remained permanently at the disposal of the state, which ‘permitted’ employment in civil navigation outside the periods of service in the national navy. The companies benefitted from employing personnel accustomed to working on board steamships, especially in the engine room. Table 5.3 by the way also includes personnel employed in the catering services on board packet boats, as they were by this time incorporated in the Inscription maritime as well. The Table 5.3 shows that the captain earned five times as much as the able seamen. The gap is wider than in the age of sail. By now, the officers of the great steamship companies clearly had become a maritime elite. They were responsible for much more expensive ships and larger crews than before—not to mention the passengers. Commanding a big transatlantic packet boat was a prestigious job, a crowning achievement of a brilliant career.

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Table 5.3 Monthly wages of crew members of the steamer Guatemala in 1912 (in francs)

Function Captain Mate Second mate Boatswain Able seaman Ordinary seaman Cabin boy Chief engineer Engineer Stoker Trimmer Greaser Baker Steward Boy Assistant cook Cook

Monthly wage 400 300 150 132.50 80 50 35 400 150 110 à 132 80 110 à 132 25 150 60 40 125

Source AD 76, 6P6 627: Steam ship Guatemala registered in Le Havre going to New Orleans. Steamer of the CGT built in Rouen in 1908, belonging and armed by the CGT, with Captain Rinet for the long course. Armament from 14 April 1911 to 20 May 1912

Wages had to correspond with ranks. Able seamen, in their turn, received 2.2 times as much as cabin boys, the same gap as in the previous muster rolls. However, the arrival of engine crews on board led to a revision of the payroll. On the Guatemala, the chief engineer was paid at a level similar to that of the captain, even though he did not bear responsibility for the ship. This underlines the importance of this specialist who was now indispensable for the smooth running of the vessel. Thanks to his advanced know-how, he also could help keeping the costs of propulsion under control. It is remarkable, too, that trimmers who handled coal, the least qualified of the engine personnel, received exactly the same wages as able seamen, who were skilled workers. To explain this rather considerable payment, the arduousness of the task must surely be kept in mind. The hierarchy of wages of engine crew was largely modelled on that of the deck crew. A trimmer earned one fifth what a chief engineer earned. Firemen, for making sure coal was burned efficiently, could be paid as well (or almost as well) as boatswains.

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Like deck personnel, engine room crews had their staff, too. Next to the chief engineer, packet boats of the CGT at the end of the nineteenth century also had a second and a third one, who earned 350, 180 and 125 francs a month, respectively. The engineers, or bouchons gras, commanded the greasers and, indirectly, the firemen and trimmers. Regarding engine crews, the École d’apprentissage de garçons in Le Havre had a section for the training of engineers for the navy from 1887 onwards.8 This École des Apprentis Mécaniciens pour la Marine was founded at the initiative of the Chamber of Commerce jointly with the Ministère du Commerce, the city of Le Havre and a number of shipping companies.. Three-year vocational training prepared the majority of pupils for functions of officiermécanicien de la Marine. The school was free of charge and open for all boys between 15 and 17 year of age at 1 October of the current year, but the lack of funds limited the number of recruits to 20 pupils in 1889 and 50 in 1914. To compare long-distance shipping and coastal shipping, we will examine two muster rolls from the beginning and from the end of the period studied here. Before we do so, we present data borrowed from the work by Jean Randier, which gives an overall picture of wages of seamen employed in the French merchant marine in international coastal shipping and long-distance steam navigation between the middle of the 1870s and the early 1880s, when steam navigation clearly asserted itself (Table 5.4). These data do not allow measuring, at a national scale, the gaps in wages between merchant shipping in European waters and in the Atlantic nor the gaps between deck crews, engine room personnel and catering personnel. Wages in long-distance shipping were evidently higher, with the exception of those of ordinary seamen. Let us now take a look at examples of coastal shipping from Le Havre (Table 5.5). Generally speaking, wages of mariners in coastal shipping in 1844 were only about a third of wages paid to seamen in long-distance shipping. This applied both to deck crews and engine room personnel. Please note that the pilot’s wage is higher than the captain’s. The pilot’s function is the most important for cabotage. This is coastal navigation, very dangerous, and the pilot was the best expert to navigate. We also need to take into account that the captain enjoyed additional sources of income in addition to the monthly wage. As mentioned before, he, being responsible for the safeguarding of precious goods, was paid the chapeau—the equivalent to 1% of the gross freight on liners and 4% on sailing ships over 500 tons.

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Table 5.4 Monthly wages of crews of international coastal shipping and longdistance steam navigation in France in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (in francs) Function

Monthly wage in international coastal shipping 1875

Captain Mate Boatswain Chief engineer Able seaman Ordinary seaman Cabin boy Cook Stoker Trimmer Steward

190 170 90 240 55 45 – 70 60 – –

Monthly wage in long-distance steam navigation 1881 250 200 100 350 80 30 25 100 95 70 70

Source Randier, Histoire de la marine marchande française, 410

Table 5.5 Monthly wages of crew members of the steamer Neptune in 1844 (in francs)

Function Captain Pilot Boatswain Able seaman Ordinary seaman Cabin boy Engineer Stoker

Monthly wage 100 150 50 45 40 20 100 50

Source AD 76, 6P6 117: rôles des bâtiments de commerce de l’année 1844. Steam ship Neptune of 1817 tons, built in 1844 in Paris and armed in Le Havre going to cabotage, 24 sailors embarked

Captains in coastal shipping, officially called maîtres au cabotage, did not enjoy an equally prestigious status as those in long-distance shipping, and while the latter ones were permitted to command a vessel in coastal shipping, the reverse was not possible. According to this first muster roll from coastal shipping, the captain earned 2.2 times as much as an able seaman, who in turn earned 2.25 times as much as a cabin boy. These

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Table 5.6 Wages of the crew of the steamer Finistère in 1898 (in francs)

SEAMEN IN THE CITY. ORIGINS, RESIDENCE …

Function Captain Mate Boatswain Able seaman Able seaman Able seaman Able seaman Able seaman Cabin boy Engineer Stoker Stoker Stoker Stoker Stoker Able seaman Able seaman Stoker Stoker

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Monthly wage

Total amount earned during voyage

100 100 65 45 45 45 45 45 20 150 80 80 80 80 80 45 45 80 80

1083.33 1083.33 704.17 487.50 487.50 48 37.50 487.50 216.67 1.625 866.67 866.67 554.67 792 866.67 450 352.50 144 178.67

Source AD 76, 6P6 598: The steamer Finistère registered at Le Havre 273 879, armed between 18 June 1897 and 17 June 1898. Built in 1875 in Dundee, 218 tons, 400 horsepower engine belonging to the Compagnie maritime des paquebots du Finistère and armed by it, under the command of Captain Le Dugue

were the same proportions found in deep-sea shipping. As in deep-sea shipping, the specialists in the engine room were better paid than crew members on deck. The second case concerns a muster roll from a steamship in the coastal trade in 1898. As can be seen in Table 5.6, this roll contains the monthly wages for each crew member. The column on the right shows the total amount earned during the period of employment. Not all crew members who enrolled stayed on board for the duration of the voyage. It could happen, for example, that a seaman left the ship prematurely because of an accident. Maxime Douillard remarked that when a seaman disembarked or died during a voyage, other crew members sometimes had to take over his work load without any financial compensation.9

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The muster roll of the Finistère, which dates from more than 50 years later than that of the Neptune, illustrates some new elements in the evolution of wages. While the wages of deck personnel remained more or less stable, those of the engine room crew distinctly increased. On the Neptune, the stokers earned 11% more than the able seaman. On the Finistère the difference was 77%! Here we encounter an essential aspect for the understanding of our subject. As wages of engine room personnel clearly rose above those of deck crew members, particularly in long-distance shipping, this category of mariner turned into a ‘maritime aristocracy’. In the age of mechanisation, the world of the seamen became more and more heterogeneous. A marked hierarchy emerged between deck and engine room crews and within each of those categories.. This evolution naturally also affected the living conditions of mariners ashore.

Standards of Living of Mariners In order to assess the relative financial and material position of mariners and their socio-economic status in Le Havre, let us now compare the wages of mariners and those of other groups of workers. First of all, it should be noted that for many professions the study of wages is not an easy matter, as conditions within the same profession sometimes differed markedly. Moreover, wages of an individual could fluctuate over time depending on the relation between supply and demand of workers and on the outcome of negotiations with employers. First of all, we examine the evaluation of wages of mariners in comparison with those of workers in professions ashore and with the evolution of basic food prices. Following Jean Legoy, who has published on the labouring population of Le Havre between 1800 and 1914, we use 1872 as a base year for the reference groups. The index of prices of basic foodstuffs is composed of the prices of bread, meat, cider, butter, eggs and potatoes (Tables 5.7 and 5.8). Generally speaking, both wages of seamen and wages of workers ashore increased after about 1840 and more rapidly so than the prices of basic foodstuffs. However, there were exceptions, as the reverse trend of wages of shipwrights and caulkers show. These were crafts that declined as iron hulls became common in ship construction. Wages of seamen increased not as steadily as those of workers ashore. It was not until the turn of the twentieth century that mariners saw a

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Table 5.7 Indices of food prices and monthly wages of various groups of male workers in Le Havre, 1830–1910 (1872 = 100)

1830 1840 1848 1860 1872 1882 1894 1900 1910

Prices of basic foodstuffs

Unskilled workers, day labourers

Diggers

Construction workers

Shipwrights and caulkers

Metalworkers, fitters, blacksmiths

71 69 73 81 100 105 110 111 129

69 69 77 87 100 115 115 135 135

60 60 75 87 100 112 106 95 108

55 65 60 80 100 100 120 130 130

57 62 71 86 100 93 86 86 93

55 64 73 91 100 109 127 127 136

Source Legoy, Le peuple du Havre et son histoire, 258

Table 5.8 Indices of wages of able seamen and stokers in France, 1840–1910 (1875 = 100) Able seaman in deep-sea shipping 1840 1875 1900 1910

100 100 122 145

Able seaman in coastal shipping 90 100 110 130

Stoker in deep-sea shipping – 100 100 138

Stoker in coastal shipping 82 100 125 145

Source Cochard, Les marins du Havre, 128

substantial rise in earnings. In the early 1890s, a worker at the state railways earned 3.80 francs a day, a supervisor 5.00 francs, a worker in a streetcar company 2.50 francs, a salesperson in a store 4.00 francs and a household servant 2.30 francs. At the same time, an able seaman in coastal shipping earned about 2.00 francs a day while an able seaman in deep-sea shipping could expect a daily wage of 2.60 francs. It should be kept in mind that these were net wages. Apart from his wages in money, a seaman received board and lodging. To give some idea of the value of this remuneration in kind: the CGT paid its employees an allowance of 1.50 a day when they were ashore. Able seamen in coastal shipping thus earned in fact 3.50 francs a day and

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those in deep-sea shipping 4.10 francs, which is more or less in line with wages of skilled workers ashore. At the end of the nineteenth century, a switchman at the railways, for example, earned exactly 4.10 francs a day, too. In 1910, a skilled worker at the tobacco factory in the quartier SaintFrançois in Le Havre earned 5.60 francs a day, a worker in a streetcar company 3.00 francs, a charcoal burner 4.20 francs, a metal worker 4.70 francs and a salesperson in a store 5.20 francs. At the same time, an able seaman on the steamer Guatemala earned 2.60 francs net, a stoker 3.60 francs and an engineer 5.00 francs. What was the purchasing power of the wages of different groups? Table 5.9 shows the current prices in francs of the basic foodstuffs in Le Havre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1840, a kilogramme of bread represented 0.88% of the monthly wage of an able seamen in long-distance shipping and 0.62% of that of a stoker. A litre of milk represented 0.26% of the wages of the former as against 0.15% of those of the latter. By way of comparison, for a worker in the tobacco factory in Le Havre expenditures on these items represented 0.68 and 0.20% of his wages. However, the growing gap between the wages of deck personnel and engine room crews by the turn of the twentieth century had a clear impact on the purchasing power of these groups. In 1910, an able seaman in long-distance shipping spent 0.50% of his monthly earnings on the purchase of a kilogramme of bread and 0.25% on that of a litre of milk, while a stoker needed only 0.36 and 0.18%, respectively, to buy the same Table 5.9 Prices of basic foodstuffs in Le Havre, 1830–1910 (in francs)

Bread (1 kg) Meat (1 kg) Cider (1 litre) Butter (1 pound) Eggs (1 dozen) Milk (1 litre) Potatoes (1 kg) Total

1830

1840

1848

1860

1872

1882

1894

1900

1910

0.40 0.90 0.10 0.90 0.65 0.12 0.07 3.14

0.40 0.90 0.10 0.90 0.65 0.2 0.06 3.03

0.43 0.95 0.09 0.90 0.65 0.12 0.06 3.20

0.39 1.02 0.06 1.05 0.85 0.14 0.05 3.56

0.40 1.12 0.10 1.25 1.29 0.16 0.08 4.40

0.34 1.40 0.07 1.24 1.35 0.16 0.08 4.64

0.30 1.44 0.8 1.35 1.25 0.20 0.11 4.83

0.33 1.45 0.17 1.39 1.20 0.20 0.15 4.89

0.40 1.66 0.17 1.55 1.54 0.20 0.15 5.67

Source Legoy, Le peuple du Havre, 258

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products. For a worker in the tobacco factory, these items represented 0.33 and 0.17% of his monthly income. The purchasing power of mariners nevertheless generally improved. This was especially true for engine room personnel. While the real incomes of deck crews remained more or less the same as those of workers on shore, people operating the engines on board enjoyed a rise in their standard of living which put them on a par with the highest paid skilled workers on land. We should also keep in mind that the prices of bread and milk are not the only ones to take into account, given the importance of drinking in the social life of manual labourers. In the Bar de la Banque in Le Havre in the early twentieth century, a glass of beer or a glass of wine cost 0.50 francs, an absinth 0.20 francs and an apéritif 0.30 francs.10 Surely, not all seamen were equal at the zinc! An inquiry into wages and standards of living remains absolutely essential whatever socio-professional group one studies. Without playing down the misery among some maritime populations, especially fishermen, the evidence presented here nonetheless shows that, as the number of functions on board increased, the material and financial conditions among mariners became more diverse, too. There was more heterogeneity than before. Generally speaking, jobs linked to the operation of engines were better paid than those on deck, which corresponded with the decline in professional status and the diminishing role on board of the latter. As conditions starkly differed depending on the position on board, it is completely inaccurate to talk about mariners as a homogeneous group. The ‘misery’ often attributed to mariners thus did not affect all maritime professions, nor all individuals, nor every period of life of a seaman. Sailors could sometimes be poor, but this also applied to other socio-professional groups with a comparable status. We end with a telling example: at a distribution of bread in Le Havre in January 1847, 89 (or 4.90%) of all recipients were seamen. This was a proportion comparable to that of craftsmen such as shoemakers: 4.50%. By contrast, day labourers made up 46.3% of the total.11

Conclusion This essay has examined the impact of the rise of new jobs in the shipping industry on the maritime population of the port city of Le Havre. This transformation had two important consequences. First, the social and geographical origins of mariners became considerably broader than

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before. By the turn of the twentieth century, seamen in Le Havre can to a lesser extent be characterised as ‘locals with maritime roots’ than in around 1800. This is a crucial fact to keep in mind to understand why the borders between seamen and other urban workers in the course of time became more porous. The fact is that mariners, workers and finally all the labourers lived together in the modern port city. The maritime population in this respect experienced the same dynamics as the urban labouring population as a whole. Second, as the gamut of maritime professions widened, the wages and other material conditions of seamen became more heterogeneous, too. A hierarchy emerged in which seamen working on deck clearly fell behind engine room crews, who became indispensable in the transforming shipping industry. The case of the great commercial port of Le Havre between 1800 and the First World War thus shows a striking change in the identity of maritime workers, who became more like other workers, in their origins and residential patterns as well as in their standards of living.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

Labruyère, Notre marine marchande, 21–22. Mollat, L’Europe et la mer, 221. Captier, Etude historique 346. Personal data bases, see explanation in Cochard, Les marins du Havre. References to these sources can be found below the tables. Masson, La mort et les marins, 271. Note: the tables show seamen with the same rank and wages on the same line. The number of lines thus does not correspond with the size of the crews. Moreover, the salaries do not take into account possible shares in cargoes which, admittedly, rarely involved ordinary crew members. The shipowner in this way rewarded the captain in order to encourage him to take care of the cargo; this was called the chapeau, which normally amounted to 1.00% of the gross freight rate on packet boats and 4.00% on sailing ships of more than 500 tons. Rougier-Pintiaux, ‘L’Ecole d’apprentissage du Havre’. Douillard, Loyers des gens de mer (Nantes: Imprimerie Bourgeois, 1897), 80. Nourrisson, Alcoolisme et anti-alcoolisme en France, 255. Archives Communales du Havre (ensuite AC Le Havre), F4 , carton 5: subsistances.

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References Captier, Jacques, Etude historique et économique sur l’Inscription Maritime (Paris : Girard et Brière, 1907). Cochard, Nicolas, Les marins du Havre (Rennes: PUR, 2016). Douillard, Maxime, Les loyers des gens de mer (Nantes: Imprimerie Bourgeois, 1897). Labruyère, René, Notre marine marchande pendant la guerre (Paris: Payot et Cie, 1920). Legoy, Jean, Le peuple du Havre et son histoire, du négoce à l’industrie, 1800– 1914 : la vie politique et sociale (Saint-Étienne du Rouvray: EDIP, 1982). Masson, Philippe, La mort et les marins (Grenoble, Glénat, 1997). Mollat, Michel, L’Europe et la mer (Paris : Seuil, 1993). Nourrisson, Didier, Alcoolisme et anti-alcoolisme en France sous la Troisième République. L’exemple de la Seine-Inférieure (Phd. Diss., Université de Caen, 1986). Randier, Jean, Histoire de la marine marchande française, des premiers vapeurs à nos jours (Paris, Éditions Maritimes et d’Outre-Mer, 1980). Rougier-Pintiaux, P., ‘L’Ecole d’apprentissage du Havre: une tentative d’éducation populaire’, Revue française de sociologie 24 (1983), 653-78.

CHAPTER 6

Reading Shipboard Space: The Plans of Ships Serving the Netherlands East Indies, 1850–1914 Richard Guy

Introduction1 In 1874 the Netherlands government conducted an inquiry into the state of Dutch shipping. Theunis Scholl, director of the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Java (SMJ), offered the inquiry an opinion as to why the rival Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland (SMN) had failed to make money: the SMN had fatally misjudged the East Indies market. ‘The first ships of the Nederland were built more for transatlantic navigation. They are big, beautiful steamships but not suitable for the Indies’.2 Aside from their excessive cargo capacity, they were wrong in style and temperament: ‘he who goes to the Indies becomes Indian, and he who comes back is Indian. Those people are used to sailing with a saloon in the middle and the cabins on either side’.3

R. Guy (B) Ithaca, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_6

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Scholl’s terse opinion engaged several lively debates that were then taking place in the shipping industries in the Netherlands. First, the rapid growth in size, comfort, and conspicuous luxury of transatlantic liners generated great publicity for ocean travel and shaped consumer expectations. But the transatlantic market was different from that which linked the Netherlands with its Indies colonies: it was shaped by the desires of a growing class of millionaire American industrialists, who traveled to Europe for pleasure and education, and who demanded opulence and exclusivity suitable to their new status.4 In contrast, most passengers on the Netherlands Indies lines were government employees on limited budgets, traveling for work rather than pleasure: both the passengers and the shipping lines had to prioritize low costs over luxury.5 His second point, that the Indies itself infected passengers with a particular aesthetic inertia, linked a colonial discourse of Oriental lassitude to a particular spatial arrangement: cabins flanking a saloon, or dining room.6 This arrangement, which Scholl’s own ships used, was self-consciously oldfashioned by 1874: it harked back to sailing ships, which had connected the Netherlands with its colonies via the Cape of Good Hope since the 1820s.7 But other companies on the Indies routes were already experimenting with other arrangements and in the decades that followed these experiments would lead to a new language of ship design and new modes of travel. The period 1850–1914 saw a revolution in shipping technologies. The adoption of steel construction led both to an unprecedented increase in ship size and a new era in ship plans, in which spaces and functions were formalized at the draftsman’s table and welded into the ship’s frame, so that for the first time, butchers, bakers, and wet-nurses were assigned explicit working and living spaces aboard. Steam power added to the complexity of shipboard society, through a proliferation of new crew positions and functions. At the same time, sweeping social and economic changes ashore, combined with a radical reduction in the lengths and uncertainties of oceanic voyages, created new kinds of passengers for the East Indies routes: the colonial officers and soldiers who dominated the passenger lists in 1850 were joined by families of migrants, tourists, and pilgrims. The result was a regimen of accelerating change in customer expectations and in ship size and complexity, which continually challenged designers to revise their fleets. In 1850 a passenger ship could potentially serve for 30 years or more. In 1902 a freight director for the SMN observed that, ‘given the traveling public’s constantly increasing

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need for speed, comfort and luxury, a mail ship cannot possibly serve adequately for 19 years’. At the time most SMN ships served for 15.8 By then, Scholl’s company had been absorbed into the SMN, and both his own ships and the ‘transatlantic’ style steamers he had criticized had been refitted, then downgraded to the status of slow bulk freighters, and finally replaced with larger, faster, more complex vessels.9 This chapter traces the evolution of the design language referred to earlier through an examination of spatial organization on ships that carried passengers, troops, and cargo between the Netherlands and its East Indies colonies from 1850 to 1914, using the surviving ship plans of the three Netherlands-owned companies that dominated these routes: the SMN, Rotterdamsche Lloyd (RL), and Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (KPM). These companies formed a cartel that monopolized Netherlands government contracts and carried the majority of passengers to destinations in the Netherlands East Indies.10 It relates evolutions in deck plans to changes in the social organization and roles of shipboard workers and passengers through the period, showing how ship architects and interior designers experimented with space to communicate and reinforce new social relations and roles.11

Theoretical Orientation The analysis of the plans is informed by the works of the architectural theorists Thomas Markus, Bill Hillier, and Julienne Hanson, and the philosopher Michel de Certeau, who have each discussed ways in which buildings serve as non-discursive social actors, shaping the everyday life of their occupants to ‘canalize’ their habits into particular power-affirming patterns, rendering some individuals more visible than others or affording them different degrees of access and availability to others.12 Under the guise of a shipshape ‘functionalism’, the plans show a strict regimentation of all the ships’ occupants into defined groups with differential affordances and expectations, from the right to occupy certain parts of the vessel to dining hours to availability of lifeboats.13 Spatial organization was complemented by a system of finishes and furnishing, in which the highest-status spaces (public gathering rooms in first class) received wood paneling, carpets, parquetry, and complex moldings, while lowerstatus spaces (cabins) were painted simply, with wooden floors, and the lowest-status (crew accommodation) were bare metal. Using these signs, a passenger could see which parts of the ship were intended for them

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and where they were trespassing. The chapter also uses Yoko Arisaka’s explication of Heidegger’s ‘workroom’ theory, which addresses the ways people, spaces, and equipment are brought together to associate certain shared spaces with special functions, rules, social relations, and activities, rendering them both possible and ‘natural’.14 The saloon was one such workroom: for the stewards, it formed a working unit with the kitchen, pantries, and glass-storerooms, as the site where the ritual and equipment of mealtimes was presented. For passengers that ritual was hemmed about with a complex and changing set of rules: beginning as a general socializing and resting space, the saloon was transformed by 1889 into a specialized location used only for dining and alcohol-serving, with expectations for formal behavior and dress from passengers and divided meal sittings, the higher-class passengers eating later than lower.15

1850–1871: The Cape and the Overland Route In 1850, passengers faced a choice between two routes to the Indies: they could sail via the Cape of Good Hope or take the faster, more expensive ‘overland’ route, by any steamship through the Mediterranean, by coach across the Egyptian desert, and then by British Peninsular and Oriental (P&O) steamship to Singapore, with a final Dutch naval ferry service to Batavia.16 The sailing route took 80–120 days, depending on the weather, but did not require complex connections and was considered healthier. The ships that served this route provided the prototype for Scholl’s description. The sailing clipper Kosmopoliet (in service between 1855 and 1873, 750 tons, Fig. 6.1) was a typical example. Society aboard these vessels was divided socially and spatially into three groups: the regular sailors, who were housed in dormitories of bunks in the forepeak and in a deckhouse; any soldiers being transported to the colony, who were carried below decks, in the hold; and the cabin passengers, ships’ officers and military officers, who were housed together aft, under the quarterdeck.17 Passengers were in general afforded the status of guests of the officers: they were instructed not to interfere with the crew or rigging, but were otherwise free to wander the upper deck and the communal spaces they shared with the officers under the quarterdeck. The Kosmopoliet had 12 double passenger cabins, organized into a single class together with the captain, sailing officers, ship’s doctor, and steward. The captain alone had a larger cabin, partly to provide space for examining the charts.

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Passengers and officers on these ships formed a single social unit with a shared schedule, meals—taken around a shared, long table, a shared bathroom, and communal entertainments, including music and occasional masquerade parties.18 Their meals were served by a single steward and their communal spaces were cleaned by junior crewmen, just as on non-passenger-carrying cargo ships. The closeness of social relations in the saloon is often remarked in voyage accounts: D.F.G. van de Sande recorded in 1834 how the captain addressed the passengers in the middle of a storm, frankly discussing the possibility of the ship’s sinking and the shortage of lifeboats.19 On the other hand, physical closeness combined poorly with seasickness: De Boer reminisced in 1920 about the agony of passengers suddenly in need of fresh air, who had to squeeze past the assembled company to reach the stairs and outer deck.20 The overland route presented a sharply different face to travelers, being centered on the large, grandiosely appointed P&O steamers Hindostan and Bentinck (in service between 1842 and 1864, 2,000 tons, Fig. 6.2). In 1850 this route was nearly twice as expensive as the Cape and took 60 days. It grew faster, cheaper, and more comfortable through the 1860s, however, as trains replaced carriages across Egypt and the French Messageries Imperiales (later Messageries Maritimes or MM) steamers began competing with P&O, so that by 1864 it took 54 days and cost only 20% more than sailing.21 The P&O steamers embodied a different design philosophy from the Dutch clippers: that of the ‘floating hotel’, in which passengers were separated rigorously from the crew and served by a dedicated staff of professionals (albeit notoriously poorly). Passenger cabins were arranged in a block across the full width of the ship, to limit noise from the paddle wheels and seasickness from the ship’s movements.22 Unfortunately, poor ventilation and cramped quarters meant stifling temperatures for those inboard.23 Single women were kept apart from men in a ‘separate sphere’, consisting of four quad cabins hidden behind a ladies’ drawing room, ‘a quiet, pleasing contrast to the more brilliant decorations of the grand saloon’, these separate apartments being served by the ship’s sole stewardess.24 Luxury was signaled by ‘warm, cold, and shower baths’ and lavish public spaces, particularly a gilt-ornamented dining saloon with windows on three sides at the stern, ‘large enough to hold four tables, with sufficient latitude to admit of the perambulations and running to and

Fig. 6.1 Kosmopoliet cabin plan (Source Collection of Rotterdam Maritime Museum, T966)

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Fig. 6.2 Hindostan and Bentinck cabin plan (Source Barber, Overland Guide-Book)

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fro of the waiters’.25 These waiters came from Goa, a fact used in advertising, since they were ‘attentive and not so familiar with the passengers as English stewards are’.26 The influence of the P&O steamers on those that followed can hardly be overstated—both as examples of what to do (including ethnized service and saloon windows) and what to avoid (cabins without light and air). This influence even extended to ships on the sailing route: the Kosmopoliet III (in operation between 1871 and 1879, 1385 tons) featured a sternfacing ‘conversation salon’, partnering the windows of the Bentinck’s saloon with the sociable function of its ladies’ drawing room, along with passenger cabins in the middle of the ship and a separate children’s room. The dining saloon and mixing of first-class passengers with officers remained on the old model, however.

1871–1900: The Trans-Suez Service In 1869 the Suez Canal opened, ushering in a new age of direct steamer services between Europe and the Indian Ocean. Beginning in 1870, several Dutch companies were formed to compete with P&O and MM, carrying cargo, passengers, and mail to and from the Netherlands East Indies. The largest of these was the SMN, which launched with five new screw steamers (the ships that Scholl criticized), all of over 3,000 tons capacity, between 1871 and 1874. This initial enthusiasm was followed by two decades of setbacks and austerity: fierce competition, excessive cargo capacity, and disappointing passenger numbers limited profits and encouraged more modest ships.27 Of the Dutch companies, only two survived this ordeal: the SMN, with thirteen ships between 2,200 and 3,400 tons, and the Rotterdamsche Lloyd (RL), with seven, all around 2,200 tons. These formed a combined service in 1884 to jointly fulfill the government mail contract, harmonizing their schedules and ticket prices to offer weekly departures, alternating between Amsterdam (SMN) and Rotterdam (RL).28 The ships that emerged from this turbulent period made compromises between ostentation and frugality, which would come to characterize both lines in the decades to come. From 1870 on, the plans of all the companies show a clear, novel design method in which the ships’ various functions and jobs were resolved into discrete spaces, based largely on the area of a basic double cabin (roughly 8’ (2.4 m) square, or one square inch on the plan drawing), or multiples thereof. These functional blocks were assembled,

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with some variation, into workrooms, grouped by job category or status. Beginning in 1871, officers and engineers each gained their own dining saloons, served by a separate kitchen devoted to the ships’ staff, allowing for strict segregation from the passengers. The only place staff and passengers still mixed was in the service corridors that ran alongside the engines. The engineers were typically grouped in a line or block beside the engine; the officers’ block was either lined up opposite the engineers or stacked into a tall, isolated deckhouse under the bridge and steering controls. The crew were housed in a newly formalized forepeak, consisting of equal dormitories for the sailors and coal-stokers, on opposite sides of the center-line. Aft of these dormitories, petty officers, cooks, and carpenters received a special petty officers’ saloon and single or shared cabins, depending on their status, all smaller than the officers’. The captain’s cabin varied from ship to ship more than any other: on the Conrad (operational between 1871 and 1897, 3,100 tons), it was located among first-class cabins; on the Prinses Amalia (in service between 1874 and 1906, 3,500 tons) it retreated to its own deckhouse, between the engine and the first-class smoking salon. By 1895 it had (usually) settled above the officers’ block, forming a unit with the bridge and charts. Passenger spaces were likewise standardized and modularized, with ever-clearer separations between classes, and between parts of the ship devoted to passengers and to crew. On SMN and RL ships, first class came to mean single and double occupancy cabins, second and third classes consisted of double, quad, and dormitory cabins, distinguished from each other by their public spaces, dinner menus, and deck privileges. Passengerfacing services—linens, cabin stewards, doctors, pharmacy—were grouped near but not among the first-class passengers, on the awkward, narrow spaces flanking the boiler and engine. The soldiers, alone, remained in an undifferentiated mass in the hold, their only formally assigned beds being those in the hospital, under the supervision of the ship’s petty officers, beside their cabins. The invention of two distinct, Indies-route traditions can be seen on the first SMN plans: the use of ‘djongos’, which were Javanese stewards (or ‘servants’), and the offering of ‘mandies’, which were Javanese-style tank baths. Steel and Alexanderson have discussed the preference European travelers showed for being served by non-European staff and the ways that service professions were ‘ethnically streamlined’ during the colonial period.29 Jan Boissevain, founder of the SMN, explained the ethnizing of service as a function of the Indies’ climate: ‘In the first years

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we struggled with European table- and cabin-servants, but they didn’t do as well with the heat… so we have taken on excellent Javanese substitutes… We have arranged especially heated accommodation for them, and we have never had any trouble with them, and our passengers find them very suitable’.30 Boissevain’s rationale is borne out by the early SMN plans, which show a dormitory for Javanese servants, three cabins long, located invariably right beside the boiler. Plans after 1900, however, show the djongos’ dormitory migrating around the lowest deck, near lower-class passengers or the stokers: heating evidently became either easier or less important. Differences in pay and workers’ rights may have also been important factors in the company’s ethnic strategy: Steel has noted that on British ships, Asian workers were regarded as ‘more obedient and less radicalized than their unionized white counterparts’.31 Both SMN and RL brochures touted their ‘quiet, quick, gentle and attentive’ service, as well as the gay colors of their dress: while the SMN djongos were recognizable in ‘clean white uniforms with their smartly tied kerchiefs’, the RL was ‘confident that our boys look neater than those of SMN in their striped costumes’.32 Mandies, supposedly prized by those experienced in the Indies, were less uniformly adopted: they appear as a bathing option beside European baths on some but not all ships of the SMN, RL, and KPM throughout the period.33 The Koning der Nederlanden (in service between 1872 and 1881, 3,060 tons, Fig. 6.3), one of the first, grand SMN steamers, offers a clear example of the new, modular design method. Its first class followed the Bentinck in housing passengers in double cabins in two blocks that spanned the full width of the hull, aft and amidships, served by a likewise full-width saloon, allowing diners views outside. Emulating the latest transatlantic steamers, the saloon connected, via a grand staircase, with a smoking salon, ladies’ salon, and promenade area at the aft of the upper deck, forming a suite of specialized social spaces in place of a single, multipurpose room.34 Unlike the Bentinck, there was no secluded domain of formally designated ladies’ cabins. The single stewardess was devoted to washing linens, serving female passengers, and occupied during mealtimes in the children’s room, entertaining under-12s, who dined an hour before the adults, to allow the latter more peaceful, formal meals.35 In contrast with the bold spatial program of first class, second class was both modest and old-fashioned: located forward, adjoining the accommodations for crew and soldiers, it consisted of dormitories for up to

Fig. 6.3 Koning der Nederlanden plan (Source Collection of Het Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam, inventaris L6 04.03.2.1–2; L6 04.22. a.k.a. LK 16 Ia 02)

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12 passengers. Where first class enjoyed inboard baths and toilets, shared with the officers, second class received no baths: their toilets were placed in outhouses on the foredeck, alongside those of the crew and soldiers. On the other hand, unlike first class, second class found room for two dormitories to separate unaccompanied women from other passengers. Ostentation was deliberately suppressed and the traditional form of cabins flanking the saloon returned, suggesting that spatial conservatism was somehow considered suitable for passengers who paid less. This set a trend that continued on SMN, RL, and KPM ships until 1914, in which first class was the testbed for new comforts and features, while lower classes offered a sort of archaeology of older spatial arrangements; second class mimicked the first class of 20 years before; and third class lagged still farther behind. The trend was clearly expressed on the SMN’s Koningin der Nederlanden (operational between 1911 and 1918, 8,300 tons), where the first-class saloon consisted of a spacious room with windows on three walls and individual, intimate, family-sized tables; the second-class saloon was full width, with windows to the sides, but filled by communal long tables, like the Koning der Nederlanden; and the third class saloon was a cramped, windowless room, on the traditional model. Responding to disappointing passenger demand and thin profits, the next crop of steamers, from 1874 to 1900, were almost all smaller, with few cabins. In 1893 both SMN and RL instituted a formal differentiation in their fleets, between a few ‘mails’—fast ships, desired by the highestpriority passengers, and a larger number of ‘freighters’—slower ships that could carry bulk cargoes and troops more economically. As mails were superseded by faster ships, they were refitted as freighters, extending their service lives by up to ten years. The more modest ships that dominated after 1874 provided the prototype for freighters, frequently carrying ten or fewer first-class cabins, in a quarterdeck or deckhouse at the stern.36 Despite their limited accommodations, they retained a strict separation of passengers from officers, crew, and soldiers. Their uncrowded decks and simpler services would come to be advertised as offering an alternative to ‘the social obligations which one can hardly escape on board a passenger liner’.37 They also followed the innovations of other lines, improving washing facilities in cabins, and adding electric lighting in 1890 and refrigeration in 1898, ending the need to carry live animals in cages on the foredeck.38 While SMN ships of this type, such as the Voorwaarts (deployed between 1874 and 1899, 2800 tons), followed the traditional

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saloon pattern, the first RL ships, the Batavia and Soerabaja (operational between 1883and 1894, 2,200 tons), offered full-width saloons and smoking rooms in first class, albeit at a small scale. The SMN’s mails built during this period show difficult compromises between traditional and novel designs. First-class accommodation on the Prinses Sophie (active between 1890 and 1907, 3,500 tons) and Oranje (in service between 1903 and 1922, 4,400 tons) were divided between a stern quarterdeck and two deckhouses, the latter lacking toilets, baths, or other facilities. Aside from a children’s room, their sole public space was a cruciform saloon—that is, they sacrificed four cabins to augment the traditional saloon arrangement with narrow, transverse wings, allowing room for short side tables and some access to restricted views through portholes.

Networking the Indies: The KPM In 1888 the SMN and RL jointly launched the KPM: a mail and transport network that spanned the Netherlands East Indies and fed cargo from its various islands into the trans-Suez route. The KPM quickly became a key military and economic agent, helping to extend the colonies by providing infrastructure, communications, and troop transportation, ‘breaking open local forms of power and subordinating them to a central monopoly’: the Dutch colonial state and its shipping cartel. The KPM’s consolidation of shipping, expansion of cargo networks, and elimination of competition were major factors in changing the scale and profitability of Dutch Indies shipping. Efficiency was a higher priority than speed: 12mph was deemed sufficient for the KPM, while mails routinely exceeded 20mph.39 Regarding passenger carriage, the KPM’s primary mission was to transport colonial officers, soldiers, and Indies workers. Secondarily, it projected a self-consciously nationalist colonial culture: all officers were required to be Dutch citizens, despite grave difficulties in finding suitable recruits.40 All other crew were recruited in the Indies, principally from Surabaya, Makassar, and Singapore, with sailors and cargo handlers organized by ‘serangs’(local recruiters and foremen), who received forepeak cabins, like petty officers.41 The KPM inherited its initial fleet from the SMN, RL, and its predecessor on the inter-island feeder routes, the British Nederlandsch-Indische Stoomvaart Maatschappij (NISM). Demand on island routes varied widely and the ships ranged in capacity between 80 and 2000 tons. Thirteen

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newly built simple freighters were added, between 600 and 1200 tons, many without passenger cabins, none with more than ten.42 Among the surviving plans, the largest passenger ships before 1908 are the Van den Bosch (in service between 1903 and 1952, 1,600 tons), Baud (deployed between 1903 and 1938, 2,380 tons), and Camphuijs (operational between 1904 and 1937, 2,770 tons), laid out like the Prinses Sophie, with twelve first-class cabins aft, around a cruciform saloon, and eight second-class cabins forward, traditionally arranged, along with the novel additions of a dedicated kitchen for Chinese passengers and baths and toilets for ‘natives’. Alexanderson has described how Dutch mail ships functioned as ‘maritime colonial classrooms… aimed at preparing European passengers for their proper roles once in colonial Indonesia’.43 Before 1914, most passengers departing from Europe were making their first Indies voyage: shipboard order helped train them for life in the hierarchically ordered colonies.44 Colonial relations were expressed clearly on KPM ships, where an explicitly ethnized scheme for passengers was specified in 1890: first class was for Europeans only, second class could mix Europeans with ‘greater, nobler traders and natives of higher standing’—elite Arabs and Chinese.45 Third class (in the cargo hold) was for Chinese only, and fourth class (outside, on deck) was for ‘natives’, livestock, and soldiers. This scheme rarely held in practice: many passengers found the decks more attractive than cabins in the tropical heat, especially after livestock were moved to specialized carriers in 1906, while saloons were often used for excess cargo, against regulations.46 As the preferred colonial shipper, the KPM also took over and expanded the carriage of hajj pilgrims from the SMN, RL, and the Nederlandsche Stoomvaart Maatschappij Oceaan (NSMO), which had opened the service in 1882.47 It declared a monopoly for hajj transport in 1898, requiring pilgrims to embark for Jeddah from Batavia, Sabang, and Padang only.48 The hajj service was both a source of anxiety and a means of surveillance for colonial officials: on the one hand, they feared that it would import diseases, foreigners, and pan-Islamic ideas into the colony, on the other, they felt responsible for the welfare of pilgrims and distrusted Arabian pilgrim-guides and brokers, who traveled with their clients.49 Changes to ship design from 1908 facilitated surveillance over both hajjis and ‘natives’, and helped enforce ethnic segregation between Europeans and others. The plan for the sister ships de Haan, Reijniersz., and Swaerdecroon (operational between 1908 and 1939, 1,700 tons) shows a broad, open upper deck, overlooked by a columnar four-story bridge-house, containing the first-class cabins and saloon, surrounded by

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exterior walkways, all mounted over a dormitory for female deck passengers and the officers’ and servants’ quarters. A 1911 KPM guide actively encouraged Europeans to look down, from their high decks, upon Indies passengers as a ‘picturesque scene… to inspect more closely the numerous types and costumes of the native, Chinese, Arab and other non-European passengers of the third and fourth class’.50 Alexanderson has noted that regimes of unequal ‘viewing’ privileges create ‘unequal structures of accessibility and status, teaching everyone onboard the limits of social mobility within colonial society’.51 In 1924, looking down on ‘groups where the families live together, their sleeping mats spread out and small children sleeping in the midst of their possessions’, De Boer saw the KPM ship as a kind of theater of the colony, remarking: ‘Here is native society in miniature’.52 The scheme of theatrical segregation on KPM ships found its greatest refinement on the Melchior Treub (active between 1913 and 1945, 3,500 tons), which connected Batavia with Singapore and Deli.53 A three-story island, devoted to first class, stood over the middle two-thirds of the ship. Besides a grand dining saloon and cabins of unprecedented comfort, this offered access to a promenade deck with a deck salon, a bar, and a ‘sheltered section’ or verandah, containing tables and chairs, which overlooked the sun-tented stern, on which were mounted two special kitchens for Chinese and Javanese passengers. These passengers, carried in the hold, were only visible to first class when receiving their meals: below their open-air dining area, concealed from first class (but visible to the crew) the plan reveals hospitals and bathrooms for men and women, and files of native toilets.

1900–1914: ‘All the Comforts of a Well-Equipped Hotel’: The Sindoro and Its Successors From 1900, investment in steamers increased dramatically and the ships grew rapidly in size, numbers, complexity, quality of finishes, and speed. By 1914 the combined SMN/RL fleet had grown from 20 to 83 ships, the newest of which were around 10,000 tons. The KPM had expanded from 33 ships in 1891 to 92 ships, ranging up to 5000 tons. This expansion reflected the expansion of the Netherlands Indies economy and was largely fueled by private cargo carriage and passengers, which gradually replaced government contracts and freight as the primary sources of income.54

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As the traveling public grew more important, so did changes in public expectations, shaped by news of innovations from competing lines and an emergent consumer culture. The demographics also changed, as more Europeans settled in the colonies, attracted by the promise of a higher standard of living.55 Shipping companies competed with new services, entertainment, and comforts to attract increasing numbers of women, children, migrants, and tourists. The last category was entirely novel, and to some extent the creation of the affordances offered by the shipping services themselves. SMN and RL passenger tickets could be used interchangeably on vessels of either company, and journeys could be interrupted, allowing a passenger to pause at any ports along the way, provided they completed their trip within a year. The MM, which operated a similar ticketing scheme, had begun courting tourists in the 1890s, even offering ‘purposeless’ leisure cruises from 1896.56 RL and SMN started publishing tourist guidebooks in 1904; in 1908, they added stops catering to tourists’ interests in Lisbon, Tangier, and Algiers, even though these added to the total journey time and were not required for fueling.57 As pleasure-seekers joined business travelers, the ship itself became a destination. The RL’s Sindoro (in service between 1900 and 1922, 5,400 tons) was the first vessel built for this new, affluent era. It marked a revolutionary change in Dutch ship size and design: taking advantage of increasing scale and engine efficiency, it had a wider hull and a more ambitious plan. It was hailed as ‘the first ship to compete on an equal footing with foreign steamers, that attracted passengers who were not restricted to the Netherlands lines’.58 Its popularity with passengers ‘established the modern type of the troop-mail-ship, used thereafter’, influencing SMN ships, beginning with the Rembrandt, Grotius, and Vondel (operational between 1906 and 1931, 5,800 tons).59 The Sindoro offered passengers electric light, refrigeration, and fan ventilation, along with a new spatial layout, made possible by its unprecedented size, that placed first class in a three-story block in the center of the ship, where the movement of the waves and vibration from the propellers were felt less strongly.60 Second class moved aft, to a twostory block, leaving a space for a third class in the forepeak, beside the crew. The ship’s great breadth permitted an asymmetrical arrangement for the saloon and crew spaces, which would become common on later ships, allowing for service corridors to be separated from passengers. The upper decks comprised only cabins and bathrooms: even the servants

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were removed to lower-deck crew spaces. Unusually, second class offered single, double, and triple cabins, and had its own smoking room and promenade deck. First class’s promenade deck housed a smoking room, music room, and library. The ship’s most dramatic feature, however, was a grand, octagonal light-well that punctured three decks to illuminate the first class saloon through a domed, stained glass skylight, mounted above the bridge: a gesture borrowed from the transatlantic White Star Line’s Oceanic (active between 1899 and 1914, 17,000 tons), and calculated to outshine the barrel-vaulted light-well of the MM’s Ville de la Ciotat (in service between 1890 and 1915, 6,600 tons), which connected that ship’s saloon with its music room.61 Lewin notes that contemporary gallery design favored light falling from skylights two or more stories above, to provide ‘a decorous composition’ for paintings and sculptures: in the Sindoro’s case, the artistic composition consisted of a tableau of the diners and their service.62 Despite interrupting higher decks, saloon light-wells became a common feature through the 1920s. The RL’s Insulinde (operational between 1914 and 1919, 9,600 tons) replicated the Sindoro’s three-story performance in first class, using it to connect the saloon with the deck salon, and added a (narrower) four-story light-well in second class, which, however, only passed behind toilets and pantries en route. The SMN restricted itself to two-story wells for first class and second class.Until 1914, variations on the Sindoro plan dominated, while new passenger spaces and services proliferated: electric fans and laundries, hairdressing salons, photographers’ darkrooms, gymnasiums, and, in 1909, wireless telegraph operators became necessities.63 Interior designers and artists were employed to improve the finish and lighting of passenger spaces—most famously Lion Cachet, who decorated SMN, RL, and KPM saloons, smoking rooms, and music salons, beginning with the Grotius in 1906, a year before the Norddeutscher Lloyd launched its Bruno Paul-designed, art nouveau masterpiece, the Kronprinzessin Cecilie (operating between 1906 and 1914, 19,400 tons). Cachet’s designs focused on the history of Dutch involvement with the colonies, as did the names of the ships, which increasingly drew on historical figures. The result was a nostalgic, expressionistic synthesis of colonial history and sense impressions, involving batik-inspired fabric prints, periwig portraits, and ancient-looking maps, which gained Cachet plaudits as ‘a fine connoisseur and a great admirer of the history of our heyday and of our Royal House’.64

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The last ships of the period, after 1910, show a strange inconsistency, with contradictory changes. Passenger spaces detached farther from those of the ship’s staff, with third class migrating to the stern in its own block, as second class had on the Sindoro. With class-specific promenade decks and exterior tea verandahs perched atop their blocks, passengers no longer strayed onto the foredeck. The front of the first-class saloon accordingly became a solid wall, defining the effective front of the ship for passengers’ purposes, cutting off soldiers (now termed ‘fourth class passengers’) and foredeck crew. Suggesting a gaze turned inward, the viewing verandah that had overlooked natives on the Melchior Treub was repurposed on the Insulinde to look down on the second-class promenade deck. This insularity was contradicted, however, on the highest and lowest decks. SMN and RL both added a few extra-deluxe cabins, invading the captain’s solitude on the bridge deck, while the lowest passenger deck, occupied by a few of the second-class cabins, became the only space where passengers and service personnel still intermingled. It was there that the Insulinde and SMN’s Jan Pieterszoon Coen (in service between 1915 and 1940, 11,000 tons) added communal rooms for ‘baboes’, traveling nannies whose employers did not wish to accommodate them in their cabins.65 Almost entirely hidden from the passengers’ gaze, the crew workrooms lost their standard locations: engineers might be placed on the high boat deck above their engines or below, among the kitchen staff. Different plans show stokers and Javanese servants alternating positions fore and aft on the lowest deck, near the officers or the linen cleaners. It seems not to have mattered after 1910, provided they were out of passengers’ sight.

Conclusion The period 1850–1914 presented extraordinary challenges and continuous changes in the demands on shipping to the Netherlands East Indies. The opening of the Suez Canal and advent of steam power radically reshaped both routes and services. Changes in technologies and markets demanded an era of experimentation, in which passenger carriage, cargo, mail, and military support functions all ebbed and flowed in importance. Experiments with novel approaches resolved by 1900 into a set of clear trends. Passengers were incrementally separated from the crew into a new type of enclosing environment, based around hotel-style services and formal routines, and stratified into separate classes, illustrating and

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reinforcing hierarchies of social class and race. As each ethnic group and class of passengers was segregated from the others, so the numbers of service spaces—bathrooms, public rooms, and kitchens—multiplied. The crew were increasingly divided into functional modules, by job type and ethnicity, and hidden from the passengers’ gaze. As engineers and petty officers received their own service spaces (saloons and bathrooms), so these spaces required service personnel of their own, leading to the creation of a separate class of crew-serving stewards, with their own designated cabins. The ‘Javanese’ passenger-serving jobs of djongo and baboe, however, did not receive any support staff to go with their dormitories. Theunis Scholl had declared that ‘he who goes to the Indies becomes Indian’: by 1914 the ships that served the Indies routes had become ‘colonial classrooms’, contributing to the construction of Netherlands Indies society, but not on the passive model Scholl had envisioned: they trained passengers to negotiate visible and hidden social layers and encouraged them to engage a certain selective blindness, in order to enjoy the comforts of a socially bounded environment. Rather than becoming ‘Indian’, passengers were taught, by the social order aboard ships, to become a novel kind of colonial subject, with skills of observing and ignoring, which they had not needed while in the Netherlands but which would be vital in the stratified society that was then being constructed in the colonies.

Notes 1. Research for this article was partly conducted during a Dr. Ernst Crone fellowship at Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, with the invaluable help of Joost Schokkenbroek, Diederick Wildeman, Remmelt Daalder, and Elisabeth Spits, and of Irene Jacobs and Marcel Kroon at the Rotterdam Maritime Museum. 2. Enquête, 273. 3. Enquête, 273. 4. Roka, ‘Building Luxurious Ocean Liners’, 115. 5. Gaastra, ‘Experience of Traveling’, 137. 6. Said, Orientalism. 7. Van de Sande, Tafereelen. 8. Boissevain was the son of the first director of the SMN. He became freight director of the SMN the year after this article appeared. Boissevain, ‘Messageries maritimes’, 52.

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9. Fleet lists, tonnages, and service histories for this paper have been collected from Stichting Maritiem-Historische Databank, https://www.marhisdat a.nl/; The Ship’s list, https://www.theshipslist.com/; and Zwart, Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland, all accessed April 4, 2022. http://www. stoomvaartmaatschappijnederland.nl/. 10. In addition to the SMN, RL, and KPM, the cartel also included the Nederlandsche Stoomvaart Maatschappij Oceaan (NSMO), a subsidiary of the British Alfred Holt & Co., from 1900. Unfortunately, the NSMO plan archives were burned during World War II, and no plans were available for examination for this chapter, à Campo, Engines of Empire, 24. 11. Most of the deck plans and photographs for SMN and KPM ships consulted for this chapter are held at Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam, those for RL ships are at Rotterdam Maritime Museum. MM plans are from the collection of Ramona, L’Encyclopédie’,accessed April 4, 2022, http://www.messageries-maritimes.org.. 12. Markus, Buildings; l Hillier and Hanson, Social; De Certeau and Rendall, Practice. 13. Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland. Dienstreglementen. 14. Arisaka, ‘On Heidegger’s Theory’. 15. First class took its main formal meal at 6 pm when outward-bound to the Indies, 7 pm homeward. Second class ate at 4 pm outward, 6 pm homeward, and third class an hour before that. Dienstreglementen. 16. Gaastra, ‘Experience of Traveling’. 17. Bossenbroek, Van Holland naar Indië, 78. 18. Knight, ‘East of the Cape’. 19. Van de Sande, Tafereelen. 20. De Boer, Gedenkboek, 33. 21. Gaastra, ‘Experience of Travelling’, 128. 22. Howarth, Story of P&O, 30. 23. Wealleans, Designing Liners, 9. 24. ‘The Bentinck’. Gender segregation was a priority on British liners through the end of the nineteenth century, see Hart, ‘Sociability’. 25. Wealleans, Designing Liners, 10. 26. Steel, ‘Steamship Stewards’, 142. 27. Boissevain, Terugblik. 28. The RL grew out of Willem Ruys & Sons, which started serving the Suez route in 1875 using British capital and ships, see Scholten and Haalmeijer, Rotterdamsche Lloyd, and. Mulder, Eeeuw van de Nederland. 29. Steel, ‘Steamship Stewards’,149., Steel, Oceania. 30. Boissevain, Terugblik, 39. 31. Steel, ‘Steamship Stewards’, 138. 32. Alexanderson, ‘Dutch Mails’, 109. 33. Doedens and Mulder, Oceaanreuzen, 97.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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Hart, ‘Sociability’, 197. Doedens and Mulder, Oceaanreuzen, 99. De Boer, Gedenkboek, 52. Rotterdamsche Lloyd, The Lloyd mail. Boissevain, Terugblik, 41. à Campo, Engines, 384. à Campo, Engines, 444. à Campo, Engines, 65. à Campo, Engines, 324. Alexanderson, ‘Dutch Mails’, 116. Alexanderson, ‘Dutch Mails’. à Campo, Engines, 399. De Boer, Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, 386. à Campo, Engines, 398–400. De Boer, Gedenkboek, 51. Kersten, History, 84. Tagliacozzo, Longest Journey. Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, Guide, 6–7. Alexanderson, ‘Dutch Mails’, 113. De Boer, Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, 221. Mulder, Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, 16. à Campo, Engines, 120. Alexanderson, ‘Dutch Mails’, 101. Berneron-Couvenhes, ‘Lacroisière’. Groneman, Over zee; Mulder, Eeuw van de Nederland. Voogd, Scheepvaart, 57. Lewin, ‘Inrichting’, 6. Holmes, Ancient and modern ships, 58–9. Wealleans, Designing Liners, 30. Lewin, ‘Inrichting’, 22. Werumeus Buning, Far East, 23–4. For more on wireless telegraph operators, see Davids and Schokkenbroek, ‘Surfing the waves’, in this volume. Lewin, ‘Inrichting’, 16. Alexanderson, ‘Dutch Mails’’, 110.

References ‘The Bentinck’, Illustrated London News, 12 August 1843. à Campo, J. N. F. M., Engines of Empire: Steamshipping and State Formation in Colonial Indonesia. (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002).

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Alexanderson, Kris, ‘The Dutch Mails: Passenger Liners as Colonial Classrooms’, In Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 99–134. Arisaka, Y., ‘Heidegger’s Theory of Space: A Critique of Dreyfus’, Inquiry 38 (1995), 455–67. Barber, James, The Overland Guide-Book; A Complete vade-mecum for the overland Traveller. (London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1845). Berneron-Couvenhes, M., ‘La croisière : du luxe au demi-luxe. Le cas des messageries maritimes (1850–1960)’, Entreprises et histoire 46 (2007), 34–55. Boer, M. G. de, Gedenkboek der Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland, 1870–1920. (Amsterdam: Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland, 1920). Boer, M. G. de, De Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij. (Amsterdam: Bureau Industria, 1924). Boissevain, J., Terugblik op de eerste 25 jaren van het bestaan der StoomvaartMaatschappij “Nederland” te Amsterdam gedaan in de Algemeene Vergadering van Aandeelhouders. (Amsterdam: De Bussy, 1895). Boissevain, W., ‘De Messageries maritimes’, De Economist 52 (1895), 51–65. Bossenbroek, M. P., Van Holland naar Indië: het transport van koloniale troepen voor het Oost-Indische leger, 1815–1909. (Amsterdam: Bataafsche Leeuw, 1986). Certeau, Michel de and Steven Rendall, The Practice of Everyday Life. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Doedens, Anne and Liek Mulder, Oceaanreuzen: een eeuw Nederlandse passagiersvaart. (Baarn: Bosch & Keuning, 1991). Enquête omtrent den toestand van de Nederlandsche koopvaardijvloot. Verslag der Commissie (The Hague, 1875). Gaastra, Femme, ‘The Experience of Travelling to the Dutch East Indies via the Overland Route, 1844–1869’, In Shipping, Technology and Imperialism: Papers Presented to the Third British-Dutch Maritime History Conference, ed. by Gordon Jackson and David M. Williams. (Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1996). Groneman, I., Over zee van Amsterdam naar Nederlandsch-Indië: Gids voor reizigers met de Stoomvaart Maatschappij “Nederland”. (Amsterdam: De Bussy., 1906). Hart, D., ‘Sociability and ‘Separate Spheres’ on the North Atlantic: The Interior Architecture of British Atlantic Liners, 1840-1930’, Journal of Social History 44 (2010), 189–212. Hillier, Bill and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Holmes, G. C. V., Ancient and Modern Ships. Part II, The Era of Steam, Iron and Steel. (London: H.M.S.O., 1906).

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Howarth, David A., The Story of P&O: The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994). Kersten, Carool, History of Islam in Indonesia: Unity in Diversity. (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Knight, G. R., ‘East of the Cape in 1832: The Old Indies World, Empire Families and “Colonial Women” in Nineteenth-Century Java’, Itinerario. 36 (1), 22– 48. Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij, Guide through Netherlands India. (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1911). Lewin, Elysa, Inrichting van passagiersschepen. (Doctoraalscriptie University of Amsterdam, 1975). Markus, Thomas A., Buildings & Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types. (London: Routledge, 1993). Mulder, A. J. J., Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij: wel en wee van een Indische rederij. (Alkmaar: De Alk, 1991). Mulder, A. J. J., De eeuw van De Nederland: Geschiedenis en vloot van de Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland 1870–1970. (Zierikzee: Asia Maior, 2003). Ramona, Philippe, ‘L’Encyclopédie des Messageries Maritimes’. http://www.mes sageries-maritimes.org. Roka, William, ‘Building Luxurious Ocean Liners for the Traveling Transatlantic Elite in the Early Twentieth Century’, Yearbook of Transnational History. 1 (2018). 115–37. Rotterdamsche Lloyd, The Lloyd mail. (Rotterdam: Rotterdamsche Lloyd. 1931). Said, Edward W., Orientalism. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Sande, D. F. G. van de, Tafereelen Geschreven Op Eene Reis Uit Duitschland Over De Nederlanden Naar De Oostindien. (Groningen: W. van Boekeren, 1834). Scholten, B. W and F. M. E. W. Haalmeijer, Rotterdamsche Lloyd. (Houten, 1988). Steel, Frances, Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870–1914. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Steel, Frances, ‘Steamship Stewards: Encountering Asia on the High Seas’, In Colonialism and Male Domestic Service Across the Asia Pacific, ed. by Julia Martínez, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel, and Victoria Haskins. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 137–67. Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland, Dienstreglementen der Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland, Eerste Afdeeling. (Amsterdam. Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland, 1889). Swiggum, S. and M. Kohli, ‘The ShipsList’ Last updated: January 02, 2011. https://www.theshipslist.com/ Tagliacozzo, Eric, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. (Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Voogd, A., De scheepvaart op Indië en de Rotterdamsche Lloyd. (Rotterdam: Schueler, 1924). Wealleans, Anne, Designing Liners: A History of Interior Design Afloat. (New York: Routledge, 2006). Werumeus Buning, A., The Far East: A Voyage in a Rotterdam Lloyd Steamer to Egypt, Colombo, Sumatra, and the Islands of the East Indian Archipelago via Rotterdam. (Rotterdam. Rotterdam Lloyd Royal Mail Line, 1900). Zwart, Piet, ‘Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland’. http://www.stoomvaartma atschappijnederland.nl/

PART II

Case Studies of Old Maritime Jobs

CHAPTER 7

Reconfiguring Authority at Sea: Steamships and Their Captains in a Danish Context, c.1850–1950 Morten Tinning

Introduction Until the twentieth century, few positions of authority paralleled that of the merchant sea captain. The captain1 ‘is lord paramount’, wrote the American sailor Richard Dana Jr. in the late 1830s. ‘He is accountable to no one, and must be obeyed in everything, without a question, even from his chief officer’.2 Since the Late Middle Ages, maritime law and practices increasingly institutionalised this sovereignty of command.3 So ubiquitous had the concept of the captain’s authority become by the nineteenth century that literary classics such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Billy Budd (1891/1924), W. C. Russel’s The Wreck of the Grosvenor

M. Tinning (B) Department of Business Humanities & Law, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] The Maritime Museum of Denmark, Elsinore, Denmark

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_7

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(1877), and Joseph Conrad’s Mirror of the Sea (1906) all featured the authority of the ship’s captain as a vehicle for addressing broader issues of power relations and human freedom. Until the late nineteenth century, captains also played a vital role in the commercial activities of a vessel. Although the level of the captain’s business responsibilities varied depending on the specific sector and the shipowner’s preferences, most captains managed some, if not all, of the commercial aspects of the ship.4 Yet, even deeply embedded concepts, such as the authority of the ship captain, evolve. In the late nineteenth century, the merchant ship captain’s role, responsibilities, and authority changed fundamentally. The prime impetus for this change was steam power and the arrival of new communication tools, such as cable and later wireless telegraphy.5 Indeed, so profound was the metamorphosis of the captain’s role and duties that, in 1900, the British sailor and maritime author F. T. Bullen characterised the captain of a sailing ship and the captain of a steamship as members of two altogether different professions.6 While the impact of this new technology on the commercial responsibilities of the captain has been thoroughly reviewed by maritime historians, the transformation of the captain’s shipboard authority has so far received less attention.7 A notable exception is Eric Sager’s work on the ‘industrialisation’ of seafaring labour.8 Sager argues that the steamship introduced new types of specialised work, a more complex ‘industrial’ division of labour, and a new authority structure. Compared to a sailing ship, the steamship increased the uniformity and monotony of seafaring work and the autonomy under which it was performed. Within this new structure, specialised knowledge, increased supervision, and social distance took precedence in reconfiguring the captain’s authority and reinforcing the power of management.9 Complementing Sager’s work, this article explores the effects of new mobility (steam) and communications tools (telegraphy) on the captain’s role, responsibilities, and authority.

Background, Material and Theoretical Approach Steamships were introduced in Denmark as early as 1819, but as in most other countries, steamships did not play a significant role until the 1860s.10 From then on, steamships took on a progressively dominating role in Danish shipping, culminating in the 1890s, when a rise

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in freight rates doubled Danish steamship tonnage within a decade, making steamships predominant. This development did not mean that sailing ships did not matter or prosper in late nineteenth-century Danish shipping. Indeed, an all-time peak in sailing ship tonnage was reached in 1876, and it was not until 1898 that the total Danish steamship tonnage surpassed that of sailing ships. Whereas growth and prosperity in sailing ships were centred in several maritime communities in the Funen Archipelago, the drive towards steamships was heavily concentrated in the capital of Copenhagen.11 This article offers a bottom-up analysis, focusing on seafarers’ perceptions and experiences by deploying diaries and memoirs from Danish seafarers combined with the commentaries of contemporaneous observers, such as the British sailor and author. Bullen. This approach allows for greater sensitivity to the subtle transformations in the day-today reality of command at sea. Moreover, an experience-based analysis facilitates a more fine-grained exploration of the varied experiences of different groups of seafaring crews, which have arguably remained under-explored so far.12 Although the primary source material is principally from a Danish context, the article retains an international scope since maritime labour markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were by and large international.13 Indeed, the narratives of Danish seafarers of the period included experiences from Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, British, German, French, Russian, and American ships.14 This article’s limited length and broad scope do not allow for detailed recounts from all the available material. I have, therefore, limited myself to presenting the perceptions and experiences that best enable capturing the essence of the narratives. To better explore the shifts in the structure of the captain’s authority over time, the article relies on Max Weber’s classic tripartite definition of authority: (1) Traditional authority (authority by custom), (2) charismatic authority (authority by a uniquely personal gift of grace), and rational-legal authority (authority by legal statute or competence and rooted in rationally created rules).15 Weber’s three ideal types of authority foreground dimensions and forms of authority that help clarify the command of the captain. In an empirical analysis over time, the enactment of authority is arguably best described as a combination of several types of authority, showing shifting priorities. Based on the Weberian ideal types, the article suggests that adaptation and transformation of the

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captain’s authority are fittingly described as a reconfiguration of the relationship between traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal authority. While the captain’s overall authority did not vanish, its form and underlying rationale changed qualitatively in this period. Such a reconfiguration of authority can be hard to capture in legal texts and court cases alone. Yet, through the eyes of the seafarers, we get a glimpse of how the enactment of authority changed, how this was perceived, and how this perception changed with the transition from sail to steam. While the Weberian ideal types provide a helpful tool for capturing the qualitative reconfiguration of the captain’s authority, they do not incorporate technology’s critical impact on the maritime world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.16 To understand the link between forms of authority, on the one hand, and technological change, on the other hand, I furthermore rely on the foundational body of literature on socio-technical systems. Here it was found that the increased scale and technical complexity of coal mining—arguably, a semi-isolated work situation somewhat comparable to seafaring—brought into existence a new managerial, organisational, and social work structure similar to the one described in maritime labour by Eric Sager.17 The argument here is that the reconfiguration of the captain’s authority and the link between technological change and social organisation described by socio-technical systems theory can help explain the fundamental changes and adaptations in the structure of the sea captain’s authority during the transition from sail to steam.

The Shifting Role, Responsibilities, and Authority of the Captain ca.1300–1850 For centuries maritime law underpinned and reflected the changing reality of seafaring command. Sometimes maritime law would codify already existing traditions or practices. At other times, it would have a more progressive purpose of reforming existing practices based on an economic, political, social, or labour-related rationale. While the former codification process dominated until the sixteenth century, the latter process became progressively more important in the following centuries, culminating between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century.18 Maritime law began to reflect the captain’s bifocal nautical and commercial responsibility in the late Middle Ages.19 However, while every captain possessed nautical and navigational skills, the commercial

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varied, and the level of responsibility bestowed on the captain was left to the shipowners’ discretion. Mutual obligations were established through employment contracts. Maritime law granted captains great authority and disciplinary power to fulfil the contract with the shipowner.20 By the late eighteenth century, the principle that any ship’s nautical and administrative responsibilities at sea rested solely with the captain was firmly institutionalised in maritime law.21 Although maritime law and social convention acted as a bulwark against excessive abuse of power, it was only in severe or unusual cases that charges would be brought against the captain and only when the ship had returned to port.22 Ship captains had not always been the dominating figure of authority at sea. In twelfth-century Northern Europe, the captain (or skipper/Schiffer) was often a merchant, functioning as primus inter pares among other merchants. In such ventures, members would share duties and responsibilities for navigation and handling the vessel, and decisions were ideally made by mutual agreement. However, in the thirteenth century, the roles of the merchant, the shipowner, captain, and crew separated. A new organisational hierarchy appeared in which the captain represented the shipowner, managed the ship autonomously and operated almost independently of the merchants.23 From the sixteenth century onwards, sailing vessels designed for longrange open ocean voyages further increased the specialisation and size of the crew, as well as the complexity of navigation and ship management. As some trade voyages lasted months, if not years, an increasingly unified and hegemonic shipboard command structure emerged. As the problems of communication and principal-agent relationships became more complicated, the authority on the largest of ships could be divided between the captain and a commercial representative (supercargo). However, in most cases, captains would be responsible for managing both the vessel and the commercial tasks.24 As Ralph Davis puts it, the most significant managerial issue facing shipowners in the early modern world was ‘to find a paragon to be master, and then devise means to assist him if he really were perfect, rescue him if he turned out a fool, and restrain him if he turned out a scoundrel’.25 This vital commercial role of the captain until the late nineteenth century has been justly recognised by historians.26 However, despite the complex issues of distance, time and communications, the captain still

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depended on the managing owner’s decisions, financial credits, and retrospective approval.27 As the nineteenth century progressed, this relationship between the owner and the captain intensified due to the improved communications available through the telegraph and the regular oceanic postal services facilitated by steamships.28 In his essay Owners and Masters, Yrjö Kaukiainen recognises that ‘before the arrival of the telegraph and ocean liners’, the captain had a significant say in the business and commercial activity of the vessel. ‘Indeed, he was more like a manager than a foreman’. Pertinent to this essay is his periodisation, identifying the widespread adoption of specific technologies, here telegraph and regular ocean liners, as the turning point. Kaukiainen’s analysis focuses on the management system during the ‘heyday of sail’, the suggestion being that new technologies played a crucial role in changing the operational mode of shipping and hence the role, responsibilities, and authority of the sea captain.29

The Impact of Technology on the Commercial Role of the Captain The arrival and innovation of the steamship increased the regularity, speed, and control over the ship’s movements. At the same time, new means of communication enabled closer and more frequent contact with shipowners, shipping companies, and other land-based authorities. As the isolated world of the sailing ship began to dissolve, the ship, metaphorically speaking, moved ‘closer to land’ and increased external influence.30 With steamships, the demands for efficient and coordinated management of operations increased. This facilitated a move towards tighter and more centralised control as ‘anything propelled by steam found a ready market; since merchants could calculate, within a short period, the time of arrival of their goods …, and secure the advantages of the prevailing market’.31 One effect of this was a gradual decline in the commercial responsibilities of the captain as more and more operational activities came under the supervision of white-collared employees in shipping company offices.32 A principal driver of this development was the exponential growth and wide diffusion of more reliable and faster communications. Here the steamship gradually provided more reliable and regular postal services, while the cable telegraph revolutionised trade by facilitating

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near-instantaneous communications.33 Supported by these new means of communication, shipowners and shipping executives would gradually take over or reduce the captain’s commercial responsibilities. In 1887, the American captain S. Samuels reflected on this development, complaining that the ‘shipmaster is now no longer a merchant… Telegraphy now precludes any possibility of a trading voyage’ that could benefit ‘this man, who runs so many risks, and hazards so much, for the poor pittance of an underpaid first-class clerk’.34 This decrease in management autonomy of the ship is reflected in two incidents drawn from the diaries of F. M. F. Jacobsen. In 1919 the captain of the SS Morsø fell ill while the ship was at La Palice on the French Atlantic coast. In earlier times, Jacobsen, as the first mate, would automatically have assumed command. Now he had to await approval from Copenhagen and not until formal permission was received from the company’s agent (who doubled as Danish consul) could he assume command.35 In December 1922, Jacobsen complained that the SS Nevada was suddenly ordered to steam out, although short of being fully loaded. ‘The skipper came from shore with the telegraphic order from the shipping company. It is regrettable that the shipping company can be so pointlessly reckless that they send a ship out like that, badly trimmed, loss of cargo etc. A lot is happening that we do not understand’.36 In 1898, steamship captain P. M. Møller commented on this reconfiguration of a steamship’s commercial and operational aspects as opposed to sailing ships. He notes that steamship operations are more industrial ‘as larger sums of money are required’ and hence the ‘operational practices must, to be profitable, be factory-like’. Although ‘akin to the operations of a sailing vessel, it is nonetheless something else’.37 What had been the realm of authority of the captain, foregrounding his role not just in questions of mobility but also in business, thus was increasingly reconfigured into a role in the broader network of actors involved in steamship businesses.

The Impact of Technology on the Nautical Responsibilities of the Captain On sailing ships, navigation was the first concern of a captain. The prime quality of a successful captain was knowledge of the best routes to take at any given time of the year and the ability to plot a course that found a minimum of calms and a maximum of favourable winds. This skill noted

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Bullen, ‘cannot be learned from weather-books or weather-charts’.38 It was a craft of apprenticeship and experience. A craft to be learned. New skills and a wide range of specialised functions were needed on steamships to navigate, operate, and manage the ship. Most of these functions related directly to the running of the steam engine and the emergence of the engine room as a new detached workspace from which emerged a new complex division of labour.39 The most notable change in seafaring labour from sail to steam was that the technical issues and responsibility for the ship’s propulsion passed from the captain, mates, and sailors on deck to the engineers, firemen, stokers, and trimmers in the engine room. Overall this meant that essential tasks shifted away from the sailor’s traditional craft of harnessing the power of the wind to the specialised tending of industrial machinery and the careful management of another natural resource—coal. While authority in all nautical matters, including propulsion, still formally rested with the captain, responsibility for propulsion was now, in reality, partly shared with the chief engineer. Performance, speed, and navigation relied as much on the chief engineer’s ability to run a machine as on the captain’s nautical skills and experience. Even though a steamship captain was expected to be knowledgeable about the workings of the steam engine, he often had to rely on the specialised technical skills of the engine room. The chief engineer could wilfully or unwillingly impose his own authority on the captain in questions relating to safety, coaling, and fuel reserves. One descriptive incident comes from the diary of the sailor E. Himmelstrup, recounting the journey of the SS Siam on its way from the Suez Canal to Copenhagen in 1898. As Siam approached Gibraltar’s straits, the issue of coal reserves came up again. The coal on board was expected to take the ship as far as Le Havre, but the Chief Engineer approached the captain four hours before we reached Gibraltar, saying he did not dare continue the journey with the current coal reserves.40

In this case, the captain heeded the chief engineer’s warning. In fact, it was the second time on that particular journey that the chief engineer had called for an unscheduled coaling stop. The first time had been because of heavy fuel expenditure caused by bad weather and strong headwinds. Although the final authority still rested with the captain, he often had

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little choice but to comply with the chief engineer’s demand for an extra coaling stop. Just as skilled sailors were essential to a sailing vessel’s handling, the firemen’s skills in the stokehold could also have a significant effect on the performance of a steamship. The Danish marine engineer E. Jensen distinctly remembers the difference between two firemen on the same journey around 1900: One would stoke the fire so that the pointer on the pressure gauge was constantly on the red line marking the highest pressure. As you came into the stokehold, he would spend most of the time pacing back and forth with his hands on his back. The other fireman toiled like a beast such that he could barely climb up at the end of his watch, yet he could not keep up the pressure.41

If we return to Himmelstrup’s narrative, it is worth noting that among the crew, Chinese stokers taken on in the East were given as the reason for SS Siam’s need for an extra coaling stop at Gibraltar. Himmelstrup noted: ‘the Chinese stokers use much more coal to keep the steam going than the European ones’.42 His was a curious mix of appreciation and depreciation of specialised skills engrained with pronounced racial overtones. The relationship between specialised skills and the captain’s ability to make command decisions was more complex in a steamship. Furthermore, in the experience and perception of the different crew members, specialised expertise conveyed a new form of informal authority to people other than the captain, reconfiguring the relationship between the captain and his crew. This development resembles the technological imperative described by early socio-technical systems theory, where engineers ‘would design whatever organisation the technology required’. The ‘people cost’ of monotonous tasks and increased supervision was thought to be adequately compensated by improved socio-economic conditions.43 At sea, the new organisation seemed to follow a similar technological imperative, where steamship crews were compensated through higher wages. The captain had to be knowledgeable about steam engines to at least retain some measure of nautical authority in issues of propulsion and mobility.

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Corporal Punishment in Shipboard Discipline The unique position of the captain is also reflected in his patriarchal authority over care and punishments. The captain’s shipboard authority and his powers to uphold discipline in the age of sail have been addressed in detail by Knut Weiburst in his seminal ethnographic work on life and labour on the open ocean.44 Redressing the issues, including the relationship between the isolated shipboard authority of the captain and the landed community to which the ship would eventually return, Jann Markus Witt points out that despite the hegemonic power granted to captains by maritime law, it ‘did not imply that his power was absolute but rather that he was the sole commander of his vessel under maritime law during a voyage’.45 The seemingly near-dictatorial authority of captains was continually shaped by maritime law, informal rules of behaviour, and the captain’s relationship with the shipowner. This argument is strengthened by Heide Gerstenberger in her discussion of the willingness of early nineteenthcentury German shipowners to break up the social bonds of traditional maritime communities to decrease the social limitations on the master’s authority and allow shipowners to pay lower wages.46 Despite the potential restraints of informal rules of behaviour and relations to the shipowner, the common principle was that any ship’s nautical and administrative responsibilities rested solely with the captain.47 In 1802, Charles Abbott summarised the existing paradigm of the captain’s authority over the crew of the ship. ‘By the Common Law, the Master has authority over all the mariners on board the ship, and it is their duty to obey his commands … his authority in this respect being analogous to that of a parent over his child, or of a master over his apprentice’.48 In essence, this meant that the sailor was at the complete mercy of the captain while the ship was at sea and that captains could and would often use (or abuse) their authority without immediate consequences. In severe cases of physical abuse, sailors would desert the ship or seek retribution from the law when the ship entered port. However, there were few options available at sea other than intervention by benevolent officers, mutiny, or simply enduring the seafaring culture of violence and brutality ‘between the devil and the blue sea’.49 Despite legal regulation and declining social acceptance, the use of corporal punishment and violence was so embedded and institutionalised in seafaring that change only came gradually. Evidence of the continual

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use of corporal punishment or pure, unadulterated violence is abundant in the diaries and memoirs of Danish seafarers at least as late as the early twentieth century. This was especially true when it came to young and inexperienced crew members. An anecdote from the diary of F. M. F. Jacobsen shows how some captains, as late as 1892, could still transgress the law and social norms with relative impunity. ‘The captain’, writes Jacobsen, ‘suddenly attacked me like a wild animal and began to beat me with the rope end of the mooring line. You impudent dog?’ he screamed excitedly as he flogged my head, body and wherever he could get a good hit. Finally, he hit me across the face, so my eyes swelled terribly’.50 Back on the ship, Jacobsen declared that he would approach the consul and file a complaint. However, he soon abandoned the idea primarily because I expected no particular understanding or justice from that side either … word among the men has it that the consul always tries to run such issues into the sand and often sides with the captain’.51 Further evidence of the prevalence of violence can be drawn from a Danish pamphlet published in 1883 by N. A. Vodder, a Danish sailor and teacher of navigation. Openly inspired by the educational ideas of Rousseau and the social-evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer, the pamphlet reads as a passionate plea for better treatment and paternalistic care of young aspiring sailors. ‘The sailor has grown up’, Vodder wrote, ‘from boy to man in ships where the captain has been a dictator and not always used his powers with the greatest moderation’. Vodder goes on to lament how the reproduction of tradition and culture also left young sailors at the mercy of older sailors. It was not uncommon to hear older sailors argue that since they had been beaten as boys, they retained the right to hand out similar treatment. To Vodder, this was quite understandable as ‘roughness breeds roughness’. Yet, it was a vicious circle that needed to be broken.52 Public appeals and petitions such as the one from Vodder did resonate with many sailors, politicians, and public opinion.53 In most European countries, corporal punishment and the disciplinary use of physical violence at sea were made illegal by law in the late nineteenth century.54 In Denmark, the captain’s right to use corporal punishment was removed by law in 1866.55 A new disciplinary system was promoted to replace the violent regime of earlier days, including fines and a new social order. Under this order, the captain did retain the right and authority to confine crew members (and passengers) by force if they threatened the ship, cargo, crew, or

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passenger safety.56 However, an already existing system of fines was further institutionalised. Since at least the eighteenth century, it had been customary for captains to fine crew members for minor offences. These fines were often put in a box to be passed on to charities benefitting poor and old sailors.57 In the diary of F. M. F. Jacobsen, quoted earlier, we find an example of how such practices were later used for disciplinary action for offences of a more severe nature. In 1900, a young sailor had gone to sleep during his night watch. The sinner was brought before the master, and judgement was announced immediately: The master was tending his morning toilet, standing with a moustache, hairy chest, soaped head and a barber knife in his hand. “You have slept!” No answer. Will you accept a fine that will go to the poor of the profession?” Still no answer. The master then counted 5 – 10 – 15 – 20 – 25. Still silence. “30!” “Stop”, wailed the sinner, and the matter was settled. A debit note was immediately filled and attested, and the sum of 30 kroner was debited from the sinner’s account.58

A more curious and humorous episode, mixing discipline and help for destitute sailors, occurred in 1927. A Danish captain fined his crew collectively, arguing that the crew had behaved so well that there had been no occasion for fines, thus leaving the poor and destitute sailors with no subsistence. The crew agreed to pay a voluntary fine differentiated by income, with the captain paying a quarter of the fine because of his exceptionally exemplary behaviour59 (Fig. 7.1). The first incident shows that even serious offences such as falling asleep on watch could be dealt with in the early twentieth century without resorting to imprisonment, corporal punishment, or violence. The second shows that solidarity with other seafaring workers slowly took on an institutionalised dimension, more characteristic of landed industrialisation and unionisation. If we deploy Weber’s ideal types of authority, the traditional and charismatic authority of the captain becomes reconfigured as a rational-legal authority based in rules. Some of these rules became so established that they held the seed for new practices and a qualitatively different traditional authority.

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Fig. 7.1 At sea and in port. Two contemporary photos of the 31-year-old captain Roland Mengelberg of the Danish three masted topgallant schooner Noah taken in 1919. In both photos the ‘captain’s cap’ is the only physical marker of his captaincy. His eyes, however, convey a stern, capable, yet empathetic authoritative character (Source Archive of the Maritime Museum of Denmark, 000045674 & 000045675, from photo album 2007:0252)

Steamships and the Social Status of the Captain With steam, social status and a ‘workplace of structural inequalities’ displaced the prominence of the traditional and charismatic authority of the captain, who ruled bycustom, experience, rough attitude, and violence, and where the captain and the crew often had a common background and seafaring identity. In steamships, the captain’s authority increasingly rested on a rational-legal authority based on certified superior knowledge and skills, ‘the bearings of a gentleman’, social distance, and ‘models of dress and behaviour’.60 Besides the captain’s superior skills, the social divide between the captain and the crew was expanded. Instead of a shared bedrock of common seafaring identity, the captain and officers now belonged to an entirely different social class. Progression in rank not only meant better wages but also an embrace of bourgeois culture and identity. On deck,

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and especially in the engine room, lower-ranking seafarers would increasingly identify with the industrial working class as the opportunities for progress through the ranks narrowed due to increased specialisation. While it was still possible to advance from mess boy to captain, making it from stoker to chief engineer was rare, if not nearly impossible.61 One Danish seafarer, J. Ingerslev-Nielsen, remembered a captain on a steamer in 1905 and how he achieved respect and authority through strict expectations of proper, stately, and dignified behaviour. On watch, we had to be in uniform, with footwear polished spotless and a clean collar. It was in the atmosphere of the ship, and I liked it! There was strict discipline on board. … [The captain] was a stately and mature man. I was so lucky to get on the right side of him….62

Captains who failed to adhere to these new social norms would lose the crew’s respect and have difficulty keeping discipline. In his diary, F. M. F. Jacobsen noted one such encounter with a captain in 1893: [I] saw the captain on deck today. That is the first time on this voyage. Alas! How he looked miserable, thin, and dishevelled with his four-weekold stubble on his face. Poor man! Has he been ill? Or is it heartache? Because the wife has left him? Nobody knows!63

Some thirty years later, on a ship in 1925, drunkenness and undignified behaviour caused immediate disrespect. The captain is a terrible drunk. Today, when we sailed down river heading out to sea, he was dead drunk, leaning on the bridge railings. His legs could not carry him, and he drooled off some terrible nonsense. He’s an ugly fellow to look at – Oh dear - watery eyes. ‘Jesus’, they call him. I prefer ‘the predator’ [an earlier brutal, somewhat unreasonable captain]. At least he was sober.64

As in earlier times, the captain’s status in the late nineteenth century depended on the ship’s size and complexity of command. Here, the big ocean liners constituted their own category, and the ‘enviable position’ of the captain of a great passenger steamship held the most prominent position. ‘[I]n power, in importance in the eyes of his fellow-men, in comfort, he is far before them. His are the responsibilities, upon him rests the reputation of the ship among the people who pay the piper, the passengers, but

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beyond that, his life is rightly looked upon by his less fortunate brethren as one long holiday’65 (Fig. 7.2). Next in prestige came the small ocean-going passenger ships and the large cargo freighters, followed by the ‘tramp proper … a vessel of large cargo carrying capacity and low power of engines’. Lowermost came the steamships ‘built to sell to the first buyer’, who were often owned by ‘people knowing absolutely nothing of shipping matters’.66 Of importance here, however, is that the captaincy of even the smallest steamship marked a step upward in prestige (and wages) from even the finest sailing ship afloat. Thus ‘almost any shipmaster is glad to step down from the exalted pinnacle he may have occupied for years as master of a “windjammer” and take a very subordinate position, say, as second, third or even fourth officer in a liner, as a means of rising to the coveted post of commander of such a ship’.67 Climbing this status ladder required specialised skills and specific schooling that went beyond the practical apprenticeship of the sailing

Fig. 7.2 “Ladies and gentlemen, I drink to your very good health”. The uniformed captain of an ocean liner offering a toast to his passengers. (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Illus. in AP101.P7 1904, LC-DIG-ppmsca-25848. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011645532/)

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ship sailor. ‘A successful tramp skipper’, wrote Bullen, ‘is always a good all-round man–something of a diplomat, of a lawyer, of an accountant, of a merchant’. More importantly, he had to ‘contend with crews of the smallest and of the lowest kind of men, who are as far removed from the popular idea of what a sailor is as day is from night’. There was no room for misunderstanding the hierarchy between sail and steam.

Nostalgia and the Legacy of Sailing While one may be tempted to see a sharp divide between sail and steam, the transition occurred in fits and starts. Most Danish seafarers began life at sea on sailing ships until the 1920s. Consequently, most seafarers had experiences in both types of vessels and could compare. For some, the nature of the work and the new division of labour in steamships would trigger a nostalgic longing for life aboard sailing ships. Not even socio-economic compensation in the form of relatively higher wages68 or improved living conditions on steamers could make up for the loss. Writing in the 1950s, the retired steamship captain J. Ingerslev-Nielsen offered his characterisation of the differences in working conditions, reminiscent of the descriptions of early factory work on the land: I had become accustomed to conditions in a steamship so different from the big sailing ships. The diet was obviously better. Here we got soft bread. Hardtack was not known on board, and the diet was varied. However, the tone and work were different. We removed rust, washed the painted surfaces, stood at the helm or were on the lookout. The monotony was terrible, every day the same, no brisk trip aloft to salvage or loosen sails. … All this made me long to return to the big sailing ships. … In the sailing vessels, we were proud of our job. We would not trade with anyone. In Nordhvalen [a steamship], there was a lot of dissatisfaction and not much camaraderie.69

Another quotation will serve to further demonstrate that a comparison of steamers to factories was prevalent among both masters and ordinary sailors and related not only to the nature of the physical work environment but also to the psychology of seafaring: To a (sailing ship) sailor, [a steamship] was like being placed in a noisy factory. There was no need to take notice of the weather, for the ship stomped ahead, meandering through wind and sea, the steam horses

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working without the slightest interest in anything but coal. We just hung on, and I quickly discovered it was blasphemous to sail with a steamer.

This sense of nostalgia is widespread in the writings of Danish seafarers of the period, especially among those who had progressed to captain of sailing vessels. In an essay published in 1951, the retired sailing ship captain C. Sørensen gave the following characterisation of Danish seamen on sailing ships. Granted, life on Danish sailing ships was sometimes hard. Amenities and diet far inferior to what is offered to young people today, but it fostered hardy and tough sailors... A common sailor who could meet the demands made on him in Danish schooners could easily take the hire of an able seaman in any other nation’s ships.70

‘A possible explanation’, notes Sørensen, for a decline in the quality of Danish sailors, could be ‘that the young sailors took hire on steamers sooner since it paid better and required less’.71 According to Sørensen, these steamship sailors lacked the proper sailor mentality and craftmanship he and his contemporaries had received in sailing ships. These sentiments, however, were not universal, and some seafarers were not as indifferent to the benefits of working on steamships. In his memoirs, C. Borgland, a Danish sailor and 1920s Seafarer’s Union leader, noted that ‘the mechanisation at sea’ facilitated and helped seafarers promote individual and organised union efforts to improve working conditions.72 As a Union leader, Borgland’s perspective on the changing labour relations and social positions on board differed from the nostalgic hindsight glorification of Sørensen and others. While mechanisation and division of labour made the tasks on board less diverse, some seafarers appreciated the new hierarchy rooted in the legal-rational rather than the traditional authority of the captain and in seafarers’ specialised expertise.

Conclusions The sea captain’s authority was reconfigured in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use here the term reconfiguration to emphasise that it was not merely a question of losing or gaining authority but rather subtle shifts in prevalence and priority between types of authority. Using Weber’s ideal types, I argue that while the captain’s authority at

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sea persisted both as a general principle (in maritime law) and in seafaring identity and culture, it was fundamentally reconfigured in structure as a result of the novel operational and commercial practices of the steamship, and the introduction of fast and more reliable means of communication. In commercial matters, the captain’s role and authority were slowly watered down and shifted towards the organisational structure of the shipping company. The merchant sea captain gradually took on the part of a (shipping) ‘company man’ embedded within a broader and more closely connected network of actors involved in the new complex business reality of the steamship business. At sea, the steamship captain’s nautical authority was partly shared with other crewmembers whose specialised expertise conveyed a new form of informal power to people other than the captain. I argue that this new organisation resulted from a technological imperative similar to that described by socio-technical systems theory. In Weberian terms, this reconfiguration can be described as a shift away from the captain’s authority as traditional towards a more legal-rational legitimacy attained through the deployment of specialised knowledge and skills, certification, and increased social status. In other areas, such as corporal punishment, new forms of rational authority replaced older forms of traditional and charismatic authority. As the novel rational-legal forms of authority that replaced them were increasingly taken for granted, they provided the seed for new forms of traditional authority. As the steamship’s new ‘industrialised’ authority structures became dominant, it led to nostalgic sentiments of the past. It was true mainly among older former sailing ship captains, those whose craft, identity, and hegemonic authority had dissolved in the black smoke rising from the steamship.

Notes 1. The title of captain entered the vocabulary of merchant shipping in the early eighteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the title captain was used progressively in legislation and official documents. However, the older title of master (mariner) has remained in use until the present-day, and the two designations—master and captain—are often used synonymously. Weiburst, Deep Sea Sailors, 341; see also Witt, ‘During the Voyage’, 165 and note 2. 2. Dana, Two years, 13.

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3. Witt, ‘During the Voyage’, 166–67; see also Weiburst, Deep Sea Sailors, 353. 4. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 159–74; see also Craig, ‘Printed Guides’; Kaukiainen, ‘Owners and Masters’; Doe, ‘Power’. 5. Scholl, ‘Global Communications Industry’; Kaukiainen, ‘Shrinking the World’. 6. Bullen, Men of the Merchant Service, 26. 7. Scholl, ‘Global Communications Industry’, ix–xxvi; Kaukiainen, ‘Shrinking the World’; Doe, ‘Power’. 8. Sager, Seafaring Labour; Sager, ‘Seafaring Labour’; Sager, Ships and Memories. 9. Sager, Seafaring Labour, 245–65; see also Sager, Ships and Memories, 71– 84. 10. Petersen, Planmæssig ankomst, 6–10. 11. Møller et al., Sejl og damp, 7–39; Hornby, ‘Dansk Skibsfart’. 12. Notable exceptions include McMurray, ‘Technology’; Garcia Domingo, ‘Losing Professional Identity?’. 13. Johansen, ‘Danish Sailors’. 14. Johansen, ‘Danish Sailors’, 250–51. 15. Weber, Politics as a Vocation. 16. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, 90. 17. Trist and Bamforth, ‘Some Social and Psychological Consequences’, 8–9; Trist, ‘Evolution’, 67. 18. Frankot, ‘Medieval Maritime Law’; Frankot, Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen; Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, chaps 2–3 in particular; Jones, Plimsoll Sensation; for this development in a Danish context, see Bentzon, Den danske søret; Grandjean, Frederik IIs Søret; Jørgensen, Arbejdere Til Søs. 19. Frankot, ‘Medieval Maritime Law’, 152. 20. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry vis, 167–68; Witt, ‘During the Voyage’. 21. Abbot, Treatise; Witt, ‘During the Voyage’, 166; Bentzon, Den danske søret. 22. Witt, ‘During the Voyage’, 194; for an example from a Danish context, see the description of the journey of the East Indiaman ‘Prins Frederik’ and the subsequent court case against Captain B. L. Højer described in Agerbeck, Beretning, 35–63. 23. Frankot, ‘Medieval Maritime Law’, 152. 24. Kaukiainen, ‘Owners and Masters’. 25. Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 159. 26. Craig, ‘Printed Guides’; Ville, English Shipowning; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 159–74; Witt, ‘During the Voyage’; Tucker, ‘Masters of the Market’. 27. Doe, ‘Power’, 124; Kaukiainen, ‘Owners and Masters’.

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28. Scholl, ‘Global Communications Industry’; Witt, ‘During the Voyage’, 171; Kaukiainen, ‘Shrinking the World’; Doe, ‘Power’, 119. 29. Kaukiainen, ‘Owners and Masters’, 52; Scholl, ‘Global Communications Industry’, Kaukiainen, ‘Shrinking the World’. 30. For a discussion on the nature and conceptualisation of the isolated world of the sailing ship, see. Gerstenberger, ‘Men Apart’. 31. Annin, Ocean Shipping, 73; Mærsk Møller, ‘Skibsfarten fra Svendborg’. 32. See, for example, Williams, ‘Introduction’; C. Knick Harley, ‘Ocean Freight Rates’; for early aspects of this development see Armstrong and Williams, ‘Steamship’. 33. Kaukiainen, ‘Owners and Masters’; Kaukiainen, ‘Shrinking the World’. 34. S. Samuels, From the Forecastle to the Cabin, 1–2. 35. Jacobsen, Fra styrmand til skipper, 25–6. 36. Jacobsen, Fra styrmand til skipper, 92. 37. Mærsk Møller, ‘Skibsfarten fra Svendborg’; Tinning, ‘Imagined Futures’. 38. Bullen, Men of the Merchant Service, 31–2. 39. Sager, Ships and Memories, 71. 40. Himmelstrup, Med ØK’s SIAM til Østasien 1898, 41. 41. Jensen, ‘Eyvind Jensen’, 120. 42. Himmelstrup, Med ØK’s SIAM til Østasien 1898, 41. 43. Trist, ‘Evolution’; Trist and Bamforth, ‘Some Social and Psychological Consequences’. 44. Weiburst, Deep Sea Sailors, 354–71 has a detailed description of social relations between superiors and subordinates on board sailing ships. 45. Witt, ‘During the Voyage’, 175, 193. 46. Gerstenberger, ‘Men Apart’; Gerstenberger, ‘On Maritime Labour’. 47. Witt, ‘During the Voyage’, 166; for seminal works on the history of maritime law see Bentzon, Den danske søret. 48. Abbot, Treatise, 129. 49. Rediker, Between the Devil, 205–53. 50. Jacobsen, Fra skonnertfart til ubådskrig, 83. 51. Jacobsen, Fra skonnertfart til ubådskrig, 83. 52. Vodder, Om Sømandens Udvikling, 10. 53. Williams, ‘Mid-Victorian Attitudes’; Fink, Sweatshops at Sea:. 54. Land, ‘CUSTOMS OF THE SEA’; Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, Chapter 2. 55. Jørgensen, Arbejdere Til Søs 1870–1911, 12. 56. Bentzon, Den danske søret, 123–24. 57. Henningsen, ‘Sømandens Indsamlingsbøsse’,. 58. Jacobsen, Fra styrmand til skipper i mellemkrigstiden: Dagbøger 1919– 1936, 20. 59. Tinning, Sømandsstiftelsen Bombebøssen, 80. 60. Sager, Seafaring Labour, 264; Sager, Ships and Memories, 71–84.

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61. For a reflection on the work conditions of the stokers, see Gerstenberger, ‘Men Apart’. 62. Ingerslev-Nielsen, Dampskibskaptajn, 89. 63. Jacobsen, Fra skonnertfart til ubådskrig, 103. 64. Jacobsen, Fra skonnertfart til ubådskrig, 379. 65. Bullen, Men of the Merchant Service, 13–4. 66. Bullen, Men of the Merchant Service, 21. 67. Bullen, Men of the Merchant Service, 26; the term ‘wind-jammer’ was used by steamship crews as a contemptuous nickname for sailling ships, see Bullen, 27. 68. Hynninen et al., ‘Technological Change’. 69. Ingerslev-Nielsen, Dampskibskaptajn, 85. 70. Sørensen, ‘Livet om bord i sejlskibstiden’, 430. 71. Sørensen, ‘Livet om bord i sejlskibstiden’, 430. 72. Borgland, Gennem Storm og Stillle, 7; Davids, ‘Seamen’s Organizations’.

References Abbot, Charles, Treatise of the Law Relative to Merchant Ships and Seamen, ed. by William Shee. 10th ed. (London: Shaw and Sons, 1802). Agerbeck, O. D. L., Kort Og Ukunstlet Beretning over de Vigtigste Begivenheder, Som Ere Kendtes Mig Fra Min Barndom, Og de Hendelser Og Anekdoter, Som Er Forekomne Mig Mest Mærkværdige i de 44 Aar Jeg Har Faret Til Søes (Copenhagen: Minding, 1804). Annin, Robert Edwards, Ocean Shipping—Elements of Practical Steamship Operation (New York: The Century Co., 1920). Armstrong, John and David M. Williams. ‘The Steamship as an Agent of Modernisation, 1812–1840’, International Journal of Maritime History 19 (2007), 145–60. Bentzon, Viggo, Den danske søret.Fforelæsninger af Dr. Juris Viggo Bentzon (København: G.E.C. Gads Universitetsboghandel, 1899). Borgland, Christian, Gennem Storm og Stille. En gammel dansk matros’ erindringer (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, 1954). Bullen, Frank Thomas, The Men of the Merchant Service. Being the Polity of the Mercantile Marine for Longshore Readers (London: John Murray, 1900). Craig, Robin, ‘Printed Guides for Master Mariners as a Source of Productivity Change in Shipping, 1750–1914’, Journal of Transport History 3 (1982), 22–36. Craig, Robin, ed., British Tramp Shipping, 1750–1914 (St. John’s: Liverpool University Press, 2003). Dana Jr., Richard Henry, Two Years Before the Mast. A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (New York: W.L. Allison, 1840).

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Davids, Karel, ‘Seamen’s Organizations and Social Protest in Europe, c. 1300– 1825’, International Review of Social History 39 no. S2 (August 1994), 145– 69. Davis, Ralph, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962). Doe, Helen, ‘Power, Authority and Communications: The Role of the Master and the Managing Owner in Nineteenth-Century British Merchant Shipping’, International Journal of Maritime History 25 (2013), 103–25. Fink, Leon, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Frankot, Edda, ‘Medieval Maritime Law from Oléron to Wisby: Jurisdictions in the Law of the Sea’, in Communities in European History: Representations, Jurisdictions, Conflicts, ed. by Juan Pan-Montojo and Frederik Pedersen (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2007), 151–72. Frankot, Edda, Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen: Medieval Maritime Law and Its Practice in Urban Northern Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘Losing Professional Identity? Deck Officers in the Spanish Merchant Marine, 1868–1914’, International Journal of Maritime History 26 (2014), 451–70. Gerstenberger, Heide, ‘Men Apart: The Concept of “Total Institution” and the Analysis of Seafaring’, International Journal of Maritime History 8 (1996), 173–82. Gerstenberger, Heide, ‘On Maritime Labour and Maritime Labour Markets in Germany, 1700–1900’, in Maritime Labour. Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500–2000, ed. by Richard Gorski (Amsterdam University Press, 2007) 43–60. Gerstenberger, Heide and Ulrich Welke, Vom Wind zum Dampf: Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Handelsschiffahrt im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung (Münster: Westfalisches Dampfboot, 1996). Grandjean, Louis E., Frederik IIs Søret—Et erhvervshistorisk kulturbillede fra 1561 (Copenhagen: Chr. Eriksen, 1946). Grandjean, Louis E., Frederik IIs Søret—Et erhvervshistorisk kulturbillede fra 1561 (Copenhagen: Chr. Eriksen, 1946). Henningsen, Henning, ‘Sømandens Indsamlingsbøsse’, Handel- Og Søfartsmuseets Aarbog 55 (1996), 23–43. Himmelstrup, Ejnar, Med ØK’s SIAM til Østasien 1898 - Jungmand Ejnar Himmelstrups dagbogsoptegnelser, ed. by Erik Jensen (Marstal: Marstal Søfartsmuseum, 2004). Sørensen, Chr. ‘Livet om bord i sejlskibstiden’ in Holm-Petersen, F. and A. Rosendahl, eds., Fra Sejl Til Diesel: Dansk Skibsfart, Søhandel Og Skibsbygning, Vol I, 407–430, (Copenhagen: Skandinavisk Bogforlag, 1951).

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Hornby, Ove, ‘Dansk Skibsfart 1870–1940: Nogle Hovedlinier i Udviklingen’, \Aarbog for Handels- Og Søfartsmuseet Paa Kronborg (1988), 31–70. Hynninen, Sanna-Mari, Jari Ojala and Jaakko Pehkonen., ‘Technological Change and Wage Premiums: Historical Evidence from Linked Employer–Employee Data’, Labour Economics 24 (2013), 1–11. Ingerslev-Nielsen, J. Dampskibskaptajn. Edited by Ole Højrup. Søens Folk Beretninger Fra Århundredskiftet 8. Copenhagen: Nationalmuseets Etnologiske Undersøgelse & Christian Ejlers’ Forlag, 1988. Jacobsen, Frederik Mads Ferdinand, Fra skonnertfart til ubådskrig: Dagbøger 1889–1918, ed. by Berrit Hansen and Hanne Geertsen. (Copenhagen: Forlaget Orte v/Berrit Hansen, 2008). Jacobsen, Frederik Mads Ferdinand, Fra styrmand til skipper i mellemkrigstiden: Dagbøger 1919–1936, ed. by Berrit Hansen and Hanne Geertsen. (Copenhagen: Forlaget Orte v/Berrit Hansen, 2010). Jensen, Eyvind, ‘Eyvind Jensen’, in Fyrbøder Og Maskinmester, ed. by Ole Højrup (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseets Etnologiske Undersøgelse & Christian Ejlers’ Forlag, 1986), 97–150. Johansen, Hans Chr., ‘Danish Sailors, 1570–1870’, in “Those Emblems of Hell”? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870, eds. by Paul van Royen, Jaap R.Bruijn and Jan Lucassen (St. John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997), 233–252. Jones, Nicolette, The Plimsoll Sensation: The Great Campaign to Save Lives at Sea (London: Abacus, 2007). Jørgensen, Henning Vester, Arbejdere Til Søs 1870-1911. (Copenhagen: Tidens Højskoles Forlag, 1987). Kaukiainen, Yrjö, ‘Owners and Masters: Management and Managerial Skills in the Finnish Ocean-Going Merchant Fleet, c. 1840–1889’, in Management and Industrial Relations in Maritime Industries; Essays in International Maritime and Business History, (St. John’s: International Maritime Economic History association, 1994), 51–66. Kaukiainen, Yrjö, ‘Shrinking the World: Improvements in the Speed of Information Transmission, c. 1820–1870’, European Review of Economic History 5 (2001), 1–28. Land, Isaac, ‘CUSTOMS OF THE SEA Flogging, Empire, and the “True British Seaman” 1770 to 1870’, Interventions 3 (2001), 169–85. Mærsk Møller, Peter, ‘Skibsfarten fra Svendborg og Omegn: 18 February 1899’, Svendbrog Amtstidende, 18 February 1899, No. 42 edition. McMurray, H. Campbell, ‘Technology and Social Change at Sea: The Status and Position on Board of the Ship’s Engineer, Circa 1830–1860’, in Working Men Who Got Wet, ed.by Rosemary Ommer and Gerald Panting (St.John’s: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1980), 35–50.

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Møller, Anders Monrad, Henrik Detlefsen and Hans Christian Johansen, Sejl og damp, 1870–1920, vol. 5. Dansk søfarts historie. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1998). Petersen, Holger Munchaus, Planmæssig ankomst: Danske dampskibe indtil 1870 I (Esbjerg: Fiskeri- og Søfartsmuseet, 1983). Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Sager, Eric W., Seafaring Labour. The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada 1820–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989). Sager, Eric W. ‘Seafaring Labour in Maritime History and Working-Class History’, International Journal of Maritime History 2 (1990), 259–74. Sager, Eric W., Ships and Memories: Merchant Seafarers in Canada’s Age of Steam (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993). Samuels, Captain S., From the Forecastle to the Cabin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1887). Scholl, Lars U., ‘The Global Communications Industry and Its Impact on International Shipping before 1914’, in Global Markets: The Internationalization of the Sea Transport Industries since 1850, ed.by David J. Starkey and Gelina Harlaftis (St. John’s: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 195–216. Tinning, Morten, ‘Imagined Futures of Sail and Steam. The Role of Community in Envisioning Entrepreneurial Ventures’, Business History 64 (2022), 1–21. Tinning, Morten, Sømandsstiftelsen Bombebøssen, 1819–2019. (Copenhagen: Sømandsstiftelsen Bombebøssen & The Maritime Museum of Denmark, 2019). Tortzen, Christian, En Sømand Han Maa Lide: Sømændenes Forbund 1897–1997, Bind I: De Første 50 År (Copenhagen: Pantheon & Sømændenes Forbund i Danmark, 2001). Trist, E., ‘The Evolution of Socio-Technical-Systems - a Conceptual Framework and an Action Research Propram’, Occasional Paper. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania: Ontario Ministry of Labour, Ontario Quality of Working Life Centre, 1981, 2: 67. Trist, E. L. and K. W. Bamforth, ‘Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An Examination of the Psychological Situation and Defences of a Work Group in Relation to the Social Structure and Technological Content of the Work System’, Human Relations 4 (1951), 3–38. Tucker, Hannah Knox, ‘Masters of the Market: Ship Captaincy in the British Atlantic, 1680–1774’ (PhD. Diss. University of Virginia, 2021). Ville, Simon P., English Shipowning During the Industrial Revolution: Michael Henley and Son, London Shipowners 1770-1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

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Vodder, N. A., Om Sømandens Udvikling i Nutid og Fremtid (Copenhagen: Andr. Schous Forlag, 1883). Weber, Max, ‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy’, in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. by E. A. Shils, translated by H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949). Weber, Max, Politics as a Vocation by Max Weber, in Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society’, ed. and translated by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Weiburst, Knut, Deep Sea Sailors: A Study in Maritime Ethnology (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1969). Williams, David M., ‘Introduction: The World of Shipping’, in The World of Shipping, ed. by David M. Williams (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), ix–xxvi. Williams, David M., ‘Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Seamen and Maritime Reform: The Society for Improving the Condition of Merchant Seamen, 1867’, International Journal of Maritime History 3 (1991), 101–26. Williams, David M., and John Armstrong, ‘An Appraisal of the Progress of the Steamship in the Nineteenth Century’, in The World’s Key Industry - History and Economics of International Shipping, ed by Gelina Harlaftis, Stig Tenold and Jesús M. Valdaliso (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 43–62. Witt, Jann M., ‘“During the Voyage Every Captain Is Monarch of the Ship”: The Merchant Captain from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime History 13 (2001), 165–94.

CHAPTER 8

Feeding the Fleet: Cooks in the Belgian Merchant Marine, c.1850–1930 Kristof Loockx

Introduction1 It has been argued that for the maritime world, the cook and the captain were the most important men aboard. While the captain navigated through calm and rough seas, the cook was responsible for the crew’s strength, morale and perseverance.2 ‘If the food was bad, the voyage became a hell, but if the food was good, everything ran smoothly’, said the Belgian seamen’s journal De Zeeman in 1923.3 According to contemporaries, this observation also applied to the nineteenth century, although the cook’s duties, status and education changed significantly during the period under study. Indeed, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries heralded a radical change in the nature of maritime labour. Sailing ships, the familiar mode of water transport that men had used to navigate the world’s oceans and seas for millennia, were gradually replaced by steamships, complex machines that carried their own fuel.4 With the

K. Loockx (B) University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_8

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emergence of steamers, ship sizes boomed and so did the crews who operated these vessels. This challenged the traditional system of catering on board, as the staff grew accordingly and even ‘exploded’ on passenger ships due to the unprecedented growth of passenger transport at the end of the nineteenth century.5 The biggest vessels catered for hundreds of travellers of all classes, which, just like the substantial crew, needed to be fed different menus for multiple days to weeks—a true logistical feat.6 This article examines how the profession of cook evolved during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 It aims to better understand the development of the status, working methods, profiles and careers of cooks in order to make the intersection between industrialisation at sea and its impact on maritime labour more explicit. This focus is relevant since labour remains an understudied factor in research that deals with the transition from sail to steam. Scholars have shown that the emergence of steamers created a larger international economy. They have also examined the processes that led to the diffusion of steam, but we know relatively little about how maritime occupations evolved.8 Apart from studies that examined able-bodied seamen in the age of sail and, to a lesser extent, members of the engine room department on steamers, many professions, not least those related to catering, remain at best a footnote in the literature.9 Only studies that have investigated the social structure of crews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide insights into the operation of the steward’s department.10 Sari Mäenpää’s profound analyses of British passenger liners and Justin Cousin’s focus on British imperial merchant vessels are laudable examples.11 Furthermore, Günter Bäbler’s in-depth descriptions of the plethora of occupations aboard the Titanic elucidate precisely how the legendary liner of the White Star Line was structured.12 Such studies enhance our understanding of occupational developments, especially regarding service personnel and the emergence of women in the steward’s department.13 This research aims to add a new layer by examining cooks who worked on Belgian sailing ships and compare them with peers employed on merchant steamers and passenger liners during the transition from sail to steam. How did the profession of cook evolve during this period in terms of status and working methods? What differences can be detected between different types of shipping? What were the characteristics of cooks and what did their careers look like? To answer these questions, this research relies on a variety of sources. Belgian maritime legislation, writings from contemporaries and primary

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literature provide qualitative information about the profession of cook in the Belgian merchant marine. However, a substantial part of the sources relevant to nineteenth-century Belgian shipping has been lost. What is preserved is generally available in fragmentary form. For example, apart from a few individual examples, muster rolls, which recorded details on voyages, crews and ships, are not preserved from 1845 to 1919. Most archives of Belgian shipping lines from that period, such as the Red Star Line, the biggest company running a passenger service between Antwerp and the United States, have not survived.14 Despite these important lacunae, the above-mentioned documents will be further complemented by the seamen’s registry, which recorded identity and career details about seafarers who worked on Belgian merchant vessels departing from the port of Antwerp, such as their geographical backgrounds, functions aboard and wages.15 This provides more insight into the characteristics of crews in the Belgian fleet and the operation of the maritime labour market in Antwerp.16 Unfortunately, the registry did not record information about ships, such as ship types and tonnages. Therefore, this research relies on individual examples derived from literature to differentiate between types and trade. In the following, I will first set the scene by giving a brief outline of the development of the Belgian fleet. Then, the focus will be on how the profession of cook altered during the transition from sail to steam and how changes in food supplies and increasing crew and passenger sizes gradually led to the professionalisation of catering crews. Finally, the profiles and careers of cooks in the Belgian fleet will be discussed.

The Transformation of the Belgian Fleet Before analysing the work, profiles and careers of cooks in the Belgian fleet, it is relevant to contextualise wider trends in Belgian shipping and focus on the demand for seafaring labour. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the Belgian government aimed to create a strong national fleet because the establishment of an international trade network, together with the development of domestic country roads, railways and waterways, were seen as important elements to consolidate the young nation’s independence—Belgium became an independent country in 1830. Although the government had developed an early interest in steam technology and took several initiatives to stimulate Belgian shipping, such as providing grants, subsidies and loans, which, in some cases, had a positive impact,

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measures did not have the desired outcome.17 The middle of the nineteenth century even heralded a decline of Belgian shipping: the fleet consisted mainly of sailing ships and decreased from about 150 to 80 vessels between 1850 and 1870, while total tonnage stagnated around 30,000 tons during this period (Graphs 8.1 and 8.2). International competition, the absence of colonies and a lack of private capital investments, to name but a few factors, explain why it proved difficult to build a strong national fleet.18 During the 1860s, the Belgian government decided to re-assess its strategy. Aware of the declining national fleet and insufficient domestic capital, the government opted to grant subsidies to foreign shipping companies if they sailed under the Belgian flag.19 The influx of foreign capital explains why about two-thirds of such companies’ profits went abroad. Notwithstanding, the government’s strategy paid off from an economic point of view as it opened the door for capital investment, stimulated technological innovation and expanded commercial routes. Furthermore, the new maritime policy spurred the development of the insurance and banking sector, while it also allowed Belgian shipping to benefit from the great advances resulting from German industrialisation.20 As noted by Lewis Fischer, ‘the Belgian fleet, in the second half of the nineteenth century, while always the smallest among North Sea nations, was also the fastest growing, increasing more than ten times between 1850 and 1900’.21 Particularly, the fast and drastic changeover to steam from the 1870s onwards, which took place early compared to many other nations, explains the rise of Belgian shipping. Graphs 8.1 and 8.2 clearly demonstrate that the number of steamships increased from 12 steamers of a total of 7,501 net tons in 1870 to 67 steamships of a total of 105,786 net tons in 1900, while this trend was exactly the opposite for sail. After World War I, the trend continued. In 1930, the Belgian fleet consisted of 143 steamships of a total of 316,133 net tons22 . With the advent of steam, most Belgian vessels departing from Antwerp operated regular services, with a strong focus on the passenger, grain and oil trades, while large shipping companies also emerged. Founded in 1872, the Belgian-American Red Star Line was involved in passenger transport and operated in the North Atlantic. The transport policy of the Red Star Line company was structured around three main pillars: third-class passengers who moved to the United States because of family reasons or work, people who returned to Europe and trans-Atlantic tourism.23 Throughout its history, which officially lasted until 1935, the

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Graph 8.1 Belgian merchant fleet, number of sailing ships and steamships, 1850–1930 (Source Baetens, ‘A Survey of Maritime Relations’, 248–49)

Graph 8.2 Belgian merchant fleet, share of sailing ships and steamships in net tonnage, 1850–1930 (Source Baetens, ‘A Survey of Maritime Relations’, 248–49)

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Red Star Line acquired 23 steam-powered vessels, while the shipping company also regularly chartered steamers from its sister company, the American Line.24 Another major shipping company that sailed under the Belgian flag was Lamport and Holt, the British shipping company from Liverpool that was involved in the transport of general cargo and passengers, operating in the South Atlantic.25 In 1876, the Belgian government reached an agreement to fulfil the Belgian mail contract. The Belgian subsidiary of Lamport and Holt had a dozen ships and represented about 97% of all voyages between Antwerp and South American ports, such as Rio de Janeiro. Following the example of the Red Star Line and Lamport and Holt, also steam lines to Africa were established at the end of the nineteenth century, which underlined Belgium’s colonial ambitions. Fuelled with British capital, the Compagnie Belge Maritime du Congo (CMB) was founded in 1895 and transported general cargo and passengers.26 Among other things, the transition from sail to steam had an enormous impact on the demand for seafaring labour, a process that followed ship sizes and types of trade. To navigate and maintain ships and, in the case of passenger liners, provide services to passengers, crews increased, notwithstanding the ratio of men to tonnage decreased significantly with the advent of steam. For example, the Belgian sailing ship Harriet of 432 tons consisted of a crew of about 15 men on the outward voyage to the United States in 1847.27 In contrast, the steamship Pieter De Coninck (1881–1889) of 2,500 net tons of the shipping company T.C. Engels & Co. was involved in the North Atlantic grain trade and required a crew of about 40 men.28 The Red Star Line’s passenger liner Belgenland I (1879–1905) even required a crew of approximately 86 men and had a capacity to transport 150 passengers in first class and 1,000 emigrants in steerage, while its successor, the Belgenland II (1923–1935), needed about 530 workers to serve 600 passengers in first class, 350 in second and 2,000 in third.29 However, providing exact numbers of seamen employed in the Belgian fleet, as is the case for other fleets, remains a challenging task.30 It has been estimated that the number of seafarers increased from approximately 1,100 seamen in 1846 to 2,500 in 1900.31 In the 1920s, this trend continued as the expanding Belgian fleet required 5,500 to 7,000 workers.32 Engine room operators, such as firemen and trimmers, explain the vast increase in the demand for labour, as was the case for waiting- and catering-related professions, which underscored Belgium’s involvement

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in the passenger trade.33 For example, the Red Star Line’s ocean liner Kroonland (1902–1914) of about 12,000 gross tons hired approximately 250 men in 1911. Excluding higher ranks, the waiting crew consisted of about 85 men and the galley crew of 15 workers.34 Thus, given that Belgian sailing ships in the 1850s required crews of about 10 to 20 men, the transition from sail to steam altered labour structures significantly.

A Job in Transition Cooks in the Belgian fleet were not yet a specialised group in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was customary that an able-bodied seaman filled the position of cook as a part-time activity. Prior to the advent of steam, most Belgian merchant ships relied on a single cook who catered for the master, officers and ratings.35 Factors, such as crew size, type of vessel and type of trade, had a direct impact on the composition of the galley crew. Cooks specialised, professionalised and diversified when steam gradually became the dominant mode of propulsion during the second half of the nineteenth century. Larger nineteenth-century sailing vessels and cargo steamers could have a handful of cooks, but especially the emergence of passenger liners resulted in a very complex and strict hierarchy of authority, responsibility and function in the catering department.36 The chief cook, or chef, was the most important person in the galley of an ocean liner. He oversaw the catering crew that was responsible for the menus in first and second class. In cooperation with subordinates, such as the second cook and first baker, the chef headed teams that were further subdivided into classes, while the storekeeper stowed provisions properly, maintained stocks and provided the necessary quantities to the galley crew. The third-class catering staff was less extensive. In general, it included a ‘passenger cook’ and several assistants who, compared to first and second class, prepared rather simple meals. Finally, ship’s cooks oversaw the provisions of those who worked on board, further subdivided into the captain’s quarter and messes for officers and ratings in different departments.37 As such, the hierarchy in the catering section was related to class and target group. Even though the cook’s job became more professionalised on passenger liners at the end of the nineteenth century, contemporaries generally considered cooks not to be seafarers in the strict sense. The perceived ‘feminine nature’ led to comparisons with service-related

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professions on land as these ‘soft’ professions were regarded as the opposite of the strength and perseverance of the skilled hands before the mast. This might explain the rather condescending attitude towards catering personnel.38 Despite the emergence of stewardesses, nurses and laundresses aboard steamers, however, the profession of cook remained a male-centred profession. According to Frances Steel, the work of cooks was ‘regarded as similar to hotel catering, also a male preserve at this time’, while ‘the position of stewardess was tied to domestic service work ashore’.39 Anyway, dismissing the cook’s duties simply as easy and attainable is probably overstated. As Sari Mäenpää pointed out, ‘preparing meals that were simple ashore was not as easy in damp, unsteady and cramped conditions’.40 Indeed, on nineteenth-century cargo vessels, whether it concerned a traditional bark with general cargo or a steam oil tanker, working conditions were often difficult. Kitchen facilities were generally very basic and the working space small as most of the ship’s space was reserved for cargo. This explains why it was not uncommon that sailors had to eat in their bunks.41 By contrast, passenger liners were an entirely different matter, gradually consisting of well-equipped galleys and superiors who were experienced and trained, such as chefs42 (Figs. 8.1 and 8.2).

Fig. 8.1 Kitchen of the Red Star Line’s Lapland, c.1908 (Source Thomas Stewart Blair, Public Hygiene (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1911), 584–85)

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Fig. 8.2 Galley of the Red Star Line’s Lapland, c.1908 (Source Thomas Stewart Blair, Public Hygiene (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1911), 584–85)

Furthermore, food had always been considered an important factor for the general welfare of the crew, which strongly determined the relationship between the cook and other crew members. Indeed, the cook was held responsible for the quality of meals, although, at the same time, the cook also had authority as he had direct and unlimited access to food supplies.43 Cooks had responsibilities, although they were not certified in any formal way. The latter explains why learning on the job to consolidate knowledge and experience was common practice, as was the case for many other ratings in the nineteenth century.44 Developments differed between different fleets, but it was only in the early twentieth century that cooks were required to have had formal training. In Britain, for example, certificate requirements became effective in 1906. The chef was assumed to serve three meals a day and had to be able to bake, while the second cook was someone who was still in the process of being certified as a chef.45 In Belgium, by contrast, formal training for cooks came late. It was only in 1929 that first steps were taken to establish specified training for cooks, while, for example, training and examinations for engineers were in place from 1888 onward.46 Among other things, syndicalism played a significant role. While unions for officers and engine room operators were established in the last two decades of the nineteenth century

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in Belgium, a section for cooks and stewards only emerged during the 1920s.47

Food for Crews and Passengers To better understand the work of cooks and how their profession developed, it is relevant to analyse provisions aboard. This section highlights the process of professionalisation among cooks, which partly resulted from changes in food supplies and an increasing division of labour. As was the case in other fleets, the types and total quantity of food aboard Belgian-flagged merchant vessels were regulated by law. The amount of food for the crew was meticulously calculated on an individual and weekly basis and expressed in kilos, while the provisions of the master and officers were supplemented with a variety of foodstuffs. From 1845 onwards, the Belgian muster roll determined that each crew member aboard a Belgian merchant vessel was entitled to cured (or fresh) meat, bacon, stockfish, butter (or, in the absence of butter, sweet oil), bread, pearl barley (or rice) and beans. Given the lack of refrigeration facilities, the focus was thus on salted and dried food supplies, while the law did not mention beverages.48 As of 1855, the law also stipulated that maritime police inspectors and consuls in foreign ports were responsible for the monitoring of the weighing equipment that was used for measuring portions of provisions.49 In practice, however, derogations on rations were not exceptional. According to the law, the master could ration the food due to voyages that took longer than planned and other unforeseen circumstances, although it was not specified what the latter entailed.50 For the Belgian fleet, weekly rations for seafarers were barely subject to change in the nineteenth century.51 Contemporaries therefore increasingly questioned both the one-sided diet and the quality of food, which eventually resulted in a public debate towards the end of the nineteenth century.52 This was an international phenomenon and closely related to discussions on the relationship between increasing crew sizes and, among other things, the decline in skill with the advent of steam. Authorities, but also emerging seamen’s unions, considered improved food and cooking as a crucial element that would contribute to attracting more reliable and capable men.53 Also in Belgium nascent syndicalism proved an important factor as seamen’s unions considered bad food to have a negative impact on the morale and health of the crew.54 In 1908, Charles Hervy-Cousin, a Belgian lawyer and defender of the welfare of seafarers in the Belgian

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fleet, even stated that masters all too often purchased the cheapest food so that they could take a share of the money they received from shipowners, which had negative effects on the quality of food.55 According to contemporaries, the lack of clean water was often a problem as well. Water tanks were placed in the cargo hold where they were covered with cargo or coal, and therefore, these tanks were not maintained on a regular basis. In retrospect, a Belgian seafarer even stated that ‘during our careers as seafarers, we often had to drink water of all colours, yellow, reddish, milky, all colours and tastes, even sometimes very bad smelling, spoiled; we even had water that tasted and smelled so bad that the captain decided to pump it overboard’.56 The call for more varied meals was also related to stereotypical seamen’s diseases. Especially scurvy was often the result of one-sided and limited food supplies that lacked vitamin C. The disease led to apathy, weakness, sore arms and legs, and bleeding gums; and if not treated, scurvy could be deadly.57 Belgian newspapers regularly reported on this and included, for instance, advertisements for pharmaceutical products, such as mouthwash to ease sore and swollen gums.58 All these testimonials advocated for better food standards for seafarers aboard, although it remains difficult to assess whether the complaints mentioned earlier reflected the overall situation in the Belgian fleet. Sources tend to focus on the negative, which makes it risky to generalise, especially because it was crucial for the captain to keep his crew healthy and motivated. It should be noted that the Belgian government took some initiatives to improve food standards, albeit indirectly. For example, in 1890, a regulation for the use of kitchenware was approved, specifying that objects, such as vases, tools and other items could not contain excessive levels of harmful substances, such as zinc or lead; and in 1909, the government established a laboratory for the analysis of suspicious foodstuffs that were monitored by inspectors of the maritime police and Belgian consuls in foreign ports.59 Moreover, it has been argued that although the seafarer’s menu might seem one-sided by present-day standards, seamen’s food in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was rather energy rich and varied compared to the diets of many people ashore. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, improvements in the quality of water, ventilation in living quarters and washing facilities, for instance, also indicate that seafarers were often better off than many landlubbers.60 Food standards on passenger liners were usually higher than on other types of vessels, which highlights the strong differences between different

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types of ships.61 In 1890, rations for passengers were regulated by law, including controls on the quantity and quality of food. As the Atlantic trade was important for the Belgian fleet, these regulations were in line with new measures in the United States concerning the health of passengers who were denied disembarkation in case of illness, which highlights that shipping companies benefited from healthy passengers.62 For example, the weekly menu on Red Star Line vessels in steerage consisted among other foods of potatoes, biscuits, peas, beans, rice, bacon, meat, dried fruits, stockfish, herring, cheese, salt, tea, fresh bread and freshwater; and for children, the company also provided sufficient condensed milk and milk powder. As a rule, migrants were divided in groups of ten and entitled to three meals a day.63 Food of poor quality and insufficient amounts mainly referred to the early days, as food standards vastly improved at the beginning of the twentieth century.64 In first class the food was even comparable to high-class restaurants on land. A dinner menu of the Red Star Line’s Zeeland in 1901, for instance, shows that the restaurant offered a rich menu, highlighting the professionalism of the galley crew (Fig. 8.3). Breakfasts and lunches were of equally high quality.65 However, it was only by a change in legislation in 1926 that more account was taken of the provision of varied and safe food in the entire Belgian fleet, which, in turn, explains the increased call for certified cooks. From then on, a distinction was made between daily and weekly rations. Daily, seafarers were entitled to fresh bread, roasted coffee, chicory, tea, freshwater of ‘good’ quality and ‘enough’ meat, smoked bacon or fish. The law also stipulated those meals should always contain adequate amounts of salt, vinegar and spices. Weekly food rations were composed of potatoes, peas, barley (or gruel), rice, fresh vegetables, sugar, butter (or margarine), compotes, flour, condensed milk and dried fruit, grapes, plums and currants. In addition, seafarers who worked on vessels that sailed for more than twenty days at a time were entitled to an additional half a litre of freshwater, twenty grams of lemon juice and an equal weight of sugar per week. Particular attention was paid to maritime workers below deck, such as firemen and trimmers, whose work was hard and, therefore, they were entitled to sufficient freshwater and gruel.66 As of 1926, provisions were also no longer the responsibility of the ship’s captain. Food supplies were now directly delivered by shipowners and rations had to be described in Dutch and French, Belgium’s official languages.67

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Fig. 8.3 Dinner menu of the Red Star Line’s Zeeland, 20 November 1901 (Source The New York Public Library, Rare Book Division, The Buttolph Collection of Menus)

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Geographical Backgrounds and Careers Paths Regulating food supplies for crews and passengers was one thing, but it was also of great importance to hire men who prepared food. Who were these cooks in terms of geographical backgrounds and how did their careers evolve during the period under consideration? To answer these questions, it is important to make a distinction between the period before and after the transition from sail to steam. Before the advent of steam, the duties of cooks were often performed by able-bodied seamen (ABs). For example, the Océan of 349 tons was a typical Belgian midnineteenth century three-master with a crew of 14 men, among them a cook who combined the work with that of an AB.68 The same logic applied to stewards who assisted the cook with serving out the provisions and cleaning the cooking material.69 In contrast, when new departments emerged and ship, crew and passenger sizes increased in the era of steam, the profession of cook gradually became an occupation in its own right. Before the heyday of steam, cooks in the Belgian fleet were often ABs. Although ABs consisted mainly of Germans and Scandinavians, it were especially Belgians and Dutchmen who prepared meals aboard Belgian sailing ships. For example, in 1850, about 53% of the newly recruited ABs (a total of 150 men) came from Germany and Northern Europe, while this was 29% in the case of Belgians and Dutchmen. However, of the 27 newly recruited cooks, 80% originated from the latter two countries. How can this be explained? Many captains in the Belgian fleet at that time originated from Belgium and the Netherlands, and it seems that they preferred to award fellow countrymen.70 Indeed, wages indicate that ABs who combined the work with that of cook received a premium. In midcentury, the median nominal monthly wage of an AB was 42.33 Belgian francs (BFR), while this was 50.79 BFR for ABs who were also cooks. Based on 73 wages of cooks in the seamen’s registry in the 1850s, 70% of the cooks earned more than ABs.71 The remaining 30%, who received lower wages than ABs, were often Belgians and mainly used the occupation of cook to get familiar with seafaring life, which indicates that not all Belgian sailing vessels relied on ABs to prepare meals. The prominence of Belgian and Dutch cooks also contrasted with, for instance, the American and British fleets in the nineteenth century, which increasingly relied on coloured seafarers in the catering department.72 Although there was a relationship between the geographical background and the profession of

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cook, the Belgian fleet did not rely on coloured seamen, which highlights that each fleet has its own characteristics. With the advent of steam and the transformation of the Belgian fleet, the share of foreign seafarers increased. For example, the ratio of Belgian to foreign seafarers declined from 1:2 in 1850 to 1:2.8 in 1890. Seafarers from Germany and Scandinavia were still hired in large numbers, but also British seamen were deployed in increasing numbers. In contrast, the number of Dutchmen decreased, while seafarers from other parts in Europe and the world remained a minority—as was the case before the emergence of steamships.73 As a result, the internationalisation of the Belgian fleet partly changed the profiles of crews. On a total of 43 newcomers who were hired to work in catering departments in 1890, for instance, Belgians still represented the largest group (35%), followed by Britons (28%) and French (11%), leaving Dutch representation with only 4%. Belgians were mainly hired in lower positions, which explains why cooking-related duties on steamers that were not involved in the passenger trade often relied on domestic labour. This was also the case in the passenger trade, although Belgians mainly served as assistant, third or fourth cooks, while foreigners tended to hold better positions.74 This trend was in line with general tendencies in the Belgian fleet at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as many trimmers and firemen were Belgian, while captains, mates and engineers often came from abroad.75 Contemporaries denounced the entry of foreign capital as foreign shipping companies that sailed under the Belgian flag preferred fellow countrymen or men from countries with a good overall reputation.76 The latter explains, for instance, the presence of higher ranked Frenchmen in catering departments. Seafarers from France were almost absent in the Belgian fleet during the period under study, but particularly the Red Star Line hired French chefs to cook for passengers. The Belgian-American shipping company was committed to this practice as those men represented the shipping company’s high standards in first class. In contrast, Britons worked both in lower and higher positions in catering departments, but this was mainly due to recruitment strategies of Lamport and Holt. The British shipping company simply changed flags according to contract of service and hence sailed with crews who were hired in Liverpool. Nevertheless, Lamport and Holt was an exception since other shipping companies also recruited Belgians, albeit mostly in lower

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positions.77 During the 1920s, however, lower ranks in catering departments were increasingly foreigners, notwithstanding that the number of foreigners in the Belgian fleet decreased in general. The ratio of Belgian to foreign seafarers, for instance, rose from 1:2.8 in 1890 to 1:0.4 in 1930.78 Furthermore, whereas ABs often received a premium for cooking on Belgian sailing vessels, this was no longer the case on steamships. Cooks who were not involved in passenger trade received the median monthly wage of an AB, which was 100 BFR. On passenger liners the wage dispersion was more pronounced because of the division of labour. At the end of the nineteenth century, the standard nominal wage of a chef was 145 BFR, while the wages of second cooks were between 115 and 125 BFR. In contrast, third cooks generally received 87.5 BFR, which was the standard nominal wage of a steward and lower than counterparts who were not involved in the passenger trade.79 Moreover, it clearly paid to work for the Red Star Line, particularly in the higher ranks. Chefs could earn 250 to 300 BFR per month at the turn of the twentieth century, while this was 145 to 175 BFR for second cooks. It remains unclear whether maritime chefs earned more than their counterparts on land, but compared to other members of the galley crew, chefs were highly prized by the Red Star Line. This was related to competition—in relative terms, the Red Star Line’s wages were in line with similar shipping companies, such as the White Star Line—but also passenger numbers seem to have been an important factor.80 In contrast to other Belgian shipping companies that were involved in the passenger trade, such as Lamport and Holt and CMB, Red Star Line vessels carried considerably more passengers. For example, the largest Belgian steamer of the CMB in 1908, the Leopold IV that sailed to the Congo, carried about 650 passengers.81 Red Star Line’s Friesland, however, already in 1890 transported more than 920 passengers, while newer vessels, such as the Lapland, in 1910 carried approximately 2,350 passengers.82 In what way did the transition from sail to steam affect the careers of cooks in the Belgian fleet? As mentioned, before the advent of steam, cooks were often ABs or, to a lesser extent, men who were at the beginning of their careers and eventually became ABs. Examples of men who had a career as a cook were thus almost non-existent before the transition from sail to steam.83 Nevertheless, careers could last a few years. In 1850, for example, 40% of the newly recruited cooks had more than five voyages experience and therefore had served several years in the Belgian

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fleet, albeit mostly in the capacity of an AB. Obviously, men with multiple voyages in sail had longer careers compared to the era of steam because steamers decreased the length of voyages considerably. For example, a Belgian sailing vessel that sailed between Antwerp and North America in the 1850s needed about 164 days for a roundtrip, while a steamer at the end of the nineteenth century completed the same voyage in 35 days.84 Hence, the emergence of steamships opened the door for careers with shorter voyages. In 1890, for example, 63% of the newly recruited cooks had sailed fewer than five times before, which corresponded to a career of about a year or even less, while only 17% sailed at least ten times. Despite the increased division of labour and the growing demand for specialised labour in the passenger trade, there is also little evidence that working on passenger liners resulted in permanent employment. Although chefs in the passenger trade were regularly the exception, it seems that it was rather common to work for different shipping companies. In addition, apart from chefs, cooks with multiple voyages occasionally switched jobs as they also worked as stewards or maîtres d’hôtel during their maritime careers.85 However, it was most uncommon to work in different departments. Of all seafarers with more than five voyages in 1890, for example, only 8% switched departments at a given time, highlighting that each department relied on its own labourers.86

Conclusion In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Belgium experienced a fast and drastic transition from sail to steam, resulting, among other things, in an increased demand for labour and altering labour structures. Catering departments exemplified this as the numbers of crew members increased and passengers needed to be fed at regular intervals. While cooking was often considered a part-time job in the age of sail, it became a separate occupation with the advent of steam. However, compared to other seafaring occupations, such as engine room operators, the recognition of cooks was above all a slow process. Cooking was often seen as women’s work, although discussions on the quality of food, changes in food supplies and the unprecedented growth of the passenger trade at the end of the nineteenth century increased the call for qualified and trained cooks. And while Belgian unions already stood up for masters, officers and engine room operators during the last decades of the nineteenth century, a union for cooks and stewards was only established in the

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early twentieth century and it was only at the end of the 1920s that the Belgian government decided to provide formal training for cooks. Shipping companies that were involved in the passenger trade, particularly the Red Star Line, were the exception. They already hired experienced cooks in the late nineteenth century, especially in the higher ranks. As such, this research highlights how changes in food supplies and increasing crew and passenger sizes had an impact on the profession of cook, but more research on the series of logistic steps of the catering process would also contribute to a better understanding of the professionalisation and the operation of galleys in the maritime industry. Furthermore, cooks often had specific characteristics, although the pattern in the Belgian fleet indicates that the fleets of each country were different. For instance, unlike the American and British fleets, Belgium did not hire coloured cooks in the nineteenth century. Before the advent of steam, Belgian-flagged sailing vessels relied heavily on Belgians and Dutchmen who combined the work of able-bodied seaman with that of cook. When steam became the dominant mode of propulsion, there was continuity as Belgian cooks were still recruited, albeit in lower positions. This reflected general trends in the Belgian fleet. Many Belgian shipping companies were fuelled with foreign capital and preferred fellow countrymen or seafarers from countries with a good overall reputation in the higher ranks. It was only in the 1920s that the pattern altered in lower positions in the catering departments. Moreover, the increased division of labour and growing importance of specialisation, particularly in the passenger trade, did not necessarily result in permanent employment. It seems that men who had a career as cook often worked for different shipping companies, both cargo steamers and passenger liners, and switched jobs in the steward’s department. Nevertheless, apart from chefs, most cooks had careers with a rather limited number of voyages after the change to steam. It should be stressed, however, that this research focuses only on the Belgian fleet. Many seafarers were not bound to a particular flag and therefore could have had longer careers. Future research would thus benefit from an approach that follows individuals and transcends national borders.

Notes 1. This research is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), project number 12X1822N. The author wants to thank Torsten Feys

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

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(Flanders Marine Institute) and Jasper Segerink (University of Antwerp) for their useful insights. Witt, ‘During the Voyage’, 166–67. De Zeeman 1, no. 1 (1923), 3; De Zeeman 1, no. 3 (1923), 4. Sager, Seafaring Labour, 74–5. Burton, ‘Counting Seafarers’, 314–15. Mäenpää, ‘New Maritime Labour?’, 1–4. In this article, ‘cook’ refers to someone who was involved in the preparation and cooking of food in the galley. See, for example, Harley, ‘Shift’; Kaukiainen, ‘Journey Costs’. For able-bodied seamen in the age of sail see, for example, van Royen et al., eds., “Those Emblems of Hell”?. For members of the engineer’s department see, for example, Kennerley, ‘Stoking the Boilers’. See, for example, Fricke, ‘Social Structure of Crews’; Dixon, ‘Seamen and the Law’. Mäenpää, ‘New Maritime Labour?’; Mäenpää, ‘Galley News’; Mäenpää, ‘Pea Soup’; Cousin, ‘Extra-European Seamen’. Bäbler, Guide. See, for example, Stanley, ‘Company of Women’; Loockx, ‘Jackie’. Willems, Inventaris, 17–9. For a detailed overview of the history and content of the seamen’s registry see Loockx, ‘From Sail to Steam’, 89–97. Since the seamen’s registry recorded information about seamen who worked on Belgian merchant vessels departing from Antwerp, which was Belgium’s main port, other Belgian ports, such as Ostend and Ghent, are not included in this study. Segers, ‘Op zoek naar afzetmarkten’, 424–27. Baetens, ‘Survey’, 248. Segers, ‘Op zoek naar afzetmarkten’, 427. Veraghtert, ‘Advance’, 373 and 393-417. Fischer, ‘Around the Rim’, 62. Baetens, ‘Survey’, 248–49. Feys, ‘Trans-Atlantic Migration’, 38–40. For a detailed overview and history of Red Star Line vessels see Vervoort, ‘The Red Star Line’. Heaton, Lamport & Holt, 29. Devos and Elewaut, CMB 100, 23–39. City Archives Antwerp – Felixarchief (CAA), Private Archieven, Scheepvaart en Rederijen (PA), Harriet: Monsterrol, no. 1104#668, 1847 (HM). Van Coolput and Van Otterdyk, België op Zee, 102. Vervoort, ‘The Red Star Line’, 45–7. Burton, ‘Counting Seafarers’, 305–6.

192 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

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Loockx, ‘From Sail to Steam,’ 121–26. Raats, ‘Beroepsprofiel van de Zeeman’, 193. Loockx, ‘From Sail to Steam’, 130–40. National Archives of Belgium (NA), Archief van het Bestuur van het Zeewezen, Zeevaartpolitie, 1824–1957 (ABZ), no. 4750, Extract from the Muster Roll of the Kroonland, December 8, 1911 (MRK). CAA, PA, HM and Jean Key: Monsterrollen, 1104#650, 1844 and 1846 (JKM). Sager, Seafaring Labour, 262–63. NA, ABZ, MRK; Bäbler, Guide, 113–21, 143–45 and 150–54. Mäenpää, ‘Galley News’, 255–6. Steel, Oceania, 134. Mäenpää, ‘Pea Soup’, 40. Raats, ‘Beroepsprofiel van de Zeeman’, 217. Bäbler, Guide, 128–29. Dixon, ‘Seaman and the Law’, 138. Bäbler, Guide, 113–18. Fricke, ‘Social Structure of Crews’, 32. Van Bladel, Eléments, 35. Raats, ‘Beroepsprofiel van de zeeman’, 65–6, 70 and 218. CAA, PA, Ortelius: Monsterrol, no. 1104#666, 1846 (OM). Beheer van het Zeewezen, Wet en Reglementen, 54. CAA, PA, OM. Hervy-Cousin, Pour Notre Marine, 96; Raats, ‘Beroepsprofiel van de Zeeman’, 216. Raats, ‘Beroepsprofiel van de zeeman’, 216–18. Williams, ‘Quality’, 43; Mäenpää, ‘Pea Soup’, 42. De Transportarbeider: Orgaan van de Belgischen Transportarbeidersbond 1, no. 10 (1914), 130; De Zeeman 1, no. 1 (1923), 3; De Zeeman 1, no. 3 (1923), 4. Hervy-Cousin, Pour Notre Marine, 95–6. Translated from Dutch: ‘Hoe dikwijls hebben wij niet gedurende onze loopbaan van zeeman, water moeten drinken van alle kleuren, geel, roodachtig, melkachtig, alle kleuren en smaken, zelfs soms zeer slecht riekend, bedorven, zelfs is het ons gebeurd dat het water zoo slecht smaakte en slecht rook dat de gezagsvoerder besloot het over boord te pompen’, U.O.M., 1, no. 11 (1920), 309. van’t Hoff, Geneeskundige Gids, 4–6 and 111. Popp, ‘Anatherin-Mondwater’. Beheer van het Zeewezen, Wet en Reglementen, 50–3. Bruijn, ‘Zeevarenden’, 176–77. Mäenpää, ‘Pea Soup’, 40. Beelaert, ‘”Have You Been to the Doctor Yet?”’, 5–7.

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63. Feys, ‘Een brug tussen werelddelen’, 119. 64. Feys, ‘Trans-Atlantic Migration,’ 37; Feys, ‘Een brug tussen werelddelen,’ 125. 65. The New York Public Library, Rare Book Division, The Buttolph Collections of Menus, Red Star Lines menus. 66. Beheer van het Zeewezen, Wet en Reglementen, 55–6. 67. Raats, ‘Beroepsprofiel van de zeeman’, 66 and 218. 68. CAA, PA, Océan: Monsterrol, no. 1104#659, 1847. 69. CAA, PA, JKM; State Archives Antwerp (SAA), Archief van de Dienst Schepenbeheer Antwerpen en Rechtsvoorgangers, Registratie van Zeelieden in het Stamboek (ADSAR), nos. 1760–1763. 70. SAA, ADSAR, no. 1760. 71. Loockx, ‘From Sail to Steam,’ 342–43 and 346–47. 72. Bolster, Black Jacks, 176; Cousin, ‘Extra-European Seamen,’ 84–90. 73. Loockx, ‘Migration Trajectories’, 621–22. 74. SAA, ADSAR, nos. 1772 and 1773. 75. Loockx, ‘Migration Trajectories of Seafarers’, 630–34. 76. De Raet, Vlaanderen’s Economische Ontwikkeling, 288–89. 77. Loockx, ‘Migration Trajectories of Seafarers’, 633. 78. Raats, ‘Beroepsprofiel van de zeeman’, 173. 79. Loockx, ‘From Sail to Steam,’ 346–47. 80. NA, ABZ, MRK; Bäbler, Guide to the Crew, 114–16. 81. Devos and Elewaut, CMB 100, 32. 82. Vervoort, ‘The Red Star Line,’ 50–1 and 56. 83. SAA, ADSAR, no. 1760. 84. Loockx, ‘From Sail to Steam’, 301–09. 85. SAA, ADSAR, nos. 1772–1778. 86. Loockx, ‘From Sail to Steam’, 310.

References Bäbler, Günter, Guide to the Crew of Titanic: The Structure of Working Aboard the Legendary Liner (Stroud: The History Press, 2017). Baetens, Roland, ‘A Survey of Maritime Relations between Belgium and the United States of America (1830–1939)’, in Proceedings of the International Colloquium Industrial Revolutions and the Sea, ed. by Christian Koninckx (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten in België, 1991), 229–54. Beelaert, Bram, ‘“Have You Been to the Doctor Yet?” Het Red Star LineHygiëne- en Controlestation voor Emigranten als Plek van Herinnering’, Brood en Rozen 3 (2010), 5–23.

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Beheer van het Zeewezen, Wet en Reglementen Betreffende den Arbeid op Zeeschepen (Brussels: Belgisch Staatsblad, 1926). Blair, Thomas Stewart, Publique Hygiene (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1911). Bolster, W. Jeffrey, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Bruijn, Jaap, ‘Zeevarenden’, in Maritieme Geschiedenis der Nederlanden: Achttiende eeuw en eerste helft negentiende eeuw, ca. 1680 tot 1850–1870, ed. by Frank Broeze, Jaap Bruijn and Femme Gaastra (Bussum: De Boer Maritiem, 1977), 146–90. Burton, Valerie, ‘Counting Seafarers: The Published Records of the Registry of Merchant Seamen, 1849-1913’, Mariner’s Mirror 71 (1985), 305–20. Cousin, Justine, Extra-European Seamen Employed by British Imperial Shipping Companies (1860–1960) (PhD. Diss., Sorbonne University Paris, 2018). De Raet, Lodewijk, Vlaanderen’s economische ontwikkeling (Antwerp: De Vos-Van Kleef, 1905). Devos, Greta, ‘Belgische overheidssteun aan scheepvaartlijnen, 1867–1914’, in Bijdragen tot de Internationale Maritieme Geschiedenis, ed. by Christian Koninckx (Brussels: Weteschappelijk Comité voor Maritieme Geschiedenis, 1988), 81–98. Devos, Greta and Guy Elewaut, CMB 100: Een eeuw maritiem ondernemerschap, 1895–1995 (Tielt: Lannoo, 1995). Dixon, Conrad, ‘Seamen and the Law: An Examination of the Impact of Legislation on the British Merchant Seamen’s Lot, 1588–1918’ (PhD Diss., University College of London, 1981). Feys, Torsten, ‘Trans-Atlantic Migration at Full Steam Ahead: A Flourishing and Well-Oiled Multinational Enterprise’, in Red Star Line Antwerp, 1873–1934, ed. by Bram Beelaert (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2013), 32–44. Feys, Torsten, ‘Een brug tussen werelddelen en een wereld apart: TransAtlantische passagiersschepen als plaatsen van ontmoeting en segregatie’, in Allen zijn welkom: Ontmoetingsplaatsen in de Lage Landen rond 1900, ed. by Ben de Pater (Hilversum: Verloren, 2017), 117–33. Fischer, Lewis, ‘Around the Rim: Seamen’s Wages in North Sea Ports, 1863– 1900’, in The North Sea: Twelve Essays on Social History of Maritime Labour, ed. by Lewis Fischer, Harald Hamre and Poul Holm (Stavanger: Stavanger Maritime Museum, 1992), 59–78. Fricke, Peter, ‘The Social Structure of Crews of British Dry Cargo Merchant Ships: A Study of the Organization and Environment of an Occupation’ (PhD Diss., University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, 1974). Harley, Charles K., ‘The Shift from Sailing Ships to Steamships, 1850-1890: A Study in Technological Change and Its Diffusion’, in Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain after 1840, ed. by Donald N. McCloskey (London: Methuen, 1971), 215–37.

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Heaton, Paul, Lamport & Holt Line (Abergavenny: P.M. Heaton Publishing, 2004). Hervy-Cousin, Charles, Pour Notre Marine et Pour Nos Marins (Brussels: Dewit, 1908). Hoff, L. van ’t, Geneeskundige Gids voor den Scheepskapitein (Rotterdam: W.L & J. Brusse, 1905). Kaukiainen, Yrjö, ‘Journey Costs, Terminal Costs and Ocean Tramp Freights: How the Price of Distance Declined from the 1870s to 2000’, International Journal of Maritime History 18 (2006), 17–64. Kennerley, Alston, ‘Stoking the Boilers: Firemen and Trimmers in British Merchant Ships, 1850-1950’, International Journal of Maritime History 20 (2008), 191–220. Loockx, Kristof, ‘From Sail to Steam: Two Generations of Seafarers and the Maritime Labour Market in Antwerp, 1850–1900’ (PhD Diss., University of Antwerp and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2020). Loockx, Kristof, ‘Migration Trajectories of Seafarers During the Transition from Sail to Steam: Change and Continuity in Antwerp, 1850–1900’, International Journal of Maritime History 32 (2020), 616–35. Loockx, Kristof, ‘Jackie of All Trades: The Emergence of Stewardesses in the Belgian Fleet, 1870–1914’, Yearbook of Women’s History 41 (2022), 51–65. Mäenpää, Sari, ‘Galley News: Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938’, International Journal of Maritime History 12 (2000), 243–60. Mäenpää, Sari, ‘From Pea Soup to Hors d’Oeuvres: The Status of the Cook on British Merchant Ships’, The Northern Mariner 11 (2001), 39–55. Mäenpää, Sari, ’New Maritime Labour? Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938’ (PhD Diss., University of Liverpool, 2002). Mäenpää, Sari, ‘Comfort and Guidance for Female Passengers: The Origins of Women’s Employment on British Passenger Liners, 1850–1914’, Journal of Maritime Research 6 (2004), 145–64. Raats, Stefaan, ’Beroepsprofiel van de zeeman op de Belgische koopvaardijvloot tussen 1895 en 1930’ (Master thesis, University of Ghent, 1984). Royen, Paul C. van, Jaap R. Bruijn and Jan Lucassen, eds., “Those Emblems of Hell"? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870 (St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 1997). Sager, Eric W., Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1989). Segers, Yves, ‘Op zoek naar afzetmarkten: De uitbouw van de Belgische koopvaardijvloot, 1830–1870’, in Orbis in Orbem: Liber Amicorum John Everaert, ed. by Jan Parmentier and Sander Spanoghe (Ghent: Akademia Press, 2001), 401–29. Stanley, Jo, ‘The Company of Women’, The Northern Mariner 9 (1999), 69–86.

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Steel, Frances, Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c.1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Van Bladel, Georges, Eléments de Droit Maritime Administratif Belge (Brussels: Vve Ferdinand Larcier, 1912). Van Coolput, Luc and Flor Otterdyk, België op Zee: Verhalen rond schepen uit de 19 e en 20 ste Eeuw (Antwerp: Vrienden van het Nationaal Scheepvaartmuseum, 2013). Veraghtert, Karel, ‘The Advance to the European Top, 1850–1913’, in Antwerp: A Port for All Seasons, ed. by Fernand Suykens, Gustaaf Asaert and Alex De Vos (Antwerp: Ortelius, 1986), 359–418. Vervoort, Robert, ‘The Red Star Line Shipping Company: History and Ships’, in Red Star Line: Antwerp-America. Carrier of Hope, ed. by Robert Vervoort (Antwerp: Pandora, 2005), 7–80. Willems, Bart, Inventaris van het archief van de Dienst Schepenbeheer Antwerpen en Rechtsvoorgangers, 1845–2008 (Brussels: Rijksarchief in België, 2012). Williams, David M. ‘The Quality, Skill and Supply of Maritime Labour: Causes of Concern in Britain, 1850–1914’, in The North Sea: Twelve Essays on Social History of Maritime Labour, ed. by Lewis R. Fischer, Harald Hamre and Poul Holm (Stavanger: Stavanger Maritime Museum, 1992), 41–58. Witt, Jann Markus, ‘“During the Voyage Every Captain is Monarch of the Ship”: The Merchant Captain from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime History 8 (2001), 165–94.

PART III

Case Studies of New Maritime Jobs

CHAPTER 9

Elbowing Their Way: Ship’s Engineers in the Spanish Merchant Marine, c.1850–1950 Enric Garcia Domingo

Introduction1 Historians have given considerable attention to technological developments in steam navigation, but much less so to the men in charge of the engines and boilers. In the United States and in the United Kingdom, the first engineers began to work on board vessels from the 1820s at least, and a few of them went to other countries where steam was being gradually introduced.2 This is a history of men as well as a history of technology. The history of the Spanish ship engineers has been a story of a confrontation with related professional groups and with circumstances, including civil wars, colonial wars and conflicts. Although ship engineers had similar problems everywhere, I will highlight the main facts and traits of this professional group in Spain. As a second-rate maritime

E. Garcia Domingo (B) Museu Marítim de Barcelona, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_9

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nation example, exploring comparisons with other national realities can be very useful.3 I will emphasise different topics: the job opportunities, the struggle to put an end to foreign domination, the legislative framework that made possible the regulation of the profession, the establishment of training and learning facilities, the defence of rights or privileges and the recognition of the profession. The recurrent topic is the continuous conflict Spanish ship engineers found themselves in whilst building up their profession—constantly competing with someone or something. When studying the development of the profession of ship engineer in Spain (from now on referred to as ‘the Spanish case’), we find a semantic problem that must cleared up for the non-Spanish speaking reader. The Spanish traditional word for ship engineer is ‘maquinista’, which is defined in the Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española 4 with two accepted usages: as the inventor or maker of machines; and also as the person that directs or operates these machines. In contrast, ‘ingeniero’ (engineer) is defined as a person who works in engineering or any of its branches, whereas ‘ingeniería’ (engineering) is defined as the study and application of technology or technologies by specialists. This terminology always caused confusion. The English term ‘engineer’ is clearer and better understood worldwide, although not without some problems.5 A first step in the reconstruction of the history of this profession in Spain was made by a former maquinista, Pedro Robles, who tried to give his colleagues a chronicle of their predecessors.6 Juan Zamora incorporated the position of engineers in a wider approach to various maritime professions.7 A discussion on Spanish ship engineers from the labour point of view was started by the author as part of a PhD dissertation,8 and later continued and expanded in another work.9 We must also cite the works of Javier Moreno10 and Gonzalo Duo.11 For other countries, we find early research on the position of the ship engineer by Griffith, and in the seminal works by Alston Kennerley, as well as other contributions from British authors.12 The French case can be seen in the works of Lenhof, Clochard, Xavier Daumalin, Olivier Raveux and others.13 We should also mention a PhD thesis by Katy Joanne Hamblin, ‘Men of brain and brawn and guts’.14

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Elbowing Their Way In 1817, a first Spanish ship was powered with steam. The Real Fernando, a small vessel of 21 m. in length, operated for a short time on the river Guadalquivir between Seville and Sanlúcar, but it failed as a business venture. It took 17 years to develop a more sustainable model for the usage of steam power on board ships under the Spanish flag. In 1834 the first steamship line between Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca was opened by a private firm with the Balear, imported from Great Britain. Thereafter, the growth of the steamship fleet was constant. The promulgation of two royal decrees of the Spanish government in 1868 introduced reforms in maritime affairs and had a direct impact on the process of mechanisation, followed by a rapid increase in the import of steamships between 1870 and 1890. A second big change was the introduction, in the 1920s, of the Diesel engine that promoted the modernisation of the Spanish fleet—although further usage was curtailed by the economic crisis of the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. After the restrictions of a long post-war period, in the 1960s the fleet recovered, and became fully motorised, that is until the Spanish merchant fleet virtually disappeared at the end of the 1980s.15 Since the eighteenth century, Spanish maritime workers were organised and controlled through the Matrícula de Mar, inspired by the French Inscription Maritime. The Matrícula de Mar was a military institution that had jurisdiction over sea-related occupations (such as those of sailor, fisherman, or shipwright), especially regarding their utility and availability for service in the Spanish Navy. It created restricted access to maritime professions, and a privileged legal framework for those who chose to be included in the Matrícula. When workers and technicians suddenly came to sea in the engine room and boiler room, they had to face traditions that considered them aliens to traditional maritime professions, for they were not included in the legal framework of the Matricula. Thus, they were not treated as true seamen, and for decades their contracts, labour conditions and place on board put them at the margins of the maritime legal system. On 22 March 1873, the Matrícula was abolished, but later a new military-tailored system, the Inscripción Marítima, was established, though with lesser impact on labour. By then, ship engineers were considered already a maritime profession.

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Foreigners’ Domination At the beginning of the mechanisation of the Spanish merchant marine, most of the steamers came from Great Britain with their engine room hands already on board. Manufacturers of engines and equipment supplied their customers not only with the actual engines, but also with components, operational guidance, and assistance with manning. Sometimes this included workers and ad hoc training.16 The lack of local engineers favoured the dependence on foreign engineers, mostly British, who sought to retain the virtual monopoly they held over the activity. They were generally bad teachers, or better, no teachers at all, and kept the secrets of the profession to themselves, trying to ensure that they were always needed, so the local engineers would be relegated to second-rate engineers.17 Even so, their presence was fundamental for the slow training of local engineers, and it was through these foreign engineers and technicians that the transfer of technology to other parts of the world was carried out. On the other hand, the foreigners frequently caused conflicts. Unable to speak Spanish and being Protestants in a predominantly Roman Catholic country, they rarely fitted in with their colleagues. Drunkenness was rampant among British engineers as well. In a legal case opened against the British engineers who had been working onboard the steamship León XIII and were arrested in Manila in 1882, the Spanish consul in Singapore said that ‘with some honourable exceptions, among the English engineers is where we can find most developed the vice of drinking, as it is widely known’.18 The number of French engineers in the Spanish merchant marine was lower,19 and from time to time we also find German engineers, but clearly the British dominated the labour market. Another question is that of the Spanish professionals with British licences from the Board of Trade. Though a Royal Order of 11 October 1886, authorised them to work on board Spanish ships, they were considered foreigners and were to pass an exam in Spain. The most important battle fought between engineers and shipowners was the insistence by the latter on employing non-Spaniards on Spanish ships. It was a very slowly evolving and problem-plagued conflict, which was not properly resolved until 1904. Even when foreign engineers had been replaced on board by Spanish engineers, they continued to have a big influence ashore as the Superintendents in shipping companies.20 The main argument used against the local engineers was that they did

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not have the level of practical training to replace their foreign counterparts were extremely expensive and demanded high-level handling. But the fast high demand of a growing fleet forced shipowners to explore the domestic market. Even so, shipping companies, including the Compañía Trasatlántica and the Vapores del Marqués de Campo, two of the most important in terms of units, tonnage and political influence, defended their right to hire ship engineers as they wished, no matter their nationality. Moreover, some companies which sailed under a Spanish flag but were owned by British capital did not employ a single Spanish engineer.21 Spanish engineers blamed the maritime authorities of showing no inclination to act in their defence.22 The most important company in Spain, the Compañía Trasatlántica, had only 65% of its engineering positions occupied by Spanish subjects in 1878; by 1881 this percentage had increased to 80%.23 Sources give plenty of evidence of the presence of British engineers.24 Published and unpublished sources give us plenty of information about claims and complaints from Spanish ship engineers’ associations to naval authorities, sending formal requests to the authorities, publishing press articles, etc. (Fig. 9.1).25 Using some crew lists available from the vessels of the Vapores del Marqués del Campo Line (Liverpool-Manila, 1880–1883) we can clearly see the proportion between foreign and Spanish engineers in two samples.26 On board the steamship Barcelona (1881–1883) we found: James Barnet Tealkers, 1st engineer; Alex Neisch, 2nd engineer; John Thomson Donald, 2nd; Jesus Landagorta, 2nd; Alessandro Strom, 2nd; Enrique Moliné, 3rd engineer and sometimes 4th engineer; José Sotelo, 3rd; Juan Roca, 4th engineer; Juan Ventura Sendra, 3rd and sometimes 4th; Jaime Cubells, apprentice. On another steamer, the España (1881– 1883), we can find: James Law, 1st; August Henry, 1st; John Broom, 2nd; James Purves, 2nd; Antonio Pérez, 3rd; Manuel Codina, 3rd; Hipolito Anguileger, 4th.; Jaime Castané, 4th; Carmelo Puerto, apprentice. Using the surnames as an indicator, the result is that nineteen foreign engineers were employed against ten Spanish engineers. All three apprentices were local people. Note that there was neither Spanish First Engineer, nor foreign apprentice. Most of the 1st and 2nd engineers were foreign, and most of the 3rd or 4th were Spanish. The process of replacing foreign engineers with Spanish ones lasted until the early years of the twentieth century. The long road was marked by an apparently endless succession of contradictory laws that seemed at

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Fig. 9.1 A Chief Engineer of the Compañía Trasatlántica, c.1880–1900 (Source Author’s collection)

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times to move employing of Spanish engineers back and forth. Instructions and counter-instructions were given year after year until 1904, when a Royal Decree of 21 May finally set out that, henceforth, all the engineers on board of Spanish steamers must be Spanish without any exception, thus marking the end of a process which had lasted 27 years.

Legislation and Regulation of the Profession For a total of 60 years, from the launching of the first steamship in 1817 to the decree of 1877, the profession of ship engineer was not regulated in Spain and so subject to the discretion of the shipowner in a free labour market. The turning point was the Royal Decree of 23 January 1877. It represented the legal start of the definition and regulation of the profession of ship’s engineers in Spain and a milestone in its development. On the contrary, mates and shipmasters had a system of certification beginning in the sixteenth century.27 The enactment of legislation regarding ship engineers was motivated largely by concern with safety, since most accidents at sea were a result of engine failure and the carelessness and lack of skill of the men in charge of the engines. Thus, the authorities had to regulate the level of competency of engineers and ensure that they had the required training and were employed in sufficient numbers. The decree was strongly rejected by the shipowners. They clearly interpreted it as an imposition and a reduction of their freedom to hire and fire. Spanish shipowners were not used to the State interfering in their activities. For them, the most important thing was the trust between employers and employees, and they insisted that no law could replace this. Among other things, the law28 established the level of competency and the number of engineers to be employed on board Spanish steamships according to engine power and the type of voyage, as well as the requirements to be appointed as Second Engineer, a first step in the definition of the career. The candidates had to be of Spanish nationality, be not less than 21 years of age, of sober habits and clean living, and able to demonstrate that they had gained experience in an engine room afloat. The candidate also had to have worked as an engine-fitter, blacksmith, cooper smith, boilermaker or in some other similar trade either afloat or in the steam plant of a workshop for no less than four years. To be appointed a Second Engineer, he had to pass a compulsory exam based on a syllabus set out in the decree. To become a First Engineer, the next level up, the law required a year at sea as a Second Engineer, and after

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that, to undergo an exam based on the syllabus set out in the text. The issuance of certificates attesting previous experience on engines was to be the responsibility of the naval authorities or the factories where candidates had done their practice. The examinations were to take place before naval officers in the capital of one of the three Departamentos (the naval administrative districts) of Cartagena, Cádiz and Ferrol, or at a Spanish naval bases in Cuba or in the Philippines.29 It should be noted that the French established certification for ship engineers by the Ordonnance of 17 January 1846, article 40.30 For the British case, the Board of Trade exercised the statutory responsibility of licensing marine engineers with the introduction of Certificates of Competency (2nd and 1st) by the Merchant Shipping Act Amendment Act 1862 (25 & 26 Vict. c.40). The Act remained in force 1980.31 The Spanish law of 1877 remained valid for decades. Its general outlines were confirmed by a new law of 1885 that introduced only minor amendments to the original. Some years later, in 1893, a step forward was made when Spanish ship engineers were accepted in an official institution called Junta de la Marina Mercante, a consultative body created to advise the maritime authorities when discussing legislative proposals.32 It was a formal recognition of ship engineers as maritime professionals. A royal decree of 8 May 1915 stipulated that ship engineering studies were to be integrated in official nautical schools at the same level as traditional shipmasters’ studies, though with their own specific syllabus.33 Both professional trainings were considered vocational training. A royal decree of 6 June 1924 reorganised the nautical schools in Spain, modifying the training of a maquinista to the point that it was incorporated into the syllabus of official schools, and not just accepted or allowed. Shortly thereafter, on 2 November 1925, a new regulation for maquinistas was approved, which regulated in detail the profession and established different professional categories. There were no great changes until 6 February 1953, with the promulgation of the Reglamento de Maquinistas y Mecánicos Navales, a bit outdated, for though Diesel motor propulsion was well established, the Spanish merchant marine, affected by in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 and the immediate post-war period, still had a great number of steamers.34

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Training and Learning The engineering profession started in the workshops, and men went up the ladder, working and living between participating in mechanical workshops and operating ships. Training was key for ship engineers throughout the world. As Kennerley stated, clearly ships’ engineers in the early years were perhaps more mechanics than engineers, but as time progressed and standards were raised their status as engineers became more certain.35 Whereas the work of the shipmasters was greatly simplified by developments in the science of navigation, the work of the engineer became more complex and arduous.36 Their careers began with a practical learning experience in workshops and afloat, and progressed with the search for scientific and technical training, aimed at dignifying the profession and justifying its place in the hierarchy of shipboard life. There were two stages of practical learning. The first phase, prior to embarking, involved a few years of training in basic mechanical skills. This practice had to be carried out in workshops or factories and had to be certified to enable one to enter the profession. The second stage was that of practical learning on the job, permanent and without a clear end, since the continuous development of technology created a permanent need to update knowledge. Ships’ engineers around the world had to work hard to be up-to-date about the technological changes in electrification, in Diesel engines, turbines, and later in electronics and informatics. For decades, the challenge for engineers was to find a balance between theoretical training and practical skills, not only at the beginning of the exercise but throughout his or her entire working life. As professional awareness developed among engineers, the day-today experience made it increasingly evident that they had to improve their knowledge of engineering and gain the theoretical basis that would permit them to leave behind the colloquial and somewhat denigrating stigma of ‘practicones ’, meaning those who had learned their trade on the job.37 Unlike mates and masters, who had almost invariably gone to sea directly from school (generally between 14 and 16 years of age), ships’ engineers worked ashore for years during those formative years. It was possible for engineers to complete an apprenticeship in their twenty-first year, but they often were well into their twenties before going to sea. Then they were likely to spend some two years accumulating the requisite sea time. Thus, it took at least twelve years to become a fully qualified merchant ship’s engineer.38

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The factory Sociedad Talleres Nuevo Vulcano, in Barcelona, played a critical role not only in the development of steam shipping, but also in the training of the first generation of Spanish engineers. In the early years, the Sociedad represented the only avenue for acquiring experience in engine and steam navigation in the country. From 1844 onwards, the organisation trained the first generation of Spanish engineers in its facilities and on board the ships of its parent company, the Sociedad Navegación e Industria. A project to supply marine engineers for the navy was to be set up in Barcelona, using the facilities and the ships of the company, but the project failed. Later, in November 1850, when the first Escuela de Maquinistas de la Armada was founded in Ferrol, all the candidates were Catalan, for Barcelona was still the place where the new technology was developing, followed by the fast-growing Bilbao steam fleet.39 In the second half of the nineteenth century, in addition to the Talleres Nuevo Vulcano, men intending to become ships’ engineers could also go to several other workshops in Barcelona, Seville, Girona, Valencia, Madrid, Mallorca, Bilbao, Zaragoza, Santander or Gijón. Later, new factories were created, such as Astillero de Matagorda (1878), Astilleros Euskalduna (1900), etc. And, of course, they could go to the State arsenals, from 1909 under the administration of Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval. In those workshops and factories men learned to handle engines and boilers, but this experience did not always prepare them for their work afloat. In a scenario where learning on the job and training was a central issue, manuals, journals and technical documents were critically important to achieve the necessary level of knowledge and skill. On the other hand, certification, and later examinations, gave a boost to the production of textbooks specifically related to the syllabus, while later revisions of the regulations added considerably to the need for such books. We can cite some few relevant works, mostly translated from English, such as Tratado de Máquinas de Vapor, by Thomas Tredgold, translated, and published in 1831 by Jerónimo de la Escosura. Probably the first text in Spanish was Descripción de las Máquinas de vapor y sus importantes aplicaciones by Juan José Martínez Tacón (1835). One of the most popular tools was Handbook-Libro de Mano o Manual Obra escrita en inglés para uso de los maquinistas navales por M. Thomas Reed, translated into Spanish in 1879 by Antonio Genescá. The list could be extensively expanded. Despite the absence of official schools, ships’ engineers could train themselves and advance in their careers with these tools at their disposal.

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Professional journals published between 1877 and 1936 played an important role as well, not only in the defence of the interests of their members, but also in the dissemination of technical developments. For example, Revista Mecánica (Asociación de Maquinistas Navales de Barcelona), Boletín Mensual de la Asociación de Ingenieros Industriales de Barcelona, El Maquinista Naval (Asociación General de Maquinistas Navales de Bilbao), Proa (Asociación de Maquinistas Navales y Náutica de Bilbao), El Maquinista Mercante (Publicación de la Asociación de Maquinistas Navales de Cádiz), etc. Due to the absence of formal schools before 1915, when official nautical schools in Spain started incorporating engineering studies in the traditional navigation curriculum, private schools were the only possibility for further educational development. In the early years, leaving apart the case of the Sociedad Talleres Nuevo Vulcano, another possibility was the Escuela Industrial in Barcelona, established in 1851. The Asociación de Maquinistas Navales offered private lessons in Barcelona to help their members to pass the official exams and used the facilities of Escuela Industrial de Barcelona.40 The Escuela de Maquinistas y Electricistas was established by the Compañía Trasatlántica Española in Cádiz in 1880, in their shipyard in Matagorda. This institution had a great influence in Spain, for it produced hundreds of professionals for the most important shipping company in the country.41 Hundreds of men started their careers as apprentices at that and its workshop. After an exam, candidates ranging between 14 and 21 years old were accepted at the premises. In August 1895 the Asociación Católica de Escuelas y Círculos de Obreros decided to create a free school in Santander to teach the youngsters the material needed to pass the exams, both theory and practice.42 There were also private instructors who taught at home or in small academies to help the men who wanted to do the official exams. In the professional press, we find ads of the schools of José Navarro Castells in Bilbao, Jacinto Vez in Barcelona, Edmundo Sanjuan in Ferrol, and so on.43 According to the Royal Decree of 1877, aspiring engineers had to pass a set of subjects, but the technological advances which took place in subsequent decades (triple and quadruple expansion engines, electric and hydraulic devices, etc.) made it necessary to broaden the base of required theoretical knowledge. A royal order of 17 April 1891 updated the subjects needed to obtain appointment as a ship engineer. It was called Nuevo Programa (New Programme).

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Students preparing to sit for the official examination from 1879 onwards benefitted from the very affordable book entitled El Maquinista Naval by Juan T. Molinas. It followed, point by point, the set of subjects which students needed to prepare for the test. A new edition was produced in 1894 to incorporate technological advances and the requirements included in the ‘New Programme’. The following programme for ship’s engineers, approved by Order of 17 June 1901, was much more complex and covered, among others, subjects such as algebra, arithmetic and mechanics. As we have seen, the Decree of 1877 established a system of exams. But those who were already carrying out the duties of an engineer before the publication of the new regulations of 1877could request a certificate that permitted them to continue exercising their profession without the need to sit for exams, through the system of ‘habilitaciones ’ (qualifications): a short administrative procedure through which naval authorities recognised the experience of ship engineers without the need for an exam. In this way, not only Spanish but also some foreign engineers received permission to embark in Spanish ships without passing the mandatory exam.

Careers We have little information about professional careers, but what is available gives some examples.44 To cite one, José Tornel González gave information about his curriculum. He worked as 3rd engineer in the Navy from 1 February 1867 to 4 October 1874; then switched to the merchant marine and embarked in the steamship Almagrera from 2 July 1874 to 7 August 1877. The same year that the profession was first regulated, he asked for official recognition of his experience. Authorities considered him worthy of a 2nd engineer category and after the required additional experience at sea, he received his certificate as 1st engineer on 14 November 1881. The same procedure was required for foreign engineers already working on board Spanish ships. Some examples give us information about their careers. For instance, Matthew Brown Taylor, a British citizen born in Glasgow in 1851, was given 1st engineers status by Spanish naval authorities on 6 October 1881. Also in 1881, James Norwell Law, born in Glasgow in 1845, presented certification by the British Board of Trade of 13 December 1869, and was recognised as 1st engineer on 13

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August 1881. We have as well the case of a 25-year-old German engineer, Johann Friederich August, with certification issued by authorities in Hamburg on 29 December 1879. In 1881, he requested his Spanish authorisation when sailing aboard the steamship Daoiz. As far as we know, applying for the status was a matter of individual initiative. But sometimes shipowners negotiated the path through the bureaucracy. When the steamship Magallanes, owned by the Vapores del Marques de Campo Line, arrived at Cartagena in 1881, three foreign engineers received their appointments as 2nd engineers. They had embarked in Liverpool and the shipowner had meanwhile successfully processed their applications for Spanish certification.45 When asking to sit an exam, men had to provide the authorities with certificates of practical experience. The records of this requirement give us a bit of an insight into their working lives. For example, Fermín Lapuente Pozuelos, 2nd engineer, offered evidence of experience on board the steamship Alicante. At the time of his application, he was employed at the metal workshop of the Naval Arsenal. He passed the exam and became 1st engineer on 8 November 1881. Another case is that of Fulgencio Ros Araujo, born in Cartagena in 1856, who entered as an apprentice at the Arsenal of Cartagena on 25 November 1875. On 19 November 1876, he embarked on the steamship Remolcador as apprentice engineer. On 4 July 1879, Ros Araujo came back again to the arsenal for a short time but embarked again on 11 September 1880, as an apprentice on the steamship Alerta. He disembarked on 13 November 1880 and was accepted again at the workshop, now as a workman. It was then when Ros Araujo asked to pass the exam for 2nd engineer. In Spain, until 1891 shipmasters were not required to have knowledge of engines, boilers or any mechanical gear. There were no compulsory requirements. This was different in France, where authorities as early as by l’Ordonnance Royale of 17 January 1846 recognised that masters needed to have sufficient knowledge about engines to supervise the operations of a steamer and the work of the ship’s engineers. Later, an Imperial decree of 26 January 1857, established that any candidate to command a merchant ship had to have at least an elementary knowledge of steam engines and their application to navigation.46 So masters were in some ways dependent on their chief engineers.

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Professional Associations In order to organise themselves and to gain acceptance as highly specialised workers, ship engineers followed the path of other new professions (such as industrial engineers or mechanics) and created trade associations, imitating the traditional ones.47 Doing that, they hoped it would allow them entry into the labour aristocracy.48 Thus, to defend their interests, an Asociación de Maquinistas Navales was founded in Barcelona in 1877. It was the first known professional association in the Spanish merchant marine. Shipmasters and deck officers established theirs only some years later.49 On 6 January 1879, the Asociación de Maquinistas published the first number of its official journal, the Revista Mecánica, and they even set up a modest centre for the education of their affiliated members. Another early ship engineers’ association was formed shortly thereafter in Havana in 1879, to defend the interests of ship engineers in Cuba before its independence in 1898.50 Around 1880 Bilbao rose to being the most important port in Spain, so it is not surprising that in 1891 the Asociación de Maquinistas Navales de Bilbao was established and soon gained influence. In 1912 both associations joined with other minor groups to form the Sociedad Española de Maquinistas Navales. In Gijón the Asociación de Maquinistas Navales de Gijón was founded as a subsidiary of the Bilbao association.51 In Cadiz we find a Asociación de Maquinistas Navales de Cadiz (established in 1917), though probably it was already active before that date.52 To sum up, in 1917 there were five different organisations in Spain: in Barcelona, Bilbao, Gijón, Cádiz and La Coruña, with a total of 1,659 members.53 Spanish ship engineers were adamant in defending their rights and status. From time to time, their struggle for recognition led to strikes. There were also efforts to constitute an alliance with deck officers, for example in 1912, under the name of Federación de Oficiales de la Marina Civil Española. but it failed, due to the major differences between the professions. As a matter of fact, two years later ship engineers separated and created their own federation, the Federación Española de Maquinistas Navales (1914).54 In 1939, at the end of the Civil War, trade unions and professional associations were banned. In 1967, during General Franco’s dictatorship, a so-called Asociación Profesional de Maquinistas Navales was re-established, but only as an association of ex alumni, for union activities were restricted.

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Fighting on Multiple Fronts The emergence of the ship engineers created a competitive situation and a permanent conflict between deck and engine room. The problem was caused not only by the equivalence in rank and salaries—in the early decades ship engineers had higher salaries than masters but lacked their social status and recognition—but also by psychological and social responses to the growth in size and importance of the below-deck department. Some masters saw engineers as outsiders and a threat to their traditional working culture. Perhaps it was a middle-class prejudice in the face of a growing ‘proletariat’ below decks. This distrust from deck officers extended from firemen and stokers to include ship engineers, even though the latter were officers. But socially and culturally, the roots of the ship engineers were in the labour aristocracy; they were rarely from maritime families, and they brought a different set of values with them, such as self-improvement, individualism and professional ambition.55 Of course, the resentment was mutual. In Spain, as elsewhere, the idea took hold that ‘oil and water do not mix’. In Spain, it took decades to accept ship engineers as officers on equal footing with the traditional maritime professions such as masters, mates, boatswains, etc.56 Nevertheless, ship engineers, climbing the ladder from their lower social origins, looked at their new privileges, or at least their hard-fought gains, as officers and vigorously defended them. The cases of conflict between ship masters and deck officers on the one side, and ship engineers on the other, were recurring. For example, engineers were usually relegated to second-rate places on board, prohibited from using the areas reserved for deck officers in dining-rooms or in the poop-deck. They even were given second-rate food. Regarding that, shipmasters and first officers received rations comparable in quality to those for 1st class passengers, while engine room officers received food rations of a lesser quality, like those of 2nd class passengers.57 For many years, from the beginning of steam navigation until the final decades of the nineteenth century, engineers were in short supply and enjoyed high wages compared to the shipmaster wages. This situation was common in other merchant marines as well. But at the end of the nineteenth century differences had been reduced, and ship engineers’ wages fell behind. In defence of their place in maritime labour markets, ashore or afloat, engineers had to fight competitors. For example, in some labour markets

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such as the coastal trade, high seas fishing, port traffic, engineers had to compete with lower professional categories, such as firemen, who took advantage of some legal loopholes. The ‘fogonero habilitado’ (a fireman empowered by authorities though lacked formal training) was the engineer’s main enemy. Without the same level of learning but with formal permission, experienced firemen could obtain a licence that gave them access to certain jobs, for example when it was impossible to hire proper engineers.58 This possibility was also present in other countries, such as France. Around 1919 it was even discussed if there was the need to create a body of licensed firemen, but the plan was dismissed.59 With the dissemination of the Diesel motor a question could be raised whether a new profession was born, different from the old ship engineers. In the Spanish case, it was considered unnecessary, for differences with the former profession were so few. Even so, it was clear that Diesel, turbines and so on, required specific training and education.60

Conclusion In Spain, until as late as the 1980s, the profession of maquinista naval was considered only a vocational technical career and not a scientific one. Contrary to mechanical engineers, those aspiring to become ship engineers were not required to have a secondary education. They were considered skilled tradesmen and would only acquire a system of formal qualifications as late as 1915. So, their academic and social recognition was slow, both on board and ashore. Ship engineers fought to build a new identity as a technician-scientific class.61 But they always found a glass ceiling when it came to social recognition. Even so, in contrast to traditional seafarers who were largely locked into the employment afloat, ship engineers were always a part of the wider engineering employment scene, able to combine work ashore with periods of employment afloat. Their reliability, autonomy and leadership roles which came with their experience at sea made them attractive for responsible positions ashore in factories, energy plants, hospitals, etc. As engines grew larger and more complex, with larger engine room crews to run and maintain them, the role of the engineer became more like that of an executive officer.62 At the end of the nineteenth century, Spanish ship engineers succeeded in getting their skill level recognised and in keeping the path open for career advancement from an apprenticeship in a workshop to hard work in

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the engine room. That is, they were able to create and maintain windows of opportunity for professional progression. However, the other side of the coin is that social recognition was never fully achieved, and deck officers’ negative attitudes towards engineers’ presence and shipboard responsibilities persisted for decades.63

Notes 1. The present work is part of the projects Seafaring Lives in Transition, Mediterranean Maritime Labour and Shipping, 1850s –1920s (SeaLiT), international research project funded by the ERC Starting Grant 2016 (PI. Apostolos Delis), and Mundos del trabajo en transición (1750–1850): cualificación, movilidad y desigualdades. HAR2017-84030-P. Programa I +D Excelencia del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (2018–2021). PI Dr. Cristina Borderías. 2. A synthesis in Kennerley, ‘The Human Element’, in this volume. 3. This work does not address engineers serving in ships of the Navy, though there was some interaction shortly after the introduction of steam navigation. For the Spanish Navy, see De la Vega Blasco, El cuerpo de maquinistas. For the British case, see Walton, ‘Officers or Engineers?’ 4. Diccionario. 5. About the designation of the profession and the difficult acceptance, see Kennerley, ‘British Merchant Marine Engineer Licensing’, 187; Kennerley: ‘Engineers’, 4. 6. Robles, Vicisitudes históricas. 7. Zamora, Notas. 8. Garcia Domingo, ‘Engine Drivers or Engineers’. 9. Garcia Domingo, El mundo del trabajo; Garcia Domingo, ‘Long Road’. 10. Javier Moreno Rico, ‘Apuntes para una historia de la profesión de maquinista naval en la Marina Mercante Española’, Revista de Historia Naval, no 137, 2017, 61–80. 11. Gonzalo Duo, ‘Enseñanza de “maquinista naval” en las escuelas de náutica de Bizkaia (1860–1925)’, Zainak, no. 25, 2003, 501–24. 12. Griffiths. Steam at sea, Chapter 10; Kennerley: ‘Engineers’; Kennerley, ‘Exercise’; Kennerley, ‘British Merchant Marine Engineer Licensing’; Kennerley, ‘The Alternative Entry Scheme for the Education and Training of Merchant Marine Engineers: Background and Context’ [Delivered at an History of Education Society Conference, Cambridge circa 2001, unpublished work]; Milburn, ‘Emergence’; Buchanan, ‘Institutional Proliferation’; Buckley, ‘Role of Labour’. 13. Lenhof, ‘Voile ou vapeur’; Barzman and Lenhof), ‘Travail et travailleurs’; Cochard, ‘Les “bouchons gras”’; Daumalin andRaveux, ‘Autour de l’explosion’.

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14. Hamblin, ‘Men of Brain and Brawn and Guts ’. 15. On the evolution of the Spanish merchant marine, see Valdaliso ‘Entre el mercado y el Estado’. 16. Kennerley, ‘Engineers’, 4. 17. In a private agreement between Alexander Swan and Francisco Brocca, Liverpool, 16 July 1836, the British engineer was obliged to teach any company’s employee. Private agreement between Alegato por Alejandro Swan, maquinista inglés, en el pleito que sigue contra la Compañía catalana de buques de vapor, en grado de apelación en la Audiencia Territorial del Principado de Cataluña. Barcelona, Imprenta de Tomás Gorch, 1837. 18. Archivo General de Marina Álvaro de Bazán (AGMAB), Correos Marítimos, 7518. 19. For example, Ferdinand Reynaud Brun, Chief on board the Santiago, was denounced by the Asociación de Maquinistas Navales. Information about the complaint in Revista Mecánica, February 1879, and September 1879. 20. For example, the Compañía Trasatlántica, the largest Spanish shipping company, employed the British Thomas Coleman as Inspector of Engineers up till 1897. See S. Vázquez, ‘Los maquinistas de la Compañía Trasatlántica’, Revista de Navegación y Comercio, March 15, 1897, 129–31. 21. Mac-Andrews, Serra & Calsina, Olano, Larrinaga & Co, Línea de Vapores Tintoré (the so-called Hispano-inglesa), etc. These shipowners sailed under a Spanish flag to get into the colonial trade between the peninsula and the colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Philippines, a business reserved for Spanish ships. 22. Revista Marítima, September 1, 1878. Also ‘Los maquinistas de la Marina’, El Fomento de la Marina, February 16, 1883. 23. The Spanish Navy had an even worse problem, for the presence of foreign ship engineers could create conflicts in case of war. In 1863 the Spanish engineers represented less than 50% of the total engineers employed, and the salaries of their foreign colleagues were higher, so conflicts were common. See De la Vega Blasco, El cuerpo de maquinistas, 151. 24. Some examples in AGMAB, Navegación Mercantil, L. 7104; Archivo Naval de Cartagena (ANC), Fondo Comandancia de Marina de Barcelona. Roles de Navegación, Vol. III; ANC, Fondo Comandancia de Marina de Barcelona. Roles de Navegación, Vol. III. I must thank Dr. Javier Moreno for the information about these cases. 25. It would be impossible to gather the thousands of testimonies of this conflict. For example, Revista Marítima, June 12, 1878, 261– 262; Revista Marítima, July 20, 1878, 326–331; AGMAB, Navegación Mercantil, L.7114. 26. Arxiu de les Escoles Pies de Catalunya (AEPC), Borrell collection. Crew lists, 1880-1884, Liverpool-Barcelona-Manila line.

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27. Garcia Domingo, ‘Losing Professional Identity’, 451–70. 28. Reglamento de Maquinistas para los buques de comercio, aprobado por Real Decreto de 23 de enero de 1877. 29. The examinations were to be organised by the Spanish naval authorities, who, except for a brief period during the Second Republic (1931–1939), had jurisdiction over the merchant marine until 1992. The first examination for ships’ engineers took place on 17 July 1877 in the Arsenal de La Carraca, at Cadiz. The first to be appointed a 2nd Engineer was the Catalan Antonio Genescá. After a year of practice, he became a 1st, Engineer. 30. Daumalin and Raveux, ‘Autour de l’explosion’, 33. 31. For Board of Trade regulations, see Kennerley, ‘British Merchant Marine’ and Kennerley, The Alternative Entry’. 32. Royal Order of August 26, 1893. 33. The British case was quite different. Several educational institutions recognised by the Board of Trade (49 in 1915, for example) offered theoretical courses for engineers. See Kennerley, ‘The Alternative Entry’, 17 (Table). 34. For the later period, see Garcia Domingo, ‘Long Road’. 35. Kennerley, ‘Engineers’, 4. 36. Shorten, ‘The Australian Marine Engineer’, 39. 37. “Practicones” was the pejorative name for those who learnt their trade through practice. 38. Kennerley, ‘Engineers’, 7. This is the case for Britain, but it is reasonable to accept that in Spain or in other countries the experience was similar. 39. De la Vega, El cuerpo de maquinistas. 40. Garcia Domingo, ‘Engine Drivers or Engineers’, 258. 41. Revista de Navegación y Comercio, no. 59, June 20, 1891, 5. 42. Revista de Navegación y Comercio, no. 164, August 30, 1895, 630. 43. For example, adds in El Maquinista Naval, 1 May 1918. 44. The source here is AGMAB, CG [Cartagena] no 1037. Engineers, exams 1879–1881. 45. We find them in a crew list of the Magallanes in 1880 (AEPC, Borrell collection. Crew list, 1880–1884, Liverpool-Barcelona-Manila line). 46. Daumalin and Raveux, ‘Autour de l’explosion’, 33–5. 47. Romero, ‘Segmentación laboral’, 281–2. 48. The long and winding history of the Spanish maritime professional between 1877 and the end of Franco’s dictatorship in 1975 has been described in detail by Juan Zamora. 49. Garcia Domingo, ‘Losing Professional Identity’. 50. Revista Mecánica, no. 6, June 1, 1879. 51. Asociación de Maquinistas Navales Asturianos. Reglamento de régimen interior de la Asociación de Maquinistas Navales de Gijón. Filial de la Asociación General de Maquinistas Navales domiciliada en Bilbao (Gijón, Imprenta de El Comercio, 1914).

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52. Asociación de Maquinistas Navales de Cádiz. Reglamento modificado y memoria de las gestiones realizadas durante el año, aprobada en Junta General Reglamentaria celebrada del 7 de enero de 1917 (Cádiz. Imprenta La Unión, 1917). 53. Agacino, ‘La Marina mercante’. 54. The convulsive period between 1914 and 1936 is outlined in Zamora, Nota para el estudio. 55. Walton, ‘Officers or Engineers?’, 183. 56. Daumalin and Raveux, ‘Autour de l’explosion’, 31, and Kennerley, ‘British Merchant Marine’, 195. 57. Museu Marítim de Barcelona (MMB). Compañía Trasatlántica collection. 2.5.3/17., 1893–1898. 58. For example, an order of March 5, 1901, allowed them to access short voyages in coastal trade from ports when engineers were not available (AGMAB) Navegación mercantil. Asuntos particulares. Expediente 82. 59. Ministerio de Marina. Dirección General de Navegación y Pesca Marítima. Junta Consultiva. Nota de los asuntos que figuran en el orden del día de esta Junta para la convocatoria del día 9 de diciembre de 1919 (Madrid, 1919). There were, in any case, unions that represent those workers. 60. The topic was discussed in the session of 2 December 1912, and 10 June 1918. See Ministerio de Marina. Dirección General de Navegación y Pesca Marítima. Junta Consultiva. Nota de los asuntos que figuran en el orden del día de esta Junta para la convocatoria del día 9 de diciembre de 1919. Madrid, 1919, 20–30. 61. For the French case, see Cochard, ‘Les “bouchons gras”’. 62. Walton, ‘Officers or Engineers?’, 200. 63. More details in Enric Garcia Domingo, ‘Long Road’.

References Agacino, Eugenio, ’La Marina mercante de España’, Vida Marítima no. 453 (30 July 1914), 321–7. Buckley, Ken, ‘The Role of Labour: The Amalgamated Society of Engineers’, Labour History no. 4 (May 1963), 3–10. Buchanan, R. A., ‘Institutional Proliferation in the British Engineering Profession, 1847–1914’, The Economic History Review, New Series 38 no. 1 (1985), 42–60. Cochard, Nicolas, ‘Les “bouchons gras” dans la ville. Les personnels des machines de navire à vapeur au Havre au XIXe siècle’, Annales de Normandie 61 (2011), 155–79. Daumalin, Xavier and Raveux Olivier, ‘Autour de l’explosion du navire à vapeur l’Industrie dans le port de Marseille. Statuts, identité et compétences des

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mécaniciens de la marine marchande au milieu du XIXe siècle’, Artefact. Techniques, histoires et sciences humaines 11 (2019), 19–38. De la Vega Blasco, Antonio, El cuerpo de maquinistas navales de la Armada, 1850–1950 (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa & Instituto de Historia y Cultura Marítima, 2009). Del Blanco, Manuel, Ética y Técnica. Escritos de José Pérez del Río (Barcelona: Sociedad General de Jefes y Oficiales de Máquinas de España, 2005). Diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua (Madrid: RAE, 2001, 22nd edition). Duo, Gonzalo, ‘Enseñanza de “maquinista naval” en las escuelas de náutica de Bizkaia (1860–1925)’, Zainak, 25 (2003), 501–24. Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘Engine Drivers or Engineers: Ship’s Engineers in the Spanish Merchant Navy (1834–1893)’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 19 (2010), 249–70. Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘Losing Professional Identity? Deck Officers in the Spanish Merchant Marine, 1868–1914’, International Journal of Maritime History 26 (2014), 451–70. Garcia Domingo, Enric, El mundo del trabajo en la marina mercante española (1834–1914) (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona & Icaria Editorial, 2017). Garcia Domingo, Enric, ‘The Long Road to Recognition: The Profession of Ship Engineer in the Spanish Merchant Marine, 1877–1980’, in Labour History in the Semi-periphery, ed. by Leda Papastefanaki and Nikos Potamianos (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020), 321–344. Griffiths, Denis, Steam at Sea. Two Centuries of Steam-Powered Ships (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1997). Hamblin, Katy Joanne, ‘Men of Brain and Brawn and Guts’: The Professionalization of Marine Engineering in Britain, France and Germany 1830–1914 (PhD. Diss. University of Exeter, 2013). Kennerley, Alston, ‘Engineers in British Merchant Ships, 1850–1870: Origins and Careers’, Proceedings of The Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology, Part B, no. B10, (2006), 3–13. Kennerley, Alston, ‘An Exercise in Social Conditioning? The Joint Education and Training of Engineer and Navigator Cadets for Careers in British Merchant Ships, in the 1960s’, The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord 16 no. 4 (2006), 49–67. Kennerley, Alston, ‘British Marine Engineering Licensing, 1865–1925’, in Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500–2000, ed. by Richard Gorski (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), 185–217. Lenhof, Jean-Louis, ‘Voile ou vapeur: le travail et la vie à bord des cargos français à la fin du XIXe siècle (1880–1920)’, Revue d’histoire maritime 5 (2006), 59–102.

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Milburn, R. G., ‘The Emergence of the Engineer in the British Merchant Shipping Industry, 1812–1863’, International Journal of Maritime History 28 no. 3 (2016), 559–75. Moreno Rico, Javier, ‘Apuntes para una historia de la profesión de maquinista naval en la Marina Mercante Española’, Revista de Historia Naval 137 (2017), 61–80. Robles, Pedro, Vicisitudes históricas de nuestra profesión (Barcelona: Sociedad General de Jefes y Oficiales de Máquinas de la Marina Mercante, 1993). Romero Marín, Juanjo, Segmentación laboral y asociacionismo obrero, 1820– 1855’, Estudis històrics i documents dels arxius de protocols 17 (1999), 281–2. Shorten, Ann R., ‘The Australian Marine Engineer and the Imperially Valid Certificate of Competency: Some Aspects of a Tradition’, The Journal of Transport History 11 (1990), 38–53. Valdaliso, Jesus Maria, Los navieros vascos y la Marina mercante en España, 1860–1935.Una historia económica (Bilbao: Instituto Vasco de Administración Pública, 1991). Valdaliso, Jesus Maria, ‘Entre el mercado y el Estado: la Marina mercante y el transporte marítimo en España en los siglos XIX y XX’, Transportes, Servicios y Telecomunicaciones. Revista de Historia 1 (2001), 55–79. Valdaliso, Jesus Maria, ‘Growth and Modernization of the Spanish Merchant Marine, 1860–1935’, International Journal of Maritime History 3 (1991), 33–58. Walton, Oliver C., ‘Officers or Engineers? The Integration and Status of Engineers in the Royal Navy, 1847–60’, Historical Research 77 (2004), 178–201. Zamora Terrés, Juan, Notas para una historia del movimiento obrero en la Marina mercante (Barcelona: Museu Marítim de Barcelona, 2003).

CHAPTER 10

From the Captain’s Tiger to the Chief Steward. Career Patterns of the Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938 Sari Mäenpää

Introduction This paper offers insight into careers of the catering personnel on British passenger liners in the period 1860–1938. It demonstrates the enormous increase in the numbers of catering personnel and provides quantitative data on the changing structure of the UK maritime labour force. It is vital to understand that technological change, particularly in connection with the development of large passenger ships, made catering departments a major component of seagoing labour. I focus especially on career patterns of the men and women working in the catering departments of the constantly growing passenger liners. Their career patterns were

S. Mäenpää (B) Maritime Centre Forum Marinum, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_10

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much more complicated than those of the other seafarers. By the 1920s, large luxury liners carried a cavalcade of stewarding staff and cooks, whose career advancement and promotion was determined by gender, by seniority or simply by arbitrary decisions of the chief steward and the passengers.

Rapid Expansion of the Catering Departments The development of passenger shipping and technological changes altered the composition of the maritime labour force. In particular, due to massive growth of overseas passenger capacity, the number of catering personnel increased in the UK maritime workforce. Technological innovations—particularly the transition from sail to steam, the transition from wood to steel materials, national rivalry, overcapacity and the US immigration restrictions of 1921 and 1922 gradually shifted the focus of the liner companies from emigration to leisure and later into cruise travel.1 According to Bernhard Rieger, in the years 1907–1914 the focus of the Atlantic liner companies changed from speed to size at the time when ships such as the Lusitania, Mauretania, Olympic, Titanic and Britannic entered service.2 Travelling for pleasure became more popular and at the same time the superstructures of the ships increased immensely. When passenger services improved and luxury experiences were intensely marketed especially for the first-class passengers, catering on passenger liners became extremely competitive between shipping companies. Therefore, catering work became more demanding, and more staff were needed to fulfil the passengers’ desires. Catering departments grew extensively during the period under consideration. In the 1861 Census, only 2% of the seafarers on UK registered trading vessels were enumerated as belonging to the catering sector, but by 1931 they formed almost one fourth of the whole maritime workforce (see Table 10.13 ). On passenger liners, stewards’ departments grew considerably in the beginning of the twentieth century. On Cunard passenger liners, stewards, stewardesses, waiters and cooks accounted for 28% of crew members in 1861 but constituted 62% of the crews in 1938 (see Table 10.2) These developments, in turn, changed the composition of seafaring labour in terms of skills and gender. Catering departments became a major segment in the UK maritime labour force and on most passenger liners, they outgrew the deck and engine departments in numbers. Although technological changes in shipping offered

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remarkably more employment opportunities for women, they continued working in a very marginalised sector in the maritime industry with practically no channels for career advancement. On the other hand, the massive expansion of the catering departments on large passenger liners offered, for the first time, remarkable career and earning prospects for the male segment of the catering crew. Table 10.1 Catering staff included in the census statistics of England and Wales compared to the total number of seafarers in 1861–1931 Year Female catering personnel

Male catering personnel

Women’s share of catering personnel, %

Other Number of seafarers catering personnel, %

1861 146 1871 216 1881 386 1891 389 1901* 995 1911 596 1921 933 1931 1,128

1,471 3,436 6,381 not available 26,205 15,514 23,865 23,956

9 6 6 not available 4 4 4 4

94,665 2 94,370 4 95,093 7 107,445 not available 154,700 16 77,028 17 99,056 20 78,023 24

Source Crew Lists and Agreements of Cunard ships. Database 1861–1938 compiled by the author * The census for 1901 is missing, so instead the statistics ‘Annual Statements of Navigation and Shipping’ is used in the table

Table 10.2 The average crew size on Cunard’s Atlantic liners 1861–1938

Year

Deck and engine department

Catering personnel

Total

1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911 1921 1931 1938

83.7 77.0 65.5 101.5 137.7 244.7 176.7 124.8 134.6

33.5 40.2 40.9 59.5 98.7 212.8 209.5 197.2 217.5

117.2 117.2 106.4 161.0 236.4 457.5 386.2 322.0 352.1

Source Crew Lists and Agreements of Cunard ships. Database 1861–1938 compiled by the author

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Sources and Methodology The quantitative data used in this article is based on material gathered from British crew agreements from 1861 to 1938.4 Most of the crew agreements used in the sample are archived in the Maritime History Archive of the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. The rest of the crew agreements were deposited either in towns from which Cunard ships operated, namely in the Liverpool Record Office and Southampton Record Office, or in the Public Record Office in Richmond, UK. Most crew agreements for the year 1861 are stored in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I have compiled a sample from the crew lists of Cunard ships for years ending in the number 1, as it made the sampling comparable to British censuses collected every ten years. In the dataset, all crew members of the first voyage of each year were listed, including their names and addresses, dates and place of birth, occupations, salaries and the previous ship they worked on. The dataset contains information on 13, 451 seafarers and 915 voyages they made on Cunard’s passenger ships. The advantage of this method is the detection of long-term changes in, for instance, the number and composition of the catering staff. The disadvantage, however, is that as the detailed analysis of the catering staff is done only for the first voyage of the year, seasonal variations, which were remarkable especially in the catering department, has not been considered to any significant degree. The occupational tables of the National Censuses were utilised to obtain an overall picture of maritime labour. The information has serious defects. Only those seafarers who were at home or in port on board the ship were enumerated, which means that the occupational tables cannot be used as a basis for calculating absolute numbers of those employed on ships. The numbers are much too low, as most seafarers would have been at sea at the time of enumeration. With the census tables, the researcher faces similar problems as with crew agreements: because of the long-time span, the principles of recording changed and make the comparison of data difficult. However, the available data clearly demonstrates the relational change in the composition of UK maritime labour and especially the growing proportion of the catering segment in the labour force. The absence of records relating directly to catering crew is unfortunately evident especially in the Cunard archives. The situation is slightly better with other shipping companies. The P & O’s and the British India

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Shipping Company’s records are good examples and detailed records of catering personnel have been preserved. They relate mainly to service and discipline, which reflects the intensity in the scrutinising of the catering personnel. The records contain detailed reports and registers on stewards’ character and Merseyside Maritime Museum’s archives have stored Blue Funnel Line’s archives as well as discharge books which reveal career patterns of individual seafarers useful for this study. Guidebooks and handbooks for employment on passenger liners are good sources to study catering personnel as well as personal recollections of seafarers regarding their working conditions.

Recruitment and Training of the Catering Personnel Catering crew entered service by informal apprenticeship, by applying at a shipping company office in person, by going to the ship while in port and asking for a job or by gaining a certificate from a cookery school. When catering personnel’s work on passenger liners became more demanding from the early twentieth century onwards, liner companies often preferred recruiting their catering personnel straight from school. An informal ‘apprenticeship’ (serving as a boy), which was usually started between the ages of 14 to 16, was a popular route for men into the steward’s or cook’s profession. Informal apprenticeship was different from the formal training provided for deck personnel.5 This type of apprenticeship was essentially the same as in hotels and restaurants ashore. The boys entered the profession as bell boys, lift boys, cloakroom attendants or apprentice cooks. The extent to which apprenticeship was either formal or effective varied considerably between individual companies. Early in the period, running away to sea might have been a shortterm solution for many youngsters, who wanted to escape school or a career their family had chosen themselves or selected for them. However, from the 1920s onwards, it was not common to choose a career on a passenger liner. On the contrary, family and school were strongly involved in a young man’s career choice. Certain elementary schools prepared the boys during their last two years at school to be chosen by the representative of a shipping firm to sign on as apprentices.6 In general, family background was a very important factor in determining youth employment.7 The boy ratings on passenger liners were usually children or young boys between 14 and 18 years old. The parents’ occupation and

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cultural background largely determined a young man’s career choice in two ways. On the one hand, the occupation of the boy’s father or other male relative often served to define certain jobs as more masculine or desirable than others. Parents often made application on behalf of their children and went for interviews with them.8 Gender, influential connections and family background were the three crucial factors that affected the recruitment of crew on British liners. Employment on big liners seems to have been a family tradition: there were families where most of the members were employed by the same company and even served on the same ship. According to John Brinnin, there was even a ‘father-toson heritage of stewardship that marked whole families in Liverpool and Southampton.’9 For example, Robert William Blythyn (father), Robert James Blythyn and William Blythyn (sons) and George Knull (husband of Mary Blythyn, Robert William’s daughter) were all employed as stewards and cooks by Cunard.10 According to the 1934 Social Survey of Merseyside, 25% of seafarers’ sons went to sea, which is much more than the career inheritance in other major occupations in the area.11 The Blue Funnel Line operated its own training scheme for stewards, which also acted as a recruitment system. Boys had to apply in writing before their 16th birthday and be related to a serving member of the company’s staff. They were always interviewed with their parents. Blue Funnel also required a recommendation from the Juvenile Employment Committee, which operated under the Liverpool Education Committee.12 Living at the coast, longing for the sea and dreams of distant places played an important part in the career choice of those who decided to go to sea. Mr John Jenkins’s story is fairly typical of the background of those who signed on and of the reasons for one becoming a seafarer at the time. It also brings together previous points about family connections and recruitment patterns. Jenkins, who went to sea as a bellboy, wrote about his decision as follows: Living only five minutes from the sea, I spent much of my time as a boy at the beach. Great ships were a daily sight, warships from the naval base and the liners passing to and fro from Southampton: Berengaria, Aquitania, Europa, Bremen and the Union Castle ships to South Africa, enough to make a boy dream of far-away places. That dream came true for me in 1934, the year I left school at the age of fourteen... For a few weeks, I worked for a local printing works until one day my grandparents,

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who had a friend with connections at Cunard, asked me if I wanted to go to sea…At last a letter arrived asking me to go to Southampton for an interview where it was explained to me and my mother what the job would entail. Incidentally, my mother was a widow and my brother and I never remembered our father: at one time, he had been a soldier in India and also a steward on the old Majestic.13

No evidence exists of stewards’ boys paying any money, the so-called ‘premium’, to the shipping companies. The only expense was the uniform, for which the company sometimes lent the money. Heavy physical work was done by the boys and their growing number suggests that they were increasingly used to replace more expensive labour in the catering departments. In 1861, 3% of the catering staff were boy ratings, but by 1938, they comprised 7% of the catering departments on Cunard passenger ships.14 Several explanations for the increase could be given. Although some were young and eager to pursue a career at sea, many boys did not have much of a choice. They often came from families who could not afford an expensive education and starting as a boy rating was the only route into seafaring and a way of starting to earn money as soon as possible. The system was undoubtedly exploitative of juvenile labour, but it nevertheless contained an apprenticeship element. The boys’ wages were about half the salary of an adult male, and there was a clear hierarchical division between work carried out by men and by boys. The latter were assigned the least desired jobs, such as the work of a lavatory boy.15 Cunard did not use cheaper non-European labour, unlike P & O, and perhaps found employing juveniles a more acceptable way to save on labour costs. Furthermore, cultural taboos still created a barrier to employing women (who, with children, had been a traditional source of cheap and easily exploitative labour) in these roles at sea. Food has always been of crucial importance in seafaring.16 The quality of food was a matter of life and death at sea since it was not possible to obtain alternative nutrition during long voyages apart from occasional fishing and hunting. Yet, before the 1906 Merchant Shipping Act, no attention was paid to the training of cooks and other caterers.17 Seafarers’ yarns are full of legends and horror stories of the food served on board, especially on sailing ships. The cook was often described as a tragicomic or unpleasant character, and the cook’s extraordinary lack of skill was the curse of almost everyone on the ship.18 On sailing ships, the cook was

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normally the oldest or the least skilled seaman. It was even argued that ‘the man who was not good for anything else was the man to cook’.19 Simon Ville states that sometimes an apprentice would do the cooking and receive a few pence more per week in return. He also suggests that little skill was required of a cook since the meals were simple.20 As the passenger services required far more skills than stipulated in the 1906 Act (a few weeks’ training and a month’s service at sea), existing cookery schools in the UK started offering more advanced lessons for passenger liners’ needs. Before the 1906 Act, there were already a number of sea cookery schools in Great Britain: in London (opened in 1893), Liverpool (1890–189121 ), North Shields (1890), Hull (1904) and Belfast (1904).22 The first sea cookery school in Britain operated in Glasgow, but it had to close because of a lack of pupils and funding.23 For example, the increasing variation of cookery and catering courses in Liverpool reveal the intensifying need for trained catering personnel in the merchant navy: in the 1930s, the school did not only offer basic courses in cookery, but also separate courses for ship’s butchers and confectioners. Advanced courses for assistant cooks, apprentice cooks and stewards were also on offer. Extra courses on Cabin Cookery, Saloon Cookery and HigherGrade Cookery were offered for those already working on passenger liners.24

Gendered Patterns of Recruitment As mentioned in the previous section, gender was a crucial factor in recruitment processes. The newly appearing opportunities for training and career advancement in the catering sector were, however, only open to males. Thorough the period, women were employed on passenger liners mainly for the purpose of serving female passengers, immigrant and otherwise. In 1861, according to census returns, only 146 women were enumerated as working at sea. By 1931, there were 1128 seafaring women enumerated in census statistics. However, women’s share of the catering personnel remained low throughout the period. Less than 10% of catering personnel were women both in 1861 and in 1931.25 With the expansion of catering departments, their numbers grew alongside those of their male counterparts, but their career prospects and the jobs they were recruited for remained extremely narrow. The percentage of women in the whole UK maritime workforce remained very low through the period

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in question: when in 1861 the share of female seafarers was 0.15%, it had only grown to 1.45% by 1938. Especially from the early twentieth century onwards, one reason for this was the parallel recruitment channels of the liner companies, which were organised on the basis of binary gender ideology. Women were often recruited via ‘Lady Superintendents’ who recruited only women, and to very restricted roles. There is no evidence of women being apprenticed to any roles in the shipping industry during the period. The initial reason for the employment of women as matrons was the prevailing ideology according to which men and women were to be separated during voyages on emigrant ships. Women, men and couples travelled in compartments completely isolated from each other, and of course, away from the firstclass passengers as well. As matrons were not thought to require any special skills, many shipping companies hired an emigrant to do the job.26 In 1881, The Marine Department officially recommended to the Board of Trade that a matron should be employed in UK emigrant ships. The most important task of the matron was to play the part of an ever-present domestic inspector, and her special office should be to encourage decency and order and suppress any indecorum amongst the single27 females’. Stewardesses were also employed throughout the period to provide services for female passengers, particularly in private spaces, such as cabins and later in swimming pools, shops and in hairdressing saloons. Already in the 1850s, there was usually just one female member who solely served the first-class passengers. By the 1880s, the largest ships employed two to four women, and in 1911, the Atlantic liners had 16 to 19 female crew members, even in the low winter season. The available evidence suggests that women were only employed at sea when absolutely necessary: providing ‘intimate’ services to female passengers (and later in the period, to children as well) made the employment of women a requirement. The ideology supporting the difference and separation of the genders created the need to employ women on passenger liners. The employment of women in the first and second classes also reflects the increasing mobility of women in the period in question. In 1900, a contemporary author described the duties of women in merchant shipping as follows: ‘Stewardesses are of course carried in British steamers; in fact they must be, for attendance upon the ladies’.28 Similar information is provided by Richard Bond in his Ship Steward’s Handbook from 1918: ‘The stewardess on all ships is required more particularly to attend

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to the wants of lady passengers…when there are small children on board it is the stewardess who is deputed specially to look after them during the voyages’29 According to stewardesses Maida Nixson and Anne Smith, caring for the seasick women and children took a great deal of their time when the ships were at sea.30 Even if the expansion and the improvement in catering services gave women opportunities for employment at sea, their career prospects in seafaring remained very limited. Women did not have many opportunities to advance in their careers, as their work was regarded as unskilled. They could, however, increase their earning potential by gaining a position in a higher passenger class, where there was more earning capacity in the form of tips. Similar types of career advancement were available for men in the catering workforce—as will be explored next. Women could only advance to the positions which did not require any authority over men. In large liners, they were organised in their own sub-groups who normally had a chief stewardess or head laundress as supervisors. Women’s work outside of the home, and especially on board ships, was viewed as dangerous and detrimental to the general morale.31 Perhaps for this reason, women working on ships were physically isolated in separate accommodation and partially also in working spaces. According to the available evidence from Cunard archives, women were not allowed to eat with the men in the mess, but had their meals in their own cabins, and were advised not to speak with their male colleagues about anything other than matters concerning their work. They were forbidden to enter the crew’s own pub on board the ship.32 It might be relevant to note that there were laws in England at the time that forbade women from working in groups that included men.33

Men Climbing up the Career Ladder The expansion of catering departments, within the context of the overall development of passenger shipping, made career advancement possible also for both cooks and stewards. On sailing ships, a ship’s cook, for example, could only secure career advancement by moving to the deck when a newcomer would take over his cooking duties and the possibility of promotion remained restricted. On passenger liners, the situation was slightly different. A cook would have probably started as a mess boy, occasionally helping in the kitchen. Later in the nineteenth century, a second

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cook ( that is an assistant) appeared; he might have earlier been a steward or mess boy before becoming a ship’s cook. After a training period, the boy started as a galley boy if he was to be trained as a cook, or as a steward’s boy if he was to be trained as a waiter or a steward. These boys would act as the captain’s personal servants known as captain’s tigers, as commis waiters who assisted the waiters during mealtimes, as messengers (in the period before telephones) or as bellboys who answered the bells from passengers’ cabins. John McGreavey, of Warrington, described his first trip as a bellboy in 1933 as follows: Initially, life was very rough indeed. There was no training and you only got through by the goodness of the other crew. It was pretty brutal and there was a lot of bullying. I loaded bar stocks, removed dirty linen, scrubbed out toilets and cleaned cabins and stairs.34

Despite early hardships, the boy ratings had the prospect of promotion. Men who gained employment on big liners expected to advance along a career ladder according to certain principles. In a few cases, it was possible to proceed from boy ratings as far up as chief steward. For example, John Sawyer joined Cunard as a bellboy and became a chief steward and finally an assistant vice-president of Cunard in New York.35 Employees expected to either move into positions where more tips could be made or to a more senior position such as headwaiter, second steward, a specialised cook, chef or even chief steward. In principle, employees were willing to move into positions in higher passenger class, preferably in the first class and into positions where they had access to a large number of passengers because of the tips. Each passenger was expected to tip their catering staff, so the possibility of gaining contact with a large number of tipping passengers could lead to more income. In fact, the existence of a complex tipping system ensured the high quality of service for the passengers. Those who had been able to secure a position in first class with direct contact to with a large number of passengers, were able to earn as much as $250 in tips over a five or eight day crossing in the 1920s while their formal wages could be as little as $25 a month. As argued by Coye and Murphy, the wages paid by the shipping companies were purposefully so low that it was impossible to survive without tips.36 Lucrative career advancement only became a reality for a limited number of employees. Even if the principle of seniority was followed,

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not everybody was able to climb the career ladder since many more assistant ratings than senior ratings were employed. A sample of the author’s dataset is used here to give a brief insight into the career patterns of the catering crew. The sample consists of 343 individuals who were identified as having had multiple entries in the crew agreements over different years. The minimum gap from signing on to the last mention of the individual was ten years, except in the period between 1930 and 1938. The data confirm that nearly 50% of the catering personnel did not register any career advancement and 6% even experienced demotion. Only 20% enjoyed promotion within a rating (for example, from second-class steward to saloon steward). The next most common type of promotion was from lower into a higher class (15%). These figures, however, should be treated with caution, since studying career advancement is challenging due to problematic and occasionally vague job descriptions used in crew agreements. It is likely that a person, even if he still worked as a waiter, had advanced into a somewhat better position within his section over the years. Also, some staff had already reached a supervisory position when they first appeared in the records and simply stayed in that position. Certain other patterns can be seen in the dataset. Their job titles show that it was fairly usual for catering crew to obtain positions slightly lower on the occupational scale than on the previous trip, depending on what was available and how desperate they were to get a new berth. The catering work was also very seasonal. In the wintertime, the passenger numbers were usually low and therefore fewer catering staff were needed. Staff also accepted different positions within the employment hierarchy in the horizontal scale, for example, signing on as a bedroom steward for one trip and working as a saloon steward on the next voyage. Due to the peculiar nature of seafaring employment patterns, an employment position, by definition, only lasted for one voyage: a new position had to be negotiated for the next trip when employment was again dependent on the availability of suitable posts and the qualifications of other applicants. The extreme casualness of maritime employment and the constant need to negotiate a position were characteristics that were simply not replicated in most shore-based employment. Miscellaneous discharge books at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, which reveal seafarers’ careers either in full or in part, have been used to analyse more closely the career patterns of some seafarers in catering.37 An example of someone who started his career at sea as a boy rating and advanced to the position of chief steward was Albert Parr (born in

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1892). He joined the S.S. Lusitania as a bell boy in 1907 and worked as such until 1910. In 1911, he was promoted to first-class waiter. In 1919, he was promoted to chief steward, changing from Cunard to a smaller company, for which he worked until 1926 when he died at sea.38 Robert James Blythyn’s case shows that career advancement did not always mean going up in the hierarchy. He started his career as a steward’s boy on S.S. Aquitania at the age of 17 in 1919. He was promoted to a third-class waiter after a year and a half and, after three more months, to a second-class waiter. By the end of 1920, he held the position of a firstclass waiter but was re-rated into second class after changing ships within the company. Indeed, re-rating was often connected with the change of ship. Afterwards, he was promoted again to first-class waiter and worked as such until 1927, when he was re-rated again as a chief engineer’s steward (a personal servant), a position he held until 1929. Later, he worked as a first-class waiter on the S.S. Queen Mary and stayed at sea until at least 1954, when he was employed as a night steward.39 Lift attendants, night stewards and mess room stewards were often positions held by older men in their 50s and 60s. Recruitment to the Cunard ships was exceptionally local during the period as compared to the other shipping firms. The large majority of its catering personnel were English throughout the period. Foreign nationals made up less than 3% of the catering labour force throughout the period. The notable exceptions were the early decades of the twentieth century when the proportion of foreigners was as much as 23%. After 1903, when Cunard entered the Mediterranean emigrant trade, it commonly recruited its catering personnel from the Continent. The recruited crew was mainly Italian (37%), Austrian (24%) and Hungarian (11%) as were most of the 40 000 emigrants carried from the Continent each year between 1903 and 1915.40 The number of foreign nationals in British catering departments was low compared to the other departments. Only around 10% of the stewards were foreign at the turn of the twentieth century, while in the deck departments, 25–30% of the seamen were of foreigners.41 These figures exclude Lascars who were an important element of the Asian workforce on British vessels. There were national differences with foreigners employed in different departments: Germans and Scandinavians dominated in the deck departments unlike the low-paid non-Europeans who were employed in catering departments.42 The passenger liner companies operate in the Far East employed Lascars, Chinese and other Asians in

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their catering departments. The P & O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company) was the first to run services from Suez to Bombay via Aden and recruited crew from the region. Often the whole catering personnel—apart from stewardesses—on the India routes consisted of Lascars, because they were cheaper.43 It was also common for ships to carry mixed European and non-European catering departments.44 The absence of foreigners on Cunard passenger liners was indeed striking compared to the national average. It appears that they had a strong local bias in recruiting their workforce and that workforce was easily available. The foreigners employed were mainly of European origin, rather than Africans, Lascars or Chinese.

Criteria for Promotion and Reactions to Increasing Control By the 1920s, the large luxury liners carried a cavalcade of stewarding staff and cooks, whose promotion was determined by the principle of seniority or by arbitrary decisions of the chief steward. On Cunard ships, for example, there were 142 different job titles available for male catering personnel in 1921, and as many as 198 in 1931 (the numbers available for women were 6 and 11, respectively). Apart from the 1906 Act, no formal legislative regulation applied when it came to catering personnel. No official training was required for the post of a steward, for example. Instead, personal appearance and smartness were the prospective stewards’ most appreciated qualifications. A guide to employment on passenger liners stresses the importance of presentation on several occasions: ‘everything depends on personal appearance and smartness’ and stewards were admonished to ‘be determined and persistent, and should your appearance and manners be satisfactory, you will eventually be successful’.45 It appears that next to merit and looks, the time spent on each rung of the ladder was an important criterion for promotion. It is important to note that appointment to most posts in the deck and engineers’ departments required formal certification, but this was not the case with catering personnel. What personal qualities therefore did one need to obtain promotion within the catering department? Contemporary instructions for stewards provide some insight into the answer. They state that:

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As a general rule advancement comes more rapidly to those who have in addition to the indispensable qualities enumerated above (deftness, quickness, civility and a certain measure or refinement of speech and manner, cleanliness in both person and work and natural aptitude to desire and please), a cheerful pleasant manner, everlasting patience and sufficient selfcontrol to restrain any outward expression of annoyance under the most trying circumstances.46

Promotion aspects also depended on the size of the ship, in other words: on the size of the catering department. As large-scale industries developed in the late nineteenth century, large passenger liners followed the general tendency of creating several new job titles in order to ensure the functioning of the workforce, whose tasks had become increasingly segregated and divided into smaller units. The size of the ship started to affect career patterns, especially towards the end of the period in question. The larger the vessel, the longer it took to climb the career ladder. For example, there were four different grades of pursers in Cunard (A, B C and D), The senior assistant pursers were graded as E and F and junior assistant pursers as G, H, I and J. The larger the ship, the more ratings there were, and differences in wages became more pronounced, with greater responsibility and authority entrusted to chief pursers. A Cunard memorandum from the mid-1920s regarding pursers’ pay and conditions emphasised that promotion should be given by merit rather than on seniority, which indicates that seniority was still a very important criterion for promotion.47 A similar grading system applied to leading stewards. Job titles were divided into grades and when a man was promoted from the ‘rank and file’, he started on grade G and was promoted to a position of Extra Tourist Chief Steward or Extra Chief Third Class Steward. The Cunard’s general manager stated that: Promotion to a higher rank or another grade will depend on his own ability to prove himself capable of advancement. It is not necessary that any rating should stay in any grade for a lengthy period, on the other hand circumstances may not permit of rapid advancement but whilst remaining in any specific grade he will receive £1 per month, except in grades F and G.48

Those who managed to stay on good terms with their work mates, superiors and passengers had the best chance for promotion. The most important criterion for promotion, however, was the ability to please the

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passengers. Superiors kept a careful record of their conduct, and sometimes a single complaint from a passenger was enough to stop promotion or even cause dismissal.49 In the absence of formal training, other methods were used to measure abilities and skills. Richard Bond (chief instructor to the Nautical Training School for Stewards and Cooks in Liverpool) wrote of the steward’s profession: The duties of a steward, like all other professions, are only learned after years of labour, and the ability to climb the ladder of success to the top is decided by the skill and reliability of the steward, and the developed sense of tact, patience and adaptability under many trying conditions.50

The importance of promotion cannot be overestimated. The shipboard hierarchy was based on job titles, and this was reflected in every aspect of life on board and, to a lesser extent, in the private life of every worker. Sometimes promotion determined when it was an appropriate time for a man to marry. In 1910, a Cunard steward asked for shore leave from the company’s chairman A. Booth to get married. Booth refused the request and stated: ‘the request is foolish…wait to get married until you have established yourself on a more secure footing by providing your ability and keenness’.51 The rewards of promotion were not only financial: advancement to a supervisory position was an indicator of social distinction and bestowed advantages over ordinary stewards. The size of cabin accommodation, the extent of privacy and the quality of food on board all increased in relation to status. Personal appearance and manners were also closely scrutinised by superior staff and determined an employee’s career prospects. As a result, the personal likes and dislikes of both passengers and superiors played an important part in determining career advancement. As competition over the best paid positions on passenger liners was fierce, informal networks were important when decisions over recruitment and promotion were negotiated. There is anecdotal evidence of catering personnel being organised in Freemason’s lodges during the period. Not much is known about how the lodges actually functioned, but many staff members of the catering departments belonged to the lodges especially in major ports in the UK.52

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During the first decade of the twentieth century, the big passenger liners started to call themselves ‘floating hotels’ and imitated international luxury hotel kitchens by their system of organisation. Career advancement, especially in the kitchen department, was affected by this as, according to French hotels, passenger liners now employed chefs and sous-chefs increasingly from the Continent.53 They were previously employed ashore and brought land-based education and working culture with them. The new institutional apparatus—the development of modern forms of planning, production, and control (or ‘personnel management’)—also gave rise to a whole new range of new managerial and supervisory occupations on board passenger liners.54 Seafarers started to reply to the increasing control around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1909, catering personnel organised themselves into the National Union of Ship’s Stewards, Cooks, Butchers and Bakers (NUSSCBB) under the leadership of Joe Cotter, an ex-steward from Liverpool. Its goals were to obtain reasonable hours of work, better accommodation and adequate sanitary conditions for seafarers.55 The adoption of an eight-hour day, or indeed any reduction in working hours, was its main objective as the intensity of catering work would have meant a huge increase in their overtime pay. Because of the nature of their work (extreme casualness, the wage formation), they had a reputation of being extraordinary difficult to organise. The NUSSCBB had a membership of around 15, 000 in the early 1910s and around 10, 000 in 1920.56 The union went on strike in May, 1921, to resist the National Maritime Board’s wage reductions and the elimination of an overtime clause in the regulations governing the members’ employment.57 This unsuccessful strike led to the disappearance of the NUSSCBB by it amalgamating with the British Seafarers’ Union to form the Amalgamated Marine Workers’ Union (AMWU) later in 1921. It became the main rival union to the NSFU but lost its position due to the shipowners handing the sole representation on the National Maritime Board and the right to supply labour to the National Union of Seamen (NUS) (the former NSFU). Finally, NUS membership, which followed what was in practice a closed shop policy, became gradually obligatory, also for catering personnel in all British ports by 1938.

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Conclusion In the sailing ship era, the cook’s work was regarded as unskilled labour. There was an assumption that the job was transient, the cook being on the way to becoming a sailor working on deck. However, during the period in question, catering facilities became more important to crews and passengers and, therefore, catering could develop into a respectable career also at sea. The recruitment and training of catering staff was sometimes intertwined, as many liner companies preferred to recruit their own catering staff by offering informal ‘apprenticeships’ that also provided them with cheap labour. Two major career paths on a passenger liner emerged: through the kitchen or through the stewarding section. Career advancement of catering personnel manifested itself in different ways compared with other groups in the maritime labour force. In terms of structure and hierarchy, the distinction between ratings and officers was further complicated by the internal division of the catering crew within passenger classes. Not only were the skills required for the new jobs different from those needed among the old maritime labour force, but the principles determining pay differed from those for the rest of the labour force. Career advancement in the catering sector differed from the other departments in many ways. Career progression went not only vertically, but also horizontally. Promotion to a supervisory position was regarded as a career advance. A transfer to another class of passengers was equally important, since a steward’s status, for example, was directly related to that of the people he looked after. Furthermore, a transfer to another position which had access to a larger number of passengers was also regarded as a promotion as then more money could be made in tips. Therefore, the formal wages paid by the shipping companies was only a fragment of the catering personnel’s overall earnings. The careers of catering personnel were characterised by excessive casual employment and therefore by constant negotiation over jobs. As their work was seasonal, temporary, irregular and volatile, they were also more vulnerable as compared to the other segments of maritime labour. The continuity of employment could depend on personal likes and dislikes of passengers and senior staff. The high levels of discipline were partly due to the shipping lines’ concern over their reputation and the tightening competition among passenger liner companies.

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The expanding numbers of catering personnel reflect the changing nature of seafaring work in general. Technological change and the expansion of passenger traffic meant there was a significant shift in the structure of the maritime workforce, transferring most seafaring tasks from operational work to work indoors. In a sense, the changing composition of the maritime workforce reflects the occupational transition in western societies with faster growth in the service sector. The catering department was the segment in seafaring where women first gained formal employment opportunities. The physical separation of the sexes and a certain unease concerning women’s presence on board limited both their liberty and role at sea. As a result, their numbers remained relatively small and their employment opportunities and career prospects were extremely limited. They did not find employment opportunities outside the catering department, nor did they gain supervisory positions—apart from team leader roles within laundering or other work groups consisting solely of women.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Coons and Varias, Steamship Travel, 15–16. Rieger, ‘Floating Palaces’, 97. Burton, ‘Counting Seafarers’. Mäenpää, ‘New Maritime Labour?’. Boys who wanted to become deck officers were required to serve three to four years as an apprentice, preferably in a sailing ship at least up to the early twentieth century. A boy was entitled to rank as Able Seaman (A.B.) after three years at sea. At the end of his fourth year, he was qualified to take the Board of Trade Examination for a Second Mate’s Certificate. Usually, he had to pay a fee. Those who could not afford the apprenticeship could enter as a deck boy and serve a few voyages as such and then serve as Ordinary Seaman (O.S.) for three years and then maturing to an A.B. MMM.710.MAR/PM. Handbook for Employments in Liverpool. Merseyside Maritime Museum (MMM), Liverpool, 710.MAR/PM. Handbook, 168. Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 12 and 33; Childs, Labour’s Apprentices 90. University of Liverpool (UL), Cunard Archives (CA). C2/259. Applications for Employment 1922–1926. Letters from applicants. Brinnin, Sway of a Grand Saloon, 396. MMM. DX/1055. Blythyn/ Knill Collection. Jones, Social Survey of Merseyside, 90 and 100.

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12. MMM. 6. C.2213. Ocean archives. Blue Funnel Line. Statistical details and staff details 1914–1966. 13. Jenkins, ‘Young Bellboy’. 14. Database 1861–1938 compiled by the author. 15. Maritime Archives, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN). Logbook of Carmania, 30.7.1921. ‘’List of young persons under sixteen years of age employed as members of the crew of Carmania on a voyage from Liverpool to New York’. Three boys under sixteen years of age were employed on the particular trip and all as lavatory boys. The Employment of Women, Young Persons and Children Act of 1920 obliged every master of a ship to keep a list of young persons over 14 and under 16 years of age who were members of his crew. 16. See also the essay by Kristof Loockx in this volume. 17. The Act was passed in 1906 but only became effective on 13 June 1908. The Act made it compulsory for every British ship of 1000 tons and upwards to carry a certified cook. The act aimed to regulate the cooking for seafarers, not the passengers. 18. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 123. 19. Seaman, August 28, 1925, 2. 20. Ville, English Shipowning, 109. 21. Around 1890 the Liverpool City Council started to provide seamen’s cookery classes. Quinlan and Mann, Cookery, 3. 22. University of Warwick (UW) Modern Records Centre (MRC), Coventry. MRC. MSS.367/TSF/1/4/1. The Shipping Federation Archives. General Purposes Committee minutes 20.11.1903 and 19.2.1904. 23. Report of the Committee. LXII, q.15,166. The evidence of Mrs E.E. Bell. BPP 1903. 24. MMM. DX/313. Classes for Stewards and Cooks; NMM. SAH/58/3. “Classes for Ships’ Stewards and Cooks. Held at the Nautical Training School for Ships’ Stewards and Cooks”. Prospectus, 1936. 25. See Table 10.1. 26. Reports with regarding to accommodation. LXXXII, q. 136. The evidence of Charles McIver, Cunard Line, Appendix C. British Parliamentary Papers (BPP) 1881. 27. Reports with regarding to accommodation. LXXXII. Report by the Assistant Secretary, Marine Department, to the President of the Board of Trade. BPP 1881. 28. Bullen, Men of Merchant Service, 190. 29. Bond, Ship Steward’s Handbook, 329. 30. Nixson, Ring Twice, 18; MMM.DX 1560/3/1. Voyage accounts of Anne Smith, a stewardess with Cunard. Diary on board Carinthia in November 1927. 31. ‘Female Labour at Sea’; Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 126–53.

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32. UL.CA. C2/154. Memorandum from the General Manager to the Lady Superintendent regarding Lady Thurlow’s letter to the company, which complained about stewardesses’ accommodation on board Atlantic liners 6.12.1922. 33. Such laws included The Mines Act 1842 and The Agricultural Gangs Act 1867. 34. ‘A life on the Ocean Wave’. 35. Ibid. 36. Coye and Murphy, “The Golden Age’, 184. 37. From 1900 onwards, the continuous discharge books revealed a seafarer’s career by listing all the ships served, dates when signed on and off, position and the ship’s route. 38. MMM. DX/1359. Discharge books of Albert Parr. 39. MMM. DX/1055. Discharge books and career papers of Robert James Blythyn. Blythyn/Knill Collection. 40. Hyde, Cunard), 110–111; The author’s dataset. 41. Report of the Committee appointed by the Board of Trade to inquire into certain questions affecting the Mercantile Marine. LXII. Appendix M, No 8. Evidence supplied by Mr. Malan, Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen. (BPP 1903). 42. Censuses of England and Wales 1861–1931, Occupation tables. Census figures should be treated with caution, as the numbers sometimes include also foreign vessels in ports at the Census night. Furthermore, the Census only began enumerating the non-European nationalities from 1901 onwards. 43. The collected material on seafarers’ wages on various liners reveals that most ships where all catering personnel were South Asian, carried a British stewardess. UW. MRS. MSS.367/TSF/2/3/1. The Shipping Federation Archives. “Seafarers’ wages on various liners in 1917”. 44. NMM. P&O/10/10. “Instructions to Pursers and Clerks in Charge on board the Steamships of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company” (1860), 9. 45. MMM. DX/1050e. How to Obtain Berths on the Large Liners, 3. 46. UW. MRC. MSS 175/6/AMW/3/16. Do’s and don’ts for Stewards. 47. UL. CA. D42/C2/259. Cunard pay and conditions of pursers and assistant pursers 1922–1926. 48. UL. CA. GM9/12. Letter from General Manager’s office to C.E. Cottrell, April 27, 1937. 49. NMM. P&O/77/12–30. P & O Collection. Steward’s records on catering staff; MMM. A3. Cunard Collection. White Star Line’s Black List Book on Catering Personnel. 50. Bond, Ship Steward’s Handbook, 1.

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51. UL.CA.C1/212. Letter from Mr Le Sueur to A. A. Booth, Chairman on 22 July 1910, and reply 26 July. 52. According to available crew agreements, a similar system was in use in Cunard’s passenger liners by 1911. 53. Clements, ‘Final Voyage’. 54. Beechey, ‘Sexual Division, 65. 55. UW. MRC. MSS 175/6/AMW/2/1. “Rules of the National Union of Ship’s Stewards, Cooks, Butchers and Bakers, 1920.”. 56. UW. MRC. MSS 175/6/AMW/2/7.”An analysis of the Shipping Industry”, 5; Arthur Marsh and Victoria Ryan, Historical Directory of Trade Unions (Gower: Aldershot, 1987), 189. 57. Marsh and Ryan, The Seamen., 112–3.

References ‘A life on the Ocean Wave’, Liverpool Echo, June 10, 2000. Beechey, Veronica, ‘The Sexual Division of Labour and the Labour Processes: A Critical Assessment of Braverman’, in The Degradation of Work? Skill, deskilling and labour process, ed. by Stephen Wood, (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 54–73. Bond, Richard, The Ship Steward’s Handbook (Glasgow: James Munro & Co., 1918). Brinnin, John Malcolm, The Sway of a Grand Saloon. A Social History of the North Atlantic. (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972). Bullen, Frank Thomas, Men of Merchant Service. Being the Polity of the Mercantile Marine for Longshore Readers (London: John Murray, 1900). Burton, Valerie, ‘Counting Seafarers: The Published Records of the Registered Merchant 1849–1913’, Mariner’s Mirror 71 (1985), 305–20. Burton, Valerie., ‘The Work and Life of Seafarers with Special Reference to the Port of Southampton 1871–1921’ (PhD Diss., University of London, 1989). Childs, Michael J., Labour’s Apprentices. Working-class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). Clements, Diane, ‘Final Voyage: the Freemasons aboard the Titanic’ FMT Freemasonry Today March 15, 2012, accessed 27.12.2021, freemasonry today.com/features/final-voyage Coons, Lorraine and Alexander Varias, Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years. Tourist Third Cabin. (Gloucestershire: Amberley, 2016). Coye, Ray W. and Patrick J. Murphy, ‘The Golden Age: Service Management on Transatlantic Ocean Liners’, Journal of Management History 13 (2007), 172–91. ‘Female Labour at Sea’, Sea Breezes Vol. II (New Series) (1946), 258–9.

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Hyde, Francis, Cunard and The North Atlantic (London: Macmillan), 1975. Jenkins, John, ‘Young Bellboy goes to Sea on the Mauretania’, The Ocean Liner Gazette, Fall/Winter 1996/97, 8. Jones, David Caradog, The Social Survey of Merseyside, Vol 2. (Liverpool: Hodder & Stoughton [for the] University Press of Liverpool, 1934). Lane, Joan, Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914 (London: UCL Press, 1996). Marsh, Arthur and Victoria Ryan, Historical Directory of Trade Unions. (Gower: Aldershot, 1987). Mäenpää, Sari,‘New Maritime Labour? Catering Personnel on British Passenger Liners, 1860–1938’ (PhD. Diss, University of Liverpool, 2002). Nixson, Maida, Ring Twice for the Stewardess (London: J. Long, 1954). Quinlan, Alexander and N. E. Mann, Cookery for Seamen (Liverpool: C. Tinling & Company, 1894). Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Rieger, Bernhard, ‘Floating Palaces: Victorian and Edwardian Ships’, in Ocean Liners Speed and Style, ed. by Daniel Finamore and Ghislane Wood (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2017), 88–112. Seaman, August 28, 1925. Ville, Simon P., English Shipowning During the Industrial Revolution. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

CHAPTER 11

Surfing the Waves. The Rise and Decline of Radio Operators in the Dutch Mercantile Marine in the Twentieth Century Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek

Introduction In 1932, Dutch author and ship’s doctor Jan Jacob Slauerhoff in his novel Het verboden rijk characterized a wireless operator as ‘a creature that is not a fish nor a good red herring, seaman nor countryman, officer nor rating’.1 Dutch-American author (and former seaman) Jan de Hartog in his volume of sketches Scheepspraat in 1958 called radio operators ‘the latest addition to the family of the ship’s crew, who exhibit all the characteristic features of the youngest in the family’. They have not yet quite adapted themselves to the community to which they belong, and the

K. Davids (B) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] J. Schokkenbroek Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Hong Kong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_11

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community had not yet entirely accepted them.2 The singular position of wireless operators earned them all sorts of nicknames such as ‘toean knetterrr’ (lord of the crackle), or, most commonly, ‘sparks’. Wireless operators, also known as ‘radio operators’ or ‘radio officers’, are an example of a new profession appearing on board during the great transformation of the shipping industry taking place from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Along with the transition from sail to steam, the increased use of electricity on board and the expansion of passenger shipping, hierarchies on shipboard were being thoroughly restructured.3 The presence of radio operators at sea has been less durable, however, than that of other new professionals such as engineers, stewards, or stewardesses. Their profession has risen and fallen in a period of barely a hundred years. Radio equipment was first installed on German and Belgian merchant ships in 1900 and on English and Dutch merchantmen in 1901. At about the same time, shore stations were established on the coasts of Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States.4 Wireless operators became redundant in 1999, when radio telegraphy on merchantmen was formally superseded by the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System.5 Aside from its short life span, this profession was also distinctive in its work environment and the way its practitioners were employed. Radio operators often worked alone. Most of them were not employed by a shipping company but by a wireless telegraph company, which hired them out on a contract basis. They had a different supervisor than other members of the crew. In the British shipping industry, for example, the Marconi International Marine Communication Company (Marconi Marine Company, in short), created in 1900, was the largest employer of radio operators, while the Deutsche Betriebsgesellschaft für drahtlose Telegrafie (Debeg ), founded by a consortium of private companies in 1911 with strong backing of the German government, obtained a similar position in the German shipping industry.6 Still, a number of shipping companies, such as Shell Tankers, British Petroleum, Alfred Holt and Townsend Thoresen, at various times staffed their services with their own radio operators. The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company did so from 1953 onwards.7 Furthermore, unlike nearly all other crew members, radio operators did not exclusively belong to either the ‘back office’ (such as mates, engineers, firemen or sailors) or the ‘front office’ (such as stewards and stewardesses). Like ship’s doctors, wireless operators provided services to

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the crew as well as to the passengers and they could mingle with both. The first radio equipment in the merchant marine was mostly installed on big passenger liners plying the route across the North Atlantic. Wireless telegraphy was regarded as a ‘nice and pleasant toy to pass time for passengers on large steamers, who could afford such a luxury’.8 Radio operators have hardly been studied by historians. The most comprehensive survey to date is H.E. Hancock’s history of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, which concentrates on the company rather than the operators, however, and only covers the period of the ‘rise’ of the profession until 1950. Various bits and pieces of their history are discussed in essays by Friedewald and Evans on the early development of wireless telegraphy at sea and in sundry commemorative books.9 This essay looks at radio operators as a group, both in the phase of ‘rise’ and during the phase of ‘decline’. It focusses on radio operators in a single national mercantile marine, namely the Dutch merchant navy, while taking available studies on other countries into account for comparative purposes. The questions the essay seeks to answer are: how did radio operators cope with the challenge of establishing and preserving a position in the ship’s hierarchy? What did they aim to achieve and what did they attain? What factors and circumstances can explain their achievements or failures? We will argue that radio operators in the period between World War I and the mid-1960s for most of the time could benefit from a ‘window of opportunity’. On the one hand, demand for their services, favored by government regulations and economic circumstances, strongly grew, while on the other hand their skills were often in relatively short supply. However, this window of opportunity was eventually closed due to fundamental changes in technology. The first section of this article gives an overview of the employment and tasks of radio operators on merchantmen. The second section examines the radio operators’ struggle over the years to establish their position in the ship’s hierarchy. The third section analyzes demand and supply on the labour market, government regulations and technological change. All these factors and circumstances influenced the position of radio operators on board. Throughout this essay, the terms ‘wireless operator’, ‘radio operator’ and ‘marconist’ will be used interchangeably. The term ‘radio officer’ appears only sparingly, as it served as sign of status rather than a neutral professional description.

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Employment and Tasks of Radio Operators Radio operators on Dutch merchantmen were initially employed by the Marconi Marine Company in London and then, from 1913 onwards, by its subsidiary based in Brussels, the Société Anonyme Internationale de Télégraphie sans Fil (SAIT ). The Marconi firm also supplied the equipment for the ships and took care of its maintenance.10 As in England, the company provided its own training facilities, too. The SAIT founded a school for radio operators in Rotterdam in 1910 and another one in Amsterdam in 1914. However, the outbreak of World War I made it hard to continue this arrangement with the SAIT , as Belgium was occupied by the Germans while the Netherlands remained neutral. To ensure that radio communication with their ships could be maintained, Dutch shipowners in 1916 joined forces to establish a new wireless company, the Nederlandsche Telegraaf Maatschappij Radio Holland, commonly known as Radio Holland, which would take over the role of the SAIT . Nineteen shipping companies became shareholders. Nearly, all the big shipping firms were represented in its Board of Directors: the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland, the Holland Amerika Line, the KNSM, the Java China Japan Line, the Koninklijke West-Indische Maildienst, the Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd and Van Nievelt Goudriaan & Co. A director of the Bataafsche Petroleum (Shell) and a professor at the Technical University in Delft each had a seat on the board as well. Next, Radio Holland created a subsidiary company for the production of radio equipment, the Nederlandsche Seintoestellen Fabriek (NSF), in 1918. All staff members and facilities of the SAIT in the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies, including its training schools in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, were transferred to Radio Holland. The whole process was completed in 1919.11 From 1919 onwards, almost all wireless operators in the Dutch mercantile marine were employees of Radio Holland. Only a few shipping companies, such as Wijsmuller’s towage and salvage company, employed their own personnel to operate the radio equipment.12 When Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) introduced the use of radio equipment (built by the NSF) on flights to London and Paris in the mid-1920s, it initially recruited its operators from Radio Holland as well. The first wireless operators serving on KLM planes had previously worked on merchantmen and tugboats. The start of regular flights to the Netherlands Indies in 1931 induced KLM to establish a separate corps of radio operators, which partly

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consisted of operators hired from Radio Holland and partly of operators trained and paid by the airline company itself. In a few years’ time, the KLM corps expanded from fourteen to fifty men.13 Graph 11.1 shows the ups and downs of employment at Radio Holland and KLM over the years.14 The number of employees of Radio Holland expanded rapidly from only four in 1917 to 164 in 1919 (after incorporation of the operators formerly employed by the SAIT ) to nearly 340 in 1920. After a slight decline in the early twenties, the number grew again to reach more than 400 in 1930. The start of the Great Depression led to a steep fall in employment. In August, 1930, the radio operators’ association warned in the newspapers that there was no shortage of wireless operators in the merchant marine at all. ‘There was a surplus instead. Immediate placement was by no means guaranteed’.15 The nadir was reached in 1934, when a mere 250 operators had jobs at Radio Holland. In the second half of the thirties, by contrast, the number of employees began to climb again to peak at nearly 500 on the eve of the occupation of the Netherlands by the German army in May, 1940. After the end of World War II, when employment stood at just over 400, the workforce of Radio Holland serving at sea showed continued growth until the beginning of the 1960s. The all-time high was reached in 1962, when 750 radio operators were employed on board ships. By the late twentieth century, the sailing workforce no longer consisted only of men. Women eventually made their appearance as operators at sea as well.16 Meanwhile, KLM, which had recruited hundreds of wireless operators for its swiftly expanding fleet in the late 1940s, started to cut back structurally on its flying radio personnel from 1958 onwards. The spread of land-based radio telephone systems made the presence of marconists on airplanes no longer necessary. The number of radio operators employed by KLM dropped from 230 in the late fifties via 130 in 1961 to zero four years later. The KLM corps was dissolved in October 1965.17 British airline companies showed a parallel decline. The last radio operator at British European Airways retired in 1963.18 In the Dutch mercantile marine, employment of wireless operators only began to decline when the downsizing of the KLM corps was already in its final phase, and it proceeded much more gradually. Radio Holland closed its school for radio operators in 1983, and the nautical schools merged their training programs for their radio officers, mates, and engineers. ‘Sparks’ entirely disappeared from Dutch merchantmen in the 1990s.

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800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

1917 1919 1920 1924 1930 1934 1936 1940 1945 1950 1952 1954 1956 1962 1966 1976

Graph 11.1 Number of radio operators employed by Radio Holland (blue columns) and the Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) (red columns), 1917–1976. (Source PDRH 50 jaar Radio Holland N.V .; PDRH Speciaal nummer 19166 december -1976; Van der Klaauw and Houtkooper, Onsterfelijk alphabet )

Shipping company Nedlloyd, the successor parent company of Radio Holland, sold its radio communication activities to SAIT , creating a new holding company, SAIT-Radio Holland.19 What did radio operators do on ships? Throughout the years, their main task was to care for the safety of human life at sea.20 A wireless operator was required to be alerted to distress, emergency and safety calls during a listening watch, which normally consisted of four two-hour watches, alternating with two-hour periods rest in between. Furthermore, he assisted the captain by receiving and transmitting telegrams concerning cargo, routes and sailing orders, by following news and weather reports, by recording time signals and by maintaining communication with nearby ships and shore stations. A radio operator could also be asked to send or receive private telegrams for the captain, for crew members or for passengers. In this way, he served both at the ‘back office’ and at the ‘front office’ on board. From the early 1930s onwards, the operator’s task was made easier by the spread of newly invented automatic alarm devices that

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produced a loud noise whenever a distress call (preceded by a standardized signal) came in during hours when an operator was not on duty.21 Finally, operators were also responsible for the maintenance and repair of the radio equipment on board.

Radio Operators in the ship’s Hierarchy Slauerhoff’s quip about the ill-defined status of radio operators in the ship’s hierarchy was not entirely a fictional invention. The question whether a wireless operator was a seaman was, formally at least, not settled until the First World War. In a lawsuit filed by a wireless operator in New York in 1916, the court ruled that ‘a wireless telegraph operator (was) a seaman and a member of the ship’s crew (…) even though in fact he was hired and paid by the Marconi Marine Company and was on board pursuant to a contract between it and the shipowners’. The decisive arguments were that a radio operator was required ‘to sign the ship’s articles, (that he) was there in pursuance of some arrangement with the owner of the vessel, (that he) was under his orders and (that) his services were rendered in aid of navigation thereof, since his presence increases the safety of the vessel in times of danger’.22 In the Dutch merchant navy after World War I, wireless operators were treated likewise as members of the ship’s crew, even though they were under contract of Radio Holland. Details of an employment relationship of an operator on a merchant ship were laid down in a contract between the operator and Radio Holland. This was complemented by a contract between the operator (represented by Radio Holland) and the shipping company.23 Whether wireless operators could be regarded as officers was still a moot point in mercantile marines in the Interwar period. Like their colleagues in England, Dutch operators in the early 1920s were adamant that they should be called ‘officers’.24 When learning that navigation officers of some shipping companies enjoyed an allowance for the upkeep of their uniforms for the entire duration of a voyage, they immediately claimed a similar arrangement from Radio Holland. Wearing a uniform meant a lot for a wireless operator, they added. Men’s fashion shops advertised for operator’s uniforms in this very period.25 Ten years later, the high-ranking status of radio operators on board was confirmed in an indirect way. An amendment of the Schepenwet (Shipping law) of 1931 added the radio operator, next to the captain, the mate, and the engineer, to the list of those on board who could be held responsible in

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case of shipwreck.26 After the Second World War, the status of wireless operators as officers was broadly accepted. Radio operators were included in the central organization of captains and officers of Dutch mercantile marine, the Centrale van Kapiteins en Officieren ter Koopvaardij (CKO). In the United States, an amendment of the Merchant Marine Act of 1948 formally granted radio operators what they had campaigned for over many years: a licensed status as a ship’s officer, on a par with mates and engineers.27 Radio operators in the Dutch merchant marine strove to protect and reinforce their position on board as soon as their numbers began to expand. In this respect, too, the development in the Netherlands moved in sync with that in Britain. The principal instruments in these efforts were mutual association and cooperation with other organizations of ship’s officers. The idea to establish an association of their own emerged— according to of one of the founding fathers—‘in the dark November revolutionary days of the year 1918’, when a number of radio operators one evening attended a socialist meeting in Amsterdam. Although the ‘dogma’s’ of the speakers made little impression on these particular listeners, the slogan ‘unite’ did not fall on deaf ears. On November 24, 1918, a small band of wireless operators founded the Vereeniging van Radio-telegrafisten ter Koopvaardij (VRK ).28 The new association was quickly recognized by Radio Holland and the SAIT as representative of the radio operators.29 It also established relations with the Association of Wireless Telegraphists in Britain, which had likewise received recognition from the Marconi Marine Company in 1918, and other foreign organizations of radio operators.30 The growth of the number of wireless operators employed by KLM led the association in 1932 to change its name from Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij to Vereeniging van Radio-telegrafisten ter Koopvaardij en in de Luchtvaart.31 After the Second World War, the radio operators serving on KLM planes founded their own association, while the old-established association of operators merged with other officers’ organizations in the mercantile marine into the Centrale van Kapiteins en Officieren ter Koopvaardij (CKO).32 The first ally which the wireless operators sought among other ship’s officers in the Dutch mercantile marine were the engineers. When a government committee studying the legal position of captains and crews in 1921 asked the VRK for its opinion on the matter, the association took the position of the association of engineers as its reference point

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because that organization was deemed to be more experienced.33 During the Second World War, the cooperation between wireless operators, engineers and navigation officers intensified to such extent that the VRK in 1947 decided that the interests of radio operators would be better protected if the association would merge with the professional associations of the other groups of officers into a new central organization, the CKO.34 The initial aims of the VRK were to obtain better accommodation on board, to get salaries and allowances that were in accordance with the operators’ actual work and responsibility and corresponded to the existing standard of living and to achieve decent arrangements for watch times and payment of overtime hours.35 In correspondence with the British fellow association about a project to an international federation of wireless telegraphists, which started in early 1919, the VRK was more explicit and specific about the protection of the status of operators on board. Not only did the association underline the need for ‘sep[a]rate sitting and operating rooms (…) to avoid that operators of duty (were) troubled by noise of motors and ionized air’, but it also added the desideratum that operators would receive ‘the same allowances pay and other conveniences’ as ‘the other officers on board’ and that ‘operators on ships sailing in foreign trade’ would be relieved ‘on the same terms and at the same time as the other officers on board’ and insisted that it was ‘necessary that the combination navigation officer and wireless telegraphist (would) only be allowed on small ships or on short voyages or in case of illness and emergency’. The latter demand was quite moderate compared to the position of the British association, which was not prepared to allow the combination under any circumstances at all.36 British operators insisted on a closed shop. A complicating factor for the realization of these aims was that wireless operators had to deal with many different parties. For salaries, allowances and the like they could negotiate directly with their employer, Radio Holland. As acknowledged representative of the radio operators, the VRK and its successor organization, the CKO, frequently concluded agreements with Radio Holland about the remuneration of its employees. Except for severe cuts in the early thirties, the wages and benefits paid by the wireless company gradually increased over the years. Unlike its British counterpart in 1925,37 the Dutch organization never went so far as to call for a strike to obtain a fair level of payment. In the mid-1950s, the mood among radio officers about the outcome of the negotiations

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with Radio Holland even bordered on the euphoric. Improvements were achieved across the board, ranging all the way from increased salaries and higher premiums for long voyages to more generous holiday allowances and better payment for overtime hours.38 However, other matters could not be dealt with in such a straightforward way. The outcome could vary by shipping company, by ship and even by individual operator. Government policies could play a role as well. This variability applied, notably, to accommodation on board, which was a matter of concern for radio operators’ associations in Britain and the Netherlands from the start. Accommodation for wireless operators on British merchant ships, H.E. Hancock has written, ‘was not, generally, of a high standard in [the] early days, especially in the cargo ships, and the wireless cabin was frequently a light wooden structure on deck’. The union of radio operators alerted the Board of Trade in the mid-1920s to ‘the danger of wireless cabins being fixed in an exposed position and constructed of wood’, which then ordered their inspectors to ‘pay careful attention to the strength and security of the wireless house’ 39 Wireless operators in the Dutch mercantile marine again and again complained about the lack of separate sleeping cabins.40 Technical drawings of steam ships including deck plans show the sheer amount of variation of accommodation by ship and by shipping company in the Dutch merchant marine in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the often bewildering conditions which wireless operators had to face in their life and work on board.41 In the collections of Het Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam, we examined sixteen deck plans of freighters and passenger ships from four different major Dutch shipping companies from this period: the KNSM, the Koninklijke Hollandsche Lloyd (KHL), the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland (SMN) and the Koninklijke Paketvaart Maatschappij (KPM).42 While the KNSM and the KHL concentrated their operations on Europe and South America, the SMN specialized in routes between Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia and the KPM had a far-flung network of shipping lines in Asia itself, centered upon the Dutch East Indies. In the deck plan of the KNSM freighter S.S. Tellus, dating from 1904, we find the cabin of the radio operator located as a separate space to the starboard side of the captain’s cabin. In this case, the company apparently set the radio operator on a par with the captain. Seven years later, however, the same shipping company had on the freighter S.S. Calypso a so-called Marconihut (cabin) placed as a single room right aft on the

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top deck, immediately behind the funnel—a far from desirable location due to the smell, smoke, and noise. On the large passenger/cargo ship Gelria (13,868 BRT) of the KHL, built in 1913, by contrast, the radio operator’s cabin turns out to have been placed amidst the cabins of the other officers. Deck plans from the SMN suggest that vessels of this company lacked a marconist’s cabin prior to 1911. On plans of the passenger vessels S.S. Grotius and S.S. Lombok (both built in 1907), cables for radio communication leading up to the captain’s cabin can be discerned, but no separate cabin for a wireless operator. The S.S. Koningin der Nederlanden (1911), a big passenger ship of 8,205 BRT, seems to have been the first ship of the SMN to be equipped with special facilities for radio operators. Right behind the funnel, apart from the navigation officers and engineers, three rooms are depicted: a waiting room, a bedroom, and a Marconi telegraph room. Working and living spaces were apparently separated. Specific mention is made of the marconist providing services to passengers. On another even larger passenger ship, the S.S. Jan Pieterszoon Coen (built 1914, 11,653 BRT) the wireless station was located in between funnels, situated completely apart from all other cabins. In this case, too, the services provided to passengers were specifically mentioned on the plan. By contrast, on the S.S. Rotti (1914), a fairly simple freighter built in 1914, a telegraphist’s cabin was placed amidst the cabins of other officers. For the KPM, we analyzed eight plans ranging in date from 1908 to 1915. The picture is as varied as in the case of the KNSM. On the freighter S.S. De Haan (1908; 3,000 BRT), the radio operator had a radio station on the upper deck, just forward of the captain’s cabin, but a specific operator’s cabin (a living space as opposed to working space) seems to be absent. In the deck plan of the mailboat S.S. Rumphius, also constructed in 1908, there is no sign of a radio operator at all. Another KPM vessel, the Van Linschoten, built in 1909, had similar arrangements as the De Haan. This was also the case with the 1912 built S.S. Schouten (a freighter with passenger accommodation) and with the 1913 built Van Imhoff. On these ships, a radio station can be found forward of the captain’s cabin, but the plans contain no references to a specific cabin for the radio operator. Deck plans of the M.S. Siberg (built in 1915) show the radio cabin being located on a flying bridge, combined with the captain’s cabin and chart room. There is no special mention of a marconist. The deck plans of the KPM passenger ship S.S. Melchior Treub (built in 1913) show the wireless operator’s quarters located far aft, behind the

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engineers and quite some distance away from the other officers. They include both working and living spaces, suggesting that the KPM appreciated the importance of radio operators. Similar observations can be made regarding the passenger ship S.S. Roggeveen (1915). In this case, despite its relatively awkward location just in front of the funnel, the radio operator’s quarters were placed on its own island, apart from other officers. The facilities consisted of a cabin, a bathroom and two toilets. Together with the captain, the telegraphist seems to have been the only officer on board to have enjoyed such lavish private facilities. Up to the First World War, there was clearly no uniform pattern in the way radio operators were accommodated on Dutch merchant ships. Although deck plans often show wires trailing down to the flying bridge or captain’s cabin (or chart room), there is no standard location set aside either for operating the telegraph or for a specialized radio operator to sit and work in. In some cases, we have been able to discern marconists’ cabins. These facilities were always situated on the top deck, but the exact location could vary from the bridge or the captain’s cabin to a site near the funnels to the aft section of the superstructure. Except for the Koningin der Nederlanden and the Rotti, the cabins of radio operators appear to have been separated from those of all other officers on board. What all cases from the period 1901–1915 have in common, though, is that the radio operator was physically placed in the vicinity of the captain, which suggests that the operator’s importance for the safety of the ship was early acknowledged by the shipping company and the ship’s commander alike (Fig. 11.1). Better accommodation could only be provided by shipowners, however, not by the Marconi Marine Company, Debeg or Radio Holland. The wireless company could do no more than act as a messenger boy. Moreover, adequate arrangements were easier to realize on new ships than on existing vessels. In the British merchant marine, accommodations for radio operators when off duty were ‘generally of a high standard in ships built since the [Second World] war’, according to Hancock.43 In the Dutch merchant navy, the issue of accommodation receded into the background in the later Interwar period, presumably also a by-product of the renewal of the fleet. Another matter that for many years loomed prominently in the minds of wireless operators was the question of managing the balance between work and leisure time. A recurrent grievance voiced by radio operators up to the 1950s concerned the practice of being assigned to do work

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Fig. 11.1 Radio-operator giving a message to an Indonesian steward aboard a Dutch merchant ship, 1943 (Source Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 2.24.01.05 Bestanddeelnummer 935–2945 [Public domain])

which in their view was not a proper part of their job at all. When a vessel was staying in port, radio operators were, for example, sometimes requested by the captain or first mate to assume the task of supervising the loading or unloading of the ship, which strictly speaking was the duty of the mates.44 If they complied, they did so for pragmatic reasons rather than with eagerness or pleasure. While a wireless operator formally could not be obliged to go down into the hold of a ship, it could still be wise to play along for the sake of good relations on board.45 One of the perks of the profession, however, was the prospect of being master of your own time outside the statutory hours for listening watches. This meant not only that radio operators could socialize with passengers on board, but also, in principle, that they could easily go on shore leave, as long as they took care that their equipment was kept in good shape. Memoirs of ‘sparks’, particularly relating to the period after World War II, abound with stories about trips and adventures ashore in foreign places, sometimes with a bunch of other officers and sometimes in the company

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of passengers whom they had got to know en route.46 Jan de Hartog’s portrait of a radio officer in the 1950s was not altogether fanciful. Radio operators on their part were very sensitive about encroachments on what they considered to be their own area of expertise. Combining the functions of navigation officer and wireless telegraphist was, except in a few special cases, out of the question, as far as professional operators were concerned. The task of a specialized radio operator should as a rule not be taken over by a mate with an additional competence in wireless communication. For obvious reasons, a combination between the two functions was in their view not only undesirable because it restricted employment opportunities for specialized radio operators but also because it would put the safety of the ship and its passengers and crew at risk. Even a mate with a proven ability in radio communication (and assisted by an automatic alarm device) had less experience, and thus worked slower than a professional telegraphist—which could make all the difference in case of emergency, the radio operators argued; besides, mates in such a situation also had other things to attend to.47 This border dispute flared up about 1920 and in the early years of the Great Depression. Associations of radio operators and navigation officers were at loggerheads with each other; the organization of captains and mates refused to support the case of the wireless telegraphists.48 Radio operators asked Radio Holland to delete in the contract with the shipping companies the rule that an operator would be obliged to train mates in wireless telegraphy.49 Both in 1920 and in 1934, they also petitioned the government about the matter. The first time they demanded a regulation that every ship equipped with radio would have someone on board with the exclusive task of operating that equipment. The second time they petitioned more generally for support for professional wireless operators.50 Although none of these requests led to any concrete result, an indirect consequence of the VRK ’s action in 1934 was that the organization of radio operators in the mid-1930s was acknowledged by the government as a participant in its effort to raise the standard of education of wireless telegraphists.51

The Labour Market, Government Regulations and Technological Change How was it possible for radio operators to improve their position in the ship’s hierarchy over the years? This success can hardly be ascribed to the mobilizing power of their professional organization alone. Membership

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of the VRK was never very large. Attendance at meetings was often pitifully low. Its membership magazine is full of complaints about arrears in subscriptions. Cooperation with other associations was not very intensive and sometimes even broke down completely, as it did in the case of the captains’ and mates’ organization. The fact that the operators’ association wielded any influence at all was largely due to the dogged efforts of the former telegraphist who served as its paid secretary from 1927 to 1945, C.F.G. Nelck.52 More important for the ascent of radio operators was a combination of external factors that worked in their favor during most of the period between World War I and the middle of the 1960s. External circumstances benefitted the rise of the profession in two ways. First, the bargaining power of radio operators as a group became stronger as national and international regulations and the long-term expansion of the Dutch merchant fleet increased the demand for their services. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a shipping company was still entirely free to decide whether it would employ a wireless operator on a vessel or not. From 1911 onwards, however, national and international legislation concerning radio communication at sea became stricter. All Dutch passenger ships and all other vessels of 1,600 BRT or more henceforth had to be provided with radio equipment. Following the International Radio Telegraph Convention of Berlin (1906) and the United States Wireless Act (1911), Dutch lawmakers introduced the requirement that those who operated the equipment had to possess a certificate of competence issued under the auspices of the Dutch government. Examinations of wireless operators, held in Dutch, began to take place from that very year onwards and a permanent examination committee was installed in 1914. The new rules implied not only that the demand for seafaring wireless operators rapidly grew, but also that those applying for a Dutch certificate had to be able to speak Dutch.53 As a result of these regulations, more and more facilities were created for training candidates for the state-supervised radio exams in the Netherlands while foreign wireless operators largely disappeared from the Dutch merchant fleet. Next to the schools founded by the SAIT in Rotterdam and Amsterdam before World War I, existing nautical schools in Rotterdam, Groningen, Flushing, Terschelling and Amsterdam soon began to offer courses in wireless telegraphy for navigation officers and professional radio operators as well. Private ‘radio’ schools, such as the

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Radio-Instituut Steehouwer in Rotterdam and the Amsterdamsch RadioInstituut, entered the market at the end of the war or shortly afterward.54 Except for a brief period before the First World War, when the SAIT school in Rotterdam attracted people from many different countries, the pupils of all these schools customarily came from the Netherlands itself. Foreign radio operators only reappeared in the Dutch merchant fleet in small numbers about 1920 and at the end of the Second World War. In 1946, 22 foreigners could be found on the pay roll of Radio Holland, against 447 Dutchmen.55 Further national and international regulations adopted in the Interwar Years admittedly had more mixed effects. Following the International Radio Telegraph Convention of Washington (1927) and the International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea of London (1929), Dutch shipping law in the thirties laid down detailed rules about the duration of the listening watch on different categories of ships and about the installation and utilization of automatic alarm devices. The amended Schepenwet notably stipulated that a continuous listening watch had to be kept on all passenger ships of 3,000 BRT or more and on all other vessels of 5,500 BRT or more, and a listening watch of at least eight hours on non-passenger ships of 3,000–5,500 BRT. Exam requirements were specified for different degrees of competence and the level rose. As a result of these regulations, the need for qualified radio operators became greater than before, but not necessarily only for professional telegraphists. Navigation officers who held a certificate of competence in wireless telegraphy could act as part-time radio operators, too, on payment of a so-called radio allowance. Only captains and first mates were by law excluded from performing that role.56 Demand for radio operators also grew because of the long-term expansion of the Dutch merchant fleet. The number of large ships grew from about 250 in 1900 to about 1,000 in the Interwar Years, and again expanded rapidly after World War II, reaching a peak of more than 1,500 vessels about 1960. The average size of ships significantly increased in two phases: it doubled in the 1920s and it became nearly twice as large between 1945 and the beginning of the 1960s.57 Given the state regulations about the presence of qualified radio personnel on board merchant ships, both developments automatically implied a growing need for radio operators. The upward trend was only temporarily reversed in the early years of the Great Depression when shipowners reduced their fleets and

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tried to cut back labour costs by paying mates with an additional qualification in wireless telegraphy a modest ‘radio allowance’ to assume the tasks of full-time professional operators. This substitution process occurred for a while on a quite large scale. The wireless operators’ association claimed in 1934 that about 150 full-time marconists had been replaced by mates doubling as radio operators.58 The second way in which external circumstances benefitted the rise of radio operators was the effect of bottlenecks on the supply side. Although hundreds of pupils enrolled in radio courses at different schools in the Netherlands every year, the actual ‘pool’ of skilled operators available for employment in the Dutch mercantile marine was much smaller. In the Interwar period, many pupils never made it to a radio cabin on a ship at all. About 1930, only a small minority of the candidates managed to pass their exams. While some schools, such as Flushing and Groningen, boasted pass rates of more than 30%, the average percentage of passes at the time was estimated at no more than 20 to 25%. The high rate of failure on exams was the reason the government a few years later appointed a committee consisting of civil servants and teachers as well as representatives of the VRK and Radio Holland to advise on measures to raise the standards of education in wireless telegraphy.59 Even though curricula in state-sponsored schools and Radio Holland schools were reformed by the end of the thirties,60 the bottleneck in supply of radio operators became acute in the early postwar years. Education in wireless telegraphy had almost come to a halt in the final years of the German occupation, as the regime was not very keen on allowing Dutch civilians to become skilled in radio communication.61 Demand for radio operators meanwhile grew so rapidly after the war, both in the merchant marine and in aviation(see Graph 11.1), that anyone who had passed his exam almost immediately could get a position as an assistant operator aboard, without first going through a period of practical training. To alleviate the pressure on the labour market, Radio Holland in 1956 went so far as to hire a number of operators from Italy.62 Moreover, turnover among certified radio operators in the Interwar period was very high, as Tables 11.1 and 11.2 show. These tables are based on the list of names of wireless telegraphists published every few months in the magazine of the radio operators’ association.63 Samples were taken every five years, creating five ‘cohorts’ of radio operators. Table 11.1 shows for each of the last four sample years how many of the total number of radio operators were new entrants in the profession

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(columns three and four). In the 1920s, and again at the end of 1930s, the ‘pool’ of radio operators evidently was refreshed at a very high rate. More than half of all radio operators dropped out within a period of ten years; some 30 to 45% even left within five years. This meant that a large inflow of new certified operators was needed to maintain the size of the ‘pool’, let alone to expand it. Table 11.2 shows the drain over the years for each cohort separately. The main cause of the drain does not seem to have lain in a physical strain peculiar to the profession. Although wireless operators sometimes may have developed an internal-ear deafness because of their work,64 this was at the time not mentioned as a problem by the marconists themselves. A more important factor was the lack of career prospects for individual Table 11.1 Radio operators on Dutch merchant ships: total number and new entrants per 5 years, 1919–1939 Year

Total number of radio operators

New entrants in absolute numbers

New entrants in % of total number of radio-operators(%)

1919 1924 1929 1934 1939

164 329 406 273 443

– 240 191 48 198

– 73 47 18 45

Source Orgaan der Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1934, 1939

Table 11.2 Turnover of radio operators on Dutch merchant ships, 1919–1939 Radio operators active after 5, 10, 15 and 20 years, in % of cohort and in absolute numbers Cohort of new entrants

1919

1924

1929

1934

1939

1919 1924 1929 1934

100% (164)

54% (88) 100% (240)

40% (60) 63% (150) 100% (191)

21% (35) 37% (88) 53% (102) 100% (48)

19% 37% 49% 69%

(31) (87) (93) (33)

Source Orgaan der Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1934, 1939

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radio operators in the mercantile marine, at least before the Second World War. In contrast with navigation officers and engineers, wireless operators could hardly look forward to a rise through the ranks, because the hierarchy of their profession was much less elaborate and because places at the higher rungs of the ladder, such as head of a radio department on a passenger liner, were very scarce. Most marconists had a lone job on a freighter and had no prospect of ever being promoted. As the Inspector of Coastal and Marine Radio Telegraphy observed in 1934, discontent among seafaring marconists was rife because they realized that very few of them had a future as a radio telegraphist, ‘which would give satisfaction and allow the formation of a family’.65 On the other hand, skills of radio operators could easily be transferred to a job ashore, for example as teacher at a technical school, employee in a technical department of the government or staff member of a shore station or a depot of a wireless company. By 1950, the Marconi Marine Company had over 200 service stations all over the world, which employed more than 3,000 technicians. The majority of the technical staff ashore consisted of men who had first served as radio operators at sea.66 Radio Holland employed 67 people ashore in 1924 and 530 in 1966. Memoirs of ‘sparks’ suggest that in the Dutch case a career switch from operator at sea to technical expert ashore was by no means unusual either.67 Changes in technology eventually reduced the labour market for radio operators. The coming of land-based radio telephone systems, installed from circa 1950 onwards, not only led to the quick disappearance of wireless operators in aviation, but also diminished the number of places or marconists in coastal shipping.68 When the satellite-based Global Maritime Distress and Safety System,69 established by international convention in the late 1980s, was implemented worldwide in the 1990s, specialized wireless operators were no longer needed on the high seas either.

Conclusion The rise and decline of the radio operator is a paradoxical story. A major breakthrough in technology at the end of the nineteenth century made the emergence of this highly skilled profession possible. Another wave of technological change in the second half of the twentieth century made

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it redundant. For a while, radio operators enjoyed an exceptional position between ‘front office’ and ‘back office’, but in the end they were no longer needed in either. The position of the radio operator on board was somewhat indeterminate from the start. A radio operator was, as a rule, not employed by a shipping company, but by a wireless company, which hired him out to shipowners. This particular relationship made his status on board a matter of discussion, even of confusion: should a marconist be considered a crew member or not? Was he an officer or not? As our brief analysis of deck plans from the period up to World War I showed, the message from Dutch shipping companies about the operator’s position was initially far from clear. Arrangements for the accommodation of radio operators on board varied markedly, the only common denominator being that radio cabins were often placed relatively near the captain’s cabin. It was not until the Interwar period that the position of the operators began to be more securely established. Radio operators soon realized that to attain and preserve a higher rank in the ship’s hierarchy they needed to associate not only among themselves, but also to seek cooperation with other organizations of ship’s officers. Thus, they sought to achieve improvements in salaries, working hours, leisure time and accommodation through negotiations with wireless companies, shipowners, and government institutions. However, the fate of the new profession was at the end of the day not decided by actions of the practitioners themselves, but by changes in external circumstances. On the one hand, the expansion of the merchant fleet, the increasing demand from the aviation sector and the growth of government regulations concerning the quality and quantity of personnel and equipment in wireless telegraphy for a long time strengthened the bargaining position of radio operators and eased the establishment of their position in the ship’s hierarchy. On the other hand, outside forces, notably the coming of new communication technologies in the later twentieth century, eventually undermined the very raison d’être of their profession. ‘Radio operator’ turned into a relic of a past age.

Notes 1. Slauerhoff, Verboden rijk; see also Fenoulhet, ‘Time Travel’. 2. De Hartog, Scheepspraat, 64–65.

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3. See the introduction to his volume by Davids and Schokkenbroek; Record, ‘Marine Radioman’s Struggle’, 353–4. 4. Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 69–71; Wireless over the Waves, 10. 5. Wireless over the Waves, 78–79. 6. Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 23, 84, 88–9,106; Raboy, Marconi, 131, 144– 5; Mann, ‘Status’; Friedewald, ‘Telefunken’, 42–43; Evans, “Path to Freedom”, 212–213. 7. http://www.marconi-veterans.org/ see ‘Trace employees’; http://www. pandosnco.co.uk/radio_officers (consulted October 10, 2022). 8. Friedewald, ‘Telefunken’, 33–4. 9. See footnote 4 and 6. 10. Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 77, 88–9; Raboy, Marconi, 131, 144. 11. Wireless over the waves, 11–13, Van der Klaauw and Houtkoper, Onsterfelijk alfabet, 13; ‘Aan alle leden’, in Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten no.3 (October 1919), 2–3. 12. Baaij and Schokkenbroek, ‘Honderd jaar “Sparks”’, 75. 13. Van der Klaauw and Klaas Houtkoper, Onsterfelijk alfabet, 38–9, 48, 51. The list of radio operators in the monthly of the Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij of March 1931 no. 108 p. 24 mentions three men employed by the KLM who previously served at sea. 14. ‘Enkele cijfers in beeld’, in: PDRH Maandblad 16 (1966) no.3 December 1966 50 jaar Radio Holland N.V .; PDRH Maandblad 26 (1976) Speciaal nummer 1916 6 december 1976;Van der Klaauw and Houtkooper, Onsterfelijk alfabet. 15. ‘Geen tekort aan marconisten !’, Leidsche Courant, 15 Augusts 1930, p. 4. 16. See e.g. the reminiscences of Françoise van Essen-Woltring of her voyage as radio-operator in 1988–1989 in https://www.doornweerdje.nl/a60622187/scheepvaart/oude-k-p-m-schepen-van-temp-doeloe-deel-ii-vol ume-ii/#description (consulted October, 30 2021). 17. Van der Klaauw and Houtkoper, Onsterfelijk alfabet, 163, 197, 258, 261– 2, 272, 275. 18. Flight International 11 (1963) 504. 19. Wireless over the waves, 74, 77; Baaij and Schokkenbroek, ‘Honderd jaar “Sparks”’, 77. 20. Baaij and Schokkenbroek, ‘Honderd jaar “Sparks”’, 77; Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 76–80; Mann, ‘Status’, 40. 21. On this device: Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 126–130. On its introduction in the Dutch mercantile marine, see Nationaal Archief (NA) 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30, ‘Beschouwingen van de Inspecteur der Kust- en Radiotelegrafie’, enclosed in advice by Inspecteur-Generaal Scheepvaart, 13 November 1934; C.B. Broersma, ‘Internationale verdragen’, in: PDRH Maandblad 16 (1966) no.3 December 1966, 50 jaar Radio Holland N.V .

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22. ‘Who are Seamen’. 23. New models for such contracts were agreed in 1948, see Centrale van Koopvaardij-officieren. Mededelingenblad, 2 (April 1948) no.2, 5– 6. Copies dating from 1948 can be found in Herinneringen van Engelbert (Bert) Spoor. Mijn leven als marconist bij de Nederlandse koopvaardij direct na de 2 e Wereld Oorlog (Goor, december 2015) 100– 103, www.pa3esy.nl/oudershuis/marconist/Marconist-versie-12-internetv ersie.pdf. (consulted October, 30 2021). 24. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, no.3 (October 1919), 12; Orgaan, October 1921 no. 13, 3; cf. Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 141–2. 25. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, no.7 (December 1920) 10. Advertisements for uniforms in Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij, December 1921 and Orgaan, May 1921 no.8 (insert). 26. Memorie van Toelichting, ‘Voorgeschiedenis’. 27. Record, ‘Marine Radioman’s Struggle’, 356. 28. The foundation story is told in a letter of 9 August 1920 by vice-president T.A. van der Vlies in Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no. 6 (August 1920), 2. 29. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.1 (April 1919,) 3–4. 30. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.2 (July 1919), 11, 13–14, 16–17. 31. Maandelijksch Orgaan, September 1932 no.124. 32. Van der Klaauw and Houtkoper, Onsterfelijk alfabet, 167–169; Centrale van Koopvaardij-officieren Mededelingenblad, October 1945 no.4 and May 1947 no.5. 33. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.5 (May 1920) 9–10, Orgaan, October 1921 no. 13, 3 ff.. 34. Centrale van Koopvaardij-officieren. Mededelingenblad, October 1945 no.4 ‘Aan de leden der Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij en bij de Luchtvaart’, idem, Mei 1947 no.5, ‘Verslag van de vergadering van het Bestuur van de Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij en bij de Luchtvaart’, gehouden op zaterdag 29 maart 1947. 35. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.1 (April 1919). 1–2. 36. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.2 (July 1919), 11–13–14, 16–17. 37. Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 141–142. 38. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.4 (January 1920), 2; Orgaan, November 1931 no. 115, 18–22; idem, December 1931 no.116, 2–6; ‘Verbetering in de arbeidsvoorwaarden van de radiotelegrafisten in 1957’, PDRH Maandblad., 7(1957) no.5, 50–1. 39. Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 220–3. 40. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.5 (May 1920) 15, 20; idem, brochure no. 6 (August 1920) 18, 47; idem, brochure no.7 (December 1920) 11.

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41. Cf. on the use of space aboard ships Dellino-Musgrave, ‘British Identities’. 42. Database of deck plans compiled by the authors. The authors are much indebted to dr. Richard Guy for his assistance in bringing the material together and compiling the preliminary results. 43. Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 223. 44. Orgaan, November 1921 no.14, 3; idem, November 1928 no.85, 6–9; NA 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30, ‘Beschouwingen van de Inspecteur der Kust- en Radiotelegrafie’, enclosed in advice by Inspecteur-Generaal Scheepvaart, 13 November 1934. 45. As former radio operator Jan Noordegraaf explains in his novel De wereld is een schip, 156–7. 46. Bullinga, Zeeverhalen, 21–5, 30–4, 43–6; Herinneringen van Engelbert (Bert) Spoor, 17–79; Bert Trumpie, http://www.bert.trumpie.org/btr umpie/Nostalgie.htm, Arie van der Ruit, ‘Radiogolven en boeggolven’, https://sites.google.com/site/radiogolvenenboeggolven/Home/koopva ardij-3 (consulted October 10, 2022); Dick Bal, ‘Memoires van een sparks’, https://dickbal.wordpress.com (consulted October 10, 2022); van Zijverden, ‘Door het oog van de naald’. 47. Letter from VRK to Minister van Waterstaat, 11 March 1920, in: Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten brochure no.5 (May 1920) 35–36; letter from VRK to the Raad van Ministers, 29 October 1934, in: NA 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30. 48. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.5 (May 1920) 36–7; Orgaan, September 1932 no.124, 2–5; Centrale van Koopvaardijofficieren. Mededelingenblad, Maart 1946 no.9, p.4. 49. ‘Stuurlieden als radiotelegrafist’, Orgaan, June 1921 no. 9, 9–20. 50. Letter from VRK to Minister van Waterstaat, 11 March 1920, in Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten, brochure no.5 (May 1920) 35–6. 51. Letter from Minister van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen to VRK 12 October 1936, in: NA 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30. 52. C.F.G. Nelck, ‘Tot afscheid’, Centrale van Koopvaardij-officieren. Mededelingenblad, October 1945 no.4, cf. on his role also: NA 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30, ‘Beschouwingen van de Inspecteur der Kust- en Radiotelegrafie’, enclosed in advice by Inspecteur-Generaal Scheepvaart, 13 November 1934.

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53. Van der Klaauw and Houtkoper, Onsterfelijk alfabet, 12–13; F.W. Blom, ‘De maritieme radio-examens tot en met Atlantic City 1947’, http:// www.arendnet.com/pagina2RH.htm (consulted October 30, 2021). On the Berlin Convention and the American regulations, see also Friedewald, ‘Telefunken’, 33–4, 49. 54. Van der Klaauw and Houtkoper, Onsterfelijk alfabet, 13; NA 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30, advice Inspecteur Nijverheidsonderwijs to Minister van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 26 November 1934; Steehouwer, ‘Geschiedenis’. 55. Orgaan, June 1921 no.9, p. 5; ‘Ons telegrafistencorps’, PDRH Maandblad 6 (1956) no.4, 10–11. 56. Broersma, ‘Internationale verdragen’; Blom, ‘Maritieme radio-examens’; Schepenwet, articles 78, 79, 81, 85; Het Scheepvaartmuseum, inv. Nr. 1998.0639. Signatuur GR-98–016/museale signatuur Doc-2566 circular Centrale van Koopvaardijofficieren about payments, 13 October 1937; Centrale van Koopvaardij-officieren. Mededelingenblad, Maart 1946 no.9, p. 4. 57. Reuchlin, ‘Handelsvaart’, 225. 58. NA 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30, letter from VRK to the Raad van Ministers, 29 October 1934, ‘Beschouwingen van de Inspecteur der Kust- en Radiotelegrafie’, enclosed in advice by Inspecteur-Generaal Scheepvaart, 13 November 1934. 59. NA 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30, minutes of 3rd meeting Commissie inzake het Radio-Onderwijs 24 February 1936, letter Inspecteur Nijverheidsonderwijs to Minister van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen, 25 May 1936, W. Dogterom ‘De radio-examens’ (December 1929). 60. Maandelijksch Orgaan, August 1937 no.178, 5–17, October 1937 no. 179, 15–17, February 1939 no.194, 4–8. 61. ‘De opleiding tot radiotelegrafist in de jaren 1946–1956’, PDRH Maandblad, 6 (1956) .51; Bullinga, Zeeverhalen, 12. 62. Herinneringen van Engelbert (Bert) Spoor, 6; Van der Ruit, ‘Radiogolven en boeggolven’; ‘Ons telegrafistencorps’, PDRH Maandblad, 6 (1956) no.4, 10. 63. The sample includes the complete lists of names published in the quarterly/monthly of the Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij in July 1919, 30 June 1924, 23 September 1929, 20 August 1934 and 29 June 1939. 64. French’s Index), 208. See also the discussion ‘Did listening to morse code make you deaf’ on www.shipnostalgia.com/showthread.hp?t=10567 in March 2007 (consulted October 30, 2021).

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65. NA 2.14.38 Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Afdeling Nijverheidsonderwijs inv.nr.30, ‘Beschouwingen van de Inspecteur der Kust- en Radiotelegrafie’, enclosed in advice by Inspecteur-Generaal Scheepvaart, 13 November 1934. 66. Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 202–2–3, 226–7. 67. ‘Enkele cijfers in beeld’, in: PDRH Maandblad, 16 (1966) no.3; see for example the memoirs of Bullinga, Spoor, Van der Ruit, Trumpie and Bal mentioned in footnote 46, which relate to the period after World War II. 68. Van der Klaauw and Houtkooper, Onsterfelijk alfabet, 193–214: Record, ‘Marine Radiomans’ Status’, 357: ‘Opleiding tot radiotelegrafist’. PDRH Maandblad, 6 (1956), 53. 69. Wireless over the Waves, 78–9.

References Baaij, Eduard and Joost Schokkenbroek, ‘Honderd jaar “Sparks”. De geschiedenis van de Nederlandse radio-officier’, in Verhalen van het water. Scheepvaart en mensen in de twintigste eeuw, ed. by Henk Dessens, Lucas Veeger and Jan van Zijverden (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1997) 75–9. Bullinga, E. Jack M., Zeeverhalen van een radio-officier (Groningen: Recon, 1997). Centrale van Koopvaardij-officieren Mededelingenblad. Dellino-Musgrave, Virginia, ‘British Identities through Pottery in Praxis: The Case Study of a Royal Navy ship in the South Atlantic’, Journal of Material Culture 10 (2005), 219–43. Evans, Heidi J. S., ‘“The Path to Freedom”? Transocean and German Wireless Telegraphy, 1897–1922’, Historical Social Research 35 (2010), 209–33. Fenoulhet, Jane, ‘Time Travel in the Forbidden Realm: J.J. Slauerhoff’s “Het verboden rijk” viewed as a Modernist Novel’, The Modern Language Review 96 (2001), 116–29. French’s Index of Differential Diseases, ed. by Arthur H. Douthwaite (Bristol: John Wright 1954, 7th ed.). Friedewald, Michael, ‘Telefunken under der deutsche Schiffsfunk, 1903–1914’, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 46 (2001), 27–57. Hartog, Jan de, Scheepspraat (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1958). Hancock, H. E, Wireless at Sea. The First Fifty Years (Chelmsford: Marconi International Marine Communicataion Company, 1950). Klaauw, Bart van der and Klaas Houtkoper, Het onsterfelijk alfabet. 1931–1965. De KLM-vliegtuigradiodiens t (Heerlen: Wedrego, 1981). Maandelijksch Orgaan van de Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij. Mann, Peter H., ‘The Status of the Marine Radioman. A British Contribution’, American Journal of Sociology 63 (1957), 39-41.

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Memorie van Toelichting Wijziging van de Zeebemanningswet in verband met de invoering van tuchtrechtspraak, Tweede Kamer der Staten Generaal vergaderjaar 2002–2003. Noordegraaf, Jan, De wereld is een schip (Hilversum: C. de Boer, 1966). Orgaan der Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij. PDRH Maandblad voor het Personeel van Radio Holland N.V . Raboy, Marc, Marconi. The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Record, Jane Cassels, ‘The Marine Radioman’s Struggle for Status’, American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957) 353–9. Reuchlin, H., ‘Handelsvaart’, in Maritieme Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol..IV, ed. by R. Baetens, Ph.M. Bosscher and H. Reuchlin (Bussum: De Boer Maritiem, 1978), 224–71. Slauerhoff, Jan Jacob, Het verboden rijk (The Hague: Nijgh en Van Ditmar, 1932). Steehouwer, L. F., ‘De geschiedenis van het Radio-onderwijs aan de Zeevaartschool te Rotterdam’, in De Rotterdamsche Zeevaartschool 1833–1933, ed. by Ch. A.Cocheret (Rotterdam: Klomp en Boman, 1933), 151–60. Vereeniging van Radiotelegrafisten ter Koopvaardij, brochure no. 3 (October 1919). ‘Who are Seamen—Wireless Telegraph Operator’, Michigan Law Review 16 no.2 (December 1917) 136–7. Wireless over the Waves. Radio Holland 1916–2001, (Rotterdam: Radio Holland, 2002). Zijverden, Jan van, ‘Door het oog van de naald. De amoureuze relatie tussen radiotelegrafist Jan van Schooten en passagiere Yvonne Startz aan boord van de Jan Pietersz Coen (1938)’, in Verhalen van het water. Scheepvaart en mensen in de twintigste eeuw, ed. by Henk Dessens, Lucas Veeger and Jan van Zijverden (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1997), 93–7.

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek

The ten essays in this volume discuss transformations in a variety of ‘old’ and ‘new’ maritime jobs in a wide range of European countries. All of these articles are set against the background of major changes in the shipping industry after 1850: the transition from sail to steam and from steam to oil, the substitution of wooden ships by ships made of iron and steel, the rise of specialized passenger shipping and growing regulation by government authorities. The contributions focus on four key questions: what were the implications of those radical changes in terms of earnings of personnel, recruitment, status, skills, career prospects or gender relations? How did relations between employees in ‘old’ and ‘new’ jobs develop over time? To what extent and in what ways did employees in ‘new’ or ‘old’ jobs experience a process of professionalization ? What was the

K. Davids (B) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] J. Schokkenbroek Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Hong Kong, China e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7_12

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effect of changes on board on social arrangements ashore—for example, in terms of residential patterns or the establishment of training facilities?

Transformations in Maritime Professions Between c.1850 and 1950 The essays by Alston Kennerley, Jari Ojala, Alkiviadis Kapokakis and Apostolos Delis, Richard Guy and Nicolas Cochard in various ways demonstrate the far-reaching impact of the great changes in the shipping industry on the recruitment, skills and remuneration of maritime labour after 1850. As sailing vessels gave way to steam ships and passenger liners became a regular fixture of mercantile marines, the recruitment areas of crews changed. For Greece, Kapokakis and Delis observed a shift in the origins of seamen from old-established maritime centers such as Hydra, Spetses, Kranidi, Poros and Galaxidi to burgeoning hotbeds of steam navigation such as Piraeus, Syros, Andros, Ithaca and Cephalonia. Engineers were for the most part hired from abroad, especially from Great Britain. In a similar vein, Cochard noted that the geographical origins of seamen in the port city of Le Havre, France, became broader than before. Mariners in the city no longer hailed almost exclusively from the immediate neighborhood, but increasingly also came from inland parts of France and, as far as engineers were concerned, from the opposite side of the Channel. The advent of steam navigation and the expansion of passenger shipping led to an increased demand for seamen with new skills, such as engineers, stokers, trimmers, stewards and other service staff in the catering department, as the studies by Kennerley and Guy corroborate. On the downside, these changes also caused a certain degree of deskilling. For the Swedish and Finnish shipping industry, Ojala shows that deskilling occurred in the sense that the share of medium-skilled seamen, i.e., those with long experience but relatively little formal education, dramatically declined both on steam ships and on sailing vessels. Kapokakis and Delis noted deskilling in the Greek merchant marine as well. Evidence presented by Kapokakis and Delis and Cochard moreover amply confirms that the revolutionary changes in the shipping industry also opened up a substantial gap in earnings between different categories of seamen and between seamen and workers ashore. In Greece, the remuneration of officers and able-bodied seamen in the sailing fleet declined while wages of engine crews and navigation officers on steamships were

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on the rise. Even firemen and stewards on steamers were better paid than comparable categories of workers on land. For mariners based in Le Havre, Cochard found that on steam-powered passenger liners the wage gap between the captain and able seamen by the early twentieth century was wider than it ever had been on ordinary sailing ships. Within the engine room, a similar gap in earnings emerged between engineers and firemen. In long-distance shipping, wages of engine room personnel rose above those of deck crew members. While the real incomes of deck crewmen remained more or less the same as those of workers on shore, engine room personnel enjoyed a rise in their standard of living which put them on a par with the most highly skilled workers on land. The ramifications of the big changes in the shipping industry for spatial, social and institutional arrangements on board and ashore are discussed in the articles by Guy, Cochard, Ojala, Kennerley, Garcia Domingo and Davids and Schokkenbroek. Guy’s case study on Dutch liners serving the Netherlands East Indies shows how advances in technology and the concomitant changes in the size and composition of crews and passengers between 1850 and 1914 led to a drastic reorganization of space on board. Passengers were increasingly separated from crew members, passenger accommodations became more stratified and crews were divided by ethnicity and type of jobs. ‘Back office’ and ‘front’ office became more and more insulated from each other. Interestingly, this was not the case among different groups of mariners on land. As Cochard’s essay on Le Havre illustrates, different groups of mariners actually lived close to each other and frequented the same spaces in the city. Moreover, Ojala found that technological change in time also called forth more national and international regulation of maritime labour, but that the growth of these institutional provisions proved to be a slow and laborious process. Another side effect of the revolutionary changes in the shipping industry, documented by Kennerley, Garcia Domingo and Davids and Schokkenbroek, was the emergence of a wealth of nautical schools, engineering schools, radio schools, firemen’s training schools and all sort of other educational facilities, which was sponsored both by governments and private organizations. What was the impact of the great changes in the shipping industry on specific maritime jobs on board? Morten Tinning addressed this question for the oldest profession on board, namely that of the captain. Looking at the Danish mercantile marine, Tinning shows that, although the captain continued to hold supreme authority on board, the nature of his authority

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thoroughly changed as a result of new practices involved in the use of steam propulsion, and of the introduction of faster and more reliable means of communication with various actors ashore. Captains lost their former status as sovereigns on board, deriving their authority chiefly from custom, experience and sheer force of personality. They could no longer use violence at will but had to abide by new formal rules specifying their rights to impose fines or to confine crew members or passengers. In commercial matters, their authority was increasingly circumscribed by the interference of shipowners and shipping executives. In the nautical sphere, they had to share their authority to some extent with members of a new profession, chief engineers. Kapokakis and Delis found that in Greece in the early twentieth century, the wages of the first engineer were equal to or sometimes even higher than the salary of the captain. On the other hand, the growth of steam shipping and the expansion of passenger shipping also offered captains new career opportunities. As Cochard’s study on Le Havre attests, too, captains could gain prestige and increase their earnings by moving upwards from being in charge of a sailing vessel or a steam-powered tramp ship to taking command of a small ocean-going passenger ship, a large cargo freighter and, eventually, commanding a great steam-powered liner. The old job of ships’ cook changed in several ways as well, as Kristof Loockx and Sari Mäenpää demonstrate in their respective case studies of the Belgian merchant marine and British passenger liners. Cooking turned from a part-time activity for ‘the oldest or the least skilled seaman’ into a separate, specialized occupation, even though formal training facilities, such as cookery schools, did not become common until the early twentieth century. The size of kitchen staffs grew, especially on passenger lines, but permanent employment of cooks was a rare phenomenon and careers were generally brief. For the Belgian merchant marine, Loockx found that higher positions in the cooking department were increasingly held by foreigners. Gender remained a crucial factor, both for cooks and for catering departments as a whole. Cooking on board continued to be a preserve of men, Loockx notes. Mäenpää observes that the expansion of catering departments on British passenger liners, and the appearance of new jobs on board such as stewards, stewardesses, waiters and laundresses, on the one hand offered more employment opportunities for women but on the other hand did not improve their career prospects accordingly. While the number of women on board expanded, the female share of the catering department always remained rather low. It did not exceed 10%

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before World War II. Women were recruited in different ways than men and were employed for restricted roles. Usually, they only attended to female passengers and children. They could not advance to positions in the catering staff where they held authority over men. If they were lucky, they could move to a higher passenger class where they might be able, just like male catering personnel, to increase their earnings by receiving tips from passengers. However, Mäenpää found that even among men, only a minority of employees in the catering department on passenger liners really experienced ‘lucrative career advancement’. Other new professions discussed in this volume, namely engineers and radio operators, show both similarities and differences with those in the catering department. Like personnel in the catering service, engineers and radio operators had the opportunity to switch between employment at sea and employment on land, as Enric Garcia Domingo and Karel Davids and Joost Schokkenbroek point out in their essays. After all, engineering and wireless telegraphy were not areas of expertise bound to the maritime sector. The data collected by Kennerley on British shipping companies in the first half of the twentieth century showed that the percentage of engineers thus lost to the maritime sector within a few years’ time could be very high. Davids and Schokkenbroek observed an equally high turnover among Dutch radio operators in the Interwar Years. An additional factor in the case of radio operators was their lack of career prospects, at least before World War II. The hierarchy of their profession on board was much less elaborate than that of the engineers. Unlike engineers, individual radio operators could hardly expect to rise step by step to a top position in their department. And their position remained for a long time in limbo. In contrast with most of the crew members, radio operators did neither entirely belong to the ‘back office’ (such as mates, engineers, firemen or able seamen) or the ‘front office’ (such as stewards, stewardesses or waiters). While engineers and radio operators lacked the extra income from passengers tips which some of the catering personnel enjoyed, they nevertheless received considerable benefits in terms of a good salary, decent accommodation and, in the course of time, rising status on board. These material and social advantages were to some extent related to another characteristic that set engineers and radio operators apart from cooks, stewards or waiters: they went through a process of professionalization. Both engineers and radio operators in the course of time acquired all the trappings of a profession, as Kennerley, Garcia Domingo and Davids and

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Schokkenbroek demonstrate: formal schooling, examinations, certificates of competency, restricted admission, formation of professional associations and cultivation of a professional culture through manuals and journals. Although the professionalization process took longer in some countries than in others (with engineers in Spain, for example, having to overcome in some ways more obstacles than those in Britain), the direction and the outcome was by and large the same. The result was partly due to the actions of the emerging professional associations of engineers and radio operators, which learned ever better to protect the interests of the members of their trade. Catering personnel, on the other hand, proved much more difficult to organize, as Mäenpää pointed out, and the unions that emerged failed to achieve any substantial results. Regulation on the part of national states, often in the framework of international agreements, and interference from shipping companies played an important part in professionalization processes, too, as Davids and Schokkenbroek showed. And in the last resort, the viability of any maritime profession, whether ‘old’ or ‘new’, depended on what happened in the world of shipping at large.

Coda: Changes in the Shipping Industry After 1950 and Their Impact Transformations in maritime professions were, in fact, far from over after the middle of the twentieth century. The essays by Kennerley and Davids and Schokkenbroek give a glimpse of the dramatic developments after that date. Some professions, such as the engineer’s, were redefined, while other jobs such as those of stoker, donkeyman or radio operator disappeared entirely. These transformations were brought about both by technological innovations and by political and institutional changes. The most important driving forces were the shift from steamships to motor ships, containerization, the introduction of GPS and ICT, the switch from ocean liners to cruise ships in passenger shipping and the rise of flags of convenience. As oil replaced coal as the main energy source for shipping, the engine room crew was downsized. Around 1930, a coal-fired steamship of 8000 tons on average employed 21 men in the engine room, while an oil-fired ship of the same size just needed eight. Stokers, trimmers and donkeymen became redundant.1 Diesel propulsion had been introduced at the eve of World War I. Some maritime countries (notably Norway, Denmark,

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Sweden and the Netherlands) had already equipped a large part of their merchant fleet with this new type of engine before the beginning of World War II, but the share of oil-fired ships in total world tonnage still amounted to only 24.4% by 1939. In the British merchant fleet, only 25.6% of the total tonnage then consisted of motor ships. It was not until after 1945 that steamships were largely replaced by ships powered by diesel engines. Many of these motor ships were Liberty ships, produced on a huge scale in the United States and Canada during the war and sold to foreign tramp operators thereafter, and oil tankers, which formed a large part of the total tonnage of the world’s merchant fleet in the latter half of twentieth century. Massive investment in Liberty ships and oil tankers was one of the key factors that helped to turn the Greekowned merchant fleet into the leading shipping industry in the world by the 1990s, leaving former dominant maritime powers like Britain and the United States far behind.2 Containerization, which revolutionized dry cargo shipping from the 1960s onwards, had a profound impact on maritime labour in many ways. Crew sizes were greatly reduced. In the 1990s, ships carrying 2780 containers of twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) could be manned by only fifteen officers and ratings, 4173-TEU carriers by sixteen and 4932-TEU vessels by twenty-one. Ton/man ratio’s reached record highs. A class of ‘super’ carriers of Maersk (6000-TEU) had a crew of no more than fifteen, which translates into a ton/man ratio of 4000/1.3 Turnaround times in ports were drastically cut, while ports became more remote from city centers. A pioneering company in container shipping, Sea-Land, managed to reduce the turnaround time of its vessels from one week to a single day as early as the 1960s. By 2002, the mean actual time spent on unloading/loading time at a container terminal in Rotterdam was less than 21 hours. A case study from 2000 shows that the average port stay of container ships amounted to a mere 13% of a vessel’s working time, as against 50% in about 1970.4 Shore leaves for seafarers thus became much shorter and travel from terminals to city centers took more time and money.5 Moreover, as shipboard cranes disappeared, there was hardly anything left to do for crew members in the loading and unloading of cargo or the maintenance of crane equipment. Chief officers had to check stowage plans and stability and stress calculations prepared in advance ashore rather than performing these operations themselves, as had been the usual practice before. Some officers even tried to avoid being posted

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on container ships because their job in port was much less interesting than on conventional cargo ships.6 Shipping companies also strove to cut labour costs by replacing seamen from high-wage regions, such as Western Europe and Japan, by those from low-wage economies, such as the Philippines and Indonesia, and by the introduction of ‘multi-skilling’. ‘Multi-skilled’ officers were trained to be proficient both in navigation and in engineering. They could be employed both for the deck-side and for the engine room.7 Multi-skilling was made possible by innovations in information and communication technology from the 1970s onwards. Work processes aboard became more and more automated and computerized. Traditional methods of position-finding and plotting were supplanted by satellitebased navigation and electronic chart display systems. Communication by radio was replaced by satellite telephones and Global Maritime Distress and Safety Systems (GMDSS). Specialized radio officers were therefore dispensed with, even though ‘deck officer GMDSS operators’ did not possess the same level of expertise in communication equipment as radio officers used to have.8 The disappearance of radio officers meant that the workload of captains increased. Captains themselves now were almost in constant contact with the shore. ‘I’m now the radio officer’, a captain explained in an interview around 2000. He called the new internet-based communication system ‘good’, ‘fast’ and ‘reliable’, but added that it had ‘also provided [the shore-side] with the means to pour information at us’ and that he sometimes wished ‘we didn’t have so much communication’. The captain’s authority, which had already undergone a drastic transformation during the transition from sail to steam, was thus further watered-down. Captains, chief officers and engineers spent a large part of their time administrating and monitoring work processes by means of computers instead of ‘hands-on’ managing of the vessel.9 Passenger shipping saw a change as radical as cargo shipping. The introduction of jet airplanes in the middle of the 1950s led to a sharp drop in bookings on passenger liners. The number of people traveling on transatlantic liners suddenly fell by half. Operating passenger liners across the ocean was no longer a profitable business. To survive, some companies, such as the Holland Amerika Line, left the liner branch and concentrated on the offer of holiday cruises, which up to then only had been a subsidiary activity in the winter season. Other companies, such as Carnival Cruise Lines, grew big in the cruise industry from the start. The collapse of the ocean liner industry in the late 1950s and 60s initially

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led to a massive loss of employment for catering staff, such as stewards and stewardesses, as well as for deck crews and engine room personnel.10 However, the enormous growth of the cruise industry from the 1980s onwards created a renewed demand for personnel, especially in jobs in the catering services. The expansion of catering departments on passenger liners in the early twentieth century, examined by Mäenpää, was repeated with a vengeance. Of the more than 200,000 people employed on 178 cruise ships in the early twenty-first century, 70% worked as ‘hotel staff’, ranging from room cleaners, laundry workers, cooks and waiters to swimming pool attendants, hostesses, croupiers, entertainers and pursers. The average number of employees per ship amounted to more than 1,100. As in cargo shipping, cruise companies set out to reduce labour costs by hiring large numbers of personnel from low-wage regions. While senior officers usually were Italian, Norwegian, British or Dutch, the bulk of the labour force in the lower ranks came from South-East Asia, South and Central America, the Caribbean or Eastern Europe.11 The massive replacement of seafarers from high-wage regions (Western Europe, North America and Japan) by personnel from low-wage countries was made easier by political and institutional changes revolving around the rise of ‘flags of convenience’ (FOC’s). The simple expedient of ‘reflagging’, viz. transferring the registration of a ship to a country with less strict regulations, such as Panama, Liberia, Cyprus or the Bahama’s, could yield significant savings for shipowners. They no longer had to abide by all sorts of rules about wages, working conditions, social benefits, safety standards or nationality of crew members. Similar advantages could to some extent be achieved by placing a ship on a ‘second register’ in a traditional maritime country, such as Norway and Germany, which offered more flexible conditions than the traditional system. Starting with trampers and tankers in the late 1940s, ‘flagging out’ spread to ever more parts of the shipping industry, including container liners and cruise ship companies from the 1980s onwards. FOC’s became an established practice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, ‘open registers’ included no less than 45 percent of the world merchant fleet.12 As a result of reflagging (on top of other factors leading to downsizing of crews as discussed above), employment for seafarers from high-wage countries steeply declined, with losses for ratings surpassing those for officers. In the 1980s and 1990s, an estimated 300,000 Western European seamen lost their jobs. The number of seamen in Japan’s deep-sea trades fell from 42,000 in 1975 to less than 2,500 in 1995.13 The

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main international body of seafaring and dockworker unions, the International Transport Workers Federation, long campaigned against FOC’s because of their undermining of workers’ interests. However, in the late 1980s the Federation finally accepted a lower bottom line for wages for able-bodied seamen, in exchange for the introduction of a worldwide labour inspection regime and the foundation of a welfare fund for unemployed and retired seamen, partly supported by payments from FOC shipowners.14 For some groups, especially officers from European countries and the United States, companies moreover offered some improvement in fringe benefits by introducing shorter voyage contracts and longer leave periods.15

Further Lines of Inquiry This overview of technological, political and institutional changes in recent decades, and their impact on maritime professions, suggests several further lines of inquiry. The recurrent phases of what Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’ in the shipping industry, which began about 1850 and continue until the present day, left hardly any job on board untouched. The changes not only affected old-established professions such as captain, mate (chief officer) or able seaman, but also jobs that emerged during the transition from sail to steam and the rise of passenger shipping (such as engineer, stoker, steward, or radio officer). Job functions changed beyond recognition or vanished entirely. Crew sizes shrank, or as in the case of cruise ships, went through the roof. The origin of crews in a large part of the industry became more global than ever before. One of the issues that deserves further inquiry is what these waves of change meant for the workload of the individual seafarer. Even if mechanization and automation may have lessened the physical burden of work, the question is whether seamen felt the pressure of work decline or increase and to what extent, in what respects and at what time? And in which jobs or categories of personnel were these effects prominently felt? The sparse data on the impact of containerization and ICT reported by Samson and Wu suggest that the answer to this question may be very complex indeed.16 Another question is how and to what extent these successive changes affected crews as a community. Did the introduction of ‘multi-skilling’, for example, blur the differences between deck crew and engine room

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personnel that had emerged in earlier phases of change? Did the cohesion within crews increase as crew sizes declined? On the other hand, is it plausible that the growth and diversification of personnel in passenger shipping aggravated inequalities and tensions among crew members? Finally, more research also should be done about the relations between class, race and gender in merchant shipping between circa 1850 and the present. Richard Guy’s essay in this volume shows that passenger accommodations in the late nineteenth century ‘became ever more stratified into separate classes, illustrating and reinforcing hierarchies of social class and race’. Mäenpää demonstrated in her contribution that, even if ‘the expansion and the improvement in catering services’ on British passenger liners before World War II gave women an opportunity for employment at sea’, their career prospects in seafaring remained more limited than those for men. For the modern cruise industry, Francisca Oyogoa claimed in a recent study that although ‘“whiteness” does not exclude European workers from servility’, those workers ‘are overrepresented’ in the front office and in ‘more prestigious jobs’ on board. She concludes that ‘racism … is used to justify nation-based hierarchies aboard the ship’.17 The question can be asked whether, throughout all the technological, political and institutional changes since 1850, traditional hierarchies by class, race and gender among crews and passengers on merchant ships were being reproduced over and over again, and if so, what the underlying factors for their persistence may have been. Under what conditions were solidarity and cooperation across lines of class, race and gender still possible, for example, though trade unionism? These and other questions could provide guidance for further studies on maritime professions, their local, regional, national and international contextual backgrounds, and developments within these professions as affected by sociopolitical and economic circumstances. The contributions in this volume only focus on developments related to maritime professions in some ‘maritime’ countries in Europe, as we explained in the introduction. The editors hope to have sparked interest for similar research related to the realm of shipping and seafarers in other regions of the globe.

Notes 1. Sturmey, British Shipping, 70–1, Samson and Wu, ‘Compressing Time’, 138.

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2. SGarcia Domingo British Shipping, 71, Harlaftis, ‘Greek shipping sector’, 79–84. 3. Broeze, Globalisation, 213, 231–2, Samson and Wu, ‘Compressing Time’, 145. 4. Miller, Europe and the maritime world, 337, Samson and Wu, ‘Compressing Time’, 144. 5. Samson and Wu, ‘Compressing Time’, 144, 146–7. 6. Samson and Wu, ‘Compressing Time’, 140, 143–4. 7. Broeze, Globalisation, 231. 8. Broeze, Globalisation, 231, Samson and Wu, ‘Çompressing Time’, 139– 42. See also Davids and Schokkenbroek’s essay in this volume. 9. Samson and Wu, ‘Compressing Time’, 138–40. 10. Flayhart, ‘Cruising’, 521–2, Sturmey, British Shipping, 137–8, Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, 175. 11. Flayhart, ‘Cruising’, 522, Broeze, Globalisation, 215–6, Oyogoa, ‘Cruise ships’, 32–4. 12. Broeze, Globalisation, 217–21, Sturmey, British Shipping, 177–88, Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, 178–9. 13. Broeze, Globalisations, 226–8. 14. Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, 180–90. 15. Samson and Wu, ‘Compressing Time’, 147–8. 16. Samson and Wu, ‘Compressing Time’, passim; see also Lane, ‘Masters and Chiefs’. 17. Oyogoa, ‘Cruise ships’, 36.

References Broeze, Frank, The Globalisation of the Oceans. Containerisation from the 1950s to the Present. (St.John’s: International Maritime History Association, 2002). Fink, Leon, Sweatshops at Sea. Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Flayhart III, William H., ‘Cruising’, In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, ed. by John B. Hattendorf. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), vol. 1, 519–23. Harlaftis, Gelina, ‘The Greek Shipping Sector, c.1850–2000’, In International Merchant Shipping in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: The Comparative Dimension, ed. by Lewis R. Fischer and Even Lange. (St. John’s: International Maritime History Association, 2008) 79–104. Lane, Tony, ‘Masters and Chiefs: Enabling Globalization, 1975–1995’, in Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500–2000, ed. by Richard Gorski. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 235–59.

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Miller, Michael B., Europe and the Maritime World. A Twentieth-Century History. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Oyogoa, Francisca, ‘Cruise Ships: Continuity and Change in the World System’, Journal of World- Systems Research, 22 (1) (2016), 31–7. Samson, Helen and Wu, Bin, ‘Compressing Time and Constraining Space: The Contradictory Effects of ICT and Containerization on International Shipping Labour’, International Review of Social History, 48 (2003) Supplement, 123– 52. Sturmey, S. G., British Shipping and World Competition. (St.John’s: International Maritime History Association, 2010).

Index

A Able(-bodied) seamen, 42–44, 86, 108–110, 112–116, 179, 186, 190, 239n5, 272, 273, 275, 280 Accommodation, 5, 6, 26, 46, 123, 130, 132, 133, 230, 236, 237, 253–256, 264, 273, 275, 281 Associations, professional, 7, 24–25, 81, 203, 212, 254, 258, 259, 276

B Boatswains, 2, 42, 43, 67, 68, 73, 77, 79, 81, 82, 108–110, 112, 113, 213 Boilers, 14, 17, 19–21, 26–29, 76, 129–130, 199, 200, 205 Boys, 44, 48, 54, 68, 73, 74, 79, 80, 83, 107–113, 130, 157, 160, 225–227, 230–233, 239n5, 256 Bridge, 4, 18, 129, 137, 138, 255, 256

C Cabin, 5, 121–130, 132–139, 229–231, 236, 254–256, 261, 264 Captains, 1, 3, 4, 7, 43, 70, 72–75, 77–79, 81, 84, 86, 103, 107–113, 118n7, 124, 125, 129, 138, 147–160, 162–164, 173, 179, 183, 184, 186, 187, 231, 250–252, 254–260, 264, 273, 274, 278, 280. See also Masters Careers, 3, 6, 96, 97, 103, 109, 174, 175, 183, 186, 188–190, 207–210, 214, 221–223, 225–228, 230, 233, 235–239, 262, 263, 274, 276, 281 Cargo shipping, 16–18, 66, 67, 70, 72, 75, 84, 86, 125, 161, 179, 180, 190, 254, 255, 277–280 Carpenters, 2, 3, 13, 14, 42, 43, 75, 83, 107–109, 129 Catering, 2, 5, 7, 41–43, 45, 48, 109, 111, 136, 174, 175, 178–180, 187–190, 221–225, 227, 228,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Davids and J. Schokkenbroek (eds.), The Transformation of Maritime Professions, Palgrave Studies in Economic History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27212-7

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286

INDEX

230–239, 272, 274–276, 279, 281 Child labour, 39, 48–50, 54, 227 Colonial relations, 133–135 Containerization, 18, 276, 277, 280 Cooks, 2, 3, 5, 7, 44, 73, 79, 82, 107–110, 112, 129, 173–175, 179–182, 184, 186–190, 222, 225–228, 230, 231, 234, 236–238, 240, 274, 275, 279 Cruise ships, 18, 136, 222, 276, 278, 279, 281 D Deck crew, 3–5, 14, 74, 75, 79, 81, 86, 100, 110, 111, 114, 117, 273, 279, 280 Deck officers, 4, 5, 14, 19, 21, 23, 212, 213, 215, 278 Deck plans, 122, 123, 127–131, 133, 134, 138, 254–256, 264 Deskilling, 17, 22, 41, 42, 44, 45, 56, 57, 201, 206, 207, 214, 272, 276, 277 Diesel propulsion, 17, 22, 41, 201, 206, 207, 214, 276, 277. See also Oil-fired ship Donkeymen, 32, 75, 82, 276 E Education, 23, 26, 29–31, 39, 43, 45, 49, 50, 122, 173, 212, 214, 227, 237, 258, 261, 272 Engine crew, 74–76, 81, 86, 101, 110, 111, 272 Engineers, 2–7, 14, 17–26, 28–32, 38, 41–44, 67, 74–78, 81–87, 100, 110–113, 116, 129, 138, 139, 154, 155, 160, 181, 199–215, 233–239, 246, 255, 256, 263, 272, 276, 278, 280

Engine room, 3–5, 15, 17–20, 24, 27–29, 31, 42, 44, 74, 84, 86, 100, 101, 105, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116–118, 154, 160, 174, 178, 181, 189, 190, 201, 202, 205, 213–215, 273, 276, 278–280 Engines, 14–18, 21, 29, 100, 107, 117, 129, 138, 155, 161, 199, 202, 205–209, 211, 214, 277 Entertainment, 125, 136 Examination, 20, 22, 23, 26, 31, 33, 39, 50, 51, 54, 81, 90, 181, 206, 208, 210, 217, 259, 276

F Firemen, 2–5, 14, 15, 20, 26–29, 38, 41, 42, 44, 48, 50, 54, 74–76, 81, 83–86, 110, 111, 154, 155, 178, 184, 187, 213, 214, 246, 273, 275. See also Stokers, Trimmers Food, 5, 46, 81, 107, 114, 173, 175, 181–184, 186, 189, 190, 213, 227, 236 Foreigners, 69, 81, 100, 134, 187, 188, 202, 233, 234, 260, 274

G Galley, 179–181, 184, 188, 190 Gender, 3, 222, 226, 228, 229, 271, 274, 281 Geographical origins of seamen, 20, 69–73, 96, 97, 100–102, 117, 175, 186, 187, 278, 279 Global Positioning System (GPS), 276

I Insurance, 39, 65, 67, 77, 84, 85, 87, 88, 176

INDEX

International Labour Organisation (ILO), 40, 43, 46–48, 50–54 K Kitchen, 124, 129, 134, 135, 138, 139, 180, 230, 237, 238, 274 M Maritime inscription, 96, 102, 109, 201 Masters, 3, 4, 9, 14, 22, 28, 67, 68, 162, 183, 189, 206, 207, 211–213. See also Captains Mates, 3, 4, 14, 21, 22, 38, 43, 67, 68, 75, 78, 154, 187, 205, 207, 213, 235, 246, 249, 252, 257–261 Multi-skilling, 278, 280 O Officers, 4, 5, 14, 19, 21, 22, 26, 30, 31, 38, 42, 43, 70, 73, 74, 78, 81, 83, 86, 109, 122, 124, 125, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135, 138, 139, 156, 159, 179, 181, 182, 190, 206, 213, 214, 238, 249, 251–253, 255–260, 263, 264, 272, 277–280 Oil-fired ship, 276, 277. See also Diesel propulsion Oil men, 5 P Passenger liners, 3, 7, 17, 28, 41, 174, 178–180, 184, 188–190, 221–223, 225, 228–230, 233–238, 247, 272–275, 278, 279, 281 Passengers, 2, 5, 6, 38, 41, 43, 108, 109, 122–125, 128–130,

287

132–139, 157, 158, 160, 161, 174–176, 178, 179, 184, 186–190, 213, 221, 222, 224, 227–232, 235, 236, 238, 239, 246, 247, 250, 254–260, 263, 271–276, 278, 280, 281 Port cities, 77, 86, 87, 95–97, 103, 105, 117, 118, 272 Prices, 2, 37, 84, 114–117, 128 Professionalisation, 2, 3, 21, 175, 182, 184, 190, 271, 275, 276 Pursers, 2, 5, 14, 67, 68, 73, 74, 77, 79, 235, 279 R Race, 139, 281 Radio operators, 2, 3, 71, 245–264, 275, 276 Reflagging, 279 Regulation, 1, 2, 4, 23, 30, 39, 40, 46, 51, 52, 54, 81, 134, 156, 183, 184, 200, 205, 206, 208, 210, 217, 234, 237, 247, 258–260, 264, 271, 273, 276, 279 Remuneration, 72, 78, 86, 115, 253, 271. See also Wages Residential patterns, 3, 103, 118, 272 Routes, 2, 74, 122–125, 128, 133, 138, 139, 153, 176, 225, 227, 234, 247, 250, 254, 258 S Sailing ships, 4–6, 14, 38, 40, 41–45, 49, 53, 66, 69, 72–74, 77–79, 81, 84, 86, 87, 95, 97, 101, 107, 108, 111, 118, 122, 148, 149, 151–153, 155, 161–164, 166, 173, 174, 176–179, 186, 190, 227, 230, 238, 273, 274 Sailmakers, 2, 3, 13, 14

288

INDEX

Schools, 23, 29, 43, 76, 77, 111, 206–209, 225, 228, 236, 248, 249, 259–261, 263, 273, 274 Servants, 129, 130, 135, 136, 138, 231 Shipowners, 24–26, 43, 46, 47, 52, 73, 75, 84, 86, 151, 152, 156, 183, 184, 202, 203, 205, 237, 248, 251, 256, 260, 264, 279 Shipping companies, 1, 21, 24, 89, 111, 136, 152, 154, 164, 176, 178, 184, 187–190, 202, 203, 222, 224, 225, 227, 229, 231, 238, 239, 246, 248, 250, 251, 254, 256, 258, 259, 264, 275, 276, 278 Social class, 50, 85, 139, 159, 174, 281 Standard of living, 96, 98, 106, 108, 114, 117, 118, 136, 253, 273 State, 22, 43, 66, 69, 71, 72, 76, 85, 86, 89, 109, 115, 121, 133, 205, 208, 228, 234, 259, 261, 276 Status, 3, 4, 6, 14, 19, 21, 112, 114, 117, 129, 159–161, 164, 173, 174, 207, 210–213, 236, 238, 247, 251–253, 264, 271, 274 Steamers/Steamships, 2, 4–7, 16, 19, 21, 22, 26, 38, 40, 42–45, 48, 50, 53–54, 66, 67, 69–72, 74–77, 86, 108, 109, 121–125, 128, 130, 132, 135, 136, 147, 149, 151, 155, 157, 159, 161–163, 173, 174, 176, 180, 187, 190, 202, 204–206, 229, 247, 273, 277 Stewardesses, 2, 5, 6, 20, 180, 222, 229, 230, 234, 246, 274, 275, 279 Stewards, 2, 5, 14, 47, 83, 84, 86, 110, 112, 124, 125, 128, 129, 139, 174, 182, 186, 188–190,

222, 225–228, 230–238, 246, 272–275, 279, 280 Stokers, 14, 26, 38, 41–43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 67, 114, 129, 130, 138, 154, 155, 167, 213, 272, 276. See also Firemen, Trimmers Stowage, 277 Strikes, 75, 81, 84, 87, 212, 237, 253

T Technological change, 17, 38, 39, 45, 47–51, 53, 55, 86, 150, 199, 207, 209, 210, 221, 222, 239, 247, 258, 263, 273 Tips, 5, 230, 231, 238, 275 Trade unions, 24, 46, 74, 76, 84, 87, 181, 182, 189, 212, 237, 276, 280 Trimmers, 2–5, 14, 15, 20, 26–28, 38, 41, 42, 44, 48, 50, 54, 74–76, 83, 85, 110–112, 154, 178, 184, 187, 272, 276. See also Firemen, Stokers

W Wages, 2, 4, 5, 20, 38, 45, 47, 54, 66, 72, 73, 77–81, 84–86, 100, 106–118, 155, 156, 159, 161, 162, 175, 186, 188, 213, 227, 231, 235, 237, 238, 241, 253, 272–274, 278–280. See also Remuneration Waiting crew, 16, 128, 178, 179, 222, 231–233, 274, 275, 279 Wireless telegraphy, 148, 247, 258–261, 264, 275 Women, 5, 6, 38, 50, 80, 125, 132, 135, 136, 174, 189, 221, 223, 227–230, 234, 239, 249, 274, 275, 281