LITTLE SCRIBBLES FROM THE HIGH SEAS! From the VIKING SEA Oct-Nov 2018
by Published on 22nd November 2018 02:14 AM
LITTLE SCRIBBLES FROM THE HIGH SEAS!
From the VIKING SEA Oct-Nov 2018
The guests aboard are interested, love lectures & sometimes have direct connection to the lecture topics. And they often enjoy coming-up & chatting afterward. And this is often interesting & sometimes very interesting for me.
I joined P&O in 1961 and worked in their offices on Leadenhall St in London, said a charming, long-retired man from England. I was with P&O in one way or another for 42 years. I remember Leadenhall St in those days being crammed with shipping offices one almost on top of the other. The P&O offices were very grand with a huge entrance and lots of those highly-detailed ship models placed about. In the offices above, there were long rows of desks and the humming sounds of typewriters.
I was assigned to the British India Line, an arm of P&O, and looked after their UK-East African service, he added. British India had 102 ships when I joined and the flagships were the Kenya & Uganda, passenger-cargo ships that carried about 300 passengers down to places like Mombasa, Beira, Dar-es-Salaam & Zanzibar. They were fine ships, but less and less viable. Theyd stay in the London Docks for two weeks or more for offloading & then reloading. And we were also lots of strikes, which disrupted everything. These were problematic and more and more expensive. And then there was the great decline of passengers going by sea in the Sixties.
Later, I was assigned to BI Educational Cruises with their Devonia, Nevasa & Uganda. That was a unique service, very popular in those times and, at P&O, we were allowed to join for a pound-a-day but only if a passenger cabin was available and then only at the very last minute. Revenue always came first.
He concluded, But it all declined. BI Cruises was finished by the mid 80s. The big P&O liner division became P&O Cruises and were later sold to Carnival. P&Os freight division was sold to Nedlloyd and then to Maersk, and even P&O Ferries is today owned by Dubai Ports Authority. P&O and all those great British shipping lines are now gone. Such a loss such a great pity!
Below: The 14,000-ton Kenya in the London Docks in the 1960s.
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