Proceedings of the Scottish Maritime History Conference 2025
Posted: Wednesday 19th November 2025
The very successful 15th Scottish Maritime History Conference (SMHC) was held in Glasgow on 21 and 22 October 2025.
The SMHC is the only regular maritime history conference held in the UK which is open to any presenter. It is free to all participants and is by no means limited to papers on Scottish subjects. Support comes from the Lind Foundation, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, Glasgow Life and from funds originating with the Maritime Information Association which are now held by the British Commission for Maritime History (BCMH).
The lead organisers are Professor Hugh Murphy and Dr Martin Bellamy, supported by past and present academic staff of the University of Glasgow. This report is by Dr Roy Fenton, one of three BCMH Trustees attending the Conference
Evening lecture at the Wolfson Medical School, University of Glasgow 21st October
Virtual Viola - electronically salvaging the career of the oldest steam trawler
Dr Robb Robinson, University of Hull
The Viola is a remarkable survivor: a reminder of Hull trawling during days of ‘Boxing’, a requisitioned fishing vessel which had the rare distinction of sinking a First World War U-boat, and a career in South Atlantic whaling which concluded with her being beached at Grytviken in South Georgia. Her life story was outlined by Dr Robinson who has been involved from the outset in attempts to rescue the Viola, but which were thwarted during the Covid epidemic. However, the vessel’s structure has been stabilized and her story has been told visually in a presentation combining live footage and digital imagery which Dr Robinson presented.
Conference programme at the Mitchell Library 22nd October
The Amazon, the Booth Line, a Scottish romance and a tourist ‘boom’
Elizabeth Allen, The Tall Ship
Elizabeth Allen’s paper looked at the opening of the Amazon to international shipping and how the Liverpool-based Booth Line played an important role. The river is tidal for 600 miles and is one mile wide at certain points. Steam navigation was introduced to the river by a Brazilian company in 1853, whilst a Peruvian concern began services on the upper reaches in 1862. The river trade flourished with the rubber boom in the last half of the nineteenth century but later declined as the Malayan rubber industry grew in importance. Booth Line began services between Europe and North America and up-river ports in 1863 and for one hundred years were one of the river’s principal users.
The paper tells the story of a Scottish romance in 1951 between a Merchant Navy war hero and a leading lady botanist during a voyage on the passenger ship Hilary to explore the beginnings of pleasure cruising on the Amazon and the subsequent tourist boom. Their six-week cruise extended from Belem near the river’s mouth to Iquitos in Peru. The largest ship in the Booth Line fleet at the time, the Hilary had been built in 1931 by Cammell, Laird in Birkenhead for the Liverpool to Manaus route. She was broken up in 1959.
Elizabeth Allen spent the first two decades of her career working in tropical Latin America and developed a special interest in the Amazon. After sea voyages as crew on tall ships, she has researched in depth the lives and histories of those who sailed on the Glenlee. Elizabeth is currently Vice Chair of the Board of the Glenlee Trust.
‘To Trade Freely with All’: Mediating the Kru labour crisis in early colonial West Africa
Dr Lloyd Belton, University of Glasgow
This paper examined the intensifying inter-imperial competition for Kru labour - both maritime and terrestrial - in West Africa in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, a period marked by the transition from informal imperialism to formal colonial rule on the continent. It foregrounds the tension between market liberalization and protectionism and traces its impact on the economic, social, and political networks of the Kru.
The collective identity and livelihoods of this coastal West African people had long been shaped by engagement in both licit and illicit Atlantic maritime commerce. The Kru were not slaves and with their skills including pilotage and canoe handling, were essential to the maritime commerce of the area, willing to work for anyone from traders to pirates. At one time an estimated 10,000 Kru were working at sea or on shore.
For generations, Kru hiring aboard European and United States vessels operated through unregulated wages, informal contracts, and convoluted chains of brokerage involving tribal leaders, headmen, and European agents. However, the growth of the palm oil trade in the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed new imperial attempts to curtail out-migration and institutionalise labour recruitment, driven by the imperative to retain scarce manpower in newly established colonies. British, French, and Spanish governments, shipping lines, and colonial administrators all sought to resolve what became known as the ‘Kru labour crisis’ by implementing regulatory frameworks and contractual regimes.
British shipping lines such as the Liverpool-based Elder Dempster, which relied heavily on Kru seafarers, spearheaded efforts to establish a ‘Kru Shipping Conference’ that would allocate labour quotas among European powers. Confronted with this encroachment on their traditionally itinerant modes of life, Kru workers pushed back and mobilised enlightenment-era ideals - particularly the right to free movement - to assert their autonomy and defend their longstanding claim to ‘trade freely with all’.
Dr Lloyd Belton is a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow in the School of Humanities, University of Glasgow. He is a historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic world and focuses on slavery, carcerality, abolitionism and empire.
Shipping and the state in First World War Britain: between the national and the global
Dr David Morgan-Owen, University of St Andrews
The relationship between shipping and the state during the First World War has overwhelmingly been shaped by ideas of ‘control’ and ‘nationalisation’. In this telling shipping was like many other areas of economic life; it required state intervention to rationalize its commercial practices in the pursuit of wartime organization. That intervention arrived in late-1916 with the creation of the Ministry of Shipping, which succeeded in ‘controlling’ the use of maritime transport.
This paper developed an alternative account of the wartime relationship between ships, ship owners, and the state. The ships and the trade they carried were a tangible manifestation of a reality known to historians: that Britain was a primary driver and beneficiary of globalization before 1914. The advent of war did not change this basic reality. As a result, the emphasis placed upon ‘national’ organization is fundamentally antithetical to how Britain made war between 1914-18.
British strategy was predicated upon its capacity to exploit, adjust, and re-make the forms of global connectivity that had underpinned its financial and geopolitical power before 1914. This could not be achieved through any measure of state control possible between 1914 and 1918. The state lacked the economic understanding, administrative capacity, or political appetite to dictate world trade.
Rather, partly through the appointment of Glasgow ship owner Sir Joseph Maclay as Shipping Controller in 1916, the state evolved a purposeful policy of partnership and co-operation with maritime business that saw the logic of shipping become central to British strategic decision-making. The dictates of maritime transport ‘controlled’ how the war was fought and ensured that it was far more than a ‘national’ endeavour.
Dr David Morgan-Owen is a senior lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. His research examines British strategy-making and strategic thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. David’s first book The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford, 2017) won the Templer Medal for the best first book from the Society for Army Historical Research in 2017. He has held fellowships at the National Museum of the Royal Navy and the National Maritime Museum and was the recipient of the Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History in 2016.
Coaling the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow: a nightmare
Dr Roy Fenton, British Commission for Maritime History
Fuelling the Grand Fleet in its remote First World War anchorage of Scapa Flow required an enormous transportation effort. It proved to be a nightmare for Admiral of the Fleet John Jellicoe, for the rail network which transported coal from Aberdare and the Rhonda Valley, a huge fleet of war requisitioned colliers, and for the Grangemouth, which was closed to all commercial traffic for the duration.
Railway historians have highlighted the huge burden put on the rail network of running up to 17 coal trains over 400 miles every day, when railways were beset by labour shortages, huge backlogs of maintenance the need to run troop and ambulance trains, and inadequate rolling stock. Local historians have chronicled the demands placed upon the port of Grangemouth. Although there are extensive records of the estimated 2,800 colliers requisitioned by the government during the war and their losses, specific details of their actual service are difficult to find.
This paper aims to shed more light on these operations and to answer a number of questions: Why was Grangemouth chosen as the dispatch port for colliers bound for Scapa Flow, rather than the larger and better-equipped port of Glasgow? Why wasn’t steam coal shipped directly from South Wales ports? What was the effect of closing Grangemouth to all but military traffic? The relatively light losses due to mines and torpedoes around Scotland recorded for colliers serving Scapa Flow suggests that the hazards of supplying coal by sea from South Wales were considerably exaggerated, Using this route could have avoided putting a major strain on an already highly stressed rail system.
Dr Roy Fenton is an independent researcher, author and publisher, who specialises in cargo ships of the steam and diesel era and those who built and operated them. He is a trustee of the British Commission for Maritime History, and a director and trustee of the World Ship Society. His most recent books are Evolution and Significance of the Powered Bulk Carrier: The Black Freighters, Research in Maritime History No. 56, (Liverpool University Press, 2023) and Fisher’s Fleets: the Barrow Shipping Company and its Constituents (Ships in Focus Publications, 2024).
A Chief Surveyor’s inspection of Scottish iron shipbuilding, 1847
Dr Catherine Scheybeler, King’s College London
As Principal Surveyor of Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, Augustin Francis Bullock Creuze (1800-1852) was instructed in 1847 to carry out a routine visitation tour of Scottish shipyards. Creuze suggested that this presented a potentially valuable opportunity for studying the then still novel but rapidly expanding methods of iron ship construction at a location which was at the centre of the development of iron and steam-powered ship technology. Creuze’s interest in iron shipbuilding dated back to his work for the Royal Navy at Portsmouth Dockyard where, in 1840, he surveyed HMS Nemesis, the first ocean-going iron-hulled British warship.
Following his employment by Lloyd’s Register of Shipping in 1844, it was an interest, and expertise, which he continued to develop, especially as this Society sought to ensure that its classification requirements were up to date and fully adapted to ensure the greatest possible level of safety at sea without unnecessarily inhibiting technological creativity and progress. These concerns were reflected in his subsequent report, which covered his visits to, among others, the shipbuilders Robert Napier and Sons, Denny Brothers, John Scott and Sons, and Caird and Company. It provides a valuable insight into the state of iron shipbuilding on the River Clyde at this time and highlights the challenges of technological transition. This paper explores these themes as it describes Creuze’s 1847 tour of Scottish shipyards.
There had been relatively slow progress in iron shipbuilding in Great Britain since the first iron hulls were built in the 1818. Problems to be overcome were the poor quality of the available iron, the requirement for effective anti-fouling, and the effect of an iron hull on compasses, the latter problem not overcome fully until the 1870s. Although Creuze did not live to see it, his report did lay an important foundation for Lloyd’s Register’s first rules for iron shipbuilding, published in 1855, which helped counter the belief that ‘Lloyd’s Register was not interested in iron shipbuilding’.
Dr Catherine Scheybeler is a historian and Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London. She specialises in the eighteenth-century Spanish navy and is a member of the Editorial Board of the world’s oldest international quarterly journal of maritime history, The Mariner’s Mirror, and is a member of the Council of the Society for Nautical Research. She is currenlty undertaking research into the archives of Lloyd's Register Foundation focusing on the theme of Transitions (ports and ships) and creating resources to help others to interpret and access the collections.
‘Human spiders spin and spin’: the Scottish ropemaking industry in transition from the age of sail to the age of steam
Dr Nina Baker, Independent engineering historian
‘Knowing the ropes’ is one of the many phrases that have come to us today from the days when sailing ships were the principle means of both local and international travel. The deckhand had to know where every rope, large or small, was and what he needed to do with it in any circumstance. It was a hard life at sea and almost exclusively male and until the mechanisation of the ropemaking industry and its transition to water and steam power, it too was almost exclusively male.
However, during the adoption of steam in the workshops and long before the transition to steam at sea, increasingly women replaced men in the ropeworks. They too had a hard life and were generally tough women from the same working class background as the deckhands. They were doing work that was essential to a nation in both peace and war. A ship of 1,250 tons deadweight (for instance, the deadweight of HMS Victory is 2,162 toms) would require over 18 miles of cordage of a myriad of sizes from ½ inch up to 16 inches in diameter, plus a lot of smaller twines and cords for canvas sewing or whipping ropes’ ends.
There were hundreds of ropeworks, large and small, making cordage for all manner of uses (not just for ships) in a great variety of sizes. Dr Baker’s paper considered the rise, spread and eventual decline of the industry in Scotland. Technological changes included the introduction of hackling machines to refine and sort the fibres which made up the yarn which was spun into strands and eventually into ropes. Recollections from workers in the 20th century helped explore working conditions in the industry, and highlighted the problem of byssinosis caused by inhalation of vegetable fibres into the lungs.
Dr Nina Baker is a former Merchant Navy deck officer who later became a materials engineer and then a politician. She is now a historian specialising in the history of women in the history of UK engineering and construction trades and professions.
The Battle of Trafalgar, interpretations through art; 220 years on
Michael Leek, MA, MPhil (RCA), Cert Ed, FRSA, AFRHistS.
The use of contemporary or more recent marine drawings and paintings to illustrate histories of wars and specific naval battles is accepted practice, and rightly so - they add context, besides which a picture is worth a thousand words! However, contrary to received opinions of many historians, these artworks, regardless of how well executed, are rarely, if ever, 100% accurate. This is evidenced by analytical examinations of paintings by different artists, over different periods of time, of the same action.
The importance was stressed of achieving accuracy by using empirical evidence of ship design and rig, establishing the prevailing weather and light conditions from log books and examining charts and ships’ logs. It is the author’s contention that each piece of artwork is very much the interpretation by the individual artist to the point that each work becomes an impression - contrary to the labels applied to art by such theoretical art historians from the likes of the Courtauld Institute!
Only since the introduction of photography are we able to get a reasonably accurate visual record of an action, albeit with inevitable limitations. Even having artists present at an action - such as the van de Veldes in the seventeenth century - does not guarantee a complete and accurate record. A number of examples of paintings of the Battle of Trafalgar were discussed, including those of Turner, Stanfield, Wyllie and Gardner. The first, by Turner, was artistically very successful, but attempted to illustrate the entire seven-hour action, including the death of Nelson, in one painting.
Concern was expressed about recent images, developed by software from digital photographs, and more recently those produced by artificial intelligence. Historical inaccuracy in terms of the appearance of the ship, the lighting and weather conditions depicted is of great importance especially in the context of students accepting the images as accurate. Even Wikipedia did not escape censure. It was stressed that this brief talk is simply an introduction to what is a complex subject, one that is currently being explored in greater depth.
Michael Leek trained as a technical and information illustrator. He was Head of the School of Illustration at the Arts University Bournemouth, where he researched, designed and directed visual information heritage projects in Britain, Sweden and Aland; notably on HMS Victory, SS Great Britain, HMS Warrior, Cutty Sark, HMS Gannet, Portwey, HMS Belfast, Pommern and Vasa - the last two in collaboration with Malardalen University. He has also written and contributed to a number of books, including The Art of Nautical Illustration (London 1991) and has exhibited with the Royal Society of Marine Artists.
Ferry chartering: A Stena concept, 1965-2025
Professor Bruce Peter, Glasgow School of Art
The recent entry into service of the new hybrid electric/LNG-powered Saint-Malo and Guillaume de Normandie, operated by Brittany Ferries under long-term charter from Stena RoRo, reflects a growing phenomenon of asset-light operation in transport, evident also in the road and air transport sectors.
This presentation examined the transfer of the application of chartering from bulk shipping to the ferry sector from the mid-1960s onwards. It will be shown why the Swedish Stena AB line became the innovator in ferry design and leasing. The company moved from building liquid natural gas carriers for charter to the development of the successful and highly flexible ferry designs, notably the Stena Searunner class and the twin-engined, Chinese-built E-Flexers such as Saint Malo.
Stena were joined in the 1970s by other Swedish companies who benefited from shipbuilding subsidies and a taxation regime encouraging investment in ships. These companies initially supplied nationalized short-sea operators in the UK and Canada with up-to-date vessels. The early lead gained by the Swedes - and the expertise in ferry design that they accumulated - continues to reap benefits with ‘sustainability’: nowadays an important criterion for success. Against a rapidly evolving legislative context, chartering has become a low-risk and cost-effective solution for operators.
Bruce Peter is Professor of Design History at the Glasgow School of Art. He has written extensively about modern design and architecture in the contexts of travel and leisure. He is the author of several books and has appeared in various television documentaries. His latest monograph is Art Deco Scotland: Design and Architecture in the Jazz Age, (Edinburgh, 2025). He has regularly contributed journalistic writing to shipping industry publications produced by Shippax in Halmstad, reporting on the development of the international ferry industry.
Image European Space Agency, Id 387332, http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2017/12/Amazon_River, User:Fæ/Project_list/ESA
File:Amazon River ESA387332.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
