Putting the economic development into perspective

In 1950, when one of the authors travelled as a young child by a British Overseas Aircraft Corporation flight (BOAC, the precursor to today’s British Airways) from England to Jakarta in Indonesia, it took about five days to get there and was seen as a rare privilege. Flying in a four-engined, piston-driven Lockheed Constellation, known familiarly as the ‘flying banana’ because of its shape, the flights took place mainly during daylight hours, as little radar and few navigational aids existed at the time. Today, such travel is commonplace. Bali, in Indonesia, is a major tourist holiday resort for people from all over the world and flights to New Zealand from Europe, about as far as one can travel, take only 24 hours.

Maersk Line had been serving Indonesia regularly since 1929, and as part of expanding the liner network in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, Harrisons and Crossfield were appointed as agents in 1953. The liner services of the early 1950s, like the flights, were a very different story from those of 2013. Then, Maersk Line’s ships, scheduled to arrive on a certain day rather than at a certain hour, berthed at quays in or near the city centre near the all-important infrastructure of roads and railways, rather than at terminals located far away, as today. The ships often stayed in port for days rather than hours, allowing time for gangs of longshoremen to unload or load the cargo, which consisted of many small boxes, bales and drums, rather than today’s many large containers. It was a different world and, just as in the skies, the revolution in sea transport has changed the way we look at and live in a globalised world.