Introduction

A large proportion of this section has come from the major steamship companies of Liverpool: Ocean, Elder Dempster, Pacific Steam Navigation Co., Ellerman, Lamport and Holt and Brocklebank are all prominent and date from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even with the loss of a large number of vessels in both world wars Liverpool remained a major, though declining, centre for shipowning into the 1970s, and the acquisition of these collections is linked with the closure of offices and the sale of ships. The bulk of the ships were passenger and cargo liners as opposed to tramps, bulk carriers or tankers. From the mid-1960s there were moves to join consortia to fund the establishment of container services and diversification into other ship types, such as gas tankers.

Apart from the Brocklebank collection, there is little material on the sailing ship owners who owned a higher proportion of Liverpool's tonnage until the mid-1880s. To an extent their activities can be traced through some of the collections listed in volume 2 - Merchants and other Maritime Businesses. Their ships are well documented through the Liverpool Registers of merchant ships, Lloyds and other commercial registers and personal research papers of sailing ship historians such as Captains Beard and Woods. The same applies to coasting companies and many of the passenger/cargo lines which did not survive into the mid-twentieth century; for example, the White Star Line records seem to have disappeared after the merger with Cunard in 1934, and as a result of this many other companies are represented by fragments. Other mergers have left some companies’ records embedded in others. This is especially true for the Archives of the Ocean Group. Other collections within the Archives can also yield useful information, especially MDHB, Liverpool Steam Ship Owners Association, solicitors’ accumulations such as Alsop Wilkinson, and the Bryson collection. It should also be noted that most major companies have a published history (of varying quality) and these are useful starting points. Other local collections are also important, especially the Liverpool City Record Office and the University of Liverpool Archives, which holds the bulk of the Cunard Archives.