Our Seamen appealed for the compulsory surveying of all merchant ships and ended with a clarion call to its readers: ‘It is on you, who read these lines, that this great, this life-giving duty now devolves — you personally, not Parliament only, nor Government merely, but you.’
Over the preceding decades, the broadening of the franchise and the rapid growth in literacy, mirrored by the rise of the popular press, had greatly increased the power of public opinion, and the impact of Our Seamen was immediate and widespread. Newspapers throughout the country ran extracts and editorialized about it, and public meetings, many addressed by Plimsoll, were held in every large town and city.
Britain was now at the height of her economic powers and dependent on shipborne trade for her continuing prosperity, but the British people were roused to complain that the human price being exacted from British seamen was too high.
Plimsoll’s mercurial temperament and impatience with the obstructive, stalling tactics of ship-owners and Board of Trade officials alike, also led him to make furious attacks in his public speeches and on the floor of the Commons, but attempts to silence him through libel writs failed.
C. M. Norwood, a Hull MP and ship-owner, sued him over his comments about the loss of the ship, the Livonia, which began drifting when its engines failed just six hours after sailing with a cargo of railway iron in October 1871. It eventually sank off Spurn Head.
Plimsoll called as witnesses a Lloyds surveyor, another more reputable ship-owner and the ship’s mate, who testified that some of the cargo had to be removed before the ship could even clear the bar at the entrance to the harbour. One of the stevedores who loaded it also testified: ‘I would not have sailed in her three miles, if I were to receive the whole ship and cargo as a present.’
The Court of Queen’s Bench found in Plimsoll’s favour on 14 June 1873 and as a result of the case several other MPs and ship-owners withdrew their own libel writs.
In March of that year, Chichester Fortescue, the president of the Board of Trade, had announced a Royal Commission into: ‘The Alleged Unseaworthiness of British Registered Ships, whether arising from Overloading, Deck-loading, Defective Construction, Condition, Form, Equipment or Machinery, Age or Improper Stowage; also to inquire into the present state of the Law as to the liability of ship-owners for injury to those whom they employ, and the alleged practice of “Undermanning” ships.’
The Merchant Shipping Act of May 1873, passed while the Royal Commission was still considering evidence, gave the Board of Trade power to survey ships suspected of being unseaworthy or overloaded, provided a member of the public had made a complaint. Even with these modest powers, 440 ships were stopped from leaving port within the next twelve months, almost all after a complaint from a single member of the public: Samuel Plimsoll, christened ‘The Seamen’s Friend’ by the popular press.
Plimsoll had to take the information supplied to him on trust, but 424 of the 440 were condemned as unseaworthy in any circumstances, and as the commission was forced to concede, ‘So clear was his judgement that in no case was he called upon to pay costs, not even in the case of the sixteen vessels out of 440 which were allowed to go to sea.’ Even they were forced to unload part of their cargo before sailing.
Ship-owners giving evidence to the commission tried to place the blame elsewhere. One owner, who had lost eighteen ships in ten years, blamed every one on ‘the incompetence of the masters and crews’. All united in denouncing Plimsoll as ‘hare-brained’, a ‘notoriety hunter’, a man who sought ‘to prohibit death by Act of Parliament’, and, even worse, ‘a landlubber’.
A contrary view was expressed in a letter sent by a ship’s mate to his fiancée just before boarding his vessel. Having complained of the overloading of his ship, he added, ‘It’s a great pity that the Board of Trade doesn’t appoint some universal loadmark and surveyors to see that ships are not sent to sea to become coffins for their crews.’
Reluctant to lose face with his shipmates and face gaol for desertion, he sailed with the ship. It was his last communication. He drowned when it sank during that voyage.
Such testimony did not unduly impress the Royal Commission, which met behind closed doors and largely consisted of Board of Trade officials, ship-owners and -builders. There were no representatives of seamen and, despite the commission’s wide-ranging brief, much of the evidence Plimsoll had painstakingly accumulated was ruled inadmissible because it allegedly lay outside its terms of reference.
The commission’s report carried the strong odour of whitewash: ‘We have therefore come to the conclusion, though not without regret, that we cannot prescribe any universal rule for the safe loading of all merchant ships.’
At the 1874 elections Gladstone’s Liberal government was swept from power and, as a Liberal MP, Plimsoll cannot have been sanguine about his chances of securing the passage of new legislation under Disraeli’s administration.
None the less, he pressed ahead with his Shipping Survey Bill, moving the second reading in the House on 24 June. To the astonishment of Disraeli, despite the concerted opposition of the Government and the shipping interests, the Bill failed to secure its second reading by only three votes.
Ships continued to be lost and the incompetence of the new president of the Board of Trade, Sir Charles Addersley, further inflamed public opinion. Matters came to a head over an overloaded ship, the Thoranby, at Cardiff dock in December of that year. Informed of its dangerous condition, Addersley elected to send a letter instead of a telegram to stop the ship from leaving port. By the time it was delivered, the ship had already sailed. Twenty-nine men drowned when it foundered.
Plimsoll brought another Bill before the House the following year but once more the obstruction of ship-owning MPs saw it delayed and debilitated over the ensuing months. Then, on 22 July 1875, Disraeli announced that the Merchant Shipping Bill would be abandoned to allow parliamentary time for the Agricultural Holdings Bill, thereby concerning the House not with the life and death of seamen, but the correct form of transfer of land titles.
Plimsoll gave voice to his own fury and the anger of the public in a display of open defiance to the House, though it was far less spontaneous than at first it appeared. He carried his toothbrush in his pocket in case he was imprisoned, and his wife was in the Ladies’ Gallery, scattering copies of a longer but equally vitriolic version of his speech on to the reporters’ desks below.
He shook his fist at the MPs opposite him:
I desire to unmask the villains who sit in the House, fit representatives of the more numerous, but no greater villains, the ship-owners of murderous tendencies outside this House. They have frustrated and talked to death every effort to procure a remedy for this state of things.
The Secretary of Lloyds does not know of a single ship that has been broken up by the owners because she was worn out for thirty years. They are bought up by needy and reckless speculators, by whom they are sent to sea with precious human lives on board. Hundreds and hundreds of brave men are continually being sent to their deaths and their wives are made widows and their children made orphans, so that a few speculative scoundrels, in whose breast there is neither the love of God, nor the fear of God, may make unhallowed gains.
In the name of our common humanity, I demand that this Bill shall be proceeded with immediately. Failing this, I lay upon the head of the Prime Minister and his fellows the blood of all the men who shall perish next winter from preventable causes.