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All Hands 2020-1 (UK Spring) P a g e 14

Argentina, India and China. Unfortunately, Liverpool was at that time a fairly rugged city and he was murdered
in 1840, the company thereafter being run by his sons. But progress intervened when the Suez Canal opened in
1859, and the direction of the company was left to others until 1889, when it reverted to the family under the name
Bibby Bros Ltd. It changed its name thereafter in 1931 to Bibby Line Ltd.
To a degree the company had been fortunate in the period leading up to the opening of the Suez Canal. It seems
strange to us now, but in Britain there was scant enthusiasm for the very idea of the Canal. Perhaps one reason
was that it was the French who had had the fortitude to create the Canal itself, and the other was that th e system
of transporting goods and passengers from Alexandria to Suez was a very successful economic enterprise in itself.
P&O had close to a monopoly of the trade between Suez and the main Indian ports, but had insufficient resources
to adequately command that part of the journey that encompassed the Liverpool/London voyage to Alexandria,
and it was in this sector of the trade with India that Bibby grew in economic strength, assisted by the fact that it
obtained the mail contract for that part of the journey. For some reason the trip across the desert was called the
Waghorn Road.
The fact that Bibby operated extensively in the Mediterranean was also fortuitous in that when the Crimean War
started in 1853, the company was well placed to provide logistic support to the British, French and Turkish armies.
However, the company name was changed to the Leyland Line, and shortly after that time the controlling interest
in the entity passed to the larger Ellerman Line. At this time it was decided by the Prime Minister, Disraeli, that
the Suez Canal was a meritorious endeavour and Britain bought 44% of the company from the Viceroy of Egypt
for four million pounds (and, politics being what they were, the Prime Minister was immediately excoriated for
having made the purchase).
In 1886 Britain decided that the Indian Province of Burma merited separate governance and created the new
country, independent for administrative purposes, at which point Bibby opened a trading route between Liverpool
and Colombo and Rangoon, and at the same time the British Government put the company on the ‘Approve List’
for the transport of Service Officers to the Indian Ocean.

The main trading of the company devolved from Europe to Burma, essentially at a propitious time, for of the
countries of the British Empire, Burma had one of the most robust economies. Not only was it home to a
disproportionately large portion of the world’s teak forest, but it was a major producer of rice, the primary food
of a large part of the eastern component of the Empire, and, of course, of China. However, it is not too fanciful to
say that the WWI, and more pointedly WWII, demonstrated the fact, at least as seen by colonized countries, that
the Western Powers had feet of clay: even though often promised autonomy, or at least self-government, the
colonizers real intentions did not include letting the empires dissipate into fragmented independent nations.

Bibby Sapphire Bibby Polaris
Aung San led the way to independence, and was followed by Ne Win, who developed the singular road created by
the wartime leadership by instituting The Burmese Way to Socialism. This economic model can only be described
as a disaster, and the whole raison d’etre for Bibby’s existence having thus been destroyed, relatively quickly the
company began to operate by chartering its vessels to others, creating a worldwide network of agencies, financial
services, offshore support services and the business of construction equipment hire. Today it operates in 16
countries and employs some 16,000 people.

4.2 Loss of the Derbyshire
I remember one day in 1980 entering Ebbisham House in Epsom where I worked for the MNOPF. Glaring out
from the newspapers displayed in the hall-way were headlines about the missing bulk-carrier, the mv Derbyshire.