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which relied upon the very inefficient handling by ship’s gear or shore cranes of
individual crates or pallets. Damage was expected (crates of whisky could simply
disappear during unloading) and idle time was the norm (at which time a ship
was earning no money but was spending it profligately) with piecemeal cargo-
handling. It was to be five years before P&O organised its fleet to include custom-
made container ships, but soon, shipyards were hard-pressed to meet demand.
Consequently, the second revolution was in ship sizes. Rapidly cargo ships
became virtual behemoths, fast, usually manned by a crew similar in manpower
to Khyber, and which rarely remain in the new specialised ports for even a day.
One obvious result was that, almost overnight, cargo damage was substantially
minimised. Other specialist ships, for example car carriers (the most ungainly
of all ship designs), by driving cars up and down ramps, eliminated damage
occasioned to cars hoisted into the holds of ships like Khyber, where scrapes or
dents were almost inevitable.

These factors contributed to fundamental changes to commercial and to
working lives. The Royal Docks very rapidly fell into terminal decline. Something
less than twenty miles from the North Sea, these docks were in a shallower and
narrower part of the Thames than large container ships could safely navigate,
and they simply stopped coming, though the docks actually remained open
until 1981. Needless to say, this progress necessitated huge social changes to
dockworkers, but inevitably, the rules of commerce prevailed; today, there are
merely three rather sinister large bodies of water lying parallel to a short-runway
airport. Necessarily, ports like Newcastle, with their narrow entrances, became
transformed and in need of substantial government aid. But for those who got
the good and difficult jobs, (container-crane operators and the like) the cargo
revolution was wholly good.

Other changes that were occurring were more gradual but inevitable. While
ships of all types were still being built in the UK, their numbers declined quite
rapidly, although the P&O Canberra (Belfast) and the Orient Line Oriana
(Barrow-in-Furness) were both launched in 1960, British yards being generally
obsolescent and unable to easily compete with builders in developing countries (at
that time most notably Japan, but many others wished to get into such profitable
lines of business). There were also a number of specialised ventures that, often
with government help, saw opportunities that in the past would have gone to
British entrepreneurs; the Finns became adept at constructing the most exotic
of passenger ships, and their success was closely followed by both Germany and
Italy. Ship-breaking, in the past a British specialty, was taken over by Pakistan
and Taiwan, and had it not been for oil rigs, oil-servicing ships, warships and

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