Lamport & Holt

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The British shipping company Lamport & Holt existed from 1845 to the early 1990s.

history

The shipping company was founded in 1845 by William James Lamport from Workington and George Holt (whose brother Alfred Holt operated the Blue Funnel Line ). Lamport and Holt began to serve the North and South America, South Africa and India routes with wooden sailing ships. After both of them had gained experience in the Mediterranean region in the mid-1850s with their first stakes in steamship services of the shipping companies James Moss & Co. and the Papayanni Brothers, they acquired their first two trampers in 1861/62, each with a load capacity of around 1300 tons.

In 1865, the shipping company began building a successful freight, mail and passenger service from Liverpool, London, Antwerp and Glasgow to the east coast of South America under the name Liverpool, Brazil and River Plate Steam Navigation Company . From 1869 they pioneered the coffee trade from Brazil to New York. In 1874, when Lamport died, the shipping company was already operating around a dozen of its own ships and changed its corporate form to a corporation. A Belgian subsidiary was also founded in 1874. The sailing area was expanded in the following years and extended to Valparaiso in the 1880s (but this route was abandoned in 1896). From 1886 the transport of frozen meat from the area of ​​the Río de la Plata was started. Refrigerated shipping developed so well that in 1898, two years after George Holt's death in 1896, five large refrigerated ships , each with a deadweight of 5555 tons, could be ordered.

Shortly after the turn of the century, in 1902, the shipping company set up a New York-South America passenger service with second-hand tonnage, which soon became so well established that new, larger ships could also be commissioned for this service. The three passenger ships, each measured at around 10,000 tons, were put into service on the Liverpool-South America route in 1910. The following year, Lamport & Holt was taken over by the competing Royal Mail Line , but remained as an independent shipping company.

At the beginning of the First World War, Lamport & Holt had 36 ships with a volume of around 200,000 tons, eleven of which were sunk during the following four war years. After the end of the war, the South American freight services were turned back to, especially the frozen meat trade, but the passenger service to New York was also revived.

After the loss of the passenger ship Vestris in 1928 and the New York stock market crash the following year, the shipping company and its parent company, Kylsant's Royal Mail Group, collapsed. After a re-establishment in 1934, the Vestey Group , which also owned the Blue Star Line , took over Lamport & Holt in 1944. The shipping company continued to operate independently until 1974, but ships were repeatedly brought under the Lamport & Holt brand after that. The last Lamport ship was the refrigerated container ship Churchill , which was operated from 1986 to 1991 with the characteristic black, white and blue chimney colors.

literature

  • Paul Michael Heaton: Lamport & Holt , The Starling Press, Risca, 1986, ISBN 0-9507714-6-5

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Churchill on bluestarline.org (English)

Web links