LAME TRAMP AND GAY LINER

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 71, 21 September 1936, Page 8

LAME TRAMP AND GAY LINER

The sea has some bad traditions, but possibly not all the charges that have come down from "the bad old days" were founded on fact. A British Judge, it is cabled, has directed that there is "no case" against two men charged with sending a ship to sea in an unseaworthy condition; and has discharged defendants without calling on the defence. This decision warrants the hope that the old coffin ships have gone, never to return, or never to return in the form made famous by the late Rudyard Kipling's "Ballad of the Bolivar." A dramatic phase in the political career of Joseph Chamberlain" was his fight in the earlier eighties, when a Liberal Minister, for the passing of merchant shipping legislation dealing with this evil, concerning which he used language and stated facts very unwelcome to Liberal ship owners, and certainly embarrassing to Mr. Gladstone! For a decade or more before that Samuel Plimsoll had led in (and out of) the House of Commons a war against , the people responsible for unseaworthy and overloaded vessels. Entering the House as a Liberal in 1868,. Plimsoll introduced a Bill against coffin ships—a prelude- to stormy times that are now forgotten. Failing to pass his Bill, Plimsoll in 1872 wrote "Our Seamen," a book which "made a great impression" throughout Britain. By 1875 he had induced the Government to bring in a Bill, but when Mr. Disraeli, under pressure, dropped it, Plimsoll called the Commoners villains and shook his fist in the Speaker's face. Later he "apologised, but the country shared his view that the Bill had been stifled by the pressure of the ship owners." Plimsoll in the seventies and Chamberlain' in the early eighties both failed to pass their Bills, yet a little later the legislative goal was attained by pressure of public opinion, and the fights of these stalwarts are hardly remembered. Kipling's vivid verse tells how the seamen of the Bolivar, "leaking like a lobster-pot, steering like a dray," watched "some damned liner" go by with lights like a grand hotel. That was fifty years ago. Today, if the coffin ship is scarcer, the liner is more magnificent and "grand hotel-like" than ever. To be a floating palace is not enough, and Dennys and Browns have now patented retractable fins for stabilising ships in rough weather. They claim that the device can be bought for less than £10,000 and less than half a knot speed-loss. What would the men ol the Bolivar have said if, while they were "sinking in the swell" of the Bay of Biscay, the damned (and stabilised) liner had passed them on an even keel?