SHIPS OF LONDON.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19529, 11 July 1925, Page 19

SHIPS OF LONDON.

LINE THAT TRACES AN ANCIENT DESCENT. It soenis rather paradoxical that a line bearing the name of a Scottish seaport should throughout its history have been associated mainly with London (says C. Fox Smith in the Daily Chronicle). Yet so it is, for London, Sydney, and Melbourne have always been the principal milestones on the route of tho Aberdeen White Star ships, both sail and steam, and they remain so to the present day. The Aberdeen Line is ono of the very few which has carried on many of its old traditions, with its old house flag, in an unbroken lino of descent from clipper ship to steamer. Its ships have always boon noted “good-lookers,’' and although it is not to be expected that a steamer should lie able to compete for beauty with that loveliest, surely, of all man-created things, a clipper under full sail, it is admittedly tho case that the steamers of tho line are still among tho handsomest regular visitors to the London River.

“Aberdeen green” is still one of, their distinguishing marks —that peculiar shade something between a bottle and a sage tint, which aforetime set off so admirably tho gracious linos of tho clipper hulls at the. Pagoda Anchorage or Circular quay. And the custom of classical names —“jawcrackers.” as the old shellback used to call them—is also faithfully preserved. Whether their pronunciation presents any less difficulty in these days of popular education, or whether “Sophocles” and “Themistocles” still rhyme with "cockles” as they woro wont to do, 1 know not. To this particular form of continuity of tradition it is gratifying to note one important exception. The annals of tho line record but ono ‘Thermopylae.” That is as it should bo. Some names are in a sense sacrosanct. It is a shock to one’s sense of the fitness of things to come across a motor boat christened “Cutty Sark,” or a haldhonded schooner of tho ugliest typo masquerading as “Flying Cloud ” This year ia the centenary of the line—tho ships flying the familiar house flag berth in the King George V dock. Old stagers recall the time when the bowsprits of the clippers and their leaning figureheads thrust out across the roadway as they lay in tho East and West India Docks; and the six-pointed star on the red and blue swallow-tail fluttered above the warehouses among tho crowded masts and spars, with many another now long since gone and forgotten.