Now we come to “Ellermans”.
It really is difficult to understand how such a huge shipping company could just more or less disappear overnight. Ellermans weren’t just one entity. There were all sorts of Ellermans. All under the same funnel colour and rather homogenous. Some had grey hulls, some white, some green. But the same funnel.
You would see an Ellemans ship in just about any port in the world during the mid 1950s to the late 60s (even 70s I suppose). Not often in the Orient though. Blue Flue, Ben Line, P&O and BI kind of had that market sewn up. But Ellemans weren’t a “Tramp” outfit. They were Cargo Liners, which meant that the various elements of Ellermans traded on specific routes (albeit with the odd excursion..like everybody else did). So they had a fleet that traded to the Med, another to NZ and Aussieland, a big run to South Africa and so on. Some of their fleets were of quite small ships (4000 tons or so) but the long haul stuff equated with the ships of Blue Star and so on.
One class of their ships has always struck me as being one (actually 4 of them) of the most beautiful and purposeful looking merchant ships of all time. I refer to the City of York class…a pic of her eventually.
But let’s look at a random selection of what they had to offer.