Cunard and Donaldsons.
Alsatia….originally built for the “Silver Line”. A pretty well known company that must have had some grandiose ideas when they built this thing!
Hello Bryan
The Silver Line was a shipping company formed in 1908, part of the British Merchant Navy. By the 1930s they were offering round the world passenger/cargo services, with the passenger fare on a freighter of £100. Entirely on foreign service, the ships did not include UK ports of call. Managing owners were the S & J Thompson family. Most of their merchant ships bore the name Silver followed by the name of a tree. The Second World War claimed 11 of their ships. One of them, the Silverfir was sunk by the German battleship Scharnhorst on a voyage from Manchester to New York in 1941. Silver Line switched to tramping around the world in the 1950s, then went through several ownership changes, and by 1985, with the sale of their last ship, was no more.
The Silverplane, a sleek twin funnel vessel of 7,226 gross tons built in 1948, was sold to the Cunard Line in 1951 and renamed Alsatia II, and so was her sister ship Silverbriar, to become Andria I. Their forward funnels were false, containing the chart room and the captain's cabin, looked like miniature Queen Elizabeths, and carried just 12 passengers, the maximum allowed without a regulation onboard doctor. They were sold to the Republic of China and renamed Union Freedom and Union Faith respectively. The latter ship was demolished in a fiery collision with an oil barge outside New Orleans in 1969, with considerable loss of life.
An associated company, Joseph L. Thompson & Sons of Sunderland, was involved in the design of the first Liberty ships that saw service in World War II and beyond.
I served my time as Apprentice D.O. with the Company and then as 3/Officer before moving on. I was told that the Company had the monopoly for liner trades from the East Coast of the States to the Phillipines and East Asia. They had the leases on several piers in San Fransisco and that most of their ships lost in WW2 were lost in the Pacific. At that time the US did not have a viable Merchant Fleet.
After WW2 (in 1949/50) the US Protectionism forced the Company to sell their ships due to the loss of their trade routes and the Company was sold to a Welsh Company who’s name escapes me. They then started tramping, as I did.
So, you see, the Company did not have grandiose ideas when the two twin funnel ships were built, they already had the liner trade for them but sadly lost it soon after
Hope this fills in a gap or two.
Keep the pictures coming Bryan. Great thread.
Cheers
John