[BITList] Making a mark

Tue Feb 12 06:36:54 GMT 2013

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Plimsoll,  Samuel  (1824-1898), politician and shipping reformer, was born on 10 February 1824 at 3 Colston's Parade, Bristol, the eighth of thirteen children born to Thomas Plimsoll (1785-1844), clerk in the Excise Office, and his wife, Priscilla (1789-1863), formerly Willing. Soon after his birth Thomas Plimsoll was promoted to supervisor at Penrith, where Samuel received the rudiments of his education until 1838, when his father was transferred to Sheffield. He was a pupil at Dr Samuel Eadon's school there for about a year, leaving aged fifteen to work as clerk for a solicitor, then for a brewery. When Robert Bayley founded the Peoples' College, he attended the classes available before and after the normal working day. When his father died, Plimsoll was left to support his mother and five young children.

With the development of the railway network between the south Yorkshire coalfields and London, and the involvement of his brother Thomas in the coal trade, Plimsoll's mind turned to the profits which would accrue to anyone who could deliver coal to London more cheaply than hitherto. His dream became a possibility when he received an unexpected bequest of several hundred pounds from the properties left by his grandfather. Before these plans materialized, Henry Cole, organizing secretary for the Great Exhibition to be held in London in 1851, arrived in Sheffield and recruited Plimsoll as secretary for the Sheffield Great Exhibition committee. Plimsoll declined payment, but by his energy and forceful speeches he secured a great many exhibitors, and made himself known and respected. By 1853 several south Yorkshire coal owners had promised to support his plans, and as Thomas was by then manager of the Sunderland and Hartlepool Coal Company, Plimsoll went to London that summer, hoping to make his fortune as a coal merchant.

This naive enthusiasm rapidly led to Plimsoll's downfall. He was unaware that the manager of the Great Northern Railway, with whom he was negotiating, had a brother who was a London coal merchant, and that these two were determined to obstruct his every move in order to protect their monopoly. In February 1855 Plimsoll was declared bankrupt, and, when the news reached Sheffield, he suffered the further indignity of being suspended from his Congregational church membership until he humbly accepted their condemnation of his business methods. He began fresh negotiations, helped by a local businessman, John Chambers, and very soon was invited to meet Chambers's two stepdaughters. Romance followed, and on 1 October 1857 he married the younger, Eliza Ann Railton (1830-1882), and they set up home over Plimsoll's coal office at 32 Hatton Garden, London. Their only child, Elizabeth (b. 1865), died the day after she was born. The Plimsolls then adopted Nellie Plimsoll (1866-1957), daughter of Plimsoll's nephew, who had died of typhus six days after her birth. The coal transporting business began to prosper, and Plimsoll patented a 'sliding tip' which prevented much of the coal being smashed to dust as it was being shot into wagons.

By this time Plimsoll had a well-developed concern for social justice and the problems afflicting labour in dangerous trades carried out in Yorkshire, notably coalmining and edge-tool grinding, and he decided to enter parliament. He stood for Derby in 1865 and was defeated, but was elected in 1868 and held the seat until 1880. Plimsoll was considered to be an 'advanced liberal', voting for the disestablishment of the church in Ireland, a system of arbitration to ensure workers' rights, and for the special care of orphans, outside the workhouse. His interest in the welfare of seamen was generated by James Hall, a Tyneside shipowner, who in 1867 had voiced the general abhorrence at the loss of life brought about by the overloading of sub-standard ships and a payments system for the crews which forced them onto vessels which were clearly unsafe. Provided with facts and figures by Hall, Plimsoll launched into an emotional campaign against a supposed conspiracy between the insurers and the shipowners to profit from sending what soon became known as 'coffin-ships' onto the high seas where many vanished without trace. He also condemned the Board of Trade, in the person of its president, Sir Charles Adderley, as the body responsible for the weak regulations then in force. Over the centuries laws had been in force in various countries, to prevent overloading, and the excessive stowage of deck cargo, sometimes requiring a marked load-line. But to service the growing cargo and passenger traffic, many unseaworthy vessels were kept in service and heavily overloaded. By the 1870s more than 3000 merchant seamen were lost each year, their families condemned to fatherless poverty. The Board of Trade could require load-lines to be painted and could detain unsafe ships, but this required a complaint to be laid, and when the inspectors arrived, the offending vessel had usually left the port.

In 1873 Plimsoll published Our Seamen: an Appeal, a hotch-potch compilation of pictures, data, and letters from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and other organizations. Although justifiably described as 'a work marred by inaccuracies and want of knowledge ... the writer showed by his ignorance of technicalities that he was dealing with a subject that he did not know in detail and was not entitled to speak with authority' (The Times, 4 June 1898, 10b-c), it nevertheless caught public attention.

Meanwhile Plimsoll's motion in parliament, calling for a royal commission to examine the high incidence of loss of merchant ships between 1856 and 1872, was immediately successful. Being, however, staffed by eminent landlubbers, the commission concluded that human error and drunkenness had been principally to blame for the losses. The proposed bill to amend the Merchant Shipping Act did not go far enough for Plimsoll, who moved his own Shipping Survey Bill. Its defeat, by 173 to 170, forced the government to strengthen its bill, but Disraeli misjudged and under-rated Plimsoll, and his growing support from both unions and public. When Disraeli allowed the government bill to run out of time, Plimsoll could no longer contain his ire. On 22 July 1875 members witnessed an extraordinary scene where Plimsoll vehemently abused the shipping interests, including certain members of parliament, among the villains who sent sailors to their death. Asked to withdraw these statements, Plimsoll defied the speaker, threatened the prime minister, and left the house still shouting 'villains' and 'scoundrels'. Lord Shaftesbury, brought in to calm these storms, commented, 'He is proud of his own impetuosity and seems to think that no-one can be weary of it. I find him bold, earnest, rash. He will ruin himself and the cause by his violence'  (Hodder, 3.326). A few days later Plimsoll returned to the house and apologized for his behaviour, while declining to withdraw any statement of facts.

These stressful events brought Plimsoll to the edge of nervous breakdown and while parliament was in recess he and his wife set off on a long cruise which took them to the Baltic, the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and up the Danube. He returned to find the new Merchant Shipping Bill still, in his view, gravely defective. Further argument and debate, supported by public agitation, led to the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, which obliged owners to mark their foreign-going vessels with a load-line in the shape of a 12 inch circle with an 18 inch horizontal bar. When Joseph Chamberlain took over as president of the Board of Trade in 1880, Plimsoll found he now had a friend in that department. Rules for establishing the mark's position were set out by Lloyd's register of shipping in 1885, and in 1890 Plimsoll's ambitions were finally realized when another act required the Board of Trade to affix the Plimsoll line.

Plimsoll's achievement in 1876 brought him a testimonial and £1000 from the Society of Engineers, and he was elected president of the Sailors' and Firemens' Union, a post which required him only to preside at the annual congress and advise on parliamentary action. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution presented him with a silver model of a lifeboat then under construction which was launched at Lowestoft that December as the Samuel Plimsoll. In May 1880 he sought and failed to obtain the Chiltern Hundreds and in 1880 he contested and was defeated in the Liverpool and in 1885 the Sheffield constituencies. He did not again stand for election.

Plimsoll never recovered his full health. In 1879 he had an eye removed. That summer he purchased 28 Park Lane, Westminster, and adopted a spurious coat of arms, but his wife was by then gravely ill. They spent the winter in the warmer climate of Algiers, returned to London, then went to Madeira the following autumn. At Christmas they sailed round southern Africa, returned again to London, then in the summer of 1881 went to India and Ceylon. Encouraged by her apparent recovery, Plimsoll left his wife in the care of family members while he went back to deal with business in London. She went to Australia, and in 1882 settled at Brisbane with Plimsoll's married sister. A relapse prompted her to ask for him but he was unable to secure a passage before learning of her death on 17 August 1882. Plimsoll was well-known in Australia and her funeral cortege included the governor and premier of Queensland, together with many of its leading citizens. On 21 August, however, Plimsoll obtained an exhumation order, and had her remains shipped back for burial on 15 November at Highgate cemetery.

During his many visits to Hull, Plimsoll had had business dealings with Joseph Armitage Wade, a prosperous timber merchant, and on 8 October 1885 he married Wade's daughter, Harriet Frankish (1851-1911). She identified with his public interests and accepted Nellie as a daughter, besides giving birth to a son, Samuel Richard Cobden Plimsoll (1887-1955) and two daughters, Eliza Harriet (1889-1939), and Ruth Wade (1891-1957). By 1892 Plimsoll was suffering from diabetes and decided to retire from public life. He moved to 31 Clifton Gardens, then to 35 Augusta Gardens, Folkestone, where he died on 3 June 1898. Within hours all the ships in Folkestone harbour had their flags at half mast, and on 7 June a contingent of sailors drew his hearse to St Martin's Church, Cheriton, Kent, for his funeral and burial.

Besides his Plimsoll line, which is now elaborated to take account of the differences in buoyancy of fresh and salt water and the increased hazard of the north Atlantic winter, Plimsoll's name was also bestowed in 1876 on the rubber-soled canvas shoes, then being manufactured by the Liverpool Rubber Company. The company's salesman, Philip Lace, said that the shoes were water-tight as long as they were not immersed above the level of the band, which reminded him of the Plimsoll line.

Anita McConnell 

Sources  G. H. Peters, The Plimsoll line (1975) + D. Masters, The Plimsoll mark (1955) + M. Grey, 'The sailor's friend', Maritime Heritage, 2/3 (1998), 18-22 + E. L. Rasor and J. O. Baylen, 'Plimsoll, Samuel', BDMBR, vol. 3, pt 2 + The Times (4 June 1898), 10b-c + The Times (8 June 1898), 12b + G. Alderman, 'Samuel Plimsoll and the shipping interest', Maritime History, 1 (1971), 73-95 + E. Hodder, The life and work of the seventh earl of Shaftesbury, 3 (1886), 326 + m. cert. + DNB + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1898)
Archives Bishopsgate Institute, London, letters to George Howell
Likenesses  London Stereoscopic Co., carte-de-visite, c.1875, NPG [see illus.] · Barraud, photograph, NPG; repro. in Men and Women of the Day, 4 (1891) · R. H. Campbell, oils (after photograph), NMM; posthumous · Lock & Whitfield, woodburytype photograph, NPG; repro. in T. Cooper, Men of mark: a gallery of contemporary portraits (1876) · G. Pilotell, drypoint print, NPG, BM · WV [W. Vine], watercolour study, NPG; repro. in VF (15 March 1873) · bust, Bristol Portway · carte-de-visite, NPG · prints, NPG
Wealth at death  £40,849 9s. 8d.: probate, 3 Nov 1898, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

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