These Splendid Ships; The Story of the Peninsular & Oriental Line

London: Frederick Muller Limited, 1960. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. 355 pages. Includes black and white frontis illustration of the Peninsular & Oriental Liner "Strathaird." Also includes 24 black and white illustrations of ships and ship captains. DJ has a small tears and small pieces missing. Dust jacket is in a Brodart cover. Arthur Durham (David) Divine, CBE, DSM, (1905-1987) was a prolific South African writer of books on a variety of subjects but will be remembered for books on defence issues. Divine had been a war correspondent and after the Second World War became the defence correspondent of the British Sunday Times, a post he held until 1975. In 1930 he began his career as an author of military politics and history books. During the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk in 1940, Divine crossed the English Channel three times in a 35-foot boat to rescue British soldiers. Divine was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal (DSM). The little Peninsular Line secured the first deep-sea mail contract. The mail contracts carried British shipping over the experimental period of the steamship to success. That success was of primary importance in the development of the new countries in the south and in the spread of British power through the east. The British shipping companies were among the greatest of the builders of the British Commonwealth, and the P & O is the exemplar of them all. P&O (formerly the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company) was a British shipping and logistics company dating from the early 19th century. In 1822, Brodie McGhie Willcox, a London ship broker, and Arthur Anderson, a sailor from the Shetland Isles, went into partnership to operate a shipping line, primarily operating routes between England and Spain and Portugal. In 1835, Dublin shipowner Captain Richard Bourne joined the business, and the three men chartered the William Fawcett and started a regular steamer service between London and Spain and Portugal - the Iberian Peninsula - using the name Peninsular Steam Navigation Company, with services to Vigo, Oporto, Lisbon and Cádiz. P&O first introduced passenger services in 1844, with a leisure cruise departing from Southampton to the Mediterranean. These voyages were the first of their kind and the forerunner of modern cruise holidays. The company later introduced round trips to destinations such as Alexandria and Constantinople and underwent rapid expansion in the later half of the 19th century, with its ships becoming larger and more luxurious. One particularly notable ship of the era was the SS Ravenna, built in 1880, which became the first ship to be built with a total steel superstructure. Mail contracts were the basis of P&O's prosperity until the Second World War, but the company also continued to become a major commercial shipping line and passenger liner operator. In 1914, it took over the British India Steam Navigation Company, which was then the largest British shipping line, owning 131 steamers. In 1918, it gained a controlling interest in the Orient Line, its partner in the England-Australia mail route. Further acquisitions followed and the fleet reached a peak of almost 500 ships in the mid-1920s. P&O and Orient Line were formally merged in 1960 to form P&O-Orient Lines.