Chapter 15 - The Shipping Depression of 1901 to 1911: The Experience of Freight Rates in the British Coastal Coal Trade

Summary

The period 1900 to 1914 has been characterized as one of continuing depression in the international shipping industry. James considered 1901 to 1911 to have been an acute depression in shipping, while Sturmey considered the period 1904 to 1911 to have been “the first truly international shipping depression.“ More recently Aldcroft, examining ocean freight rates, the earnings of half a dozen British liner companies and the movement of earnings per ton of four British shipping firms, has concluded that “during the first decade of the twentieth century British shipping was more depressed than at any time during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.” Aldcroft admits the statistical basis of his conclusions “are very weak,” and indeed he presents no new index of freight rates to support his case, relying on data from Angier and Isserlis.

No cognizance has been taken of coastal freight rates in this period, and indeed not much is known generally about the movement of coastal freight rates. It has been established that coastal liner companies followed the practice of the railways in charging on an eight-fold classification based on the value of the good and the difficulty of handling it and that the coastal liner charged less than the railway for virtually all commodities and routes. However, there has been no attempt to look at a series of coastal freight rates to see how they fluctuated over time. Freight rates charged by liner companies were only one aspect of the coastal trade. There was also the tramping coaster, not tied to any specific route but going wherever there was a cargo to be carried and working to no published schedule of sailings but departing as and when the cargo had been loaded. Although the liner companies carried the higher-valued cargoes, leaving the bulkier, lower-valued commodities to be hauled by tramps, liners were almost certainly a minority of the total number of ships in the coastal trade and carried a smaller aggregate tonnage of goods than the tramp ships. Thus, to concentrate only on liner freight rates is to ignore charges made on the major portion of coastal trade. The single most important cargo carried by the coaster in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was coal.