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You are here: History

Our History

P&O has a long and proud history stretching right back to 1815 when "a young man with no influence and but limited pecuniary means, opened an office in Lime Street, London and commenced business."  The young man was Brodie McGhie Willcox and he was joined in his new endeavour, as ship broker and agent, by Arthur Anderson, employed by him as a Clerk.  Willcox and Anderson soon became partners and with the financial backing of a Dublin ship owner, Captain Richard Bourne, the "Peninsular Steam Navigation Company" issued its first prospectus in 1835.  The rest, as they say, is history all too briefly condensed in our key dates below.  In 2012 we celebrated 175 years of P&O history.

  • P&O was founded in 1837 when the company formed by Brodie McGhie Willcox and Arthur Anderson; then known as “Peninsular Steam Navigation Company” was awarded the Government contract to carry the ‘mails’ from UK to Spain and Portugal
  • In 1840 a second contract for the Egyptian mails followed and ‘Oriental’ was added to the company’s name and services. On 31st December P&O was incorporated by Royal Charter with a capital of £1million
  • P&O’s early steam ships succeeded in establishing ‘regular’ services which sailing ships had struggled to provide. Successive Government mail contracts extended the company’s reach to India in 1842 and further East to Ceylon, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong in 1845
  • In 1850 P&O began building Keppel’s wharf in Singapore to serve the company’s growing transhipment needs and in time for a new mail service to Australia, inaugurated by the P&O paddle steamer CHUSAN in 1852. In 1859 P&O became the first company to carry tea by steamer from China to UK and made its first call in Japan
  • By 1866 P&O’s fleet of 53 steamers plied their trade over 1,500,000 nautical miles per year. The company had established itself with representative offices or facilities in all its major ports and employed in excess of 12,000 people across 10 countries
  • In 1870 NUBIA became the first P&O ship to transit the new Suez Canal. The canal was a triumph of engineering but for P&O its completion provoked the first Suez crisis. The company’s monopoly of the steam traffic in the east was under threat. Freight rates plummeted and the P&O fleet, built for pre-Suez age, was now extremely uncompetitive
  • Saved from the Suez situation by the determined intervention of Sir Thomas Sutherland, P&O celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 1887, the same year as Queen Victoria. The company marked the occasion with four new steamers the first of which was named VICTORIA. At 6,500 tons the Jubilee class were the largest ships the company had ever built
  • P&O had always carried cargo but with the mail taking precedence it was generally confined to low volume, high value luxuries like bullion, silk and ivory. However the economic opportunities of bulk cargo were hard to ignore and in 1896 the Company launched its first purpose-built cargo ship CANDIA
  • In 1904 P&O offered its first official programme of pleasure cruises. The iron passenger liner ROME was refitted as a ‘cruising yacht’ and renamed VECTIS. It was many years before ‘cruising’ made any real contribution to the company’s profits but in the meantime it was a useful way to fill berths in the traditional ‘off season’ for the liner trades
  • 1910 began a decade of rapid expansion for P&O. The purchase of Blue Anchor Line was the first of many tactical acquisitions which included the shipping lines: B.I., New Zealand Shipping Co., William Cory, Hain, Union Steam, Nourse, Khedival Mail Steamship Co., Mercantile and a majority share in the Orient Line
  • In the war to end all wars, over half of the P&O Group fleet was requisitioned almost at once, rising to two-thirds at the peak of hostilities. P&O continued to run its regular mail, cargo and passenger services but these were not immune to the war being waged at sea. By Armistice Day, 83 P&O ships had been lost and with them 989 lives
  • In spite of the scars of war, P&O continued to expand acquiring the General Steam Navigation Co. in 1920 and Strick Line in 1923. P&O was now the largest shipping company in the world and the newest addition to its fleet was the most luxurious and technologically advanced passenger ship to date, the VICEROY OF INDIA
  • In the wake of the gloom of the Great Depression, P&O broke with the traditional dark black hulls of its past to launch five modern ‘white’ liners for the Australia run. The “White Sisters” catered for a new ‘Tourist class’ and took cruising beyond the Mediterranean and Baltic waters to the Pacific inaugurating P&O's first cruise from Australia in 1932
  • P&O celebrated its centenary in 1937. In 100 years, the company had gone from the first faltering days of coal-powered, steam driven paddle wheels to turbo-electric super liners effortlessly ferrying passengers, mail and cargo across the globe in a vast and varied fleet
  • “Your vessel RAWALPINDI is hereby requisitioned for Government services” So began the scores of telegrams requisitioning P&O Group ships as armed merchant cruisers, troopships and hospital ships. In all guises P&O ships ran the gauntlet of the German U-boats. By the end of the war, P&O had lost almost half of its once mighty fleet
  • P&O used the need for post-war rebuilding as an opportunity to rationalise its passenger services, now no longer tied to scheduled mail contracts, and to diversify its cargo capacity. With a growing demand for frozen meat the company acquired a ‘cold storage’ facility in Australia and in 1958 P&O’s first tankship was launched
  • In the 1960s P&O continued to diversify its shipping services acquiring interests in ferries, logistics, offshore support vessels, bulk carriers and the most significant revolution in cargo: containerisation. School children filled the berths of former troopships and ‘Ten pound poms’ flocked to Australia on P&O-Orient’s new ships ORIANA and CANBERRA
  • In the 1970s the P&O Group was restructured. Different shipping lines which had for so long operated under their own distinct identity were merged and unified under the P&O flag. With liner routes dwindling and passenger jets hovering above, there was a move to one class ships and a gradual transition from ‘travelling’ by sea to ‘cruising’. Princess Cruises was acquired and with the purchase of Bovis, in 1974, P&O looked beyond shipping for the first time in its history
  • On 2nd April 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands and three days later CANBERRA was the first P&O Group ship to be requisitioned. At home another battle was brewing as Trafalgar House Plc made a hostile bid for P&O. In a ‘Sterling’ victory P&O survived and bolstered its assets by merging with the property and service businesses of Sterling Guarantee Trust. There were further acquisitions in the Ferry, Cruises, Container businesses and P&O’s first joint-venture in a container port in 1986
  • 150 years after winning its first Government mail contract, P&O was a thriving global business employing over 55,000 people worldwide. The company proudly celebrated its anniversary with the publication of the “Story of P&O” and a year of commemorative events culminating in a formal dinner attended by Her Majesty The Queen
  • In the 1990s P&O was focused on the disposal of non-core businesses and substantial investment in worldwide port interests. After 25 years Bovis left the P&O Group and P&O Containers merged with Royal Dutch Nedlloyd to create P&O Nedlloyd. In the English Channel the opening of Eurotunnel in 1994 and the abolition of Duty Free prompted the strategic merger of P&O Stena
  • In the millennium year P&O’s cruising business was demerged from P&O creating an entirely separate company, P&O Princess Cruises, which was later acquired by Carnival Corporation in 2003. The company’s remaining stake in P&O Nedlloyd was sold to Maersk in 2005 and in Dover, P&O Ferries acquired Stena’s share in their business. In March 2006, P&O was itself acquired by DP World for £3.3billion
  • Today we can look forward to another remarkable milestone in 2012 when P&O will be 175 years old
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