Shipping Control Committee

On 27 January 1916 Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith set up the Shipping Control Committee. It was to decide on the allocation of British ships to the essential needs of the Allies and to the essential needs of Britain herself, and to put its views to the Cabinet on the tonnage required by the Navy and the Army. On the latter, however, it could not decide. The chairman was Lord George Curzon, Lord Privy Seal and a member of the Cabinet. Alongside him sat Lord Faringdon, a financier and chairman of the Great Central Railway; Thomas Royden, deputy chairman of the Cunard Line; and Frederick Lewis, deputy chairman of the shipowners Furness, Withy & Co. The secretary was Captain Clement Jones of the Booth Line.

Not enough ships for everything

At the turn of 1915 and 1916 the government was still mainly worried about rising freight rates, but the shortage of ships themselves was becoming ever clearer. The number of ships requisitioned by the state was rising steeply: according to the British official history, from about 1,300 vessels of 5 million gross register tons in September 1915 to more than 1,700 vessels and 6.5 million tons at the beginning of February 1916. France and Italy were demanding more than 1.4 million tons on top of that. The building of new merchant ships had almost stopped, because the shipyards were working for the Navy, and in the last quarter of 1915 only about 93,000 tons were launched, not much more than the losses of a single month. Ships trading between foreign ports had already been reviewed by the Ship Licensing Committee, and little more could be squeezed out of them.

The Transport Department of the Admiralty, which requisitioned the ships, had to meet the requests of other departments and could not judge which of them were more important. Its advisory committee of shipowners considered that it lacked the knowledge to arbitrate between the forces, the Allies and trade, and called for a central authority. For a short time this role was played by the Port and Transit Executive Committee, but it was overloaded with its own work. In January the licensing and food-transport committees called in a joint memorandum for imports to be restricted. On the same day the new committee was set up, the President of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, announced in the House of Commons a ban on imports of a large part of paper and the raw materials for making it, more than 1.6 million tons a year, as well as restrictions under consideration on imports of tobacco, timber and some fruit.

A transitional body

The committee was given no staff of its own. Its members worked on it only part-time, and its decisions were carried out by the Transport Department. The historian of seaborne trade Ernest Fayle considered that Curzon’s presence in the Cabinet in practice guaranteed the approval of its decisions, while Royden and Lewis linked it with the committees that already controlled shipping. Arthur Salter, then an official of the Transport Department, judged it more severely: the committee was essentially an intermediary and arbiter in disputes between departments and Allies, but it carried out no independent research and mostly endorsed the department’s work.

A few weeks after its creation the committee drew up a review of the situation. It calculated that about 3.25 million tons of shipping were lacking for imports into Britain and the Allies’ new demands, which meant a shortfall of about 13 million tons of goods a year, and it proposed a temporary ban on imports of everything except essentials. The government considered this too drastic and on 15 February confined itself to banning imports of paper, tobacco, furniture woods and stone without a licence. The committee worked until the end of 1916, when David Lloyd George’s government appointed a Shipping Controller with his own ministry. According to Salter it was an interesting transitional experiment, which showed that directing shipping required a strong authority with full information.