Plimsoll

Plimsoll, SAMUEL, 'the sailors' friend,' was born at Bristol on 10th February 1824. In his seventeenth year he became clerk in a Sheffield brewery, and rose to a position of trust in the firm. In 1854 he started business on his own account, in the coal trade, in London. Shortly afterwards he began to interest himself in the sailors of the mercantile marine, and the dangers to which they were exposed. He accumulated a mass of facts proving that the gravest evils resulted from the wilful employment of unseaworthy ships, from overloading them, and under-manning them, from bad stowage, and from over-insurance; unscrupulous owners insured rotten or 'coffin' ships at a value greatly exceeding their real value, and sent them to sea, hoping they would founder, by which means they would make bigger profits than they could make by legitimate carrying of merchandise. Failing to induce parliament to take legislative steps to put an end to these evils, Mr Plimsoll himself entered parliament, for Derby, in 1868; but it was not until he had published Our Seamen (1873) and had made an appeal to the general public that he succeeded in getting passed the Merchant Shipping Act in 1876, to supersede temporary measures passed during three preceding sessions. By this act the Board of Trade was empowered to detain, either for survey or permanently, any vessel deemed unsafe, either on account of defective hull, machinery, or equipments, or improper loading, or overloading; a penalty not exceeding £300 was incurred by any owner who should ship a cargo of grain in bulk exceeding two-thirds of the entire cargo, grain in bulk being especially liable to shift on the voyage; the amount of timber that might be carried as deck cargo was defined, and enforced by penalties; finally, every owner was ordered to mark (often called the 'Plimsoll Mark') upon the sides of his ships, amidships, a circular disc, 12 inches in diameter, with a horizontal line 18 inches long drawn through its centre, this line and the centre of the disc to mark the maximum load-line—i.e. the line down to which the vessel might be loaded, in salt water. Failure to comply with this last regulation exposed the owner to a fine not exceeding £100 for each offence. In 1890 this act was amended, the fixing of the load-line being taken out of the owner's discretion and made a duty of the Board of Trade. Mr Plimsoll retired from parliamentary life in 1880. But he did not slacken his efforts to make the sailors' calling safer: in 1890 he published a work on Cattle-ships, exposing the cruelties and great dangers connected with the shipping of live cattle across the ocean to British ports. He died 3d June 1898. See Japp, Good Men and True (1890).