ANDERSON, Arthur (1792-1868), of Oriental House, 122 Leadenhall Street, London; Norwood Grove, Surrey; Vaila, Shetland

A Shetlander of humble origins, Anderson was the co-founder and managing director of the mighty Peninsular & Orient (P & O) Steam Navigation Company. A Liberal free trader, during his brief spell in Parliament Anderson sought to promote the economic development of his native islands and regularly contributed to shipping debates.

Anderson was employed from the age of ten, initially as a beach boy ‘scrubbing and washing fish’.1J. Nicholson, Arthur Anderson: a founder of the P & O company (1932 edn.), 7. In 1808 he joined the royal navy, rising to the rank of midshipman, and after the French wars he unsuccessfully sought employment until he was introduced to Brodie McGhie Willcox (1786-1862), a London shipowner.2Ibid., 10-22. He became a clerk in Willcox’s firm in 1816 and a partner in 1822.3Ibid., 23. They supplied liberal forces during the Spanish and Portuguese civil wars of the early 1830s, and secured a mail contract for the Falmouth-Lisbon line in 1837.4Ibid., 25-7.

Anderson and Willcox pioneered the use of steamships, won a succession of government postal contracts and founded the Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company in 1840.5D. & S. Howarth, The story of P & O (1994), 16, 23-6. A condition of the company’s royal charter was the exacting contract with the East India Company to establish a mail service between Egypt and India, which they confounded expectations and fulfilled.6B. Cable, A hundred year history of the P & O (1937), 42-3. P & O’s subsequent expansion was phenomenal and ‘attained … a magnitude far exceeding any similar private enterprise’.7Illustrated London News, xviii. 233 (22 Nov. 1851). By 1851 the company had 31 ships, used 150,000 tons of coal and navigated 800,000 miles annually.8Ibid. Mail contracts remained the bedrock of P & O’s business, although by 1868 the company had also acquired lucrative global property holdings.9Nicholson, Arthur Anderson, 40-1. Willcox and Anderson were joint managing directors until 1854, when the former became chairman, a position assumed by the Scotsman on the latter’s death in 1862. They received no salaries but a percentage of gross earnings and later profits.10Howarth, Story of P & O, 87; Cable, History of the P & O, 143-4; Nicholson, Arthur Anderson, 38.

Anderson sought to promote the economic development of his native islands. He founded the Shetland Journal in June 1836, although the lack of facilities meant that it had to be printed in London.11Nicholson, Arthur Anderson, 47-53. A year later, Anderson established the Shetland Fishery Company, to cure fish and sell it to overseas markets.12Nicholson, Arthur Anderson, 55-7; H.D. Smith, Shetland life and trade, 1550-1914 (1984), 133. His attempt to foster hosiery manufacture was less successful, however.13Ibid., 153; Nicholson, Arthur Anderson, 59-63. He also galvanised local opposition to the corn laws, arguing that the tax prevented Shetlanders exchanging their fish for bread, and he was a supporter of the Anti-Corn Law League.14Nicholson, Arthur Anderson, 73-85; Select Committee on Public Petitions (1837), appendices 677-8; K.J. Cameron, ‘Anti-Corn-law agitations in Scotland, with particular reference to the Anti-Corn-Law League’, Univ. of Edinburgh Ph. D. Thesis (1971), 274-5; P.N. Sutherland Graeme, ‘The parliamentary representation of Orkney and Shetland, 1754-1900’, Orkney Miscellany, 1 (1953), 64-104 (at 80-1).

Anderson’s popularity, philanthropy and commercial influence secured his election as a Liberal in 1847 for Orkney and Shetland, defeating the interest of the Whig Dundas family, earls of Zetland, who had long dominated the constituency.15Ibid., 82-91; Dod’s electoral facts, impartially stated, 1832-53, ed. H.J. Hanham (1972), 239; Daily News, 30 July 1847; Morning Post, 18 Aug. 1847; Glasgow Herald, 3 Sept. 1847; Caledonian Mercury, 6 Sept. 1847. In his hustings speech, Anderson advocated a revision of taxation and an unsectarian national education system.16Sutherland Graeme, ‘Parliamentary representation’, 90. Such views placed him alongside other Radical MPs associated with the programme of the National Parliamentary and Financial Reform Association. He supported Richard Cobden’s motion for retrenchment, 26 Feb. 1849, and repeatedly cast votes in favour of Joseph Hume’s ‘little Charter’ of political reforms. Anderson supported Jewish emancipation and the abolition of church rates, but backed the 1851 ecclesiastical titles bill. Despite his shipping interests, Anderson’s free trade inclinations led him to back the repeal of the navigation laws in 1849. For the same reason he opposed Disraeli’s attempts to relieve burdens on land, which he thought would reimpose the corn laws under another name.17Hansard, 19 Feb. 1850, vol. 108, cc. 1068-79. However, Anderson hinted that retaliatory tariffs were necessary to force the Spanish government to abandon the differential duties which discriminated against British shipping, 5 Aug. 1850.18Hansard, 5 Aug. 1850, vol. 113, cc. 815-18.

Anderson took a natural interest in shipping questions, and with Willcox, Liberal MP for Southampton 1847-62, vigorously promoted the interests of P & O, including defending the system of government postal subsidies from which the company derived much of its revenue.19PP 1849 (305), xvii. 457-86; 1851 (605), xxi. 806-8, 814, 823; Hansard, 27 Mar. 1851, vol. 115, c. 652; Howarth, Story of P & O, 83; A.G. Jamieson, ‘Anderson, Arthur (1792-1868)’, www.oxforddnb.com. Anderson repeatedly proposed that seamen leaving the merchant navy for the royal navy should forfeit their wages.20Hansard, 18 July 1850, vol. 112, cc. 1448-50; 25 July 1850, vol. 113, cc. 215-16; 19 July 1851, vol. 118, cc. 1049-50, 1051. In 1849 he suggested to a parliamentary inquiry that commercial shipping could act as ‘a large reserve steam fleet available for the national defence’ without costing the country anything until it was required.21PP 1849 (305), xvii. 458. Government postal contracts could henceforth stipulate that commercial steamers be able to carry guns, as P & O’s ships were.22Ibid., 481-2; Illustrated London News, xviii. 233 (22 Nov. 1851). He returned to the issue, 30 Mar. 1852, arguing that his policy would prove to be a better form of defence than the militia bill, noting that ‘for every private or commercial steam vessel possessed by France, we have twenty’.23Hansard, 30 Mar. 1852, vol. 120, cc. 369-79 (at 371). Britain’s maritime power would be a deterrent and ‘consequently prove the most effectual, as well as the cheapest, instrument for the permanent maintenance of peace’.24Ibid., 379. However, Anderson withdrew his motion after receiving government assurances that it would be looked into.25Ibid., 395.

Although by the late 1840s he had wound up the Fishery Company and discontinued his newspaper, Anderson continued to press for improvements which would benefit his constituency.26Nicholson, Arthur Anderson, 52-3, 58. He called for enhanced coastal lighting to prevent shipwrecks, 21 Feb. 1848, for islanders to be exempted from the duty on imported wool, 5 Aug. 1850, and for better postal services, 22 Mar. 1852.27Hansard, 21 Feb. 1848, vol. 96, cc. 1035-6; 5 Aug. 1850, vol. 113, cc. 830-1; 22 Mar. 1852, vol. 119, c. 1461. Having initially denied that he would retire at the next dissolution, Anderson did exactly that in June 1852, citing ill-health, but his endorsement of a Conservative free trader against the Liberal Dundas nominee did not endear him to his erstwhile supporters.28Sutherland Graeme, ‘Parliamentary representation’, 94-6; Nicholson, Arthur Anderson, 96.

In his last decades Anderson devoted himself to philanthropy, founding schools in Southampton and Lerwick and a working man’s institute in Norwood.29Ibid., 97-101. He remained an active chairman of P & O until his death from bronchitis in 1868.30Howarth, Story of P & O, 88, 90; Aberdeen Journal, 4 Mar. 1868. Anderson left no heirs but was succeeded as chairman by Thomas Sutherland, whom he had appointed as assistant manager shortly before his death and who was married to his niece.31Cable, History of P & O, 175-6. Sutherland was later Liberal, then Liberal Unionist MP for Greenock 1884-1900.32M. Stenton and S. Lees (eds.), Who’s who of British Members of Parliament (1978), ii. 345. Anderson’s personal estate was sworn under £120,000.33Calendar of Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration (1868), 74.