Khedivial Mail S.S. Company

The company was a successor to the Medjidieh, a steamship company that operated in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, created by Said Pasha.^[1] The Medjidieh was also referred to as the Egyptian Steam Navigation Company, and quickly failed under the leadership of Said Pasha. His successor, Isma'il Pasha, restarted the venture in May 1863 in the hopes of creating a merchant marine for the modernising Egyptian nation.^[2] After falling into debt, Ismail used the company as leverage to try to gain control of and merge with the Egyptian Commercial and Trading Company, a European trading firm based in Egypt, in order to become a player in European financial markets.^[3] That venture was unsuccessful, and the merger never materialised. In 1894, the Egyptian government ordered the Medjidieh to make a large reduction in expenditure, which they achieved by eliminating some of the destination ports and closing local agencies.^[4]

In January 1898, the Egyptian Government agreed to sell the fleet of the "Poste Khedivieh Administration", as well as certain ship repair facilities at Suez and Alexandria, to the British merchants Allen, Alderson and Company of Alexandria and Frank Reddaway of Manchester.^[5] Francis Allen (1852-1926) and George Beeton Alderson (1844-1926) had been in partnership together in Alexandria since around 1864 as importers of Machinery, and Builders and Contractors. They converted their firm into a limited liability company in 1900.^[6] Allen, Alderson and Co. and Frank Reddaway then arranged for these properties to be sold into a new British company: the "Khedivial Mail Steamship and Graving Dock Company Limited". This company was registered on 30 April 1898 with a capital of £300,000. Among its initial eight subscribers were Robert William Perks, and Thomas James Barratt (chairman and managing director of Pears Soaps.^[7]

That company`s fleet consisted of three ships built in 1891–1892 in Scotland and operating on the Alexandria-Piraeus-Constantinople route, as well as eight old ships serving Syrian ports and the Suez-Red Sea services. The new company raised capital to finance the purchase, further fleet renewal and the construction of a new drydock at Alexandria.^[8] They received an operating subsidy from the Egyptian Government and undertook to continue the existing mail services, with an exclusive concession for commercial passenger traffic on those routes.^[4]

In the first year of operations the company began a programme of upgrading and expanding the fleet as well as restoring services to the full previous range of ports. In addition, due to restrictions under Ottoman law, all the ships were registered under the British flag.^[14] In early 1900, within a three days, two of the company's older steamers were lost. The cargo ship Menoufieh was wrecked on 11 March on the Sudan coast, south of Suakin;^[15] two days earlier, the passenger steamer Chibine was wrecked in the Gulf of Suez, on a voyage from Jeddah to Suez, carrying over 350 Muslim pilgrims, some Europeans, and the mails.^[15] In a subsequent inquiry, the ship was judged to have been unseaworthy, but there was no provision to enforce the Board of Trade's maritime safety regulations applicable to British-registered passenger ships as the company's vessels did not call at British ports.^[16] The same year, on 18 September Charkieh was wrecked in Greece, with a loss of 49 lives,^[17] which prompted writer and activist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt to take the matter up in The Times.^[18]

Also in 1900, construction began on the new graving dock at Alexandria in August.^[19] The total cost of this dock (the "Gabbary dry dock, 522 feet long, 75 feet average width, and 33 feet deep") was £116,400.^[20] In 1903 this graving dock was sold by the company to the Egyptian Government.^[21]

The company was purchased by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company in 1919 as part of P&O's post-war expansion.^[22] It continued to operate and expand, later adopting shipping routes that would bring its ships to the United States.

The company once again changed its name, to the Pharaonic Mail Line, in 1936. It was finally nationalized by the Egyptian government in 1961, forming the United Arab Maritime Company, later the Egyptian Navigation Company.