Catalogue description Sea Transport: Correspondence and Papers

The Transport Department of the Admiralty was transferred to the Ministry of Shipping during the 1914-18 war. Because of the shortage of ships, it was necessary to establish priorities as between the Army, Navy and Air Force and the import programme. Other departments and Services of the British Government were reluctant to accept the decisions of the Admiralty - a service in competition with them for the use of merchant ships - on their requests. Hence an independent Ministry of Shipping was given priority to requisition all merchant shipping and to direct it to work of high priority. The Transport Department was the nucleus of the new Ministry, with the particular responsibility of meeting the needs of the fighting services.

After the First World War, the Ministry of Shipping was dissolved and the Transport Department, instead of returning to the Admiralty, was made part of the Mercantile Marine Department of the Board of Trade. To meet Admiralty requirements, the Director of the Transport Department was given a dual status. He was made head of an Admiralty Department as well as an officer of the Board of Trade

The Sea Transport Division, as it came to be called, together with the rest of the Mercantile Marine Department of the Board of Trade, was transferred to the Ministry of Shipping in 1939, later becoming part of the Ministry of War Transport, when inland and overseas transport were amalgamated into the one Ministry in 1941.

The director of transport and shipping was responsible both to the department for the transportation of men and stores of the armed forces and other government passengers, and to the Admiralty for naval transport and the direction and discipline of transport officers. Sea transport officers, initially naval officers but later civilians with Royal or Merchant Navy experience, were appointed at major trooping ports in the United Kingdom and abroad to supervise embarkation and disembarkation of troops and stores.

The division maintained a fleet of government-owned troopships together with vessels held on long-term or ordinary commercial charter. In peacetime the management of such ships was commonly left to selected shipping companies; the booking of cargo space, which was undertaken in wartime by the Allocation of Tonnage Division was carried out in peacetime by freight agents employed by the division. The division included a Technical or Survey Branch which prepared fitting out plans for troopships and, through the marine survey offices, supervised such work in dockyards. There was also a Stores Branch charged with purchasing, holding and servicing stores and equipment for vessels under the division's control. The division was transferred to the Board of Trade on 1 January l969.