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European Shipping Still at Low No Real Sign of Revival—Launch Exhibition Ship Scheme—Work Suspended on a Number of New Vessels—Cancel Surplus Sailings to Reduce Expenses NCE again there is_ little O enough that is bright to re- port in most sections of Eu- ropean shipping and shipbuilding during the quarter, particularly in British. Many of those connected with the industry appear in fact, to be now staying in business as much for the sake of seeing what can pos- sibly happen next as for any other reason, for the slump shows no signs of passing away and is certainly the worst known by the shipping indus- try for a century at least. Admittedly some process of ra- tionalisation was very badly needed after the war boom which glutted the markets with tonnage that could not possibly be used and which was frequently of poor character. During past slumps there has usually been no difficulty in getting such surplus tonnage, or at least the best of it, absorbed by the growing groups of which there always seem to be at least one or two in process of de- velopment. slump has coincided with the crea- tion of what is practically a new type of ship, the fast steam or diesel car- go liner, so that the usual growing groups have been building up their fleets with special tonnage built to their own design and have bought in the open market far less than on any previous occasion. Another influence which has tend- ed to keep in existence a mass of useless tonnage which would be far better scrapped is the fact that the banks seem to have been as hope- lessly optimistic over the duration of the boom as the veriest tyro in shipping matters. They are now hop- ing to get some, at least, of their money back if things recover and in the meantime are naturally dis- couraging the disposal of their se- curity. There is no doubt that, if the truth were now known, the Brit- ish banks would be by far the big- gest ship owners in the world and would’ very. dearly love to be out of the business if only there were a -way out. Few Bright Spots to Record There are few enough bright spots to record during the quarter for there is certainly no real sign of the much talked of revival. At the same time there are two or three ex- amples of making the best of a very bad job which show that the ship- ping and allied industries still have all their old enterprise if only they 48 On this occasion the: By Frank C. Bowen can be given a chance to show it. The agreement between the North German Lloyd and Hamburg Amer- ican line is working very smoothly and there is no doubt that it has made possible a reasonable return to the shipowner without impairing the service given to the public. There are some economists in Germany who are rather apprehensive at _ the enormous proportion of the nation- al mereantile marine which is com- ing under the influence of the few men at the head of the two parties, but there are others who argue that the combination is giving the great- est possible service during the slump, and that when prosperity returns there will be plenty of firms spring- ing up to take advantage of it. Natu- rally enough, the combination of so many services which were formerly run in keen competition has meant a surplus of tonnage, and a number of the older ships have been sold. Most of these have gone to the scrappers either in Europe or Japan but a few have been bought for running. The Galway scheme is at last in proper working order and there ap- pears to be every prospect of the Irish harbor figuring very largely in the revival plans of the transatlantic companies. It should be noted that the sponsors of the present scheme have avoided the two great mistakes which had so much to do with mak- ing former projects a failure; they are only considering it as a port of eall and not as a terminal and there is a generous measure of local sup- port which should secure a certain amount of public sympathy which has been absent before. Needless to say, the promoters have to fight the keen competition of the people of the Cork district whose trade will be serious- ly affected by any success scored by Galway. Another small but quite hopeful portent is the successful launching of the British exhibition ship scheme. The former Bibby liner L&IcESTLR SHIRE has been converted into a very attractive exhibition ship and under the name of British EXuHIpiIToR is to sail for South American and West Indian waters, with particular at- tention to the Latin American mar- kets, almost immediately. Many ex- hibition ship schemes have been started since the war but this one really looks as though it is to be carried to a successful conclusion. Those three points, however, are very small when one compares them MARINE REVIEwW—November, 1931 with the mass of depressing material to be considered. At the end of June the shipyards of Great Britain and Ireland had under construction only 555,603 tons, nearly 850,000 tons less than at the corresponding pe- riod in 1930 when things appeared to be bad enough and the lowest figures recorded since 1887. And even of this poor total no less than 68,000 tons was labelled ‘‘work suspended”’ without any definite information as to when it would be recommenced. In the quarter immediately preceding the war British yards were building 57.2 per cent of the world’s output; in these figures the precentage has fallen to 30.4. There are many more shipyards than there were in 1914, and countries are building their own ships which formerly bought, but practically all the shipbuilding coun- tries of Europe are very hard hit at the moment, although not quite so hard hit as Britain, and Denmark is about the only reasonably prosper- ous one. Not only is work suspended on a number of new ships under construc- tion but also on a number of mod- ernization schemes which were giving much needed work to the yards and engineering establishments. As an instance, the Clan line was so pleased at the results obtained by adding a Bauer-Wach turbine to the recipro- cating engines fitted in so many of their ships that they launched a big program for the purpose, convert- ing all the cargo liners whose types promised successful employment with higher speed. This program has now been held up pending some signs of improvement and although it is the directors’ intention to restart at the first opportunity it is a serious loss to the business which is snatch- ing at any order. Shipbuilding Credits Not Justified The British government went in- to the question of shipbuilding cred- its carefully and finally decided that the move was not justified by the financial state of the country—that was before the departure from the the gold standard—and that with the present glut of tonnage in the world it was undesirable from more than one viewpoint. As the proposal was that Russian credit should be guar- anteed in order to get the order for new ships there was a good deal of bitter political feeling introduced in- to the discussion, but the general feeling is that the decision was cor-