Passenger lists
Ships´ passenger lists of voyages to the United Kingdom from destinations outside Europe survive from 1878 to 1960 in the series BT 26
. They are arranged in date order by port of arrival. Unfortunately, they are not indexed, so unless you know the port of arrival and ship, and an approximate date a speculative search can be too time consuming. However, there is now an on-going project called Travel to the UK to improve information online and link ships to their port of arrival in the UK, The project is based on the inward passenger lists of ships up to 1960 that are held in BT 26.
Migration
You might be interested to learn about a project called Travel to the UK. This project aims to provide information online about ships arriving in the United Kingdom. Using the inward passenger lists in BT 26 the project will link every ship arriving to its port of arrival up to 1960.The project is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and is due to be completed in the summer of 2006.
Some passengers´ names for certain ships arriving at U.K. ports during 1959 can be searched online on an experimental basis. The vessels are Tamele, Highland Princess, Dongedyk and Jamaica Producer. Vessels such as Jamaica Producer were not grand ocean-going liners but small mail steamers involved in trading while carrying a limited number of passengers, and were fairly typical of the type of vessel on which passengers travelling from the Caribbean to find work or settle in Britain might travel. The mail steamer Jamaica Producer arriving in the Port of London on December 21 1959 was carrying no more than a dozen passengers, while Highland Princess was carrying barely four dozen. You can search online for the Jamaica Producer for the ship´s details and passengers´ names. The image shown here is of the passenger list of the Jamaica Producer at the time it disembarked at the port of London on 10 July 1950.
This was very different from great transatlantic luxury liners like Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth whose inventories list the names of many hundreds of passengers. Cunard owned the Queen Mary but the names of owners of vessels sometimes reflected their primary activity. For example, the owners of Jamaica Producer were the Jamaica Banana Producer Steamship Company Ltd., involved in carrying produce and mail between Britain and the Caribbean. The passenger ships visiting British ports took about a fortnight to travel to and from North America, South America and Africa, while those going to and from Asia and Australia took slightly longer. This means that you can expect to find, on average, two passenger lists for an individual ship each month.
While ships started out from ports outside Europe, their routes sometimes included stopovers at European ports, such as Marseilles, Genoa and Trieste. This would be the case with ships whose journeys took them from the Near East and Southern Asia through the Suez Canal and Mediterranean. Surprisingly, some passengers ended their sea journey at ports such as Trieste, completing their journey to Britain overland. The ships in such cases returned to their ports of origin and therefore no record is held by The National Archives.
Travel to the UK will improve the ability to successfully search for information from the records of passenger ships and their passengers. The records are arranged in such a way that it is essential to know the name of a ship to get to information about a passenger. Until the names of all passengers are listed, knowing a ship´s name will overcome a major hurdle in retrieving that information.
For example, trying to find information about RMV Apapa travelling from Freetown in Sierra Leone, it is possible to undertake a search by entering in key names by year (i.e.: Apapa, Freetown, 1959). The catalogue shows that RMV Apapa arrived at Liverpool from Freetown on 23 March 1959.
The project has thrown up some interesting discoveries. For example, some records contain information about American service personnel en route to Britain which includes details about race. Many famous names have also been found among the lists of passengers, including Richard Burton, Charles Chaplin, Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, Duke Ellington, Judy Garland, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Milligan, Sylvia Plath, Cliff Richard, Peter Sellers, John Wayne, the Duke of Windsor and members of the West Indies Cricket Team.
