P&O Ferries - not all plain sailing

Originating in a once-proud British company dating back to 1822, P&O Ferries is now owned by a Dubai-based organisation, and its ships sailing out of British harbours are registered to ports in Cyprus, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and a handful of European countries. None are registered as British vessels.

The name P&O is from the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, a British shipping company created in 1822, by Brodie McGhie Willcox, a London ship broker, and Arthur Anderson, a sailor from the Shetland Isles.

They joined forces to operate a shipping line between England and Spain and Portugal.

P&O first introduced passenger services in 1844 with the launch of a cruise from Southampton to the Mediterranean, and it began operating ferries in the 1960s.

The brand P&O Ferries was created as recently as 2002 through mergers within P&O. In 2006, the P&O Group, including P&O Ferries was sold to Dubai-based DP World, which sold it then repurchased it in 2019.

The cruise line P&O Cruises remained a separate business owned by Carnival UK (a British-American Cruise Line with UK headquarters in Southampton).

P&O's involvement with the passenger ferry business has included several complicated sales, mergers and restructures. In 1985 the company made an almost total pull-out from ferry-operations, selling its Normandy Ferries brand to European Ferries. The Dover to Boulogne route was re-branded as Townsend-Thoresen, a company that was owned by European Ferries, the rest of the lines became known under the banner of Normandy Ferries Limited.

Only two years later, in 1987, P&O bought the European Ferries brand, including their Townsend-Thoresen lines back again. But just a week after the sale, one of the flagships of the Townsend-Thoresen brand, the Herald Of Free Enterprise, capzised out of Zeebrugge harbour. Both the ships loading doors had been left open when she set sail and the loss of the ship was 'caused by avoidable human error'. 155 passengers and 38 crewmembers lost their lives. It was the biggest maritime disaster in peacetime in Great Britain since the sinking of Titanic in 1912.

In a total re-branding strategy, the services from Dover, Portsmouth and Southampton became P&O European Ferries.

On 17th March 2022, P&O abruptly suspended its operations, cancelling all sailings and offloading passengers and cargo. 800 UK staff were told in a video call that their employment was "terminated with immediate effect due to redundancy", and that their work would in future be undertaken by staff contracted to a third-party supplier. These foreign workers would be earning much less than the UK minimum wage.

Mark Dickinson, general secretary of maritime union Nautilus International, said: “The news that P&O Ferries is sacking the crew across its entire UK fleet is a betrayal of British workers.

“It is nothing short of scandalous given that this Dubai-owned company received millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money during the pandemic.”

At the time of writing it seems that little can be done to save the sector for British workers of today and in the future.