Why Plimsoll?

In 1995 I moved into Plimsoll Road in north London. A few doors down was a pub
called The Plimsoll, with a trainer stuck in the middle of its pub sign. Around
the edges of the sticker was a scrap of grey sea.When the pub changed name a
few years later, a strange impulse prompted me to buy the sign—an ugly object
that revealed, with the trainer stripped off, the Plimsoll mark, and the name
and dates of Samuel Plimsoll, 1824-1898.

I knew then that the Plimsoll line was the level of maximum submergence marked
on a ship, but other than that nothing about the man it was named after. I
began to find out about him, and discovered a story of such resonance and
irresistible drama, and a character so compelling, that my idle curiosity
became something of an obsession.

Plimsoll had fought a timeless fight, I discovered, against the greed of those
who made profits, on behalf of those who took risks to provide the profit.
Encountering resistance to his proposed life-saving safety measures from
shipowners, including some in the House of Commons where he was an MP, Plimsoll
turned for support to a nation that responded with tumultuous enthusiasm. I
discovered, to my delight, novels, plays, music hall songs and poems his
decade-long campaign inspired.

The story was vivid and involving even to someone who had not previously paid
attention to the merchant marine. When I learnt of Plimsoll losing his temper
in a famous outburst in the House of Commons, I could see and hear him,
shouting and trembling with rage, while his wife scattered copies of a protest
from the ladies’ gallery onto the press gallery beneath her. The parades and
cheering crowds that applauded Plimsoll’s cause; the doomed sailors saying
farewell to their sweethearts; the desperate mariners clinging onto the masts
of sinking ships; the uncooperative captain who painted a Plimsoll mark on the
funnel of his ship … such images as these emerged from the contemporary
accounts I read, and caught me up.

I was moved to tears by Plimsoll’s rhetoric and entertained by his stroppy
defiance, and wrought upon by the sufferings of those who drowned or were
bereaved. The greed, negligence, callousness, racism and deviousness of the
evil-doers in this tale were shocking. And the story of the machinations in the
corridors of power, and the crisis that nearly ousted Disraeli from office,
seemed to be a slice of political history we should not forget.

Nor, I thought, should we forget the tenacity of one man and his wife in
pursuing an altruistic end at any cost to themselves. Sincere and intensely
empathetic, unstuffy and plain-speaking, and ahead of his time in much of his
thinking, Plimsoll was someone I was very glad to get to know.

The pub sign is now in my back garden. The house is full of Plimsoll
memorabilia. And I can’t leave the subject alone even now the book is
published.

This essay originally appeared on
Booktrust.