Elder Dempster Lines

The author would like to thank Elder Dempster Agencies who have very kindly allowed the use their rendition of the house flag of Elder Dempster at the top of this page. Their web site can be accessed by clicking on the flag. This site is not an official Elder Dempster site, it is not directly connected with Elder Dempster Agencies in any way and the views expressed in it are those of the author alone.

The Dempster Family Archive is generally concerned with Dempster family genealogy and family history. It cannot attempt to be a site concerned with the detail of the history of the Elder Dempster company. The information below has been collected incidentally in the course of attempts to trace the family of John Dempster, one of its founders.

John Dempster and his family.

Though the Elder Dempster shipping line is one of the few internationally known uses of the family name, information on it, and on John Dempster, one of the founders, is not all that easy to come by.

The official version is that John Dempster was born at Penport, Thornhill, Dumfriesshire in 1837, son of William Dempster, builder to the Duke of Buccleuch. The family moved to Birkenhead in the 1840s and he started his career in the shipping buisiness as a clerk with the Liverpool agents W & H Laird in 1851 at the age of 14.

There are lots of Dempsters in the parishes of Penport and of Thornhill in Dumfriesshire, but my local copy of the IGI lists no John, son of William for 1837 or any date near it. This is no surprise if he moved south as a young child - he may have known cousins in Dumfriesshire and always have assumed that he was born there. It does however, mean that his actual ancestry still has a question mark over it.

Joan Morlang has got some possible details of the family from the 1881 census for Cheshire which records John Dempster, head, living in Oxton, steamship agent, 44 yrs. old b. Scotland Jessie D., wife 42 yrs. old b. Scotland Children: Margaret S.; Jane H.; William; Agnes B.; John; Jessie J. - all born in Birkenhead, Cheshire.

The Company

John Dempster started his career in the shipping buisiness as a clerk with the Liverpool agents W & H Laird in 1851 at the age of 14. He was joined there by Alexander Elder in 1856, Elder having been appointed as Superintendent Engineer of the African Steam Ship Company for which W&H Laird were the agents. By 1866, William Laird had retired and the company was known as Fletcher & Parr, Alexander Elder had moved on to become Shipwright Surveyor to the Liverpool Board of Trade, and John Dempster was chief clerk. The African Steam Ship Company was slow to expand, and this lack of capacity drove a group of Liverpool and Glasgow merchants to form the British & African Steam Navigation Company. They needed a Liverpool agency, and since Fletcher & Parr (the only experienced agents) were committed to their potential rivals, the new company did the next best thing - it poached their chief clerk, who set up for himself as an agent in partnership with Alexander Elder.

The ups and downs of the shipping trade means that today, the Elder Dempster name is back where it started, as a shipping agency. The house flag at the top of this page is a link to the company's web site.

There are also a few other sites out there which commemorate connections with Elder Dempster either as staff, or as passengers in the days before aircraft took over

Odette Lind's site recalls various voyages to and from Africa in the 1950s and 1960s with photos of various ships including the Elder Dempster vessels

George Lang's site is more concerned with former crew of the Elder Dempster ship Fourah Bay, but does have a picture that vessel.

The following books may be of interest to those interested in the company and its ships rather than the Dempster family.

© James Dempster 1997, 1998