Cruise Ships by Peter C. Smith

Author:Peter C. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783461059
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

Celebrity Cruises

When the North American public began flocking to cruise ships in ever-increasing numbers, there seemed to many existing shipping companies a perfect way to turn around their waning fortunes as conventional passenger transit declined sharply. One such family company to seize the opportunity and optimize the new wave was the Chandris family from the Aegean island of Chios, Greece. John D. Chandris Snr had founded this shipping dynasty back in 1915 with the purchase of a single sailing vessel, the Dimitrios, with which he traded around the eastern Mediterranean. In the glut of post-war shipping he was able to build up his fleet by adding three steamships, which also carried cargoes to Levant ports. In 1922, Chandris moved into the passenger market with the Chimara, and plied a regular route between Piraeus and Corinth. Growth was gradual, and the next acquisition did not occur until 1936, when a British-built, French-owned steamer, the Corte II (ex-Bloemfontein Castle) was purchased and renamed Patris. Based principally at Venice and with a single-class capacity of 161, Patris ran combined passenger/cruise routes up and down the Adriatic and around the Aegean as far as Haifa. The Second World War intervened, Greece being invaded first by Italy in 1940 and then by Germany in 1941, when many citizens were forced to flee and Patris herself was bombed and sunk.

During the war the death of the company’s founder left his two London-based sons, Anthony and Dimitri, in charge, and with the coming of peace they steadily began to rebuild the company. A ready-made market was available in the mass exodus from the rubble and near-famine of war-torn Europe of people seeking a new and better life in North and South America and Australia. Among the companies to service this need was Chandris. In 1948 two ex-Canadian train ferries, the 6,892-ton sisters, Prince Robert and Prince David, which had served as auxiliary warships in the Royal Navy during the war and were surplus to requirement, became the Charlton Line’s Charlton Monarch and Charlton Sovereign after conversion in Belgium in 1946. The Chandris brothers had purchased this company and these two ships became the nucleus of what was to become the largest Greek shipping line of the post-war period. They voyaged from Bremerhaven, Germany, to Sydney, Australia, and similar destinations, packed with refugees from Stalin’s occupation of Eastern Europe as far apart as Lithuania and the Ukraine.

Back in Greece the fleet was steadily increased as similar older ships were added and converted to passenger/cruise capacity, and routes grew. The Britanis (the former Union-Castle liner Kenya Castle) inaugurated a migrant route from Piraeus to Australia in 1961, and two years later Ellinis extended this via the Panama Canal to a global service. By 1976 the Chandris Line was running thirteen ships and carrying half a million people. The distinctive house-style featured blue funnels with the upper-case rendition of the Greek alphabetical character ‘Chi ’, used in both Chios and Chandris, which takes the shape of an ‘X’ and still forms one of today’s most immediately recognizable ship markings.

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