Malcolm McLean

Malcolm Purcell McLean, pioneer of container ships, died on May 25th 2001, aged 87

THE first container ship was an elderly oil tanker, the Ideal X, whose deck had been strengthened to accommodate 58 well-filled boxes each some 30ft (9 metres) long. Malcolm McLean, normally an unemotional man, as befitted his Scottish ancestry, watched with a twinge of anxiety as the ship left Port Newark in New Jersey. Would the boxes survive the long journey down the east coast, into the Gulf of Mexico and on to Houston? Or might some of the boxes, or all of them, be swept unrecoverably into the sea, as some doubters had predicted? Would the valuable cargoes themselves arrive undamaged after the Ideal X, described by a reporter as an “old bucket of bolts”, had been buffeted by Atlantic gales?

They seemed reasonable worries at the time, but even had the Ideal X sunk, the probability is that containerisation would have only been delayed for a year or two. Trade was ready for it. Mr McLean had the determination to push aside the initial obstacles. In fact the first voyage went without a hitch. Mr McLean’s pioneer clients were delighted with the savings made by moving their freight from roads to sea. April 26th 1956, the day the Ideal X sailed, is seen as a marker in maritime history. On the 40th anniversary in 1996, by which time around 90% of world trade was moving in containers on specially designed ships, New York threw a party for Mr McLean, variously described as shipping’s “man of the century” and the inventor of “the greatest advance in packaging since the paper bag”. Bill Clinton simply said, accurately, that containerisation had helped to “fuel the world’s economy”.

Mr McLean disliked fuss. He was polite to reporters but avoided publicity. He hated the telephone, preferring to conduct a business discussion face to face. He liked, he said “to look someone in the eye”. You could have a frank talk. That was how they did business in Maxton, North Carolina, where he was brought up.

He was a farmer’s son, one of seven children. His first business transaction was selling eggs for his mother, taking a small commission. But in the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression, farming was one of the worst-hit industries. Mr McLean got a job at a petrol station and saved enough money to buy a secondhand lorry, calling himself, grandly, the McLean Trucking Company. He did well enough to buy five more lorries, hired drivers for them, but continued to drive himself.

He said the idea that gave birth to containerisation came to him one day in 1937. He had delivered a load of cotton bales to the port of Hoboken, for shipment abroad. In later life Mr McLean recalled the moment to American Skipper, a magazine:

I had to wait most of the day to deliver the bales, sitting there in my truck, watching stevedores load other cargo. It struck me that I was looking at a lot of wasted time and money. I watched them take each crate off a truck and slip it into a sling, which would then lift the crate into the hold of the ship. Once there, every sling had to be unloaded, and the cargo stowed properly. The thought occurred to me, as I waited around that day, that it would be easier to lift my trailer up and, without any of its contents being touched, put it on the ship.

Mr McLean did not rush to pursue the idea. First, he set out to become rich. By 1940 he had 30 lorries. In 1955, when he had decided that containerisation was the future, he sold his trucking business for $6m, equivalent to $40m today.

It seems unlikely that Mr McLean was the first to notice that the “break-bulk” shipping of goods, as it was called, could be improved on. There used to be a rather romantic train called the Golden Arrow which each evening travelled from London to Paris, the coaches crossing the English Channel by ship without the passengers having to get out. No doubt there are other examples. Perhaps the Romans thought of it. All the idea needed was an enthusiast.

But for centuries the trade of the world had depended on there being a vast labour force at every port to handle goods in manageable quantities. So why change? For Mr McLean the lure was lower costs. Moving a shipload of containers from the north to the south of the United States, as happened in the voyage of the Ideal X, was itself cheaper than trucking the containers individually. As the cost of dock labour was reduced, savings of as much as 25% could be passed onto the shippers. As containerisation spread around the world, ships were turned round more quickly with more savings.

In 1969, when Mr McLean sold for $160m his share in Sea-Land, the business he had created, it was the world’s biggest container carrier. He guessed, correctly, that container ships would grow and grow. The latest are over 1,oooft in length, as fast

as speedboats, accommodating hundreds of containers, and with small crews. Mr McLean said approvingly, “People are never going to pay a lot of money just to move things.” He never really retired. He devised a way of moving a patient from a stretcher to a hospital bed with the minimum of discomfort. He started a pig farm, which had the reputation of being one of the cleanest in the United States. In Maxton, he said, the farmers always treated their pigs decently.