Reviewed by Maureen H. Berry University of IIlinois
Professor Hyde is the emeritus Chaddock Professor of Economic History at the University of Liverpool, editor of Business History, and well known for his writings on maritime affairs. His latest contribution to this field is a business history of the Cunard company, drawn from materials in the Cunard Archives as well as private collections. The book contains 10 chapters and emphasizes the shipping and financial management of the firm. The first 5 chapters deal individually with significant concurrent activities from 1840 until the First World War. The writer then switches to a chronological approach to bring the reader from 1914 to 1973.
In deciding how to organize his topic, Hyde had examples of several other efforts to draw on and learn from. In his preface, page six, he notes that a privately published history of the Cunard Steam Ship Company appeared in 1886 but that no official history was attempted until the late 1930s when Captain Taprell Dorling, better known as ‘Taffrail’, produced a manuscript dealing only with ship specifications. Mr. Tom Hughes commenced a history covering the period 1839-1906 but did not complete his work. Mr. Charles Graves made the next attempt, describing the Company’s activities during the Second World War in a book published but subsequently pulped in entirety.
Finally, Mr. Henry Eaves, a Company Secretary, undertook a massive research effort and prepared a chronological study of the the firm from 1840 to 1957, using a considerable amount of financial data. Unfortunately, this work fared no better than its predecessors as it was never published. Hyde describes it as “a mine of information on almost every aspect of the Company’s affairs” but comments, without further clarification, that it “could not be published in the chronological form in which it had been written.” Hyde himself found the Cunard story to be “highly complex and difficult of interpretation” and decided to use a sectionalized approach to show “the various threads of development in both policy and action which, when woven together, make up patterns on a wide historical canvas.”
Separately examining concurrent events and subsequently blending them into a chronological stream is a tricky business because of the inevitable leap-frogging about in time, and the concomitant demands on the reader’s memory and patience, which occurs until the threads are brought together. The process demands a considerable amount of expertise from the author. He has to select the relevent and salient activities, isolate those which can act as link-pins to connect the various pieces of his story, and employ a writing style and mode of presentation which will reduce complexity and enhance interest. It goes without saying that there must be an underlying technical competence with respect to the subject matter. Professor Hyde comes through with only partial credit since he swims well in the familiar waters of economic history but flounders badly when he strays outside into areas of accounting and finance.
Hyde starts out successfully by setting the scene and introducing the main actors and events in the first chapter dealing with the foundation, capital structure, and control during the period 1840-1880. There is good follow-up in Chapter 2: “Men, Ships and Mails 1840-1 880” Hyde identifies the essentially conservative nature of Cunard’s management policy, which adopted innovative approaches only after other firms had designed and tested them, and evaluates the effects of this policy on the firm’s growth. It is not until the third chapter: “Cunard and the Emigrant Trade 1860-1900”, when the author commences his commentaries on the financial management of the firm, that the reader starts to have difficulties. Unfortunately, the problem extends beyond matters of style as a quotation illustrates: (p. 183)
“So far we have dealt only with the operational costs. It now becomes necessary for us to set the working capacity of the fleet against the wider financial background of the Cunard organization as a whole. This involves the debiting of many other items in the balance sheet, such as depreciation, overheads, preference dividends, capital and other charges. Unfortunately many of these items are not given separately in the accounts and we have therefore had to extract such information from the voyage books. In aggregate, however, all such charges are included in the total annual expenditure as shown in Table 6.1.”
As accountants would appreciate, charges appear on earnings statements, not balance sheets and certain costs, such as depreciation and use of capital, are not “expenditures” in the sense of cash disbursements. Hyde’s confusion raises serious questions about the reliability of the financial calculations which are scattered throughout the book.
Fortunately, the Cunard archives are on loan in the library of the University of Liverpool so that the source materials for the financial studies can be consulted by those who are seriously interested in them. Other readers are advised to skip them, or treat them with caution, and enjoy Hyde’s work on the topics he knows best: ships and the men who sailed them.
