Surveyors of Lloyd’s Register’s Past

Newham Mumford

INTRODUCTION

Corey Watson, PhD student at the University of Portsmouth and recipient of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation grant ‘Lloyd’s Register Surveyors in China 1869-1918’, has written a series of stories to spotlight the micro-biographies of predominant LR surveyors stationed around the world during the latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Explore how you can use our collection to help build a collective history of the people behind the ships.

EARLY LIFE AND CAREER

The earliest record of Newman Mumford is the 1871 Census, which shows that he spent his early years growing up on Church Street, Hugh Town, with his mother, Annie, his father, Clement, and his younger sister Augusta. Both of his parents had lived their entire lives on the island of St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly, where his father was a schoolmaster and later a registrar of births and deaths as well as a clerk to the justices. Several older siblings had, by this point, moved on with their own lives.

At the age of 14, Mumford’s life took a very different path from his parents, as he left the Isles of Scilly and he apprenticed as a marine engineer in Newcastle at the Wallsend Slipway and Engineering Company. This is where we find him in the 1881 Census – age 19, listed as an engineer and lodging with the Morley family at 77 Howard Street, Tynemouth. Visiting at the time was Newman’s older brother, Charles N. Mumford, who was working as a master mariner and was seemingly based in South Shields. Perhaps Newman was following in his brother’s footsteps by training for a maritime career in the North East of England.

Newman later spent some years working at sea on P&O ships, as well as on a shipping line between New York and the West Indies, where he became a chief engineer at the age of 23. One of the ships that he worked on seems to have been the Valetta, a hybrid steam and sail ship that was built in 1883 by Caird & Company in Greenock, Scotland and owned by P&O. The ship was also surveyed several times by LR. It is likely that Newman Mumford was onboard for the ship’s maiden voyage to Australia early in 1884, as the The Cornish Telegraph newspaper reported on the Scillonian’s success.

During these years, Newman’s training developed into the expertise in maritime engineering which would later see him hired as a Lloyd’s Register surveyor. Already no stranger to international travel and working beyond the British coast, he later left this life at sea to work at a sugar mill in Singapore, where the next big chapter of his life began.

SURVEYOR TO HONG KONG, 1896 - 1905

Singapore was a place of firsts for Newman Mumford. He married Janie Gibson Sherris, also from the Isles of Scilly, and they had their first child there, Joyce, who was born in 1895. In 1893 however, one of the LR surveyors in Singapore died and Newman Mumford was hired as a non-exclusive surveyor. He may not have known it, but this was the start of a 25-year long career with LR that would see him work all over the world. Lloyd’s Register’s General Committee Minutes for 1895-6, which are records of the meetings of the governing General Committee (GC) where members discussed everything regarding the operations of the organisation, noted that Newman had applied for the position of exclusive surveyor to Rio de Janeiro. This went favourably for him and he was to be appointed surveyor there until the untimely death of Andrew Johnston, the surveyor for Hong Kong, caused the GC to instead appoint Newman to Hong Kong instead. He did have to interview for a second time though. He was given an initial salary of £600 annually and took up his position on 30 May 1896, which the Bank of England’s inflation calculator estimates to be worth around £67,722 in December 2024.

During this time, he worked on a number of ships, including a some under construction or needing repair. He also sought to improve the shipbuilding industry within China. In a speech on the maiden voyage of the Kwongchow in 1902, owned by the Shiu On Steamship Company and built by Bailey and Murphy in Hong Kong, he recognised China’s long shipbuilding history. He stated that Hong Kong and the banks of the Pearl River would become akin to the formidable shipbuilding industries of Belfast and the River Clyde. The way to get to this point, he believed, was to focus on taking advantage of the raw materials needed for shipbuilding already present in China. Writing to the editor of the Overland China Mail newspaper, he believed that the importation of materials, particularly steel, hindered the development of shipbuilding despite the abundance of the necessary resources in China and called for steel works to be established within China instead.

Perhaps the highlight of his entire professional career took place here in Hong Kong, when he supervised the repair and rescue of the battered and stranded steamer Pembrokeshire in 1903. With holes in her hull ‘almost large enough to accommodate a launch’, the Pembrokeshire was thought ‘impossible to float’, but under Mumford’s direction, she was patched up with planks and cement and successfully sailed the four-day journey to Hong Kong. An incredible ‘Feat of Marine Engineering’, according to the Cornishman newspaper, who wrote proudly of the Scillonian Mumford’s achievement.

While in Hong Kong, Newman’s son, Patrick Foster was born in 1897 back in St Marys, Isles of Scilly. For most of his career, it seems that Janie stayed with Newman as much as possible, but their children were raised at times back at home instead of in Hong Kong. Newman also integrated himself well into Hong Kong society. He joined a Hong Kong branch of the Freemasons, which met at Zetland Hall. He became members of the Hong Kong Odd Volumes Society and the Institute of Engineers and Shipbuilders, where, for a time, he took on the positions of Treasurer and President respectively. He was a member of the prestigious gentleman’s club, the Hong Kong Club, and also attended dances and balls, such as the 1904 Engineer’s Ball of which he was on the decoration and invitation committees. It was not all fun and games however, as the OCM reported in May 1900, as on 21 May when Newman Mumford went to Aberdeen (Hong Kong) to survey a ship, his clerk found the LR office at 13 Beaconsfield Arcade to have been broken into and ransacked by burglars. The burglars were likely disturbed during their misadventures, as they had left many goods behind, but Mumford believed that they had taken at least ‘two new felt hats, a clock, an umbrella’ and some other office supplies.

Valetta (1883)