History

13.08.1900: Launched.

10.10.1900: Registered.

20.10.1900: Delivered as Persia for The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. She was the fifth and last of P&O’s ‘Egypt’ class, and the company’s largest ship to date; at £260,290 she was also the most expensive.

1904: Stopped by a Russian warship in the Red Sea during the Russo-Japanese War and had her mails searched.

1907: Carried the Princess Royal and her family home from the Mediterranean.

11.07.1911: Went aground on soft mud near Marseilles. After some lightening she was got off undamaged on 14th November by tugs Vulcan and Goliath from the French Naval base at Toulon and the Marseilles tug Marius Chambon.

22.12.1911: Coroner’s inquest held on board in Bombay when the strangled body of an unidentified Indian, not a member of the crew, was found on board. Verdict: murder by unidentified person(s).

30.12.1915: Torpedoed without warning by the German submarine U38, 115km (71 miles) south east by south from Cape Martello, Crete, Her port boiler blew up five minutes after the attack and she sank rapidly.

Being the last of the "India" class to be built, the Persia was the last single propeller ship to be commissioned by the P & O, two propellers being safer, faster and smoother through the water than one. In 1913 Rudyard Kipling sailed from Marseilles to Port Said aboard the Persia and wrote about the voyage in an article entitled “Egypt of the Magicians”. He was not impressed: “It had slipped my memory, nor was there anything in the rates charged to remind me, that single-screws still lingered in the gilt-edged passenger trade.” According to Kipling the Persia suffered in comparison with the liners of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s steamship company and the North German Lloyd Line. He recalls the astonishment of some American passengers at the old-fashioned condition both of the ship, and of the facilities and service on board, a reaction reflected in a popular ditty of the day: “P & O – dear and slow”.

The founder of the Free India party Veer Savarkar, a politician, writer and activist who spent many years as a political detainee of the British, sailed second-cabin from Bombay to London aboard the Persia in the summer of 1906 and described the voyage in his book “Inside the Enemy Camp”.

The Persia also played a minor role in aviation history when she arrived at Bombay in December 1910 with six dismantled aircraft in crates in her hold. The aircraft belonged to the Humber Motor Company who sent two mechanics and two pilots under the supervision of Captain - later Sir - Walter Windham to reassemble and fly them. One of those planes, piloted by the Frenchman Henri Pequet, carried the first ever consignment of airmail from Allahabad over the river Ganges to Naini on February 18th 1911.

Mail had been carried in planes and balloons before but the 6,500 or so items on board that day had been authorised by the postmaster general of the United Provinces, Sir Geoffrey Clarke, and franked with a postmark designed by Captain Windham to mark the occasion. That September, on his return to England, Windham inaugurated the first British airmail service between Hendon and Windsor.