Anchor Line Steamship Caledonia

The Glasgow shipping company of Handysides & Henderson, in 1856, inaugurated a new mail, cargo and passenger service, the "Anchor Line of Steam Packets" between Glasgow and New York. From 1866, the company’s Glasgow to New York steamships started calling at Moville and continued to do so until 1939.  

By making Derry a ‘port of call’, where steamers took but a few hours to embark and disembark passengers at Moville, on voyages from Glasgow to North America, a sustainable business grew which linked Derry to Scotland and to northern Europe. As early as 1868 the Anchor Line offered a "transmigrant" service from Scandinavian ports, bringing passengers from Oslo and Gothenburg to Leith and then transferring them by rail to Glasgow.

Caledonia: Anchor Line advertising poster

Derry now became the major emigration port for the northern half of Ireland. For many emigrants the boarding houses in Bridge Street, was where they slept on their arrival in Derry. At the bottom of Bridge Street was the jetty, at the ‘Transatlantic Tenders’ shed (built 1904 and destroyed by fire in 1961) on Abercorn Quay, where the tenders of the Moville Steamship Company and, from 1928, of the Anchor Line took emigrants to Moville to board the liners that left weekly for the USA and Canada.

The Anchor Line, twin-screw streamship Caledonia, 9,223 tons, 500 feet in length, was built at Glasgow by D & W Henderson Ltd and launched on 22 October 1904.

The Caledonia made 115 passenger sailings from Glasgow, via Moville (Londonderry), to New York from 1905 to 1914:

Year

Number

Year

Number

Year

Number

1905

10

1906

12

1907

13

1908

11

1909

12

1910

13

1911

12

1912

13

1913

13

1914

  6

Total

115

 

 

The first passenger voyage of the Caledonia, from Glasgow via Moville, arrived in New York on 4 April 1905 and her last on 20 July 1914. In August 1914 the Caledonia was requisitioned as a troopship, and on 4 December 1916 she was torpedoed and sunk off Malta.

In 1925 the Anchor Line launched another steamship, built in Glasgow by Alexander Stephen & Sons, called Caledonia. This oil-burning liner, 17,046 tons (with 3 funnels), 505 feet in length was also operational on the Glasgow, via Moville, New York passenger route. At the outbreak of the Second World War the Caledonia was converted to an armed merchant cruiser. This ship suffered the same fate as its earlier namesake as it was torpedoed and sunk off Inishtrahull in 1940.

The outbreak of war in 1939 meant the end of Derry’s emigrant trade. With the return of peace the transatlantic liners of the Anchor Line didn’t come back to Derry. Train loads of emigrants from all over Ireland now headed for Cobh.