For a hundred years, the ships that carried palm oil, cocoa, timber and passengers between Liverpool and West Africa ran on the muscle of African sailors. The most famous of them were the Kru, from the coast of today's Liberia. This is their story, and the story of the Liverpool company that relied on them, paid them less and finally vanished.
Liverpool likes to tell its maritime story through the names on its buildings and the statues at the Pier Head: shipowners, merchants, captains. The men who shovelled the coal, trimmed the bunkers and kept the furnaces burning through the heat of the Gulf of Guinea rarely got a statue. On the West Africa run, a large share of those men were Africans, and for generations the best known of them were the Kru.
The Kru, also written Kroo or Krou, came from the coast of what is now south-eastern Liberia and western Côte d'Ivoire. They worked on European ships for more than a century and a half: first along the African coast, then in the Royal Navy, and finally on the steamships of the Elder Dempster Line of Liverpool, the company that dominated British shipping to West Africa. Some settled in Freetown, some in Liverpool, and some never came home.
This page doesn't romanticise them. It describes a working relationship that made a Liverpool company enormously rich and kept African seamen on lower pay. The Kru understood that bargain very well, and at times they fought it.
The Kru were fishermen and traders long before any European ship needed them. Their home district on the coast was a chain of towns that European writers recorded as Little Kroo, Settra Kroo, Kroo-Bar, Nana Kroo and King Will's Town. Their skill in surf canoes made them invaluable on a coast with almost no natural harbours, where every barrel of palm oil and every passenger had to be ferried through the breakers.
Europeans called the men who signed on as sailors "Krumen" or "Kroomen", and often, offensively, "Krooboys", whatever their age. The labels covered more than one people. Men from neighbouring groups such as the Grebo joined the Kru crews and took on the identity, because it was the name ship captains asked for. In practice, "Kru" was a brand of labour as much as an ethnic label.
Many Kru men carried a distinctive mark: a dark line tattooed down the middle of the forehead to the tip of the nose. Accounts from the 19th century say it identified a Kru man as free, someone European slavers were not to take. Whether or not every captain respected it, the mark tells you something important. The Kru built their seafaring trade during the Atlantic slave trade itself, and their survival depended on being useful to the very ships that carried others into slavery.
Steam came to the West Africa trade in 1852, when the African Steam Ship Company began the first regular sailings between Britain and West Africa. Liverpool sailings followed in 1856. A rival, the British and African Steam Navigation Company, was formed in 1868 by Glasgow businessmen, and it needed an agent in Liverpool. Two former clerks of the Laird shipping and shipbuilding circle, Alexander Elder and John Dempster, set up Elder, Dempster & Co. for the job. The firm started trading on 1 October 1868.
Within a generation the agency had swallowed its masters. Elder Dempster managed both steamship companies and then most of the trade on the coast. In 1895 it led the first West African Shipping Conference, a cartel that fixed sailings and freight rates. In practice it controlled how goods moved between British West Africa and the world. Its ships called at Freetown, Takoradi and Sekondi, Accra, Lagos, Port Harcourt and Calabar. Many were named after places on the coast: Accra, Apapa, Abosso, Falaba, Elmina.
Its crews were mixed in a very particular way. Officers and most of the deck crew were white British seamen. In the engine rooms of the coal-fired steamers, the firemen (stokers), trimmers and general hands were very often West Africans: Kru first, and later Sierra Leoneans and Nigerians of many backgrounds. Liverpool companies also learned to replace white sailors with West Africans for the voyage home to Liverpool, because African crews were cheaper.
After Jones died in 1909, Owen Philipps, later Lord Kylsant, took control through his Royal Mail group. When Kylsant's empire collapsed in scandal around 1930, Elder Dempster was reorganised, with Liverpool's Ocean Steam Ship Company (the Blue Funnel Line of Alfred Holt) as the leading shareholder. The two merged fully in 1965.
Alfred Lewis Jones was born in Carmarthen, Wales, on 24 February 1845, and went to sea as a cabin boy with the African Steam Ship Company. He became a clerk, ran his own shipping business from 1878, and was taken into Elder Dempster as a partner. By 1884, when Elder and Dempster retired, he was in charge. He was knighted in 1901 and died, unmarried, in Liverpool on 13 December 1909.
His public reputation rests on two things. First, he is credited with bringing the banana to Britain as a mass-market fruit, shipped from the Canary Islands and later Jamaica. Second, he founded the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1898, the first of its kind in the world. Both were real achievements. The medical research was also good business: an empire whose agents died of fever could not trade.
There is a darker line on his record. Elder Dempster held the shipping contract for King Leopold II's Congo Free State, and Jones served as the Congo's consul in Liverpool. A young clerk at Elder Dempster, Edmund Dene Morel, noticed something in the company's figures that he could not explain away. Ships went to the Congo carrying guns and ammunition and came back loaded with rubber and ivory, with almost no trade goods going out to pay for them. Morel concluded that the rubber was being taken by force. He left the company and became the leader of the Congo Reform campaign, which exposed one of the worst colonial atrocities of the era.
West African seamen had been landing in Liverpool since the 19th century. Many stayed only between voyages, in boarding houses in the south end of the city and around the docks. Some stayed for good. Historians describe the Kru in Liverpool as moving through two stages: first as transients who kept their Kru identity and expected to go home, then as settlers who married locally and raised families. That settled community became part of the oldest Black community in Britain. You can read more on our page about Liverpool and the slave trade.
Historian Diane Frost describes the Kru as a reserve army of labour: hired when British shipping needed hands, laid off and left stranded when it didn't. Local accounts tell of a company hostel where Kru seamen lodged between voyages, sometimes running up debts that tied them to the next voyage south.
Liverpool remembers 1911 as the year of the great transport strike, when dockers and seamen brought the port to a standstill. Less remembered is that West African stokers on Elder Dempster ships walked off first, weeks before the general strike, demanding better pay. The Liverpool Echo reported that the company offered the Black stokers an extra five shillings a month, and that the men refused and asked to be sent back to West Africa instead. Crews from several more ships joined them, protesting that they earned roughly half of what white seamen were paid for the same work. The white trade unions largely ignored them. Any gains were small and short-lived.
Eight years later, during the economic slump after the First World War, Black seamen in Liverpool, Cardiff and Newport were attacked in the streets, blamed for "taking" jobs that they had done for decades. That story is on our page about the 1919 race riots in Cardiff, Newport and Liverpool. Many of the West African men involved had come to Britain on Elder Dempster ships, and some walked from Liverpool to the South Wales ports to look for work. See also Tiger Bay, Cardiff: African and Somali seamen.
In both world wars, Elder Dempster ships and their African crews sailed through U-boat waters. Their losses were part of Britain's war at sea, even though the men were rarely named in British memory.
On 27 March 1915 the Elder Dempster liner Falaba, named after a town in Sierra Leone, left Liverpool for West Africa. The next day the German submarine U-28 stopped and torpedoed her off southern Ireland. 104 people died, including an American passenger, Leon Thrasher. His death caused a diplomatic row with the United States six weeks before the Lusitania. West African crewmen died too. One of them was identified among the dead by John Thomas, the Nigerian chief fireman.
John Thomas himself died two years later. On 28 November 1917 the Apapa, homeward bound to Liverpool with a large West African crew, was torpedoed by U-96 off Anglesey in North Wales, and about 70 lives were lost. Our sister site Wales Britain Adventures covers the Anglesey coast.
The company's passenger fleet was wiped out again in the Second World War. For how West African soldiers rather than seamen served Britain, see West African soldiers in the First World War.
The 1950s were, in a way, Elder Dempster's last golden age. Mail ships such as the Accra and the Aureol carried colonial officials, students and returning families between Liverpool and Lagos. In 1957 around 1,400 Nigerians and 400 Sierra Leoneans worked on the company's ships, and Africans were moving into clerical and management jobs in the West African branches. Many Nigerian and Ghanaian students who came to Britain in those years arrived on Elder Dempster ships. Their story is on our pages about the West African Students' Union and Ghanaians and Nigerians in Britain since the 1950s.
Independence changed everything. Ghana founded its own Black Star Line in 1957, and Nigeria formed the Nigerian National Shipping Line in 1959. Elder Dempster took a one-third stake in the Nigerian line and sold it to the Nigerian government in 1961. The new national lines wanted their own share of the freight that had long been a British monopoly. Then came containerisation, which made the old mixed cargo liners and their large crews obsolete. Air travel ended the mail ships.
In 1989 Elder Dempster was sold to the French company Delmas-Vieljeux, and Tilbury replaced Liverpool as the main British port for the West Africa trade. The company was finally wound up in 2000, about 130 years after Elder and Dempster opened their agency. The Kru sailors had long since been replaced by the time it closed.
The ports Elder Dempster served are still there, and so are the surf, the fishing canoes and, in Freetown, Krutown. These pages on our network pick up the African end of the voyage:
Liverpool has no museum dedicated to the Kru, so you have to piece the story together, and that is part of the point. Start at the waterfront, where everything sits within a short walk.
Our full guide to the city is on the Liverpool and the slave trade page. To come from West Africa, see flights from Africa to the UK and UK visa and entry from Africa.
Our tour partner offers guided tours and experiences across the UK, and for travellers going the other way, in Nigeria. Entrance fees are included in the tour price where a tour visits paying sites. Tips are not included but are always welcome.
The Gold Coast and Nigeria regiments, the first British shot of the war and the carriers nobody counted.
What happened to Black seamen in British ports when the war ended.
The African and Somali seafaring community of the Welsh coal port.
The Welshman who opened the Congo for Leopold II.
The hub for every Britain and Africa history page on this site.
Britain Adventures is part of a network of independent sites on Africa and its history. These are the places where the stories on this page continue:
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