SILVER LINE LTD.

Early sources show a silver funnel and flag band, sometimes with black letters. By 1942 Talbot-Booth noted the funnel’s change to white and also changed the flag band to white and its letters to blue. Harnack gives both versions in different sections. S380’s flag is based on the museum example, dated about 1951 and measuring 609.6 by 965.2 mm; many other sources show equal blue-white-blue bands. Silverteak’s photograph confirms the funnel, with the gap below the top wider than the band.

After the Dene combination, the company apparently used five blue and white diagonal bands running from upper hoist to lower fly, as in the 1966 Liverpool chart and S866. Ship photographs, including Silvercrag, support that slope. Loughran instead gives seven white and blue bands from lower hoist to upper fly as S381; Rosanoski considers that version probably erroneous rather than silently discarding it.

A later white flag placed a panel of the five-band diagonal design between additional blue panels above and below, separated slightly by the white field. Its adoption date is unknown, but it appears in a February 1969 Marine News article. Mitchell assigns the funnel to Silver Chemical Tankers; his Silver Line version lacking the panel’s white horizontal lines is considered probably incorrect. His Alvenus drawing instead uses the Vlassov V47 funnel, presumed to indicate a managed vessel.

Silver Line’s management passed from the Thompson to the Barraclough family in 1947. Accounts differ over the Dene combination: the main history calls Silver Line a wholly owned Dene subsidiary from 1957, while another describes Silver Line absorbing Dene in 1956. Mitchell gives both dates and uses amalgamation and reconstruction. The corporate direction is therefore left unresolved. The last ship was sold in 1985.

Silver Line participated in Seabridge from 1965 and retained the Silver Java Pacific connection. Subsidiaries included Bishopsgate, Kerr-Silver Lines (Canada), acquired in 1946, and Silver Chemical Tankers from 1965. An undated Navcot acquisition is noted; the company passed to Vlasov with Shipping Industrial Holdings in 1974, and Mitchell dates acquisition of Capitalfin’s remaining half to July 1978. After disappearing from the registers in the late 1980s, it reappeared a decade later under Vlasov/V. Ships, then disappeared again.