Author : Andrew Clark
ISBN : 9781840338973
Cover : hardback
Price : £75.00

‘The company’s ships and history became embedded in my mind’

So the author describes how as a child, he became fascinated by David MacBrayne Ltd. Many decades later Andrew decided to explore that history in ‘greater depth’. This book is the result, a weighty tome of 2.36kg. It chronicles the operational and business history of the transport company founded in 1879 by David MacBrayne, which in its latest incarnation is CalMac Ferries Ltd. The recent declassification of archives, together with the digitisation of ships’ logs and old newspapers is a treasure trove of information to delve deeper and deeper into, including David MacBrayne’s hand-written correspondence from the 1880s. Here was the story of how MacBrayne established his dominance of the west coast shipping market in the late 19th century with his canny operating techniques, only for his son Hope to later take the company to the brink before selling out and more recently the tentacles of government to choke the company’s independence.

Hardback, 504 pages, full colour, 723 illustrations.