Arthur Anderson (businessman)
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Arthur Anderson (1792, Shetland -1868), was a Scottish businessman and Liberal politician. He was co-founder of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O).
He was born at Grimista, in Lerwick, and as a boy worked on the beach preparing fish. By 1808 he joined the Royal Navy, being dischrged 10 years later in London. Anderson eventualy became a clerk in the London shipping firm of Brodie McGhie Willcox where he become a partner in 1822. They developed the shipping business between Britain and the Iberian peninsula, at one stage shipping guns and a British Legion to fight Portuguese conservatives and Spanish Carlists during their internal wars of the 1830s.
They followed this with a regular steamship service in 1837, called the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company, which soon became P&O. Despite cash crises, it expanded operations to Hong Kong and Australia, supported by government mail contracts. At his death in 1868 P&O had the largest commercial fleet of steamships in the world.
He moved to Streatham, London, and was Chairman of P&O from 1854 until his death; other chairs included the coal transport company the Union Steamship Co and the Crystal Palace Co.
He served as a radical Liberal MP for the Orkney and Shetland constituency
He also founded the Shetland Journal, the Shetland Fishery Company at Vaila, and encouraged fish exports to Spain and business between Shetland and the UK mainland.
He endowed Lower Norwood Working Men's Institute, the Anderson Educational Institute (later and currently known as Anderson High School) and a home for the widows of fishermen in Shetland.
He was buried at West Norwood Cemetery.
His nephew James Anderson, who worked in P&O, was married to the medical pioneer Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
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Categories: Scottish MP stubs | United Kingdom business biography stubs | 1792 births | 1868 deaths | Members of the United Kingdom Parliament from Scottish constituencies | Members of the United Kingdom Parliament from Orkney and Shetland | Scottish businesspeople | Scottish newspaper editors | Scottish politicians | UK Liberal Party politicians | People buried in West Norwood Cemetery
