North Coast, Ltd.

тж Vista Dome North Coast, Ltd.

см North Coast, Ltd.

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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King was educated at the High School of Glasgow, and then served an apprenticeship with the Port Glasgow shipyard of Russell \& Co. This was followed by experience in drawing offices in Port Glasgow, Hull and finally in Belfast, where he was responsible for the separate White Star Line drawing office of Harland \& Wolff Ltd, which was then producing the plans for the Atlantic passenger liners Majestic and Teutonic. Following certain unpopular government shipping enactments in 1890, a protest from shipbuilders and shipowners in Ireland, Liverpool and the West of Scotland led to the founding of a new classification society to compete against Lloyd's Register of Shipping. It became known as the British Corporation Register and had headquarters in Glasgow. King was recruited to the staff and by 1903 had become Chief Surveyor, a position he held until his retirement thirty-seven years later. By then the Register was a world leader, with hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping on its books; it acted as consultant to many governments and international agencies. Throughout his working life, King did everything in his power to quantify the risks and problems of ship operation: his contribution to the Load Lines Convention of 1929 was typical, and few major enactments in shipping were designed without his approval. During the inter-war period the performance of the British Corporation outshone that of all rivals, for which King deserved full credit. His especial understanding was for steel structures, and in this respect he ensured that the British Corporation enabled owners to build ships of strengths equal to any others despite using up to 10 per cent less steel within the structure. In 1949 Lloyd's Register of Shipping and the British Corporation merged to form the largest and most influential ship classification society in the world.

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