Everyone, or anyone who knows anything about the city, knows that the Clyde made Glasgow and Glasgow made the Clyde, and in such terms, central to this were the great shipping companies and shipbuilders who turned Glasgow into one of the most important and biggest of maritime centres.

Nowadays people think those days are long gone, but they are wrong.

Glasgow is one of the world's centres for ship management and can boast a great reputation as such, with seven ship management firms plus one in Clydebank, responsible for over 6 million gross tonnage of shipping around the world every day!

To understand the importance of this you have to realise that a ship manager, more or less, runs the ships, crews them, even supervises their construction, just the way shipowning companies do, but their knowledge, expertise and experience can prove invaluable to the shipowner, freeing them up to concentrate on developing their business.

So although the Clyde shipping companies have nearly all gone (one or two do remain!), in their place much the same ship operating functions remain with teams of managers employing officers and crew, running the ships on their routes and generally ensuring that everything needed to keep a ship going and going well, legally, physically and economically.

The purely ship management companies on Clydeside today are as follows:

Anglo-Eastern Ship Management Ltd, Milton Street, Glasgow
ASP Shipmanagement Ltd, Clifton Street, Glasgow
Blystad Shipmanagement, Linwood Road, Paisley
GBLT Shipmanagement (UK) Ltd, Claremont Terrace, Glasgow
Harrison's (Clyde), Woodside Crescent, Glasgow
Norbulk Ltd, Glassford Street, Glasgow
Northern Marine Management (Scotland), Clydebank
V.Ships (Glasgow), Elliot Place, Glasgow

As well as these companies, Glasgow has offices for many of the big shipping companies: Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, CMA-CGM, MacAndrews and others.

So the Clyde is teeming with maritime people, and add to this maritime insurers, the UK's biggest cadet training and recruitment company, Clyde Marine, as well as small firms like Gardiners and a host of agents such as Burke, Braid and Denholm (who have large shares in Anglo Eastern after a merger) it is suprising we do not hear more of the success of Glasgow as a place to do maritime business.

Sadly this is a reflection of the modern attitude to anything to do with ships, stemming from the huge decline in ship-owning and shipbuilding from the 1960's onwards. Modern Glasgow has become a bit sniffy about itself lately, and turns its collective back on even its own maritime industries, as if they are all in the past.

I hope I have illustrated that the opposite is the case. Denholm's of Glasgow were the great pioneers of ship management and with their newly merged company Anglo-Eastern along with all the others, they have forged the future of shipping for all time. That is a big achievement, and one to be proud of then, now and for generations to come as Glasgow and the Clyde proudly bestrides the world's oceans, running sea going ships every day.

Not convinced? Well, look down this massive list of ships operating right now as you read this, and just remember each time you buy something, put fuel in your car, or in any way handle goods, they might well have been on a ship managed from Clydeside.

(With thanks to Stuart Cameron who advised me of a shipmanager I had not included before this update)


Ships sailing today, managed from Glasgow and Clydebank: