Arthur Anderson (businessman)

[1] The Crown attempted to press gang Anderson but Bressay man Thomas Bolt persuaded the Royal Navy to wait until he had finished his apprenticeship before his impressment in 1808.

Like many Shetland men, he was left destitute 600 miles from home[2] after his service to King and country during the Napoleonic wars.

[5] Despite cash crises, it expanded operations to Egypt (1840), India (1842), Hong Kong (1845) and Australia (1852),[6] supported by government mail contracts.

Anderson had a thrusting entrepreneurial character[2] and by his death in 1868 P&O had the largest commercial fleet of steamships in the world.

Other chairs included the coal transport company the Union Steam Ship Company (which he created in 1853 to supply his P&O line ships with fuel)[5] and the Crystal Palace Co.[9] He served as a radical Whig MP for the Orkney and Shetland constituency from 1847 to 1852.