MV Mombasa

From Tony Chetham:

MV Mombasa worked up and down the coast of East Africa for the British India Steam Navigation Co. Ltd. - 'the BI' as it was known to all of us. The BI was in fact a subsidiary of P&O which had taken over the company in the 1920s, but the BI continued with its original name operating as a seperate company.

A twin screw motor vessel, Mombasa, ship No 379, was one of two built by the Leith Shipyards of Henry Robb for the Mombasa - Mtwara service via Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Kilwa and Lindi. Her sister ship was the Mtwara, ship No 393. The round trip took ten days. On the Mombasa's inaugural voyage to Mtwara she carried Sir Edward Twining, Governor of Tanganyika. She was the first commercial ship to visit the recently completed deep-water wharf arriving on the 15th of September 1953.

The Mombasa carried eight first class passengers, sixteen second class passengers, and 250 deck passengers, and she also had a refrigerated capacity of 2,000 sq ft.

After ten years with the BI, during which she had carried over 200,000 passengers and more than a quarter million tons of cargo, she was withdrawn from service and laid up at Port Reitz, Mombasa, before finally being sold to Crescent Shipping Lines of Karachi, becoming Kareem on the 18th of October 1961. She was broken up in Karachi in 1968 with the ship's bell being presented to her last British India captain.