Irrawaddy Flotilla Company

The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company (IFC) was a passenger and cargo ferry company, which operated services on the Irrawaddy River in Burma, now Myanmar. The IFC was British-owned, and was managed by P Henderson & Company from Glasgow, Scotland. The IFC operated from 1865 until the late 1940s. At its peak in the late 1920s, the IFC fleet was the largest fleet of river boats in the world, consisting of over 600 vessels carrying some 9 million passengers a year.

Beginnings

The IFC was formed in 1865, primarily to ferry troops up and down the Irrawaddy River and delta. Soon, the company was carrying passengers, rice, government stores, and mail from Rangoon to Prome and, in 1868, to Bhamo. Click here to see a photograph of Beeloo, a mail steamer of the IFC.

The ferry became indispensable to the oil fields up river at Yenangyaung and Chauk for carrying supplies and heavy equipment. Partly because the railway to Mandalay followed the path of the Sittaung River rather than the Irrawaddy River, the company stayed relevant and useful well into the twentieth century, even after independence from Britain.

The ships, which were paddle steamers, were built in Scotland, before being dismantled and transported to Burma for reassembly. When the Japanese invaded Burma in World War II, Manager of the IFC's Burma fleet, John Morton, ordered the scuttling of all 600 ships in his fleet. This supreme act of denial prevented the Japanese from having a usable, local fleet for transport up the Irrawaddy River. In 1948 the company was reconstituted as the Government Inland Water Transport Board.

Quote

The paddle steamers of the IFC inspired the famous lines penned by Rudyard Kipling:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,

There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;

For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:

"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

Come you back to Mandalay,

Where the old Flotilla lay:

Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flyin'-fishes play,

An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!