Founded by the Thomson family in the early nineteenth century and incorporated as William Thomson and Company, Ben Line developed initially as a sailing ship operation working Scottish coastal and North Sea routes before transitioning to steam power in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The company’s expansion into Asian trade routes in the Victorian period positioned it as one of the significant operators on the UK-to-Far-East trade, with a particular focus on the China trade that made companies like Ben Line significant employers of Chinese seamen.
The specific naming convention — Ben Line ships were named for Scottish mountains and hills with the “Ben” prefix — gave the fleet a distinctive identity within British merchant shipping. Benlomond, named for Ben Lomond, the mountain at the southern end of the Loch Lomond valley in Scotland, was the name of one of the most recognizable peaks in the Scottish Highlands, and its use for a 6,630-ton cargo steamer built in 1922 placed the ship within the long tradition of naming commercial vessels after landscape features of the operator’s home territory.
By the wartime period, Ben Line was a substantial employer of Chinese seamen, operating vessels on routes that included the Atlantic crossings on which the Benlomond was engaged when it was torpedoed. The company’s employment practices — the wage structures, the recruitment channels, the conditions of service for Chinese crew members — were consistent with those of the broader British merchant navy’s employment of non-European seamen, as documented by the records maintained by researchers of the lascar and Chinese seamen history.