Counties Ship Management
| Industry | Ship transport |
|---|---|
| Successor | London & Overseas Freighters |
| Founded | 1934 |
| Founder |
Manuel Kulukundis, Basil Mavroleon |
| Headquarters | London |
Counties Ship Management Co. Ltd. (CSM) was an ocean-going merchant shipping company based in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War CSM merchant ships made a substantial contribution to supplying the British war effort, at a cost of 13 ships lost and 163 officers and men killed.
In 1920 Manuel Kulukundis (1898–1988) from the Aegean island of Kasos moved to London, England and started work in a shipping office. In 1921 he and his cousin Minas Rethymnis founded the Rethymnis & Kulukundis shipbroking business in London. R&K was nominally a ship management company, but through a network of family and business relationships this was increasingly intertwined with actual ownership by members of the Kulukundis and related families.
The Royal Mail Case criminal prosecution of Lord Kylsant, director of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSP), in 1931 led to the liquidation of that company in 1932. RMSP was restructured as Royal Mail Lines and companies connected with it also had to restructure. One of these was Elder Dempster Lines, whose fleet included 24 First World War standard cargo ships that it had to sell quickly and at low cost in order to survive. R&K and its Greek associates bought many of the Elder Dempster ships, and with Greek banks and British shipping companies created a new company called Tramp Ship Development Co Ltd to facilitate this.
R&K also started owning ships in its own right. At first they were registered in Greece, but from 1934 some R&K ships were registered in the UK. R&K gave the ships a "house" image by giving each one a name beginning with "Mount". Their funnels were black with a white band above a blue band, and a five-pointed red star straddling the boundary between the two bands. The white and blue bands denoted R&K's Greek heritage. Other shipping companies had previously used a red star as a badge, notably Robert Kermit Red Star Line (1818–67) and Red Star Line (1871 onwards).
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