The Appropriation Books held at the Registry of Shipping and Seamen (RSS) in Cardiff are the central records of the allocation of official numbers for British ships.

The six volumes cover the period from the first official number allocation on 16 April 1855 to the 1950s. All the British ports of registry are covered, including the ports of registry in the former British colonies.

For more details of Official Numbers and the Appropriation Books, please see: Official Numbers

The CLIP image viewer provides images of the entries indexed by official number so you can check data and see any additional information about the ship.

How to search for details of a ship

Use the search form to enter the official number of the ship.

Then click Search

The image of that page of the Appropriation Books will be displayed.

There are more details about using the viewer in a notes file on the image display page. This also provides additional information about the pages.

If you know the name of the ship, but not her official number, you can search by name on the CLIP data page, here: Search for ships by name This will show you the official numbers for all ships of that name and each has a link back to this page.

Images source and acknowledgements

The images were made by CLIP from the original volumes held at RSS and we would like to thank the staff for their helpfulness in providing us with access to the volumes.

We have published the images as an aid to private research - please use them only for that purpose, and do not re-publish them.