This page is an index of ships by official number drawn from the primary records of British shipping from 1855 to the 1950s.

All British ships were registered at one of the hundreds of ports of registry around Britain and the then British Colonies. From 1855 onwards, each ship was allocated an official number. These numbers provided a unique reference and they are still used by modern archives as a means of identification of documents.

The index shows the ship's name(s) and ports of registry, with links to other data such as the location of crew list holdings and clear references to the sources of our data.

The database includes every British registered ship from 1855 to the early 1950s with official numbers 1 to 200000. It was last updated on 6th May 2023 and contains 794743 entries.

For a full explanation of the records of British shipping, please see our information page: Records of British ships

How to search for ships by official numbers

On the search form, enter the ship's official number in the range from 1 to 199550. This should be a pure number without wild-cards such as '*', '%', '?'.

Then click Search.

Reading the results

The results show the names given to that ship and her ports of registry, together with other details such as tonnage.

The source of our information is shown in all cases, with links to images of documents or to archive catalogues wherever possible. For example, the icons link to images of the Appropriation Books or the exact Mercantile Navy List page. You can check our data for yourself.

Using the results

Below the results table, there are links to the MHA and CLIP indexes of crew lists and agreements.

Below again is a link which opens a list of further links to other sites which may have data for this official number.

Where there is a Board of Trade enquiry report - a 'Wreck Report' - relating to the ship, we provide a link to the Southampton City Library site which has transcripts and images of these documents. Where the ship's official number and/or port of registry is not shown (or is incorrect in the report), we have deduced it from the other information in the report, in which case we have shown it in square brackets like this: [12345] of [London].

Many thanks to Sid Barnett for helping to compile this wrecks index.

Data sources

The sources of the data are:

• The Appropriation Books held at the Registry of Shipping and Seamen in Cardiff covering the years from 1855 to the 1950s for all British and Colonial ports. For more details, please see our page: Appropriation Books
• The Mercantile Navy List (MNL) for the years ending in 0 from 1860 to 1940, together with 1857 and 1915. MNL shows all ships extant that year for all British and Colonial ports. Editions of MNL from 1875 to 1904 record the closure of registrations. For more details, please see our page: Mercantile Navy List
• Shipping registers and Ship registration documents include all the British registered ships, but few have been indexed. For more details, please see our page: Registration of shipping
• Crew lists record the ship's name and port of registry and, from 1855 onwards, the official number. Our data is taken either from the crew list itself, or from archive catalogues. For more details, please see our page: Crew Lists
• We have included a small amount of data from Publications where official numbers are shown.
• The National Archives (TNA) catalogue for BT 110 which contains closed registration documents. For more details, please see TNA's Discovery page: BT 110
• The Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships (RCUS) report of 1874 into the reasons for the huge losses of British merchant ships included an appendix listing several thousand ships lost in the period from 1850 to 1870. For the data, please see: Unseaworthy ships
• TNA's catalogue for BT 165, which contains ships' log books from the period 1902 to 1919, shows the names and official numbers of the ships. For more details, please see TNA's Discovery page: BT 165

Please see our general information page CLIP data for more details on sources, methodology, the abbreviations we have used, and acknowledgements.