Edward Hain

Sir Edward Hain, (26 December 1851 – 20 September 1917) was an English shipping magnate and politician from Cornwall, England. He represented St Ives as a Liberal Unionist from 1900 to 1904, and as a Liberal from 1904 to 1906. His shipping company, Hain Line, was sold to the recently merged Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company and British-India Steam Navigation Company after his death.

Personal life Edward Hain was the son of Edward Hain, a shipping magnate and the latest in a long line of shipowners from Cornwall. Hain was born at St Ives in December 1851 and received his education locally at Mr James Rowe's school, at Academy Steps, in Fore Street.

Hain did not originally intend to go into shipping. He went to London to work with a bank and then with a tea merchant. However, on his return to St Ives in 1878, his experience in the tea trade had convinced him that the family company should switch from sail to steam.

In 1882, he was married to Catherine Seward. They had two daughters, one of whom died. The Edward Hain Hospital in St Ives was named after Captain Edward Hain.

He owned "nearly all the lands between St Ives, Towednack and Zennor, known as the Porthia Estate. He was survived by his widow and his daughter, Shipwright would be elected as a Conservative MP for Penryn and Falmouth at the 1922 general election.

Business On his return to St Ives from London, he told his father that he could see no future in a line of small sailing vessels, and that if his father were not prepared to switch to steamships, he would leave the family business and seek a new career elsewhere. The relationship between Hain and Readhead produced eighty-seven ships for the company, all with the prefix ‘Tre’ a Cornish word for "farmstead". These were merged into one limited liability company — The Hain Steamship Company Limited - which owned twenty-two steamers.

In 1910, he was made President of the Chamber of Shipping of the United Kingdom having previously been vice-president.

In 1917, the shares of the Hain Line (valued at £4m) were sold to P&O and British India Steam Navigation Company. The twenty-seven Hain Line cargo steamers, totalling 108,787 gross tons had all been built by J Readhead and Sons of South Shields. The Hain Steamship Company remained a separate operating subsidiary of P&O until 1964, when it merged a number of subsidiaries. and was elected unopposed.

In 1903 he had already announced that as a supporter of Free Trade he could no longer support the government of Arthur Balfour the leading advocate of "tariff reform" (that is, imposing high tariffs in place of free trade). Devonshire and other supporters of Free Trade left the Liberal Unionist Association in 1904; Hain thenceforth sat as a Liberal.

At the 1906 general election, Hain retired as MP partly on political grounds and partly for health reasons