The paddle steamer Crested Eagle running down the Thames Estuary, her deck crowded with passengers

In the years immediately after the Great War, the General Steam Navigation Company found itself with a virtual monopoly on steamer services down the Thames estuary and beyond. Its two big steamers - Eagle and Golden Eagle - operated a busy daily schedule for which passengers were so numerous that the company decided to invest in a third, even larger vessel in the early 1920s. The result was Crested Eagle, built for G.S.N. by J. Samuel White & Co. at Cowes and launched there on 25th March 1925. Registered at 1,110 tons gross (579 net), she measured 299½ feet in length with a 34½ foot beam and could make over 18 knots with her builder's own triple-expansion engines at full power. The first Thames pleasure steamer to burn oil fuel - and also, in fact, the first such vessel in Europe - she was designed with an immensely long and comfortable promenade deck and also sported a telescopic funnel and hinged mast to allow her to pass under London Bridge to board passengers at Old Swan Pier. The first new post-War pleasure steamer to run down the Thames, she initially operated on the Southend, Margate and Ramsgate service but changed to the Southend, Clacton and Felixstowe route in 1932. A hugely popular steamer with the public, especially day-trippers, she was requisitioned for war service as an auxiliary anti-aircraft coastal vessel in March 1940 and given suitable armament. Despatched to Dunkirk to assist with the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force, she was dive-bombed on 19th May (1940) and set ablaze when her fuel caught fire; run ashore on the beach, the men aboard her, many of whom were badly burned, were saved but the ship herself was totally destroyed.