Joseph Hoult & Co

Joseph Hoult (18 August 1847 – 18 October 1917) was a British ship-owner from Liverpool. He was also a Conservative Party politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1900 to 1906.

Hoult was the son of the John Hoult and his wife Alice (née Welsby). He was brought up in the Stanley area of Liverpool and educated privately, before being apprenticed to a shipbroking business in Liverpool on a salary of £60 per year. When he was 21 he set up his own shipbroking business, and later became an owner of steamships through his company, Joseph Hoult & Co, in Castle Street, Liverpool.

His business prospered, and he became a member of Liverpool City Council and a Justice of the Peace. In 1872 he married Julia Anne Murray, from Edinburgh.

In 1896 Hoult was appointed by the Board of Trade committee to inquire into the manning of merchant ships. The inquiry had been prompted by the shipwreck in 1894 of the under-manned vessel Port Yarrock, which foundered in Brandon Bay with the loss of 20 lives. Its remit was to advise whether the law needed to be changed to allow the detention of undermanned ships. In their report later that year, the majority of the committee recommended legal controls, but Hoult and the other ship-owners on the committee submitted a minority report which opposed legal control. They claimed that any such Law would disadvantage British ships against their foreign competitors, and would be too rigid as improvements in propulsion and navigation technology reduced the necessary levels.

In 1897 Holt was elected as a member of the council of the British Empire League. In December of that year, he told the annual dinner of the Liverpool Shipbrokers' Benevolent Society that British business had been hampered by too much regulation, and called for the abolition of light dues.

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