Gibson Brand Guidelines: Hunting’s 1893 Tanker Broker, Employee-Owned Since 2015

Hunting’s ships, Gibson’s chartering rights.

Gibson’s story starts with a shipowning family. The company’s own history traces its roots to 1870, when the businessman Charles Hunting Senior gave his son Charles Samuel Hunting two wooden sailing ships, the Genii and the Sylvia, for his 21st birthday. English Wikipedia’s article on Hunting plc, citing The Daily Telegraph, dates the Hunting shipping business to 1874 and gives its early name as Hunting & Pattison. By 1889, Gibson says, the Hunting fleet had grown to a dozen cargo steamships.

The broker itself dates from 1893. That year, the company says, Hunting’s friend and business associate Edward Aisbett Gibson was awarded the exclusive chartering rights for Hunting’s first oil tanker, the 5,000-deadweight-ton Duffield, and later the same year E.A. Gibson & Company Limited was formed. TradeWinds, writing for the firm’s 125th anniversary in December 2018, described the Duffield as one of the world’s early oil tankers and said Hunting joined forces with Gibson to form the brokerage.

The First World War hit the Hunting side hard. Gibson’s history says the Hunting fleet was pressed into military service and was down to four ships by the end of the war. In 1914 a 13-year-old office boy, Bill Green, joined E.A. Gibson; the company says he became managing director by the age of 24, after cornering the creosote market, and TradeWinds called him a key figure in rebuilding the firm.

The two businesses drew closer. In 1925, Gibson says, Hunting moved its headquarters from Newcastle to London and absorbed E.A. Gibson’s shipbroking business. From 1929 Gibson handled crude oil, and the company says it was recognised in Europe as the principal broker for crude oil sales. During the Second World War most Gibson staff were called up, and the company says a skeleton office was moved out of London and did only nominal business; TradeWinds also wrote that only a skeleton office remained.

Dry cargo, gas, research and a long stay at Ely Place.

Recovery came after 1945. Gibson’s history says that under Richard Haig, whom TradeWinds names as Richard Haig Hunting, the firm re-entered dry cargo broking, enlarged its tanker and agency departments and even started an aviation department. It then merged with the dry cargo brokers Fergusson Wild, becoming E.A. Gibson Fergusson Wild (Shipbrokers). The company’s timeline dates that merger to 1961, while the 2018 TradeWinds article places it in 1969. A sale and purchase department followed in 1962, the company says.

In 1969 Eric Shawyer became managing director. TradeWinds described him as a formidable broker with close links to Shell, and Gibson credits his era with a record: in 1970, it says, the firm concluded the first block fixture of a fleet of one million tonnes deadweight, belonging to H. Waage of Norway, for Shell. The company says it computerised its ship and charter records in 1971, and in 1973 a new company, E.A. Gibson Shipbrokers Ltd, was formed.

Hunting remained the parent. English Wikipedia says that by 1981 there were three public Hunting companies, one of them Hunting Gibson plc, which later became Hunting Group plc and in 1989 Hunting plc. Gibson, meanwhile, opened an LPG and petrochemical gas department in 1980, moved to Ely Place in London in 1981 and opened an offshore department in 1982. In 1985 it set up Shipwise, a research unit that later became Gibson Consultancy and Research.

The company says it became the first major shipbroker to gain ISO 9002 registration, in 1994, and that in 1998 the gas broker Peter Lilley became managing director, the first in a post that had always gone to a tanker broker. Overseas offices followed, the company says: Gibson (Asia) in 2004, Singapore in 2008, Houston in 2014 and India in 2020.

How shipbroking houses present themselves.

Shipbrokers arrange charters and ship sales rather than make products, and their websites lean on age, reach and research. Many London houses put a long founding date close to the name: Clarksons traces its business to 1852, and Braemar counts more than fifty years since its 1971 start. This guide reads the category through a sober register of navy, deep red and stone with plain wordmarks, an unofficial interpretation rather than any firm’s own colours.

The websites tend to be organised by market. Clarksons and Braemar both split their chartering pages into desks for tankers, dry cargo, gas and containers, with sale and purchase alongside, and both run derivatives teams that trade freight futures. At Clarksons, offshore and renewables appear as further desks, so a visitor can go straight to the market they trade.

Research is the second pillar. Clarksons runs Clarksons Research as its own business line, with data platforms sold by subscription, while Braemar keeps a research team next to its broking desks and a news and insights section. Market reports, forecasts and conference talks give these firms a public voice between deals, and trade publications such as gCaptain and The Maritime Executive have reported their outlooks and results.

Office maps and careers pages complete the picture. Clarksons says it has more than 70 offices in 26 countries, and Braemar lists tanker desks from London and Madrid to Houston, Geneva and Singapore. Both publish trainee broker programmes for graduates and newcomers, and Clarksons adds summer internships in London and Oslo. The guides that follow look at how each house presents its history, its markets and its people.

Out of Hunting and into its employees’ hands.

The biggest change in Gibson’s recent history is its ownership. In 2015, the company says, after more than 120 years of association it separated from Hunting plc and became a fully independent, employee-owned company, run on behalf of its staff around the world; it says it made its final payment to Hunting in 2021. TradeWinds reported in December 2021 that Gibson was a 170-strong, employee-owned business, with executive and elected in-house trustees overseeing it, and that Roger Harrison, who had joined as deputy managing director, would take over as managing director on 1 January 2022 from Nigel Richardson, who had led the firm since 2008.

Under Harrison the firm has kept adding desks and offices. It says it built its first proprietary broking system, Propel, in 2022, and in 2023 left Ely Place after more than 40 years for New Street Square in London, adding offices in Dubai and Athens. It now lists seven offices: London, Athens, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Houston. In July 2025 it announced that the maritime finance and advisory firm RMK Maritime (Europe) would join it and be renamed E.A. Gibson Capital from 1 August 2025. It also sells a Gibson Freight Rate API, which it says covers more than 300 freight assessments across crude, clean and dirty products, LPG and LNG.

Some work reaches beyond broking. The Business Times of Singapore, carrying a Reuters report on 1 July 2024, said London-based Gibson Shipbrokers and the state-owned Sabah Oil & Gas Development Corporation had signed an agreement to develop oil and gas facilities at the Sipitang Oil and Gas Industrial Park in Malaysia, including a jetty, onshore storage terminals and a floating power plant, according to a Gibson statement.

The identity itself has moved gently. When the firm turned 125 in 2018, TradeWinds noted that the main marks of the anniversary were a subtle logo change on its website and some branding at its Posidonia reception. On its website the company signs itself simply “Gibson” and uses the line “Delivering shipbroking excellence.”

For a design guide, Gibson shows how a broker can carry a family founder’s initials for more than a century while presenting itself under one short name. Compare SSY, another privately owned London broker with nineteenth-century roots, and Frontline, a tanker owner of the kind such brokers serve. For this guide we use a deep claret and an amber with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Gibson’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.