Life at sea in the 1950/60s & 1990s

Captain Joe Welch has been producing a video a year for the last two years, but for 2012 he has sent PONLHeritage two to review!  

Volume 3 of Captain Welch's Containerships series is titled "Voyages on Later Vessels to 1998".  Like the two videos before it, this uses video footage footage that Captain Welch took during his time as master at sea.  Here we see a voyage on the Peninsular Bay from Europe to the Far East, starting and finishing in Hamburg.  The highlights are too numerous to list here, but we must mention the sunfish in the Red Ocean and arrival in Kobe shortly after the 1995 earthquake (the Peninsular Bay was the first container vessel to call in the Japanese port after the disaster).

The second video that Joe has produced this year consists of still photographs that he took when he started his career at sea.  We see him as a cadet at the Warsash nautical college in 1958 and then joining his first ship, the 1944-built ss Pinjarra.  Other ships that follow are the Iberia, Maloja, Coromandel and the Oriana.

The ports featured in P&O Days part 1,  "Life in the P&O Fleet circa 1960s - A young officer's pictorial record" include Singapore and Hong Kong which look very different from the mega-cities that we know today.  We see Sydney with the Opera House under construction and Southampton still with the Ocean Terminal building intact.

These two videos will be of interest to ex-sea staff who want to relive memories of their own time sailing to foreign climes and for shore staff who too want to recollect their involvement in world trade in times past.  Anyone with an interest in nautical history will find them fascinating as the two videos effectively capture two very different ways of life at sea, the traditional break-bulk/liner trades of the 50s & 60s and the mass transportation world of containerisation in the 1990s.

Full reviews of both videos can be found by clicking in the links below, along with guidance on how to place an order for your own copies.  If you are interested in purchasing the two earlier videos then reviews and order instructions can be found via the PONLHeritage Shop.