Lawrence Rennie & Phil Dawson - Behind the Scenes on Cruise Ships - P&O and Princess Lines10/26/2023 Laurie & Phil share their experiences while sailing as crew on P&O and Princess Lines. They relate the history of the two companies in this Part 1. In Part 2 they will take us behind the scenes on the TSS Canberra. About Lawrence Rennie
After graduating from high school, Lawrence followed in his father’s footsteps and served a five year apprenticeship in a shipyard in Aberdeen, Scotland. He attended Technical College during that time and then joined P&O Lines as an Assistant Engineer Officer. He served on a freighter for two years. In 1966 he moved to P&O – the Orient Passenger Division. From there he moved to the Princess Lines, where he served for nine years, moving through the ranks to Chief Engineer. During this time, he served on a number of ships and so, travelled the world. Latterly, he was with Princess Cruises on the Alaskan Cruise voyages. Lawrence left Princess in 1973. He then joined Aviva Insurance, in Toronto, as an engineer/surveyor. That position took him to Northern Ontario, the Dominican Republic and Norway. Moving from Aviva, he joined an engineering risk management firm where he was retained by Lloyd’s of London to inspect the Avostal Shipyard in Mariupol, Ukraine and Reliance Petroleum Company in India. The past 15 years, Lawrence has returned to Marine Surveying, where he still works in season for Crawford Marine Services. About Phil Dawson Phil Dawson was born post WWII of Anglo-German ancestry. He first became interested in ships during his early childhood in the city of Bahia, Brazil, through his father’s work there as an exporter and, as a passenger on several long ocean voyages with his parents and siblings. Moving first to England and then to Canada, he completed his schooling in Winnipeg, studying computer science at the University of Manitoba. While working with large mainframe computer systems in Canada and Europe, he also continued to follow developments in merchant ships and shipping. He started writing about these interests on a part-time basis. Leaving the computer field altogether shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, Phil opted to pursue his life-long love of architecture and design. He embarked on an entirely new photographic and literary career specializing in the design, operation and supporting infrastructural aspects of world-wide sea and air transport. On the strength of his success in these ventures, he later became an associate member of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects in London. Phil Dawson has written extensively for various international shipping, aviation and architectural publications. He has also written and co-authored a number of significant books on ships and ship design. The first of these books, British Superliners of the Sixties, presented an in-depth design study of Britain’s significantly modern ORIANA, CANBERRA, and QE2. He later wrote the commemorative book, Canberra: In the Wake of Legend, at the end of her service career, and co-authored QE2: Britain’s Greatest Liner with Bruce Peter and Ian Johnstone, at the time of her decommissioning.
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