Dear Cdr Messinger
 
Thank you very much indeed for your very kind message. To be frank, that book was researched and written in the most awful rush because it took ages for DP World to reach an agreement with the publisher to produce it. Fortunately, Phil Dawson and I got a lot of help from P&O Heritage, the archives of which contain fascinating material. Then, once the whole thing was written up - all in less than a year! - DP World decided that they no longer were interested because the final chaper was insufficiently eulogistic. The publisher then produced it anyway - which was a big relief.
 
You certainly have worked on many very fine and interesting vessels. Alas, I am slightly too young to have known any of them at first-hand experience, but Philip at least had visited some of the 1950s passenger liners in Vancouver.
 
I find it a great pity that P&O was so ruthlessly dismantled in the early-2000s for the short-term benefit of a few. It still seems strange that one no longer sees their trailers and containers on the roads.
 
Please feel free to comment on my book as you wish and to put it on your website, which I am now going to enjoy visiting.
 
Wishing all the best regards and thank you once again,
 
Bruce
 
Dr Bruce Peter
Reader
History & Theory
The Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew Street