After being refloated, the liner was found to be safe, and the voyage continued to Britain.From 1957 to 1962 I was a boarder at Wrekin College in Shropshire.

I then spent two years working in the City of London for the Midland Bank, and in 1964 applied for an assisted passage to Australia.In February 1965 I boarded the P & O-Orient liner Orsova at Tilbury for the voyage to Sydney, travelling in a six berth cabin on F Deck.On arrival here I joined the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, working in several branches around Sydney before being moved into Head Office.

As people had trouble remembering or pronouncing my given name, Piers, I became known as Peter, which I have used ever since. I was married in 1973 and had three children, a daughter and two sons, and now have seven grandchildren.

From the time I settled in Australia I was very keen to learn about the Australian coastal liners, but found there was very little published material. I started researching to develop my own material, and was eventually able to get this published in 1980 as a two-volume work titled “Passenger Ships of Australia and New Zealand 1875 – 1980”.

My next book, “From Chusan to Sea Princess”, was published under the pseudonym Malcolm R Gordon, being the combined names of my children.In 1986 I took my family on a driving holiday along the Murray River, and discovered the many wonderful paddleboats. This led me into a totally new  area of research, and in 1992 I published a book on the history of paddleboats in Australia, “The Wheels Still Turn”. The same year I also had published a book on the many passenger liners that had come to Australia from 1946 to 1992, “Emigrant Ships to Luxury Liners”.From 1988 to 1993

I was the editor of the quarterly magazine, “Australian Sea Heritage”, published by the Sydney Maritime Museum. In 1993 I returned to Bermuda for eighteen months to work for a newspaper there, spend time with my aging father, and do research for two books I wanted to write. The first was a biography of my father, who had a most interesting and unusual life, while the second was a history of Furness Bermuda Line, in collaboration with renowned maritime artist, Stephen Card, also a Bermudian.

After returning to Australia in 1994 I joined the ANZ Bank on a part-time basis, which left me enough spare time to write the two books for Bermuda. I eventually had my father’s biography privately published in Bermuda in 2001, while the history of Furness Bermuda Line was published by the Bermuda Maritime Museum in 2002.

Since then I have had seven books on maritime subjects published in Australia, on a diversity of subjects. These include troopships, coastal passenger liners, migrant ships, cruise liners and paddleboats, and details of all these books can be found on this site.

I have been interested in passenger liners as long as I can remember. I was born in Bermuda in 1944, and christened Piers Maurice Plowman. As all my relatives lived in England, my family would visit there every two or three years, going by ship. We would travel from Bermuda to New York on the Queen of Bermuda, then from New York to Southampton and back on some of the greatest liners ever built, including Queen Elizabeth twice, Queen Mary, Caronia, Mauretania and Ile de France.

In July 1957 I was a passenger on the liner Reina del Pacifico when it ran aground on the reef that surrounds Bermuda, and remained firmly stuck there for four days.