George T R Campbell

From MarineWiki

Short biography

George Campbell was born in 1910 in the coastal town of Whitley Bay in northeastern England, he spent his youth in the Tyneside village of Whickham, where his father Athol, a government administrator, had purchased a 16th; century manor farm named Dockendale Hall.

By age 30, Campbell had apprenticed at the Swan Hunter and Parsons Marine shipyards, worked in design and production at Sigmund Pumps, and served three years in an armaments department of the British goverment. a 1940 position as works manager at a Tyneside ship repairer led to his feteful appointment to a joint London Salvage/Royal Navy operation where he was responsible for repair and the salvage of war-damaged ships.

Sent to Canada in 1941, he joined the wave of British emigres crossing the pond for wartime work in that country's undermanned and overtaxed ship contruction and repair industry. At the end of the World War II, he remained in Canada, moving shop from Halifax to Montreal in 1948, with his brother Jack as controller.

In those years, Japanese shipyards were beginning to rebuild and absorb the mass-production and quality control methods of Hentry Kaiser and Elmer Hahn, which had enabled America to build one Liberty ship per day during the war. In 1949, Campbell went over to Japan as an independent supervisor for conversion and newbuildings. It was then that he began his long association with the Greek shipping community.

By 1965, campbell had offices in Montreal, Halifax, Vancouver, London, New York, and five locations in Japan. GTRC was producing some $85 to $100 million in ships each year, employing fifty designers in Montreal alone. Between 1950 and 1989, some 523 ships were built to George Campbell's designs. Most were constructed at Japanese yards under supervision of his servicecompany GTRC.

His achievements

• Credited for mass production in commercial shipbuilding

Freedom series (172 ships), Fortune (86), Freedom MkII (30), and other series ships 40 in number. Freedom series was 14,800 TDW and Fortune was 21,500 TDW bulkcarriers. The snap on the right is AMFITRITI, a Freedom MkII series vessel.

• Credited for the development of Ore-Bulk-Oil (OBO) carriers.

Developed for CM Lemos, a Greek ship owner. OBO are ships that can carry ore, bulk goods, and oil. Although they are more expensive to build, they ultimately are more economical because they can make return journey with cargo rather than empty as single-purpose ships often must.

• First to move the accommodation far aft on tankers and bulk carriers.

This allowed freeing of the decks for movement and machinery.

• Also pioneered the cost-saving use of bow thrusters, even employing a water jet thruster on a Canadian Coastguard cruiser in 1966, and he was a leader in refining and popularizing the concept of the bulbous bow for commercial ships.