Philip Eastell, co-founder of UK charity Container Shipping Supporting Seafarers (CSSS), never believed he was destined for a maritime life, despite family connections.
The Englishman’s heart lay with botany and horticulture, but he was unable to turn it into a career after discovering he had a serious allergy to certain plants that left him very ill and needing tests in hospital.
So in 1979, he entered the world of container shipping through his father, who was the director of Polish Ocean Lines’ London office.
After observing their data inputting, he began a summer job there, despite “having never seen a computer before”.
Through this introduction, Eastell built up an expertise in container logistics and moved into container leasing management with TMM, Contships and later CP Ships, designing container maintenance and repair software.
He joined Hapag-Lloyd when the German line took over CP Ships in 2006, specialising in reefer containers. The company bought 8,000 of these boxes from Japanese producer Daikin, for which Eastell eventually ended up working for more than a decade.
This brought him into contact with Japanese marine paints group Chugoku, and he joined the firm in the UK in 2012, preferring to stay in his home office rather than head to the Netherlands with Daikin. “Moving to Holland wasn’t going to work. My daughters were doing exams and starting university,” he said.
Eastell was thoroughly used to working from home when the pandemic struck, but “the last few months have been the first time in my life that I haven’t seen the inside of an airport every few weeks. It’s been an interesting life.”
He is unsure about the future of the container leasing industry in terms of personnel.
“There are people who I worked with in the 80s who were new into the container business, they’re now VPs at this container company and that container company,” he said.
“They’re old and grey like me. I don’t know where this business is going when we retire — I haven’t been introduced to any young people for years who are coming up into the container management business.”
