Geerts and the Scheldt: the 1960s

Entrepreneur Marc Geerts passed on his transport company to his three sons and has since thrown himself into his new career as a city guide in Antwerp. From there, the idea was born to create a reporting series in which he takes Flows through the rich history of the Antwerp port.

Geerts could listen for hours to his great-grandparents’ stories about the two world wars. “My great-grandmother was born in 1896 and she still knew stories of her grandparents who had lived before Belgium’s independence,” he says. “I was enormously fascinated and gradually started looking up more and more information about this in history books. I wanted to check in that way whether those stories were true.”

Together with Marc Geerts, Flows canned the reportage series ‘Geerts en de Schelde’, which gives you an insight into the origins of the Antwerp port. In eight short episodes, Geerts looks back, in his own style, at a number of key moments in Antwerp’s history, which ensured that the port evolved into the world port it is today.

The 1960s

The post-war years brought many important changes and developments to the port of Antwerp. For instance, the petroleum industry grew into just about the most important chemical cluster in Europe. In addition, in the 1960s, the US Army introduced the first containers to European ports.

The first 30ft. containers arrived in Antwerp on 6 May 1966 aboard Sea-Land Corporation’s ‘MS Fairland’, later Maersk. It was Marc Geerts’ father, Corneel Geerts, who drove one of the first containers to Wijnegem on a flatbed truck.

To conclude the series, Geerts briefly looks back at the unique collection of historic harbour cranes still on display on the Rijnkaai in Antwerp.

Missed an episode of ‘Geerts en de Schelde’? No problem. You can watch all episodes here.