Peter Charles van Geersdaele was born on 3 July 1933 in Fulham, South West London, to a family with roots in the Netherlands.

[4] He began in the moulders' shop, creating replicas of classical sculpture,[1] and rose to become a senior conservation officer in the British and Medieval department.

[4] There he notably led the team tasked with making a mould, and later a fibreglass replica, of the Sutton Hoo ship,[5][6] a process he repeated in October 1970 with the Graveney boat.

[2] During his time at the museum he also studied part-time towards a conservation diploma at University College London's Institute of Archaeology, which helped equip him to publish several articles on his work.

[16] Van Geersdaele led the operation,[5] with help from Jack Langhorn,[1] senior technician at the British Museum's plasterers' shop, A. Prescott, Nigel Williams, G. Adamson, Y. Crossman, and G.

[27] Van Geersdaele was asked in 1970 to take an impression of a clinker-built wooden boat, when the widening of a watercourse near the village of Graveney in Kent unearthed the ninth century vessel.

[1][31] Four years later the family moved back to England, and van Geersdaele became the National Maritime Museum's deputy head of conservation.

[35][36] After returning to England in 1976, he lived in Woodbridge, Suffolk: "a stone's throw from the site of his triumph at Sutton Hoo", as a British Museum colleague termed it.

[1] During the 1993 Birthday Honours van Geersdaele was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire,[37] in recognition of his services to museums.

[35] He was remembered by a colleague, Andrew Oddy, as "a natural-born leader who was universally liked and who inspired those who worked with him to give of their best", and as among "the last of the team of conservators and specialist craftsmen who responded to a challenge that had left archaeologists daunted".