The Life and Loss of the Finnish Barque Vanadis (1874–1903)

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Oil painting of the ship under full sail, bows to the right of the image, on a stylised blue sa and under grey-blue skies
A 19th-century oil painting of the Vanadis under sail, by unknown artist, courtesy of Pietarsaari (Jakobstad) Museum, Finland. Between 1809–1917, when Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire, Finnish ships used the Russian national (civil) ensign for merchant purposes. The Russian white-blue-red tricolour was also the official flag of the Grand Duchy.

Introduction

As part of the Nordic Shipwrecks project my colleague Tanja Watson, Maritime Research Specialist, has taken a look at a Finnish shipwreck on the north-west coast. Finnish wrecks form a rather unusual nationality sub-group in Historic England’s National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR), [1] where Finnish vessels currently account for just under 3.5% of England’s records of over 1,600 Nordic shipwrecks.

This is the story of a regular cargo vessel, Vanadis, wrecked in bad weather on 22nd February 1903 in Morecambe Bay. The remains of the wooden hull lie embedded in the sand in a small, shallow embayment called Half Moon Bay on the Heysham coastline in Lancashire, north-west England. Occasionally exposed to beachgoers by weather and changing sands, they serve as a reminder of the elegant three-masted ships that sailed this coastline some 120 years ago.

Vanadis (Vanadís) is an epithet for Freyja – the Norse goddess of love, beauty, fertility, war, and magic. [2] For almost thirty years the Finnish sailing vessel crossed the world’s oceans, carrying coal, timber, and trade between Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Built in 1874, it survived hurricanes, volcanic catastrophe, collisions, and the loss of crew at sea – only to be lost in the comparatively confined waters of Morecambe Bay – due to extreme weather, mechanical failure, and difficult navigational decisions – but thankfully without any loss of life.

Construction

The Vanadis was built in 1872-74 by master shipbuilder Johan Löfhjelm (1816-1878), at the Carlholmen shipyard in Jakobstad (now called Pietarsaari), on the west coast of Finland. It was one of three built for Otto August Malm of The Malm Trading House, one of the most prosperous shipping magnates at the time. Launched on 19 September 1874, the vessel was constructed as a full-rigged, three-masted wooden fregattskepp or frigate [3] copper- and iron-fastened, carvel-built, and sheathed with felt and yellow metal. It had one deck and was roughly 56 metres in length, 11m in breadth, and 10m in height (185 ft × 35 ft 1 in × 33 ft 3 in), with a carrying capacity exceeding 1,000 net register tons. It was one of three large frigates built at the yard for Otto Malm, the other two were called Equator and Europa. [4]

By the late nineteenth century, the Vanadis had been converted from a full-rigged ship to a barque, reflecting changes in crewing practices and economic conditions. (A barque retained much of the speed and cargo capacity of a full-rigged ship but was easier to operate, requiring fewer crew.)

Eventful voyages

Throughout its career, the Vanadis demonstrated both the resilience and vulnerability of wooden deep-sea sailing ships – captured in letters written by its crew members, held by Pietarsaari (Jakobstad) museum and compiled by Jukka Mikkola. [5] These track passages to Singapore, Java, Hong Kong, New York, South Africa, and later repeated timber runs between North America and Europe.

Its first voyage to England took place two months after its launch, on 12 November 1874, destined for Hull. Some particularly eventful voyages are recorded for the following years:

1882: Tragedy struck the frigate on 7 December, while en route from Cardiff to Singapore, the frigate encountered a severe storm in the English Channel. Heavy seas swept across the deck, carrying five crewmen to their deaths; a sixth later died of stomach trouble. The ship sought refuge in Falmouth before continuing its voyage.

1893: In August, Vanadis was sailing near Krakatoa, Indonesia at the time of the catastrophic volcanic eruption. Ash fell onto the vessel, a thick layer of pumice floated on the sea, and the ship sailed for a week half buried in debris from one of the most violent natural disasters in recorded history.

Historic black and white photograph of explosion of Krakatoa, seen from the sea: large clouds of dust and smoke rise up in the air. The image has been historically retouched and enhanced in a fashion typical of late 19th to early 20th century photos to bring out the key subject.
De uitbarsting van de Krakatau, University of Leiden, public domain
https://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:788817

1894: In July, the Vanadis was struck by a hurricane as it sailed towards the Florida coast. The ship was battered for many hours by storm force winds but arrived in Pensacola, despite all sails having been blown to shreds and severe damage to masts and rigging.

1898: On 25 August the Vanadis left Plymouth heading for the north American coast to pick up a cargo of timber. On 2 October they were hit by another massive hurricane north of the Bahamas. The main top sails were torn to pieces and the mast was destroyed. Somehow the crew survived and set to work to put up masts out of the wreckage left on the decks and rig up the sails and get the ship sailing again. In a letter to his wife, first mate Frans Hägglund described this hurricane as so devastating the Vanadis could easily have been ‘lost with all hands’. But after a few more days at sea the ship was able to limp into the city of Savannah in Georgia. The Vanadis stayed there until early 1899 as repairs took many months. [6]

On 27 July 1899 the vessel was sold to Captain John Andersson and his partners Victor Sundman and K A Karlsson, of Mariehamn, Åland (now part of Finland). Under new ownership, it continued to trade primarily in timber, making repeated transatlantic voyages between Georgia and northern Europe.

Mechanical failure

Vanadis set off on what was to become its final voyage on 12 January 1903, departing Darien, Georgia, for Fleetwood, Lancashire, with a cargo of pitch pine and softwood logs. The passage was difficult for the fifteen-strong crew. The vessel was reported overdue to Lloyd’s of London before finally being sighted off Rathlin Island (Northern Ireland). After 41 days at sea, it finally reached Fleetwood about 5pm on Sunday 22 February 1903. The weather at the time was exceptionally mild (14°C). A “spectacular dry dust fall”, likely originating from the Sahara, had darkened the skies earlier that day and covered everything on land with yellow sand, while there were storms at sea. [7]

Pilot Albert Iddon boarded the barque at the Morecambe lightship and anchored it, with sails furled, in Lune Deep near Wyre Point. Gale-force winds from the southwest rapidly worsened. During the night, the ship’s windlass failed on the starboard side, placing enormous strain on the anchor cables. The chains were torn from the hold, resulting in the loss of both anchors and cable, leaving only a spare anchor without cable. [8]

Later testimony from Jakobstad museum records indicates that the windlass had not been properly maintained by the new owners, a fact agreed upon by both captain and pilot as the primary cause of the wreck. The windlass was a critical, heavy-duty mechanical device located on the forward deck (forecastle) used to raise the anchors and manage anchor chains. By the turn of the 20th century, these mechanisms had evolved from simple manual devices into sophisticated, often steam-assisted, machinery.

Sepia pen and ink drawing of seven men pulling on a windlass aboard ship: six men, three on either side, operate the windlass, while the 7th man in left foreground pays out the chain. The image is canted at an angle to right, suggesting the movement of a ship at sea, while seagulls fly in the sky.
Print of a wooden windlass in use, from Dr. Isaac I. Hayes, Cast Away in the Cold: An old man’s story of a young man’s adventures as related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner (Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers: 1892) Public domain: Wikimedia Commons

Heysham Rescue

The pilot advised the Master, Karl Oskar Karlsson, to head for the sandbanks at Heysham, as this was considered the safest area in Morecambe Bay: anywhere else was too risky. The vessel reached a position at 54.3N, 2.54W NNE of Heysham Pier with high tide at 8.07pm.

According to Pilot Iddon, the ship experienced a calm night with very little rolling. However, at 3am, one of Vanadis‘ lifeboats was launched carrying five crew members and Pilot Iddon, reaching the shore just 100 yards away without difficulty. The men then walked to the Higher Heysham post office, arriving at around 4am. As there was no immediate danger, the captain and nine crew members remained aboard the Vanadis. They would have been able to disembark at low tide since the vessel was lying level; however, as the tide rose, the gale intensified and by dawn it was making signals of distress. At 7:30am, the lifeboat station at Fleetwood fired a gun after harbour authorities received a telegram confirming that Pilot Iddon and five crew members were safe. The lifeboat crew launched the lifeboat Maude Pickup at 8am, setting sail towards the Vanadis 12 miles away, in very rough seas, reaching the vessel in under an hour, and rescuing the remaining 10 crew. The ship had run aground on Sunderland Bank at the entrance to the River Lune, but with no effective anchoring capability and conditions deteriorating, it floated off the bank and drifted up past the entrance to the new Heysham Harbour (not open to ships until 1904). [9]

Breaking Up

Newspaper and maritime reports from February and March 1903 documented the vessel’s rapid deterioration. The Vanadis had missed stays, had sprung a leak, and was full of water. It lay partially submerged and slowly sinking deeper into the sand close to the pier at Heysham, having unshipped its rudder. By 25 February it lay almost dry but was unfavourably positioned; a day later, embedded in sand, it was losing ground as strong westerly winds drove water into its hull. It was condemned as a total loss. [10]

Once condemned, a hole was cut in the stern to access the hold. The cargo of softwood logs was hauled out by horses and carts and sold to the highest bidder. The hull was partially stripped for scrap metal, while masts, decking, and superstructure were cut away. Over time, the remains slowly broke apart on the beach until “virtually nothing was left” above the sand. [11]

Historic black and white photograph of the Vanadis, seen in port bow view with her masts having collapsed over the side. An inset at top right shows the detail of the figurehead from the same photograph.
The stranded Vanadis with broken masts, and figurehead still intact. The figurehead [inset] may still exist: it was displayed in the rose gardens of Heysham Head until it closed (date unknown). It was a carved full-length figure of a woman in a long dress with large collar, painted in pale colours, with dark, pinned hair, standing on a plinth. Image courtesy of Lancaster Maritime Museum.

Today’s remains

Modern digital colour photograph of the 'ship shape' of the exposed hull timbers full of sand and pools of water, looking out towards the sea.
Remains of the Vanadis, taken by Ian Taylor, 12 February 2010
Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Photographs of Vanadis aground are preserved in Lancaster Museum and Heysham Heritage Centre, while archaeological investigation has confirmed the extent of dismantling and loss. Although largely buried, elements of Vanadis continue to surface on re-exposure due to the shifting sands, a feature common to the several other ships also known to have been lost in the area over the last few centuries.

A three-foot long cannon was recovered from the wreck in 2005 by two Heysham locals, believed to date from the ship’s earlier service in eastern seas when defensive armament was common against pirates. The cannon is displayed at the Heysham Heritage Centre, along with the ship’s bell and several other items salvaged from the site.

Modern digital colour photograph of a black cannon displayed indoors on a black wheeled gun carriage
The Vanadis cannon, displayed on a modern gun-carriage. Photograph by Graham Dean: image by kind permission and courtesy of Heysham Heritage Centre



Footnotes

[1] At the time of writing in 2026, the NMHR is currently publicly accessed via the Heritage Gateway portal

[2] Vanadís – as Vana dís – occurs as an epithet for Freyja in the Skáldskaparmál within the Prose Edda, compiled by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) in Old Icelandic: cf also the element vanadium, named after Vanadis by the Swedish chemist Nils Gabriel Sefström (1787-1845). It seems to have been a reasonably popular name in contemporary Scandinavian circles – see, for example, four Norwegian ships of this name in Det Norske Veritas 1879, p405, and HM Fregatt Vanadis (HSwMS Vanadis), commissioned 1862.

[3] Although a cognate, the English word ‘frigate’ does not accurately convey the vessel type, as in English it has historically predominantly referred to a warship during the age of sail or later. In the Nordic languages fregatt or fregattskepp (and variants) instead refer (by transference from the form of warship so called, which was also the initial primary meaning) to a three-masted full-rigged fast-sailing ocean-going vessel such as the Vanadis: see Store norske leksikon: fregatt. Although by no means an exact equivalent, the English-language clipper ship such as the Cutty Sark is both contemporary with, and better conveys the function of, the non-naval Nordic fregattskepp in English.

[4] Larn, Richard & Bridget. Shipwreck Index of the British Isles, Volume 5: West Coast and Wales. Section 2, Lancashire, 2000; ‘Vanadis’, by Jukka Mikkola. https://www.jamikko.fi/Purjelaivat_Vanadis.htm, accessed 14 Jan 2026; ’Jakobstad’, Uppslagsverket Finland, https://www.uppslagsverket.fi/sv/view-170045-Jakobstad, accessed 14 Jan 2026; wrecksite.eu, ‘Vanadis’: UK Hydrographic Office Wreck Report and information from Lloyd’s Register, compiled by Chris Michael. https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?65359, accessed 14 Jan 2026 [subscription required].

[5] ‘Vanadis’, by Jukka Mikkola. https://www.jamikko.fi/Purjelaivat_Vanadis.htm, accessed 14 Jan 2026. This is the source for all the voyages described.

[6] ibid; “Shipwreck still interests Heysham inhabitants”, The Visitor, published 8 Nov 2007. pdf, , accessed 14 Jan 2026     

[7] wrecksite.eu; ‘Weather – Feb 1903’, https://community.netweather.tv/topic/99882-february-1903-exceptionally-mild-a-dustfall-and-a-great-gale/, accessed 19 Mar 2026

[8] Åland Newspaper Report, 25-FEB-1903, No.16, pp 2, 4.

[9] The Visitor

[10] Åbo Underrättelser [in Swedish] 03-MAR-1903, No.60, p 3; 04-MAR-1903, No.61, page 3; 06-MAR-1903, No.63, page 4; Historic England Archive, Archaeological Diving Unit, Report No. ADU 97/04: Vanadis, Half Moon Bay, Heysham

[11] ibid; ‘Weather – Feb 1903‘

Edward III – a keen interest in wrecks

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Historic mid 20th century photograph in black and white in close-up side view of the effigy head of Edward II, showing his long, wavy hair and beard, a prominent nose, and well-defined eyebrows
Detail view of the gilt bronze head of Edward III on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, believed to have been based on his death mask, photographed by Eric de Maré. AA98/06219 © Historic England Archive

Two wrecks from the 1350s

The medieval wrecks project and what we know so far

Our ongoing research project into medieval wrecks seeks to provide a sounder documentary knowledge base for future finds such as those of the designated Mortar Wreck dating to the mid 13th century, particularly in understanding patterns of trade and the discovery of new shipwreck events to close the documentary gaps.

As predicted from previous research into medieval wrecks, the strongest evidence comes from the reign of Edward III (1327-1377). The records for the fifty-year span of his reign comprise exactly one-third of our known records for the nearly 5 centuries between 1066 and 1540 traditionally accepted as the medieval period. Undoubtedly record creation and survival play their part, as does the sheer length of his reign, but there is equally no doubt that here was a king particularly interested in matters of rights to wreck, whether they pertained to himself or his queen, Philippa of Hainault, or whether restoring goods to shipwrecked merchants who had seen them ‘taken into safe custody’ by local inhabitants.

In this he followed in the footsteps of his father, Edward II (1307-1327), who seems to have been similarly interested, with 11% of our documented wrecks over a 20-year reign. Therefore records under those two kings between them account for 44% of our known shipwrecks for the Middle Ages, or over two-fifths.

Edward III’s successor, his grandson Richard II, reigned for a similar length of time as his great-grandfather, Edward II, in fact slightly longer (1377-1399) but only 8% of our known wrecks for the Middle Ages derive from his reign. In the following reign, that of Henry IV (1399-1413), interest appears to have fallen off a cliff, accounting for 3.5% of our documented wrecks for the medieval period and that pattern would be repeated thereafter.

Although it is true that there is a dearth of documentary evidence for shipwrecks from the 11th and 12th centuries, we can see that a later date does not necessarily equate to more records: royal interest played a crucial part.

Rights to wreck – a source of dispute and a source of records

Rights to wreck were the principal reason for the appearance of wreck events in the record: essentially, if no-one escaped alive to land, the right to wreck went to the crown – and was a lucrative source of revenue and goods. However, if there were survivors, then they were entitled to reclaim their goods. Merchants who survived shipwreck naturally asserted their rights, and it must have taken some tenacity to do so, after being in peril of their lives and ending up in a foreign jurisdiction. To then have had their goods taken away – whoever claimed them – must have been the final straw, particularly when there were assertions that that the goods had not been duly ‘cocketed’ for export and the threat of having to pay customs dues all over again hung over them.

Some of the shipwrecked merchants were, of course, Englishmen, but dialects at the time were not necessarily wholly mutually intelligible – see William Caxton’s famous story printed in 1490 about an English merchant asking for eggs and only being understood when he asked for eyren in Kent, which incidentally took place when forced to put in by the weather en route from London to Zeeland. Others most likely spoke English or French well as a second language due to repeated contact and at a time when the language of the court and government was in Anglo-Norman (though it would be Henry IV before a king of England spoke English as his first language). Others still would have had to depend on interpreters and legal assistance to fight their cases.

It therefore follows that disputes over the right to wreck, for example between local landowners, or between landowners and the crown, tended to make it into the record, and more straightforward wrecks did not, so there is a strong selection bias in record creation in the first place. This selection bias is further compounded by the fact that squabbles inevitably arose over lucrative and richly-laden wrecks – they were the ones worth claiming – and cases were then brought by those who had the means to do so, who of course were the ones engaged in those lucrative cargoes, and out of those, only those who were very determined and/or very wealthy or very well-connected persisted. For these reasons, we very rarely hear, if at all, of the loss of minor coasting or fishing vessels.

These issues are compounded by the variety of legal sources in which wrecks could be entered – the Close Rolls, Patent Rolls and Inquisitions Miscellaneous – which, as the name implies, covered a variety of enquiries into all sorts of cases. Our two cases today illustrate that it is sometimes by interrogating more than one source that we finally flesh out the details of a wreck.

One wreck at Coatham, not three

In our first example, we have recently realised that a cluster of wrecks in Coatham, south of the Tees, over the best part of a decade, were all variant reports of the same wreck, not a product of assiduous local reporting. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for legal wrangling over the right to wreck to persist for many years – we have one wreck where the dispute continued for two decades, and across the reigns of Edward II and Edward III, without an apparent resolution: either the document finally resolving the case disappeared long ago, or was never made, as everyone involved had died. I suspect the latter but the merchant involved was certainly more determined than most. [1]

Today’s first case is rather less extreme, only covering the years 1352 to 1359, but it illustrates the potential for wrecks to escalate to the level of diplomatic incidents – another very good reason for them to enter the record, but, again, we do not quite know how this case ends. It is quite tantalising.

However, it is clear that all three references, to 1352, 1358, and 1359, pertain to the same wreck, from the circumstances of the wreck, the description of the ship and its cargo, the location of the wreck, and the names of those involved. The ‘ship of Lescluse in Flanders’ [now Sluis, Netherlands] was ‘lately freighted with goods and merchandise to the value of 1,700l’ (worth around £1.5m to buy today, but other calculations are available: see measuringworth.com). The issue was that the goods were consigned for Scotland by Scottish merchants. It was initially thought that ‘some evildoers carried away the same, which should pertain to the king as forfeit to him’. [2]

It therefore looked initially as if local inhabitants had plundered the wreck and robbed the king of his due. However, the issue was more complex than that. The merchandise belonged to the ‘enemies of the king of Aberden [sic] in Scotland’. By 1358 the merchants are recorded as hitting back: they complained that goods ‘to no small value’ were carried away and that they had been arrested and imprisoned for six months ‘and more’ in York, being further deprived of their goods while unable in prison to do anything about it. They pointed out that the wreck and subsequent events happened during the time of truce between Scotland and England, so a state of war was not a legitimate excuse for their being deprived of their lawful merchandise. The king ‘commanded their bodies to be released from arrest and the goods delivered to them’, but the ‘evildoers’ had ‘carried away the goods while so under arrest and refused to make restitution of these to them’. [3]

In 1359 there was a further twist to the story. The merchants alleged that they had been forced to sign over their goods ‘through fear against their will’. Henry de Greystok, one of the accused, counter-claimed that the Scots had signed over their goods to be sold and the remainder were to be made over to the king ‘without this that any of the goods came to the hands of Henry or to his profit or that he imprisoned the said petitioners’. [4] It further emerged that the mayor of York had refused to affix his seal to the commission to the attorney to sell the goods: whether that was in support of the merchants, or in support of those who had carried away the goods, we are not quite clear, as we know nothing further save that the king was appointing two juries to enquire further into the matter. History is silent on the outcome, but Edward III clearly felt he had to get to the bottom of the matter. [5]

All we can deduce is that it was a significant headache to uncover the truth at the time, but that effort then has practical implications for our record now, which is dynamic and one of subtraction as well as addition: we can add new wrecks that we discover, and flesh out the information we have for those we already know about, but our research also allows us to use new evidence to consolidate records that we now see clearly hang together.

A 1354 dispute with a twist in the tail

In a similar-but-slightly-different vein, in 1354 a London ship foundered off Scarborough ‘by the violence of the sea’ while bound from London for Berwick-upon-Tweed. The case came before the king twice in 1356, as noted in the Calendar of Patent Rolls: in September that year a merchant named John de Boulton complained that, while he and the mariners ‘came to land alive’, a couple of named local men had carried away the goods that were cast ashore. [6] A wreck was then reported to the king in November as one ‘of which no-one came to land alive, whereby the goods should pertain to the king as wreck of sea, and that these goods have been occupied and concealed from him by some men of the parts adjacent to the said town’. [7]

It therefore looked as if there were two distinct wrecks, one with a happy outcome and one involving considerable loss of life, near Scarborough in the same year. That would have been completely plausible given the amount of trade on the North Sea. However, research in the Calendar of Close Rolls revealed that in 1357 a further complaint was made by John de Boulton about the ‘malefactors’ who had taken away ‘those goods and chattels and committed other enormities’. This complaint brought the matter to the fore again and there was a dawning realisation that ‘the ship contained in the two commissions is the same one’ as the circumstances were otherwise identical. It looked as if ‘the malefactors’ had tried to cover up their concealment of the goods by pretending that they had reserved them for the king.

However, the feature which broke open the case for Edward III, and which those who had carried away the goods apparently hadn’t realised, was that John de Boulton was the king’s own clerk, and John was able to use this fact to his advantage. It must have been an uncomfortable situation for king and clerk to realise that they were being played off against each other by those who had abstracted the goods. Again, we don’t know the outcome, but it must have backfired spectacularly for the ‘malefactors’. For us in 2026, this feature of the case also made us realise the two wrecks were one and the same, and needed to be consolidated, but it was only finding the reference in the Calendar of Close Rolls that enabled us to make that judgement.

An accident of survival in a corroborating source becomes a wonderful illustration of how making texts available online facilitates research. We will never be able to recover all the wrecks of the medieval past, but at least we can do our best to ensure tbat we understand them as best we can and that we have not artificially inflated the figures since we now have digital access to the major legal sources for these wrecks.

Historic oil painting of King Edward III, featuring the bust of a crowned figure with a white beard, wearing a white ermine furred robe trimmed with gold and jewels. The facial features, hair and beard are very similar to those on the tomb effigy in the previous picture. .
Portrait of Edward III: anonymous workshop portrait, not contemporary, but dating to the late 16th or early 17th century, based on his tomb effigy
NPG 4980(7) © National Portrait Gallery, London CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Footnotes

[1] Navis de Jehsu Christi de Portu, of which the first mention was in 1318. It was a richly laden vessel and it is probably testament to the wealth of the principal merchant in this voyage that he was able to insist on his rights. It must have taken considerable means to do so, particularly in a foreign jurisdiction. For more detail on this particular vessel, see Cant, S. 2013: England’s Shipwreck Heritage: from logboats to U-boats (Swindon: English Heritage)

[2] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1350-54, p38, membrane 13d, p38

[3] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1358-61, membranes 6d (p79) and 21d (pp218-9)

[4] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1358-61 membrane 21d (pp218-9)

[5] Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, Edward III, Vol. III, 1348-1377, No.375, p135

[6] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward III, 1354-58, membrane 6d

[7] Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III, Vol. 10, 1354-1360

The Cordelia, a West Country smack embayed in the Bristol Channel (1874)

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Historical black and white photograph of a coastal harbour looking down from the top of the cliff to the water below, centred on a sailing ship leaving harbour. Beyond the harbour in the background can be seen encircling hills and cliffs sheltering the harbour from the open sea beyond.
Ilfracombe Harbour, Devon. Elevated view looking west across the harbour and Lantern Hill towards the buildings of Ilfracombe. Photograph taken 1850 – 1920
Source: Historic England Archive (ref: OP07458). https://historicengland.org.uk/education/schools-resources/educational-images/the-harbour-ilfracombe-10092

For this blog we welcome my colleague Tanja Watson, Maritime Research Specialist, Historic England, who introduces us to the loss of the Cordelia in the Bristol Channel in 1874 and the specific wreck process of embayment on a lee shore.

Tanja writes:

The hazards of the Bristol Channel

Today’s blog explores the hazards faced by sailing vessels in the Bristol Channel. Sailing smacks such as the Cordelia were a common feature of 19th-century coastal commerce in Britain, particularly in the Bristol Channel. These vessels were typically small, single-masted, and fore-and-aft rigged – designed to be sturdy and versatile for both fishing and the transport of goods. Some larger smacks were ketch-rigged, while smaller ones retained the traditional gaff cutter rig.

These smacks, though modest in size, represented a type of vessel essential for the local economy. They could navigate the Channel’s strong currents, unusually large tidal ranges (12-14 metres) [1], and frequently unpredictable weather with small crews, achieving average speeds of 4 to 7 knots (nautical miles per hour), depending on wind conditions.The Bristol Channel is known for having one of the highest tidal ranges in the world, second only to the Bay of Fundy in Canada. [2] It has a complex, irregular coastline, creating conditions in which vessels can easily become embayed or trapped in a bay or coastal recess.

The combination of tides, winds, and coastal geography in the Channel can quickly limit a vessel’s manoeuvrability and push it towards a lee shore – a stretch of shoreline lying downwind of the ship, where wind and waves drive it steadily closer to land. The term lee denotes the side of a vessel sheltered from the wind, as opposed to the windward side, which faces into it, and thus a ship being driven onto a lee shore is being driven by the wind onto the shore.

The loss of the Cordelia

On 30th November 1874, the Barnstaple-registered Cordelia set off from Ilfracombe Harbour for what should have been a routine voyage up the Bristol Channel to Newport on the River Usk, to collect a cargo of Welsh coal. This West Country smack, built around 1855 and with a tonnage of 32 register tons, was crewed by two men and a boy (the captain’s son). [3]

Map of the Bristol Channel, featuring its coastal towns such as Cardiff, Swansea, and Newport, with an inset map showing the location of Bristol and London.
Map of the Bristol Channel, England/Wales. Combination of CIA World Factbook map and Demis Map Server (http://www2.demis.nl/worldmap/mapper.asp) data with additional annotations and modifications by the ChrisO – Public Domain

At first, conditions seemed favourable, with a light north-north-westerly breeze. But as the Cordelia passed the hamlet of Watermouth, just two miles east of Ilfracombe, the wind veered sharply to the north-east, catching the crew off guard. Several attempts to tack failed, and the decision was eventually made to return to port. Nearing Beacon Point, however, the wind shifted once more – this time to the north-west – before dropping away altogether. Unballasted and at the mercy of the tidal currents, the ship began to drift helplessly toward the rocky shoreline.

Contemporary newspapers describe the unfolding crisis:

‘[The Cordelia] proceeded some distance, but the wind having shifted, they let her drift back with the tide. Late in the day she was observed from the shore to be off Lantern Hill. After this, with a turn of the wind, she again went up Channel, but not far, for she was next seen in Hele Bay, and from this spot appeared unable to get clear, being ‘embayed.’ . . .

‘The course taken appears to have been too close in—too short a cut in fact was attempted. The Cordelia struck on Beacon Point, and there stopped. It was seen that nothing more could be done, and that it must be abandoned. A very heavy sea was running, but the men providentially were able to effect their escape in Stephen Brown’s boat.

‘When the fact of the smack having gone ashore became known at the quay—it was between seven and eight o’clock when it struck—the three gigs, the Try, the Tiger, and Brilliant, were at once manned and pulled out to the point, but they could give no assistance, as they were unable to tow the vessel off the rocks; indeed they could not get within any reasonable distance because of the heavy swell which was continually breaking around her.

‘[The Cordelia] soon fell over on her side, and held that position for a while, one of her lights being seen after the crew had landed. In about an hour’s time, the light had disappeared, and nothing was afterwards visible in the black darkness from the pier.’ [4]

Aerial view of a coastal town with the sea to the left of image, showcasing a mixture of residential buildings, hills, and rocky shoreline with agricultural land in the background.
Aerial view of Ilfracombe
© Chris, contributor to geograph.org.uk CC-BY-SA 2.0

An account from another newspaper:

‘Floating like a bladder on the water, there being no ballast in her, she was quickly carried by the flowing tide and ground sea on to the west of Beacon Rock [Point], when, seeing there was no hope of saving her the crew got into the boat, and shortly afterwards the timbers of the smack were floating about like an upset box of matches. Had the smack been in ballast there is every probability that the disaster would not have occurred. It is not at all unusual for vessels to run between Ilfracombe and the Welsh coast without ballast, and it is to be hoped owners will now see the folly of this penny wise and pound foolish economy.’ [5]

(At this period coal was sufficiently profitable that it did not require trading for an exchange cargo, so it was common for ships to run ‘light’ (without cargo and ‘in ballast’) to collect a cargo of coal. The lack of ballast is almost unheard of in the wreck record.)

Fortunately, Captain Thomas Vound and his crew were rescued from their night-time ordeal by lifeboatman Richard Souch in the Olive Branch shortly before the vessel struck at about 9pm. All their belongings were lost. [6]

One week earlier, storms had struck the nearby Hele Bay with considerable force, and had this incident occurred then, their chances of survival would have been far slimmer, as pointed out by the newspapers.

Services interrupted

Cordelia’s owner, John Tucker Bament (1840–1876), a local coal merchant in Ilfracombe [7], lost his entire investment that night. He had just paid for Cordelia’s refitting with new sails and repairs in preparation for the winter season. However, he had decided not to, or could not afford to, pay for either the ballast she should have carried, or the insurance of the vessel. It is possible Bament supplied coal to Ilfracombe or Barnstaple, or the newly opened Barnstaple and Ilfracombe Railway, which had begun operation just four months earlier (20 July 1874). [8]

Historic sepia photograph showing a train travelling along to right with a noticeable head of steam, with a station and buildings in centre background, set in a rural landscape of rolling hills beyond.
Picture postcard of Ilfracombe railway station around 1900.
public domain image

(The strong links between maritime and rail transport have recently been covered in this blog in a three-part special by my colleague Serena Cant, see Railways 200: a maritime perspective.)

In the master’s own words

Further slight variations on these reports were published in contemporary newspapers, including the captain’s report, which was published five days after the event:

‘CORDELIA – Report of Thomas Vound, Master of the smack CORDELIA, of Barnstaple, 32 tons, from Ilfracombe for Newport: On Monday, the 30th November, at1 P.M., tide half ebb, weather fine, wind N.N.W., light breeze, the ship was about half a mile N.E. of Capston[e] Hill [Ilfracombe]. We proceeded as far as Watermouth, when the wind shifted to the N.E., with a fresh breeze. The vessel missed stays on several occasions. Bore up for Ilfracombe at 7 P.M. Reached as far as Beacon Point, the wind then shifted to N.W., with a light breeze. Heavy ground sea on. The vessel drifted ashore at 8 P.M. on Beacon Point on the rocks, and immediately began to fill with water, the water being over the cabin sheets. The vessel began to break up when I left her, about 8 30 P.M. – Ilfracombe, Dec. 1.’ [9]

And so we conclude with an insight into the processes of wreck, with specific reference to the combinations of wind, tide and sea state: a local vessel lost on her local shores, compounded by an unusual and locally-adopted cost-cutting measure, which ultimately cost her owner more money.

Footnotes:

[1] Generally cited as mean spring range12.2m to 12.3m at Avonmouth but reaches 14m in the Severn Estuary specifically: Associated British Ports (nd) ‘Bristol Channel Tides’ ABP South Wales; HM Government, Department of Energy and Climate Change, 2010: Severn Tidal Power: Feasibility Study Conclusions and Summary Report gov.uk

[2] Gao, C and Adcock, T 2017 ‘On the Tidal Resonance of the Bristol Channel’ International Journal of Offshore and Polar Engineering 27(2): 177-183 https://users.ox.ac.uk/~spet1235/ijope-27-2-p177-as19-Gao.pdf

[3] Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 05 December 1874, p10

[4] Ilfracombe Chronicle, 05 December 1874, p9

[5] Western Morning News, 02 December 1874, p3

[6] Moore, J (nd) On the Hele Shipwrecks. https://johnhmoore.co.uk/hele/shipwrecks.htm; Western Times, 04 December 1874, pp7–8; Lloyd’s List, 03 December 1874, p8

[7] Find a Grave: John Tucker Bament (1840–1876). https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/227351890/john-tucker-bament; North Devon Advertiser, 04 December 1874, p4

[8] Spong, G, ‘Combe Rail’, Ilfracombe Branch Project. http://www.combe-rail.org.uk/history/#:~:text=The%20Ilfracombe%2DBarnstaple%20line%20was

[9] Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, 05 December 1874, p10

Thrice shipwrecked

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Black and white photograph of an impression from a medieval seal, featuring a sailing ship enclosed in a roundel of Gothic text
Seal of Thomas Beaufort as Lord High Admiral, c.1416-26 depicting a single-masted clinker-built ship.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence

Sometimes the research goose lays a golden egg that you just have to share straight away, and this is one of them.

A number of wrecks in the record involve historical personages one way or another: Henry VIII witnessed the loss of theMary Rose; Daniel Defoe recorded the wrecks of the Great Storm in 1703, and is one of our best sources for that storm, as well as writing Robinson Crusoe; in Mrs Mary Roberts and Charles Lightoller, we have relatively ‘ordinary’ people who acquired a degree of fame as prior survivors of the Titanic and later went on to be involved in other wrecks in English waters. Sometimes, too, there are accounts of celebrity survivors – a violin virtuoso and his celebrated Stradivarius, both of whom fortunately survived.

On this occasion we have an unexpected connection with a historical figure – though, when you pause to think about overseas trade in the Middle Ages, it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise.

A piece of research in the Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous – summaries of Chancery documents for the 13th to 15th centuries – proved to be more interesting than anticipated. These are enquiries by royal officials known as escheators – who worked at local, usually county, level – into a wide variety of matters of life and death, hence their name, the Inquisitions Miscellaneous. They are now in the National Archives and were summarised – or calendared – in published volumes in the 20th century. Along with the Calendars of Patent Rolls (copies of letters patent, or open documents) and the Close Rolls (copies of letters close, or sealed) the Inquisitions Miscellaneous forms one of our principal sources of medieval wreck records.

One such document concerns a ship freighted with wine at La Rochelle for Nieuwpoort, Flanders (now in West-Vlaanderen province, Belgium) in 1400. This voyage was never intended to touch the English coast at all, but it did, ‘by the bad piloting and default of the master’ – in other words, it was significantly off course when it was wrecked at Shoreham-by-Sea. Wrecks of ships on the English Channel coasts while bound from Atlantic ports in France to the northern coast of France or Flanders are not at all uncommon, and nearly always driven by southerly or south-westerly winds onto the Sussex or Kent coastlines. [1]

In this case though, there is none of the usual ‘tempest’ or ‘stress of weather’ but an accusation of navigational incompetence: behind those words ‘bad piloting’ and ‘default’ we sense the exasperation of the merchants who were now involved in an administrative and legal headache.

As the documents show, this headache was caused by tracking down their goods in a foreign country: the wine was stolen by local men. Again, this isn’t an uncommon story throughout history – wine and spirits were attractive in their own right, and lucrative. We discover the names of some of these men – tuns of wine which had been unlawfully taken up and hidden, instead of being turned over to the merchants or the authorities, were located in the cellars of two men called Simon Benefeld and William Hulle. Simon Benefeld had dealings with a cloth trader named John atte Gate – who was part owner of a ship named La Nicholas of Shoreham. All three men were MPs – Benefeld and atte Gate successively representing New Shoreham, and Hulle Salisbury, so we start to gain a sense of the rising power and dominance of the mercantile classes in the 14th century but also a sense that they weren’t averse to a side hustle when opportunity arose. [2]

They led us to our man. In 1407 La Nicholas was freighted by a London mercer (dealer in cloth) with wool from Chichester for Calais – this is not a shipwreck, but it is important evidence for a close network woven between the mercantile classes of London and Sussex, and it was worth following the documentary trail for these connections.

The same London mercer was Mayor of the Staple of Calais through which wool was exported from England – La Nicholas fits entirely into this pattern of regulated trade at a time when Calais was under English control, so he was a significant figure on both sides of the Channel. Our mercer joined together with two other merchants, William Marchford and Thomas Aleyn, in 1413 to ship some more wool from Chichester to the Staple of Calais in three ships. It was a considerable quantity of wool, some 20 sarplers or 20 tons. Alas, these three ships were ‘submerged by a tempest near the coast by Shorham’, and the wool ‘driven ashore by the same town’. [3]

Our London mercer? None other than ‘Richard Whytington’, thrice Lord Mayor of London (appointed, then elected, both in 1397, again in 1406, and for the last time in 1419), and thrice finding his trade shipwrecked in this one incident. It isn’t often we find such a well-known figure behind a historical wreck incident. The pantomime based on the folk tale often tells us of the vicissitudes the young Dick Whittington experienced, but even as the real-life wealthy and established merchant it is clear that he also had his share of setbacks.

The gaps in the medieval record are significant – we essentially have nearly as many records for medieval shipwrecks as there are years between 1066 and 1540. Oh no, they aren’t evenly distributed at all: there isn’t anything like a even match of one wreck per year but instead we have several missing years and great variability around the numbers of wrecks recorded. The wrecks around 1413 are a case in point: we have no records for 1410-11, two for 1412, one other besides Whittington’s wrecks for 1413, none for 1414, one each for 1415 and 1416; seven in 1417, with three for 1418 and a decline towards one each for 1419 and 1420. It isn’t a case of more tempests in a particular year, but instead issues of record creation and record survival. Wealthy merchants like Richard Whittington were simply more likely to leave a documentary trail.

Oh yes, we now have 3 more records for the year 1413, to add to the one we already had, and Richard Whittington is behind them!

An historical black and white engraving of Sir Richard Whittington, depicting an older man with a beard wearing a hat and fur coat, holding a cat, with a border frame and the legend 'Sr Rich. Whittington' at the bottom
Sir Richard (‘Dick’) Whittington, after unknown artist, early 19th century engraving
NPG D240668
 © National Portrait Gallery, London



Footnotes

[1] Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, Vol. 7, 1399-1422 No.172

[2] History of Parliament Online, Simon Benefeld and John atte Gate

[3] Calendar of Patent Rolls, Henry V, Vol. 1. 1413-1416, p149; History of Parliament Online, William Marchford

Railways 200: a maritime perspective, Part Three

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All Aboard!

In the last blog we looked at the 19th century rise in passenger travel and the drive to make the connectivity between trains and ships an ever more seamless experience for both passengers and cargo. But how could that experience be made even more seamless?

Train ferries: the beginnings

The answer: by making it multi-modal! The concept had its origins in Scotland, on boats on the Forth & Clyde Canal onto which railway wagons were loaded from the Monkland & Kirkintilloch Railway from 1833 onwards [1].

As stated in Part Two, the new ‘rail and sail’ technologies were brought into use on existing routes, with trains serving existing ports. In the next – also Scottish – case, this included ferries traversing the Firth of Forth. The passage across from Burntisland to Granton evolved towards a conventional train-ferry-train arrangement, but from 1850 onwards trains were rolled on to the purpose-built paddle steamer Leviathan and rolled off again at the other end. This permitted the carriage of ‘goods, minerals, etc. without breaking bulk’, i.e. without having to be unloaded from the train, loaded on to the ferry, unloaded off the ferry, and once more loaded onto the train. [2]

‘The first experimental trial took place on Wednesday last . . . 12 trucks, laden with coals and general merchandise, were taken on board at Burntisland in about seven minutes. The time occupied by the steamer in crossing was 25 minutes, and the trucks were safely run ashore at Grandon in the course of three minutes afterwards.’ [3]

The train ferry had a 40 year lifespan until the Forth Bridge – still in operation today – effectively replaced it in 1890.

Train ferries: the 20th century

There was a short-lived attempt to run a train ferry to the Isle of Wight between 1884-1888 [4] but it would not be until the First World War that the concept of the train ferry came into its own again in UK waters – more specifically, English waters – meeting a critical need. The Richborough train ferries came into being, with corresponding infrastructure built at Calais and Dunkirk, shuttling war matériel back and forth across the Channel. These were known simply as Train Ferries 1 to 3 (TF1 to TF3). [5]

Historic black and white print of the hull of a vessel propped up by timber props (left of image). The sheer size of the hull casts shadows and dwarfs the tiny figures working underneath (bottom right of image)
Building a Cross-Channel Train-ferry : Underneath the bows (Art.IWM ART 1481) Part of a series by the artist recording shipbuilding on the Clyde, this image is sometimes labelled in other collections as Building a Cross-Channel Ferry. If this is indeed a train ferry, it almost certainly references TF3, which was built on the Clyde by Fairfield, Govan.
Muirhead Bone, Wellington House and Ministry of Information Commission, First World War Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/2634

The then new-fangled medium of film provides extraordinary footage of the train ferry berthing at Dunkirk, a locomotive reversing from landside and coupling up with the wagons, filled with tanks and shells – which also illustrates that the modus operandi was to carry rolling stock only and be re-linked with a locomotive at the other end, not to run a locomotive onto the ferry. Aerial photographs – again a remarkable new hybrid technology facilitated by the war, of camera equipment on board aircraft – of the train ferry making the crossing with wagon-loads of tanks, confirm that locos did not also make the crossing. The film and aerial photos also show that the train ferries were painted in dazzle camouflage – a temporary measure adopted in the latter stages of the war (see our blog on March 1918 for more on dazzle camouflage).

Multi-modal transport here intersects with the temporary – the military train ferries and the ship camouflage regime – in a conjunction of new technologies and new ideas.

Historic black & white photograph of railway wagons on either side of a train ferry, with empty tracks in the middle. The ferry is in port being loaded as the gantry is visible in the background. Wires from the vessel's superstructure criss-cross the foreground.
First World War train ferry
Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co417786/horwich-collection CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

TF4 was built at Cammell Laird, Birkenhead, for the St. Lawrence River in Canada, but was also rendered obsolete three years after delivery by the opening of the Quebec Bridge in 1917. [6] She was navigated back to Britain for the Southampton-Cherbourg train ferry run over 17 days, which, in a transatlantic landscape of war, was no mean feat for a fairly evidently slow vessel that would have proven very vulnerable both to deep-sea waves and any lurking enemy dangers.

TF4’s time on the Southampton-Cherbourg service was also to be brief, ending in 1919, but she was a remarkable vessel which operated differently to the others, with a platform that could be lowered to connect with the landward end, rather than using linkspans to ‘bridge the gap’ as TF1-TF3 did.

Modern photograph of train ferry model in glass case
Model of the Leonard at the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, where she was built, on showing rolling stock conveyed on the raised platform which could be lowered as required. Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons 3.0

Rolling on into the mid 20th century

It would not be until the early 1920s that the train ferries would once more be put to use for their intended purpose, in a joint Anglo-Belgian enterprise between the Great Eastern Ferry Company Ltd. and the Société Belgo-Anglaise des Ferry Boats, for a service to be run from 1923 onwards between Harwich and Zeebrugge. [7]

The question was how to transport the landside infrastructure at Southampton to Harwich. The proposed solution was to ‘load the bridge on one barge, and the towers and machinery on another’ in tow of the tug Plumgarth in early September. This did not end well. ‘When out in the North Sea the weather became very rough, and the continued heavy rolling motion caused slight damage to the barge with the tower on it, and she started to take in water.’ [8]

The master of the tug tried to reach Harwich, but ‘. . . the waves pounded in between the two barges, causing one to drag on the other in a submerged condition.’ [9] The incident occurred on the 5th of September and by the 12th the wreck sites of the barges and the infrastructure had been marked in a Trinity House Notice to Mariners. [10] By the following week one of the barges had been raised, with salvage works ongoing. [11] By the beginning of October the ferry bridge (or linkspan) had been brought ashore at Harwich, but it was not possible to raise the towers.

History does not record whether the second barge was recovered, but it may have been underneath the towers. The wreckage was cleared by explosives, since it lay in the fairway on the approaches to Harwich, but the site is now uncharted, suggesting that any archaeological remains may, at best, be level with the seabed. [12]

Fortunately the towers from Richborough were still available to mesh with the linkspan from Southampton and the Harwich-Zeebrugge service commenced operations in 1924.

Historic black and white aerial view of Harwich harbour, with the train ferry docked in the foreground, with rails running onto the ship at bottom right. The shoreline is seen at right with other ships berthed or moving about in the harbour.
Trinity Pier and the Train Ferry Berth, Harwich, 1952 EAW043676 © Historic England Archive

The Harwich train ferry continued in operation until 1987, alongside the Night Ferry service between Dover and Dunkirk, introduced in 1936. Both services ceased operations for the duration of the Second World War, while the train ferries once more went to war, and TF3 was lost to a mine off Dieppe in 1945. [13]

A vintage colour poster advertising 'The Night Ferry' train service, featuring a nighttime scene with sleeping cars and train details, over a timetable advertising the nightly service in both directions between London and Paris. The poster has evidence of streaks which look like water or oil damage to the left.
British Railways (Southern Region) Night Ferry poster, Barber, 1953
Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co231568/the-night-ferry CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Both services resumed post-war, the Dover-Dunkirk service ceasing operations in 1980, but the Harwich-Zeebrugge ferry managing to survive until 1987. The berth at Harwich was listed at Grade II that year. [14]

Modern colour photograph of the 1923 gantry, painted in grey, and rusty dock infrastructure, under a cloudy sky.
View of the gantry towers at Harwich Train Ferry Berth from the south-east, 2014
DP165500© Historic England Archive

Trains on board ship

We have seen that small ships could be carried on trains in kit form, and we have also seen that full trains (minus their locomotives) could be carried on board ship, fusing the two modes of transport together. There were other circumstances in which ships carried trains, including locomotives, and other railway materials – wheels, carriages, sleepers, and so on – primarily for export during the expansion of the railways during the 19th century. At that time these export cargoes were often described by the catch-all term ‘railway iron’.

Our earliest example of such a wreck is the Ann, lost in 1844 off Whitby with a locomotive consigned from Newcastle for one of the south coast railways. [15] Even though Britain’s railways were booming, there was no other way to get stock to its intended destination on a network that was not yet fully joined up.

Thereafter losses of ships carrying railway components occurred with some regularity, and underline the truly international nature of Britain’s railway exports. The English brigantine Spartan stranded in Cornwall during a storm in 1846, with ‘railway iron’ from Cardiff for Livorno, for example. [16]

In 1849 the Archelaus of New Orleans foundered at her anchors off Lundy Island, again bound from Cardiff with ‘railway iron’ but for New York. ‘Railway bars’ were regularly brought up from the wreck over the course of the ensuing six months by a number of local vessels engaged in the salvage operation. [17]

Occasionally the wrecks would involve three countries: Britain as the manufacturer and exporter of the railway components, the destination country to which they were consigned, conveyed by a ship belonging to a third country. A good example is the Dutch galliot Jonge Wirther, which again stranded on the Cornish coast en route from Cardiff to Stettin (now Szczecin) in 1846. [18]

The export trade in British railway technology was truly global. The American full-rigged ship Cornelia likewise foundered off the Isles of Scilly while bound from Greenock for Santos in Brazil with rolling stock and railway components in 1861. The Palala was wrecked on Kimmeridge Ledge, Dorset, in 1886 while bound for Durban with a general cargo including wines, candles, tins of paint, and eight railway carriages. [19]

A modern colour 3D scan of a shipwreck showing railway wheels and machinery, covered in sediment.
Perspective view of the Brackenholme and her export cargo of rolling stock components for Denmark lost off St. Catherine’s Point, Isle of Wight, following a collision in 1865 with HMS Supply.
Maritime Archaeology Trust

Such exports continued into the 20th century, including railway carriages consigned for France in the First World War: see our blogs for the Africa, 1915, and St. Chamond, 1918, which also makes a comparison with the Fort Massac, lost in the Thames Estuary with a loco from Darlington consigned for South Africa in 1946.

One story that comes up over and over again with consignments of ‘railway iron’ is its propensity for the cargo to shift, with predictably disastrous results. This happened to the full-rigged ship Ganges in 1881, stranding on the Goodwin Sands en route from Middlesbrough for Calcutta; the clipper South Australian, which foundered off Lundy in 1889 while bound from Cardiff to Rosario (and now a Scheduled Ancient Monument). [19]

Possibly our most extraordinary story of an unfortunate railway cargo concerns the English schooner Georgiana, bound from London for Cork with railway sleepers in 1881. She ran aground near the Manacles and ‘signals of distress were made by pouring paraffin on an old sail and lighting it.’ Though this was successful in alerting rescuers to the crew, it was disastrous as it ‘ignited some of the creosoted railway sleepers’ and burnt the vessel to the waterline. [20]

Coming full circle: the last rail & steamship experience

And finally . . . no blog linking the sea with the railways is complete without referring to the Southend Pier Railway running for most of the length of the Grade II-listed pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world. The pier head is approximately 1 and a third miles out to sea on a stretch of mud flat shoreline in which the sea can recede up to a mile at low tide. Since the pier head therefore stands in deep water, the pier thus served a practical purpose in enabling vessels to draw alongside to take trips out into the Thames Estuary.

This tradition continues today with the regular visits to the pier by paddle steamer Waverley, the last sea-going steamer still operating in the world, to pick up passengers for pleasure cruises in the Thames. Part of the experience is taking the train out to sea! And so we come full circle, for the Waverley was built for the London and North-Eastern Railway (LNER) in 1947, just before the railways were nationalised in 1948.

Historic black and white aerial view of the Southend Pier Railway stretching over water from top left to lower right: the railway is seen in operation with a train towards lower right
A train near Middle Landing on Southend Pier, 1928 EPW024886 Source: Historic England Archive

We hope you’ve enjoyed your voyage on the high seas and the connections we’ve made between trains and ships!

With many thanks to Andrew Wyngard, railway consultant for this blog.

Logo celebrating 200 years of train travel since 1825, featuring stylized numbers and a train graphic.

Footnotes

[1] Hennessey R 2016 ‘The Train Ferries: Part One’ Backtrack (30:11 661-667); ‘The Train Ferries: Part Two’ Backtrack (30:12, 742-747)

[2] ‘Melancholy Accident at Burntisland’, The Scotsman, 30 January 1850, No.3,137, p3

[3] ‘The Floating Railway across the Forth’, Bell’s Life in London & Sporting Chronicle 10 February 1850, p2 [issue not numbered]

[4] Hennessey 2016; Burns R 2023 ‘Train Ferries’, Maritime Archaeology Trust online

[5] ibid. ; Batchelor, S 2014 Port of Richborough and the birth of the cross-Channel train ferry Railway Museum online

[6] Hennessey 2016. She was converted post-war into the oil tanker Limax, and was broken up at Kobe, Japan, in 1932 (Report of Total Loss, Casualty &c. for Limax, 26 January 1932, LRF-PUN-W639-0101-W)

[7] ‘The Harwich Train Ferries’, Harwich and Dovercourt: a time gone by, online (nd); National Heritage List for England, Harwich Train Ferry Berth, official list entry 1187897, first listed 1987

[8] ‘250-ton Ferry Bridge Lost: Lighters founder six miles from port’, Lancashire Daily Post, 6 September 1923, No.11,307, p4

[9] ibid.

[10] Notice to Mariners No.64 of 1923 Liverpool Journal of Commerce, 15 September 1923, No.30,232, p6

[11] ‘The Sunken Train-Ferry Bridge’, Staffordshire Sentinel, 18 September 1923, p3

[12] Shields Daily News, 4 October 1923, No.20,150, p6; ‘The Harwich Train Ferries’, Harwich and Dovercourt: a time gone by, online (nd); examination of UKHO data in and around the position quoted in [10] above

[13] The Loss of the Train Ferry HMS Daffodil Maritime Archaeology Trust, online

[14] National Heritage List for England, Harwich Train Ferry Berth, official list entry 1187897, first listed 1987

[15] Historic England NMHR records

[16] Historic England NMHR records

[17] Historic England NMHR records

[18] Historic England NMHR records

[19] Historic England NMHR records

[20] Historic England NMHR records; Royal Cornwall Gazette, 25 February 1881, p6

Railways 200: a maritime perspective, Part Two

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Full Steam Ahead: Tourism and Freight

In the second part of our three-part Railways 200 special we go full steam ahead . . .

If the railways and the steamship were virtually born together, they also grew up together. The railways not only facilitated the development of new ports and new markets: together they enabled both domestic and international travel for work, study and leisure. They opened up tourist travel, which percolated down the social classes as workers’ holidays began to gain traction with employers and the law – especially to the seaside, to ‘London-on-Sea’ at Southend and Brighton, and to other resorts. Nowhere was it easier to access the sea by rail than at the Kent resort of Ramsgate, decanting passengers straight onto the beach.

Historic B&W aerial photograph of Ramsgate Harbour Station, showing people walking straight from the station onto the beach; a park and genteel terraces in the town are shown in the upper register of the image
Ramsgate Harbour Station, 1920. Ramsgate Harbour Station was operational between 1863 and 1926.
EPW000093 Source: Historic England Archive

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Bristol

Elsewhere passengers started their overseas journeys by rail. Trains provided connections with steamship and ferry services. Bristol is a city which became a transport hub – Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s transatlantic steamer and early ocean liner, the SS Great Western, entered service in 1838, followed by the SS Great Britain in 1845. (A liner is a vessel that provides a regular ocean-going passenger and/or cargo service between two or more fixed points, in this case Bristol and New York.) From 1841 the Great Western Railway (GWR) terminus at Bristol, also designed by Brunel, provided a connection for passengers to and from the liner, with a hotel also built for the convenience of passengers.

Modern colour photograph, Brunel's old station now beside a busy road with plenty of car traffic. The front elevation is built of cream limestone but areas behind, such as the side returns and chimney stacks, are built of less prestigious and darker Pennant stone.
Brunel’s Old Bristol Station, 2013 adjoining the present-day station. Its Tudor Revival style with its crenellations and oriel windows gives an impression of age and prestige
Peter Broster Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-2.0

In this case the connection was not entirely seamless, as passengers still had to traverse the city, and potentially stay overnight in the hotel, but it is a travel cityscape which sprang from the brain of one man – and one which is still legible in the city today with the Grade I-listed old station next to the present-day Temple Meads (itself built in the 1870s), Grade II-listed hotel (known today as Brunel House) and SS Great Britain in preservation in the city.

Modern colour photograph seen looking down from a nearby window over the SS Great Britain displayed in dock and 'dressed overall' with flags flying between her six masts. and the city beyond. The river is seen to left and foreground.
SS Great Britain in Bristol, 2025
© Anthony O’Neil, geograph.co.uk CC BY-SA 2.0

How many visitors to Bristol today alight from Temple Meads, with Brunel’s original station on their right, to see the SS Great Britain and realise that they are following in the footsteps (or perhaps train wheels!) of passengers making the original transatlantic connection?

The Port of Liverpool and the Great Western Railway

Another ‘nearly seamless’ integration between the railways and port infrastructure can be seen in the Great Western Railway warehouse and office on the dockside at Liverpool, dating from the late 19th century. The GWR did not actually reach Liverpool itself, but goods could be moved by barge between the GWR’s Morpeth Dock at Birkenhead [1] and their warehouse at Liverpool alongside the Manchester Dock (filled in: now underlying the Museum of Liverpool) – a reminder that the railways also joined up with canal and river traffic in many different locations.

Modern colour photograph of Liverpool: edge of dock in foreground with propeller to left and steam crane to right, with the black & white hull of the ship just beyond in the middle ground. The deck lies under the lower roof of the warehouse saying RAILWAY, while the upper structure lies beneath the upper roof structure of the warehouse with the words GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY, creating a visual echo in the composition, also echoed by the building works beyond, and the varied heights and sizes of the Port of Liverpool and Royal Liver Building domes at the top of the image.
In this 2009 photograph the Great Western Railway warehouse is sandwiched between dockside infrastructure and the museum ship Edmund Gardner on the one side and on the other the dome of the Port of Liverpool building, with the Royal Liver Building beyond – two of the iconic ‘Three Graces’ of Liverpool fronting the River Mersey.
DP073748 © Historic England Archive

The rise of passenger travel

As the great age of the steam liner expanded, so also did the railways, and the two fed off one another, not only in Britain, but in parallel developments in other countries in Europe and elsewhere. This in turn enabled mass tourism (Cook’s Tours from 1855 to Europe, for example), emigration, and its darker side, colonialism. The liners, linking with railways on both sides of the Atlantic, made it possible for Charles Dickens to connect with his audiences in the United States and for Frances Hodgson Burnett of Little Lord Fauntleroy fame to regularly criss-cross the Atlantic.

Historic B&W photograph of men, women and children posing beside a railway carriage to the left, steam rising against the roof of the station
Passengers waiting on the platform at Waterloo for the Cunard Steamship Company boat train, probably for Southampton, 1913. The photograph was commissioned by Cunard from Bedford Lemere, who also specialised in photographing newly-built liners.
BL22173/001 Source: Historic England Archive

In the same way, liners grew not only to serve specific passenger routes such as Southampton or Liverpool to New York, or to serve European colonies abroad, but also to become cargo specialists. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise of cargo liners and of refrigeration, benefiting not only the growth of fish and chips (see Part One) but also enabling meat to be shipped from South America and Australia under refrigerated conditions, for example by the Nelson Line, and despatched onwards by rail. Our records mark the loss of the Nelson Line’s Highland Fling on Enys Rocks, Cornwall in 1907, and Highland Brigade, torpedoed off St. Catherine’s Point, 1918. [2]

Like the coal magnates of the north-east before them (as covered in Part One), the railway companies saw the potential in an integrated market and a seamless experience. They would run passenger trains to the ports: thence it was but a short step towards commissioning the building of steamers, operating ferry services in their own right, and providing onward travel.

Trains and ships in the Lake District

Sometimes the ‘onward travel’ was a new development in its own right and an extension of the leisure experience within Britain. The steam yacht Gondola, the idea inspired by Venetian travels, as well as her name and hull form, was commissioned by Sir James Ramsden of the Furness Railway Company and entered service from 1859. The Gondola allowed passengers alighting from the Furness line at Coniston to enjoy pleasure cruises on Coniston Water in the Lake District, enhancing their holiday experience. [3]

The links between railways and ships were especially close in the Lake District, because trains could also transport small ships like these: the Gondola‘s hull was transported in four sections by rail and heavy horse to Coniston to be assembled locally, a methodology also adopted for the motor vessel Teal on nearby Windermere in 1938. [4] The railway line to Coniston was closed in 1962 so the link between Gondola and the railway that once brought passengers to her has been broken. [5]

Modern colour photo of the Gondola on the lake against a background of green tree and heather-covered mountains
Steam yacht Gondola on a cruise on Coniston Water in 2011 © Ian Greig CC BY-SA 2.0

The growth of the ferry

Where the railways could most easily dovetail with the steamers and provide the most seamless experience was on what we would today call ‘short-haul’ routes and ferries across to Ireland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. They built on existing ports and routes with a history of passenger demand. The experience could be completely seamless and was a strong selling point. ‘The train comes to a standstill bang opposite the boat’ at Southampton, as described in promotional literature for the Southern Railway in 1931. [6]

The wreck record illuminates how old some of these ferry or ‘passage’ routes could sometimes be. The Duke of York ‘passage boat’ struck the Goodwin Sands in 1791 en route from Dunkirk to Dover – perhaps even with some refugees from Revolutionary France? (Turner was ‘nearly swampt’ on landing at Calais in 1802 as his painting Calais Pier demonstrates.) In 1669 one of the regular packets between Harwich and Hellevoetsluis (the precursor of the Harwich-Hook of Holland service which still continues today), was wrecked at Dunwich.

Some railway + ferry services were run by prestige named trains, such as the Golden Arrow train of the Southern Railway, which linked with the Southern’s first-class ferry Canterbury at Dover, which in turn connected with the reciprocal Flèche d’Or train which took passengers from Calais to Paris.

Steam locomotive in green and black livery with a Golden Arrow on its side (to right of image) and the prominent Clan Line Merchant Navy Class logo, enclosing the line's house flag of a red lion rampant
The post-war Golden Arrow seen at the Railways 200 Greatest Gathering in Derby, August 2025, one of the Merchant Navy class, commemorating the Clan Line. © Andrew Wyngard

In general, the railway steamers had a fairly good safety record, but collisions in fog could and did happen, most notably with the Normandy paddle steamer, belonging to the London & South-Western Railway Company, which was involved in a collision off the Needles in 1870 with considerable loss of life while en route to the Channel Islands. [7]

Another collision in fog which ended more happily was that in the Channel between the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway steamer Seaford, having left Dieppe with passengers for Newhaven, and ‘le cargo-boat’ steamer Lyon, belonging to the French railway firm Compagnie des chemins de fer de l’Ouest, voyaging in the opposite direction under a reciprocal service arrangement. All on board the sinking Seaford were saved by the French ship, which returned to Newhaven, and ‘special trains’ were run for the passengers to get them home, although a few people were sent to hospital with broken legs and ankles. [8]

Vintage Southern Railway booklet cover featuring a map and promotional text for weekend and holiday travel to the continent, dated May 1st, 1939.
1939 Southern Railway brochure with map of connections, the last hurrah of passenger services before World War II. The Art Deco cover design blends stylised ships (white and pink) with steam trains (green) (Author’s own collection)

In 1918 the London & South-Western Railway ferry South Western was attacked by U-boat while on a cargo run from Southampton to St. Malo. More commonly, however, the railway ferries were lost outside both their normal roles and usual routes during both World Wars. They found themselves requisitioned for war service and were sometimes sunk on that service, such as the Southern Railway’s Tonbridge, which pivoted from her cross-Channel service to become a net layer (setting anti-submarine nets), and was sunk by a bomber off Sheringham in 1941.

Railway ferries also played their part both at Dunkirk in 1940 and during D-Day on 1944, including one very special class of ferry which we will take a look at next week in the conclusion to this blog series.

An artistic depiction of the steamship SS Canterbury with the Red Ensign flying astern, steam billowing from her funnels, and heading towards the White Cliffs of Dover
Southern Railway steamer SS Canterbury (of the Golden Arrow service described above) approaching Dover. Walter Thomas, c.1936 Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum
A vintage black and white photograph of the ship in wartime livery, with an aeroplane flying overhead.
HMS Canterbury (FL 7489) Underway, at sea. As HMS Canterbury, the railway company ferry would participate in Dunkirk and D-Day
Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205124826

All aboard for Part 3 next week . . .

With many thanks to Andrew Wyngard, railway consultant for this blog.

Logo celebrating 200 years of train travel since 1825, featuring the number '200' in stylized red design with a train track element.

Footnotes

[1] The Great Western Railway Warehouse and Office, Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network (CITiZAN), online; photograph of the warehouse and office, CITiZAN, online

[2] Historic England NMHR records

[3] History of Steam Yacht Gondola, National Trust, online

[4] Gondola, National Historic Ships, online; Teal, National Historic Ships, online; MV Teal, Windermere Lake Cruises, online; ‘Lake Flotilla’, Liverpool Echo, No.17,595, 6 June 1936, p4

[5] Andrews, M and Holme, G, 2005 The Coniston Railway (Pinner: Cumbrian Railways Association)

[6] Leigh-Bennett, E P and Fougasse 1931 Southern Ways & Means (Plaistow: Southern Railway)

[7] Historic England NMHR records. It should be noted that the comment on the safety record pertains principally to records of losses within English waters, which are relatively few by comparison with the regularity of the service and the number of journeys undertaken; however, other wrecks did occur outside English waters, around the other home nations, the Channel Islands, and the coast of France.

[8] Historic England NMHR records; ‘A Channel Steamer Sunk: Loss of the Seaford‘, Morning Advertiser, 21 August 1895, No.32,535, p5; ‘Le Naufrage du Seaford’, La Marseillaise, p3 (in French)

[z] Railways 200 Fridays – PS Waverley, National Historic Ships, online

Railways 200: a maritime perspective, Part One

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Parallel lines – the growth of the railways and the steamers

Historic sepia postcard of parallel rows of multiple railway lines stretching into the distance, with the vertical posts of the coal hoists of the dock just visible to the top of the photograph. The postcard bears the punning title on the front 'Just a few lines from Immingham'
Postcard of the railways towards Immingham Dock around 1912 from the C J Wills & Sons collection. The firm of C J Wills & Sons were railway contractors whose work included Immingham Dock, built for the expansion of the coal trade initially. In the distance the coal hoists servicing the southern side of the dock can be seen.
AL0589/054/01 Source: Historic England Archive

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the world’s first passenger-carrying railway service on the Stockton and Darlington Railway on 27 September 1825 we take a look – in a three-part special – at the close relationship between the railways and the sea, a mutually interdependent relationship from the very beginning.

It’s a story full of surprises, so read on!

Steam ships and steam trains were forged in the same era on the anvil of the Industrial Revolution. The world’s oldest surviving steam locomotive is Puffing Billy, built 1813-14 for the Wylam Colliery near Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Meanwhile the wreck record demonstrates that steam ships stuttered into life on small passenger vessels in inshore waters, but were prone to disasters: in 1817 a steam packet on the River Yare exploded just after leaving Norwich for Great Yarmouth, with the loss of half the passengers. [1]

Later that same year. the Regent steam packet, a ‘fine vessel of its kind’ which had apparently cost £1100 to build, suffered a fire en route to Margate. According to a passenger, the fire came from the wooden casing on the deck surrounding the chimney of the steam engine. (Just like today, the press was keen to hear from survivors of any incident and print eyewitness accounts.) There were only two buckets on board to put out the fire, so all that the master could do was order everyone on deck and close all the hatches to deprive the fire of oxygen. He then made a signal of distress and directed the vessel towards Whitstable, the heat trapped inside still keeping the boiler going.

There was ‘terror and agitation’ among the passengers and the fire was ‘only kept from penetrating through the deck by the constant application of water’ from the two buckets to hand, but fortunately the vessel ‘grounded on the sand at Whitstable, when three boats from that place, which had overshot them, arrived to their assistance, and safely took on board all the passengers and crew’, who included children. The vessel burnt to the waterline and as the tide ebbed the keel and engine were exposed on the sand. [2]

‘King Coal’: the railways and the coal industry

From the beginning the railways were intimately connected with the coal industry. The earliest railways originated in the horse-drawn waggonways which brought coal out of the pits to waterways for onward despatch to market. Puffing Billy and its sister engine Wylam Dilly demonstrate the evolution of the waggonways from horse power to steam power.

View of Wylam Dilly locomative from above in a museum setting, giving prominent attention to its tall chimney and small size
Wylam Dilly at the National Museum of Scotland
Kim Traynor CC-BY-SA 3.0

At this period coal was not directly loaded onto the collier brigs of the Tyne from the shore, but taken out to the ships by the flat-bottomed barge-like Tyne keels, who gave their name to a standardised measure of coal (one keel = 21 tons 4 cwt). The keelmen of the Tyne went on strike in 1822 and a strange story persists that the Wylam Dilly locomotive was loaded onto a keel in order to break the strike by towing a number of keels behind her.

"Wylam Dilly" B&W illustration depicting the locomotive converted to a paddle tug on the River Tyne, surrounded by ships and the Newcastle skyline.
The ‘Amphibious’ Wylam Dilly, the print that tells a remarkable tale
Image © National Museums Scotland

This attractive story seems difficult to substantiate, however: it seems an audacious experiment which would surely have attracted the attention of the press. However, while both local and national newspapers devoted many column inches to the keelmen’s strike and the authorities’ and colliery-owners’ responses, the press is remarkably silent on such an event – despite the twin novelties of steam propulsion at sea, still in its infancy, and the repurposing of a railway engine for riverine use. [3]

The story does, however, serve as a neat illustration of the fundamental links between the railways and the sea, linked by coal. From the outset the powerful coal magnates of the north, landowners with several collieries, saw the potential in facilitating the links between the coalfields and outlets to the sea for domestic export, the best route to moving large quantities of coal. It was this great trade in coal from the 16th century onwards that gave rise to the expression ‘coals to Newcastle’ as an expression for a futile endeavour: coal was Newcastle, benefiting from the rich Durham and Northumberland seams, and the trade was so profitable that ships taking coal to London ran in ballast (empty) on the voyage home: there was no real need for a return or exchange cargo.

The railways and the ports

Just five years after that inaugural passenger service in 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway was linked to a new port at Middlesbrough on the Tees for the transhipment of coal via the River Tees, but the demand soon outgrew the port and further development was needed.

Historic B&W aerial photo of rail lines surrounding a dock in the foreground, with several ships in it. In the middle ground is the Tees with the Transporter Bridge to left, and in the background a rural landscape contrasting with the industrial riverscape
Middlesbrough Dock and the Transporter Bridge, 1949
This post-war view of the dock (opened 1842) and the Transporter Bridge (opened 1911) well illustrates the integration of rail and maritime transport, replicated in many locations across the country
EAW024124 Source: Historic England Archive

At the same time the Marquis of Londonderry saw an opportunity to develop Seaham on the Durham coast to ship the coal from his nearby coalfields, connected by a railway line from Rainton from 1831. [4] The increase in maritime trade was not without its hazards: the number of shipwrecks associated with the region grew commensurately with the growth in shipping using the port. [5]

Coal thus made of the north-east a perfectly closed-loop economy. Coal was used in the manufacture of iron and steel for the engines and bodies of locomotives, trains and steamships, which were themselves powered by coal. Shipbuilding flourished accordingly in Britain’s industrial centres, particularly where there was a strong coal hinterland. Built using coal, powered by coal, and destined to carry coal, the steam collier built on the banks of the Tyne and the Wear unlocked cargo capacity for ever greater shipments of coal to meet demand. Coal created both its own demands and the means to fulfil them.

In terms of the coal trade, railways were intended at the beginning – through the development of port connections – to serve the shipping of coal, and not to replace it. The growth in freight hauled by rail, including coal, never did put the steam colliers out of work for many and complex reasons, not least the fact that from the outset the railways facilitated access to the ports, and hence port development by the coal magnates.

From our 21st century perspective, this approach, while understandable in terms of the bigger picture, seems counter-intuitive. The reliance on shipping rather than devolution to the railways to reach the domestic market would certainly come to place Britain in great danger during the two World Wars. Coal was needed to, quite literally, ‘keep the home fires burning’: it was required for factory production, for domestic heating, lighting and cooking, to build and to power the trains that connected the country, for shipbuilding and to bunker both British steamers and ships from all over the world arriving at British ports. It was therefore vulnerable to supply disruption and economic loss in both income and ships – and, of course, human lives.

Historic black and white print of three men lit up by the engines into which they are shovelling coal in a vast and dark space symbolising the power of the engines and the size of the ship, and underlining the fact the machines depend on these men.
Heroes : in the stokeholds of the Mercantile Marine
Three stokers shovel coal aboard ship
James McBey, 1917 (Art.IWM ART 1409). Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/17930

The steam colliers were vital, and thus became a clear target of the Scarborough minefield laid by enemy shipping during the First World War. During the Second World War colliers likewise had to contend with mines and the ever-present possibility of a U-boat strike or bombardment from the air. [For a little more on the attacks on collier shipping in the First World War, see our previous blogs on Sir Francis (June 1917) and The Schooners’ Last Stand, (September 1917).]

Fish’n’Chips

As well as taking goods to market – and facilitating their international export as well as domestic circulation by sea – the railways also brought fish from market. The expansion of the railway network over Britain coincided with the development of the steam trawler exploiting the fish stocks of the North Sea and North Atlantic.

The catch could be brought to market more quickly by steam trawler and onward despatch by the burgeoning railway network meant that from the late 19th century onwards inland communities could benefit as much as coastal communities from ready access to fish. It was a cheap meal – because it could be brought in quickly and in quantity – and a nutritious and filling one, particularly important for the diet of working-class communities in industrial cities.

The steam fleets of Kingston-upon-Hull, Grimsby, and Fleetwood were particularly noteworthy, and well placed to reach the great cities of the industrial north and the Midlands – and beyond – by railway. The steam trawlers and the railways together made fish and chips a national dish.

Streetscape of brick terraced houses with round-headed door frames and windows. To right is a shop window bearing a stained glass Art Deco sunrise design with the legend 'Titus Street Fisheries' at the top.
Titus Street Fisheries fish and chip shop, 38 Titus Street, Saltaire, taken c.1966-1974, from the Eileen Deste collection. DES01/01/0626 © Historic England Archive

The wreck record parallels the twin growth of the steam trawler and the railways. Our earliest record of a steamer in the fishing trade being lost at sea in English waters dates from March 1853. The George Bolton was a ‘new screw steam schooner, which had been introduced in the fishing trade for the purpose of expediting the conveyance of fish from the coast of Holland to the London market’. She was supplied with a ‘full cargo of cod-fish, shipped on board of her from the numerous craft engaged in those fisheries, for Grimsby, where she would discharge her cargo, and thence conveyed to London by railway.’ Her boilers exploded off the Humber, almost cleaving her in two, and she sank, although collier brigs in the vicinity were able to rescue survivors, some much scalded by the explosion. [6]

Part 2 follows next week with the ever-closer connections between trains and steamers in the 20th century

With many thanks to Andrew Wyngard, railway consultant for this blog.

Logo celebrating 200 years of train travel since 1825, featuring a stylised number '200' in red with the zeros reminiscent of train wheels and terminating in the British double-arrow train logo

Footnotes

[1] Historic England NMHR records; ‘Horrible explosion of a steam packet’ Lancaster Gazette, 12 April 1817, No.826, p1

[2] Historic England NMHR records; ‘Total Loss of a Margate Steam Packet’. Stamford Mercury, 11 July 1817, No.4,503, p4

[3] The source for the story appears to be the print presented by Forster Bros, based at Scotwood-on-Tyne, depicting the Wylam Dilly ‘made to answer as a paddle tug’ in 1822 (reproduced above and in Grelling, M, nd, “Wylam Dilly: one of the world’s oldest locomotives”, National Museums Scotland). but it does not appear to be a contemporary record of events. It is undated: the typefaces and grammatical details in the caption appear more consistent with the mid- to late 19th century. It was certainly extant by 1912 when it was republished in a Newcastle paper in 1912 (Newcastle Daily Chronicle, September 10, 1912. p3) to celebrate the centenary of Henry Bell’s steamboat, the paddle steamer Comet. The newspaper credits Messrs Ord and Company, 45 Hartington Street, Newcastle, as the source of the print. John Shute Ord, shipbroker, was resident at that address in 1911 (England and Wales Census, 1911).

The caption reads “Wylam Dilly” Taken off Railway Waggon Way and fitted on a Keel called “Tom and Jerry”, at Lemington, and made to answer as a Paddle Tug, going by Quayside, Newcastle. By the mid-19th century the practice of capitalising nouns in English was very old-fashioned, but persisted to some extent in press circles, and this may be a hallmark of the print. i.e. it was handled by a press associated with the newspaper industry. There were Forsters owning tugs on the Tyne from the 1830s at least: Scotswood appears in connection with Forster ownership from the 1870s to the 1920s. There is sufficient detail in the print to suggest details from memory, perhaps from local rivermen as the Forsters had been – Tom and Jerry was a popular novel and play of 1821, just the sort of inspiration for a vessel name that was very common, Lemington was the end point of the Wylam waggonway to the river, and both Wylam and Lemington were places name-checked in acounts of the strike.

So far, so plausible – yet the print remains puzzling, in the face of the silence in the contemporary press on the Wylam Dilly‘s purported use on the river in 1822 and the fairly rudimentary nature of the paddle wheels as shown more by the movement of the water than in size or action. So far the origin of the story remains untraced, but the ‘presented’ caption at the bottom suggests to me that the original was commissioned or presented for a local publication on local industrial heritage. Wylam and Lemington were key locales in the strike, and Wylam Dilly in use on the waggonway at that time – that much is certain. Whether the locomotive actually made it onto the river is less certain.

[4] Seaham Town Council, nd, Seaham Harbour 1828-1851, published online

[5] Cant, S 2013 England’s Shipwreck Heritage: from logboats to U-boats (Swindon: English Heritage) p179

[6] Historic England NMHR records; ‘Blowing up of two Steam Vessels, and Loss of Life’, Morning Advertiser, 14 March 1853, No.19,258, p3

Diary of the Second World War – August 1945

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Graphic commemorating the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, featuring a bold 'V' with '80' above and 'VJ DAY' below.

The Terukuni Maru

In our final Diary of the Second World War, 80 years after VJ Day on 15 August 1945, we take a brief look at what it took in terms of shipping losses to enemy causes in the immediate post-war world before we circle back to the early months of the war and a rare loss of a Japanese vessel in English waters, and an even rarer one under the circumstances of war.

Sweeping the Peace

The immediate post-war world was dedicated to achieving the peace and in this the world’s navies and merchant fleets played as large a part as they had done during the days of war – but in shipping lanes that were considerably safer than they had been for the past six years: no approaching aircraft with a payload of bombs, no warships on the prowl on the surface of the sea, no submarines waiting to loose a torpedo and hole a vessel below the waterline.

Even as the new world order started to take shape and ships brought home troops, POWs and refugees, home, carried occupation forces, and took dispossessed persons and GI brides to new lives on other continents, there remained one more issue that was harder to deal with than simply ceasing fire.

After both World Wars there were occasional losses to stray mines following the cessation of hostilities (see our post on losses after the First World War, which were recorded right up to 1925). Between VE Day on 8 May 1945 to VJ Day 15 August 1945, there was only one war-related loss in English waters: HMS Kurd, mined off the Lizard with the loss of 16 crew while on those self-same necessary clearance activities in July 1945.

As late as 1950 the Ramsgate trawler Volante exploded after striking a mine in the Thames Estuary, although fortunately, in that case, all hands escaped.

These were the very last direct maritime victims of the Second World War within English territorial waters. Mines continued to wash up on beaches on a regular basis until the 1950s and 1960s and less frequently since then, although they still occur and require dealing with.

A Japanese liner in 1939

From the immediate post-war period, we now circle back to think about VJ Day and events earlier in the Second World War. Of course, the events in question – the atomic bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the surrender of Japan – took place on the other side of the world and so we cannot commemorate the end of the war directly with events in our waters in the year of 1945.

The war, however, came to Japan’s door in the waters of the Thames Estuary in November 1939 with the loss of the Terukuni Maru – described in the contemporary press as a ‘crack liner’ – i.e. a first-class liner (a slightly old-fashioned usage now, but which survives in expressions such as ‘crack shot’). Her prestige was demonstrated in several ways, such as the fact that she was a motor-driven vessel, rather than a steamer.

1930s lithograph postcard of the Terukuni Maru in port bow view at sea, with the legend of her owners NYK Line to top right, underneath her name and tonnage in both English and Japanese
1930s postcard of the motor vessel Terukuni Maru (Public domain: Wikimedia Commons)

Terukuni Maru and Nagasaki

The Terukuni Maru was completed in 1930 for the Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) Line as a link between Japan and Europe. She was built by Mitsubishi at Nagasaki, reflecting the increasing pre-war Japanese industrial confidence which saw ships built domestically, rather than via orders placed with foreign shipyards. [1] This shipyard would be devastated by the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. An annotated aerial view of Nagasaki in the US National Archives from 1945 identifies the shipyard (marked 2 on plan), while the shipyard is seen devastated in this aerial view of 1946 with sunken shipping also visible.

The final voyage of Terukuni Maru

The Terukuni Maru left Yokohama for London on 24 September 1939 – but not without war risk insurance: it was a journey that may have seemed safe in the Far East but would become increasingly risky as it neared a Europe in conflict.

As they neared the English coast in November 1939, that journey would become riskier still. There had been plentiful recent minelaying all along the east coast of England: by U-boats on the Suffolk coast and off the mouths of the Thames and Humber by destroyer groups, each claiming several ships. US naval intelligence warned that ‘thirty-nine mines had been sighted adrift off the English coast’. [2] British intelligence suggested that on the nights of 20 and 21 November German mine-laying aircraft had been active. [3] Among the ships attributed to the Thames destroyer group’s activities was the Dutch liner Simon Bolivar, bound from Amsterdam to South America, on 18 November.

There were already swept War Channels off the coast of the UK for Allied shipping and neutrals alike – mines being no respecter of neutrality – for at the outset of war Japan was neutral. Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was yet to come.

Both the British naval authorities and the captain of the Terukuni Maru were well aware of the dangers ahead.

Captain B Matsukura gave an interview to The Times. in which he said that, having arrived in the Channel on the morning of 19 November, his vessel was boarded by naval officers for clearance and guidance towards the swept War Channels. [4] They finally weighed anchor for London with their 28 remaining passengers on the morning of 21 November with the assistance of a British pilot, while five crew were posted to scan for mines. However, as lunch was being served, ‘there was a terrific explosion . . . the ship shot up, several plates were broken, and three of the passengers were injured.’ [5] To Reuters he said that ‘When we struck the mine the ship shivered and jumped into the air.’ [6] The master gave his opinion that: ‘I would say it was a deep mine. If it had been an ordinary floating mine at least one of my look-outs would have seen it. My own belief is that it was a magnetic mine.’ [7]

All on board saved – including an unusual passenger

The ship’s engines were disabled and the pilot suggested beaching the ship, but it proved impossible to do so, and she began to list. However, the time it took for her to finally sink, 40 minutes later, and the relatively few passengers (most having disembarked earlier in the voyage) meant that it was possible to save all on board in eight lifeboats: 28 passengers, a passenger’s dog, 177 crew, and the pilot. The ship then finally heeled over to starboard and sank. [8]

There was another passenger – a stowaway of sorts. A falcon had flown on board, exhausted and hungry in the eastern Mediterranean, and was ‘taken care of by the bath-steward, but otherwise regarded as a bird of ill-omen.’ It was placed on board the Beaverford, one of the ships which had come to the rescue, and taken to London Zoo. The Beaverford was in Convoy HXF (Halifax-UK Fast), having made the journey ‘northabout’ via Scotland and bound for Dover, which suggests the convoy was on scene and others may well have been able to assist, including their escorts HMS Acasta and HMS Ardent. [9] The falcon’s survival made a good story and a feelgood picture for the press, even if its feathers had been somewhat ruffled by its extraordinary journey.

Images flashed around the world

But someone else also took good pictures of the wreck as it was taking place – the ship’s photographer, K Asami. The Daily Mirror told its readers: ‘You owe the amazing pictures in today’s Daily Mirror to a boy of eighteen . . . His photographs will be well paid for. It won’t be only camera work that will have earned him the money, but initiative and enterprise.’ [10]

That picture of the wreck itself is now in the Mirrorpix archives – search on Terukuni Maru – and and tells the full story at a glance – the ship heeling over to starboard, her bows already below water, the passengers escaping, and the swarms of other vessels giving assistance at the scene. The viewpoint is high, and taken from some distance, so he was able to take his photograph safe on board another vessel, giving him a stable platform to create a coherent image that told a powerful story.

Clearly he was able to take his most precious – and portable – possession with him, and became an accidental war journalist. Photography – and the democratisation of photography – made it possible to record shipwrecks as they actually happened, a trend which started to significantly come into its own during the First World War, can be said to have come of age during the Second World War, and is a precursor to today’s crowdsourced mobile phone footage that contributes so much to modern television news bulletins.

Orderly evacuations such as those on board the Terukuni Maru, or aboard the WWI loss Ballarat (subject of an earlier post) made it easier to do so, or those on board rescuing vessels could also take pictures (covered in our post on HMHS Anglia, also WWI). The teenage Asami’s astonishing photograph was syndicated around the world by radiophoto – a means of remote transmission of photography which emerged in the 1920s and 30s (also called Wirephoto by the Associated Press). For example, it was reproduced in the New York Times, where it was described as ‘passed by British censor’. [11]

Those who were there could thus bring a perspective that professional journalists just could not cover, but the conventional press could, of course, avidly film and interview survivors: check out this Gaumont newsreel of 23 November 1939.

Censorship and the War Channels

The reason Asami’s picture passed by the censor was that there was no identifiable detail as to the vessel’s location and no press report gave details other than ‘North Sea’ or ‘England’s east coast’, in conformity with British wartime censorship, even internationally. For example, in the Daily Mirror, we are told: ‘Crowds saw the crack Japanese liner Terukuni Maru sink off the East Coast yesterday after striking a Nazi mine.’ [12]

Hidden in plain sight

Yet there is an interesting story that is hidden in plain sight and wartime censorship has nothing to do with it. The position of the wreck has received no commentary as far as I am aware, until now.

The wreck’s position and identity have always been known with a consistent charting history since the date of loss, wartime reports on her position and marking, and dispersal activity in 1950 – an unbroken chain of reporting. [13]

The official Lloyd’s casualty report was finally made on 19 February 1940, and stated ‘reported to have sunk in forty minutes after striking a mine off Harwich on the 21st November, 1940’ although further correspondence ensued with the owners, who were reluctant to give up the possibility of salvage. However, by May 1940, they had ‘no objection to the record ‘Sunk – War Loss 11.39′ being made against this ship’s name in the Society’s Register Book.’ [14]

The wreck is charted and located around 3.5 miles or so NNE of the Sunk Head Tower light, and 2 miles ENE of the Inner Sunk light, nearly 12 miles east of Frinton-on-Sea, Essex. [15] The pilot’s suggestion of beaching the ship confirms its proximity to local sandbanks. [16] The Daily Mirror had said ‘crowds’ witnessed the wreck, which appears to be corroborated by the reminiscences of an eyewitness standing as a boy with his friend on the cliffs at Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, on 21 November 1939: he saw a liner he believed to be the Terukuni Maru sailing near the Sunk lightvessel go up in ‘an enormous plume of water’ and ‘turn on her side’. [17] This position also seems consistent with two boats from the Terukuni Maru, still complete with their oars and a quantity of ships’ biscuits still inside, fetching up at Den Hoorn and De Koog on the Dutch coast a couple of weeks later. [18]

What exactly was the Terukuni Maru doing there? She was heading north from the Downs off the eastern coast of Kent for London, so how come she was as far north as off the Sunk light vessel? The location of the wreck is nearly 30 miles north of Margate, where she could ’round the corner’ west into the Thames.

Map showing the location of the Terukuni Maru near the east coast of England, Frinton to the west, the approaches to the Thames to the south-west, and Margate almost due south.
Maps Data: Google Earth; Image: Landsat, Copernicus; Data: SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO

The Terukuni Maru had a British pilot on board, familiar with the many sandbanks of the Thames, and who will have been up-to-date with the war channels, adding a new layer of requirements for careful navigation – and the vessel was proceeding in accordance with instructions given when boarded by naval officers. She might well have drifted a little after being mined, since her engines were disabled, but she cannot have drifted very far, if at all, in the 40 minutes it took her to sink. Yet she was seen off Frinton-on-Sea near the Sunk light vessel by witnesses, with many vessels coming to her rescue; she was recorded by Lloyd’s as mined off Harwich; and has a consistent history of charting and identification by the UK Hydrographic Office since the time of loss.

So why was she there? Examination of data for wrecks which were mined in English waters during the first four months of the war shows that there is a small cluster off this area corresponding to those few days of activity noted above. It seems natural that the Simon Bolivar, coming across from Amsterdam on 18 November, would have joined the war channel close to Harwich (after all, Harwich and the Hook of Holland have been connected by a regular service for centuries) but it is harder to work out exactly why the Terukuni Maru was so far north of her expected peacetime course, when the weather was not a factor and her crew had expert pilotage and Admiralty advice.

The clue, perhaps, is in the words ‘the expected course’. The vessel will have been directed towards the swept War Channels, and it could be that the wreck remains of the Terukuni Maru form a tangible record of something short-term and ephemeral – a set of instructions, a change of course, a temporary alteration to the war channels, and direction towards known channels believed swept and safe – as the area near the recent wreck Simon Bolivar would have seen significant sweeping activity to make the area safe. Or was she directed away from London to Harwich?

There is an intriguing comment in a secondary source, synthesised from contemporary Australian and Singaporean newspapers, [19] which describes the position of loss as 8 miles north of Margate, 20 miles east of Shoeburyness. That position is some 24 miles south of the known and charted position of the wreck, but it would certainly be a location more compatible with a vessel turning east into the Thames from the Downs. Yet she cannot have drifted 24 miles to her final location of loss when she was seen off Harwich having exploded.

There is clearly more to discover.

Conclusion

The Terukuni Maru demonstrates the sense of menace present in the world’s shipping lanes from the outset of the Second World War and which would finally be brought to a close worldwide on VJ Day. The losses of Simon Bolivar and Terukuni Maru in close temporal and geographical proximity brought home in headlines around the world the danger posed to neutrals by unsignalled minefields in the early years of – and throughout – the war. As a neutral at this stage of the war, Japan was outraged, and this was a rare maritime loss for Japan prior to her entry into the war at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. So this wreck marks a moment in time for Japanese vessels during the Second World War.

Despite press censorship, we see also a positive shift in the documentation of shipwrecks by the growing medium of photography and the development of war journalism. The wreck’s dispersal in 1950 echoes the parallel efforts made in post-war minesweeping and the constant reminders of war debris in various forms. From September 3, 1939 to August 15, 1945, the Terukuni Maru was but one of many victims of the war in English territorial waters: the remains of some 349 vessels, some positively identified, some with potential attributions, and some unknown, are recorded in Historic England’s dataset, with many more known only from documentary evidence. [20]

It seems there is more to discover, so we may well return to the Terukuni Maru in due course.

The one Japanese loss of the Second World War in English waters, the Terukuni Maru has been an appropriate wreck to mark the final edition of the Diary of the Second World War on this blog. We will continue to cover other shipwreck stories within English waters: all Second World War entries, and those for the Diary of the First World War will remain archived and accessible.

Footnotes

[1] Lloyd’s Register Foundation Archive and Library, completion report for the Terukuni Maru, 28th June 1930, LRF-PUN-W283-0129-R. There is some confusion in some secondary sources over whether she was built at Kobe or Nagasaki, possibly because some elements of her construction were overseen by the Kobe surveyor, necessitating some correspondence with the Nagasaki surveyor, all of which is also in the Lloyd’s Register Foundation archives.

[2] Rohwer, J and Hümmelchen, G 2007-2025 Chronik des Seekrieges 1939-1945 November 1939 (Württembergische Landesbibliothek: published online) (in German); New York Times, 23 November 1939, No. 29,888, p2 (subscription service).

[3] Terukuni Maru Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) Line 1930-1939 https://www.derbysulzers.com/shipterukunimaru.html, based on contemporary newspapers. This source covers the Terukuni Maru as a motor vessel fitted with Sulzer engines. Attribution to a parachute mine is supported by eyewitness accounts from Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, reminiscences in 2007 of a witness who had, with a friend, seen parachute mines being dropped as a boy of 14 on 20 November 1939.

[4] The Times, 22 November 1939, No.48,569, p8

[5] ibid.

[6] Malaya Tribune, 22 November 1939, p1

[7] Straits Times (Singapore), 6 December 1939, p10

[8] The Times, 22 November 1939, No.48,569, p8

[9] The Times, 25 November 1939, No.48,572; convoyweb Convoy HXF 8. The falcon was a peregrine falcon which arrived at the Zoo on 23 November 1939, listed as ‘caught at sea’ and presented by the Chief Officer of the SS Beaverford, Surrey Commercial Docks. It died on 29 July 1940. With very warm thanks to the Librarian at the Zoological Society of London for this information.

[10] Daily Mirror, 22 November 1939, No.11,220, pp 1, 10-11, 20

[11] New York Times, 23 November 1939, No. 29,888, p7 (subscription service)

[12] Daily Mirror, 22 November 1939, p20

[13] United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) report 14537, 28 November 1939 onwards

[14] Lloyd’s Register Foundation Archive & Library, Report of Total Loss, Casualty, &c. for Terukuni Maru, 29 February 1940 LRF-PUN-W283-0109-W

[15] Correlation of the wreck’s charted position with key seamarks and landmarks using geospatial information tools

[16] The Times, 22 November 1939, No.48,569, p8

[17] Eyewitness writing in 2007 on his experiences as a teenager witnessing the wreck on the Warsailors Forum

[18] e.g. in De Limburger, Vol. 70, No.284, 5 December 1939, p6 (in Dutch)

[19] https://www.derbysulzers.com/shipterukunimaru.html

[20] Examination of the National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR), Historic England, August 2025

Greek freighter, SS Mount Othrys, in collision on the Thames (1945)

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Historical photograph of the SS Mount Othrys, a damaged cargo vessel, highlighting its collapsed structure due to the aftermath of a collision.
Undated photograph of what may possibly be the damaged front section of Mount Othrys at the time of the accident. Unknown photographer. Copyright: © Historisches Marinearchiv, HMA (by kind permission, 17/01/2025)

Written by Tanja Watson, Maritime Research Specialist, Historic England

This week’s blog looks at the loss event of the SS Mount Othrys (όρος Όθρυς) – a Greek cargo vessel which collided with MV Erinna, a Dutch oil tanker, on the narrower part of the river Thames, near Canvey Island, on Sunday 7 January 1945. While not a war loss, the Greek-owned Panamanian-flagged freighter demonstrates an accident that can easily happen in a busy thoroughfare. Both vessels caught fire in the collision but thanks to the quick response of a nearby fireboat stationed at Holehaven, the oil tanker and most of its cargo could be rescued. The steamer, however, became a total wreck and its remains were later scrapped.

Greek support

Just over 100 losses of Greek-owned vessels have been recorded within the 12 nautical mile limit of England’s coastline; circa twenty of these date from the Second World War.[1] The Mount Othrys offers the opportunity to highlight the important role Greek shipowners played under German occupation during the Second World War. Long-standing connections with the British shipping industry before the War made them an obvious ally, and their continued support of Britain throughout the War – allowing almost the entire Hellenic merchant fleet to be used for transporting goods (40 million tons of supplies) and troops alongside the Allied Forces, at great cost to the shipowners themselves – were invaluable in the fight against the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan.[2] By the end of the War, the Greek merchant fleet had lost almost 80% of their ocean-going freighters, every passenger vessel, and more than 2,000 seamen.[3]

Mount Othrys

At the outbreak of the War, Greece had the ninth largest merchant marine in the world, consisting of around 500 vessels, with an additional 100 Greek-owned steamships sailing under British and Panamanian flags. The British government chartered a number of these, Mount Othrys being one of them. A regular on the large Allied slow convoys; sailing the Sierra Leone (Freetown)/ Halifax (later New York)/ Sydney (Cape Breton) or Halifax or New York and the UK routes, it participated in 14 convoys between 1940-44, transporting supplies such as coal, pitch, and potatoes.[4]

Black and white photograph of the SS Mount Othrys, a Greek cargo vessel, in the water. The ship is shown with masts and cargo equipment visible, taken from the side with some coastline in the background.
Photograph of the SS Mount Othrys at sea, taken in September 1943 by the U.S. Coast Guard. Copyright: Historisches Marinearchiv (HMA), Raul Maya collection, HMA (by kind permission ).

The steel-hulled freighter was originally built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast in 1919 as SS Newton and under ownership of Lamport & G. Holt, for the Brazil & River Plate Steam Navigation Co. Ltd. in Liverpool.[5] In 1933, Newton was changed to Mount Othrys on transfer to Greek ownership (first Theseus Shipping Co. Ltd, Athens; then Rethymnis & Kulukundis, Panama; and in 1936, Kulukundis Shipping Company). Her final owner, Emmanuel Markou, purchased her in 1938, continuing her registration under Panamanian flag. Markou was related to the family of Manuel Kulukundis – a British-Greek banker, shipowner, and chief negotiator with the British government in the discussions around chartering the Greek merchant fleet around that time. Kulukundis and his cousin had founded the famous Rethymnis & Kulukundis (R&K) in 1921, which eventually became the largest Greek shipping office in London.[6]

The collision

On the morning of the collision, at around 10.30am, the MV Erinna, a 9,100-ton Shell tanker built in 1936, laden with 8,000 tons of motor spirit (80% octane), was pulling out into the fairway from Coryton Wharf, assisted by two tugs and heading down river, outward bound. Meanwhile, the SS Mount Othrys, a 6,500-ton vessel, was about to arrive to its destination, London, having picked up its cargo from the Canadian Port of Saint John on Newfoundland.[7] It was transporting Quaker Oats in cardboard boxes and bulk grain, and was making upriver, passing Holehaven, the creek to the west side of Canvey Island on the lower Thames.

Black and white photograph of the Greek cargo vessel SS Mount Othrys at sea, showing its steel hull and smokestack.
Photograph of the Dutch oil tanker MV Erinna, date and photographer unknown. Copyright: Stichting: Maritiem-Historische Databank, (Permission granted)

For whatever reason, as the Erinna moved out into the fairway, the Mount Othrys collided with her – striking the Erinna on the port side and bursting No7 port tank. Some 350 tons of petrol gushed out and showered the two ships and surrounding water. A spark must have ignited and both vessels were suddenly engulfed in flames. The crews on both vessels started abandoning ship, some even diving into the flaming water.[7]

The National Fire Service

Fortunately, the collision was heard by the crew of the National Fire Service (NFS) fireboat, the F.B.282 Laureate, normally stationed at nearby Holehaven, and upon seeing the flames the crew immediately scrambled to assist, laying out hose and foam branches on the deck of the fireboat. During World War II, the London Fire Brigade’s Thames River Formation used fireboats to fight fires along the banks of the Thames and protect ships in the river. It had about 70 craft, including fireboats, fire floats, and other tenders, and was ‘the first to be equipped with radio communications’.[8]

A black and white image showing a group of crew members on a small boat in the river Thames, with some members waving flags. The Tower of London is visible in the background.
With the Tower of London in the background, NFS firemen of the River Thames Formation travel down the river on their way to an incident in 1943. (D 17215) Copyright: © IWM https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205200557

As the first arrival to the scene, an immediate decision had to be made as the two burning vessels were starting to drift apart. The section leaders on board the Laureate judged the tanker as in the greatest danger as well as the greatest threat to any nearby shipping, jetties and wharves. Approaching the tanker’s starboard side, the firefighters clambered on board with their hoses which soon changed spraying water to foam. Altogether, the NFS men were reported to have worked for 21 hours, with some injured and taken to hospital.[9]

“The speed and effectiveness with which this was done was due not only to the resolution of the branch operators, but also to the unflagging energy of the pump operators, who, in using nearly 600 gallons of foam solution, had rapidly to unseal and empty more than 100 5-gallon tins into the multiple jet inductor.” [10]

Several members of the crews of the two ships were reported missing, believed drowned. Eventually the flames were put out and the tanker was saved with very little loss to the cargo. Other vessels continued to try and save the Mount Othrys, the Thames tug Sun VIII being one of them [11], but eventually the freighter had to be beached at Scar’s Elbow on Canvey Island.[12]

On January 8th, the day after the collision, the cargo vessel was re-floated and four tugs attempted to tow it to nearby Tilbury. This failed and the vessel was re-beached at Mucking. The superstructure and majority of the accommodation amidships had completely burnt out. The engine and boiler rooms were flooded, and the vessel hogged and was badly cracked. On the 20th January, at 02:30, the ship broke into two parts and was declared a total loss.[13]

Commendations were awarded to some of the Thames firefighters involved in putting out the fires, among the last to be given national gallantry awards: one British Empire Medal and nine King’s Commendations for Brave Conduct.[14] Three of Mount Othrys‘ crew were killed in the accident – two Greeks (both stokers) and a Brit.[15]

Footnotes

[1] National Marine Heritage Record (NMHR), Historic England. Marine records are currently searched via the Heritage Gateway (Mount Othrys, record id 1260991)
[2] Greek Shipping Miracle: Decimation of the fleet 1940-1945
[3] Voudouris, Dr. Ioannis, The Contribution of the Hellenic Merchant Fleet during the WWII (April 30, 2017)
[4] Arnold Hague Convoy Database, OS/KMS Convoy Series
[5] WWI Standard Ships, War Justice (the name given to Mount Othrys in initial construction phase)
[6] Greek Shipping Hall of Fame, Manuel E. Kulukundis (1898-1988)
[7] Historisches Marinearchiv (HMA), Mount Othrys
[8] Pike, David C, A retired London Fireman: A short history of London’s fireboats (April 18, 2021)
[9] The Crawley & District Observer, 22 September 1945, page 2
[10] Canvey Island: History & memories of a unique island community, Thomas Henry Setchell BEM
[11] Thames Tugs: London Tugs Limited, Sun VIII
[12] Historisches Marinearchiv (HMA), Mount Othrys
[13] Pike, David C, A retired London Fireman: A short history of London’s fireboats (April 18, 2021)
[14] Historisches Marinearchiv (HMA), Mount Othrys

VE Day

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Flying Fortress B17G 44-8640

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe on 8 May 1945 we are republishing this blog looking at the very last craft of any kind to be lost off the coast of England.

The last few months of the war saw a significant decline in shipping and aircraft losses over the sea attributable to war causes. The last six weeks of the war saw 10 shipping casualties to war causes in English waters. Over the same period there were 6 aircraft lost to non-war causes (mechanical failure or accident, for example).

The seventh and last aircraft, and last loss of the war in English waters, was the exception, and a war loss, despite its peaceable mission – just one day before the celebration of Victory in Europe. And it is to events in Europe we must turn first of all to understand the mission of the last aircraft of the war to find a grave with most of its crew in England’s territorial sea.

Background:

As the end of the war approached, there was real desperation in the occupied Netherlands after the arduous Hongerwinter [“Hunger Winter”) of 1944-5, of whom one of the best-known survivors was the actress Audrey Hepburn, whose mother was Dutch and who grew up in the Netherlands.

The Hongerwinter arose from a terrible combination of circumstances, any one of which on its own would have been bad enough Although the Allies pushed ahead after breaking out from Normandy, the objective of Arnhem in the Netherlands in September 1944 during Operation Market Garden proved a ‘bridge too far’. Attempted strikes by Dutch railway personnel led to retaliation by the occupiers, preventing food supplies from getting through, and when this blockade was lifted, there were overwhelming obstacles to overseas relief efforts. Although the Allies had managed to capture Antwerp in September 1944, it was several weeks before the port could be used and, even if it had been in use earlier, the the occupied western provinces of the Netherlands with the greatest population density,  and least agricultural land, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, remained cut off. The canals and rivers froze early that winter and fuel for lorries was scarce. Limited relief supplies from neutral Sweden and Switzerland had helped a little but the situation remained dire. (1) 

Sepia pen and ink wash of seated woman in hat with a boy and a girl in the background.
‘They have taken all, and our food’, Netherlands. Eric William Taylor, 1944, purchased by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. Taylor would go on to record the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.  © IWM Art.IWM ART LD 4989

The relief effort: 

Even as the Allies closed in on Berlin and the end of the war in Europe, they were able to refocus from a purely offensive approach towards a relief effort and the rebuilding of a new Europe. The Lancasters of the RAF and the B-17 Flying Fortresses of the USAAF based in England, which had so recently been deployed on bombing missions were perfectly suited to dropping food parcels to the Netherlands, and thus Operations Manna (RAF) and Chowhound (USAAF) were born.

Historic B&W photo of six men loading the sacks, their uniforms streaked with escaped flour.
Operation Manna: Ground crew of No.514 Squadron at RAF Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire, loading cement bags filled with foodstuffs into the bomb bay of a Lancaster bomber, 29 April 1945, destined for those parts of Holland still under German occupation. © IWM CL 2490

It was a massive logistical effort which drew upon the resources of the Allied airfields of East Anglia at very short notice from mid-April 1945, with the situation becoming urgent against German resistance and the risk of further deliberate flooding both of agricultural fields and transport infrastructure a real possibility. There were no spare parachutes available, so safe conduct for low-level food drops was arranged, to begin in late April 1945.

Black & white photo of Dutch citizen waving at three aircraft flying low over a town.
Dutch citizens wave as food is dropped from Lancaster bombers over the Netherlands in April 1945. Fotocollectie Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst Eigen © Nationaal Archief, CC0 120-0739

The mission: 

Flying Fortress B17G 44-8640 of the 334th Bomber Squadron, 95th Bomb Group, set out from USAAF Horham in Suffolk on 7 May 1945, the day after the surrender of German forces in the Netherlands and the day before Victory in Europe day. Along with its precious cargo of food there were 13 on board, including observers from the station’s Photographic Section, all anticipating a routine mission.

Nose and two engines of silver aircraft inside a hangar with white roof.
A B17G Flying Fortress under restoration at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum, Georgia, USA. Jud McCranie, CC BY-SA 4.0

Following a successful drop 44-8640 turned for home. There were still pockets of resistance from the occupation forces, which is believed to have had a bearing on subsequent events. No. 2 engine was reported as ‘running rough’, with smoke and oil, thought to originate from rogue flak fired by the occupation forces at the aircraft in the IJmuiden area. (2) 

According to a crashed aircraft recovery specialist based at RAF Ford, Sussex, in 1944, crew would nurse their crippled aircraft, whether shot up, suffering mechanical failure, or simply running out of fuel, back from overseas missions to the English coastline, but would then often be forced to crash-land at or near the nearest available base, unable to make it back to their home bases. (3) 

As the situation worsened, the crew of 44-8640 realised that reaching the coast was going to be impossible and, fearing an explosion, they baled out over the sea off Suffolk, in the vicinity of Benacre Ness or Southwold, with one survivor recalling that the engine dropped away in a ‘ball of flame’ as he got away. The aircraft then fell into the sea.

Two men were picked up alive by a Catalina flying boat after some time in the water, and it is their testimony that enables us to know what happened to 44-8640, but the remainder of the crew were killed, including the observers.

Commemoration: 

Those of the crew whose bodies were recovered were interred at the American Cemetery and Memorial, Coton, Cambridge, but others were never found and are presumed entombed with the aircraft on the seabed.

Five aircraft seen in a blue sky with angel h
Detail of a mosaic on the ceiling of the chapel at the American Cemetery and Memorial, Coton, depicting aircraft being escorted by angels. James O Davies DP180621 © Historic England Archive

This, the final loss of any craft in English waters to war causes, was also one of the cruel tragedies of the war: to be shot at over the Netherlands and to keep the aircraft airborne so many miles only to lose the battle so close to the English coast, and all on a humanitarian mission. Somewhere off the coast lie its remains, which are yet to be discovered but which are automatically protected under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.

Victory in Europe was, perhaps, a collective sigh of relief, but it was not the end of the war, which would only come in August 1945 with VJ Day. It was a victory achieved at a huge human cost which has left legible traces in the historic environment – the destruction of historic fabric from London to Coventry and beyond, the legible traces in standing buildings from the suburban semi to national museums, the construction of military installations that have since become ‘historic’ in themselves, the legacy of commemoration – and the remains of ships and aircraft on the seabed, lost to war causes over the years from 1939 to 1945.

References: 

(1) For more detail on this subject, see Sutch, A. 2016 “Manna from Heaven”, RAF Museum blog, online

(2) Onderwater, H. 1985 Operation Manna/Chowhound: the Allied food droppings April?may 1945 Netherlands: Unieboek

(3) Oral history testimony, Ronald Cant (RAF Corporal, 1942-1946) as told to his daughter in reminiscing over D-Day, 2019.