Month: July 2018

Diary of the War, July 1918

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The ‘rag-tag and bobtail of the seas’

On 30 July 1918 a U-boat sighted a ship on a westbound course some 25 miles or so off the south Devon coast in the English Channel.

She had happened upon Stock Force, a modern steel-built collier of only 732 tons, launched in 1917, one of the little ‘rag-tag and bobtail of the seas’, under the command of Harold Auten. (1) Steaming westward without convoy, the Stock Force, though small, was better than nothing for a U-boat half-way through a hitherto unsuccessful war patrol.

At 5pm the U-boat launched a torpedo whose track was spotted by the crew of Stock Force, who tried their best to port the helm and put the engines full speed astern. Even so, they could not avoid the incoming torpedo, which struck their ship on the starboard side forward. The explosion caused a ‘tremendous shower’ of timber and a 40-foot hole in her side, and she began to settle down by the bows, with five men injured. (2) There was nothing for it but for the crew to put the long-rehearsed ‘abandon ship’ order into effect.

Not all the crew got away. There were some left behind . . . with five wounded taken below decks by the surgeon, working ‘up to his waist in water’, to have their hurts attended to.  (3)

The U-boat surfaced half a mile distant and watched for some 15 minutes as the crew pulled away, then drew closer to investigate on the port beam, perhaps considering why, as you might too, why a modern vessel, and a collier at that, was throwing up such a shower of timber.

Thus began one of the most well-known duels between a U-boat and a Q-ship. In a sense Stock Force was indeed coasting in home waters, but she was on patrol in the hope of attracting just such attention from a U-boat. The timber was ballast bolted into her hold to keep her afloat in the event of being torpedoed – ‘floatation planks’. (4)

The men who got away were a ‘panic party’ for show: the remainder of a crew larger than usual for a collier of her size were now busy dropping all pretence along with her false sides as they opened fire with the ship’s hidden guns, minus her forward gun and some of the ammunition – the gun had been knocked out of action and the ammunition blown up in the explosion. One man was pinned underneath the forward gun and remained there ‘cheerfully and without complaint’ (5) while in a very real situation of danger. Nevertheless, forty minutes after the torpedo had struck, the Stock Force was engaging her enemy.

Contemporary black and white photograph of merchant seamen, two men in foreground, with gun in background being manned by crew to right.
Manning the gun. Image courtesy of the Butland family, descendants of William Butland, Chief Petty Officer on board Stock Force.

They were all naval men wearing the clothes of merchant seamen, and such was the level of pretence there was even a ‘Board of Lies’ aboard the vessel, so that every man knew the story of each patrol by heart to account for the greater crew complement – the extra men were supposedly crew of one or more mined vessels (always mined, never torpedoed, to avoid the risk of the story not checking out).

The Stock Force continued to attack the U-boat, inflicting so much damage upon her periscope, conning tower, and finally also tearing a hole in the submarine’s hull. They ‘poured shell after shell until the submarine sank by the stern, leaving a quantity of debris on the water.’ (6) In turn the ferocity of the action contributed to the Stock Force‘s own demise and the water gained on them even as they tried to nurse her back towards land.

As Auten would later put it: ‘ . . . it was particularly hard to have got her almost within sight of land – the shore was only eight miles away – and then to lose her’ as ‘poor little Stock Force sank to her last home’. (7) She sank at 9.25pm with the crew taken off by two torpedo boats and a trawler. (8)

Another story of mutually assured destruction on the high seas? Not quite. There was more to the tale of the Stock Force than met the eye. Few, if any, details emerged of the action in the press, with greater prominence being given to other successes against U-boats, for example off the east coast by a British submarine and in the English Channel by a yacht (9) The key detail widely extracted in the press from a statement by David Lloyd George in Parliament was that U-boat losses now stood at 150. (10)

Details began to trickle out with crew honours gazetted, divorced from any context and prefaced only by the words that ‘The King has been graciously pleased to award the following honours . . . ‘ (11) Auten was awarded the Victoria Cross for his part commanding the action. Immediately after the war, details emerged of the Stock Force in action and it was there that the ‘kill’ of the submarine came to light. (12) The story was then widely taken up in the press, with double-page spreads and artists’ dramatic impressions of the U-boat upended and sinking below the waves, even as Auten and his crew met the public aboard Q-ship Suffolk Coast on tour. (13)

Pencil drawing of docklands, with barges in foreground and to right a submarine and ship are berthed alongside one another.
HM Q-Ship Suffolk Coast and U-155, Deutschland, St. Katherine’s Dock, London, 1918. Ministry of Information Commission, Scheme 2 © IWM (Art.IWM ART 1496)

The lost U-boat was originally attributed to U-98, which can, however, be placed south of Norway with the sinking of Alkor on 31 July and was surrendered on 16 January 1919. The attacking submarine was UB-80, which sank only to rise again, for once again she was out on patrol in September 1918 following repairs and surrendered to Italy on 26 November 1918, but it is unsurprising that at the time she was credibly believed to have been lost. Both were broken up in the UK and Italy respectively. (14)

So, after all, there is only one ship on the seabed off the south coast of Devon as a result of the action of 30 July 1918. Camouflaged in service, the Stock Force also remained camouflaged on the seabed following her demise and was attributed to two different sites, both also probably contemporary war losses, before being identified in 2011 in a location much more consistent with Auten’s description of the position of loss than the previous two candidates, at some 7 miles SW off the Bolt Tail, Devon. (15)

Or is there? We will continue the story of Stock Force across this week as we commemorate the centenary of one of the most well-known of all Q-ship incidents and its significant contribution to the maritime heritage of Devon.

[With many thanks to Steve Mortimer and John Butland for their very kind help in telling this story over the week.]

(1) Intertitle, Q-Ships, 1928, New Era Productions

(2) Auten, Lt Commander Harold, 1919, Q-boat Adventures London: Herbert Jenkins Ltd; Keble Chatterton, E, 1922 Q-Ships and their Story London: Sidgwick and Jackson Ltd

(3) London Gazette, 19 November 1918, No.31,021, p13,695

(4) Auten 1919; Keble Chatterton 1922

(5) London Gazette, 19 November 1918, No.31,021, p13,695

(6) ibid.

(7) Auten 1919

(8) London Gazette, 19 November 1918, No.31,021, p13,695

(9) for example, Hull Daily Mail, 21 August 1918, No.10,265, p2, Gloucestershire Echo, 9 August 1918, extra, p1

(10) for example, Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle, 9 August 1918, No.7,167, p4

(11) London Gazette, 13 September 1918, No.30,900, p10,847

(12) London Gazette, 19 November 1918, No.31,021, p13,695

(13) The Sphere, 14 December 1918, No.986, pp196-197

(14) U-98 https://uboat.net/wwi/boats/?boat=98 UB-80 https://uboat.net/wwi/boats/successes/ub80.html

(15) UKHO 18017; Historic England National Record of the Historic Environment records 832147, 832260, and 832265

 

 

 

45 years of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973

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The First Wreck Designated Under the Act

For our second blog this week celebrating the 45th anniversary of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, enacted on 18 July 1973, where better to start than the very first wreck designated under the Act?

We welcome guest blogger Martin Read of Plymouth University, who was at school near the Cattewater Wreck during the 1970s excavations. He subsequently became an archaeological conservator for English Heritage and the Mary Rose Trust before returning to Plymouth.

He has also taken part in excavations such as the Mary Rose & Vliegent Hart. Since 2006, he has been a Licensee for the protected Cattewater Wreck, organising surveys and research work on this site carried out by local divers and University students. He has also carried out research on the 1970s excavation archive in Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery and project manager for the Cattewater Wreck Archive Project (for Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery), funded by English Heritage (now Historic England).

Martin writes:

Plymouth has been an important maritime port since medieval times and as a result the area is rich in marine archaeological resources. During the Medieval and Tudor periods the port carried out coastal and international trade in cargos such as salted fish, wine, cloth and tin. The Cattewater, the lower estuary of the river Plym, has been the main anchorage for Plymouth since medieval times.

The Cattewater Wreck is believed to be an unidentified armed wooden merchantman from the early Tudor period. The site was discovered in 1973 and partly excavated between 1976-8. A substantial portion of the remains of the wooden hull should still be present, buried beneath anaerobic sediments and is believed to be under no immediate threat of damage or destruction.

Underwater photograph with a green hue, centred on a shipwreck timber, and a black & white measuring pole for scale in foreground.
Timbers emerging from the silt. © the estate of Keith Muckelroy/Historic England/Plymouth City Council

Discovery

Dredging for air-sea rescue craft moorings in 1973 recovered timbers and iron guns identified as being from a Tudor shipwreck. As a result, the wreck site was designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 (Order No.1), becoming the first wreck given protection by the UK Government. The designation covers a radius of 50m centring on a position of 50°21’41.4”N 04°07’27.5”W. Within this area it is an offence to tamper with, damage or remove any part of a vessel lying wrecked on or in the sea bed, or any object formerly contained in such a vessel. This includes any diving, mooring or survey without a licence from the Government.

The site was surveyed and partly excavated under Government license (1976-8). Recovered finds included structural timbers, wrought iron swivel guns on wooden beds, stone & lead shot, lead waste, ceramics, shoes, a leather purse and textiles, as well as environmental evidence, including animal and fish bones. The finds could be characterised by function as being part of the ship and its working equipment, domestic artefacts, eating and drinking equipment and stores (Redknap 1997).

The excavation results suggested that the Cattewater wreck dated to the first half of the 16th century, and has been published as being ca.1530. The vessel was interpreted as operating as an English coastal trader (Redknap 1984).

Modern colour photograph of rust-red iron cannon viewed longitudinally in its display case, with sparkly reflections on glass.
Cattewater wreck gun at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in anaerobic preservative solution. © Martin Read

 

Modern exploration

Geophysical survey techniques mean that archaeologists can examine a wreck site without physical interference. Plymouth University teaches geophysical surveying as part of undergraduate and post-graduate degrees and, since 2006, has held a Government license to dive and to carry out geophysical surveys (including sub-bottom profiler, side-scan sonar and magnetometer surveys) of the wreck site. These have identified the probable location of the wreck to be approximately 20m east of the centre of the designated area, but still within the radius of protection. Sub-bottom profile images show the wreck to be about 1m below the seabed.

A team of local divers have been used to ground-truth targets generated by the geophysical surveys and have also carried out metal-detector and probe surveys of the site, locating the wreck in the area identified by the student surveys.

Archive Project

The archive from the 1970s excavation has been deposited in Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery (Site Accession Number AR.1985.2). In 2011 English Heritage funded a project (under the National Heritage Protection Commissions Programme, Project Number: 5439 MAIN, Cattewater Wreck: Developing the Archive) to improve the long term care and management of the archive to modern archival standards and organisation. The principal outcome of this project was a more accessible archive, better able to survive in the long-term.

The project revealed that a significant proportion of the excavation archive (including about 50% of the finds) was missing, presenting difficulties when making any re-assessment of the site. The number of finds recovered during discovery and excavation is hard to be precise, 474 find numbers were used, but the same number was often used for multiple finds. The site database now consists of 790 artefact/sample/timber records, including 28 records of unlabelled finds.

Open archive boxes displaying stored archaeological artefacts.
Repackaging of the Cattewater Wreck Archive. © Martin Read

A great deal of effort has been spent over the years to consolidate the site archive, including the relocation of missing elements. In 2013 the National Maritime Museum added to the archive a number of finds, samples and documents that they held.

The original archaeological studies into the finds were carried out over 30 years ago and finds research into, for instance, leather and ceramics have advanced over that period. New scientific techniques are also now available which can be applied to finds, allowing new interpretations to be made about this important site.

Ship construction

The wreck is believed to be of an unidentified armed merchantman, a 3-masted carvel-built vessel of standard form, of 186-282 tons (Redknap 1984). Evidence from the site, such as ship construction and some finds (such as ceramic tiles) now indicate that the ship was built in southern Europe, perhaps somewhere in SW France, Iberia or in the western Mediterranean (perhaps as far east as western Italy).

Carbon-14 dating was carried out on two wooden samples taken from the ships structure. A futtock was dated to AD 1420-1600 (340~80 BP, 1610~80 ad uncalibrated, HAR-3310), whilst an oak outer planking sample was dated to AD 1429-1509 (510~50 BP, 1390-1490ad uncalibrated, UB-2225).

Tree ring analysis (dendrochronology) was carried out on two of the structural timbers, the keelson and a floor timber. Comparison with tree-ring chronologies suggested several potential dates but none of these were acceptable, e.g. the keelson appeared to match at two places, giving dates for its outer ring of A.D. 1454 or 1457, but with no confidence.

Neither Carbon-14 or tree ring dating really helps with the dating of the ship, at present, though they are consistent with the other evidence.

It is believed that the carvel ship construction technique reached northern Europe sometime in the second half of 15th century. Until better dating can be obtained, this is the most likely date for the construction of the ship.

Working life

The majority of the finds recovered were identified as being English and the ballast included local Plymouth limestone and granite.

No English ceramics of the 15th-16th century were originally identified from primary wreck contexts. However, reinterpretation of the ceramics has led to the identification of one sherd of Tudor Green Ware (from the Surrey/Hants border) dating to the late 15th-17thc, whilst another unstratified sherd has been identified as possibly part of a cooking pot from South Somerset.

International links are shown from imported finds, including Dutch, Rhenish (Raeren and Siegburg), SW French and Iberian ceramics. The largest group of ceramics recovered were identified as being Dutch, but both the Dutch and Rhenish ceramics were commonly traded into England at this period.

The scarcity of ceramics from Iberia cast some doubt on a possible Iberian origin for the wreck (Redknap 1997). A number of sherds of Iberian ceramics were recovered from the scour deposits, so may not be directly associated with the wreck. A possible Merida-type glazed floor tile, which are very rare in the UK, was found in a primary wreck context and probably came from the galley hearth.

Ceramics from southern Europe, particularly from South-West France, Iberia and Italy, have commonly been found in medieval and post-medieval deposits on land sites in Plymouth showing strong links between Plymouth and Mediterranean Europe, a result of the port’s international trade. It may be significant that two fragments of ceramics identified as being from SW France were found in primary wreck deposits.

The ship seems to have been re-ballasted in Plymouth, but non-local stone was identified as originating from around the Southern English coast, from Bristol/South Wales to Kent. This was used to indicate that the vessel was acting as a coastal trader, possibly operating between Bristol and London, but other interpretations are possible. The ballast makeup could reflect local ballasting practice, incorporating residual ballast from the re-ballasting of previous ships and therefore the main background trade links of the port.

Wrecking, salvage and site formation

Recent re-dating of the leather shows that the ship must have been wrecked after 1500, with the most likely date being in the early 16th century. This is consistent with the re-dating of the ceramics (ca.1480-ca.1525), though the possibility remains that the actual date of wrecking might be later.

A study of historic records shows that the most frequent cause of shipwreck in the Cattewater was whilst either at anchor or entering/leaving the port during a storm, with the Cattewater being particularly exposed during south westerly storms. These are also the most likely causes for the loss of the Cattewater Wreck.

Another possible scenario is due to fire. There is some evidence in support of this, though this comes mostly from the scour layers and may not relate to the wreck.

The only known casualty of the shipwreck was a dog, which had probably been used to control rats on the ship. Four bones have been identified, and measurements indicate a withers height of about 50cm (just over 20 inches), the height of a whippet, border collie or spaniel.

The wreck site was shallow enough for the salvage of anything of value to have taken place. As a result it is uncertain what cargo (if any) the ship was carrying at the time. Finds included barrel parts and cod bones, with a suggestion that salted fish might have been a cargo (though they are more likely to be victuals).

Stable isotope analysis, carried out on some of the cod bones by York University, indicated that most fish were likely to have come from local (or relatively local) waters, but one fish came from outside the area, most likely from the North Atlantic.

Most finds that could be directly associated with the wreck, including the dog bones, were recovered from amongst the ballast or between the ships planking, but a large number probably originating from the wreck were found in other, later, contexts having been eroded out.

Several scour pits were excavated around the wreck, ceramic finds indicating they were formed (or at least filled) after 1700, most likely in the early 18th century.

Present Interpretation

The original scenario put forward as a result of the 1970s excavations may still be valid, with the ship operating in the English coastal trade between Bristol and London. There is some evidence to support the identification of the ship as being an international trading vessel, possibly with links to SW France or Iberia.

Martin Read, February 2018

For more information on ongoing research on the Cattewater wreck and the archive project, please visit:

https://www.facebook.com/Cattewater-Wreck-217110428413783/

http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/cattewater_plym_2014/downloads.cfm

Select Bibliography

Carpenter, A.C., Ellis, K.H. & McKee, J.E.G. 1974 Interim Report on the Wreck Discovered in the Cattewater, Plymouth on 20 June 1973 NMM Maritime Monographs and Reports 13.

Redknap, M. 1984 The Cattewater Wreck: the investigation of an armed vessel of the early 16th century National Maritime Museum Archaeology Series 8/British Archaeological Reports – British Series 131.

Redknap, M. 1997 ‘Reconstructing 16th-century ship culture from a partially excavated site: The Cattewater Wreck:’ in Redknap, M. (ed.) Artefacts from Wrecks Oxbow Monograph 84.

600 years of the Grace Dieu

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Henry V’s Grace Dieu – medieval England’s biggest ship

View of blue river towards tree-lined bank on the far side, against a bright blue sky.
General view of the River Hamble looking north-west towards the site of the Grace Dieu, Bursledon, Hampshire

You might say that the opposite of ‘wreck’ is ‘launch’ and today, 16 July 2018, marks 600 years since the first date we can tie to the Grace Dieu in the whole of her long history, the majority of which has been spent as a wreck site in the River Hamble. In 1974 she was one of the earliest designations under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, which came into force 45 years ago this week, so a double ‘birthday’ so to speak!

Today’s guest blogger is Dr Ian Friel FSA, an independent historian, museum consultant and writer. He worked for 30 years in museums, including the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Mary Rose Trust, and was involved in NMM fieldwork on the Grace Dieu and (potential) Holy Ghost wreck sites in the early 1980s.  He is the author of three books on maritime history, including Henry V’s Navy (The History Press, 2015) and is currently working on a fourth.

Dr Friel writes:

Six hundred years ago, on 16 July 1418, William Barrowe, the Bishop of Bangor, received his travelling expenses for a trip from London to Southampton and back.  What does this less-than riveting piece of information have to do with the theme of Wreck of the Week?   The answer is that Barrowe’s mission was ‘to consecrate a certain King’s ship, there newly built, called the Gracedieu’.

The Grace Dieu was the last and biggest of four ‘great ships’ constructed for King Henry V of England between 1413 and 1420.  ‘Great ship’ was a contemporary type name and these vessels played an important role in Henry’s plans to conquer France, because eliminating French sea power was one of the keys to a successful invasion.

Big naval battles were fairly rare in the Middle Ages, but they usually ended in a series of bloody boarding actions in which big ships with large crews had the advantage.  This was clearly the chief raison d’etre of the great ships, though they also had propaganda value as symbols of English might.

The great ships were part of one of the most powerful royal war fleets ever seen in medieval England.  Major operations relied on the participation of large numbers of conscripted English vessels and hired foreign shipping, but the ‘king’s ships’ were the spearhead of the English naval war effort.   The first three great ships, the Trinity Royal (500 tons), Holy Ghost (740 tons) and the Jesus (1000 tons), were completed between 1415 and 1417.  The Trinity Royal and Holy Ghost certainly went into battle, and it’s likely that the Jesus did, as well.  The Grace Dieu’s naval career was shorter and much less eventful.

Construction of the ship began at Southampton in 1416, in a specially-dug dock.  The work was overseen by an official named Robert Berd, but it’s unlikely he was anything more than a manager and bean-counter.  There is little doubt that the Grace Dieu was designed by the project’s master shipwright, John Hoggekyn.

We know very little about the dedicated, workaholic Hoggekyn – he was eventually pensioned off after wearing himself out in royal service – but he deserves to be remembered as one of medieval England’s greatest engineers.  His achievement was on a par with that of Brunel in building the huge steamship Great Britain in the 19th century.

The Grace Dieu was clinker-built, and each overlapping strake (line of planking) was composed of three layers of boards – presumably to prevent the huge structure from collapsing under its own weight.  The ship was reckoned to be of 1400 tons burden (theoretical carrying capacity), making it the biggest vessel seen in England before Henry VIII’s time, a century later.  Measurements of the Grace Dieu made in 1430 suggest that it was 50 m to 60 m in length and about 15 m in breadth (164-197 ft x 50 ft).  It was not much smaller than Nelson’s HMS Victory of 1805, though the Grace Dieu and the other great ships will have looked very different.  They probably resembled carracks – the carrack was a large medieval ship type of Mediterranean origin, used for both trade and war.

Wood carving of a medieval ship seen broadside on, on a wavy sea, with a tall mast and sunrays to top right.
Dated to c 1419, this bench-end was originally in St. Nicholas’ Chapel, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. It depicts a two-masted carrack with two-stage fighting castles fore and aft, which show that the vessel was a warship. It dates from the years when Henry V’s royal fleet had both ‘great ships’ and carracks, though there is no evidence to link this image directly with the king’s ships. That said, it’s likely that Henry’s great ships looked something like this. Victoria and Albert Museum W.16-1921 © Victoria and Albert Museum

 

The Grace Dieu was built with a retinue of two oared fighting ships and four boats, and at least 3,906 trees were felled for the project.  Most were New Forest oaks, though beech, ash and elm were also used, along many other timbers and boards.  The ship had a huge mainmast, possibly over 50 m in height and carried two, or possibly three masts in total.  Multi-masted ships were very new in England at the time – the purpose of the additional sails was doubtless to help propel and manoeuvre big ships.  The Grace Dieu itself came with an eye-watering price-tag, costing an estimated £3,800, perhaps equal to £1,647,000,000 nowadays.

The blessing of the Grace Dieu by the Bishop of Bangor in 1418 may have marked the day on which the hull was floated out of its building dock.  Though described as ‘newly built’ at that point, it was not ready for sea until 1420.

In the spring of that year it became the flagship of a powerful patrol group assembled at Southampton.  The force included the three other great ships – it was the only occasion on which they sailed together.  By this time, however, the naval war was virtually over.  The English had broken French sea power back in 1417, allowing Henry to invade France for a second time.  There were still fears in 1420 that France’s Spanish allies might attack England, but this threat never materialised.

Most English ships of the time were of less than 100 tons, so the Grace Dieu and the other great ships must made a deep impression on contemporaries.  One of Henry’s brothers, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, wrote to the king: ‘… your great ship the Grace Dieu is ever as ready and is the fairest that ever men saw…’

However, all was not well.  England was short of sailors, and the three earlier great ships were seriously undermanned, with between 50 and 70 per cent of their original complements of 200 mariners apiece.  Even the Grace Dieu carried only 199 sailors, surely too few to properly manage such a big vessel.

Aside from the manpower problems, there was serious discontent in the fleet.  Men were refusing to be mustered – to have their names taken for pay records – and it took a real effort to get the force to sea.  The Grace Dieu finally sailed out into the Solent, but the voyage was cut short by a mutiny, led by some Devon men.  They forced the ship to put in at St Helen’s, on the western end of the Isle of Wight, and that was the end of the Grace Dieu’s war service.  Medieval England’s biggest and most expensive war machine sailed only slightly further than a modern Solent ferry.

The four great ships were taken back to the River Hamble, on the eastern side of Southampton Water, where there was a protected anchorage for the royal fleet.  The government made serious efforts to keep them afloat, for they were still emblems of English royal power, even if there was no sea war to fight.   The Grace Dieu was certainly used to impress at least one visiting Italian galley commander.  Luca di Maso degli Albizzi was wined and dined aboard the ship in 1430, and later wrote in his diary that he had never seen ‘so large and splendid a construction’.

Despite the maintenance work, the great ships all began to leak more and more. The three older vessels were laid up between 1426 and 1430, and the Grace Dieu followed a few years after.  In order to lighten the ship, much of its heavy gear was removed in 1432 and the top part of the great mainmast was cut off.  Two years later, the Grace Dieu was towed upriver to Bursledon, and placed in a mud dock cut into the riverbank.

The great ship was abandoned, but it did not moulder for long.  It was struck by lightning on the night of 7/8 January 1439, caught fire, and burned to the waterline.  Nails and other ironwork were salvaged from the wreck, along with the charred stump of the mainmast, and royal officials continued to chronicle the storage or disposal of this junk (archeology to us) for years.  However, in 1452 the record of the Grace Dieu came to a full stop.

Four hundred years later, a small stream on the bank of the Hamble changed course, and washed away some mud to reveal a big shipwreck.  First mentioned in an 1859 local guidebook, it was identified as the remains of a Danish warship destroyed by King Alfred’s forces in the 9th century.  The ‘Viking Ship’ became quite well known – and also suffered from the attentions of souvenir-hunters, who hacked bits off it.

Ironically, the worst vandal was a man who tried to record the wreck, Francis Crawshay (c 1811-78).  He was a wealthy landowner who kept a yacht on the Hamble and evidently fancied himself as an archaeologist.  Sadly, his principal excavation tool was gunpowder!  In the end, the wreck was saved by Customs and Excise – not for any archaeological reason, but because Crawshay had failed to declare his finds to the Receiver of Wreck.

The ‘Viking Ship’ was finally identified as the Grace Dieu in 1933, by the historian R C Anderson.  Anderson visited the site with a small team, at the instigation of a local man, Mr F C P Naish.  They made the first modern survey of the site, conducted a limited excavation and revealed the wreck’s unprecedented triple-skin clinker planking.

There was other work on the wreck in later decades, including a series of investigations by the National Maritime Museum’s former Archaeological Research Centre in the early 1980s.  The full shape and extent of the hull remains were revealed by sonar survey made in 2005 by the University of Southampton and the National Oceanography Centre.  This showed that only the bottom 2 m of the Grace Dieu survives, but even this remnant is massive, measuring some 32.5 m by 12.2 m.

The wreck of the Grace Dieu was bought in 1970 by the University, and in 1974 it was designated as a Protected Wreck under the 1973 Protection of Wrecks Act.  You can only visit the site of the Grace Dieu with special statutory permission, but at very low tides it is possible to see some of its timbers from the opposite riverbank in Upper Hamble Country Park – the wreck site is marked with a yellow PWA buoy.

The Grace Dieu is of international importance, one of a small number of known medieval wrecks in the UK, and one of the few in Europe of this period that can be named.  The ship owed its existence to the warlike ambitions of one of England’s most famous kings, and shows medieval maritime technology operating at its limits.  The wreck is also a monument to one of England’s most accomplished, but least known shipbuilders – John Hoggekyn.

© Ian Friel 2018

Further reading:

Carpenter Turner, W.J., ‘The building of the Gracedieu, Valentine and Falconer at Southampton, 1416–20’, Mariner’s Mirror 40 (1954), pp.55–72

I Friel, ‘Henry V’s Grace Dieu and the wreck in the R. Hamble near Bursledon, Hampshire’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, Vol 22, 1993, pp 3-19

I Friel, The Good Ship.  Ships, Shipbuilding and Technology in England 1200-1520, British Museum press, London, 1995

I Friel, Henry V’s Navy, The History Press, Stroud, 2015

Plets, R.M.K., J.K. Dix, J.R. Adams, J.M. Bull, T.J. Henstock, M. Gutowski and A.I. Best, ‘The Use of a High-resolution 3D Chirp Sub-bottom Profiler for the Reconstruction of the Shallow Water Archaeological Site of the Grace Dieu (1439), River Hamble, UK’, Journal of Archaeological Science, 36 (2009), pp.408–18

S Rose, ‘Henry V’s Grace Dieu and Mutiny at Sea: Some New Evidence’, Mariner’s Mirror 63 (1977), pp.3–6

S Rose (ed), The Navy of the Lancastrian Kings: Accounts and Inventories of William Soper, Keeper of the King’s Ships, 1422-1427, Navy Records Society Vol 123, London, 1982.

Crawshay obituary: Hampshire Advertiser, 9 November 1878, p 5 (via britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk)

 

 

 

A Detective Story

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The Flying-P liners

Over the summer there will be a few wreck features with a German theme, inspired by my recent holidays on Germany’s northern seaboard with its strong maritime heritage – a shared history across the North Sea.

Not long ago a colleague in the Historic England Archives showed me a set of recently-acquired negatives, depicting a wrecked sailing vessel against some white cliffs with a very tiny lighthouse visible in the far distance. Those details, and a possible date of circa 1900 on technical grounds, were all we had to go on. No proper location, no real date, no identity for the vessel, no name for the photographer – and white cliffs aren’t unique to Dover.

Off I went to inspect the negatives on a lightbox, prepared for a patient elimination of white cliff and lighthouse combinations to identify the location, before then narrowing it down to a specific ship – but the ship herself proved to be extremely obliging and we struck lucky virtually at once.

At first glance the words ‘possible Flying-P liner’ came to mind, as she was clearly a very large vessel of steel-hulled construction – not unique to the ‘Flying-Ps’, which were, however, among the most celebrated sailing vessels of their day, the ‘windjammers’.

These windjammers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made use of contemporary iron and steel technology to develop large cargo-carrying sailing ships which were predominantly or wholly square-rigged to take full advantage of the wind. Hence not only the collective name ‘windjammer’, but also the ‘Flying’ Reederei F Laeisz fleet, whose ships all began with ‘P’. The windjammers arguably extended the sailing vessel era until well into the 20th century, although, even as they were being developed from the 1880s onwards, steam had already overtaken sail as the principal means of propulsion.

Then I counted the masts in the negatives – five – and with that the ship yielded her secrets.  Those white cliffs were indeed at Dover and the ship was indeed a ‘Flying-P’, the Preussen, the only five-masted full-rigged ship ever built. (1) She broke tow following a collision and stranded in Fan Bay, Dover, on 6 November 1910, en route from Hamburg on a typical windjammer run to Valparaiso, Chile, with a cargo which included pianos.

Historic B&W photo of shipwreck against cliffs, seen from seaward, sea filling the lower third of the image.
Wreck of the Preussen, Fan Bay, Dover. From this angle the masts seem to tower above the cliffs – a dramatic shot that suggests a photographer with an eye for composition.

So who was the photographer? Someone with the skills to take a photograph at sea from a moving object, namely another vessel. The image, sea conditions, the wreck itself, and the cliffs are all clearly defined, demonstrating continuing interest in the deteriorating condition of the vessel after the wreck event.

Compare this view of the same shipwreck immediately after she struck, by local resident and female photographer, Annette Evelyn Darwall, which was already in the Historic England collection. This, too, is a skilled photograph, including a section of cliff at left foreground for a sense of place and sense of scale which makes us realise that the viewpoint is everything.

B&W photograph of shipwreck of five-masted vessel seen from cliffs above, the tide receding away from the dark rocky shore to left.
The Preussen aground at low tide, seen from the cliffs above, photographed shortly after the wreck event in November 1910.

Returning to our ‘unknown’ collection, a further extraordinary photograph demonstrates the technical competence of our mystery photographer, in turn showing how photography advanced the recording of shipwrecks.

Traditional shipwreck paintings were largely creations after the event. During the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century Willem van de Velde the Elder would sketch ships lost in action from his position aboard a galliot embedded in the Dutch fleet, but these scenes would later be formally worked up onto canvas. Paintings of tragic wreck events such as the Raft of the Medusa (Théodore Géricault, 1819, Louvre, Paris) or Disaster at Sea (Turner, c.1835, Tate, London) are highly-emotive reconstructions based on survivors’ accounts. In all of these paintings we are looking towards the shipwreck, though some artists concentrated on scenes of pathos within as passengers awaited their fate (Wreck of the Halsewell, Thomas Stothard, 1786, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) but again these were retrospective ‘artists’ impressions’ based on first-hand accounts.

Photographers such as Frank Meadow Sutcliffe at Whitby or Gibsons of Scilly exploited the dramatic possibilities of artistic composition, placing the shipwreck firmly in its context as an alteration to the natural landscape, often broadside on, with the power of the waves captured naturalistically in real time.

Photographers soon began to record other aspects of shipwrecks such as daytrippers’ visits (in one Gibson photo of 1895 we’re looking at sightseers in Cornwall looking at a wreck from much the same sort of clifftop viewpoint that attracted Annette Evelyn Darwall to photograph the Preussen near Dover). It then became possible to record rescue in real time. Yet these photographs still frame shipwrecks in a landscape context, albeit as temporary alterations to the local environment (and all the more attractive as a subject for that reason).

The early years of the 20th century changed all that. It became possible to record shipwrecks from new perspectives as they were actually happening, which would come to the fore just before and during the First World War – from other vessels in company (HMHS Anglia post, 1915), or aerial photographs from the then new-fangled aircraft, or from within the wreck itself (Ballarat post, 1915).

As our mystery photographer demonstrates, it was also possible for an intrepid visitor to climb aboard a wreck and illustrate the wrecking process from within.

B&W photo of shipwreck showing amidships structure and masts to left, deck awash with water from the sea to the right, cliffs in background.
View looking astern on board the Preussen, awash amidships, c.1910. Note the sharpness and technical competence of the image aboard an unstable platform being pounded by the sea.

There seems to have been quite a trade in postcards of the event, not surprising at a time when wreck sites could become temporary seaside attractions. A quick Google gave me three possible photographers’ names so once more I prepared to research them, and once more the first hit seems to have been the correct one. A postcard from amidships in the opposite direction looking south towards the bows suggested the same photographer, named on the front as ‘Russell Jewry, Photo. Deal.’

I felt sure then that we had our man – the same modus operandi, and as a commercial photographer he would have had access to up-to-date professional equipment to stabilise his camera on board the wreck, and as a local man someone with the contacts to obtain access.

It’s likely that he was able to board her in conjunction with a survey or assessment visit, such as one noted in Lloyd’s List from 9 November, with a German lighter due in to begin offloading the cargo that afternoon.  Further reports showed that the vessel continued to deteriorate following winter gales in December, finally breaking in two in January, while the salvagers themselves ran the risk of wreck. It looks as if the photographs were taken in winter conditions, probably in early December – so Russell Jewry took significant risks to obtain a commercial scoop. (2)

If only all archive mysteries were as easy as this! What a pleasure though to go from a completely unidentified image to one with a location, a subject, a photographer, and a date in one go!

To this day tall ships remain tourist attractions, and even at the time the windjammers were something of an anachronism. As we’ve shown in the War Diary, sailing ship numbers were drastically reduced during the First World War, and by the 1930s, even at the height of the long-distance grain races on which they remained commercially viable, they were positively old-fashioned and somewhat under-resourced – even before this time books had been written on the ‘last of the windjammers’! Aboard the Winterhude in 1934, an English sailor recorded that his ship was circled in mid-Atlantic by an American liner which diverted out of her course to allow her passengers to take in the sight, something of a novelty in its turn for the captain of the Winterhude! (3)

The Preussen‘s fellow Flying-P, Pamir, passed through many adventures, including two World Wars and changes of ownership. Before the Second World War she was owned by Finn Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn, who bought up many of these old sailing barques. In Wellington, New Zealand, in 1941, however, she was seized by the New Zealand government as a prize of war, and sailed under their flag for the duration.

Post-war she was something of a celebrity as one of the very last of the commercial sailing vessels. Her return to London in 1947 excited considerable interest, sailing back to New Zealand in 1948, when she was formally rendered back to Erikson. Later the same year she left once more for Australia to pick up grain in what was billed as the last grain race from Australia to England, together with her ‘sister’, Passat. Their final landfall in England in 1949 again made headline news. (4) Sadly, Pamir would founder at sea in mid-Atlantic in 1957. Following the loss of Pamir, Passat was taken out of service, but survives today as a museum ship at Travemünde, Germany.

B&W photo of a dockside receding to show dockside cranes. To left a tall ship whose masts reach above the dock cranes.
Pamir in 1947-8 at Royal Victoria Dock, London. The neighbouring cranes give a sense of scale. Photographer: S W Rawlings

Whether as shipwrecks in 1910, a sight worth a diversion in mid-Atlantic in the 1930s, or as museum ships today, these grandes dames of the sea have always commanded attention, and never more so than in 1910 for a Deal photographer prepared to take risks for an outstanding shot.

Modern colour photograph of four-masted museum ship with four bare masts and a crane beyond at left, against a grey sky.
Passat as a museum ship at Priwall, Germany, June 2018, seen from the Travemuende bank. By coincidence, this tourist photograph echoes the crane in the Pamir shot (1947) and the slightly deceptive sense of scale of the Preussen against Dover’s White Cliffs in 1910! Photograph courtesy of Andrew Wyngaard.

 

(1) Other five-masted vessels and above were available, so to speak, but they were never as common as three- and four-masted vessels, and seem to have been particularly in vogue around the early years of the 20th century. Wreck of the Week has previously covered the unique 7-masted Thomas W Lawson (1902-1907), lost off the Isles of Scilly. One of Preussen’s ‘Flying-P’ precursors was the five-masted barque Potosi (1894-1925). TheFrance II (1911-1922), and R C Rickmers (1906-1917) were also five-masted barques built with auxiliary engines, while there were a number of American five-masted schooners such as the wooden-hulled Paul Palmer (1902-1913) and Prescott Palmer (1911-1914). The SS Great Britain steamer (1843), is now displayed as originally fitted out, with six masts, one square-rigged, the others rigged fore-and-aft, but she was the reverse of the France II and R C Rickmers, with sail auxiliary to steam.

(2) Lloyd’s List 9 November 1910, No.22,815, p9, and 19 December 1910, No.22,849, p9; Dundee Evening Telegraph, 12 January 1911, No.10,593, p1, and Dover Express, 13 January 1911, No.2,741, p5

(3) Geoffrey Sykes Robertshaw, Before the Mast: in the Grain Races of the 1930s, Blue Elvan Books, Truro, 2008. For further reading on the windjammers: Basil Lubbock, The Last of the Windjammers, Brown, Son & Ferguson, Glasgow, 2 vols., 1927-1929; Eric Newby, Learning the Ropes, John Murray, London, 1999

(4) See, for example, the eager reporting of Pamir‘s arrival in London in time for Christmas, December 1947, Western Morning News, 22 December 1947, No.27,430,  footage of the then Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh visiting the Pamir in London in March 1948, and on the vessels’ return in 1949, Hull Daily Mail, 1 October 1949, No.19,926, p3; North Devon Journal, 6 October 1949, No.6,705, p7.