Plimsoll Line

50th Anniversary of the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973

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Part 2: A PWA50 Project

In the second instalment of our two-part special commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Protection of Wrecks Act, we look today at one of the projects funded by Historic England to commemorate 50 years of the Act.

Our guest blogger Michael Lobb from MSDS Marine writes about their innovative PWA50 project – Landlocked and Looking Out – to connect landlocked counties with England’s maritime heritage.

Modern colour photograph of three rock formations tilted upwards as if they were ships ploughing through seas, instead of the grass platform on which they sit, seen against a blue sky.
Three Ships rocks, Birchen Edge, Derbyshire: three large gritstone outcrops, so-called from their prow-like appearance, near a monument to Nelson.
© Graham Hogg CC BY-SA 2.0 https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1946715

Landlocked and Looking Out

Maritime archaeology, by its very nature, is concentrated around our coasts, and as a result, opportunities for the public to engage with it can be limited to coastal communities and those who have the means to visit them. People living inland do not always get the opportunity to participate in maritime archaeology projects, so, to address this, funding from Historic England enabled MSDS Marine to deliver fifty public pop-up events over summer 2023, specifically for schools and youth groups, to encourage active participation with maritime heritage.

All events were held in landlocked Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and as a result 17,066 individuals have attended at least one of these events. Not everyone who came will become a maritime archaeologist or volunteer: however, it is hoped that by having an understanding and appreciation of maritime archaeology, more people will value the hidden maritime heritage that surrounds the UK and start to believe it is of relevance to them, and this blog further highlights this work.

As part of the project MSDS Marine explored the links between historic figures, sites and artefacts from the landlocked counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, with maritime heritage and archaeology.

Shipbuilding and provisioning of ships

Copper mines at Ecton Hill, Staffordshire (scheduled as an ancient monument) produced copper sheathing to protect the timber hulls of Royal Navy ships in the age of sail, while a number of Peak District lead mines produced ingots for use as ballast in ships.

Derbyshire quarries also produced consumable items for ships, such as Morley Moor quarries which produced holystones for use on ships up to the Boer War (1899-1902) when the practice stopped. Holystones were pieces of gritstone used for scrubbing wooden decks, a regular part of a sailor’s morning routine. They were most likely called holystones because the sailors had to scrub the decks on their knees, reminiscent of kneeling in church. Large holystones were known as ‘Bibles’, while smaller ones for use in difficult corners were called ‘Prayer books.’

Historic sepia photograph of sailors in uniform, the front row on their hands and knees scrubbing a ship's deck, the back and side rows standing. It is clearly a posed photograph with all the men smiling or laughing at the camera.
Holystoning the decks on HMS Pandora (1900-1913)
Creative Commons

Perhaps of more interest to sailors were the stoneware rum bottles manufactured for the Royal Navy by Pearsons’ Pottery in Chesterfield. The most popular size was one gallon!

Other companies produced more specialised equipment for ships, such as the Haslam Foundry and Engineering Company Limited in Derby. The late 19th century downturn in the agrarian economy saw fears of a meat shortage in Britain, but at the same time farms in Australia were producing large herds of sheep. The solution was to develop and construct refrigeration systems to allow ships to transport frozen meat on the lengthy voyage from Australia to the UK. From 1881 ships fitted with Haslam machinery were transporting frozen meat from Australia and New Zealand to London. The factory backed on to the river Derwent, allowing the finished machinery to be shipped to coastal shipyards via the Trent.

Historic B&W photograph of a long row of pipes with a flow meter connected to feeder valves on the right. The pipes are angled upwards, across the ceiling, and run down again opposite, with two rows of valves.
Brine distribution pipes in the refrigeration unit, Highland Warrior, 1924. Highland Warrior’s owners, the Nelson Line, a specialist in meat from Argentina, installed refrigeration units from both Haslam and the Liverpool Refrigeration Co. Ltd across its ships, the latter in Highland Warrior. BL26996/001 Source: Historic England Archive

The Midlands also played a part in the development of shipbuilding technology: in 1799 Simon Goodrich was sent on a tour of the industrial Midlands by the Admiralty to see how emerging technologies could be incorporated into the Naval dockyards. Goodrich was shown around the cotton mill at Derby by William Strutt, which inspired technology later used at Chatham Dockyard. He also visited a stone quarry near Derby where the saws used to cut the stonework later influenced the design of timber cutting saws at Portsmouth Dockyard. At Belper he was shown the mills by George Strutt and visited Outram’s foundry, where he took a particular interest in the boring mill.

Shipping and Trade

The proximity of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to the river Trent, and the many canals linking up with it, including the Trent and Mersey canal, meant that a range of products manufactured in the Midlands were transported to the British coast and then further afield: for example, the wreck record shows that in 1818 the sloop Industry stranded on the Sunk Sand at the entrance to the Thames while bound from Gainsborough to London with household goods, ironmongery and earthenware pottery. [1]

Historic B&W photograph showing the corn mill seen from the canal towards the boat arch, with the text 'F E Stevens Ltd./Trent Corn Mills in the gable of the mill, with a plaque saying 'No.2 Mill' below a window.
B’ Warehouse at Trent Corn Mills, Shardlow, Derbyshire, showing the boat arch, in 1960, when still in use as a corn mill on the Trent and Mersey Canal. This warehouse was built in 1780, and from the 1820s was known as the ‘B’ Warehouse, almost exactly contemporary with the 1817 wreck of the Crown which foundered off the Farne Islands carrying barley from Gainsborough for Leith. For centuries produce from the agricultural hinterland was circulated domestically via river, canal and sea, not road or rail.
Eric de Maré AA60/04515 © Historic England Archive

From the 17th century cheese from the Midlands was transported down the Trent to Gainsborough, where it was loaded onto sea-going ships which navigated the river to the Humber, then coastwise to London. At a later date, wreck records show that the sloop Fanny, laden with cheese for Hull, capsized in the Trent in 1811, while in 1783 another sloop, the Acorn, stranded off Tynemouth while inbound to Shields with cheese from Gainsborough. Similarly, in the 17th century coal from Wollaton in Nottingham was transported to the Trent, thence to Hull on the Humber, where it was transhipped to London. [2]

The War Effort

During the First World War, Chetwynd Barracks, just outside Nottingham, was the site of Chilwell Filling Factory, a munitions plant which produced 19,000,000 shells, 25,000 sea mines and 2,500 aerial bombs over the course of the war. On the 1st July 1918 an explosion destroyed part of the factory killing 139 workers. A memorial to the workers is located inside Chetwynd Barracks, but many of them are buried nearby in a mass grave at Attenborough church. There were suspicions at the time that the explosion was the result of an act of sabotage (typical of rumours in wartime – similar rumours circulated when the warship London blew up in 1665) but it was most likely caused by the summer heat triggering an explosion.

Historic B&W photograph of long rows and rows of shells and mines of different types loaded on trolleys in a large factory.
National Shell Filling Factory, Chetwind Road, Chilwell, Notts. Melt House for Land, Sea and Air, photographed a few days before the Armistice in 1918. To the right are rows of rounded sea mines: sea mines were used by both sides and hundreds of ships were lost to mines in English waters over the First World War 1914-18. AA96/03598 Source: Historic England Archive

Many other industrial sites in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire also contributed to the war effort in both World Wars: Stanton Iron Works just outside Ilkeston made experimental torpedo casings, while parts of Mulberry harbours for the Second World War Normandy landings were built at Hilton, just south-west of Derby.

Sailors

There has been a Royal Naval Reserve base at HMS Sherwood in Nottingham since the Second World War, with the Midland counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire at one point providing the most popular recruiting ground for the Royal Navy.

The roots connecting the Midlands to the sea and seafaring are ancient: Nottinghamshire was the home of Sir Hugh Willoughby, an early Arctic explorer who led an expedition to find the North-East Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He died in 1554 when two ships from the voyage were locked in the Arctic ice.

Sir Hugh’s descendant Rear Admiral Sir Nesbit Josiah Willoughby (1777-1849) was born in Cossall, Nottinghamshire. He was knighted twice, court-martialled four times, and, as his obituary in the Annual Register noted:

He was eleven times wounded with balls, three times with splinters, and cut in every part of his body with sabres and tomahawkes: his face was disfigured by explosions of gunpowder, and he lost an eye and had part of his neck and jaw shot away . . . and at Leipzig had his right arm shattered by cannon shot.

(See our previous blog on disabled sailors and shipwrecks)

Historic B&W engraved half-length portrait of man in military uniform with a black patch over his eye.
Sir Nesbit Josiah Willoughby by William Greatbach, after Thomas Barber
mixed method engraving, published 1837
NPG D11236 © National Portrait Gallery, London CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Another significant figure in British maritime history with a strong link to the Midlands was Samuel Plimsoll. Despite having been born in Bristol, he only lived there for a short time, and it was as the Liberal MP for Derby from 1868-1880 that he fought for amendments to the Merchant Shipping Act, introducing the famous ‘Plimsoll Line’ showing the safe level of loading for a vessel, preventing the loss of unseaworthy and overloaded vessels.

Modern colour photograph of sculpted bust of bearded man on plinth flanked by statues of a man and a woman looking down at a commemorative plaque in gratitude. The sculpture is seen against leafless trees and an ornate background on a bright winter's day with clear blue sky.
Memorial to Samuel Plimsoll, Victoria Embankment, London.
The central plaque is surmounted by a sailing ship: just visible above Plimsoll’s name is his load line. On the plinth the modern load line is seen, a barred circle with the letters LR for the classification society Lloyd’s Register, with load lines marked for different seasons and bodies of water. Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 http://tinyurl.com/5fcb6wen

Monuments

There are numerous monuments to Nelson and the Royal Navy throughout England, but at Birchen Edge in the Peak District the obelisk commemorating Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar is accompanied by a slightly more unique memorial in the form of the natural feature of Three Ships Rocks [shown at the top of the blog], three large rock outcrops which are carved with the names of warships from Trafalgar – Nelson’s own flagship Victory, Defiance and Royal Soverin.

Modern colour photo of the word VICTORY incised on a rock and still legible despite erosion. The rock formations run from bottom left to top right of the image, are weathered in places, and have light coloured spots of lichen.
Carving of the name VICTORY on one of the Three Ships boulders at Birchen Edge, Derbyshire.
© Neil Theasby CC BY-SA 2.0 https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2959671

The grounds of Thoresby Park in Nottingham contain a monument to Nelson’s Navy and another in the shape of a pyramid commemorating the Battle of the Nile in 1798. The interior of the monument is inscribed with the names of the ships and men involved in the battle. Both monuments were constructed by Charles Pierrepont, 1st Earl Manvers who had been an officer in the Royal Navy, and whose son was a serving officer at the time of the monuments’ construction.

Modern colour photograph of stone pyramid with entrance porch flanked by classical columns, seen against a backdrop of tall trees on a cloudy day.
Pyramid, Thoresby Park
IOE01/16506/05 © Mrs Mollie Toy. Source: Historic England Archive

Perhaps one of the most unusual tributes to Britain’s naval heritage can be found at Newstead Abbey, just north of Nottingham. The 5th Lord Byron (1722-1798), great-uncle of Byron the poet (the 6th Lord Byron), was forced to leave his position in the Royal Navy when he inherited the estate and title. Frustrated at leaving the sea, he expanded the lake outside the house, and built cannon forts on either side so that he could stage mock naval battles. The battles were no small affair, involving numerous boats, including a twenty-gun schooner manned by professional sailors!

Modern colour photograph of blue lake with fort on the left bank and a forest landscape on the right bank. In the middle distance a swan swims towards the viewer.
Newstead Abbey, Newstead, Nottinghamshire, looking NW across the lake towards the Cannon Fort.
DP278046 © Historic England Archive

Thus we can see that in the Midlands, the furthest it is possible to get away from the sea in England, there is a strong connection to ships and shipbuilding in times of peace and of war, a heritage expressed in a legacy of wrecks and terrestrial landmarks alike.

Explore our other PWA 50 blogs:

50 Years of Protecting Shipwrecks – Hefin Meara, Historic England

The Cattewater Wreck – Martin Read, licensee of the Cattewater Wreck

Footnotes

[1] Historic England wreck records

[2] Historic England wreck records

Queen Victoria 200

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Friday 24 May 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birth. Her long reign (1837-1901) saw an expansion of worldwide trade, facilitated by innovations in ship construction. Brunel’s SS Great Western, for example, was launched only a few months into her reign in 1838, and paved the way for the transatlantic ocean liner that would dominate maritime traffic for over a century.

Queen Victoria herself and the great changes in shipping that took place during her lifetime are both well-documented. Perhaps less well known is Victoria’s intimate connection with ships, shipping and shipwrecks, despite the many Fleet Reviews of her reign that set a precedent for later monarchs.

Black and white photograph of a billiard table in a room decorated in late Victorian style, with three lampshades low over the table.
Billiard table at Windsor Castle, fashioned from timbers recovered in the early years of Victoria’s reign from the 1782 wreck of the Royal George, Spithead. Bedford Lemere and Company, 1893. Source: Historic England Archive

Victoria kept a lifelong journal recording her interest in ships from an early age, beginning with her teenage visits to resorts on the Kent and Sussex coasts. She took a lively interest in all the ships and sailors she saw and took great pains to learn their names and nationalities. Then as now, press interest in royalty, was intense, including a stay at St. Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, in late 1834, which coincided with a spell of bad weather: ‘The weather has been very unfavourable, since the arrival of the Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria for out-door exercise . . . ‘ (1)

On 20 November, a coal brig homeward-bound to nearby Rye sprang a leak off St. Leonards. A rescue party in a boat was swamped and all on board drowned, a loss that was made all the more poignant because the crew of the original wreck had in fact saved themselves by abandoning ship. The royal visitors ‘most liberally subscribed . . . towards the relief of the several families who have been thrown into great distress . . .’ (2) Victoria’s entry for 5 January 1835 describes an encounter with one of the widows: ‘As we walked along by the towers we met Mrs. Weeks, one of the widows, with her little girl . . . She looks as pale as death . . .‘ (3)

One of the most famous wrecks of the entire Victorian era occurred very early in the Queen’s reign, primarily because its heroine was a young woman not much older than the Queen herself. Grace Darling (1815-1842) won international fame by accompanying her father in the perilous rescue of the survivors of the paddle steamer Forfarshire, wrecked in 1838 among the Farne Islands, Northumberland. In her journal for 28 September 1838 Victoria records hearing of the ‘gallant behaviour of a girl called Grace Darling’ from Lord Melbourne. On a rather boisterous voyage to Scotland in 1842 aboard the Royal Yacht, Victoria was nevertheless eager to discern ‘ . . . Farne Island, with Grace Darling’s Light House on it, & curious rocky islands . . . ‘ (5)

The 19th century saw enormous gains in the matter of ship safety. From 1850 the Admiralty was responsible for compiling records of shipping losses, a duty which devolved to the Board of Trade through the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854. For the first time, registers and summary abstracts (Board of Trade Casualty Returns) provided a centralised record from which to distil a statistical overview of shipwrecks and identification of common trends in shipping casualties. Hazards which caused regular or frequent losses could be identified and mitigating measures adopted (such as building new lighthouses where needed). The Returns were very successful and were copied elsewhere, for example in Denmark, and have become one of our key sources for wrecks of the Victorian era.

Similarly, a further Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 enforced the compulsory marking of a load line on British ships to do away with the overloaded ‘coffin ships’ that all too often foundered with all hands or were sent to sea unseaworthy. The load line, which is still used in a much refined form today on modern shipping, is popularly known as the ‘Plimsoll line’ after the MP Samuel Plimsoll, who had campaigned for many years to achieve its adoption.

Not all the legislation in the world could avoid ‘stress of weather’, natural hazards, or tragic accidents. The sheer volume of naval, commercial and leisure traffic in the Victorian period ensured that collisions were a frequent occurrence in crowded waterways, in the Thames, Humber, and English Channel in particular.

On 18 August 1875 the Queen herself was involved in a wreck event when the Royal Yacht Alberta was involved in a collision in the Solent with the sailing yacht Mistletoe. Victoria’s journal gives a vivid impression of the event: ‘When we [n]eared Stokes Bay, Beatrice said, very calmly “Mama, there is a yacht coming against us,” & I saw the tall masts & large sails of a schooner looming over us. In an instant came an awful, most terrifying crash . . . ‘ (6) Victoria was then ‘horrified to find not a single vestige of the yacht, merely a few spars & deck chairs floating about . . . ‘ Some of those on board the Mistletoe had saved themselves, as was common in such incidents, by jumping aboard the colliding vessel. Three lives were lost, including Thomas Stokes, master of the Mistletoe, who was picked up alive and brought onto the Queen’s yacht, but soon afterwards died of his injuries.

The subsequent inquiries were, of course, much reported in the press, and generated much adverse comment on the conduct of the respective crews. Had the Mistletoe approached too close in order for her passengers to catch a glimpse of the royal party? Why had the Alberta not been able to avoid the Mistletoe?

Less than three years later another shipwreck occurred off the Isle of Wight, which again generated huge publicity. This time it was the wreck of the sail training ship Eurydice, homeward-bound from the West Indies, which capsized in a snowy squall off Dunnose Point on 24 March 1878 with the loss of some 300 lives, mostly young men. The priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) would paint a vivid word-picture in his poem The Loss of the Eurydice of the ordeal of one of the two survivors, Sydney Fletcher of Bristol:

Now her afterdraught gullies him too down,

Now he wrings for breath with the deathgush brown,

Till a lifebelt and God’s will

Lend him a lift from the sea-swill.

The Queen heard of the wreck at Windsor Castle: ‘Too awful! . . . Too fearful! Could think of little else.’ (7) Over the course of that year the Queen and other members of the royal family, in common with much of the country, would discuss the sad fate of the Eurydice on many occasions. She was presented with a copy of The Last Four Days of the Eurydice by Captain E H Verney (1878). (8)

Spending much of their time at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, or at that year’s Fleet Review at Gosport, the royal family regularly encountered the grim sight of the wreck: ‘As we steamed across, we saw the poor Eurydice, lying close off what is called “No man’s land”, just as we had seen her the day of the Review, in fearful contrast to the beautiful Fleet.’ (9) 

This blog can only scratch the surface of the Queen’s intimate connection with the sea, one she shared with her people, including direct involvement in a form of shipping tragedy which, statistically, became more common over her reign as more people acquired the leisure for pleasure cruising. She became Queen at a time when many individuals and organisations worked tirelessly to improve both navigational safety and the lot of the ordinary sailor, and it was during her reign that the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, founded in 1824, took the name by which we know it today, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

Wrecks were interwoven into her life just as much as they were into the lives of Victorians, many of whom would have gone to sea in the navy, merchant marine, or in the fishing industry, or taken advantage of the new opportunities for passenger travel aboard the steam-powered liner. Others still were moved by what they saw for themselves, or read in the newspapers: the Queen shared all these experiences in common with everyone else.

Oil painting of wrecked ship laid up against white cliffs, with boats surrounding her on a slightly swelling sea, a cloudy sky above.
Henry Robins, The Wreck of the Eurydice, signed and dated 1878. RCIN 406265. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019

(1) Hampshire Adviser and Salisbury Guardian, 29 November 1834, No.593

(2) ibid.

(3) Queen Victoria’s Journals, Vol. 6, (5 November 1834 – 24 May 1835)

(4) Queen Victoria’s Journals, Vol. 7 (11 August – 6 October 1838)

(5) Queen Victoria’s Journals, Vol. 14 (1 July – 31 December 1842)

(6) Queen Victoria’s Journals, Vol. 64 (1 January 1875 – 29 February 1876)

(7) Queen Victoria’s Journals, Vol. 68 (1 January – 24 June 1878)

(8) “The Last Four Days of the Eurydice“, National Maritime Museum blog, 09 May 2017

(9) Queen Victoria’s Journals, Vol. 69 (25 June – 31 December 1878)