Motor Mine Sweeper (MMS) 251

 It is a small world and I am constantly amazed at the unexpected connections that sometimes crop up……I had posted the piece on Castalia, the wreck we stumbled across in the shallows at Weddell Island in the Falkland Islands, and thought little more about it, I had researched as far as I thought I could and that everything that could be found had been. It turned out not to be so and a Falkland Islands resident, Robert Rowlands got in touch to kindly correct some information and chat about the wreck and, very graciously, supplied some family photos of the wreck from his extensive archive. What has that to do with Protector III you might ask? Well, it turns out Robert also saw the piece on Protector III and, as his father had been Engineer of the vessel in her Sealing days around the Falkland Islands, Robert had some more information on Protector III to, again (very kindly), share with me. As you can see from the Picture Robert provided me (above), Protector III was built as a Motor Mine Sweeper (MMS), by Wagstaff & Hatfield of Port Greville in Nova Scotia, Canada

Wagstaff & Hatfield Port Greville Canada

George Wagstaff was born in 1887, his Father a shipwright, working at yards in Annapolis in the USA & British Columbia between 1902 and 1910. George joined his father as an apprentice in 1901 at 13 years old, until 1913 when he moved back to British Columbia, to set up his own shipyard, eventually settling in Port Greville around 1916 (Editorial “Timber to Tall Ships Our Parrsborough Shore, Wagstaffe & Hatfield Shipyard, 3”. Online Resource: https:// www. communitystories.ca / v1/pm_v2.php? id=story_line&lg= English&fl =0&ex=271&sl= 591&pos=1&pf=1 Accessed 20/12/2021). Otto Hatfield was a local, born in Port Greville, and joined Wagstaffe in 1933 to take over the financials, at which point the firm became “Wagstaffe & Hatfield Shipbuilding & Repairs”, Otto was variously, secretary, Treasurer, Office Manager and Purchasing Manager for Wagstaffe & Hatfield

The Ratchford River flows into the Minas Basin, its mouth forming a gravel bar extending down the shoreline for a kilometer, subject to tidal flow, and making an excellent groyne. It was this gravel bar that offered a natural access to those early colonialists breaking into the huge wilderness of British Columbia and, by so doing, becoming the forefathers of modern Canada. In 1874, a wall of round timber, 2,200 feet in length and seven feet tall, had been constructed along the bar to provide additional protection, forming a makeshift harbour, George Wagstaff’s father viewed the gravel spit as a fitting place to set up a shipyard, and developed the river mouth into a more substantial and safe harbour. Another benefit was its proximity to abundant and varied timbers, ideally suited to the construction of sailing ships in the 1800’s. That timber was still available in plentiful supply when sailing vessels became steam and, eventually, diesel powered ships. The wooden hulls of early vessels such as these were ideally suited to small coastal minesweeping operations, having a much reduced magnetic and acoustic signature, limiting the effect of German magnetic and acoustic mines

To better identify the harbour to shipping, in 1907, the Canadian Government had John Reid build a pair of “range lights” at Port Greville (Editorial “Port Greville Lighthouse” Online Resource:  https:// www.lighthousefriends.com/ light.asp? ID=1016 Accessed: 25/12/2021), the eventual construction would be suitably prominent: “The tower is an enclosed wooden building, square in plan, with sloping sides, surmounted by a square wooden lantern, the whole painted white. The height of the tower from its base to the top of the ventilator on the lantern is 25 feet. The light is a fixed red light, elevated 59 feet above high-water mark, and should be visible 6 miles from all points of approach by water” Although Wagstaff & Hatfield Shipyard is no longer there, remnants of the time can be seen at the Age of Sail Museum in Port Greville, where a small and uniquely local collection hosts “…a museum in an 1854 church, local blacksmith shop from the Wagstaff and Hatfield shipyard, as well as the Port Greville Lighthouse circa 1908 and a boathouse”. In a perhaps not so strange a coincidence, the first lighthouse keeper, appointed on June 29^th, 1908 was a Mr Ernest A. Hatfield, very likely a close relation of Otto Hatfield

Wagstaff & Hatfield were by no means the only builders of MMS & Llewellyn Class Motorized Minesweepers, yards in the UK and abroad were tasked with production, in order to both increase the production rate and to minimize the damage the Germans could achieve across the fleets, should they target any particular type of vessel

Those shipyards producing the 105 Ft MMS & Llewellyn (MMS specifically for the Royal Canadian Navy), according to the Reverend Michael J Melvin BEM (Melvin, M.J: “MINESWEEPER The Role of the Motor Minesweeper in World War II” Ch2, P23: Square One Publications, Saga House, Worcester 1992) included: “…19 yards in England and 11 in Scotland. By far the largest number of early 105 footers were built by Frank Curtiss of Looe, Par and Totnes.” Going on to add “In addition to the UK yards, orders were placed with twenty two builders overseas…a total of 91 vessels of the same type from Canada, Newfoundland, Rangoon, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Cochin, Kingstone Jamaica, Nassar, Hong Kong, Singapore and Colombo”

Port Greville became known for shipbuilding, more than eighty-four sailing vessels were built there, including seventy-six schooners, six Brigantines, one Barque, and one Barquentine. During WWII, Wagstaff & Hatfield, and their team of up to a hundred shipwrights and tradesmen, built wooden transfer scows. The company also took on a contract for 12 wooden hulled mine sweepers for the British Admiralty, which, due to the unpredictable freezing of the river Ratchford and the Fundy Bay area, were fitted out and finished in Shelburne before heading to the UK. The Port Greville Yard had been chosen for the Minesweepers as, according to the Government (Editorial “PROCUREMENT OF SHIPS-DEFENCE OF CANADA, 1939-41”, P46/7. Online Resource: http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-dhp/his/docs/Naval_Svc_vol2_e.pdf  Accessed 20/12/2021) “British Columbia yards had had considerable experience with both heavy and light types of construction, and were equally capable of building M.L.’s and wooden minesweepers”

These craft were in addition to small fishing and pleasure craft usually built by the yard in times of peace. In 1957 the yard became incorporated as “Wagstaff and Hatfield limited”, Otto Hatfield left the firm but the yard continued building and repairing vessels until as late as 1972, only closing after a series of contracts were hit by inflation of costs caused by a financial crisis, and then quickly followed by a huge storm in 1976, which finally destroyed many of the main Wagstaff & Hatfield buildings

The Motorized Minesweeper & Llewellyn Class sweepers were small vessels at 105 Ft long and 23 feet wide………so, for those of you who, I know, are obsessed with detail:

MMS251 was delivered to the Royal Navy on the 30^th June 1943, joining the 143^rd Flotilla at Swansea (Melvin, M.J: “MINESWEEPER The Role of the Motor Minesweeper in World War II” P51 and in Appendix F, P213: Square One Publications, Saga House, Worcester 1992), being assigned to T/LT Bernard Cakebread of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in September of 1943. She was flying Pennant J751, and attached to minesweeping duties, using Longitudinal Line Sweep Gear (LL). The importance of minesweeping is so obvious it often goes unremarked, I see innumerable web-sites and articles about the war, but fewer about the importance of the vessels, and crews, risking their lives to ensure trade and materials get through dangerous estuary areas to dock safely. Every U-Boat commander and E or S-Boat Captain, and all the Nazi Bomber Command in the Luftwaffe, knew the importance of British Ports to the war effort, the German population had been brought to the brink of starvation by British blockading of German sea ports in WWI

It was vital to the Germans to block ports wherever they could, and to deny entry, or sink as many supply-ships as they could to weaken the spirit of the British public by attrition. It was also clear, after the entry of the US into the Second World War, that troops, planes, equipment and ammunition, were crossing the Atlantic in ever growing numbers. The cheapest and by far most effective way of denying access to British ports was the mine, Germany concentrated a huge effort to laying thousands of mines across the estuaries of the South Coastal ports of Plymouth, Falmouth, Bristol, and a determined campaign to do the same around the remainder of the country, Liverpool, Swansea, Sunderland and Newcastle Upon Tyne. It fell to the vessels of the Minesweeper Flotillas such as the Texas, Poulmic, Elk and MMS 251 to spot, snare and neutralize this pernicious threat

The MMS (& Llewellyn) Class of Motorised Mine Sweeper had Two main anti-mine countermeasures, the first being the Longitudinal Line deployment. This consisted of two heavy duty and highly insulated electrical wires trailed from the stern of the boat, hence the open transom at the rear of the vessels. The lines would have a pulse of electric charge sent down them mimicking the electrical signature of a large steel ship in order to detonate the magnetic, or “field sensitive” mines of the Germans

Usually pairs of MMS craft worked in a lane in parallel, each would deploy their lines and then one “Wire-man” would synchronize to the other’s sequence and they would run a sweep. Ernest A Goodall, the Leading Wire-man on MMS41 in World War II, describes the procedure (Goodall E. A. in “Wartime Minesweeping Memories, Sweeping Procedure” Para 2. Online Resource:  https:// www.mcdoa.org.uk/ Wartime%20Minesweeping%20Memories. htm Accessed: 22/12/2021):

 “I would signal the partner to switch on and start pulsing.  Their pulse indication lights would come on for five seconds in every 30 seconds; one light at the forward location meant that they were putting a positive feed out through the short leg which produced a north magnetic field between the ships. Their next pulse would show me two lights; one at the forward location and one aft, indicating a change of polarity. Now I had to watch very carefully for when their single light came on, i.e. forward location, and when it went off.  When it went off I would immediately switch on the Venner time clock again.  Then both ships should have been synchronized but sometimes I may have been a bit slow on switching on again and perhaps lost a second.  If this happened, I had to get through the operation again until I got it spot on”

Later in the war the Germans developed multi-polarity mines, which meant the MMS flotilla’s needed to run two sweeps of each channel to ensure both North and South polarity sequences had been covered

 The second mine countermeasure the MMS flotillas were often fitted with is the Kango, or Acoustic Hammer, a device developed, as it seems clear, from the Kango hammer drill. The rotating percussion element of the hammer was fitted, originally, in a forward compartment in ships and operated from within, but it quickly became apparent that it left the ship in clear danger of being on top of an acoustic mine when it detonated, it may be that is what took the HMT Elk (another wreck dive featured on this site) to the bottom of Plymouth Sound

The answer came from scientific advances, most likely from the Royal Naval Engineering College (who were using the Elk for experimental steam powered devices), who placed the Kango into a waterproof Cone (probably amplifying its resonance at the same time as protecting those on the vessel using the device), and mounted it at the front of the MMS on a boom arrangement, or dropped it over the side on a wire, via a winch, using a device similar to a trawl or lifeboat Davit, there’s an excellent photo of that operation, from as late as the Korean War, again in the piece on HMT Elk elsewhere in this blog

The MMS, affectionately nicknamed “Mickey Mouse”, after the popular Disney Character, were small craft in the scheme of things at 30m or so long, they carried a crew of around 20, from the Captain, (often denoted T/Skipper, or “Trawler Skipper”, a Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) or Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) rank specific to the minesweeping flotillas), then First Officer, usually a Lieutenant, the Coxswain, a Signalman, an Engineer, a Wire-man (often also the signalman), a Leading Seaman, and, if they were lucky boats, a Cook, and then to the “Ordinary Seamen”  and AB’s (Able-Bodies) numbering between 10 and 12 per boat. That is a considerable crew considering the size of the boats and the accommodation aboard

Key to the operation of the sweeps, was the Radio Operator, a position my step-father was assigned to on another small vessel type in World War II, the Motor Torpedo Boat, or MTB. Another small craft, but one designed for speed to counter the E-Boat threat and to enable fast reaction to downed air-men in the Channel, Another perilous activity, in what Vic described as, “continual sea-sickness and horribly cramped conditions”, no wonder he volunteered for Commando Training as soon as he was allowed!

Nevertheless, it was the Radio Operator who coordinated the wire-sweep polarity’s, and was often the wire-man, responsible for the frequency and pulse of the longitudinal sweep too. Another wire-man, Reg Breary, from Liversedge in Yorkshire assigned to MMS 256, recalls (Breary, R. in “ROYAL NAVAL PATROL SERVICE – REG BREAREY” Online Resource: http://www.hmsgangestoterror.org/rn-patrol-service.html Accessed 27/12/2021) “….there were two huge Cummins diesels with English Electric 47 kw. generators which would put out a magnetic field of 5000 amps for a few seconds pulse both North & South (one at a time of course.) There were 48 submarine batteries to take part load on pulse”. The difficulty of that task should not be underestimated, considering the dangers of getting the synchronization out of phase with the opposite number MMS, when carrying out the lane sweep (as Ernest Goodall describes earlier in this piece), everything depended on the function and settings of the electrical wire signals, or everyone aboard was at extreme and mortal risk 

It did not take long for MMS251 to be in the thick of things, in Swansea that would mean clearing the approaches to the docks, keeping the U-Boats and Heinkel’s from any chance of success laying minefields from the sea or from the air, it would be unlikely E-Boats would operate anywhere near that far up the West Coast, but there would always be the chance a German Minelayer might get near enough if the 143^rd Flotilla guard dropped….. There were hushed plans underway behind the scenes at the Admiralty, MMS251 and her sister ships would play the biggest part in their chances of success at a very early stage of the execution of those plans. Operational orders were underway for the invasion of Normandy, the re-taking of France and the lowlands and, eventually, the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich:

ONEAST 6.–Instructions for Minesweeping
10.4.44
INFORMATION
Minesweeping Forces
1. The following is the allocation of the minesweeping forces available. (For details of
the composition of flotillas and groups see ON6, Appendix III.)

Eastern Task Force Task Force Commanders (Eastern: Rear Adm. Sir Philip Vian RN; 
115th M.S.F. (M.M.S.) .. .. .. .. .. Force S.
143rd M.S.F. (M.M.S.) .. .. .. .. .. Force S.

By the time these plans were confirmed and the forces required had been determined MMS251 had a new Captain, “On 23 Jan 1944, C. G. C. COOMBE took Command of MMS 251 (short-boat Motor Mine Sweeper otherwise known as a ‘Mickey Mouse’) as an Acting Temporary Skipper RNR with a seniority of 9 Jan 1940 and then as an Acting Lt Skipper RNR with a seniority of 9 Jan 1940. He remained in Command until at least July 1945” (Naval_Gazer. Posted in Blog Thread  https://www.navy-net.co.uk/community/threads/the-first-floatia-of-minesweepers-on-d-day-6th-june-1944.74808/ Online Resource: Accessed 27/12/2021)

The minesweepers of 143 Flotilla, and their colleagues from Operation Neptune, sailed in advance of the task force on the 03^rd June of 1944 to clear sea lanes needed to get the assault and landing forces across the English Channel, Wire-man Reg Breary, again, recalls: “…So June 3rd about 50 M.M.S. set sail after dark, we could only guess where we were headed but no generators required for 3 hrs. so a good time to top up the batteries, no codes were given to me at this time so we were sure it had to be France.” (Breary, R. in “ROYAL NAVAL PATROL SERVICE – REG BREAREY” Online Resource: http://www.hmsgangestoterror.org/rn-patrol-service.html Accessed 27/12/2021). The undertaking was enormous, the logistics involved had taken over a year of planning and were complex, depending on the collaboration of multiple allied forces, British, American, Australian, New Zealanders, Polish, Dutch, French, Canadian……. and many other colonial forces brought together for one purpose, to defeat the Germans and re-take Europe

The work involved to clear such an area of sea both offshore and (later that night through to early morning), the near shore areas of the Normandy beaches, can only be described as daunting. David Verghese describes the planning in his piece on the Royal Navy Minewarfare & Clearance Diving Officers Association web-site: (Verghese, D. “Operation Neptune: the Minesweeping Operation 5-6 June 1944” Online Resource: https:// www.mcdoa.org.uk/ Operation_Neptune_Minesweeping.htm Accessed 30/12/2021) “In respect of each of the five beach Assault Forces (designated U, O, G, J and S), two channels would be cleared S.SE. through the mine barrier for the first wave of amphibious infantry on what would be termed D-Day.  One assault channel would be for 12 knot convoys and one for slower 5 knot convoys. These channels were to be numbered 1-10 from west to east”. The ramifications of missed mines would be catastrophic to the operation, the dangers implicit in clearing the sea routes were perilous, not only the act of capturing and neutralizing the hundreds of mines, but the threat of air and sea attack from an enemy determined to prevent the assault

Verghese goes on to note the importance of the advanced planning undertaken by Admiral Bertram Ramsey and his Task Force Commanders (Eastern: Rear Adm. Sir Philip Vian RN; Western: Rear Adm. Alan G. Kirk USN): “A Fleet Minesweeping Flotilla (MSF) of nine ships would be allocated to each channel to sweep well ahead of the invasion vessels. It was of paramount importance to conceal from the enemy the time and place, and indeed intent, of the landings by the forces following up behind”. It is a testament to the secrecy of the planning, and covert assembly of the assault and landing fleets, the deception employed by the allies (to misdirect the enemy and have him expect an attack in an entirely different location than that intended), and the flawless execution of the plan, that ensured the success of Operation Neptune. If it had not been for the Minesweepers and Dan Layers of the Eastern & Western Task Forces, it might have looked completely different from that which confronted the German Army on Omaha, Gold, Juno, Sword and Utah beaches on the morning of the 06^th June 1944

The work of the D Day clearances lasted far longer than you might imagine, the German Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe did not simply abandon the seas and skies over the Normandy beaches, and constant re-mining was attempted over the days of June, July and August by sea using E Boats, and U-Boats and by air using Heinkel’s. As the land based attack became more successful and the beachhead was secured, the assaults moved inland and a fast expansion into France necessitated more supplies

MMS251 played an integral part in the clearing of mines during Operation Neptune, one of her Officers (likely 2^nd in command/First Officer), Lt G W Lambert (RNVR), being mentioned in despatches. The success of Operation Neptune minesweeping was not absolute, one of the troopships carrying American soldiers of the 90^th Infantry Division did suffer damage from mines. The Susan B Anthony hit two mines whilst travelling off Utah Beach, despite the severity of the two explosions, in an exemplary operation in the circumstances all troops were safely evacuated from her, without loss of life, on the 07^th June of 1944. The work of mine clearance, carried out under accurate and consistent fire from land, sea and air by the German forces did not go un-noticed, Rear Admiral Alan Kirk USN: “It can be said without fear of contradiction that minesweeping was the keystone in the arch of this operation. All of the waters were suitable for mining, and plans of unprecedented complexity were required. The performance of the minesweepers can only be described as magnificent”……, however Normandy would not be the last mortal danger MMS251 would place herself and her crew in!

Sadly the war was far from over, the Nijmegen parachute drops 17^th September of 1944 (Operation Market Garden) intended to secure the bridges over the Rhine River at Arnhem (for the crossing of units passing through the beachhead moving through France on into Belgium & Germany), had isolated troops a step too far from the advancing forces and, after a bloody and determined battle, they were in danger of losing the initiative through lack of supplies. The next battle phase was to be securing the approaches to Antwerp, to take the port as a re-supply route to the North-West flank of the invasion. It would, again, fall to the minesweepers of the allies, to clear the routes for the Navy bombardments and landing of men and supplies to underpin that effort

The Second British Army managed to take Antwerp but the Scheldt River approach was still held by the German Army, without taking the river there was no access from the North Sea to Antwerp. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the allied forces Europe, made it clear to Winston Churchill in a telegram (Editorial “Sweeping the Scheldt” Online Resource: http://www.wildfire3.com/sweeping-the-scheldt.html Accessed 28/12/2021) “Unless we have Antwerp producing (unloading ships) by the middle of November our entire operations will come to a standstill. I must emphasise that, of all our operations on the entire front from Switzerland to the channel, I consider Antwerp of first importance.” The German soldiers the Canadian 1^st Army & British 2^nd Army would face were the 15^th German Army, Army Group B and Army Group H, supported by battle hardened paratroopers, taking the banks of the Scheldt and carrying out minesweeping along the estuary and the river would be nothing short of brutal

There is no definitive proof MMS251 was at the Scheldt for Operation Calendar in November of 1944, nor her sistership MMS250 (MSF 142, Plymouth), however, as we can determine MMS251 was assigned to the 143^rd Flotilla (Swansea), there is anecdotal evidence she would have been there: Michael Melvin records the loss of two of the 143^rd Flotilla’s Minesweepers 248 & 257 (Melvin, M.J: “MINESWEEPER The Role of the Motor Minesweeper in World War II” Chapter 8, P121: Square One Publications, Saga House, Worcester 1992) which are noted as “Sunk River Schelde”. It is apparent Mine Sweeper Flotilla 143 (MSF 143) was deployed in support of operations to clear the Schelde, which means it is also a reasonable assumption to conclude that would include MMS251. As is often sadly the case in the smaller vessels of the war, there were high casualty rates, and the loss of lives in respect to smaller ships was proportionately far less than for the loss of larger naval vessels, often meaning the reporting of loss of smaller craft was not as accurately investigated or recorded   

I have not intended to look at the battles fought along the River Schelde in detail, that is for those who are tracking the land and air assaults, and who would do far better justice to such complex and asymmetric warfare. I will, however, mention the ferocity of the German defence along its length, and the huge effort to re-take Antwerp in the famous Battle of the Bulge, where the German Army pushed back desperately, until a combination of fierce retaliation by the Allies and the limits of fuel for the German Panzers & Tiger tanks and personnel transporters was reached, for, if it were not for the Minesweepers clearing the Schelde, allowing supply-ships into Antwerp, there would not have been re-supply of vital ammunition, fuel, food and men to defend Antwerp and turn the tide of the desperate German advance

The Schelde secured, the Battle of the Bulge won, by January of 1945 the writing was on the wall for Hitler and the Reich, it did not take long to have the German Army in full retreat back to Berlin and, 08^th May of 1945 saw the unconditional surrender of all German forces and the declaration of Victory in Europe…….That would not be the end of the war for the minesweepers of the Allies, the seas of the world would never truly be free of mines, a world war two parachute mine came ashore in England (Bognor Regis) as late as 2018, and undoubtedly they will continue to do so, but determined efforts were made by combined fleets of Minesweepers until the late 1940’s when the operations were scaled down and eventually ended. The Minesweepers now redundant, the War Office began disposals of those deemed fit for sale and, in 1949 both MMS250 and MMS251 were bought by a Norwegian and a Falkland Island concern and here the fate of both became a little murky………

The notification of Sale from “Arsenal of Democracy North: Canadian Naval Shipbuilding of the Second World War” (P99), a work on shipbuilding undertaken by the Canadians on behalf of the Allies during the war, clearly indicates MMS 250 available but MMS251 having been sold to “Commercial Harstad” in 1947. I have no idea where David Shirlaw’s information came from, and I notice the sale date as being 1947, but further investigation indicated an anomaly with this information as Robert Rowlands, whose father was the Engineer on Protector III, was convinced she was MMS251, and backed that up with information from a Norwegian site (MMS250 http://www.skipet.no/skip/krigsbygd/motor-mine-sweeper-mms-110-fots-klasse/mms-250) showing the Harstad (formerly, according to the site, MMS250) “MMS 250 ble bygget om til lokalruteskip HARSTAD og utrangert i 1966” which translates as “MMS250 was converted to a local cruise ship HARSTAD and scrapped in 1966”

So we start the investigation with anomalous and conflicting information, is the Protector III, sat on New Island in the Falklands, MMS250 or 251, and to whom and when was she sold, 1947? I suppose for most it would not matter, if the Protector III is “either” does it really make a difference? I am not sure if it is just me or if there are others like me, (I am sure there are…. poor sods) that would far prefer to know precisely “which is which”….. whatever the case, if you are interested in history, especially the history of ships (as there are often many built to the same plans), it just feels better knowing you have the “right” name matching the right numbers (ask any classic car aficionado….they are somewhat manic about “matching numbers”….). Robert Rowlands had a little more information in the form of the main and auxiliary engine serial numbers: “Protector III official number 166895 registered Kings Lynn 22.09.1947, Main Engine: Fairbanks Morse Model 35M14F Serial No 838855, Auxiliary Engine: Fairbanks Morse, model 36A4 Serial Number 837978” which he sent to me when I shared the detail I had found in David Shirlaw’s work. But Robert wasn’t on New Island to physically confirm the numbers on the wreck, and wasn’t going to be until January 2022 so there was time to dig a little further……

1^st port of call, the registration documents for Kings Lynn in 1945 or after……nothing, not a jot! Next I looked at the Wagstaff & Hatfield Records, it turns out these were available online through shipbuildinghistory.com, sadly there was not sufficient detail to confirm anything more than the delivery and sale dates, both were supposedly sold in 1946 and in the Hatfield records indicate it was MMS250 sold as Harstad, which gave us two sources identifying MMS250 as the vessel sold into Norway. So the search continued and it turns out it is by no means an easy thing to find detail on these small vessels, it is as if history has simply forgotten them. I sought help from the museums in Canada, and although they were all very helpful, there was nothing more than I already had, and nothing specific enough to identify definitively that MMS251 was Protector III, even though I was becoming as convinced as Robert was that it was MMS251 on the New Island beach…….Perhaps the Falkland Islands had the answer? I had been helped with research on the John R Kelly (another shipwreck written up elsewhere on this site) by the Falkland Islands Museum and the Jane Cameron Archive in Port Stanley, these are two separate entities, as I found out inadvertently when I copied both in a single e-mail and was politely scolded for so doing, lessons learned, and happily my faux pas had not mortally offended it seemed. I was sent some amazing copies of the documents held in the Jane Cameron National Archives:

I now had the Captain who delivered the Protector III into Port Stanley 14/11/1949, a Mr A. Monk, things were getting interesting! I was very grateful, (by some co-incidence, which my wife Ellie seems to have been somehow involved in….) to receive the Michael J Melvin Book “Minesweeper, the role of the motor minesweeper in world war II” from my youngest son Kai this Christmas and, besides making very interesting reading on the operations and flotillas, it also asserts MMS251 became Protector III, and confirms the sailing to the Falkland Islands under Captain Monk: “….the hulk turned out to be  ex-MMS 251 also built in Canada, but which served in the U.K. Her story is that following her war service, she became a Fisheries Protection Vessel and was named Protector III, but was sold to the South Atlantic Sealing Company. A Mr. A.B.Monk, OBE, from whom the story comes and who held a deep sea certificate, was invited to sail Protector III to the Falkland Islands, with another vessel, the Golden Chance in tow. With the help of 120 fathoms of 9” coir rope, a successful 5,500 miles was completed. Actual steaming time was 42 days, starting at Colchester, Essex and visiting Lisbon, Las Palmas, St Vincent, Pernabuco, Rio, Montevideo and Stanley. That was in November of 1949” (Melvin, M.J: “MINESWEEPER The Role of the Motor Minesweeper in World War II” Ch5, P80: Square One Publications, Saga House, Worcester 1992). All the documented detail still lacks the vital information I am after, in respect to absolute proof Protector III is MMS251

Looking at the journey completed by Captain Monk it is, to say the least, a daunting undertaking. The idea of a 5500 mile North and South Atlantic sea voyage is not new, whalers completed such journeys in the days of sail and on into the age of steam, however Captain Monk had another layer of complication in regards to the towing of the Golden Chance, herself a similar size to the Protector III. The Golden Chance had been a 90 Ton, 84ft Lowestoft Steam Trawler (LT371), built by John Chambers Ltd and fitted with a Crabtree & Co (Lowestoft) Steam Engine, (LT371 “Lowestoft Registered Boats”. Online Resource: https:// sites.google.com/ site/ukboatsgycouk/ lowestoft-registered-boats-3/lowestoft-registered-boats Accessed: 28/02/2022) she would be a secondary supply ship for the South Atlantic Sealing Co and was purchased, along with Protector III, by the Colonial Development Corporation for work at Albermarle

None of the information given during the recounting of Captain Monk’s epic voyage furthered the identification of Protector III, but it is all fascinating and leads the reader on a journey across over 5500 miles of Ocean (in and of itself deserving of a book at least) and through the 5 or so years of her working life in and around Port Stanley, the Capital of the Falkland Islands, and a little later on it all helped me identify an obscure piece which described the reason for her beaching on New Island

It would seem this also identifies the 1949 port of embarkation in the lead photo for this piece as Colchester, (specifically Wyvenhoe) but, again, there is nothing “concrete” in the piece identifying which MMS this was, no bill of sale, no transfer of ownership papers, or register of re-naming, just word of mouth from Captain Monk and this time the purchaser is identified as “The South Atlantic Sealing Company”…….. The purchasers of MMS251 (from the Fisheries Protection Department), seemed up to that point to have been the Colonial Development Corporation, a Government enterprise set up to help the economic development of British Colonial interests which, of course, included the Falkland Islands. Why was a war surplus craft, especially a small, ex-coastal minesweeper at that, crossing an Ocean and undertaking a 5500 mile journey to the Falkland Islands? I hoped to find out more from the references to both the Colonial Development Corporation and the South Atlantic Sealing Company, so I started to look into sealing activities in the 1900’s but that turned out to be a more difficult task than expected…… I found an article by Ian Strange (the New Island owner when I was diving the Falklands in 1996), which briefly mentions a 1949 sealing operation in his publication (Ian Strange “Sealion Survey in the Falklands” P177, Para 3. Online Resource: https:// www.cambridge.org/ core/journals/oryx/article/ sealion-survey-in-the-falklands/ 7B6CDEA9DE036754E0A18581BB694993 Accessed 06/01/2022): “In 1949, another sealing venture, the South Atlantic Sealing Company, sponsored by the Colonial Development Corporation, was formed, and in 1950 started sealing from the base at Albemarle that was used in the 1930s, aiming at full utilisation of the sealions and taking oil, skins, meat and bone. The first season was a failure due to technical troubles and a shortage of seals”. This sent me back to the Falkland Island sources and some more assistance requested from Tansy Bishop of the Jane Cameron National Archives, that surfaced a series of correspondences (“NAT-SEA-4-14 Sealing concession to Couper Friend Co.pdf” Online Resource: https:// www.nationalarchives.gov.fk /jdownloads/Natural%20History/Seals%20and%20Sealing/ NAT-SEA-4-14%20Sealing%20 concession%20to%20 Couper%20Friend%20Co.pdf Accessed 02/01/2022) between Couper friend and Co and the Colonial Secretary in London, it also identified the applicant to be licensee for the South Atlantic Sealing Company, a Mr Peter Tilbury…..

Sealing was not a new activity on the Falkland Islands, it had been going on since the whaling days in the 1800’s, probably even earlier, but this was clearly an attempt to reprise the 1930’s industry, looking a little deeper into the Falkland Islands Archive indicated the attempt had rattled someone in Whitehall as, behind the scenes, and at high altitude, there were hushed conversations taking place in the dark wood-paneled halls of office……..

The series of letters & Telegrams (for those of you way younger than I am, that is basically an e-mail sent by telephone wires, specifically between two offices carrying special teletype machines, there was no internet in 1947….) between Couper Friend & Co, the Office of the Colonial Secretary and the Governor’s Office in Port Stanley are intriguing. There is clearly a conflict of interests between the Commonwealth Office, more inclined to give support to an application for sealing licenses to Salvessons (a Norwegian Whaling Company based in the UK but whaling in the South Atlantic out of South Georgia) or an Argentine concern, Pesca, than to Couper Friend & Co (A UK Animal Feeds Processing & Fertiliser Operation based in London), represented by Peter Tilbury (an employee of Salvessons on a whaler in the South Atlantic). It is very clear from the comments, often just handwritten in the margins of the letters and telegrams, that, what was written officially, was far from representative of what was going on in behind closed doors……..

A little more on that perhaps later….but a look into parliamentary questions surfaced an interesting 1952 exchange: Hansard, the parliament archive (“Sealing Industry, Falkland Islands Volume 497: debated on Wednesday 19 March 1952” Online Resource https:// hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1952-03-19/ debates/ 7bf26c69-a758-48ec-8ac 2-a212b301bdd2/ SealingIndustryFalklandIslands Accessed 02/01/2022)  notes: “Captain Robert Ryder asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies to what extent the Governor of the Falkland Islands has granted licences for sealing in Falkland Island waters; and what is the state of this industry. Mr. Lyttelton (Responding) A licence to take seals has been granted in the Falkland Islands to the South Atlantic Sealing Company, Ltd., a subsidiary of the Colonial Development Corporation, and in South Georgia to the Compania Argentina de Pesca. Operations by the former company have been temporarily suspended owing to a dispute about the validity of the licence granted to them, but I understand that a settlement of the dispute is now in sight. In South Georgia results have been satisfactory” Clearly, by 1952 the issues surrounding Peter Tilbury and the British Government had been resolved, the intervention of the Colonial Development Corporation in support of Couper Friend & Co, and Peter Tilbury, had swayed the issue of licenses away from Norwegian or Argentinian influence

This would not be the last time the Government of the Falkland Islands interfered in those influencing the destiny of the Protector III, but let’s look at her time in the Falkland Islands and see where, and what, her duties were between her arrival in 1949, at Port Stanley, and her beaching in New Island…… Evidence of the need for a vessel for the South Atlantic Sealing Company had been contained within their business proposal to the Governor in 1948, a particularly specific vessel type had already been indicated too….

So why, particularly, a LL Minesweeper (double L mine-sweeper) then? It is a very specific requirement and I can only determine it has something to do with the open stern on the MMS class vessels. I imagine the need for the removal of Seal carcasses from a wide-ranging area around Albermarle for eventual processing, and with each male weighing some 270 to 360Kg, there is no better means I can determine to effectively move them. I would expect Peter Tilbury would have known this, coming from a whaling background, and having completed at least one season in the South Atlantic with Salvesen’s on Southern Harvester, herself a stern-slip (open stern with drag lines and ramp for dragging whales aboard) vessel

Whilst the far smaller Motorised Minesweepers of the MMS & Llewellyn Class were wooden ships, and never originally intended to be used in such a manner, fitting “…suitable deck winches..” would facilitate the dragging and, should a derrick or hoist be added, allow for the lifting aboard of large, and very heavy, Sealion & Elephant Seals, in order to bring them to the Albermarle processing factory. If the original LL winches had not been removed, and were still functional, it would make perfect sense to use an MMS class vessel for these purposes

There were several other documents shared by Tansy Bishop of the Jane Cameron National Archives, some relating to Protector III at various points in her career as a sealer, and then some repair work, there were crew lists for journeys, one to Montevideo with strict requirements from the Government, and a series of journeys between 20^th March 1952 and a six month crew signing between 30^th September of 1953, presumably expected to end 28^th of February 1954, and finally documents concerning her disposal from the Colonial Development Corporation into private ownership and her eventual demise

Around this time I also found that the Norwegian ship Harstad, sistership MMS 250 according to the Norwegian records, had ended up ashore in the Fjords which I believe, anecdotally, to be following the phasing out of licenses for wooden ships as passenger carriers by the Norwegian authorities. The Harstad had been overhauled by Danielsen’s in 1951, in 1956 it was again refurbished with a new aft deck, over a 3 month period, then in 1966 Harstad was bought by Jens Berklund for use as a Herring Salting plant. By 1969 she was owned by Hans Jensen and was, seemingly, abandoned in a very badly disrepaired state. Again there was no definitive proof in the details from Norway, that the Harstad was MMS 250, but it meant both vessels were hard aground in opposite hemispheres of the planet, it also showed that Harstad had fared considerably worse than Protector III from the photo of her badly ravaged hull

From her arrival in Port Stanley in November of 1949, Protector III was under the control of the South Atlantic Sealing Company and engaged in the setting up of the sealing enterprise initiated by Messrs. Couper Friend & Co and headed up locally by Peter Tilbury, journeys undertaken show the Protector III travelling again 24^th of March in 1952, this time bound for Montevideo. Now the records available are those of the Falkland Islands Company, the Lloyds letting agents for shipping in the Falkland Islands, they do not record all journeys for all vessels (as far as I can determine from previous research for the wreck of the Castalia, another wreck on the blog), and Protector III may well have carried out many duties between Port Stanley and Albermarle. I believed the original stated intent to re-use everything at Albermarle was a failure, the equipment there (however much there remained from the 1930’s), was unusable, although I supposed the buildings might still have been used for the operation. It was not until I came across the autobiography of Richard Laws CBE (23/04/1926 to 07/10/2014, former Director of the British Antarctic Survey), that I found out a little more about Peter Tilbury, Protector III and sealing at Albermarle

I read an excerpt from “Large Animals and Wide Horizons: Adventures of a Biologist” whilst researching this piece and strongly recommend those interested in the Falkland Islands wildlife to do the same. Chapter 14, which I will quote from in a minute, is some 30 pages concerning a 1951 voyage on Protector III around the Islands surveying Sealion populations, but is far more than just that, it gives an insight into the Protector III, the weather, the remoteness and the lifestyles of the intrepid islanders: (Laws, R.M. “Large Animals and Wide Horizons: Adventures of a Biologist” Ch14. P314. Online Resource: https:// www.spri.cam.ac.uk/ resources/autobiographies/richardlaws/richardlaws1.pdf Accessed: 06/01/2022). On Richard’s arrival in Port Stanley P327:“I had arrived in Stanley early in January 1951. On arrival the Governor asked me to carry out a survey of the fur seal population in the islands, because the South Atlantic Sealing Company was having difficulty making a success of their sea lion operations” which begins to set the scene for the rather short-lived enterprise at Albermarle, but Richard goes on to describe the journey, which I won’t spoil here (It is great reading, I assure you), and occasionally the Protector III P328: “When I eventually got out to Albemarle I expected to travel around the islands in a small wooden vessel, the Protector and hoped to get down to Beauchêne Island”  and sometimes Albermarle, P329: “….at Albemarle Harbour there was a former whaling station that had been refurbished as a sealing station, by the South Atlantic Sealing Company, with funding from the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC). Its Manager was a chap called Peter Tilbrook. The company had expected to make a success of the enterprise, which was based on killing sea lions for their oil”

The comments on Protector III are insightful, she seems to have performed well in the torrid seas of the South Atlantic P334: “Weddell Island was by now only a few miles to the North, with rolling rather bleak hills, and large areas of screes and stone runs. There was a great tide rip, with foaming breakers to negotiate, abruptly demarcated from the smoother but shallow water on each side; in the rip were swirling cauldrons of ‘boiling’ water. Nevertheless the Protector made surprisingly good speed” I have cox’d Diving RIB’s around Weddell Island and, as those of you who have read the pieces on the Falkland Islands on this blog will know, the area is wild and untamed, Protector seems to have been well suited for the work!

But there may have been an inkling of things to come buried in Richard’s piece too P338: “We unloaded the lambs and took on board ‘Remo’, Tilbury’s new horse – also hay for the horse and milk for us. I went ashore and got a couple of fox skins from Mr McGill. The Protector was touching bottom at the stern, where there was a ledge of rock, but we got her off with the engines” The plucky little minesweeper seems to have been a very capable workhorse, and despite the rough treatment of the South Atlantic, and its dangerous island headlands and islets, still performed impeccably P339: “The tide-race in Smylie Channel was very strongly against us and as it was relatively calm, formed into hundreds of small whirlpools about 6-10 feet across, with water bubbling up elsewhere. It was a most impressive experience and at times the Protector was almost standing still, even with her engines racing”

Richard Law’s Island odyssey was involved and widespread, it took him from the 17^th of February to 06^th March 1951, a trip of just over three weeks, although early on he had determined P332: “….it was 10.30 am before we slipped our moorings and steamed away against the southerly wind. I was beginning to realize that this was a general-purpose cruise, dedicated to making money, not to counting seals!” Although later in the chapter Richard is a little more understanding and perhaps forgiving of the circumstances of Peter Tilbury’s motives, and also points to the reason the venture was short-lived and unsuccessful P343: “…..Tilbury had been preoccupied with taking on miscellaneous contracts, in order to raise money. This was perhaps not surprising. The sealing venture was not founded in reality. Our voyage had shown me that neither the sea lions nor the fur seals were as abundant as people had thought. With considerable extrapolation, I estimated a total fur seal population of 14,000, and I did not recommend to the Governor that he should issue a license to the company”

It would be hard to blame Peter Tilbury for the overestimation of the enterprise at Albermarle, as Richard Law states himself P329: “In this they had been encouraged by a report, apparently written by a desk-bound ‘scientist’ in Whitehall, who had never been near the islands – nor did he have any special knowledge of seals. The best knowledge available was based on the reports of Hamilton, the Government Naturalist, who had earlier been with the ‘Discovery’ Investigations and had published two substantial papers on the species in 1936 and 1939. He had carried out a detailed count of the total sea lion pup production and, applying the results of his work on the age structure of the population he had estimated that the total population numbered almost 400,000” Where a population of that size would have probably been profitable, the more accurate numbers identified by Richard Law’s survey and estimations meant such an undertaking was doomed to failure. It would take Ian Strange’s aerial survey of 1965 mentioned earlier in this piece, to ratify Richard Law’s assessment of the number of seals in the Falkland Islands population, Ian Strange came to precisely the same (14000) figure as Richard did in 1951. What is available next comes from the crew listings which were a legal requirement for all British shipping  

Whatever the majority of work carried out between the 14^th November 1949 and the 24^th March 1952 will perhaps never be known, but the Montevideo trip was to undergo “extensive repairs to her rudder & engines” (Harbourmaster, Port Stanley F.I. in “M/V “Protector III.” ” a Letter in the Jane Cameron Archives “SHI-VES-13-6. Clearance of Protector III to Montevideo.pdf” Accessed: 04/01/2022). Following the repairs between 20/03/1952 and 09/05/1952 the Protector III returned to Port Stanley under the command of Peter Tilbury and clearly continued her work. The quality of the repairs seem to have been unsatisfactory to say the least, as para 3 of the same letter goes on to say “On Monday 8th. September, 1952 (Sealing Officers Diary) “Protector” was anchored at Barren Island where when trying to move in closer it was observed the Rudder had fallen off. H.M.S. “St. Austell Bay” went to her assistance and with the help of a diver the missing Rudder was located. On Wednesday 17th. September, 1952 at 8 a.m. the “St Austell Bay” arrived in Stanley with “Protector” in tow” Not a particularly good endorsement of the repair work in Montevideo, I am sure you would agree….

For a rudder to “fall off” requires consecutive or spontaneous failures at multiple points, the shaft connecting the rudder must pass through the hull and be connected to the steering assembly, this involves support at the base of the rudder which would be nuts, bearings & shims either side of the support strut, and then the same arrangement at the underside of the hull and inner hull side to prevent water ingress but facilitate rotational movement in order to steer. There would also be the connection to whatever arrangement was used to turn the rudder, usually a quadrant and chain or connecting rods of sorts, again usually screwed together with nuts & washers at 3 points or more for such an arrangement. I find it odd in the extreme that such an assembly was deemed to have fallen off, it seems even more strange that repairs had been recently carried out, ship repairs are seldom undertaken by inexperienced or unqualified technicians…….

The Jane Cameron National Archives may have part of the answer to the Rudder Issue Protector III experienced in September of 1952, the Log Book contains details surrounding an earlier departure from Montevideo on the 30^th of April, “…returned to Montevideo with stern gland trouble, after departing 30/04.52…..”  The stern gland is the aperture through the hull where the propeller shaft passes through seals into the vessel and to the transmission & Engine, the detail is once again not explicit, it “could” have also been used as a term for the rudder gland. Both are areas where sealing to prevent water ingress is critical, leaks at these points have sunk vessels many times. So it would seem whatever repairs were carried out in that area in Montevideo, were not without issue

The Harbourmaster’s letter (Harbourmaster, Port Stanley F.I. in “M/V “Protector III.” ” a Letter in the Jane Cameron Archives “SHI-VES-13-6. Clearance of Protector III to Montevideo.pdf” Para5. Accessed: 04/01/2022) indicates a second repair by the Falkland Islands Company was more successful ““Protector” was fitted with a new rudder made by the F.I.C. and shipped at Government Jetty, she continued in the service of the Sealing Company until 9th. March, 1953”What is not apparent in the Harbourmaster’s letter is that plans were already well underway, between the South Atlantic Sealing Company and the Commonwealth Development Corporation, to sell the Protector III, and those plans were (perhaps quite naturally), once more of some concern to those haunting the corridors of Whitehall……

It took some time to reach a decision on exactly who could and could not be approved for the sale of Protector III, but once again Peter Tilbury seems to have managed to calm the waters, and ends up in a consortia that eventually (March 1953) purchase the Protector III from the Colonial Development Corporation. However that was not before she was inspected and confirmed as in good general condition by the crew of HMS St Austell Bay (October 1952), perhaps the repairs to her rudder were finally behind her…… It seemed the Protector was getting back in the swing of things, as the Harbourmaster goes on to remark: “On the 9^th March, 1953 at 3p.m. the “Protector” changed owners by Bill of Sale to the Intercoastal Trading Company Limited of this Port.”. The Protector III’s Log shows her taking on crew in March of 1953 for a six month period for a “Voyage within Falkland Islands home trade limits for a period of 6 months” with Peter Tilbury as Captain under the ownership of The Intercoastal Trading Company:

At this point I had found another break, “The Intercoastal Trading Company” of Port Stanley, and this small piece of information gave me a lead in the Falkland Islands Biography section, a Mr John James Davis (1893-1969). John Davis was one of 10 children, born on the 30^th January 1893, into a Falkland Islands family in Port Stanley and followed his father, a sail-maker with the Falkland Islands Company, into a career in sailing vessels. John Davis (Allan, J. & Cameron, J. “Dictionary of Falklands Biography. Davis, John James (Cracker) 1893-1969” Online Resource: https:// www.falklandsbiographies.org/ biographies/ davis_john1 Accessed: 05/01/2022) had several commands from as early as 1917, when John would have been just 24 years old, including the cutters Indiana and Paloma, the ex-pilot boat Penguin and the Ketch Perfecto Garcia. John took work ferrying supplies & cargo between the islands and “working the tussac islands”, which I take to mean work moving sheep around (John had a flock of some 700 sheep & rented Hummock Island in the 1930’s to graze them) to take best advantage of the grazing on various islands seasonally. John became a part of the Intercoastal Trading Company in 1953, (as a shareholder, John is not on any crew list I have seen) as they purchased the Protector III from the South Atlantic Sealing Company (Colonial Development Corporation). In a twist of irony John Davis had captained the sealing vessel Port Richard (later known as the Afterglow) in the early 1930s for the Falkland Islands Sealing Company working at Albemarle  

John or, as most Falkland Islanders seem to have known him, “Jack” (and more often by his own use “Cracker Jack” or just “Cracker”) is described as “….the last of the Falklands pirates, famous for flying the Jolly Roger from the masthead of vessels under his command” and was by all accounts a larger than life character, I strongly suggest any reader of this piece looks him up on the falklandsbiographies.org site, they don’t make them like John Davis anymore! It is with John Davis that final closure can be given to the Protector III and that her resting place on New Island can be understood, John had purchased New Island from George Scott in 1949 to farm and, presumably, graze his sheep. The Intercoastal Trading Company was a somewhat short lived venture, evidenced by the Harbourmaster’s letter “The vessel entered in the Coastal Trade of the Colony from March, 1953 to September, 1954 when the Company considered her a non paying proposition and she was put to anchor….”. It didn’t take long for the Protector III to put to sea again, this time undoubtedly to the annoyance of the Master of the HMS St Austell bay, whose evening plans were clearly disrupted……

The final puzzle piece falls into place with a comment from John James Davis biography “When the Intercoastal Trading Company was dissolved in 1954, Jack also became the sole owner of Protector III, but could not afford engine repair costs. In the early 1960s, he arranged for the Philomel to tow her to New Island, where she still lies beached in the harbour below the settlement”. I recalled a comment made in an e-mail to me, from Robert Rowlands, concerning the Protector III’s Engine condition: “……the guy who used to run the engine for him whilst she lay in Stanley did not prime the lube system with any pressure in advance of starting and of course it ruined the crankshaft bearings which ended her career and she was towed to New Island by an ex Admiralty MFV in 1969”. The final ignominious act of the Protector III and the reason she sits forlornly in the bay at New Island, lies at the feet of the Government of the Falkland Islands, more specifically the Harbourmaster (“Grierson, W.J. 1536. 16^th April, 64”. Item 34. the Jane Cameron National Archives “SHI-VES-13-5. Disposal of mfv Protector III.pdf” Accessed 05/01/2022) who wrote to John Davis in 1964 saying “……The Sealer “Protector” which is at present lying in Stanley Harbour is being heavily buffeted by wind and I feel that she should be moved to a less vulnerable anchorage.”

So….I started with a question in the back of my mind, based on the information sent by Robert Rowlands just before Christmas of 2021…. “Is Protector III the Motorised Minesweeper MMS251” I have searched every archive I can, and found everything I believe is there to find. The search was not helped initially as the records for Protector III are buried in the National Archives filed along with “Ship Lamia”, for some reason that perhaps only an archivist would understand, and I am far from that, as I am sure you will have realised by now! I received the records in February of 2022 and they are ambiguous, the vessel is already called Protector III in 1947, at the time of her sale to the Eastern Sea Fisheries Joint Committee, and further enquiries into Protector III with Kings Lynn Port and their archives initially came up empty, as have enquiries to Wyvenhoe, the MoD/Navy sales port for the disposal of MMS250 & MMS251. The official number for Protector III, 166895, doesn’t bring anything more to the party I’m afraid either, as a search on that number gives the same 1947 and later years information

One surprising turn-out from the registration is the Master of Protector III, on her sale to Eastern sea Fisheries, a Master Mariner named Charles Walter Albert Chapple, now those of you who have read the piece on HMT Elk on this blog will perhaps recall that name? Charles Chapple is a distinguished Captain amongst those of the Minesweeping Fleets having served in both WWI and as Master of HMT Elk in World War II, indeed in 1940 he wins the Distinguished Service Cross, (second only to the Victoria Cross) for services to Minesweeping. Charles Chapple and his crew would trap and successfully recover a new kind of German mine whilst sweeping off the North East coast (it would turn out to be the first ever of a type of acoustic mine, and be defused by the specialists at HMS Vernon, the minesweeping command), and result in the development of the Kango acoustic hammer (designed by the Keyham Engineering College of Plymouth), mentioned earlier in this piece. HMT Elk was lost whilst trialing an “experimental steam powered anti mine device” likely an early version of the Kango mounted in the front hold of the little trawler, luckily, on that occasion all her crew survived 

I was convinced I had missed something….somewhere…..and was determined to take another shot in the various archives I felt she might still be hidden away, (somewhat spurred by the information on Protector III discovered in the National Archives under the “Ship Lamia” file) before reaching any conclusion on the Protector III. I took another look at the on-line catalogue for the Norfolk Record Office and found the catalogue reference (P/SHL/14) for vessel registrations in 1947, whilst there were no on-line catalogues to look through, when I sent the access request in to Jenny Watts the Senior Archivist at the Norfolk Records Office, they were happy to agree a search of that register, and that came back with Protector III as the very first entry for 1947…..Why had nothing been found beforehand?….who knows, change of personnel, change of search reference, missed by accident…it didn’t matter, I now had a two-page entry and it might just have been a second Christmas for the level of excitement and anticipation that generated!

I could barely contain the excitement when the PDF’s arrived 10 days later from Chloe, the researcher at the Norfolk Records Office, and I pored over both photos for anything that might categorically confirm MMS251 was registered as Protector III…..nothing, not a single specific to go on, no serial number against her engine, nor anything meaningful against her description “….wood. Fishery protection cruiser”……. I was disappointed to say the least, had she been a German vessel there would have been all the detail needed…..but she was British, made in Canada……and it was just my luck, just another teasing frustration in the story and history of Protector III……

There is one more piece that might serve to define Protector III as MMS251, a mention in the commsmuseum site publication in regards to her pennant, now a vessels pennant (from “pendant”) is how she would have been recognised prior to 1948 whilst in service. Looking up MMS251’s designated pennant gave me J751, the letter is her class designation and that (J) was “Minesweeper”. Looking up the assigned pennant numbers shows a sequential numerical from MMS17 which carries the pennant J517, so a simple progression takes MMS251 to pennant number J751

That pennant is also registered to MMS251 in David Shirlaw’s book The Arsenal of the North, however that is the conflicting source of sale to Harstad in 1947, the point to note there is that there is no anomaly between MMS250 (pennant J750) and MMS251 (pennant J751) in the sale notification  

With the Skipet register for the Harstad clearly identifying MMS250 as the vessel sold to Norway the evidence is becoming compelling, at least circumstantially, that the vessel known as Protector III now lying in Coffin Bay on New Island in the Falkland Islands is almost certainly MMS251. Is this conclusive……no, it isn’t, I had come to the conclusion the only person who might ever answer the question absolutely is Robert Rowlands….. and I eagerly awaited his visit to New Island which could “categorically” state that she is either MMS250 or MMS251. I personally was convinced, by weight of probability alone, that Protector III is MMS251, and up to February of 2022 I had been unable to find “proof absolute” that she is….. believing it might not even exist, should the engine serial number have been removed or eroded from the heroic (and very likely, last of her kind), little vessel, abandoned, thanklessly at the ends of the Earth………………

But then I had a stroke of luck, finally…… The request I had made to the Eastern Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority (the inheritors of the purchase of Protector III, then in their guise as the Eastern Sea Fisheries Joint Committee, which existed between 1894 and 1994 before becoming what is now “Eastern-ifca”), had been picked up by Jon Butler, their Head of Operations, who had kindly shared an internal piece written in commemoration of “The First One hundred Years of Fisheries Management Protection” printed in 1994 (The cover of which co-incidentally showed ESF Protector III, their current 1994 Fisheries Protection Vessel). The document had been saved in the personal collection of Eastern-ifca’s Admin Officer, Jodi Hammond, to whom history should be eternally grateful! The commemorative piece details Norfolk’s coastal fisheries activities and successes and explores their one hundred year fisheries protection history………and there it was……..writ large on page 12, incontrovertible evidence that meant I would finally be able to conclude this search. It transpired that the original “SS Protector”, employed by the Eastern Sea Fisheries District as a fisheries protection vessel (from its construction at Bridge Dockyard, Sunderland, by Robert Thompson & Sons and launched in August of 1899), had been replaced in 1903 (by a vessel built at Greenock by George Brown & Co), and had served between 1904 and the second world war, when the vessel was requisitioned for service, re-named HMS Thalia, and put to service as a minesweeper, sadly she was lost in a collision in Loch Linnhe, Scotland in 1942

The conclusive proof that Protector III is MMS251 is contained within a brief but concise paragraph in the Eastern Sea Fisheries Joint Committee publication “The First One Hundred Years 1894 – 1994” beautifully illustrated with the third of her name “Protector III” and states:

“When the war ended, it became imperative that a replacement be sought for the late “Protector” and Mr. Grice [now titled Chief Fishery Officer] set about investigating possibilities. His search was successful and the committee agreed to his recommendation that Motor Mine Sweeper No. 251 be purchased from the Director of Small Craft Disposals, Admiralty. It was minuted at the Joint Committee Meeting held in King’s Lynn on the 1^st. of August 1946 that the recently acquired Fishery Protection Vessel be named “PROTECTOR III” and that she would be based in King’s Lynn.”

There is no ambiguity in the statement, it is categoric: “….that Motor Mine Sweeper No. 251 be purchased…” why so adamant, who knows, but it is clear……. and……. at last, final

Protector III, lying in Coffin Bay on New Island, in The Falkland Islands of the South Atlantic Ocean is MMS251!

As ever, I am deeply indebted to those who have assisted in this piece and grateful for their help with information, photographs and research:  Robert Rowlands (The Falkland Collection), Tansy Bishop (The Jane Cameron National Archives F.I.), John Collins (Nottage Maritime Institute), Ashlyn Prasad (Vancouver Maritime Museum), Oralee O’Byrne (Age of Sail Museum) Jeff manning (Swansea Docks History), Ian Palfrey & Alison Bernard (Norfolk Record Office) John Jones (Wildfire III), Peter Hill (Wyvenhoe History), Gunnar Oversen, Jenny Watts (Senior Archivist, Norfolk Records Office), Chloe Van Roose (Norfolk Records Office), Jon Butler (Eastern-ifca), Jodi Hammond (Eastern-ifca) and, finally, the Minewarfare & Clearance Diving Officers Association (MCDOA)

And, of course, to those who “old age and senility” have made me miss from the credits above, and to whom I apologise most profoundly!

From the German: “Unterseeboot” literally….. undersea boat

  The very first wreck I dived on was the James Egan Layne in July of 1991, I was spellbound by her, sat on the bottom of Whitsand Bay, bows intact, as if she had been placed there to hide her for some clandestine purpose. It wasn’t until you dropped over her side and swim down her flank that you realise she is a shell, her structure remains but her insides have been torn apart and laid asunder by devastating force. It is only then perhaps, that you wonder at the means of her end, or perhaps you already knew her story, her desperate fight for shore and survival, the temporary success of her grounding in the bay and the removal of what could be salvaged before her forward holds flooded and she became a total loss…….. Her fate was that of many ships in those times between 1939 and 1945, “happy times” to begin with for those of the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy, those who sailed and crewed the Unterseeboot…..the U-Boats……… or “Grey Wolves” as they were grudgingly known to those at sea and caught in their periscopes 

  The U-Boat that sank the James Egan Layne was a type VIIc, one of the Type VII series, the workhorses of Karl Donitz’s “Wolf-Packs”, a lesson learned from the First World War (1914 to 1918). Grand Admiral Donitz, then an Oberleutnant zur See, had commanded UB 68, an earlier version of the U-boat, against the Allies in WWI. Donitz had seen the tactics England used to blockade the German fleet, keeping them corralled in their ports, to prevent them harassing the British fleet following the naval battle at Jutland. Donitz had seen the results, Germany had been brought to its knees in war by the Allied armies, and Germany’s population had been taken to starving point because her foreign supply routes had been denied them, by the British Royal Navy. Whilst a prisoner of war, his U-Boat having suffered technical problems forcing Donitz to surface and scuttle the boat, allowing his capture by the Royal Navy, Donitz wrote “Die U-Bootwaffe” (The U-boat Weapon), a paper on using U-Boats in “packs” (Rudeltaktik) and carrying out night attacks on enemy shipping. Donitz recommended using the Type VII U-Boat, a mid sized and reliable boat with a range eventually extended from 6200 miles to 8700 miles, ideal for the Atlantic……….. and Britain’s trade routes from the United States 

So the scene is set, between the wars Donitz spent his time following release from Allied captivity, in the Wiemar Republic, (the name given to Germany following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, on the adoption of a new constitution in August of 1919), back in the Navy, he has risen through the naval ranks, quickly promoted to Kapitanleutnant. By 1928 Donitz was again promoted to Korvettenkapitan and, by the rise of Hitler to Reich Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he had reached the rank of Fregattenkapitan or “Commander”. It only took another year before he was again promoted, taking the rank of Kapitan zur See…..Navy Captain. Between 1933 and the declaration of war on Germany by the British in 1939 following the invasion of Poland, Donitz (a committed Nazi and supporter of Hitler) had been consistently promoted, and had reached the rank of “Konteradmiral” (Rear Admiral) and was the commander of Germany’s submarine fleet, or “Befehlshaber der Unterseeboot”, it took him no time at all to set his Grey Wolves to their task

  The type VII U-Boat was the workhorse of the Kriegsmarine submarine fleet, there were eventually “A” “B” “C” “D” & “F” variants although there were 3 of the “C” ( C, C41 & C42) variants carrying different configurations. Known as “Flak” boats, the type VIIC/41 were armed with anti-aircraft guns on their “Wintergardens” (the platform to the rear of the conning tower), by the close of the war, including the type C41 & C42’s, there had been 703 Type VII U Boats built. The basis of the VII U Boats, or origin of species, was the VIIA, there were 10 of these boats from a design of 1933, they were armed with 5 torpedo tubes, 4 to the bow (front) and a stern tube at the rear, for which they carried 11 torpedoes, unless designated as a minelayer when the torpedoes would be substituted for 2 “TMA” mines. They also had a deck gun, an 88mm breech loader for which they had 160 rounds of ammunition, this was the U boat variant that began World War II with a range of 6200 miles,  these boats were from the yards at Bremen on the river Weser & Kiel on the Baltic coast and were produced between 1935 and 1937

The drawback of the type VIIA was its operational distance, this was realised early on and corrected in the VIIB which had additional saddle-tanks fitted, carrying an extra 33 tons of diesel (U-Boat Types- Type VIIB: uboat.net/types/viib.htm accessed 9/07/20) adding 2500 miles to their range. There were 3 additional torpedoes (totalling 14), an additional 60 rounds for the deck gun (totalling 220 rounds), an increase in power giving them extra speed, now able to reach 18kts on the surface and 8kt submerged, and an additional rudder giving increased manoeuvrability. In all there were 24 type VIIB boats commissioned during WWII, the most successful of which was undoubtedly U 48, sinking 52 ships between April 1939 and its decommissioning in 1943 indeed, some of the most successful of the U Boats were Type VIIB’s Gunther Prien’s U 47, Otto Kretschmer’s U 99 and Joachim Schepke’s U 100

The next iteration of the VII class was the VIIC which was by far the most popular of the class, by the close of WWII 568 Type VIIC U Boats had been commissioned (of 703) these boats produced in Kiel, Bremen, Lubeck, Emden, Danzig, Stettin, Rostock  and Hamburg. The VIIC was slightly heavier than the B meaning she was slightly slower and was produced from 1940 to 1944. The VIIC quickly became the main of the U Boat fleet, seeing the introduction of the Flak boat configurations (VIIC41 and VIIC42), designed to combat air-attacks of the Allied Air-Force, whilst on the surface, re-charging their batteries and cleansing Air supplies

  The type VIIC was the most varied U-Boat Class and initially carried the 88mm SK C5 Deck Gun forward of the conning tower, standard between the years of 1940 and 1942. As the submarine war had changed considerably during the conflict, from wolf packs to “lone wolves”, (from surface “gun” attacks, to surface torpedo attacks, ultimately, almost exclusively, to submerged, periscope attacks), the forward deck gun had been generally discontinued, replaced with additional torpedoes in place of the Gun’s ammunition. The gradual increase of Allied air superiority and the British concentration of effort on the U-Boat threat, coupled with the Bletchley Park code-breakers successes, (breaking the Enigma encoding machines encryptions, used for co-ordinating U-Boat attacks and communications with their bases) had seen an increase in successful Allied air-attacks on surfaced U-Boats, culminating in one of those casualty’s (U 256) being modified to carry 3 “Flak” guns on the Wintergarden, immediately behind the conning tower

The birth of the VIIC/41 U-Boat fitted with Flak guns to counter the Allied air-attacks, resulted in 91 commissioned boats, generally entering the operational area in the Bay of Biscay. The VIIC/41’s were limited by a lower capacity for fuel, (reducing their range) presumably accounted for by more ammunition and the additional crew required for the manning of the Flak Guns. Compensation for the reduced range came in the form of a thicker pressure hull giving them a deeper operational depth, 120m (20m more than the VIIC) and a crush depth of 250m. The Germans were nothing if not innovators, experimentation with U-Boat configurations witnesses that “across the piece”, and the Type VII U-Boat types, although based on a generic platform, varied widely, even sometimes at the whim of their commanders. Innovations such as the Flak Traps, the inception of rescue boats in tubes, increased hull thickness to allow deeper diving and the latter day “Snorkels” fitted to allow re-charging of the electric motor batteries by running the diesel engines submerged, reducing the chances of detection………. all evidence adaption, innovation and improvisation

  I took a trip to Kiel in 2017 and spent a very wet and windy day at Laboe, visiting the only example remaining of a type VIIC/41 in the world. I have to say it was one of the best trips I have ever made and the boat itself is only one of the attractions in Laboe, the U-Boat service memorial and museum is literally 100m down the road from the stunning spectacle of U 995. To see this boat complete, and as she would have been in 1943 on her launch out of the Blohm und Voss yard in Hamburg, (just 50 or so miles from Laboe) on the beach alongside the coastal road there is quite something, you would be forgiven for wondering what on earth possessed anyone to place her there, but I am grateful to whom ever did!

  If ever there was an opportunity to feel the claustrophobia of the U-Boat, to imagine the heat, the noise, the overwhelming atmosphere of high carbon dioxide, mixed with Diesel fumes and sweat……. No matter which side of the conflict, a submariner’s life must have been a special level of Hell at times, it must have taken a special breed of men to undertake successive operational tours under such stressful conditions, let alone spend considerable time in such a toxic atmosphere, whilst attacking, or under attack. It is little wonder the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy Submariners are held in such high regard, nor that they hold a unique perspective…. “There are Two Types of Ship….Submarines….and Targets”   

The crew of the Type VII U-Boats were typically around 45 men, depending on the class, (the VIIC/41 having additional gunnery crew), the generic VII boat’s crew being made up of the Kommandant (OC), 2 Watch Officers (WO’s) a Chief Engineer (CE), 4 Chief Petty Officers (CPO’s) 8 Petty Officers (PO’s) and 29 Seamen, Gunners, Mechanics or “Other Ranks” (Doctor/Meteorologist/Cook etc) and all lived and breathed in shifts, hot bunking on a one out one in basis with little personal, or “off-duty” time whilst on patrols

U 995 is an impressive relic of the day, in pristine condition on the beach at Laboe with the sea behind her, she is not only an impressive sight from the outside, giving a sense of scale and perspective to the imaginings borne of countless movies, U 995 is even more impressive internally, serving as a record of the technology of the time. U Boats were the cutting edge of naval “tech” and were constantly innovating in search of deeper, longer patrols and ever more “stealth” technology, evidenced by the “Alberich” (Wagner’s occasionally “Invisible” Dwarf, King of the Nibelungen in the Ring Cycle Opera’s) experiments, the Asdic beating rubber covering on the stealth U Boat U 480. Commanded by Hans-Joachim Forster, U 480 was never detected by the British or Allied forces, despite being sent to patrol the heavily defended English Channel late in the war. U 480 eventually become a victim of tactical Deep Mines set in the English Channel, something even her “cloak of invisibility” could not have hidden her from   

U 995 is a remarkable piece of living history, a survivor of a service that lost 75% of its core to the Allies but still put to sea to the very end of hostilities, and, as a Type VII/C41,  she is a representative of somewhere around 10% of the entire Kriegsmarine Type VII fleet during WWII. The circumstances of her survival, damaged, awaiting the fitting of a “Schnorkel” in her berth in Trondheim at the close of the war, then surrendered to the British, before finally finding her way into the Norwegian Navy as the K Class “Kaura”, are remarkable to say the least. It is astonishing, in the circumstances, that she was saved by the German Navy League, (Wikipedia: “German SubmarineU-995”. On-line, Accessed 21/07/20) despite having been offered to the West German Government for 1 Deutschmark (way before the Euro), and transformed into the superb “living museum” that she is now

There were, eventually, other Type VII’s…….. the Type VII/C42 followed the C41, designed in 1942 to replace the VIIC and incorporating a thicker pressure hull (28mm Steel), this type was designed to increase the operational depth to 200m and the crush depth to 400m, doubling the VIIC capability in this respect. These boats were essentially identical to the Type VII/C41’s but with two periscopes on the conning tower, and carrying an additional 2 Torpedoes (total 16 carried). The VII/C42 design was almost immediately overshadowed by the introduction of the Type XXI “Elektro Boat”, perhaps the very first true “submarine” designed specifically to fight “untersee” rather than compromise between surface and the deep. There were also Type VII D & F boats, the Type “D”’s being longer than the “C”’s, configured as Mine layers, there were only 6 of this type, and 4 of the Type VIIF boats, generally acting as Torpedo transports (carrying up to 39 “fish” to re-supply other U Boats on extended patrols), or sometimes as attack craft, carrying 14 fish to use in anger. The Type VIIF boats ended the type VII U-Boat category, a once almost unbeatable force, a terrifying, hidden enemy, free to roam the seas unchallenged. By 1943 all of that had gone, the hunter had become the hunted, Enigma and Ultra had clashed……. and ultra had won, Bletchley Park knew where every U-Boat was, when every U-Boat set sail, and where every U-boat could be found once at sea……and even those wearing the new “cloak of invisibility” had to surface, were compelled to talk to the Fatherland, to report, to get new orders……..time had run out for the wolf pack, and the lone wolf was being hunted…….. relentlessly

Epilogue:

  So is this piece simply a glorification of the violence of submarine warfare, is it an admiration of those who risked everything to prowl the seas, taking down those who often didn’t even see them, before it was obvious their journey had ended and a nightmare had begun? Or is this a clinical look at the boats themselves, the technology that was brought to bear in such times of conflict, an abject and detached view of ancient enemies and their prosecution of, and the machinery behind, their application of aggression? There is something of all those tenets in the piece if I’m honest, I begrudgingly admire those who endured such conditions, under unforgiving seas, in order to serve their Fatherland. Equally, there is a deep admiration, and equally despair for those who served their country, bringing supplies across hostile seas in often terrible conditions, in order to sustain and endure, only to come under attack from hidden enemies, seemingly from out of nowhere

    There are those who say we should abandon the relics of history and that keeping these reminders gives the cause of those who prosecuted global war and terrible human suffering a legitimacy, to those people I would honestly have little to say save read Orwell………. There is something tangible in the preservation of such terrifying weapons and there is something cathartic too, having served, in at least a small way, I can honestly say, and truly believe, one man’s terrorist (enemy) is another man’s freedom fighter! If you understand history (apropos of Santayana), if you study the context of those in conflict, you will find most engaged in such saga’s are there as a result of circumstance, good men overtaken by events, or driven by rhetoric to take up arms for their ideal or an ideal they cannot escape. That does not excuse atrocities committed in the name of “cause”, it simply acknowledges the predicament of those caught between the tectonic plates of history, outside of their control and with little choice but to take part, either by luck or judgement

The 5 why’s of a real “ship-wreck”

      So for some reason I have decided controversy is a good topic of conversation, the title gives the subject matter away which means we are going to be discussing, or I am (you can chip in in the comments or feedback sections on here if you like debate?) the status of Ship-wrecks. I have, on occasion in this “diary of a madman”, already mentioned my perspective on ship-wrecks, and my personal take on all other items found on the sea floor, not considered ship-wrecks, by me at least. The “5 why’s” in the sub-title of this piece might not be familiar to anyone inclined enough to read this, however it is a common tool used in manufacturing/engineering, and several other disciplines, In order to determine the root cause of a problem, the “5” being the generally accepted number of iterations optimal to producing an answer, or at least coming to a feasible conclusion…..You could use more than 5 repetitions, you could drill way down to determine some problems, Air-Crash investigation is unlikely to be satisfied by only 5 levels of investigation to determine the reason behind a disaster, nor perhaps a board of enquiry into the Costa Concordia for example…..but 5 should be ample to suit my purpose

  There are several ways to approach the real issue but perhaps the best is to work out the exam question we are trying to answer, which, in various forms is: “what really constitutes a Ship-wreck?” There are many types of incident leading to a ship-wreck, collision, fire, storm, mechanical failure, act of war, sabotage, navigational error to name some of the most common. There are other, perhaps less obvious, circumstances that can lead to ship-wrecks, insurance fraud probably being the most common, and maybe to a lesser extent, neglect, although these will be a blurring of lines for the most part, as would a ship sinking as a result of human error, such as the Herald of Free Enterprise or the Estonia, where several issues combined to take a ship under. I suppose these are the easy and then the slightly more challenging of the categories, the ship may have sunk as a result of an impact on a reef, but was that really navigational error or a struggling owner taking a dangerous route out of a sticky financial situation, or perhaps a ship past its best costing more to run than it brought in as revenue….. Anyone having dived the Red Sea could probably debate several vessels that might fit either of those descriptives

  Perhaps another valid question might be “why” do we need to determine what constitutes a ship-wreck, does it really matter? Isn’t it fairly obvious in most, if not almost all of the circumstances vessels come to grief, and should divers even care? There’s a rub there somewhere, at least for me, I will share what I mean later in this piece but suffice to say, for some reason, it is very important to me that the ship-wrecks I dive are “real”, they floundered, came upon circumstances beyond the control of their crew or captain, they went to the bottom for a reason, albeit accident or purposeful destruction (as in an act of war…), mechanical or human failures….. Now that we are on the subject of personal feelings let me be clear, this piece and those on the site will always be my own perspective and nothing more, I am very happy all who stumble on these ramblings have their own opinion and perspectives and that is a healthy situation, don’t think I have any “deep” meaningful insight to any of this, it is me writing up what I hope may be of interest, nothing more….ever! So, the first “Why” then, why do we need to determine which are true shipwrecks and which are not? I will answer with my point of view: There are perhaps hundreds of thousands of ships under the sea, of those there are hundreds of thousands of stories surrounding the manner of sinking, the circumstances leading up to the sinking and the stories of those involved in the sinking, this is our globe’s maritime history. It is impossible to dive many, if not most of those wrecks due to depth, the middle ocean cannot be reached by any other means, at present, than deep submersibles (Jason, Argo, Mir etc…..) or ROV’s, divers are confined to the continental shelf wrecks, and many of those are far too deep to dive with scuba kit too. So divers are limited to the perhaps hundred thousand shallow-ish continental shelf wrecks, most down to no more than 100m or so maximum, for the most adventurous of our technical mixed gas and re-breather divers. Perhaps we are now down to 75000 wrecks in the more “normal” diveable range…..these figures are just guess-work, nothing more, and an exercise in understanding where I am coming from…..of all the diveable wrecks in the seas of the world, it is easy to see there is not time in a single life-time to do more than a tiny percentage of those wrecks, no matter how young you start and how long you remain an active diver during your lifetime. So partly, for me at least, I have no time to do anything but dive the wrecks I want to and can get to, and even then I will leave this earth having a huge wish-list remaining un-dived and frustratingly out of reach, and as a result, why would I want to dive anything but the “real” amongst the reachable accessible shipwrecks of the seas? So I want to know the wrecks I dive are genuine, real wrecks and that the history behind and surrounding those wrecks is, essentially, genuine time-travel!

  So to the second “why” of our piece, why is the history of “Other” shipwrecks not equally of interest to me? If the paragraph above answers the “why real shipwrecks” question, and mostly that is embodied in the wreck’s history, why isn’t there equal value in the history of say HMS Scylla off Plymouth?  HMS Scylla was a Leander class frigate (F71) commissioned in 1970, and ended her career, following de-commissioning in 1993, as an artificial reef in 2004 after the reduction of the fleet under “options for Change”, possibly the worst ever re-organisation of British Forces in History. Scylla had been the last ship built at Devonport docks, and had served with distinction, so what makes a “wreck” like Scylla less interesting than the James Egan Layne sitting just a few miles from her in Whitsand Bay? Let’s answer the second “why” first as we just introduced the third unintentionally early……  Why “other” shipwrecks such as Scylla are of little interest to me (personally) is slightly more than a simple answer and surrounds many factors, some of those would be: I hate the sanitising of a ship, by commercial interests, as it robs the authenticity of the ship itself…..if a ship has real armaments and complex, dangerous areas in it, so be it, why would you think a scaffold pole welded into a gun breech would be a fitting substitute to the real barrel? Why do those sinking these ships believe cutting all but the metal shell of the ship from its interior, and gas-axing huge holes in her to facilitate “safe swim-through’s” is better than leaving the ship whole and just cleaning her environmentally? What remains, when sunk, is a travesty of the ship itself, gutted and impotent, all vestiges of her purpose gone and just a carved up hull littering the sea bed. The ship may have an illustrious past, may have been significant in many ways, but has been taken to a site and then deliberately sunk and thus has lost relevance in terms of that historic context, it has been placed deliberately, no association with the descriptive “wreck” should be claimed. If, as some would claim, the genuine purpose of the exercise is to create an artificial reef, surely that can be achieved using far cheaper, less intrusive means such as concrete structures used to create breakwaters and groynes? No the real purpose of ships like Scylla is to generate income for dive-centers locally who have nothing, or little to offer, or those who see real shipwrecks as “dangerous” or as disappearing history which, when truly ravaged to flat metal plates on the sea bed will mean no further wreck diving business…..

  So to “why” three: why is the history of a wreck like the James Egan Layne of more interest than Scylla? This is more difficult to answer as both vessels clearly have history and both would make an interesting study adding to the experience of diving them, and yes I have dived both, although I have dived the James Egan Layne of personal choice on several occasions, and Scylla only on a re-breather course as part of the course, as planned by those delivering it. Would I have chosen to dive Scylla, even as part of the course myself, no, categorically, the James Egan Layne would have been far better in my opinion. So what leads to this situation? I think for me it is the circumstances of the sinking, the two ships were sunk deliberately, one by an act of war, the other by an act of commercial intent. Is that commercial intent paramount in my view of the relevance of the Scylla as a dive-site, not completely, but it is definitely a contention. I do not believe in littering the sea-bed with such ships when there are already many true wrecks, with real history, that resulted in their demise at the point they were last afloat and resulted in their situation, orientation and state of preservation at the wreck site when dived. I think the key here, for me at least, is that the immediate history, the final act of that history, was the cause of the sinking of the ship, not some powder monkey with a wired charge sequence, initiating explosions for a horde of spectators………

  Why four is in and of itself a complexity, a “split infinitive” of wreck determination if you wish…… “to deliberately wreck” as in the multitude of wrecks of foreign flag operators strewn around the reefs of the world, strongly suspected of being “insurance jobs”. So “why four” is why potentially deliberately sunk vessels, likely to have been insurance claims, are not considered (by me) exactly the same category as those such as Scylla ie: “placed attractions”? Another layer of complexity appears here as I cannot give an absolute answer, where there is doubt, (and the idea of sinking any ship deliberately to enable an insurance claim, undoubtedly is predicated on the intention to cause as much “doubt”, as to the real nature of the sinking, as to mean even the most thorough investigator cannot say for certain the accident did not occur naturally……), then there is as much genuine historical context to the sinking, as not. Is that enough for me in truth, no, the idea I am diving on a ship deliberately sunk by its captain as an act of paid vandalism does indeed detract from the dive somewhat, however the understanding that it cannot be determined definitively means the wreck is a desirable dive, far more so than that of a sanitised business venture designed to attract gullible, or undiscerning divers

  To conclude our “5 whys” I offer you the final and most sublime of all the questions, “why worry” why would anyone care if a ship is classed by some obscure old diver from Liverpool as a “real” wreck or not? Well, that’s more for you than it is for me to be honest! Do you care why I have brought this issue up, perhaps, perhaps not? Are you aligned with the purist view, that a wreck is determined solely by its manner of end, by the sheer force of nature or act of aggression, perhaps by the miss-management of its maintenance, its cargo, or by the conduct of its master or crew, or are you more aligned to the “cool new wreck” stance taken by those dumping surplus shipping into the seas around our world? I ask as, inevitably, you will be curious to see ship-wrecks (as divers), you will help determine the course of the dive industry in the future, whilst I will perhaps not, for too much longer. I urge you all to consider the wrecks you dive in a more enquiring way, how did it get here, what was its mission, who were its crew and what caused it to sink…..I have done this for the last 30 years of diving and it has given me decades of fascination, frustration, elation and wonder…..if nothing else the “why worry” should pose more of a question than all the others together, for it asks you if you care….and the answer, as far as I am concerned, should always be yes!

   Have I enjoyed diving on “placed attractions”? Hell yes, some of you will have read the piece on Stanegarth and my family connections to the little Rea tug, I hope that piece articulated the value of a placed attraction and showed the affection I have for the vessel and its history. Some may wonder how it is possible to hold such defined views on “real” wrecks and still dive the odd exception? I dived not so long ago on an American vessel of WWII vintage, the Indra, a US Navy Achelous class “Landing Craft Repair” vessel, I had no idea the wreck was sunk as an artificial reef after the war, the ship itself genuine enough, and the dive was a good one, teeming with wild-life, (an example of the successes of the artificial reef programme off N.Carolina) and the wreck was in fantastic condition, whilst others we visited had seen far more damage and dereliction over the previous 65 plus years. It was not until I got back on board the dive boat and started asking the questions I had not had time to do so before the dive, what sank her, what was she doing in the area, that I got the story of her sinking as a reef and it was such a disappointment, what had been a marvellous dive to that point had now taken on the air of a deception, de-valuing her to me and meaning I had wasted an opportunity to carry out 2 dives on a local U Boat wreck, for the sake of a dive on an artificial reef. The dive was an enjoyable one, but the circumstances meant it was just a dive, of no historical significance to me from that point……such a shame, but take a look, see what you think!

Take a dive on her with me………

Stoney Cove Leicester

The Stanegarth was originally built in 1910 as a steam powered tug by Lytham Ship Builders Co. for the Rea Transport Co. Ltd. of Liverpool, that means she is older than The Titanic! In a bizarre twist of fate Stanegarth took longer to sink than the titanic too….

    Stanegarth was built as a steam tug, steam power being the marvel of the Victorian age, she carried a small boiler driven steam engine powering her whilst she carried out typical duties of a tug of the day, although the main of her career would be spent towing dredging barges between Sharpness and Purton on the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal. Stanegarth was converted to diesel power, along with the addition of an enclosed wheelhouse, in 1957. Found abandoned at Purton, on the Gloucestershire Sharpness canal at in 1999, Stanegarth was saved from an ignominious fate by Stoney Cove and Diver magazine, in a joint operation which saw her installed over several months into the cove as a diving attraction. Now, whatever your take on inland dive sites and the attractions within, Stanegarth is the largest ship in any dive centre by a long way! Stanegarth can be found on a 190° bearing form the Bus Stop and can also be found on a 220° bearing form the slip way

The Rea family started business as Liverpool coal merchants in 1872 begun by Russell Rea, who later went into partnership with his brother James in 1879. They started “bunkering” coal with a vessel called “Cumbria” and began the Rea Towing Company in 1881, adding the tugs Holmgarth and Aysgarth in 1899 and 1900 respectively, these were quickly followed by the tugs Fallgarth and Edengarth early in the 1900’s (Collard. I: “Mersey Tugs Through Time” Amberley Publishing) which showed the Rea Coal and Rea Towing companies were doing well!

There followed the Rea Transport Company, formed in 1902, to service the steamship trade out of Liverpool docks on the River Mersey. I grew up in Liverpool, as many of you who read this blog will know from the about me page, Rea tugs were a part of my young life, they not only coaled the steamships, but later fueled and maneuvered my Father’s own Blue Funnel ships, along with ships from the Allen line and Glen line and many others I’m sure, in fact the Alfred Holt businesses had shares in the Rea towing and the Rea Transport companies, making it easier, and perhaps cheaper to do business in Vittoria and the other Holt line Liverpool Docks. All the tugs of the various Rea companies were “Garth’s” the Stanegarth being perhaps the 10^th tug owned by the Rea family of businesses, brought into service in 1910 to tow coal barges round the docks and the Manchester Ship Canal

  Those who worked on and around these little tugs were men of their time, gritty and used to hardships we can only imagine, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times….the heady excitement of the Victorian Empire, Britain ruling the waves and 2/3 of the globe, Brunel and the Great Western Railway, and the Great Eastern, his behemoth ship, the largest moving object on the planet at that time, not 20 years since, a rusting hulk acting as nothing more than a giant advertising bill-board to the people of Liverpool, beached in the Mersey. As the great Eastern lay slowly dying, Britain ran headlong into an arms race with Austro-Hungary and Germany and the outbreak of world war 1, just 4 years following the launch of Stanegarth, and only 2 after the launch and catastrophic loss of the largest ship on earth in that era, the Titanic, another ship who’s home port was Liverpool

    How can we mention Stanegarth in the same sentence as the Titanic you might ask, well our little tug wasn’t only towing barges, she was as capable of towing and mooring the great ships as she was the more mundane tasks of a working boat on the Mersey, indeed Stanegarth features in a small way in the lives of other ships far more regal, in March of 1917 the Allen Line Ship RMS Victorian’s Captain’s log reads: 21 March 1917: At Liverpool Lat 53.43, Long -3.01 (In Canada Dock, Liverpool) 6.30am: Tugs “Bison” and “Stanegarth” alongside. 6.40am: Tugs fast, cast off and commenced hauling out into Canada Basin 7.00am: In Canada Basin. 7.15am: Commenced hauling back into Canada Dock 7.50am: All fast in Canada Dock Berth No I am: Harland and Wolf’s men employed on re-armament. Hands painting and cleaning ship. Shore workmen employed in engine-room 11.40am: J Lythgoe (fireman) deserter brought on board by civil police and confined to cells pm: Hands employed painting and various duties 6.00pm: Party of men ashore for entertainment”

Those who worked on Stanegarth speak of the life with warm nostalgia, J.H. Cropper of Wallasey, a fireman with Rea in 1905 (in Collard. I: “Mersey Tugs Through Time” Amberley Publishing) remembers: “….if we were ashore for two nights each week we considered ourselves fortunate. Each member of the crew had also to take a turn watching the tug in the docks during liberty hours. It was seven days a week duty with no stipulated hours and fixed wages” and describing the routine of tug work “Tugs had to be constantly on the alert, sometimes for days before the expected vessel actually arrived. Never the less crews were happy: the spirit was like that of a family….”

My connection with Stanegarth was never one I knew, when I was invited to see her sunk in Stoney cove, on June the 6^th in 2000, a couple of days before my 40^th birthday. I had no idea Stanegarth had been a Rea ship, nor that she had worked in Liverpool docks. I was honoured to have been invited by Alan, Margaret and Rob to be a member of the enclosure at her sinking, getting a quayside view of the event as Stanegarth gently took on water and eventually slipped below the surface of the cove to become the largest ship in an inland site in the UK. Now I am clear on the term “shipwreck”, the Stanegarth is no wreck, she is a “placed attraction” and if she had been sunk at sea in the same manner I would have absolutely no interest in her. I know that sounds odd as I consider the Stanegarth an important piece of history, with a superb heritage and a huge personal connection, however, I have what friends and divers I have spent time with describe as a “weird”, and if they are being kind, “purist” approach to wrecks…..if it didn’t sink as a result of unforeseen circumstances, in an unintended manner, then whatever it is, it isn’t a wreck…. simple! I love the fact that for years of diving her, and teaching divers on her, I had no idea of the connection to Liverpool and the Blue Funnel line, so prominent in my family history

   Stanegarth is important to me for other reasons too, one of my closest friends is interred with her, his ashes forever intertwined with Stanegarth and his presence very much there, with me, every dive I take on her. Stanegarth may not be a “wreck” in the truest sense but she represents something different, an opportunity, in a fairly benign (tideless, currentless, reasonably shallow…etc) environment, to train for some serious wreck diving, and that is priceless. I have taken dozens of students to, and through Stanegarth and they have benefited from her, without knowing a thing of her true history and her past life, from the date 2 years before the launching of the Titanic, to her sinking in Stoney Cove in June of 2000 some 90 years later!

 

  Whatever Stanegarth saw whilst working at the Liverpool Docks, by far the larger part of her life was on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. Stanegarth was a tough old girl, her steam engine and boiler having been replaced with a more modern and efficient diesel engine in 1957, a full 47 years after her launch in the Ribble estuary, she went on to work right up until the 80’s hauling dredged mud, essential to keeping waterways clear for shipping, from Gloucester to Purton, it isn’t clear exactly when Stanegarth was laid up in Purton, but she was found, abandoned, by Stoney Cove in 1999. The last working photo I have seen puts Stanegarth somewhere around 1985-90, so if we give her the benefit of doubt and say 1990 that means Stanegarth had a working career of 80 years, not half bad for a 1910 Tug….a tough old girl indeed!     

   So when Stoney Cove decided Stanegarth needed saving and deserved a better end than to just rot away at Purton, they could hardly have anticipated the scale of the enterprise they had taken on. From the off Stanegarth seemed reluctant to take up Stoney’s offer of a new home, it was touch and go for a while as to whether she would get on the transport, the crane brought in to lift her very nearly didn’t…… Stanegarth weighed in teasingly near the crane’s limit and it was only when the fore and aft bulwarks were cut off, that the tug could be lifted and the trip to Stoney Cove began

    Those of you who wonder at the deep scars in the tarmac running some 20ft down the road from the middle car-park at Stoney Cove, need look no further than the photo of Stanegarth’s arrival, the truck carrying her grounded the trailer and dug in deep…..I think that is Rob scratching his head over the wisdom of just saying “fcuk it….keep going!” Eventually though, Stanegarth made it to the bottom car-park and was harboured up at the wall of the old shop entrance for further work, cleaning, preparing and removing her engine, and making safe the areas needed before placing her in the cove for the rest of time

  I was privileged to be given a set of photos of the progress of Stanegarth, from derelict homeless abandonment into the most popular inland dive site in the UK, I still have them and occasionally look back at the effort the volunteers at the cove put in to make her such an attraction. Looking back, Stanegarth seemed to be by the shop for an eternity, taking up space normally allotted for the various dive-schools and training organisations, mine included. I don’t recall exactly how long it took to make her as safe as Alan and the crew needed before she could be sunk, but I do know that the preparations were meticulous and environmental concerns were paramount to what was done

  If it had been me, I’d have left the engine and transmission in place, I always feel she is too “bare” when passing through her, it would have been far more “authentic” to leave the mechanics intact and I was never really sure why Alan and the staff didn’t do that to be honest, I suppose I should have asked…… Sadly Alan passed away in January of 2018, he is missed by all those that knew him, (for my part only in a small way), Alan gave me my first account at Stoney Cove when I started Deep Blue Diving, and it was Alan who allowed me to test the club RIB around the cove one Saturday, after diving had wrapped up for the day, before I bought it. Alan was a lovely chap, never scared of getting his hands dirty and always asking after those who used the cove and those he knew who dived there, it was Alan that started Stoney Cove as a scuba diving venture, and all that was done there, and has been achieved there stands as his legacy, including the Stanegarth!

  I have dived Stanegarth hundreds of times, in all seasons and all temperatures, I love coming across her Anchor chain, and following it up to her bow, or watching her loom out of the murky Green waters of the cove as her hull towers over me. It is great to have such a vessel to train on, to take divers into, knowing they are as safe as anyone can be inside a ship’s hull under the water. Stanegarth may have been deemed purposeless by her former employers, but that has not diminished her use as a piece of history, available to a unique set of people who still find her value inestimable! Stanegarth has been filmed and photographed thousands of times, has been lined off and through thousands of times, and she is always my favourite part of the cove, an old friend and the memory of old friends brought back just by being around her

  I think it fitting that such a stalwart of the Rea Towing Company of Liverpool has not been allowed to rust away in some forgotten berth, far from her origins, far from her purpose. Far better that Stanegarth sits peacefully under the cove where tens of thousands visit her under the water to train, to photograph, or just to dive her and enjoy. Perhaps some know something of her history, perhaps most do not, just that she is the biggest inland vessel underwater, either way it is wonderful that Stanegarth gets to spend her days at rest, simply there……an underwater tribute to 90 years of history and 80 years of hard work, rewarded in a way, with divers from all over the world coming to see her

Take a Dive with me on Stanegarth……..

Want to see Stanegarth working? Here is the gritty little tug on the Gloucester & Sharpeness Canal System towing the Ex Royal Navy Steamer Freshspring

I was privileged to join a Dive Expedition to the Falkland Islands, Lead by Don Shirley in January of 1996, the year I would eventually leave the Army. I had met Don on a previous Army Diving Expedition to Jamaica and we had got on very well, despite the difference in rank, I a lowly Lance Corporal, Don a Warrant Officer. Don was someone I would soon call friend rather than Sir, a down to earth and highly professional soldier, but also a keen adventurer with an infectious spirit and a healthy regard for those willing to take a step outside the ordinary! Don had planned the Expedition over the last year or so, with the ambition of diving under the ice of South Georgia, this would be thwarted by the desperate acts of an Army expedition the year before we arrived, where a canoe party forced back to shore by storms at sea, failed to re-supply the party that had tabbed (marched) the island and were isolated, without the rations carried in the sea canoes…..to the demise of some of the local penguin population. It was felt by the Islanders that our expedition should be denied diving South Georgia as a result, probably just a reprisal for the outrage caused by the roasting of a protected species, but it pissed us all off….there’s millions of the bloody things……. everywhere….. and Don had actually served through the Falklands war, ungrateful bloody Bennie’s!

Anyhow, I digress, when is a shipwreck not a shipwreck? Well, in this case when it is “Protector III” lying ashore in New Island’s Coffin Harbour. She sits just around the corner from the Two settlement houses occupied by the Islands Two inhabitants, the Islanders and renowned wildlife artists, Ian Strange and his immediate neighbor Tony Chater. Protector III was built in Port Greville, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1942 during the latter stages of WWII. She was of wooden construction, built at the Wagstaff and Hatfield Shipyard for the British Admiralty, with the original purpose of mine sweeping. The Germans had made significant use of magnetic mines, dropped by parachute into the seas surrounding the UK, wooden minesweepers had a distinct advantage in counter-mine operations, obviously, not being made of Steel, and undoubtedly saved many ships by successfully clearing magnetic and acoustic mines as a result. Protector III served until the end of the war, then finding employment in various roles before being bought to be used in the Falklands, as a sealer, and later as a fishing and general work-boat, an ignominious end to a heroic career. She was beached, (hence, although “wrecked” is not truly a “Ship-Wreck” in diving terms, for quite obvious reasons,) in Coffin Harbour, New Island in 1969. Co-incidentally the Southern Craftsman Expedition was bunked on New Island for the second phase of our Diving adventure, following a week long stint on Weddell Island

The Sight of Protector III was unusual at the time, to say the least, here was a complete shipwreck, sat on the beach, as if she could be re-floated and, with a little ingenuity, resume her journey…. Nothing is ever, truly what it seems, at higher tides it was evident Protector III’s hull was not in any way sound as she did not float, rather she lay slightly to Starboard as if relaxing in the surf. It makes you wonder if there are many of her type remaining as examples around the world as, from a historical perspective, Protector III represents a valiant, and relatively unsung fleet. Such vessels crews, who’s “Navy Reserve” status meant many were regular trawler-men, disdainful of rank and Naval discipline, but were still willing to undertake some of the most dangerous work on the high seas, hunting and de-fusing that which could easily destroy far larger ships than theirs! At the time it wouldn’t have taken so much to get Protector III back afloat I’m sure, no matter though, now she is in quite different condition as photo’s taken more recently show

I cannot find Protector III’s previous MMS designation, it would be nice to add a little of her earlier history to this piece, she could have been a “Llewellyn” derivative having been made at Wagstaff & Hatfield, but there would need to be evidence of that and I have none but anecdotal to go on. It is clear that as Protector III there was modification carried out when she was re-roled as a “Sealer”, the Mine array reel was removed, and her transom replaced to fill the stern-gap the mine drag-lines were deployed through. On the picture of MMS 636 you can see the Bow carries the modification carried out to many of the wooden minesweepers, a device fitted to cope with “Acoustic” mines, a later development deployed to go off based on the “sound signature” of passing shipping. Basically this was a hammer affair used to create an artificial “signature” to set-off mines before more valuable ships were taken down in passing

What can be said about these small, and not truly “Navy” (in the “Royal” sense of the term) ships, is that they carried out incredibly hazardous work. I have dived HMT Elk some way off the Breakwater in the sound at Plymouth, a story for another post on here later, sunk whilst carrying out operations in the sound and hitting a mine in 1940. Many served, and many were lost, taking incredibly brave and not well recognised heroes to the depths in the service of their nation. The “T” in HMT is not a mistake, the minesweepers of the class were designated “Trawlers” or, to give their full title, His Majesty’s Trawler….. abbreviated to HMT

Here was a ship, “wrecked” but ashore, the worst thing possible for a wreck diver. It didn’t help that there were other wrecks around the Falklands that we were not permitted to dive, compounding the disappointment brought by the forbidding of our under-ice diving ambitions. The Admiralty and the Ministry of Defence had refused us permission to Dive the Falklands war wrecks of HMS Coventry and HMS Antelope, although at the time none of us but Don would have dived Coventry as she sits deep at 90m, I’d love the chance today though! I did get to dive a true Falkland island wreck earlier whilst on Weddell Island, and would dive another, later, whilst in Port Stanley, but you will need to visit other posts on here in the future to hear those tales……..

There are several co-incidences in respect to the Protector III, she gave me a perfect look at what HMT Elk would have been like when at sea, something I loved when I was diving the Elk years later. The second is the similarity to HMT Texas which I dived in Jamaica, all Three of these gritty and heroic little ships sit upright and proud, in Three different locations around the world, and fascinated me whilst underwater and ashore. But there is one more, although a little more tenuous, co-incidence here, Protector III sits in front of a museum now, when I was on New Island this was a desolate stone building full of whale-bone and the relics of those who pursued the leviathans of the deep in Southern Oceans. I did some research following my stay on New Island and found a little more about the site, having spoken to an American couple who were gradually restoring the building one holiday at a time, at their own expense I might add!

The coincidences continue as the hut was built by Charles Barnard, marooned on New Island June 11th 1813, June 11th of course being my Birthday. Charles Barnard was on New Island as a result of the wreck of the ship Isabella, out of Port Jackson, New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) en route to England when, being so badly handled by her Captain, George Higton, she ran aground off the Falklands on Eagle Island in February of 1813. Bear in mind 1812 was the American war of Independence….(a kind of “Pre-Brexit” divorce case where the USA (Largely British) dumped Britain….) leading to a tale of Two ships crews…….. the potential rescuers of those wrecked on the Isabella, from the American Sealer “Nanina”, and the remnant crew of the British ship Isabella, marooned on Eagle Island. Thereby hangs a tale best read in David Miller’s (Ex-Rupert in the Signals) excellent book “The Wreck of the Isabella” (ISBN 0-85052-456-3) which I read shortly after getting back from the Southern Craftsman Expedition. For those who can’t wait, or who will not look up such a story, it is one of treachery, where rescuers become the marooned after mutiny………It is far too good a read, and too well researched, to do more than whet the appetite here…….. I promise those reading it will not be disappointed!

So what has become of the Protector III today? I took a look on the internet and quite quickly learned that time has taken it’s toll, sadly the valiant survivor of WWII still sits in the lonely bay on New Island, and the weather and the years have not been kind. Protector III has become a shadow of her former self and it seems inevitable that she will eventually fall into the sands of time, as we all must. There is always a glimmer of hope, eventually the world woke up to the potential loss of the SS Great Britain, another long time resident of the Falkland Islands, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s first Iron, Propeller driven, Ship in the world. Now I am not saying Protector III is of the same importance or of the same innovation, but who know’s perhaps she is the last of her line and somewhere, someone cares enough……..

  My first dive abroad was 27/06/1992 in Croatia, from Punta Verudella, a small promontory of the Istrian peninsula on the coast of what was until a couple of months beforehand known as Yugoslavia. For those of you old enough to remember Yugoslavia the country had only opened itself up to tourism over perhaps Two decades or so, it had quickly become a favourite amongst UK holidaymakers being as beautiful as Italy and the Amalfi coast but, being less developed and far less known, it was far and away cheaper and much less crowded but just as engaging! I found myself serving in what was known at the time as “former Yugoslavia” by the ministry of defence and her employees, I had been “invited” to tour with the United Nations on a little jaunt known as “UNPROFOR”, or to us Op Hanwood, an intervention if you like, between the warring factions of Serbia and Croatia, the purpose of which seemed to be to become a pain in the ass of local combatants, “observing” their atrocities but failing to be allowed to do anything about them…… A piss poor state of affairs we all hated in equal measure!

  So why did it all go Pete Tong then? It’s a long story, the short version goes something like this: Round the late 1800’s the Serbs and the Croats and Slovenians were fed up with being eyed up by the Austro-Hungarians, they wanted independence and “nationhood”, Around 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand is visiting the area, Sarajevo in what was Bosnia, and a Serbian separatist dissident, Gavrilo Princip shot Franz and his wife Sophie, severely pissing off the Austro Hungarians who decide invasion is a good idea….Cue the alignment of most of Europe, the Ottomans of Turkey and Russia and the onset of the “war to end all wars” otherwise known as WWI….Things don’t go well for the Austro-Hungarians, now more popularly known as the “Hun” ….or “Germans” if you prefer, and after Woodrow Wilson and the Americans step in to make a point (14 of them to be exact) they surrender and the world forgets what had become the “Versailles State” ….. After various political meanderings, step-up Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia, who, in 1929 decided to suspend parliament and declare the Kingdom of Yugoslavia with himself as regent (in brief, and yes….this is the short version!),

all goes swimmingly until Alexander’s assassination in 1934 and then the inevitable World War 2 point 0 (WWII)….when Germany invades Yugoslavia, easily toppling the status Quo, the inevitable resistance arises, centring around a certain Communist rebel, Josip Broz Tito who’s HQ was on the island of Vis, about which, far more later in various posts on here, and, following the inevitable collapse of the Axis forces and the sound beating of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, once again after the belated entry of the USA into the conflict after having left Britain to stand alone for almost 4 years (there’s a pattern in here somewhere….) ….where were we, oh yes Tito…….

raised to leader of the nation of Yugoslavia, by popular demand, and ratified by the 3 winning allies, Britain, Russia and the USA (a bit prematurely, at a bit of a “do” at Yalta) we now have the “Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia” a quasi communist blending of Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, all happily ruled over by Tito, a half Croat, Half Serb and genuinely loved by all to the extent a dictator can be (Perhaps the best form of rule possible really, a benign dictator who loves their country and people)…….Until of course, Tito steps into the beyond, leaving no logical successor, and then it all goes seriously Pete Tong.

Croatia decide they can be a lot wealthier with the upsurge of tourist revenue they are seeing following Tito’s opening up of the country to Filthy Western Capitalist Bourgeoisie……..and declare themselves  separate from Serbia and the remaining countries of the old alliance……you know the rest of the story…..and after a couple of months of atrocious fighting between Croatia and Serbia in steps the United  Nations…….and 3 Field Workshops…..including me…… off to call “time” on Vlado and Slavko who are still very keen on kicking the living shit out of each other….with heavy weaponry………  well at least that was the “plan”!    

  The First of December 1991 was probably not the best choice of date to do a boat handling course if I’m honest…..badly thought through you might say? True, but getting permission from my employer (HM Forces) was not the easiest of things to do and involved getting a written letter from my Club Diving Officer, Norman Morley who, along with his partner Joy Morley both of Andover in Wiltshire, were legends in the echelons of the BSAC hierarchy. It is said every senior member of the BSAC, at the time, had slept on the floor or the couch in their picturesque cottage on the way to or from South Coast Dive Sites…..I believed it too! Once the CO of my unit had read the letter from Norman telling him how vital the skill was to our small, but popular, Tidworth BSAC branch, and how short of trained resource they currently were, Major Andrews kindly agreed I could attend the Poole Dive Centre course………..I was over the moon, no matter what the weather would be like!  

  My enthusiasm may have been a tad misplaced if the morning and first activity of the day was anything to go by, the course was started learning how to rite an overturned small boat, in our case a small RIB. It makes perfect sense as I am sure you realise, as, if you are going out in a RIB and do not know how to turn it back the right way up after a capsize, then it wasn’t very sensible going out in the first place………I got that, and to be honest it was a lot of fun climbing up the overturned hull and grabbing one of the rubbing strake hand lines, running the forward mooring line through it and standing up using the leverage of your weight as you lean back to pull the hull back upright! Some of the lighter guys had a more difficult task of it, but we all managed and after a couple of turns each we were ready to kit up and take out a couple of craft for a run in the bay

  There were a couple of craft we used, a small “Dory” type displacement hull craft, essentially a large rowing boat with a “cuddy” or covered area at the front. This was not an elegant craft, but it was a lot easier to see where you were going, and you were a lot less wet from the spray generated in a headwind than when cox’ing a RIB! We were getting used to being afloat and in charge of small craft, once we had demonstrated some level of competence with the Dory, and a small inflatable (running a small Transom mounted outboard), doing circuits and slow manoeuvres, coming alongside each other, safely, handing across minor bits of kit etc, we headed in for a sandwich and to swap over to a more powerful RIB, sporting a bigger outboard, and far more like what we would be using to dive from in our various dive-clubs   

    We had all been eagerly looking forward to getting hold of the RIB, it was by far the sexier of the craft we were going to use and each of us had, of course, our own ideas on what it would be like getting up to speed with a “real” dive RIB for the first time! 

  So we each took a turn as Cox (coxswain) and, at first….. gingerly, pushed forward the throttles and felt her rise up and accelerate….she was fast…. then it was getting her to “plane” where the speed of travel lifts the hull higher in the water and less of the hull is therefore in contact with the sea, that, in turn, means less drag from the water and a more ergonomic ride, a quick check of the “trim” of the outboards, making sure they are driving the boat “level” (the outboards not angled either too far down or too far up) so there is less, or better still no, cavitation (where the prop causes “frothing” losing mechanical efficiency) and the RIB is riding “sweet”  and you were “off” and allowed to let her rip a little, driving a series of lazy curves and then building some turns, gradually increasing the “ferocity” of the turn to get a feel of the RIB’s capability and your own competence 

  There were drills and skills to complete too, ship to shore (harbour-master) communications on VHF radios and hand-helds, boat to boat transfer, Diver pick-up…… but man overboard was probably the most important of all. The premise being someone, eventually, would fall overboard and everyone on board would need to recognise the event, immediately grasp its seriousness, and do the right thing as soon as humanly possible….that meant shout the event “Man Overboard”….keep the victim in sight…..and indicate by maintaining an outstretched arm “pointing” where he or she was, so the cox could turn the boat around effectively and quickly without anyone losing site of the casualty…..I’ve only ever had to do this as a drill, or during training…..and I thank God for that  

    When I eventually bought a RIB, it was based on what I learned in that first boat handling course, and what I had added to that experience handling Inflatables in the South Atlantic on military diving expeditions, handling small working boats in Jamaica in support of marine biology research, and leading boat handling courses at club and military dive expedition levels across the seas of the UK…… and what I’d been taught on the BSAC diver coxswain course I eventually got to take 15/01/1996….what is it with me and cold water ……?