another Facebook mention of Brunel's Great Britain
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Underestimated Arsenal
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A naval architect wrote to The Times in November 1967 to say that the forefather of all modern ships was lying a beached hulk in the Falkland Islands, and then he asked for almost nothing.
His name was Ewan Corlett. He was forty-four, he had a doctorate and a reputation, and the people who knew him described him as a modest and
quietly persuasive man. He did not ask for the ship to be rescued. He
wrote that nothing had been done to document the hulk, let alone recover
it, and he asked that somebody go and photograph it before it was lost.
The ship was Brunel's Great Britain. When she was floated out of her
dock at Bristol on 19 July 1843 she was the largest vessel afloat, over
a hundred feet longer than her rivals, and the first ocean-going ship in
the world to combine an iron hull with a screw propeller. Isambard
Kingdom Brunel had designed her with Thomas Guppy, Christopher Claxton
and William Patterson.
Prince Albert came down from London for the launch, advertised in
Bristol beforehand with the words, Prince Albert, to be seen alive. Who actually christened her is something her own museum says the record
cannot settle. One account has Mrs Miles, the wife of a local member of parliament, doing it, as she had done for an earlier Brunel ship in
1837. Another has her missing the hull altogether, and Prince Albert
taking a bottle from his own table and throwing it to save the moment. Contemporary reports disagree, and they have never been reconciled.
She was almost too big to leave. The lock out of the Floating Harbour
was a fraction too narrow for her, and she jammed in it. It was Captain Claxton's seamanship that got her hauled back out without tearing her
open, and that night Brunel had workmen lift the coping stones and the
lock gate platforms out of the way so a tug could take her down to the
Avon on a higher tide.
Her maiden voyage to New York was in July 1845. A year later she went
aground in Ireland, and the cost of getting her off bankrupted the
company that built her. She was sold, re-engined, and put on the
Australian run, and that is the part of her life that put her into the
largest number of family histories. On her first voyage to Melbourne in
1852 she carried 630 emigrants, and four thousand people in Melbourne
paid a shilling each simply to walk her decks. She carried troops to the Crimea. For almost thirty years she was considered the most reliable
emigrant ship between Britain and Australia.
In 1882 they took her engines out and made her a sailing ship carrying
coal. She left Wales in February 1886, was badly damaged off Cape Horn,
and limped into Port Stanley. On the morning of 25 May her master,
Captain Henry Stapp, registered her with the harbourmaster as needing,
in the words written down that day, repairs to spars. The insurers would
not pay for them. She was sold to the Falkland Islands Company for three thousand pounds and became a storage hulk, and for fifty-one years she
held coal and grain and wool. In December 1914 she coaled the Royal Navy cruisers at the Falklands.
By 1933 she was judged unsafe even for that. Bristol was asked to pay to
bring her home in 1936 and the money was not raised. On 12 April 1937
she was beached in Sparrow Cove, and she stayed there for thirty-three
years.
When Corlett wrote that letter he had never stood in front of her. He
knew her inch by inch from the records Brunel left behind, and he worked
out from those drawings and from the shape of the problem that she was probably still saveable. He went out by sea in November 1968 and
surveyed the hull himself. What he found was that the damage was a
handful of serious holes rather than a ship that had come apart, and
that if those holes were shut she would still float. That single
conclusion is what made everything afterwards possible.
Jack Hayward put up the money. In March 1970 a British salvage team from Risdon Beazley Marine of Southampton, Lyle Craigie-Halkett, Stu Whatley,
Bill O'Neil, Bob Light and Don O'Hara, worked alongside a German team
from Ulrich Harms in the cold and the dark inside the hull, on long
shifts, for days on end. There was a large crack down one side and a
point at which it looked as though she was going to split in two, and
what they did about it was stuff mattresses into it.
She floated. They moved her over a sunken pontoon and pumped it up until
it lifted her clear of the water, which made her the largest hull ever salvaged that way, and in April she started home. Eight thousand miles,
the longest homecoming voyage ever made under tow.
She reached Avonmouth on 23 June 1970 and started up the Avon on 5 July. Thousands of people stood along the river. The pilot aboard her, Chester Rickards, remembered going under the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the
noise from the crowd being so loud that the men on board could hardly
hear their radios. Dave Sidwell, a deckhand on one of the tugs, said
there was such a spring tide behind her that they were steering her
rather than pulling her.
She lay in the Floating Harbour about a fortnight. Then, late on the
evening of 19 July 1970, she was edged back into the dry dock she had
been built in, 127 years to the day after she left it. Corlett walked
across the temporary decking ahead of the man who had paid for it. He
came back to Bristol one last time in July 2005, a few weeks before he
died, for the ceremony marking the end of her restoration.
He had asked only that somebody photograph her before she went. The
photograph at the top of this page was taken at Bristol in 1844, by
William Henry Fox Talbot, while she was still fitting out and had not
yet crossed anything. It is believed to be the first photograph ever
taken of a ship. See less
(on one of the top 3 vacation plans for this winter was a cruise
from South America to England,
I seriously considered that, and then a 3 day self guided
stay in Bristol to visit this & Brunel's other things.)
Underestimated Arsenal
Author
She is still in that dock. The Great Western Dockyard, Gas Ferry Road, Bristol, in the same dry dock she was floated out of in 1843, with two
museums alongside her.
One detail that did not fit above. The letter to The Times was not the
end of Corlett's own part in it. It got him onto the BBC's Today
programme, and the following year he went to the Falklands himself,
aboard HMS Endurance, with Lord Chalfont, and surveyed the hull in
person. That is where the finding came from that everything afterwards
rested on: the damage was a handful of serious holes rather than a ship
that had come apart. He was not a campaigner who handed the problem to somebody else. He went and measured it.
About the photograph, before anyone else says it. It is not a flattering picture of the largest ship in the world. Her masts are bare, she is
lying against a quay with nothing set and nobody much aboard, the plate
is speckled and grainy, and she looks closer to a hulk than to the most advanced thing afloat. That is because she was not finished. William
Henry Fox Talbot made it at Bristol in 1844 while she was still fitting
out, and it is believed to be the first photograph ever taken of a ship.
It is also the only out-of-copyright photograph of her we could find
anywhere, which is why it is the one at the top.
The thirty-three years on the card run from 12 April 1937, when she was beached in Sparrow Cove, to her refloating in 1970. Counted from the day
she last sailed from Britain in 1886, she was away for eighty-four.
Aj Haines
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WaitrCashe still exists?? Now I got to plan a trip to EnglandrCa.Ive read about this ship before but just assumed she was scrapped. This would be
as close to seeing the Titanic come back as IrCOll ever get!
Reply
Neal Barnes
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For anyone interested, I have a story about the SS Great Britain.
The son of a farmer on Goose Green in the Falklands told me that he used
to play with his friends on the wreck as a child. One of the decorative
bronze fairings around the anchor chain hole was nearly detached. They
managed to recover the item and got it back to the farm, where he calmed
it still resides.
This was told to me in the early 1990rCOs. IrCOve no idea what may have happened since, but I do recall that a documentary on the refurb of the
ship in Bristol avowed how a new fairing was made for her during the renovation.
Would it be an interesting adventure to try and recover the original?
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Emlyn Huish
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A late friend of mine, Capt Stan Evans was Head of Maritime Studies at
Cardiff University some years ago. He told me that he was aboard a tug
which went to greet SS Great Britain on her return and was the first
person to put his hand on her hull as she entered UK waters
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John Richards
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On 23rd June 1970 I went down to Nash Point to watch her being towed up
the Channel on her barge. Impressive in the afternoon sun even from that distance, and a daunting prospect for her preservationists. Who have,
over the years, done a magnificent job on her; every time I visit her,
she gets better and better. The glass 'water' in her dock was an
inspired idea, and much better executed than the rather silly bubble
that 'Cutty Sark' sits in. I am most impressed by the First Class dining
room, a fine piece of early Victorian confectionery, imagine all that
lurching about in a North Atlantic gale...
Iain Fielden
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I went on a school visit to her in the late 1970s. One of the things
they were doing to raise funds was selling off small pieces of broken
plates that could not be restored and had to be replaced.
So I own a fingernail sized piece of SS Great Britain.
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Edited
John Allen
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Her Misadventure in Northern Ireland saw her stranded on a beach at
Tyrella/ Dundrum, near Newcastle, County Down.
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Jonathan Palmer
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I got married on her in 2004 and wrote the music for the ceremony....
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