by Tim Pears
McKenzie put his mouth to Leo’s ear and yelled, ‘It’s a wee bit strange the first time.’ He leaned back and gestured to his throat so that Leo could see him making a swallowing action. Leo did the same, repeatedly, responding to the sensation in his ears under the increasing pressure. He thought that something in his head would burst, but did not know what. His eardrums or blood vessels or brains. Soon he had no saliva left, his mouth and throat were dry. Again he copied Tom McKenzie who gripped his nostrils between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and blew, easing the pressure in his ears. Leo watched the needle on the dial of the air pressure move slowly round until the whistling and shrieking faded away. He did not think that anything could be worth repeating this experience for every time he came out to the ship from now on.
‘Aye,’ Tom said, ‘you’ll get used to it soon enough.’
Now they opened the inner door and climbed down the ladder and into the ship. The water-filled world they had moved through in their diving suits, and viewed from inside their copper helmets, or felt through darkness like blind men, they now traversed in breathable air. Everything was covered in a thick slime of oil and coal dust. A dark and stinking world. They wore oilskins and rubber macintoshes which became smothered with this filth. Lights were strung along passageways.
The three bulkheads ran up through the levels or decks of the ship, in various compartments. Throughout the spring of 1927 the divers were joined by others, labouring to seal them. They were like miners, but working under the sea instead of underground. Pipes were cut with oxyacetylene burners. These consumed much of the fresh air in order to maintain their heat at three thousand degrees, so the atmosphere was often foul. Pipes were blocked with wooden plugs set in red-lead putty. Buckled doors were replaced by cement patches and fills. With the ship upside down, doors were often now twenty feet above the ceiling that had become the floor, so new ladders had to be attached to armour plate.
In the German crew’s accommodation, they found photographs, clothing and personal effects in lockers and lying scattered amid the debris. Leo found bottles of fine wine, but it could not be enjoyed, for the pressure of the compressed air had blown the corks in. Harry Grosset found chocolate bars in a cupboard in the canteen, which he brought up and passed around. They still tasted good. Of course there was no evidence of the German sailors, who had scuttled their ships and escaped. Somewhere out on the bed of the North Sea lay the wreck of HMS Queen Mary, and the bones of Leo’s friends interred within her.
In bad weather the men emerged from the top of the hundred-foot airlocks into wild blowing sky and had to hold tight and climb down the ladders on the outside with the locks pitching in the savage wind.
In May of that year all was ready. The bulkheads were airtight, and each was separately fed with compressed air. All the men left the ship and on a calm day late in the month gathered around her at a high spring tide, on the tugs and tenders and floating platforms. The last stage of the job was not rushed but instead slowed down, as the ship filled with air under ever-greater pressure, towards the point where negative buoyancy would give way to positive buoyancy. Leo stood on the tug Sidonian with the other divers. All of them had worked on some at least of the destroyers and they told Leo that if this worked as Father Cox hoped it would then he was about to see something he would never forget.
Ernest Cox strode the deck of the largest platform, equipped with his megaphone. He checked the gauges that showed the pressure, on fourteen-inch dials, to the nearest quarter of a pound, and told the men on the various machines to give more air, or slow down, or shut off. The compressors throbbed and generators chugged. Labourers stood smoking on the floating docks, waiting if needed for they knew not what. As well as the airlocks protruding from beneath the surface of the Flow, with their multitude of guy wires keeping them stable, rubber pipes now squirmed in the rough water like sea snakes, and electric cables ran down to feed the lights and other equipment inside the submerged ship.
‘Look around,’ Nobby Hall told Leo. ‘We’re all here waitin, like for a miracle. Father Cox there’s like one of them old prophets, ain’t he?’
Leo smiled and said it had not occurred to him but perhaps this was right. Nobby said he hadn’t been one much for worship, but they’d had readings in school, and he seemed to recall vaguely a story in the Bible about making iron swim.
‘You’re right,’ Leo said. ‘Elisha led the Israelites to the River Jordan, and as they were cutting trees to build dwellings, one man dropped his axe in the water. Elisha made it float back to the surface, so the man could retrieve it.’
Nobby Hall grinned. ‘There you go then, mate. Father Cox is like the Prophet Elisha. There you go.’
The day was unusually calm. Men chatted and smoked on the boats, then gradually they stopped speaking and turned their attention to the site of the wreck. Leo could not see anything happening. Yet they all sensed it. Workers on the floating platforms stopped what they were doing. Everyone looked towards the water.
‘She’s rising,’ said Bill Peterson quietly.
Leo watched the three pillars of the airlocks creep upward. There came a long low groan from under the water. Harry Grosset said he had once heard a whale make such a sound. Bubbles of air appeared on the surface and popped. The sea began to ripple and roil and pitch like something cooking or fermenting. It frothed and foamed. It seethed and simmered.
The tugs pitched and swayed in turbulence; men lost their footing. Compressed air escaped from underneath the ship in twenty-foot bubbles. Suddenly there was a rush of water and the great broad hull reared up out of the sea, groaning, long tendrils of seaweed flailing from her sides in the sun.
Once positive buoyancy had been reached, and the suction of the mud in the seabed had given way, there was no way of controlling the ship’s ascent. They could only watch as a million and a half cubic feet of surplus air was expended in seconds. The driving force shot the Moltke to the surface, sending waterspouts soaring upwards around her, as if heralding this monstrous arrival from the deep. Holding his breath, Leo watched the huge ship, all her twenty-four thousand tons of metal, rise above the surface and tower above them, seeming to breathe there in that ferment or get her breath back from the enormous effort of her resurrection, while sprays of water containing the filthy slime inside the ship turned the surrounding sea a dirty brown, oil and air and bubbling seawater all gurgling together.
Sinc Mackenzie yelled, ‘She’s up!’ and Leo realised that all the men around him were cheering. He joined them. What they had just seen was a sight given to few men. Gradually the great upturned battleship settled, afloat. Ernest Cox ordered the tugs brought alongside her and secured.
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On the days following, the battleship was towed alongside Lyness Pier. The pier railway was extended with a long curve, and re-laid on Moltke’s upturned hull. A light engine towed a three-ton crane along the tracks. Openings, six feet square, were cut into the hull. Men went down with oxyacetylene burners and cut loose whatever they could. Everything metal, large or small, that could be lifted out of the ship was raised by the cranes through the hatches in her hull cut for this purpose. Gun steel, with its high content of nickel and chromium. Boiler plates, with their low content of phosphorus and silver. Cox knew what everything was worth. Three thousand tons of metal were removed.
The open holes were plated over, and the ship was once more airtight. It floated, still upside down. Two corrugated-iron huts were riveted on the hull, each painted white. One was a machine room to house the three compressors required to maintain a constant air pressure for the journey. The other a kitchen, bunkhouse and mess room for a fourteen-man runner crew. Leo volunteered to join it. Ernest Cox planned to tow the ship, lighter than it had been but still weighing over twenty thousand tons, to the Admiralty dry dock at Rosyth in the Firth of Forth.
Two towing bollards were fixed a hundred feet from the bow of the upturned hull, and lines from these were taken up by a large tug. A hundred
feet further back a bollard was bolted on the port side, another on the starboard, and a small tug secured to each.
Lifeboats and rafts were attached to the Moltke, and the tugs towed the huge overturned German battleship out of the Flow, through the Pentland Firth and out onto the North Sea. The tugs hauled the ship south, her great weight pulling them back, so that their progress was slow but steady in the swelling sea.
On the morning of the fourth day the Moltke approached the Firth of Forth. Ernest Cox stood surveying the channel before them. Somehow he managed to look as smart as ever in his Harris tweeds and brogues and the trilby pushed down tight on his head.
‘You’ll tell your grandchildren about this,’ he said, turning to Leo. ‘I know you’ve got no children yet, lad, but you’re young, you surely will.’ He stamped on the metal plate they stood on. ‘Aye, Leo, you can say that you were one of Ernest Cox’s men. No one’s lifted such a ship as this. No one’s towed a ship so far upside down either. How about that, eh, sonny?’
Leo did not think he had ever seen a man so satisfied. With good reason. ‘’Tis been quite a year,’ he said. He could not do as others did and address Ernest Cox as ‘Father’.
‘The first of many,’ Cox said. ‘It’ll be like the destroyers. We learned from all our mistakes on the first one. The rest came up quicker every time.’ He put his hands on his hips and squared his shoulders. ‘You’re a good diver, Leo Sercombe. Mac thinks highly of you, you know. Bill Peterson too. I intend to raise your pay. You’ll be earning good money with me.’
Leo nodded slowly. ‘I appreciate what you’re sayin, Mister Cox. But this is it for me.’
Ernest Cox looked at Leo with a mystified frown upon his face. He did not seem able to understand what he’d heard.
‘I’ve been long enough in the North,’ Leo said.
Cox scowled. His face reddened and it seemed he was about to curse. But he was in too good a mood to be angry. He shrugged. ‘I’ll be damn’ sorry to lose you, sonny,’ he said. ‘Have you had bad news?’
Leo shook his head. ‘No.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘I’ve been a wanderer, at other men’s beck and call, long enough. I should make something of my own.’
‘What kind of thing?’ Cox asked.
‘A field. A horse.’ Leo smiled. ‘A home. It don’t sound like much.’
‘If you’ve got none of those things, sounds like a lot,’ Ernest Cox said. ‘To make it work might not be easy.’
‘I doubt it will.’
Cox rested one hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘Few things worth doing are, sonny.’
Leo looked around. He had to admit that the man spoke from a position of authority. Cox looked up at Leo and said, ‘But we’re not done here yet. We’ve still to bring this piece of scrap to the dock.’
*
Ernest Cox radioed ahead for an Admiralty pilot, and arranged for him to come out and meet them at Inchkeith, at an agreed time, to guide them through the Firth of Forth, under the great bridge, and on to the dock at Rosyth. The galley cook announced that breakfast was served. They ate their morning meal of porridge followed by bacon and the last of the eggs they’d brought, with fried bread, and mugs of tea. The radio operator came in and reported contact with the leading tug.
‘The pilot’s on board, Father.’
Ernest Cox swallowed a mouthful of tea and said, ‘He can’t be yet.’ He strode out of the corrugated-iron hut onto the hull and marched along towards the fore end. Other men followed him. ‘Binoculars,’ he said without turning round.
Tom McKenzie had a pair slung around his neck. Stooping forward, he removed them and walked faster to catch up with his boss. Cox took the glasses and stopped and raised them to his eyes.
Leo came up level with the two men and followed Ernest Cox’s gaze. He did not need binoculars to see that a boat was now tied to the leading tug, a hundred feet ahead of the Moltke. Beyond, a second boat was approaching out of the Firth, with the Royal Navy ensign flying.
Without lowering the glasses, Ernest Cox said, ‘Get me a boat.’
Leo looked at Tom McKenzie, who gestured towards the aft of the upturned hull. ‘The rowboat’ll be quickest,’ he said. Leo accompanied him to the small lifeboat. Tom McKenzie waved others over too. They untied the boat and lowered it to the water then unrolled the rope ladder, with its wooden spars. Leo climbed down first and fixed the rowlocks in position while Tom McKenzie and two others followed. They found their oars and raised them as Ernest Cox climbed down the ladder and stepped into the boat.
The men on that side pushed off from the Moltke with their oars and they rowed out and on, around the side tug tied to the ship, towards the leading tug. The sea that had appeared calm from on top of the hull was choppy in the small boat.
‘Faster, men, faster!’ Ernest Cox yelled. Leo rowed hard, his unaccustomed muscles on fire.
When they reached the leading tug, Ernest Cox directed them to steer the boat between the two larger ones already tied to her. As soon as one of the crew on the tug had grasped the rope thrown to him and pulled their boat flush with the side, Ernest Cox rose and clambered out. The others could hear him yelling, ‘What the bloody hell is going on here?’
‘It’s gettin crowded on that tug and no mistake,’ one of the rowers said.
Tom McKenzie caught Leo’s eye again and said, ‘We’d better go after him.’
They heaved themselves aboard the tug and walked across its deck. Mac climbed the short ladder to the bridge. Leo stayed at the bottom and watched from there. On the bridge of the tug the skipper introduced a man he said was a Firth of Forth pilot. He explained that the man had hailed him, and come on board.
‘We’re towing this hulk to the Admiralty dock at Rosyth,’ Cox said. He pointed to a man in naval uniform. ‘And this Admiralty pilot is going to guide me.’
The Firth pilot shook his head. ‘I can’t allow that.’
‘You’ll do what the bloody hell I tell you,’ Cox said.
‘The tug skipper here accepted me,’ the Forth pilot said. ‘Once I’m appointed I can’t be removed until the vessel’s docked.’
Ernest Cox turned to the Admiralty pilot. ‘You’re a naval officer,’ he said. ‘Pull bloody rank or something.’
‘I’ve been contracted to do the job,’ he explained to the Firth pilot.
‘That’s no concern of mine.’
‘I can’t be removed either,’ the naval pilot said. ‘I refuse to leave this bridge.’
Tom McKenzie stepped forward. ‘Can you two not work together?’ he suggested.
The pilots looked at Mac, and at each other, with similar expressions that seemed to combine distaste with incredulity.
‘Pilots working in pairs?’ one asked.
Leo turned and walked back across the deck of the tug. He leaned over the side. The two men in their lifeboat looked up and Leo shrugged. He stood and walked to the back of the tug and rolled a cigarette and lit it. As he exhaled the smoke of the first drag he heard faint cries in the distance and looked behind him. The men of the runner crew on the upturned hull of the Moltke were waving and yelling. One of the other tugs sounded its horn. Leo turned and looked forward. He saw that though the tugs had stopped towing some while earlier, all the vessels were drifting on the ebb tide. He reckoned the tide had about a five-knot run. He looked ahead and saw to his horror the massive Forth Bridge looming.
Now the men above him on the tug saw what was happening. They were heading for the central pillar of the bridge! One of the pilots took command, or they worked in unison, Leo did not know, but the order was given to the tugs to cast off their tow lines. They did so, and all watched the twenty-thousand-ton hulk of out-of-control metal float towards the pillar.
If that pillar was struck by the tremendous weight and motile force of the Moltke it would be a disaster. If a train was crossing at the time many people would surely be killed. Cox would be ruined anyhow. All the men’s jobs would be lost. Leo would never receive the rest of his pay.
He watched in horror, unable to breathe. The miracle of the raising followed so soon by catastrophe. The haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the pride of men shall be brought low. Leo stood on the leading tug and watched the hulk turn broadside and glide through the left-hand bay, missing the pillar by no more than a few feet. He gasped a huge gulp of the Forth air.
The tugs caught up with the Moltke on the far side of the bridge and once more took her in tow, one lashed to either side, the leading tug pulling her forward. They brought her to the dry dock and inched her in, Ernest Cox yelling orders from the hull with his megaphone. Spectators came and went along the side of the dock to view the extraordinary sight. Leo and the rest of the running crew stood upon the hull like hunters who had captured this wild and huge beast of the deep, this iron leviathan, and brought its corpse to land.
When the docking was complete Ernest Cox threw his megaphone into the air, and one by one embraced his men. The dock was closed and drained. The Moltke rested on pillars in the dry dock. Her upper decks, now beneath her, were covered with barnacles and sponges, blue mussel shells, and anemones in the full range – red, orange, blue-yellow – of subaquatic colour.
On the days following the men gathered the gear off the hull of the Moltke and took it on the tugs back to Scapa Flow. Leo said goodbye to them. Ernest Cox arranged for his pay to be delivered, and Leo carried his bag and got a lift to Waverley Station in Edinburgh, to find a train and begin the journey down to the South West of England.
Part Six
THE GREY THOROUGHBRED 1923–1926
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