The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  Johnson’s artist neighbour, Martin Harris, told me that the presence of this explosive hazard 1.8 miles from the sea wall made living in Sheerness like camping out “on the slopes of Vesuvius”. Johnson was happy to embrace that idea. The closure of the dockyard and associated naval command may have contributed but it was thanks to “the wreck” that every inhabitant of Sheerness knew they were involuntary inhabitants of an experimental English version of the “risk society” that the West German sociologist Ulrich Beck would soon be describing as a “new modernity”2: living in perpetual danger, insecure, powerless to influence the forces menacing them, and yet somehow managing to hang on to the semblances of everyday life.

  “What is that thing?” wondered the newly arrived Johnson as he glanced out through his window. Established residents were more likely to ask a different question: “Why on earth is it still there?” Ever since the stranding, the Richard Montgomery has been lending its own apocalyptic twist to life in the town. To this day, enquiring visitors are likely to be informed that if they look out from the promenade on a calm and clear night, they might see flames playing on the water above the wreck, allegedly caused by phosphorous escaping from smoke bombs and igniting on contact with the air. “Welcome to Sheerness”, says the large mural painted by Dean Tweedy in 2015 on a wall overlooking Beachfield Park. It shows a sulky mermaid lying on the beach with her hand on a detonator and the masts of the Richard Montgomery protruding from the water behind her: “You’ll have a blast”. The Daily Mail got hold of that story, proving that residents of the “rundown” town were not unanimously pleased to embrace its destiny as a place of dark tourism.3 Since Johnson investigated “our one sight worth seeing”, its dangerous condition has also been invoked to see off Boris Johnson’s attempt, when Mayor of London, to float a new four runway international airport in the waters just off the Isle of Sheppey. While literary visitors may now join the local artists who have embraced the Richard Montgomery as evidence that Sheerness really is “the end of the world”,4 “the wreck” has also continued to prove a more telling point about the widely condemned indifference of the public authorities upriver, which should surely have cleared this hazard decades ago. As one campaigner from Southend asked of the government in 1978: “How far down the river do you have to go before a dangerous wreck becomes acceptable?”5 “That thing” had a history, both prosaic and fable-like, which Johnson’s essay encourages us to fathom.

  *

  Still in position as one of the Thames Estuary’s more accidental historical monuments, the SS Richard Montgomery is one of nearly 2,750 “Liberty ships” built at great and increasing speed in rapidly expanded American shipyards during the Second World War and used to supply American and Allied forces in Europe and elsewhere. The ships were modelled on a British design, itself derived from existing tramp steamers, which had been used for an order of one hundred ships commissioned from American shipyards in the early years of the war. Manufacture was carried out on both American coasts, using increasingly rationalised techniques and an industrial “speed-up” that would eventually make it possible for a Liberty ship to be built in days rather than months. They were assembled from prefabricated sections and the conventional practice of riveting was replaced with welding, an economy that hastened production but also increased the dangers of sudden disintegration, especially in cold waters. Such were the perceived inadequacies of the mass-produced Liberty ship that it was condemned, in a book published in 1943 by the American Socialist Workers’ Party, as “a jerry-built job, made to be sunk”.6

  Launched in July of that same year, with a gross tonnage of 7,225, the SS Richard Montgomery was the seventh of eighty-two dry cargo Liberty ships built by the St Johns River Shipbuilding Company at Jacksonville, Florida. It made several crossings to Liverpool and also to (and across) the Mediterranean, where it appears on one occasion to have shipped mustard gas bombs into the southern Italian port of Bari. On its last voyage for the United States Shipping Administration, the freighter had picked up a cargo amounting, according to one early report, to 6,876 tons of bombs (the numbers would be differently arranged to produce 8687 tons in some later accounts), detonators and related munitions at Hog Island in Delaware, before leaving New York on 25 July 1944 and crossing the Atlantic in a convoy on which everybody understood the danger posed by enemy submarines. Having arrived at Oban on 8 August, it sailed round the coast of Scotland to Methil, in Fife. On 13 August, it headed south for the Thames Estuary where the master of the ship — an experienced fifty-four-year-old German-born American migrant named Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Willecke who, as Uwe “Charles” Johnson might have anticipated, would soon be converted into “Captain Wilkie” by the British press — had orders to await the formation of a convoy bound for the recently liberated port of Cherbourg in France. It’s cargo of bombs were intended for use by the US military during the Allied advance into Germany following the D-Day landings two months earlier.

  As it entered the estuary on 15 August, the Richard Montgomery came under the authority of Thames Naval Control at Southend Pier (then known officially as HMS Leigh). The King’s Harbourmaster there, who would later be identified as Acting Lieutenant Commander R.J. Walmsley, “ordered her to berth off the northern edge of the Sheerness Middle Sand — part of the Little Nore anchorage — in about 33 feet of water at low tide”.7 According to one contemporary witness, the harbourmaster had chosen this anchorage because he knew the dangerous nature of the ship’s cargo and wanted, understandably enough, to keep it away from other vessels crowded into the estuary. Given that the heavily laden Richard Montgomery was “trimmed to a draught of 31 ft, aft” (considerably lower than normal for a Liberty ship), the grounding, which took place after the vessel dragged its anchor in a rising northerly wind following a high tide in the night of Sunday, 20 August, might well be considered a predictable outcome of the harbourmaster’s decision. Not so, however, according to the Board of Enquiry held in the ship’s saloon a few days after the stranding. At this hearing, which is said to have been conducted in an “an all-pervading stench of leaking fuel oil”,8 both the King’s Harbourmaster from Southend and the pilot who had guided the Richard Montgomery to its appointed anchorage pointed the finger of blame squarely at Captain Willecke. His German origins, which were reflected in his accented English, presumably did little to improve his reception. He was variously described — not least by those who found it convenient to blame him rather than the Harbourmaster — as a “cripple”, a drinker and, by implication, a man so irascible that his own watchman had been terrified of waking him as the ship dragged its anchor. No one thought much better of the second mate, who had failed to wake Willeke when lookouts on nearby vessels sounded their sirens in warning as they watched the ship drift, and could only say “I don’t know” when asked why. Willeke was found to have “hazarded his ship” and suspended for a year.

  It would later be alleged that both Willecke and the Thames pilot had actually questioned the proposed anchorage at the time. The Assistant King’s Harbourmaster at Southend pier (“HMS Leigh”), Lt Roger Foley, had also been sufficiently concerned to demand that the harbourmaster give him the order in writing. In a discussion that also involved the harbourmaster’s commander, Foley had recommended that the Richard Montgomery might be safer if it exchanged position with a smaller vessel anchored in deeper water nearby. Having been chided for questioning the harbourmaster’s decision, he left the room. Two days after the stranding, but before the enquiry held aboard the stranded ship, he had been conveniently “posted to another section”.9 As for Captain Willeke, having sailed back to New York as “Ex Richard Montgomery Cap” in December 1944, he is said to have gone back to work soon afterwards, and to have died of heart failure while being shipped home from Brest with US troops shortly after the end of the war.10 By then, the SS Richard Montgomery had settled into its final position: an American possession resting on British Crown land within the area of the Sheerness dockyard port and also within the
responsibility of the British Admiralty.

  At first, it had been imagined that, if some of its explosive cargo were removed, the stranded Richard Montgomery might be refloated at “the next good spring tide” in a fortnight’s time. This aspiration died almost immediately. Indeed, it was reported that at the time of the stranding, crewmen fishing from the British Queen over a mile away had heard sounds like gunshot as the strain placed on the heavily laden hull by the retreating tide caused “some of the welded plates to crack and buckle with an explosive snap”.11 Peering over, they saw the crew, who were “naturally apprehensive of the noise, and of the hazardous nature of their cargo, conduct an emergency evacuation of their ship via the lifeboats and rafts”. Whatever the truth of that report, the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping records that the Richard Montgomery itself signalled that the ship was breaking in two within only an hour or two of the grounding. This was followed by a further signal reporting that the holds were dry even though the ship had “a split from port to starboard side”, and recommending “discharge as soon as possible”.12

  Under exceptional wartime “deeds of arrangement” implemented in 1941, the Admiralty had command of the Port of London Authority’s responsibility for salvage and wrecks in the Thames Estuary and beyond.13 So the PLA were acting as agents for the Admiralty when they mustered some brave men and launched an emergency salvage operation to remove the cargo from the breaking ship. Conducted under contract by Messrs. Watson and Gill, Shipbrokers of Rochester,14 the work, which was underway when the Board of Enquiry met to deliberate over the situation in the saloon, was carried out by three gangs of stevedores who, having negotiated an encouraging level of danger-money, sailed out to the site from Sheerness, together with various tugs and barges, and also the ship’s Chief Officer. Starting on 23 August, they altered the Montgomery’s derricks in order to power them with steam from a tug. Guided by an American “stowage plan” of the ship’s cargo provided by the Chief Officer, they persevered despite the discovery that oil had leaked over some of the bombs, making them slippery and even more perilous to handle. The salvage operation suffered a major setback when the hull, already split but undergoing new stresses as heavy bombs were removed from the rear holds, cracked further just the following day, flooding the three still-loaded forward holds. The back of the ship finally broke on 8 September, but salvage work was continued until an estimated 3,170 tons of bombs had been cleared from holds four and five. The operation was not finally called off until 25 September 1944.15 Although civil servants would later assert that the stranding was a “Marine (i.e. not war)” casualty, the Admiralty paid the Port of London Authority £16,200 for the discontinued salvage operation and returned to the overwhelming priority of fighting the Second World War. By now separated into two parts, the SS Richard Montgomery was left to the sea — together with the bombs remaining in the forward holds. These included many heavy general purpose and semi-armour-piercing bombs as well as smaller cluster fragmentation devices and phosphorous smoke bombs. For several years after the stranding, however, no one in Sheerness appears to have known exactly how much of what remained on board.

  *

  Clearing sea-lanes of wrecks left by the Second World War confronted the Admiralty with a “vast” challenge — it was estimated that there were three to four hundred off British shores, the majority on the east coast between Dungeness and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.16 When, at the beginning of March 1946, the Admiralty once again adjusted its salvage agreement with the Port of London Authority, it stipulated that the PLA’s use of Admiralty salvage vessels should be concentrated on seven wrecks. Since the dispersal of one of these — the destroyer HMS Vimiera, which had sunk off Sheppey with the loss of ninety-six men after striking a mine near the East Spile Buoy in January 1942 — involved blowing it up with the assistance of sixteen carefully lowered depth charges, it is scarcely surprising that the SS Richard Montgomery was left off that particular list. By 30 September 1946, the Admiralty had hardened this apparent oversight into policy, announcing that, while no attempt was to be made to salvage the Montgomery or its remaining cargo, a precautionary light would be placed on the wreck to reduce the damage of accidental collision. A beacon was duly rented to the Admiralty by Trinity House, and fitted to the wreck by men from Sheerness dockyard. The Admiralty also reassured the Port of London Authority that it was “most improbable that this cargo constitutes any danger provided that no big explosion (such as that of a depth charge) takes place in the immediate vicinity”.17

  From that moment until the present, the protruding masts of “the wreck” have served as the poles around which two reluctant parties have danced and slumped their way through the decades. On one side are the tight-lipped and unforthcoming men from the ministries — initially from the Admiralty and Port of London Authority and later, as statutory responsibilities were redistributed through the cuts and amalgamations of the post-war decades, from the Ministry of Defence and the Board of Trade. Whether wriggling or just inert, these officials have proved unwilling either to risk removing the hazard or, as soon emerged, to provide the people of the estuary with a convincing account of the dangers they were evidently expected to live with. Accustomed to the instrumental habits of “seeing like a state”,18 they have remained non-communicative even when the deteriorating condition of the wreck has obliged them to fire brief statements of policy and decision down the estuary.

  The other participants in this apparently never-ending gavotte are the people who have had no choice but to live within sight of “the Monty”: downriver types who tend to mistrust officials, with their power, secrecy and assumed expertise, and have relied instead on local memory, speculation and the evidence of their own eyes as they try to understand the hazard to which they have evidently been abandoned. While stubbornly insistent on the facts as known in the locality, they have also been inclined to weave these partial threads of truth into all-encompassing conspiracy theories about the wreck and, especially, the motivation of the upriver officials who seem determined to leave this dangerous matter unresolved, kicking it down the road until the time comes for them to shuffle off onto their generous public sector pensions.

  Two other parties have also been in attendance throughout. The first is composed of MPs from constituencies on both sides of the estuary: several generations of them, who have stood up as MPs should do, one after another and from both major parties, to raise questions in the House of Commons. Then there was the press, which would delight in “discovering” the Richard Montgomery and its dangers repeatedly over the decades to come, filling the official silence with lurid exposés intended to aggravate fears of the coming Armageddon in a way that otherwise uninformative government ministers and civil servants would rarely hesitate to condemn as “sensational”. The participation of these onlooking parties would ensure that the story of the wreck became a polarised fable about government and the people in post-war Britain — an allegory that may seem all the more compelling for being set along an estuary that served, five hundred years earlier, as the primary geography of the Peasants’ Revolt. Uwe Johnson would make his own sense of this stand-off between downriver communities and the largely absent representatives of upriver power and official expertise, even while sparing himself all the details of the deadlock and exhaustion that have since found new resonances in the polarised time of Brexit.

  In the early post-war years, which had yet to be recognised as the beginning of Britain’s “long boom”, the men at the Admiralty must have hoped that the wreck Johnson would eventually dub “unfathomable” would remain unregarded too. As they and their successors discovered, however, this potent war relic was never going to sink quietly into the past. Known to be highly dangerous even though exact information about its cargo was not forthcoming, “the wreck” quickly became the subject of local speculation and rumour. People clung to fragments of knowledge: the stories of those involved in the first salvage operation, for example, or the visit of an American who turned up in Sheerness at
some point in 1948 to examine the wreck for a New York salvage company named Phillips, Kraft and Fisher, Inc. (it was said that he left town without discussing his company’s interest in the situation, and was never seen again).19

  Given the persistence of the semi-piratical form of salvage that islanders once knew as “hovelling”, it may be no surprise that valuable materials disappeared from the ship — including, allegedly in 1956, much of the copper “degaussing” cable wrapped round the hull to reduce its attraction to German magnetic mines. These, however, were superficial as well as illicit reclamations and they did nothing to prevent the wreck swelling in local conjecture. By 1951, when Winston Churchill was returned to power having narrowly defeated Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government, “that thing” had already transmogrified into Sheerness’s answer to the Kraken — a terrifying sea monster known primarily through fables but in this case also plain to see, its spines piercing the air less than two miles away from the town’s far from perfect sea defences.

  The authorities upriver were by this time also working out their position on the new hazard. The SS Richard Montgomery made its first post-war appearance in Hansard on 23 April 1952, when Dr Reginald Bennett, a former naval commander who was now the Conservative MP for Gosport and Fareham, received a written answer to a question in which he had asked the First Lord of the Admiralty to clarify his responsibilities for the wreck and to describe the actions he had and would be taking to ensure that the cargo did not blow up.20 The reply to Dr Bennett’s question, allegedly informed by discussion with the MP for Southend East,21 came not from the Admiralty, but from the Parliamentary Secretary, Commander Sir Allan Noble, who dismissed the question, saying curtly that the Admiralty had no responsibility for the wreck and therefore no plans for it either. It was, as others beside Dr Bennett were plainly intended to understand, the Port of London Authority that held responsibility for salvage operations in the Thames Estuary.