This exercise in stately buck-passing did nothing to deter the Labour MP for Faversham, Percy Wells, who wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty on 18 June 1952, expressing concern about the hazardous wreck on behalf of his constituents in Sheerness. He explained that he had already been in touch with the Port of London Authority about the matter, but they had declared themselves stymied by the Admiralty: “it has not yet been possible to obtain any definite information as to the state of the explosives”.22 In the absence of such basic information, let alone anything resembling what might nowadays be called a management plan, fears of a vast explosion were growing in the locality. Wells mentioned a “sensational article in a recent issue of a Sunday paper” thanks to which constituents were pressing him for information. He hoped that the Admiralty would provide him with some answers.
Following these inconvenient displays of public concern, powerful men and their ministries were soon preparing for battle in London. Among them was the Chairman of the Port of London Authority, who had recently been elevated to the House of Lords as an independent peer. John Anderson, as he had been known before becoming Viscount Waverley, was a Scot of considerable standing within the British state. After overseeing the development of the “Anderson” air raid shelter as Chamberlain’s Lord Privy Seal in the late Thirties, he had gone on to serve as both Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security in Winston Churchill’s cabinet during the first year of the Second World War, and again as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the months before the Labour election victory of July 1945. Having restrained himself from following his initial impulse to take the matter directly to Churchill for a quick resolution, he went, more appropriately, to the First Lord of the Admiralty, James Thomas, informing him that he’d been shocked by Commander Noble’s “outrageous” declaration that the Admiralty had no responsibilities in the matter of the SS Richard Montgomery. At a subsequent meeting with the Admiralty, which was duly chaired by Thomas on 22 July 1952,23 he repeated that the PLA had been “shaken” by the “complacency of the experts” who, having early forbidden the PLA from making any attempt to clear the wreck, now seemed to consider it tolerable simply to leave it as it was.24 In his view, the hazard, which was surely getting more dangerous as the years went by, must be cleared and removed over the remaining weeks of the summer. He also pointed out that, as a self-funding public trust, the PLA lacked the resources to carry out this task unaided. Since the ship belonged to the American government, or perhaps to the US salvage operator to whom they might have sold it, the PLA had considered the possibility of hiring private contractors to remove the obstacle, and then forwarding the bill to Washington – despite the Treasury Solicitor’s Office, which had already pointed out that it would be “quite impossible”25 for the British government to force the American authorities to pay.
Aware that the Admiralty had written to the PLA on 21 March 1952 warning that the submerged bombs might behave in a “very capricious” way, Waverley was also worried that it would not be possible to manage a private contractor sufficiently to ensure “100% efficiency” in such a delicate operation.26 It was surely time, he argued, for the British state to accept responsibility and see that the increasingly necessary job was done properly. The case, as Waverley told the meeting, “appeared to the PLA to be like that of an extreme instance of an unexploded bomb and the Crown had never boggled in the past over removing unexploded bombs”. Waverley also pointed out that the PLA had not been responsible for the wreck during the war — the Admiralty having taken over its salvage responsibilities throughout the Thames Estuary — and that, six years previously on 12 August 1946, the Admiralty had written to the PLA Salvage Department “telling them the wreck should not be moved”. Its officials had now, so Waverley concluded accusingly, “decided to wash their hands of the wreck”.
When they met informally to discuss the situation five weeks before the meeting, both Wavertree and Thomas had actually found each other inclined to favour the idea of clearing such bombs as could safely be removed and then “blowing up the vessel” without further delay. The Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty, Sir John Lang, had not been happy at the thought of this cavalier consensus. It may indeed have been normal Admiralty practice to dispose of unsalvageable wrecks by exploding them,27 but Lang had been concerned both by the “complete uncertainty” over what bombs remained in the sunken ship’s holds and by the impossibility, therefore, of establishing for certain that none had been packed with (dangerous) fuses already inserted.28 He believed that this solution would only be “reasonable” if it were possible to confine explosions to a small part of the cargo. This was not the case with the SS Richard Montgomery. He told the meeting that, while “a mass explosion would be most dangerous to Sheerness”, it was also likely to scatter “large quantities of unexploded bombs”, leaving them lying around on the seabed in what the PLA had already been informed was a “very capricious” state.29
Lang and his officials went to considerable lengths to stiffen their First Lord against Waverley’s arguments. Not content with presenting a strong case for leaving the explosive wreck exactly where it was, their briefing documents also suggested that the PLA was “shirking a responsibility”, as had been implied by the curt response Dr Reginald Bennett’s question had received from the Parliamentary Secretary, and that Waverley’s advisers were seeking to “blackmail”30 the Government into paying for the work, while he himself was strongly biased towards “shifting the cost onto the state”. They denied that the Admiralty had taken over all responsibility for the wreck under the emergency measures of the war, alleging that the PLA had earlier welcomed the SS Richard Montgomery as “a useful job for their organisation, which was otherwise running out of work” and that its extreme reluctance to fulfil its responsibilities now might be based on “nothing more respectable than the view that ‘Naval personnel are paid to risk their lives’”.31 Waverley might cite the fact that the Admiralty had written to the head of the PLA Salvage Department on 12 August 1946, specifying that the wreck was not to be removed, but it had really only meant “removed by them”. The charges laid against Waverley by these evasive minions had irritated the First Lord of the Admiralty. Declaring that he had re-read the papers connected to the case, Thomas used red ink to mark up one of the briefing documents now accessible at the National Archives with the comment, “We are being petty and should get on with the job”.32
*
Despite this interdepartmental manoeuvring within the state bureaucracy, it was the Admiralty’s researches into the SS Richard Montgomery’s cargo that clinched the decision against immediate clearance in 1952. Discussion with the American military authorities in London helped the officials get a clearer understanding of the bombs remaining in the broken ship’s holds.33 It was confirmed that the heavy TNT-filled bombs were not fused, and consequently less dangerous than they might otherwise have been. The smoke bombs might well leak, releasing white phosphorous that would ignite as soon as it reached the water’s surface. The major concern, however, lay with the remaining cargo, said to include 1,750 cases of cluster fragmentation bombs and perhaps 580 individually loaded twenty-six-pound fragmentation bombs. The likelihood that at least some of these comparatively thin-skinned devices were fitted with integral fuses was seized upon as a major complication.
Some of the deteriorating fuses might indeed get washed out and rendered innocuous as their cases were corroded. There was, however, and as Home Office explosives experts would confirm repeatedly over the years to come, a definite possibility that some might produce copper azide as they decomposed. This “capricious” substance would render them highly unstable and liable to sudden detonation if disturbed. It was considered entirely possible that a single cluster fragmentation bomb behaving this way might set off the entire cargo. It was estimated that the explosion would break most of the windows in Sheerness and also cause a tidal wave and seismic shock likely to do “severe” damage to buildings both there and in Queenborough, three miles fu
rther along the Medway. These findings seemed convincing to the men at the Admiralty, who drew the conclusion that has governed the site ever since: the SS Richard Montgomery was best left well alone. By 15 January 1953, the Port of London Authority had been brought into line with the Admiralty’s policy of vigilant inaction, and the First Lord of the Admiralty could inform Mr Percy Wells MP that the situation had now been “exhaustively examined” and “the risk to life involved in any attempt to remove the cargo is appreciably greater than the risk to life involved in leaving the wreck alone”.34
It would prove considerably harder to convince the public in Sheerness and elsewhere around the post-war estuary that this policy towards the SS Richard Montgomery consisted of anything other than irresponsible negligence that would not be tolerated in more prosperous places upriver. The Admiralty’s refusal either to come up with a clearance plan or to communicate a factually justified explanation of their decision effectively abandoned the Richard Montgomery to hostile speculation. In Sheerness, the wreck quickly became an object of disbelieving and even taunting daredevilry as well as fearful rumour and speculation. It is said that people got into the habit of sailing over to “the Monty” to fish from it and, if the tide was low, to picnic on its decks.
The popular press, meanwhile, had quickly learned to delight in the masts and derricks of the all-too-visible wreck, polishing them up until they shone back at the town of Sheerness with a terrifying gleam. The article condemned as “sensational” by the Labour MP Percy Wells had been printed by the Sunday Dispatch on 11 May 1952. It was prompted by the news that, following Commander Bennett’s question in the Commons, the Port of London Authority intended to “survey the wreck and decide what action can be taken”.35 The unnamed reporter described the stranding as “in the Medway estuary about a mile off the foreshore”. His figures were on the rough side too: he claims the ship had been carrying 6,800 tons of American bombs, and that more than three thousand tons of these had been recovered immediately after the stranding and “shipped on to Normandy”. He also claimed that “For eight years the 16,000 inhabitants of Sheerness… have looked out at the wreck” and wondered “what would happen to them if its cargo of 3,000 tons of bombs blew up”. Throughout that entire time the Admiralty and the PLA had engaged in “mutual buck-passing” and it had “seemed to be nobody’s business to remove the danger”.
Contacted by the Dispatch, the MP who had first raised the question in the House of Commons, Commander Bennett, suggested that “If the cargo blew up probably half of Sheerness would be flattened and there would be some damage, too, in Southend”. It was, he reiterated, “high time something was done and I shall be glad to see a move”. While no one in Sheerness will have relished the prospect of being “flattened”, this early forecast of the town’s plight was overshadowed the following week when the paper gave its front page to an article about the “‘Iron Curtain’ of security” that had been lowered around Chatham dockyard, where a fleet of ships was preparing to receive “Britain’s first atom-bomb”36 before sailing for the Montebello Islands, off the coast of north-west Australia, to cause a twenty-five-kiloton explosion, far more annihilating than anything that might be feared of the Richard Montgomery, would be detonated on 3 October 1952.
The Sunday Dispatch had also revealed that the people of the estuary were already making the Richard Montgomery their own. In the apparent absence of official interest in the site, an offer had been received from certain “Thames divers” to inspect the wreck. The man behind this unofficial proposal, Mr J. Bentall, explained that “two colleagues and myself have volunteered our services to give a survey report. We have not been told whether our offer has been accepted”. Meanwhile, Sheerness had already discovered that the increasingly notorious masts of the Richard Montgomery did at least provide the town with a new seasonal attraction: “in summer local boatmen run sight-seeing trips to her”. For a town that had long been anxious about its shingle beach’s failure to match the golden sands of Margate, here at least was a ride to compete with the artificial thrills of “Dreamland”.
31. THE DOOMSDAY SHUFFLE
Sheerness’s view of the Richard Montgomery would change after the closure of the Admiralty dockyard and the Royal Navy’s Nore Command in 1960–61. As the other warships vanished, the remaining wreck achieved new significance locally as a symbol of the town’s abandonment: an abiding threat of devastation, to be sure, but also a measure of the enduring indifference of governments that, having ripped the economic heart out of this patriotic coastal community, thought nothing of leaving such a dismal memorial to Sheerness’s naval past poking up to disturb the view that was one of the town’s few remaining assets.
The Daily Sketch published two articles about the “sunken ghost ship” in the spring of 1962. These were written by Desmond Wettern, a young journalist who had served with the Royal Navy (and would later become well known as the Daily Telegraph’s naval correspondent, persisting, through an ongoing age of naval cuts and restructuring, as a last-ditch champion of British sea power). In the first article, Wettern described what had happened when Sheerness Urban District Council’s seafront controller, Lt Col H.R. McKechnie, wrote to the American naval authorities in London asking for “a brief history of the ship”.1 For better or worse, he explained, the wreck had become “one of the big local attractions”, to such an extent that the council, which knew better than to look even this horrifying gift horse in the mouth, wanted to be in the position to inform visitors about it from “the main information office on the seafront”.
After a few weeks, McKechnie had received an answer confirming that, according to the Maritime Administration in Washington, SS Richard Montgomery “went aground in 1944 and, since only the superstructure remained visible, was declared a maritime wreck”. So far so familiar, but that could not be said for the following claim: “According to the record she was raised and scrapped and sold to Phillips Craft Fisher Co. in April 1948”. Wettern ended the first part of his divided article by pretending not yet to have discovered “what was on board” this highly visible but allegedly non-existent ship: “Nobody knows — though one rumour says she was carrying a load of dynamite. Enough, it is said, to blow out every window in Sheerness”.
On 8 May, the Daily Sketch returned to its story of the “ghost ship”, printing a second article devoted to solving the “mystery” planted at the end of the first.2 By now, as Wettern wrote, the US Maritime Authority was prepared to confirm what was plain as day to every holidaymaker who had paid for the summer thrill of a guided boat trip around the wreck: “Yes, she exists, alright”. As for what was in the sunken freighter’s holds, Wettern’s telephone enquiry produced the following answer:
“‘Bombs!’
‘What sort of bombs?’
‘Oh! Just bombs, you know. We can’t say exactly what sort’”.
Confirmation, and also further cause for alarm, was provided by a Daily Sketch reader, Mr Joe Gilhooley of Stoke-on-Trent, who remembered being part of the “Royal Navy boarding party sent to clear the bombs from the ship during the war”. Explaining that they had only “managed to salvage half the cargo before the ship heeled over”, he estimated that there were about three thousand tons of explosives still on board: “she is virtually an unexploded bomb. The authorities know this — that is why they have never dynamited her to clear the harbour of the wreck”.
America’s “ghost ship” had become a “problem ship” with which no branch of British public authority was at all keen to interfere. Looking for a positive end to his story, Wettern closed by repeating the Admiralty’s statement that the best hope lay in a vanishing trick that the wreck might be left to carry out by itself. The Richard Montgomery was already “scouring out a hole” in the seabed, and it was possible to imagine that both the ship and its threatening cargo may “in ten years’ time have disappeared into it”. It was an absurd idea, but one to which evasive officials were nevertheless still drawn. Indeed, it would not be long before
the responsible authorities came up with a reassuring phrase to replace their predecessors’ use of the word “capricious” to justify leaving the cargo just where it was. They started finding consolation in the thick and muffling “blanket of silt” said to be covering the bombs as the tides continued to scour the hole that would carry the hull down towards Australia.
Two years after the Daily Sketch published Wettern’s thoughts on the subject, local fears that the abandoned SS Richard Montgomery might actually threaten far worse than broken windows were inflamed by a long feature article written by David Lampe, allegedly after “many months of difficult, painstaking research”, and published in Wide World magazine in October 1964.3 On Lampe’s pages, the Daily Sketch’s “problem ship” became “the Doomsday Ship”, laden with bombs weighing “more than seven million pounds” that were still “very much alive” and capable, as Lampe announced, introducing a phrase that would be much repeated over the years to come, of causing “the most catastrophic non-nuclear explosion in history”. If the Richard Montgomery went up, as was considered entirely possible, there would be a “heavy fall of shrapnel on towns inhabited by 375,000 people and Sheerness, which was closest of all, would be wiped from the map: “every building and every thing — as well as all the 14,000 people who live in that town — would be destroyed. A tidal wave would inevitably follow the big blast — to wash away the last traces of the sorry debris that was Sheerness”. By the time David Lampe had finished with it, the SS Richard Montgomery promised an apocalyptic day of reckoning to rival anything imagined by the most zealous of Sheerness’s chapelgoers.
Wide World’s view of Sheerness.
In the absence of a full and available official account of the situation, it may not be surprising that Lampe’s reconstruction of the stranding of the Richard Montgomery was very far from accurate — not least in the suggestion that the sinking of the ship, which was actually caused by the splitting of the hull (“welded not riveted”, as Johnson would correctly point out), was the fault of the British stevedores, wrongly alleged to have been unloading the stranded vessel at the approach of a storm, and to have left its holds open when hastily abandoning it. Other statements may be truer relays from local memory of the time. It was Lampe who captured Sheerness’s recollection of the American who was said to have come over to Sheerness shortly after the war to inspect the bomb ship for a US salvage firm and then to have fled, never to return. He was also informed about a Dutch company, which considered the job in 1951, but pulled out after its man suggested — before he too scarpered — that the best solution might be to suck the sand out from under the wreck to encourage it to “sink into the ooze” more quickly. Viscount Linley, who was by then the Chairman of the Port of London Authority, had also bought the Admiralty line that the Richard Montgomery — which had become “How shall I say? A well-known landmark on the Thames” — would eventually “sink harmlessly into the mud”.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 54