When he talked to the local authorities, Lampe found men shrugging their shoulders on both sides of the estuary. In Southend, where people might be lucky enough to get away with broken windows, the town clerk seemed studiously indifferent to the threat. “We’ve lived with it for twenty years, and so far it hasn’t blown up”, he said, brushing aside Lampe’s warnings with the words, “We’re prepared to accept the advice of our government on matters like this”. The official view in Sheerness was similar. Having made his own enquiries in the town living “in the shadow of death”, Lampe concluded that “most people in Sheerness don’t even realise that the bombs are there and many of the people who once knew about them seem to have forgotten them”. Even the Sheerness Town Clerk, Mr J. Griffiths, seemed “unaware of the tremendous tonnage of bombs until informed by Wide World”.
Lampe judged these local officials to be in dereliction of their duties, but he reserved a stronger condemnation for the men at the Admiralty, allegedly disgruntled at having been merged into the Ministry of Defence earlier in 1964, who had failed even to send down naval divers to review the state of the bombs inside the holds. He found it symptomatic that no official over the last twenty years had even asked to see the loading plan of the Richard Montgomery’s holds, an unexamined copy of which had only recently been thrown away by William Hurst Ltd., the company that had served as agents to the American Maritime Commission during the partial clearance of the disintegrating ship’s holds (it seems not to have occurred to Lampe that the officials in question may long since have had the documentation from American sources). However much the authorities might invoke the “consensus of expert opinion”, this was only “an excuse to do nothing” in the hope that the Thames silt would eventually suck the all too visible wreck into oblivion.
There is much about Lampe’s article that may appear to prove one of the abiding lessons about British government that emerges from the story of the Richard Montgomery: the more secretive and unforthcoming the official authorities choose to be, the more speculative will be the press and its readers in their interpretation of events. Yet Lampe did, unquestionably, have an ace in his hand. The unconsulted “expert” he pitched against those claimed by the Admiralty was “Britain’s foremost and the world’s most experienced bomb disposal expert”. Having served for many years with the Royal Engineers, Major Arthur Bamford Hartley, MBE, had used his retirement to write a book reviewing the bravery and ingenuity of his extremely heroic comrades in the Second World War. Not given to imaginative flights, he called it Unexploded Bomb: The Story of Bomb Disposal.4
Hartley had intimate knowledge of the dangers faced by those who had dug and crawled their way into “bomb shafts” that might turn and twist weirdly as they ploughed through as much as sixty feet of earth. He knew the many ways in which courageous “disposers” had died — blown to bits, drowned, lost under collapsing earth, gassed by a sudden release of ammonia or carbon monoxide, horribly burned by phosphorous catching fire as it came into contact with air in a confined space. His engagement in bomb disposal had extended into the post-war period, when as many as 1,400 German prisoners of war were “drafted to Britain” to help British sappers in the slow and “nervously exhausting” job of clearing beaches of mines.
Precious little in Hartley’s book supports the Admiralty’s hope that the TNT-filled bombs on the Richard Montgomery might gradually become more “blanketed” and less dangerous if left undisturbed. Indeed, the major recalled a conference convened by the Director of Bomb Disposal in the spring of 1945, at which it was unambiguously resolved that “old bombs were at least as dangerous as new ones” — a realisation that led to instructions that all discovered bombs should be blown up “in situ” unless “very special reasons” made this impractical. The instability could be caused by the degradation of fuses, but Hartley also remembered many cases in which the filling of an old TNT-filled bomb had become self-activating when excavated and “tampered with”. “Chemical and physical changes” could lead to a build-up of gasses that might quickly asphyxiate a disposer if it escaped. His examples include a bomb dug up in Sheerness. Finding that internal pressure had already sheared off the baseplate, the officer in charge had quickly clambered out of the pit in which the bomb lay. Already keen to “escape the gas bubbling up from the rear of the bomb”, Captain Wadsworth was hastened by the further discovery that the bomb-casing was getting warm.
Hartley was horrified to learn that the Richard Montgomery had been left on its sandbank for so long. Leaving the wreck there, he told Lampe, was “like finding a long forgotten bomb dump in a crowded suburb — and then walking away from it without bothering even to tell anyone. In my opinion these bombs are a major hazard. They won’t make themselves safe. On the contrary, as time passes they may become more dangerous. A lot more dangerous”. He trusted that the bombs had been packed very carefully, and without fuses. He knew from a huge specimen he had once fished out of Ipswich harbour that American bombs were painted with highly protective paint: “salt water might take a thousand years or more to penetrate them”. Neither probability, however, justified inaction. Some sixteen different combinations of explosives had been used in American fragmentation bombs during the war, and it seemed that nobody knew which particular mixture had been used in the examples stowed on Sheerness’s “Doomsday Ship”. Moreover, production standards had fallen by 1944, and the Montgomery’s cargo came from manufacturers required only to produce explosives “with sufficient ‘shelf life’” to last through the war. Who could be sure that the TNT hadn’t crystallised and therefore become highly unstable, or that nitrates in the explosive fillings had not started to break down and generate gases which might in turn generate sufficient heat and pressure inside the bombs to set them off? It was entirely possible, he told Lampe, that the bombs might “explode at any time”.
Considering that the wreck had apparently been left largely unattended and “well within the reach of anyone”, Hartley also worried about an “endless” number of more external accidents that might trigger a disaster: the collapse of the wooden packaging around the bombs could do the job, as might the strength of the tide, the impact of an unpiloted ship losing control in the current — which was, according to local fishermen, very dangerous around the wreck — or of a shallow-draught vessel scraping its way across the deck as was said already to have happened. It was by no means a remote possibility that “an amateur frogman” might start poking about among the bombs: Sheerness boatmen claimed that at least one such had already dived the wreck and “carried away some of her brass fittings”. It would be a few years before the IRA started bombing pubs, railway stations and bandstands on the British mainland, but Major Hartley already dreaded to think “what would happen if a malicious person began tampering” with the Richard Montgomery. “Sheerness Would Be Wiped Out” shrieked the headline beneath which the East Kent Gazette was pleased to report that the Faversham constituency’s recently elected Labour MP, a barrister and former RAF flight lieutenant named Terence Boston, had already sent a copy of Wide World to Lord Jellicoe at the Admiralty.5
*
The articles published by the Daily Sketch and Wide World may have been viewed with entitled contempt by the authorities upriver, but their claims could not be wholly ignored. On 18 March 1965, in answer to a question by Boston, the Labour Secretary of State for Defence Mr Christopher Mayhew tried to demonstrate his grip on the situation. He informed the House of Commons that, following recent “sensational” press accounts, a working party involving the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, the PLA and the Medway Conservancy Board had been set up in the autumn of 1964 to look into the “explosive risks in leaving the wreck alone or in attempting to clear it”.6 This had confirmed that the wreck should be left where it was on the grounds that it was no more dangerous than in 1952, and that “an explosion, although serious” would not be anything like the cataclysm imagined by journalists. The working party had also recommended an up-to-date survey of the wreck, w
hich naval divers would carry out in the summer of 1965 “under strictly controlled safety precautions”.
In the event, as Mayhew would inform Boston a few months later, the divers discovered that the two halves of the wreck had separated and sunk into the mud. They had not entered the holds but it was estimated that “heavy silting” had probably engulfed the remaining cargo.7 The survey confirmed the Ministry of Defence in its view that, while the wreck must be left untouched, it should be identified more clearly as a hazard on the charts of the estuary, marked off by buoys, and also equipped with an automatic fog signal: “I think that is the best we can do”. Hearing that various private parties were still showing interest in salvaging materials from the wreck, the ministry also added a light to the second buoy, and instructed the Medway Constabulary to arrest and remove anyone interfering with the site.
News of these modest measures was not enough to reassure the members of Sheerness Urban District Council, which wrote to Boston asking him to arrange for “an expert (or experts)” to come to Sheerness to “allay the fears of councillors faced with questions from the townspeople”.8 If the Richard Montgomery really could not be cleared and removed, the council expected more than a light on a buoy. Its members wanted the authorities to consider building “a suitable barrier around the wreck” to prevent even the remote possibility of a collision, and also to provide an “estimate” of damage to Sheerness “should the explosive be found to be unstable”.
The Sheerness Urban District Council anticipated the requested encounter with cautious optimism. At a meeting on Wednesday, 16 March 1966, councillors congratulated themselves for having “prodded” the Ministry of Defence into admitting the danger posed by the “Bomb Ship” and declared again that a “speed-up” was necessary when it came to making it safe once and for all time.9 “We have mixed feelings about this”, admitted the Chairman, Cllr F.W. Roalfe, adding that he hoped “experts” were going to look at the ship and that the matter would be resolved “very shortly”.
The men from the responsible public authorities in London prepared their case carefully, calling in various explosive experts to consider what scraps of reassurance might be offered to the awakened councillors of Sheppey. It was accepted that the explosives were still dangerous, and that an explosion was more likely to be caused by the “shifting of cargo” in tidal currents than by chemical interaction within the bombs.10 Sheerness Council’s idea of creating a barrier around the wreck was discounted on the grounds that the necessary pile-driving or drilling might set the whole thing off. They also considered the masts poking up into the town’s view: some wanted to remove these on the grounds that they might “sheer and fall vertically into the holds”, while others argued that they were still in “exceptionally” good condition, and that their visibility was useful to shipping. It was agreed that “a ring of buoys fitted with radar reflectors” could be supplied, and answers to anticipated questions and objections were prepared to prevent further concessions being squeezed out under pressure. Although a letter announcing the forthcoming meeting was sent to the MP Terence Boston, it was, as a civil servant explained in an internal document, kept “deliberately vague in the hope that he will not invite himself along”.11
So the day had come, on 22 April 1966, when twelve members of Sheerness Urban District Council finally sat down to review the situation with those officials from the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Board of Trade. The meeting wasn’t held at the council’s offices in Sheerness as members had initially imagined, but in the more impressive Admiral’s Conference Room at Chatham Dockyard. It was chaired by the well-prepared J.M. Kisch of the Ministry of Defence’s Shore Division (Naval) and it appears to have gone as well as the Ministry of Defence could have wished. The minutes, which are marked “Confidential”, suggest that while some councillors insisted on their questions, there were also moments of resigned if not deferential acquiescence. The officials acknowledged that the “public attitude” in Sheerness might believe that the refusal to move the Richard Montgomery was based on reluctance to dedicate the necessary funds to safeguarding this poor, abandoned and comparatively lightly populated working-class area. The town’s representatives were, however, strongly encouraged to understand that this was definitely not the case, and that money would willingly be found for the clearance if it were judged possible.
Like their predecessors in the Admiralty, the men in charge stuck to their claim that nothing could be done that would not be more dangerous than inaction. It was only possible to draw limited reassurance from the fact that the bombs were at least now buried in their “blanket of silt” and to introduce more security measures. Warning notices would be attached to the protruding masts of the ship — a draft of the proposed wording was distributed at the meeting — as well as to the safety buoys. There would be a notice for mariners and a stronger identification of the danger area on charts. Given that the decision had been made to leave the wreck where it was, “the real menace” was now not the ship but “the passer-by who spontaneously decided to reconnoitre the wreck”. The Kent Constabulary were therefore ordered to remove, “by force if necessary”, any trespassers and the Medway Conservancy Board would maintain a “constant radar watch on the wreck and conduct daily river patrols in the area”.
Once again, the Richard Montgomery continued to lie there. Unsalvageable but also undeniable, it was by now adorned with prominent warning notices, each one like a postcard sent downriver as proof of official vigilance, each one adding to the Doomsday Ship’s utility as a roost for cormorants and shags. Parsimony with information remained the official way: partly, it may surely be assumed, because the men upriver knew very well that a fuller knowledge of “the facts” as the Americans might one day reveal them, could hardly be relied upon to take the End of the World out of Sheerness. In the upriver world, where powerful people had the power of decision, the passage of time might be associated with eventfulness, development and rising prosperity, personal or otherwise. Downriver, as the story of the Richard Montgomery shows very clearly, it would be attended by a silted mixture of anxiety, helpless inertia and speculation — the tedious encrustation that builds up around problems national governments fail adequately to address. We must find our history in that too.
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A year after the councillors of Sheerness bowed to the Ministry of Defence, fears on both sides of the argument were confirmed by the explosion of another sunken “bomb ship”. This one was a freighter named Kielce, loaded with ordnance intended for American forces in West Germany, which had suffered a collision in April 1946 and gone down in ninety feet of water some three or four miles offshore from Folkestone. On 22 July 1967, salvage divers, who had already cleared much of the cargo, are said to have fired a charge intended to open up the hull so that one hundred or so tons of bombs remaining under the bulkhead could be removed. They had already carried out two such explosions without unintended consequences, but this time the bombs went up. While the salvage workers sitting in a rubber dinghy some four hundred feet from the wreck were reported to have seen only “a small ripple and some spray”,12 a considerable crater was formed in the seabed and the seismic shock, which was registered in California, cracked chimneys, ceilings, walls and also some windows in Folkestone. There were reports of a “tidal wave”, which had caused some alarm among holidaymakers on the town beach and is even said to have led to some successful damages claims, even though subsequent analysis found it unlikely to have been “greater than about 2 ft”.
The explosion of the Kielce increased concern about the Richard Montgomery, which lay in much shallower water, considerably closer to Sheerness, and carried a very much larger collection of bombs. It was, however, a far worse event that stiffened the determination of Mr Freddy Burden, a former squadron leader who was now the Conservative MP for Gillingham in Kent. He asked Parliamentary questions about the dangers posed by the Richard Montgomery on 25 October and 8 November 1967, when the nation was still reeling from t
he disaster in the south Wales mining village of Aberfan, where a mountainous slag heap had collapsed on 16 October, killing 116 children as it buried their school. Spurred on by this avoidable disaster (the National Coal Board had long ignored pleas for action from people living in the grossly mismanaged slag heap’s shadow), Burden insisted that the Ministry of Defence, then under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, really must do something about the hazard threatening his town as well as Sheerness: “it is up to them to see that the danger is removed before the country is involved in another Aberfan”.13 He was informed by the temporising Under-Secretary of State for the Navy, Mr Maurice Foley, that the government was still awaiting a report drawing conclusions from an American reappraisal of the bombs aboard the Richard Montgomery, which, after all, remained US property.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 55