The Sea View Has Me Again
Page 57
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So what did Johnson bring to Sheerness’s oppressively abiding story of the Doomsday Ship? Having established the two futures facing Sheerness — drowning by flood or going up in a fireball — he commends the Richard Montgomery as the object of an enlightening investigation that he and the town’s other residents might like to pursue while they waited for the final day of reckoning:
Until we reach that point, might we be in a position to get to the bottom of this derelict, to recover the jetsam it has thrown off, historically, magically, biographically, sociologically, chemically, administro-scientifically, poetically, statistically?9
That was a larger project than Johnson himself could exhaust in a single article. He does, however, combine his invitation to others with a demonstration of the ways in which the “wreck” — which he insisted, with all due respect to the earlier memorial standing across the road from the railway station, was Sheppey’s true “monument to the 1939-45 war”10 — might be independently repossessed and the local predicament reconnected to a larger and by no means merely English understanding of history. He opens ironically, suggesting that, while all the Liberty ships bore the name of American heroes, the man who was Richard Montgomery would surely have been amazed to discover his name meaning anything at all two hundred years after his death. Born in Ireland in 1738, he was a “mercenary” who had entered the British Army at the age of eighteen and later “sold his services to the rebelling Americans”. Appointed a Brigadier General in Washington’s Continental Army in 1775, he had taken Montreal on 13 November that year, but died only six weeks later while leading 1,635 inexperienced men in a grossly miscalculated attack against “professional British soldiers” at the Fortress of Quebec. As a turncoat and a commander of limited competence who had proved a mortal danger to his own men (Johnson describes him as “a general, from whom people run away”), Montgomery had been obliged “to be patient when American ships were being named after the fathers of the Revolution”. The first Liberty ship was launched in September 1941, but Montgomery’s specimen had only emerged from the dockyard at Jacksonville, Florida in 1943 and here it was, as Johnson puts it, “barely a year later … busted off Sheerness”.11
Digging further down into the “magic of names”, Johnson notes that the ships were named “Liberty ships” after an earlier “national emergency” of America’s own. Historians may not doubt that the man who named the “Liberty Fleet” was the Chairman of the Maritime Commission responsible for their design and manufacture, Admiral Emory Scott Land — the designation was confirmed by the decision to name the very first to leave the slipway the SS Patrick Henry, after the patriotic American revolutionary who had declared “Give me Liberty or give me death”. Johnson, however, who enters the story sideways, finds a different inspiration in “no less a symbol than the Liberty Bell”, which was commissioned in 1751 by the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, made by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in east London, inscribed with a quotation from Leviticus (“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof”) and, in 1953, hung in the Pennsylvania State House, in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Charter of Privileges drawn up for the colony by William Penn.12 Unfortunately, this great symbol of American liberty was miscast from materials that proved too brittle, giving it a “faulty, unsteady tone”. Although recast at least twice, it continued to annoy the neighbours, who complained “as early as 1772” about the fact that its “celebratory din was being unleashed on too many occasions”.13 The Declaration of Independence was proclaimed to the sound of the Liberty Bell on 8 July 1776, and it had to be hidden in the countryside when the British invaded the city the following year. Restored to its place after the American victory, it remained there, “performing its patriotic duty”, until it cracked apart again. There are various accounts of exactly when and how the fracture finally became irreparable, but Johnson followed the legend claiming it happened in 1835, when the bell — by this time also adopted as a symbol by abolitionists — was rung at the funeral of Chief Justice John Marshall of the Supreme Court. After that, it was retired to become a famous historical relic of the republic.
In Johnson’s allegorical retelling of the story, it was the fatal “crack” rather than any uncomplicated manifestation of “liberty” that America’s miscast bell shared with the welded, and by now twice split, hull of the SS Richard Montgomery. The existence of this fatal flaw was not recognised by the organisers of the Cold War sequel that Johnson goes on to describe in a bracketed paragraph. In 1950, after the Red Army had “backed down from its blockade of West Berlin”, seventeen million American citizens had donated so that a copy of the Liberty Bell could be cast and then shipped to West Berlin where it would be installed in the City Hall at Berlin-Schöneberg as part of a “Crusade for Freedom” shared with Radio Free Europe.14 This was duly done and the replica — which showed no signs of the crack — had ever since been “rung for two minutes every day at noon (as well as at additional times on solemn or celebratory occasions)”. In 1965, as Johnson remembered, “the loyal press of the West Berlin Occupation Zone” urged residents to donate towards the cost of miniature replicas of the Liberty Bell, which were made by a Berlin porcelain works and sent as anti-communist gestures of thanks to the families of American soldiers who had lost their lives in Vietnam. “Apparently, this reciprocation from Berlin (West) for the gift of 1950 was meant to provide an image, at least among grieving Americans, of that for which their men were dying in Southeast Asia too, bringing or defending with God’s help the cause of liberty as symbolized by a little bell, from a porcelain factory in Berlin, on American mantelpieces next to photographs draped in black crepe”.15
The bells of Marienkirche in Lübeck, preserved as they fell during RAF Bomber Command’s night raid of 28–29 March 1942.
Johnson employs a more socialist perspective as he goes on to consider the impact of the “Liberty ship” programme on labour unions in America. He describes the rush to produce these ships, and the development of modular construction techniques in which prefabricated sections of the hull were joined by welding rather than the more laborious process of riveting. When the programme began, each ship took some sixty or seventy days to build. Under Henry Kaiser, whose primary shipyards were on the West Coast, it became possible to produce one in less than five days. Unemployment went down, women were drawn into the workforce, as were other workers with no experience of factories or shipyards. It was a climate in which “wages were frozen and heavily taxed” even as prices kept rising.16 Unions entered a voluntary no-strike agreement, renounced overtime, and even supported Roosevelt’s decree binding workers to their workplace: all that, Johnson notes, in exchange for a third of the votes on the War Labor Board. As the war progressed, it became illegal for workers to strike once the state had taken over a business, and the unions smiled at that too, as did the American Communist Party, which — and here Johnson sails close to the American Trostskyist denunciation of the Liberty ship programme — had called for “the speed-up” and backed the maintenance of the no-strike rule even after the end of the war. “The situation of the US labour movement in this period came down to the exact opposite of Liberty”.17
Not so for Henry Kaiser, who became the personification of “another kind of American freedom”, namely “a talent for using the work of others”. The Richard Montgomery was not actually built in a yard owned by Kaiser, but Johnson had his own reason for fingering this epitome of the ruthless capitalist entrepreneur who had grown rich and powerful on the Liberty ship programme and continued to flourish in the post-war decades. In the opening pages of Anniversaries, he had described how, on 25 August 1967, the New York Times gave two hundred lines to the memory of this deceased industrialist, who had left school at the age of thirteen to work as a delivery boy for $1.50 a week but had now died leaving assets of $2.5bn.18 So here in the waters off Sheerness was that rampant plutocrat once again: a peerless exploiter of “cost
-plus” pricing on government contracts, whose memory Johnson adds to the “murky reality” of a wreck that shows the consequences of Kaiser’s motto insisting that there was “no money in a long drawn-out job”.19 If speed of production was one priority in the manufacture of these so-called “Ugly Ducklings”, economy was another. “All aesthetic considerations were absent, as were gyroscopic compass and radar. The vessel’s one task was to move freight, escorted and protected by the watchdogs of a convoy, and never could affection or respect for this heavy labourer, as expressed in the fairy-tale nickname, transform it into a white swan”.20
Ignoring the fact that the Richard Montgomery was actually an American ship in the service of the American military when it got stranded, Johnson concentrates on the more general point that Liberty ships were used to supply Britain and other Allied countries under the Lend-Lease law of 11 March 1941. From the East German perspective Johnson seems here to rehearse without irony, that assistance had certainly been a long time coming. He explains that Stalin, in the summer of 1941, had begged the Allies to open a second front in Western Europe and the Arctic. After Roosevelt’s apparent promise to Molotov the following year, he had announced the imminent coming of such a front in 1942 — informing his own people and, by air-dropped propaganda leaflets, taunting Nazi forces on the Eastern front with the news as well. Humiliated by continued inertia from Britain and America, he had to wait through 1943, as excuses were made and Lend-Lease deliveries were reduced, allegedly in order to “ramp up for the Second Front which was still nowhere to be seen”.21 By the time D-Day finally came, on 6 June 1944, it was hardly surprising that Stalin believed the three-year delay reflected an Allied wish to have the Soviet and German armies “bleed each other dry first”. The final insult came immediately after the end of the war in May 1945, when the category of Lend-Lease deliveries concerned with feeding the Red Army “disappeared overnight”, thereby “adding ten million soldiers to the mass of an already undernourished civilian population”. Johnson insists that this practice of “fobbing off Soviet bloc countries for too long with goods alone” must be considered “one of the earliest roots of the Cold War”.22 As a ship “whose production series is named with a word that does not exist for a Communist consciousness (Stalinist denomination): Liberty”, the Richard Montgomery testified to that awkward fact too.
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When it came to getting the measure of the Richard Montgomery’s English afterlife as a hazardous wreck in the Thames Estuary, Johnson relied heavily on newspaper articles published during the new wave of anxiety provoked by the announcement in August 1978 that the authorities would soon be conducting their four-yearly underwater survey of the ship. The operation, which began at the end of September, was supervised by Commander John Bingham, Deputy Queen’s Harbourmaster at Chatham. The naval divers under his command would use underwater television cameras to survey the hull, but not the bombs, which they had been instructed to leave well alone.23 By the time they clambered into inflatable dinghies to approach the wreck from a mooring and salvage vessel, the press was assuring readers that these brave explorers would be “playing Russian roulette on the grand scale”.24
Some of the local journalism Johnson read as he sat in the pub appeared in the Kent Evening News and the Sheppey Gazette, but he also relied heavily on the Sunday Times, which had triggered the new wave of public alarm with a feature article entitled “The Thames Timebomb”, published on 27 August 1978. The author, Jon Connell, opened by informing his readers that, while summer visitors on the Sheerness promenade might view the SS Richard Montgomery as “one of Britain’s oddest tourist attractions”, local residents knew this “well-known and trusted neighbour” rather differently.25 Connell suggested that they were used to clambering about on the wreck, filming it, sailing between its masts, salvaging valuable materials from it and, if they were fishermen, using the site as a convenient dump for bombs and other “detritus” of war that turned up in their nets (better, after all, than losing a day’s fishing while you wait for a naval bomb disposal unit to come and deal with the situation). Contrary to the “official line” claiming that the wreck was becoming safer as the sea washed, blanketed and buried its cargo, Connell revived the idea that it was actually becoming more dangerous every day, that the hull was breaking up and moving and, indeed, that the “Thames timebomb” might blow up at any moment.
He made these allegations on the authority of a new estuarial warrior from the northern shore, who had by then become well known as a tenacious and highly critical opponent of government policy regarding the wreck. In 1972, when he first took up the issue, David Cotgrove had been described as a Southend restaurateur “with links to the fishing industry”. His brother John remarks that nobody should deduce from this that we are talking about any old fish and chips merchant (“You obviously don’t know much about Southend”,26 he said when I phoned to ask about the establishment he ran with his brother). Founded by Cotgrove’s grandfather in 1896, and therefore almost as old as the municipal borough of Southend-on-Sea, Cotgrove’s Restaurant was well-placed at the southern end of the High Street near Pier Hill. Capable of serving a thousand meals on a busy summer day, it also managed, as one former resident remembers, to be “the go-to place for bourgeois respectability in the Sixties”.27
At the time Connell approached him for the Sunday Times, Cotgrove was chairman of Southend-on-Sea Chamber of Trade and Industry’s Local Affairs Committee, and it was in this capacity that he had formed a taskforce of three to discover the facts about the SS Richard Montgomery and to review government policy in the light of their findings. He recruited Cllr David Anthony Atkinson, a Director of Chalkwell Motor Company in Leigh-on-Sea, who had served, while training as an engineer a year previously, as a notably right-wing national chairman of the Young Conservatives (he would go on to become an MP well known for his opposition to sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa and then for the personal scandals that overwhelmed his later years). The third member of the Chamber of Trade’s investigation was a journalist and performing musician who had been born into an east London family with a background in fireworks manufacture as well as in music hall and variety. Richard Anthony Baker (whose brother John pioneered electronic music with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) was enlisted for his knowledge of Southend and the estuary as Hon. Secretary of the Rochford Hundred Historical Society.28
These men may not have been as wild as some of the pirate radio operators and anti-state secessionists who had colonised various of the estuary’s abandoned anti-aircraft forts in the Sixties. They were, however, far from deferential towards upriver authority — and unlikely to be successfully overawed at a “confidential” briefing of the kind that, in 1966, the Ministry of Defence had laid on in the Admiral’s ballroom at Chatham as they overwhelmed and reassured the members of Sheerness Urban District Council. Entitled “The Explosive Cargo of the USS Richard Montgomery”, Southend Chamber of Trade’s report on the “developing hazard” that “still lurks off the Sheerness shore in the full view of the communities which it threatens” had been launched at a press conference at the Institute of Journalists in London on 20 April 1972.29 Reporters who turned up for this event were invited to recognise the “incredible” negligence of the secretive public authorities, accused once again of having done very little to understand the dangers posed by the wreck, and nothing at all to remove it from the estuary since Dr Reginald Bennett MP first asked for clarification in the House of Commons in 1952. The Southend report, and the journalistic discussion that followed its publication, set many of the terms on which Connell and, through his Sunday Times article, also Uwe Johnson came to understand the Richard Montgomery.
Having reviewed everything that might be conceived as an official public announcement on the condition of the SS Richard Montgomery and her cargo since the moment it ran aground, the Southend investigators were scathing about the jumble of inaccurate, defensive and contradictory statements made by officials and politicians s
ince 1952, asserting that it revealed the state’s indifference to the people on both sides of the estuary. Undeterred when the public authorities refused them access to the technical report they had commissioned from the Hydraulics Research Station on the possibility of erecting a barrier around the wreck, they set off along their own “lines of enquiry”, relying heavily on “local knowledge” and talking with people involved in “various activities in the Thames and Medway” who were quite unlike the officials in being generous with “advice, information, and the loan of documents”. It was noted, in an observation inherited from David Lampe’s article for Wide World, that not one of these experienced witnesses had “ever been asked about the matter in any way” by the responsible public officials, who could therefore be judged wilfully ignorant of the situation and manipulative in the expertise they claimed to possess.
Deferring to no one, Cotgrove and his accomplices had cut through the various acronyms used on the American loading plan and set their findings against a second inventory they had managed to get hold of, this one listing the bombs salvaged in 1944. From an initial cargo estimated at 6,127 imperial tons they calculated that 3,552 tons remained. Nearly 90% of these were general purpose and semi-armour piercing bombs, with a combined weight of 2,770 imperial tons. The remaining cargo of explosive materials included white phosphorous smoke bombs, and also rather more than a hundred tons of cluster fragmentation bombs about which they had “received very little information”, although they were understood to be “individually packed in wooden transit cases” and also to have “an integral arming system”.