They also insisted that the wreck was resting on firm ground and not sinking into sand and mud as official advocates of the supposedly reassuring “blanket of silt” theory had once tried to suggest. Despite the notices posted on its masts, the wreck was by no means secure against disturbance, and neither was the risk of an explosion decreasing. Indeed, Cotgrove and his accomplices repeated Lampe’s charge that the TNT in the large bombs had already lasted far beyond its “safe” period, and would long since have been destroyed under normal circumstances. Despite official assurances to the contrary, the chances of an explosion were definitely not remote “by comparison with absolute safety”.
The continued official neglect of the wreck impressed these Southend campaigners as particularly culpable given the possible threats, which were by no means limited to collision with a passing ship or the impact of the Richard Montgomery’s own decks, masts and derricks as the disintegrating wreck collapsed. They didn’t mention the summer boat trips full of holidaymakers from Sheerness, but they personally knew of at least twenty-five people who had visited the ship, indicating that an “immense” number must have done so over the years. Some had gone to salvage valuable materials but they’d also heard of barges that had sailed between the masts and fishermen who’d got accustomed to using the site as a convenient dump for stray bombs that turned up in their nets. Writing only a few weeks after the IRA bombed Aldershot barracks in retaliation for the now officially admitted atrocity of Bloody Sunday perpetrated by British forces in Derry on 30 January 1972, they also noted the possibility of malevolent interference by a “determined individual” who might actually do what students from a northern university had merely threatened in January 1969.
By the time the Southend Chamber of Trade’s report had gone into circulation, the circumstances surrounding the anticipated explosion were ready to be turned into the finger-pointing thriller published by Hamish Hamilton in 1976. Blockbuster is one of no less than sixty-one books that a man who published under the name of “Stephen Barlay” wrote in the thick cloud of cigarette smoke he housed, latterly, in an upstairs bedroom in Wembley. Barlay’s interest in the Richard Montgomery may have been reawakened by the publicity surrounding Cotgrove’s accusations, but he had known about it since David Lampe’s article in the October 1964 edition of Wide World (the same issue included Barlay’s own feature about the Soviet scientist Professor Vladimir Demikhov’s disgusting attempt to graft the living head of a mongrel onto a sheepdog’s back30).
Blockbuster revolves around the terrorist conspiracy of a blackmailer who threatens to blow up the Richard Montgomery if the government doesn’t hand over £1 million. Using various formulaic devices, including grinning Chinese torturers, bent coppers and lustful, hyena-like sex, the author threads his story through what was publicly known about the wreck in the years following Cotgrove’s report: from the warning-posted buoys to the cracks in the hull, through which Barlay’s blackmailer duly squeezes his threatening charge. The plot revolves around a senior police officer, suspected of being “the Principal” behind the blackmail conspiracy but eventually unmasked as a hero who has actually organised the threat to blow up the Richard Montgomery in order to flush out genuinely corrupt officers, who have learned their criminal ways during earlier service with the Hong Kong police. This misunderstood hero’s justification for the risk he is taking with the lives of people in Sheerness is that his plot might at worst oblige the “political midgets”31 then occupying the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street to do what they should have done long ago, i.e. find and commit the resources necessary to dispose of the Richard Montgomery and its hazardous cargo for good. In this respect, the novel is a fictional tribute to the longstanding downriver understanding of the Richard Montgomery as a monument to the British state’s indifference to the lives of ordinary people.
Johnson, who had learned of Barlay’s novel from the Sunday Times, notes its existence with a few words that do nothing to suggest he ever read it: “Belletristic treatment: a thriller, Blockbuster”.32 Nobody in the Napier Tavern had been in the position to inform him that the author “Stephen Barlay” was actually István Bokor, a Hungarian Jew who had seen many members of his family murdered by fascists during the Second World War, and had himself survived to join the Communist Party and then become a freelance radio journalist who had left the country in a hurry, having been in the broadcasting building that stood at the centre of the suppressed anti-Soviet revolution in 1956.33
*
Sunday Times journalist Jon Connell may not have known about “Barlay” either, but there was, as he did understand, more to be said about the authority of his primary witness. David Cotgrove was, so Connell announced, “a former government explosives researcher”. His brother, John Cotgrove confirms the truth of this: before taking over the family restaurant in Southend, David Cotgrove had, as he described in a note among his papers, worked for some ten years as an “experimental officer” at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment across the estuary from Sheerness on Foulness Island.34 His job had been to assist scientists working on nuclear detonation systems there and also in Australia where he himself had gone to test various forms of “ironmongery”35 that might be used to ignite Britain’s atom bombs.
So Cotgrove, who also records having glimpsed the Richard Montgomery on the first day after the stranding and later sailing with friends to clamber aboard the unsecured and freely accessible wreck in 1949, also knew a lot about explosives. In 1973, the year after publication of the Southend Chamber of Trade’s report, he had got in touch with an American expert, Major Theodore C. Chart, outlining the story of the SS Richard Montgomery and explaining the increased anxiety felt by “the communities on both sides of the estuary” now that the wreck was directly “in line” with the runways of the new international airport being planned for Maplin Sands. He sought Chart’s confirmation that the high-explosive bombs remaining on the wreck might safely be recovered in a “properly equipped salvage operation” and that there was only a “very remote” chance that any of the cluster fragmentation bombs had been packed with the potentially dangerous fuses installed. In a letter dated 28 March 1973, Major Chart cautiously agreed that Cotgrove’s analysis of the situation seemed “logical” and that an explosion seemed “highly unlikely” during recovery given the involvement of an experienced salvage crew. On 26 June 1973, Cotgrove took copies of this correspondence to the Chief Explosives Inspector at the Home Office’s Explosives Branch in Horseferry House, London SW1. After hearing his case, E.G. Whitbread wrote an internal memo declaring Cotgrove’s analysis “interesting and important”. The Department of Trade was soon writing to the Ministry of Defence, warning that the Home Office felt there might be “some merit” in Cotgrove’s theory, and suggesting that an early response from the MOD Ordnance Board would be welcome given that Cotgrove was by now also calling for a public enquiry into the Richard Montgomery.
Considering that neither a public enquiry nor any visible adjustment in the official position had taken place during the intervening years, it is not surprising that Cotgrove was showing signs of exasperation by 1978, when he gave his views again in the Sunday Times article that would serve as the primary source for Johnson’s “An Unfathomable Ship”. Once again he brushed off the official claim that the bombs were quietly getting safer, insisting instead that “every year the danger increases” while also reprising David Lampe’s suggestion that the Richard Montgomery had the power to produce “the most catastrophic non-nuclear explosion in history”.36 The possibility of the explosion being triggered by low-flying planes taking off from Foulness may have died in 1974 when the incoming Labour government killed off plans for a new airport on Maplin Sands, but Cotgrove could offer other threats for Connell to list. The coastguard station at Warden on the Isle of Sheppey had by this time counted twenty-four near misses and one direct hit by a freighter, and there was every chance of worse to come thanks to increased use of both Thames and Medway shipping channels. Althoug
h Cotgrove wondered what might happen when the tide went out on a hypothetical oil tanker that had accidentally got stuck on top of the wreck at high tide, it was the “danger of deliberate interference” that was judged most worrying. The student threat of January 1969 had turned out to be a rag-week jape, but there remained a serious possibility that the wreck might be targeted by terrorists operating under cover of night or bad weather. That danger was not made any less alarming by the unnamed police sergeant who, when asked about his force’s contingency plans, said “It’ll be a question of calling for our harps and haloes and praying”.
Speaking out to local papers after the Sunday Times piece appeared, Cotgrove repeated his claim that the management of the Richard Montgomery had been “bungled from the start”. The Admiralty had brought the problem on itself by ordering the ship to anchor in a plainly inappropriate place. Not content with twice rejecting American advice that the wreck could and should be cleared — first in 1948 and later in June 1967 — the British authorities had “seriously misled the public”37 about the dangers of inaction. The limited official publicity granted to the Richard Montgomery had been devoted to “perpetuating a series of myths” to justify the Ministry of Defence’s “attitude”, condemned as “essentially an attempt to convince people that the Richard Montgomery has settled firmly in the seabed and is thus free from any natural disturbance which might affect the bombs”.
It was also thanks to Cotgrove that Johnson, who had become particularly interested in the “cracks” in the Richard Montgomery’s hull, could accurately declare in his essay that “In September 1978, the question was above all whether the wreck had come apart in a second place”. The Department of Trade had announced that the approaching survey was intended to establish whether this was the case, but Cotgrove claimed to have warned them about it years before. He had deduced that the hull had cracked again by studying the angle of the masts and looking at an aerial photograph of the site, taken as part of a survey by the Medway Ports Authority in September 1971.38 He had carried out further investigations the following year after being invited to discuss his allegations with a trade minister and a junior environment minister after the publication of the Southend Chamber of Trade’s report. In the days before the meeting, which took place on 3 July 1972, he had gone so far as to commission a diver to inspect the hull. The unnamed investigator hadn’t just found the new crack. He had “put his head and shoulders through it to inspect the bombs which were clearly visible”.39
Officials might insist there was only a “one in a million” chance of an explosion, but Cotgrove believed the new split had created a highly dangerous situation that demanded urgent action. As he told the Sheppey Gazette in September 1978, the one-thousand-pound TNT-filled bombs were now actually “straddling” the eighteen-inch gap and “effectively keeping the ship together” as the tides poured back and forth between the separated sections. The movement of the fragmenting hull was causing the bombs to “grind over each other”, exposing them to “a massive force like a vice”. Cotgrove considered this more than sufficient to detonate a bomb, which was in turn highly likely to set off the rest: “they are being squashed and are gripping each other. Is this a safe situation? They are certainly not undisturbed, but maybe the Ministry does not want the public to know that”.40
Various public officials shuffled out, as Johnson read, to reject Cotgrove’s “scaremongering”.41 They also reported the words of the local Conservative MP Roger Moate, who had taken Faversham from Labour’s Terence Boston in 1970. Although he had yet to come fully into his own as one of John Major’s Eurosceptic “bastards”, Moate was surely already a man who might have respected the endurance of an individual seeking to sustain a people’s cause against powerful state bureaucracies. Not yet, however. He derided the revival of interest in the Richard Montgomery as “a typical ‘silly season’ story. We have seen many of them in the past”.
Johnson, who drew orientation as well as information from this coverage, was closer to Cotgrove in his sympathies than to the jaded politicians or the officials who had claimed, following the underwater survey of September 1978, that “there is no significant change in the state of the wreck nor any additional spillage of explosives”. This was, as Johnson noted drily from his barstool, a sentence “that contains explosives which have already spilled out through existing holes”.42 In his reading of the situation, the failure of official bodies to remove “the wreck” combined with the inertia of the public agencies that continued to leave the town exposed to the risk of flooding, giving a new dimension to the danger threatening Sheerness. While providing a clear demonstration of the powerless of islanders against the upriver state, the story of the Richard Montgomery also revealed Sheerness to be a place where Murphy’s Law had spawned a host of subsidiary clauses. The basic premise that “if anything has even the slightest chance of going wrong, it will” was now attended by additional findings: that “everything takes longer than people expect”; that “if it is possible for several things to go wrong, then the one that will cause the most damage will go wrong first”; and that “the importance of a subject can be judged by the lack of interest in it”.43
In the meantime, Johnson gathered up some of the “folklore” circulating among those obliged to live between Sheerness’s sable cloud and its terrifying silver lining. It was said that Churchill had written to Roosevelt’s successor, saying the time had come to remove his bombs, “but the Yanks said sorry, a gift is a gift”.44 Then there was the highly experienced, world-class salvage firm — was it Dutch or Japanese? — that had come to have a look but quickly backed off saying they’d “prefer not to touch this one”. Even the Germans were said to have beaten a hasty retreat, raising the hope that “one good thing about the Common Market”, might be that it would become possible to “trade this island for a West German city” — perhaps Dusseldorf (“I hear it’s on the water already”).
Under “psychological tidbits”, Johnson notes that “the Richard Montgomery is present in everyone’s consciousness, down to the level of common expressions” such as “I wish that ol’ thing’d go up at last, then we’d finally have something goin’ on around here”.45 He registers the curious fact that people remained strongly attached to their island despite the catastrophe that might engulf them at any moment. School-leavers rarely sought work on the mainland, and older folk even retired back to the island, choosing “to spend their twilight years here, in sight of a time bomb”. Back behind his own window by now, he adds “Even foreigners settle here, separated from the likely prospect of an explosion by a single window-pane? What I’m trying to tell you, in a whisper: It’s a death-wish”.
Johnson collected some of his own local ephemera for “An Unfathomable Ship”, including, we may assume, the islanders’ ready answer to the parliamentary Undersecretary of Trade, who had recently reported that, in the event of an explosion, damage claims should be sent to the United States of America: “Right. But then we’d hardly be in a position to do it”.46 In other respects, he is content to replicate the British press coverage. So it is with his list of events that might cause a detonation: a bungled salvage operation, impact with a stray ship, a strong tide causing breakage of “an intermediate deck” so that bombs fall onto one another. He cites the possibility of a terrorist attack, shockwaves from low-flying planes and students on a spree (“as occurred” [sic] in 1969). To this recycled list of community favourites, he adds a couple of his own: “a suicide reluctant to go alone” and, “an intractable philologist who wants to test the saying according to which you’ve done a great thing if you’ve set the Thames on fire”.
When it comes to describing the possible consequences of an explosion, here too Johnson follows the Sunday Times’ Connell, who in turn follows Wide World’s Lampe in mapping the impact over a series of concentric circles. The explosive experts at Waltham Abbey had confined their scientific analysis of a hypothetical detonation to measuring abstract forces, but campaigners as well as jour
nalists preferred to offer a more concrete picture of the consequences. The Sunday Times illustrated Connell’s hypothesis with a map headed “How a Blast Would Strike”. This tracked the likely impact with the help of two circles. Being within the inner one, placed two miles from the wreck, Sheerness could expect “old buildings and unbuttressed walls” to collapse and “gas and water pipes” to fracture. Between that and the second circle, at seven miles, “windows might crack and insecure chimneys and roof tiles could topple”. With the help of a second diagram tracking the damage that might be caused by “a fireball capable of hurling large chunks of debris more than a mile away”, Connell noted that this would have worse consequences on a day of low cloud cover, since “the blast would be ‘bounced’ back downwards, increasing the damage on the ground”.
The Kentish papers dreamed of a bigger bang than that. A few days after Connell’s piece appeared, the Sheppey Gazette declared that “the shockwave would be felt throughout the island. Old buildings could collapse; gas and water pipes could be wrecked, windows within a seven-mile radius could crack and insecure windows and tiles would topple”.47 By this time David Cotgrove was losing his sense of restraint too. In one highly coloured version, he would be quoted as saying that an explosion would “take Sheerness, Grain and Southend with it”.48 In another, he promised that:
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