The Cutty Sark perched atop a glass bubble, the ss Great Britain becalmed on a glass sea, and the hull of the Mary Rose cradled in a climate-controlled oyster-shell structure: these are the 21st-century conservation solutions for three of the UK’s iconic historic ships that were technological innovators in their times.
The ships will never sail again, but these three treasures of the UK’s maritime heritage are safely docked and their foreseeable future assured as visitor attractions. Two of them, the Mary Rose and ss Great Britain, now sit just yards from where they were built.
The Cutty Sark, Mary Rose and ss Great Britain are the lucky ones. Balancing the demands of conservation work and public access is complex and costly, and for many surviving historic ships, the story is not so bright.
Only about 10% of the 1,200 vessels on the National Historic Ships register (see facing page) are museum ships, and these face ongoing costs as they age and deteriorate. Many museums find it impossible to meet these costs.
Some, like HMS Stalker, a world war two landing ship, end up being scrapped because homes cannot be found. The Scottish-built City of Adelaide, the oldest clipper in the world, is likely to be lost to the UK, despite a long campaign to keep it here.
If conditions are met, the ship, built five years before the Cutty Sark and used to take emigrants to Australia, will move from its current home at the Scottish Maritime Museum at Irvine, which lacks the capacity and resources to keep it, to Adelaide in Australia where it will be part of a new museum of migration.
Hard choices
Without the tireless voluntary work of small preservation trusts to keep vessels intact, open to visitors and used for a wide range of education and outreach work, many more would be lost. But the demands of protecting ageing vessels, necessitating endless rounds of funding applications, is prohibitive.
“Saving a ship is just the beginning,” says Martyn Heighton, director of National Historic Ships UK (NHS UK). “Ships are difficult to keep. You can’t keep everything, so we have to make sure that we keep the right ones, and sometimes we have to tell owners that their ships are not of national significance.”
NHS UK has a broad remit that includes advising government on issues affecting historic vessels. It also helps the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and other funders make decisions on whether to support projects seeking grants.
The organisation runs the National Historic Ships register and also provides small grants, advice and support, such as negotiating free berthing or helping with economic impact reports.
NHS UK works with other organisations to provide the specialist and traditional skills needed for historic ships, including an apprenticeship scheme with the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port.
“We have given out around £400,000 worth of grants over the last five years, mostly to private owners and small organisations and trusts that don’t have the big support systems around them, which famous ships and big maritime museums have,” says Heighton.
“The HLF, as well as many smaller funders such as the Prism Fund [a fund for the Preservation of Industrial and Scientific Material], has put a lot of money into historic ships and many would not be here without their grants and generous support,” he adds.
“We are an island nation and our whole relationship with the world has been through ships. Even inland, we find connections with the sea through all the large country estates and families. It’s in our language and culture. But curiously, for a nation built on maritime strength, we undervalue our historic vessels.”
Even ships of national importance can be at risk. Very few are government funded.
“We need to be rational and clear about what can be preserved and then do that well,” says Matthew Tanner, the director of the ss Great Britain Trust and a contributor to the NHS UK publication Conserving Historic Vessels. “Either the fabric or the function has to be prioritised.”
The ss Great Britain has won more than 20 awards, ranging from the Gulbenkian Prize for museums and galleries (now the Art Fund Prize) to the Heritage Loo of the Year. Tanner puts its popularity down to successfully marrying the rigour of a museum and a holistic, accessible visitor experience.
“The ship is full of great stories, but we recognised that this is not enough on its own, so we worked on a great experience that wasn’t overly engineered and appeals to women as much as men,” he says.
“The ship is preserved as a museum object and has that special aura, but it’s genuinely thrilling to go through the object-rich museum and then experience boarding the ship. They are different learning styles but they work well together.”
The Mary Rose was Henry VIII’s naval flagship and a favourite of his fleet. It sank in the Solent in 1545 and was raised in 1982. The ship is part of the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard complex, which also contains the HMS Victory, HMS Warrior 1860 and the National Museum of the Royal Navy. Visitors buy a ticket for all the attractions together.
The remains of the Mary Rose’s hull are being conserved with a complex spraying and drying process. This should be completed in 2016, but the ship is expected to be back on display in a new museum from mid-2012.
The planned museum, designed by Wilk-inson Eyre Architects, was not allowed to compete with the other ships and structures on the site, and had to provide an exemplary home for the hull and the 19,000 artefacts found with the wreck, including skeletons of the crew. The objects on display will increase from 5% now to 60%.
Oyster-shell housing
“The building is a wonderful compromise, like a jewel box or an oyster shell with the Mary Rose as the pearl,” says John Lippiett, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust. “We have the advantage of being enclosed, which makes it easier to maintain the correct environmental conditions.”
Visitors will be able to get close to the surviving starboard side of the hull, and see the port side mirrored with the decks replicated on the right scale, explains Lippiett.
“It requires a 35m-long showcase that will be one of the biggest in the world,” he says. “At either end the stories of the crew will be told, led by the artefacts themselves. We have the skeletons of crew members and this has enabled us to tell stories of Tudor medicine as well as naval history, supported by a £1m grant from the Wellcome Trust.”
This year also sees the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Newport ship embedded in the mud of the river Usk in Newport, South Wales. More than 60 years older than the Mary Rose, the Newport ship was built in France in about 1447, dated by a silver good-luck coin sealed in its keel, which is now in Newport Museum.
Like the Mary Rose, the surviving hull is also on the starboard side and all 1,700 of its timbers have been cleaned and recorded and the ship is undergoing a drying process, which will take four years.
Charles Ferris, patron of the Friends of Newport Ship, hopes that the ship will find a home in the centre of Newport once it is restored. “It’s unique and important in so many ways,” he says.
“It was trading internationally and belongs to a time of great voyages and exploration beyond the confines of Europe. The local council, the Welsh Assembly and the HLF, as well as smaller funders, have all looked favourably on us and she is central to Newport’s identity as a port.”
The maritime heritage industry is concentrated on the south coast, but the National Museum of the Royal Navy has tried to expand its reach with an affiliate programme that involves the early-19th-century frigates HMS Trincomalee 1817 in Hartlepool and HMS Unicorn in Dundee.
It has also taken over responsibility for HMS Caroline, a light cruiser from world war one, currently in the Titanic Quarter in Belfast.
“People don’t expect to find an historic war-ship in this part of the world,” says David McKnight, general manager of the HMS Trincomalee Preservation Trust, whose members restored the ship and were part of the same team that restored HMS Warrior 1860 in Portsmouth.
“It costs £90,000 a year to maintain the ship and the affiliation allows us to do joint marketing, use their logo and they have helped us acquire items related to the ship, including a 2nd lieutenant’s journal and a diary of a private owner.”
McKnight has shifted the focus from the restoration to marketing, and has created a new website, as well as using social media and cross-promoting on other websites.
“We are now more focused on visitors, who start at the quayside gallery to learn about the ship and life at sea in the early 19th century, then come on board,” McKnight says. “It’s powerful stuff, and we are now welcoming up to 60,000 visitors a year.”
Preservation trusts do not give up easily. The future of the Daniel Adamson, a steam-powered tug tender built in 1903, is now uncertain since it was turned down for an HLF grant last year. The NHS UK is working with the Daniel Adamson Preservation Society on a new application.
The Adamson tug worked on the river Mersey and Manchester Ship Canal guiding larger vessels. Later, a covered promenade and two art deco saloons were added and she was used mainly for VIP outings. This makes her adaptable to education work and functions and corporate use, says John Broomby, secretary of its preservation society.
“It will be a living, breathing ship,” he says. “I don’t see the point of it being a static exhibit in a museum. People want to see and smell the steam, and today’s children will never have experienced the thrill of steam.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
The National Historic Ships register aims to widen interest in historic vessels in the UK or those with a strong UK connection. Vessels that are over 33ft long and more than 50 years old qualify for inclusion and there are about 1,200 vessels on the register at present, including 200 of unique significance.
These form the National Historic Fleet, a sub-group core collection of pre-eminent vessels, such as the Cutty Sark, HMS Victory and HMS Warrior 1860, both at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, and the steam yacht Carola, now being restored at the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine.
Only about 10% of the ships on the register are museums, with all the others afloat and operational in one form or another. The register, which is funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is a kind of maritime version of English Heritage, though unlike buildings, ships are not protected by listing status unless they are permanently dry.
National Historic Ships UK also runs the Overseas Watch List for UK-built ships now abroad. The register can alert the relevant bodies about ships that are at risk and work to find a solution. It has no legal powers unless a ship is being exported, when a temporary export ban can be arranged under “portable works of art” to allow time while a solution is sought.
If a sustainable future can’t be found, the ship will be deconstructed, recorded in the National Archive of Historic Vessels and become part of the body of knowledge that can help other owners restore similar ships. This records the details, drawings and photographs of about 500 ships that were on the register but have now been lost.
This year will see the world’s oldest complete steamship, built on London’s river Lea in Bow, open to the public as a museum.
The ss Robin was awarded a £950,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant last month and has been under restoration for the past three years and now sits on a purpose-built floating pontoon moored temporarily at the Royal Victoria Dock.
It is one of only three National Historic Ships Core Collection vessels based in London, alongside the Cutty Sark and HMS Belfast.
The ss Robin is a coastal cargo steamer and one of 1,500 originally built between 1840 and 1956 at the Thames Ironworks & Shipbuilding Company. It returned to London in July last year.
The ss Robin museum will explore the stories of London’s industrialisation, trade, energy, commodities, migration, wealth creation, seafaring and shipbuilding.
The ships will never sail again, but these three treasures of the UK’s maritime heritage are safely docked and their foreseeable future assured as visitor attractions. Two of them, the Mary Rose and ss Great Britain, now sit just yards from where they were built.
The Cutty Sark, Mary Rose and ss Great Britain are the lucky ones. Balancing the demands of conservation work and public access is complex and costly, and for many surviving historic ships, the story is not so bright.
Only about 10% of the 1,200 vessels on the National Historic Ships register (see facing page) are museum ships, and these face ongoing costs as they age and deteriorate. Many museums find it impossible to meet these costs.
Some, like HMS Stalker, a world war two landing ship, end up being scrapped because homes cannot be found. The Scottish-built City of Adelaide, the oldest clipper in the world, is likely to be lost to the UK, despite a long campaign to keep it here.
If conditions are met, the ship, built five years before the Cutty Sark and used to take emigrants to Australia, will move from its current home at the Scottish Maritime Museum at Irvine, which lacks the capacity and resources to keep it, to Adelaide in Australia where it will be part of a new museum of migration.
Hard choices
Without the tireless voluntary work of small preservation trusts to keep vessels intact, open to visitors and used for a wide range of education and outreach work, many more would be lost. But the demands of protecting ageing vessels, necessitating endless rounds of funding applications, is prohibitive.
“Saving a ship is just the beginning,” says Martyn Heighton, director of National Historic Ships UK (NHS UK). “Ships are difficult to keep. You can’t keep everything, so we have to make sure that we keep the right ones, and sometimes we have to tell owners that their ships are not of national significance.”
NHS UK has a broad remit that includes advising government on issues affecting historic vessels. It also helps the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and other funders make decisions on whether to support projects seeking grants.
The organisation runs the National Historic Ships register and also provides small grants, advice and support, such as negotiating free berthing or helping with economic impact reports.
NHS UK works with other organisations to provide the specialist and traditional skills needed for historic ships, including an apprenticeship scheme with the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port.
“We have given out around £400,000 worth of grants over the last five years, mostly to private owners and small organisations and trusts that don’t have the big support systems around them, which famous ships and big maritime museums have,” says Heighton.
“The HLF, as well as many smaller funders such as the Prism Fund [a fund for the Preservation of Industrial and Scientific Material], has put a lot of money into historic ships and many would not be here without their grants and generous support,” he adds.
“We are an island nation and our whole relationship with the world has been through ships. Even inland, we find connections with the sea through all the large country estates and families. It’s in our language and culture. But curiously, for a nation built on maritime strength, we undervalue our historic vessels.”
Even ships of national importance can be at risk. Very few are government funded.
“We need to be rational and clear about what can be preserved and then do that well,” says Matthew Tanner, the director of the ss Great Britain Trust and a contributor to the NHS UK publication Conserving Historic Vessels. “Either the fabric or the function has to be prioritised.”
The ss Great Britain has won more than 20 awards, ranging from the Gulbenkian Prize for museums and galleries (now the Art Fund Prize) to the Heritage Loo of the Year. Tanner puts its popularity down to successfully marrying the rigour of a museum and a holistic, accessible visitor experience.
“The ship is full of great stories, but we recognised that this is not enough on its own, so we worked on a great experience that wasn’t overly engineered and appeals to women as much as men,” he says.
“The ship is preserved as a museum object and has that special aura, but it’s genuinely thrilling to go through the object-rich museum and then experience boarding the ship. They are different learning styles but they work well together.”
The Mary Rose was Henry VIII’s naval flagship and a favourite of his fleet. It sank in the Solent in 1545 and was raised in 1982. The ship is part of the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard complex, which also contains the HMS Victory, HMS Warrior 1860 and the National Museum of the Royal Navy. Visitors buy a ticket for all the attractions together.
The remains of the Mary Rose’s hull are being conserved with a complex spraying and drying process. This should be completed in 2016, but the ship is expected to be back on display in a new museum from mid-2012.
The planned museum, designed by Wilk-inson Eyre Architects, was not allowed to compete with the other ships and structures on the site, and had to provide an exemplary home for the hull and the 19,000 artefacts found with the wreck, including skeletons of the crew. The objects on display will increase from 5% now to 60%.
Oyster-shell housing
“The building is a wonderful compromise, like a jewel box or an oyster shell with the Mary Rose as the pearl,” says John Lippiett, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust. “We have the advantage of being enclosed, which makes it easier to maintain the correct environmental conditions.”
Visitors will be able to get close to the surviving starboard side of the hull, and see the port side mirrored with the decks replicated on the right scale, explains Lippiett.
“It requires a 35m-long showcase that will be one of the biggest in the world,” he says. “At either end the stories of the crew will be told, led by the artefacts themselves. We have the skeletons of crew members and this has enabled us to tell stories of Tudor medicine as well as naval history, supported by a £1m grant from the Wellcome Trust.”
This year also sees the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Newport ship embedded in the mud of the river Usk in Newport, South Wales. More than 60 years older than the Mary Rose, the Newport ship was built in France in about 1447, dated by a silver good-luck coin sealed in its keel, which is now in Newport Museum.
Like the Mary Rose, the surviving hull is also on the starboard side and all 1,700 of its timbers have been cleaned and recorded and the ship is undergoing a drying process, which will take four years.
Charles Ferris, patron of the Friends of Newport Ship, hopes that the ship will find a home in the centre of Newport once it is restored. “It’s unique and important in so many ways,” he says.
“It was trading internationally and belongs to a time of great voyages and exploration beyond the confines of Europe. The local council, the Welsh Assembly and the HLF, as well as smaller funders, have all looked favourably on us and she is central to Newport’s identity as a port.”
The maritime heritage industry is concentrated on the south coast, but the National Museum of the Royal Navy has tried to expand its reach with an affiliate programme that involves the early-19th-century frigates HMS Trincomalee 1817 in Hartlepool and HMS Unicorn in Dundee.
It has also taken over responsibility for HMS Caroline, a light cruiser from world war one, currently in the Titanic Quarter in Belfast.
“People don’t expect to find an historic war-ship in this part of the world,” says David McKnight, general manager of the HMS Trincomalee Preservation Trust, whose members restored the ship and were part of the same team that restored HMS Warrior 1860 in Portsmouth.
“It costs £90,000 a year to maintain the ship and the affiliation allows us to do joint marketing, use their logo and they have helped us acquire items related to the ship, including a 2nd lieutenant’s journal and a diary of a private owner.”
McKnight has shifted the focus from the restoration to marketing, and has created a new website, as well as using social media and cross-promoting on other websites.
“We are now more focused on visitors, who start at the quayside gallery to learn about the ship and life at sea in the early 19th century, then come on board,” McKnight says. “It’s powerful stuff, and we are now welcoming up to 60,000 visitors a year.”
Preservation trusts do not give up easily. The future of the Daniel Adamson, a steam-powered tug tender built in 1903, is now uncertain since it was turned down for an HLF grant last year. The NHS UK is working with the Daniel Adamson Preservation Society on a new application.
The Adamson tug worked on the river Mersey and Manchester Ship Canal guiding larger vessels. Later, a covered promenade and two art deco saloons were added and she was used mainly for VIP outings. This makes her adaptable to education work and functions and corporate use, says John Broomby, secretary of its preservation society.
“It will be a living, breathing ship,” he says. “I don’t see the point of it being a static exhibit in a museum. People want to see and smell the steam, and today’s children will never have experienced the thrill of steam.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
Keeping watch
The National Historic Ships register aims to widen interest in historic vessels in the UK or those with a strong UK connection. Vessels that are over 33ft long and more than 50 years old qualify for inclusion and there are about 1,200 vessels on the register at present, including 200 of unique significance.
These form the National Historic Fleet, a sub-group core collection of pre-eminent vessels, such as the Cutty Sark, HMS Victory and HMS Warrior 1860, both at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, and the steam yacht Carola, now being restored at the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine.
Only about 10% of the ships on the register are museums, with all the others afloat and operational in one form or another. The register, which is funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is a kind of maritime version of English Heritage, though unlike buildings, ships are not protected by listing status unless they are permanently dry.
National Historic Ships UK also runs the Overseas Watch List for UK-built ships now abroad. The register can alert the relevant bodies about ships that are at risk and work to find a solution. It has no legal powers unless a ship is being exported, when a temporary export ban can be arranged under “portable works of art” to allow time while a solution is sought.
If a sustainable future can’t be found, the ship will be deconstructed, recorded in the National Archive of Historic Vessels and become part of the body of knowledge that can help other owners restore similar ships. This records the details, drawings and photographs of about 500 ships that were on the register but have now been lost.
The return of ss Robin
This year will see the world’s oldest complete steamship, built on London’s river Lea in Bow, open to the public as a museum.
The ss Robin was awarded a £950,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant last month and has been under restoration for the past three years and now sits on a purpose-built floating pontoon moored temporarily at the Royal Victoria Dock.
It is one of only three National Historic Ships Core Collection vessels based in London, alongside the Cutty Sark and HMS Belfast.
The ss Robin is a coastal cargo steamer and one of 1,500 originally built between 1840 and 1956 at the Thames Ironworks & Shipbuilding Company. It returned to London in July last year.
The ss Robin museum will explore the stories of London’s industrialisation, trade, energy, commodities, migration, wealth creation, seafaring and shipbuilding.