Martin Woodward on Diving

Wartime wrecks, I’ve found quite a few of those. The most significant ones are the ‘Mendi’, you know the ‘Mendi’, you’ve heard about the ‘Mendi’. That’s the one off of St Catherine’s that Prime Minister Theresa May has just presented the bell to the President of South Africa.

We’ve got a lot of stuff … I found that back in 1974 and identified it and unravelled this story about how 646 black South Africans troops drowned just off the Isle of Wight and none of us knew about it.

I mean I researched all the wrecks, and this had obviously been covered up for propaganda and apartheid type reasons and no one knew about it.

It’s half the loss of the Titanic off our Island here and no one knew about it, not even me and I’d researched hundreds of wrecks off here.

The name had never flagged up and when I found out what it was, I was absolutely dumbstruck that all this loss of life had occurred, February 1917, just off our shores.

A tragic story, we’ve got a big story about that in the Museum and I’m actually going down … there’s a famous story about the ‘Mendi’, that as the ship was sinking, it sank in 20 minutes, it was rammed by another ship, it wasn’t mined or torpedoed.

It was rammed by a bigger ship called the ‘Darro’ and it sank in 20 minutes and all these black South Africans, they’d never seen the sea before, they were all from the townships of Soweto and South African townships and they were all drowning and crying, and this other ship did nothing to try and help.

Fortunately, there some other ships in the area that came and helped, and this Reverend Wauchope who was with them got them all on deck as the ship was going down to do the death dance. He said, “We die like brothers, we came here to die for our country and help with the War effort and we’ll die like brothers” the Zulus and the other tribes there and they took of their shoes and did the death dance on the deck as it went under.