Lisa : It is the 1st November 2018, and this is an interview with Martin Woodward at his home in Bembridge. Martin, could we start by you telling me your full name?
Martin : Yes, Martin John Woodward.
Lisa : And what is your date of birth?
Martin : 1948.
Lisa : And where were you born?
Martin : I was born just over there in Southsea, well in Portsmouth basically.
Lisa : And could you tell me your parent’s names?
Martin : Yeah, my mother’s name was Janet and my father’s name was David.
Lisa : And where were they born?
Martin : Portsmouth.
Lisa : So, how did you come to live on the Isle of Wight?
Martin : It’s a long story, but my father worked in the Civil Service and he always wanted to live on the Isle of Wight because he sailed dinghies a lot in Portsmouth, and he used to sail over to the Isle of Wight, Wooton Creek and places like that. He got transferred around a bit in his job and then put in for transfers rather than promotion, and he prioritised on coming back down to the South Coast. We were up in various places for short times like Cardiff and mainly Portsmouth in my lifetime until I was seven years old and he got a transfer to the Isle of Wight. Turned down promotion in favour of coming to the Isle of Wight and then we moved down here in 1960, so I was just 11 years old.
Lisa : And where did you live then?
Martin : Lived in Bembridge. I’ve been in Bembridge now for a long time, basically nearly 60 years and I’m nearly considered a local after that time (laughs). We had a very short spell in Ryde while we were waiting for the house that was only just up the road here and then we moved into the house in Lane End Road in 1960. I even remember the ‘phone number of that house. A three-digit number, now how old does that make me?
Lisa : And so being that age, and living very, very close to the beach, do you have childhood memories of being by the sea?
Martin : Yeah, it was paradise because obviously Portsmouth … I always loved the sea right from my earliest memories I would be … in those days kids just wandered around everywhere and when I lived in Portsmouth up until … from being born up until the age of six or seven years old, I used to go down to the beach at South Parade and Eastney and just wander around down there and play in the sea and that. It was always sort of in my blood if you like and I come from that sort of background with my ancestry, they were all people that were in the Navy or worked in the Dockyard whatever, and it was just a natural thing to do. But when I came to Bembridge, it was paradise because I lived 150 yards or metres if you want to use the modern terms, from the Lifeboat Pier and of course I was straight down there, I got myself a dingy and I use to go out and make lobster pots. Peter Smith, the Coxswain at that time took me under his wing and I was slave labour cleaning the brass on the Lifeboat, the old ‘Jesse Lumb’ which now we’ve got it back in Cowes funny enough. It was in the Imperial War Museum for years, but the old ‘Jesse Lumb’ still had a funnel then, you know the old Lifeboat. It was here from 1939 to 1970, a 46 foot boat and it was just wonderful to me because I could spend all my time in dinghies, fishing, catching lobsters, you know, all then old characters like … you’ve spoken to some of them, John Luff and the Holdbrooks, the Attrills’, the old boys that used to actually used to row in the old rowing Lifeboats. My neighbours up the road, in fact we moved into one of the Attrills’ brother’s houses, his brother lived next door and they actually rowed in the old Victorian Lifeboat that we’ve got now, the ‘Queen Victoria’ so you imagine as a boy, that was fantastic. You had moved to somewhere where it’s just paradise to you really and you’re in the environment that you know, in your blood, that you know you want to be in. So, it was great. I was saying about the Café down there, I used to sit in the Café, having caught some fish and sold them or whatever, and it was the same until it has just been knocked down a few months ago. It was great place to grow up. You could go snorkelling around the Ledges, spear fishing. I remember all sorts of stories about catching lobsters and that was probably why I got in to diving because I spent al my time in the water in that time, so you can imagine it was a good place to grow up.
5 minutes
Lisa : Can you tell me a bit more about your early recollections of the Lifeboat Station? What did it look like inside back then?
Martin : Well, it remained … you ask about what it looked like inside the Station and I mean that Station was built in 1922, the Pier. It was built for a new motor Lifeboat called the ‘Langham’ which you will see up at Arreton Cross. We’ve got it up in the field by the Museum there. That’s the one that the Pier was built for, so it remained unchanged for an awful long time, apart from a couple of modifications when the ‘Jesse Lumb’ came in ’39, it had to be extended to incorporate a bigger winch, but when I was a boy, it was just a traditional Lifeboat Station with tongue and groove boarding and the yellow oil skins hanging up in the racks there and the ‘Jesse Lumb’ [telephone rings] … yes, so it was a traditional Station you know with the old tongue and groove pine boarding, you know, dark varnish. It looked like a bit of a Museum in itself but there was not a lot in there apart from the Lifeboat equipment. The yellow oil skins hanging up in the racks, and the ‘Jesse Lumb’ that used to have a tipping cradle which was … it’s now come back for this boat but in the meantime they took it away after the ‘Jesse Lumb’ which tipped the boat up hydraulically up to a level so that you could actually work on the boat inside the Boathouse, on the level which was quite forward thinking for those days. So, it was great, and the good thing about those days were the characters involved in the Lifeboat. Peter Smith, as I said, he was the Coxswain from 1956 to 1985, so he was there for almost 32 years by the time he actually signed off, so he was the youngest serving Coxswain. He was only 26 from memory when he took the job on, he was the youngest Coxswain in the RNI at the time and when he finished he was one of the longest serving ones as well, but he was a great guy, he really did a lot for me and he taught me a lot and took me under his wing really and that’s how I started off in the Lifeboat. I started off there pretty much after I, you know, 12 years old or 13 years old I was down there cleaning the brass and that’s how you did it on those days. You were slave labour for a while and then you might get taken out on some Regattas or whatever, and then I did my first service job on the Lifeboat. It was what they call now ‘a shout’ not a term I like, just off here in August 1965, before my 17th birthday, well, you were supposed to be 17. But because I’d been down there and under the wing of Peter and within the Lifeboat community if you like, then I was considered part of it I suppose, but it was great. It was a very small Boathouse in comparison to what it is now, I mean this was rebuilt in 2010. With the previous boats you could only just get the boats in there. There was no real headroom. Everything folded down so it was pretty squashed, and when I took over as Coxswain, I actually filled it up with pictures and statistics and everything so that if we were out on a service … you know, if the Lifeboat was out, we were out on a job, then people could look at all the pictures and the history and there was something there for them to look at rather than an empty Boathouse. So, yeah, it was a traditional … it was quite sad to see it go in a way because it was quite traditional, but things move on.
Lisa : Can we go back, and can you tell me a bit about that first job that you went out on?
Martin : Yes, the first one, I can tell you pretty much the date. It was late August, it was just before I went away to Nautical College. No, it wasn’t, it was when I’d been to Nautical College and I was just about to go away to sea. I’d trained in navigation and I went to sea as a Navigating Cadet and it was just before my 17th birthday, so it would have been literally August 1965. The job was nothing really, it was a normal … in those days a lot of red flares were supposedly spotted, I mean people don’t use red flares much nowadays, it’s all done by radio and cell phone and modern techniques, but this was just a sighting of red flares just out off here between here and the Mainland, and I remember Peter Smith saying to me, he said, “You’re just off to be a Navigator” he said, “you can go and navigate our position” and of course in those days you had an open wheel house or semi-enclosed wheel house and everybody smoking their Capstan Full Strength, no names mentioned (laughs), clouds of smoke and a compass and a little chart room down in the middle of the boat and I remember going down there and I couldn’t find anything and according to my reckoning we were about two miles inland, somewhere on the Mainland in a grave yard I think (laughs). I don’t think it was quite that bad, but it was one of those jobs that was just a false sighting with good intent. It turned out to be nothing in the end, but I remember it because it was my first one.
10 minutes 43 seconds
Lisa So that was 1965. And what was the boat? Was it the ‘Jesse Lumb’?
Martin : Yes, that was the ‘Jesse Lumb’ and the ‘Jesse Lumb’ was replaced in 1970 by the ‘Jack Shayler and the Lees’ which was a steel boat, much different, but the ‘Jesse Lumb’ was a great boat and we were quite sad to see it go in a way. It’s wonderful to have it back. Just briefly, the history of it is that it was used in the Reserve Fleet after it left here for quite a few years, and then the Imperial War Museum acquired it and their volunteers restored it because they wanted to have a Lifeboat there because the ‘Jesse Lumb’ was involved in quite a few rescues of Airmen and the Imperial War Museum at Duxford is basically an aircraft Museum but they wanted to put that factor in that Lifeboats rescued Airmen. Inevitably after … well it’s only about two years ago I’d had my finger on the pulse with it for several years because I’d heard a rumour that they were going to move it out to make room for new displays, so I managed to get them to gift it to us, our little Historic Lifeboat Trust here, and we got it back the July before last, and it’s now down in Cowes in a shed down there on display. So, nice to have it back after all this time, and it was built in the same Yard, in J S White’s, so that’s good news. But she was a good old boat.
Lisa : How many crew went out on a job then?
Martin : Umm, the normal quota on the old boats was eight and then that changed a little bit to I think it was down to seven, but sometimes you’d have as many as ten, depending on the task really. If you were going to go out in the middle of the Channel in a storm, then you wouldn’t want too many people on board because you know it’s quite confined and there’s no need to have lots of pairs of eyes. It depends on the task. If you out looking for someone in the water, then you’d probably have a lot more pairs of eyes of people who were available to go, so sometimes you might go out with five or six people and you might go out with eight or nine or even ten if you wanted a lot of people looking out.
Lisa : And how would you know that you were needed? How were you notified then?
Martin : Always via the Coast Guard, well nearly always by the Coast Guard. I mean if one of the crew were down here or the Coxswain was working on the Lifeboat or on his fishing boat here, and he saw a red flare, then you could go and self-launch without any Coast Guard being involved, but most of the time it would be reports to Coast Guard and then they would then ‘phone what they called the ‘Hon Sec’ in those days, which was Weaver, up the road, a great guy, and then he would ‘phone the Coxswain and say, “Oh, we’ve got this job” which would go out and then we’d fire the maroons and then go. Some of the crew, a long, long time before bleepers obviously and pagers, and that’s how the crew were called and they were big old maroons too, they were fired from up in Weaver’s Yard and they were big ones and then gradually they got superseded by the little hand-held ones which were not half as effective (laughs). With the big maroons, you could actually hear the ground charge that fired it up in the air before the main maroon went off. A real big thump. They were great days, and the great thing about that time was that the whole community was interested in what the Lifeboat was doing, and obviously for PR, for Public Relations, and you know involving the local community, that was a good thing because when the maroons went off, everybody used to rush down to the Pier Gates and all gather there and see what was going on and of course it’s quite sad that nowadays you don’t get that because people get paged. I mean I fought hard to keep them maroons in my final days before I retired from the Lifeboat, and we did keep them until I left, because I thought it was really important that the village should know when the Lifeboat goes out. Obviously you’ll always get one or two people say, “Oh, it frightens my dog” or whatever, but 99.9% of the people enjoyed knowing that the boat was going out. Progress is progress I suppose, you have to go with the flow and now no one knows it goes out except me because I can hear the engines fire up from here obviously because I’m right next to it. I could never make an excuse that I couldn’t get there in time when I was on there because it was the shortest commute ever. I’m only 100 yards away, so I know when it’s going out, but the rest of the village don’t and I always joke about nowadays, having done a long time on the Lifeboat, now I look out of my window which looks at the slipway as you can see, my bedroom window, and when I hear the engines fire up and it’s a cold old dark night, I pull that duvet up a little bit higher and wave (laughs) my hand. No, seriously, if it was a serious job in a gale in the middle of the Channel, that’s when I would miss it. I don’t miss a lot of the marine AA of today where you know it’s a lot of tow jobs in flat calm conditions, but that’s the way things are. In this age of litigation, everybody covers their backside really.
16 minutes 33 seconds
Lisa : So do you think the nature of being called out has changed during that time? The types of jobs that you went out on, were they different then in the 1960’s to now?
Martin : Dramatically different, because in those days … you’ve got to remember that in those days, weather forecasting was not good. People didn’t have the electronic aids that they’ve got nowadays and people often got caught out by weather because the forecasts were not very accurate, so if they were going across Channel to say Cherbourg or something for the weekend, and they had to be back for the office on Monday, if the weather blew up on Sunday they’d think, oh, you know, I’ve got to be back for the office, we’ll take a chance and we’ll go, and that’s just one example. People just got caught out, a lot of the time they didn’t know where they were because yachts inevitably with Bembridge Ledge extending so far out, loads and loads of boats got on the Ledge and got into trouble, but of course now they’ve got their navigation on their smart phones, it just doesn’t happen any more and because of the age of litigation, you know where everybody’s covering themselves, then the Coast Guard will request the Lifeboat even when it’s a commercial tow. It’s quite a contentious thing but you asked the question so, yes it is much, much different. They go out for things nowadays the ‘Hon Sec’ or the Coxswain in the old days would have said, “No, that’s not a Lifeboat job.” A Lifeboat is for saving life. It’s not there to tow someone in that’s in no danger and just off here in flat calm, but that’s the way things go. That’s modern life, everything had gone that way really.
Lisa : Could you just tell me sort of chronologically, your association with the Lifeboat? You started at 17, and then you went away did you? You went away to work.
Martin : Yes, I first got involved with the Lifeboat when I was 12 or 13, but only as a junior helper if you like, as I mentioned I did my first service job … I’d been out on a couple of Regattas and things when I was 14, 15, 16, because I did a lot of work down there so that was my reward …
19 minutes 3 seconds
Lisa : Tell me a bit about the Regattas.
Martin : The Regattas were things that used to happen every year like Shanklin Regatta, Sandown Regatta and the Lifeboat was always part of the day. We did quite a few Regattas, events, you know even in Portsmouth in those days with the old ‘Jesse Lumb’ so the Lifeboat would do a bit of a display and go round, a non-rescue job if you like. But then my first one when I was just before 17, I was a couple of weeks away from my 17th birthday, and then I went to sea … well I was at College and the sea for a couple of years and then I came back and I got involved again and basically I stayed involved pretty much until I retired so well over 30 years, about 38 years if you count it from when I first went on. But obviously some of those times you were away. I mean I worked in the North Sea for a while, so I was away for a month and back for a month, so I didn’t actually miss many Lifeboat jobs in that time. I missed a few obviously but then I was back from the … sort of ‘80’s I was back here all the time so did another 25 years pretty constantly and then I retired at the upper age limit in 2003 and I’ve been retired since then, so it was a long old spell, but we had the best era. We had some of the good jobs and I can think of a lot of good jobs we did which you don’t really see nowadays because safety has become such a prominent feature of Health and Safety and regulations. Everything’s regulated up to the hilt, so you don’t get so many boats that weren’t in good condition. Angling boats are much more regulated. We used to get a lot of angling boats, fishing boats, even ships sinking in those days but it’s very, very rare now. I mean the last one I remember was the ‘Flag Theophano’ which was just two miles off here which killed all 19 crew. That was quite a big ship that capsized.
Lisa : And when was that?
Martin : 1990. You’ll probably remember the hurricane of October 1987, but that blew down a huge amount of trees on the Island as you may remember or you may not. I don’t know how old you are (laughs). And then the 1990 one was worse, it blew really hard. We went out on a false alarm on the Lifeboat here and it was the worst we’d ever seen in the Solent. I’ve got some film of it actually that the helicopter took because the helicopter couldn’t even get off the ground, the wind was too strong and then eventually when it died down a bit they got off and they joined the search that we were involved in and they took some film. You would think that was the Southern Ocean, you wouldn’t think it was just out here by the Forts. Sadly, as a result of that hurricane, just after that hurricane there was such a sea running that this ship sank. It was carrying bulk cement and it’s like a liquid and if you get too much movement it can shift and then capsize a ship. Doesn’t normally happen but on this particular one it did. Very sad. It was just literally there, and we were out that night, on that same night on another job, a swimmer over at Southsea. No one knew this ship had sunk until the next morning when the Pilots reported it was missing here. It was supposed to be coming in to anchor and we probably … it had already sunk by the time we’d gone out that night but we had no knowledge. Otherwise we would have been called in to search for survivors of that, but of course no one knew it. It just went over, drowned all the crew before they could even put a mayday out. I did a lot of diving on it for the Marine Accident people just afterwards.
Lisa : Could you tell me about any of those good jobs, those memorable jobs that you went out on?
Martin : Yes, there’s a few actually. I could tell you about loads and loads but going back to the ‘Jesse Lumb’ days, there was famous time when a submarine ran on the Ledge here, a big Royal Navy submarine and ended up on the Ledge for three days because he had taken a short cut, racing with another submarine to get back to Portsmouth to get the best berth alongside (laughs) and that was one that was significant for the ‘Jess Lumb’. Another significant one for the ‘Jack Shayler’ when she’d just literally arrived that year in 1970, was the ‘Pacific Glory’, a big tanker collision off here. I was away for that, I wasn’t on that job. [telephone rings]. One of the most significant ones for the new ‘Jack Shayler and the Lees’ Lifeboat that arrived in 1970, virtually just after she’d arrived was a big tanker collision between the ‘Pacific Glory’ and a ship called the ‘Allegro’ off St Catherine’s Point, and the ‘Pacific Glory’ and the ‘Pacific Glory’ burst in to flames, had explosions and there was quite a large loss of life so that was a significant one for the ‘Jack Shayler’. Later in the ‘70’s, ones that I remember probably more clearly than the others are a ship called the ‘Poole Fisher’ which capsized and sank off St Catherine’s in an awful storm in November 1979 and all but two of the crew drowned on that. I think it was 13 dead and two survivors. The two young lads that survived and that was an awful night. It was really, really quite bad weather, a sort of Westerly gale and this ship had literally taken water and then capsized, and we were out there for I think probably about 20 hours, looking for the survivors of this ship. No one quite knew where it had sunk because all that Niton Radio got was a very quick ‘Mayday’ on the ship to shore channel, not on the distress channel so obviously they were making a ship to shore call on channel 28 and [telephone rings]
25 minutes 46 seconds
… yeah, the ‘Poole Fisher’ we were out there for about 20 hours or something like that in this pretty awful weather, not knowing where the ship had actually gone down because it had put out a ‘Mayday’ on channel 28 which is unusual. They were obviously making a ship to shore call on the ship to shore channel 28 and it happened so quickly that the guy just picked up the radio and put out the ‘Mayday’ on that channel rather than the distress channel 16. All he said was, “This is the Poole Fisher, we’re going down southwest of St Catherine’s.” That’s all and then it was over basically, and they all tried to abandon ship and obviously only two survived. That was a bad one, and it was confusing because there was another ship that had sunk just to the West that same week, called the ‘Aeolian Sky’ down off Portland, another big ship, and al the cargo from that and all the wreckage was floating around the Channel so we couldn’t identify which was from the ‘Poole Fisher’, whether we were in the right area for that or whether it was just debris from the ‘Aeolian Sky’. And moving on to later times, we did a lot of good rescues with the ‘Max Aitken III’ which came in 1987. That’s the Time Class Lifeboat when we moved on to fast boats because you’ve got to bear in mind that the ‘Jack Shayler’ and the ‘Jesse Lumb’ were only sort of eight knots or nine knots maximum, so you went everywhere at slow speed. With the new boat, the ‘Max Aitken III’ the Time Class we could go at 18 knots, so virtually doubled if not more the speed and the response time that we could get to the rescues and we did a lot of good jobs with that. One in particular I remember was the yacht called the ‘Jenny Wren’ which was 23 miles south west of the Nab Tower, way down in the Channel with a couple on board that were completely exhausted, man and wife, and they’d been trying to get back from France and the weather blew up and they were just stuck out there basically, and they were so immobilised when we got there, in fact I was asked to do a bit on a survival video called ‘Cold Water Casualty’ about that very rescue where these people just could not do anything at all and the weather was so rough that we had to go … basically tried to get alongside but then you’ve got to consider if you’re going to put a couple of people across to a boat, whether it’s safe for them, you know because if the boats are rolling together and the other yacht, which was completely out of control basically, it was just sailing with all its sails up because they were too exhausted to take the sails down. So, we transferred a couple of people over by helicopter because the helicopter had arrived, they slid down the sails and managed to get down on the boat and then get the sails down. The helicopter took the couple off because they were pretty exhausted and hypothermic and then we towed it back. So, that was quite a nice one. And I remain friends with that guy to this day and that was in July 1990 so that was quite a long time ago, 18 years ago. He lives over in Chichester. But there is just dozens and dozens, scores and scores, if not hundreds of rescues that you think about. We’d be here all week if we are going to talk about them all and at the end of the day, it’s all about the team work as well. I mean the teamwork on the Lifeboat, you’ve got 30 odd people. The Shore Crew, you can’t go out without someone knocking the pin out to launch you down the slipway and bring you back up at the end of the day so it’s important that there’s everyone on the boat basically. I always said that the man who knocks out the pin is as important as the guy who drives the boat. It’s just a team effort like cogs in a wheel. You take one cog out and it doesn’t work. So, yeah, a lot of good jobs over the years. I can think of quite a few. I remember one in particular. It was a German Coaster with three crew on board and they obviously set the auto-pilot to come down Channel. They were going to the West. They didn’t set it quite right and … completely unknown thing to do, or a stupid thing to do, three crew on board, and they set the auto-pilot and left the bridge unattended. Went down below to have a bit of refreshment, in inverted commas, a few beers or whatever, and they didn’t keep a lookout and the next thing the thing ran ashore at full speed at St Lawrence on the Isle of Wight and was stuck on the rocks. We went and towed it off, we managed to tow that thing off. It was about 1,000 tonne Coaster and we towed it off backwards and got that up into Sandown Bay. There’s quite a few memorable ones. I don’t want to bore you to tears forever (laughs).
31 minutes 6 seconds
Lisa : Can you tell me a bit about the technological changes in equipment and uniform in that time?
Martin : Good question! Technological changes a lot. From the days of the ‘Jesse Lumb’ where navigation wise you didn’t have anything. You had a chart and a compass and a pencil and a parallel rule and that was about it really. In the late ‘60’s, they put a radar on the ‘Jesse Lumb’ which was a big development because you could navigate by that to a certain extent but coming through to the ‘Jack Shayler and the Lees’ I remember doing … I ran a London Marathon and a couple of other things for raising equipment to update it because the RNLI were quite old fashioned in their acceptance of new equipment. They liked to keep to the old belts and braces methods until recent years basically, or recent decades so at that time when we wanted to put a plotter on there which is like a navigational plotter which, you know, tells you where you are basically by, in those days by beacons and nowadays by GPS by satellite, it was a bit of a struggle to get those things on board but we did get them in the end and through the ‘80’s and the ‘90’s, things improved and there was better equipment on board and nowadays I mean they’ve got everything on there. I mean they’ve got every navigational device, what they call a SIMS System which integrates everything. It’s really high tech now, so that 30-40 years, there’s a huge change in technology and also in the boats because if you remember the old boats were double enders, they were canoe shaped, sharp at both ends if you like. That got changed with the onset of the fast boats in the ‘80’s like the Time Class and others, and then they realised the potential and the value of being able to go a lot faster to get to people quicker on a rescue, so nowadays were up to three times the speed of the old ‘Jesse Lumb’ or the ‘Jack Shayler’. You’re talking 25 knots now where before it was only eight knots so a lot of changes in every way in that relatively short period of time.
Lisa : What about what you wore, your clothing for going out and your lifejackets or buoyancy aids?
Martin : That’s another very good question because if you look back to the old boys and I’ve got a tremendous respect for the old men and I consider myself really privileged that I knew a lot of those old guys … well, not a lot but certainly two or three were still alive as very old men when I was a boy, cleaning the brass on the Lifeboat. And they were my neighbours so inevitably they were local fishermen as well in their working life, so they knew all the old methods and they could tell me the story and that what probably inspired me to get involved with the Lifeboat ‘cos they told me about these stories where they’d go out and they’d put on an old oil skin and a cork lifejacket and row out to sea in a gale and be out there for hours and hours, soaking wet from the outset and rowing, physically rowing. Well, it sort of pales into insignificance … I’m not downplaying what modern Lifeboat crews do because you know you still get knocked around in bad seas and you get a bit wet but it’s completely different to actually going out there and physically rowing a boat. And I know what it’s like because we’ve got that old boat that they used to row in. The 1887 ‘Queen Victoria’ Lifeboat that we use for re-enactments and things and I’ve rowed it and I’ve rowed it round the Nab Tower, rowed it down the Great River Race in London and a few other places and it’s not an easy thing to row. You imagine doing that in a storm, in a cork lifejacket, a big bulky thing full of blocks of cork [telephone rings].
35 minutes 42 seconds
Martin : We were cork lifejackets weren’t we? And they went to sea in these old oilskins with these massive cork lifejackets which were incredibly uncomfortable things. I’ve got one, I’ve got an original one. There’s not many original ones around, and I value it tremendously because even the RNLI haven’t got original ones and I’ve actually rowed the boat with that on to see what it’s like and they were incredible people. You move forward, it went to Kapok lifejackets, again very bulky but more filled with a fabric rather than cork, again just ordinary oil skin coats. When I was a kid, or when I first went out on the boat, nobody wore lifejackets because they were so uncomfortable. They were so big, and the old boys just didn’t do it and they wore thigh boots, you know they had RNLI thigh boots. Well that’s the worst thing in the world you can wear, because if you go over the side, if they fill up, unless you can get them off, you’re going to go down pretty quick, so things moved on a lot. In the ‘70’s, we started getting a little bit more modern gear, but it was never really very waterproof, it wasn’t very effective. If you got doused, you got wet but it’s gradually improved over the years and nowadays, the lifejackets are very small, they’re quite compact and obviously the rule of the RNLI in the last 20-30 years is that you must wear a lifejacket on the boat and they wear helmets and all sorts of things now, whereas in the previous era that didn’t happen. You had basically oilskins and things in the ‘60’s, early ‘70’s and then it moved on to sort of light weight waterproofs and even then a bulky lifejacket which none of us really were that inclined to wear very often unless you needed to. It was the years of common-sense. I mean everybody knew that when you thought it was necessary to put a lifejacket on, you put it on but if you’re in the wheelhouse with a load of other people and you’re bumping into each other with these things on, it wasn’t practical. But everybody knew what they were doing and then you knew when it was time to put one on. Today, everybody has one on all the time because they’re compact, so it’s moved on a lot.
Lisa : What kind of training was there for the Lifeboat crew?
Martin : Training, in-house. In the ‘60’s, if you were considered the right material to go on the crew, you’d have probably been involved with the Marine environment round here. Some were … a lot were in those days, they were fishermen, worked on the sea whatever, you had a couple of other people that maybe didn’t, but they would learn the job as they went along. You didn’t actually go on a course to learn anything. They had courses like First Aid or in later years, you could opt and go on Radar Courses or Navigational Courses and then they started sending like a mobile unit round in the sort of ‘80’s, ‘90’s from then on where like in-house RNLI training, which is a good thing because the way it’s moved now is that most of the crews nowadays are not actually marine orientated. They’re not working … fishing has declined so you’ve got on this Station say you’ve probably got maybe one or two fishermen and that’s it and the rest of the people from all walk of life. They might be builders, they might be painters or whatever, so that’s when, in the modern era that in-house training became more essential and now it’s quite complicated. It’s what they call ‘Competence Based Training’ and everybody has to go through assessments to maintain their level in the crew and that’s the way it’s done. You know, bureaucracy and regulations have become forefront in all organisations like the RNLI. It’s quite hard for volunteers at times to give up not only the time to go out on the boats, but also the time to do the training, the assessments and everything else. Even when I was there, I wasn’t a paid Coxswain, I had my own business to run but I dedicated a lot of time to doing the job and there’s an awful lot of work involved in actually doing it. You give up a lot of hours as a volunteer. I was a volunteer Coxswain, retained if you like, so it’s quite demanding for the modern crews I think.
40 minutes 48 seconds
Lisa : How important is it do you think to know your area? To understand the seas that you’re going out into?
Martin : I think it’s very important because unless you know what you’re in store for … I mean you can’t expect a local builder who is building eight hours a day, to know the same as a fisherman would know about the area of the sea around us, but it’s a question of learning as you go along and the more they go out, the more they learn about the local area and that’s what exercises are all about. You know, the regular exercises go out and they test the crew in various ways to make sure they know what they’re doing, and they are well trained nowadays. They’re very well trained. Much more training than there used to be but as I said before, a lot of the previous crews were already seamen and they weren’t learning the job, they were already there. Having said that, a lot of them probably couldn’t navigate to save their lives, but they all knew what they were doing. So, it’s a bit of a Catch 22.
Lisa : You obviously know these waters very well.
Martin : Well, I like to think I do. I mean I’ve been on them and under them (laughs) for the last 50 years. Well more that 50 years because even as a kid I knew this area really well and I was always out on the Ledges and I had my own little dingy and when I wasn’t working with Peter Smith on his boats and the Lifeboat, I was out in my own boat you know from the age of well, 12 years old and angling, fishing, lobstering. Even taught people to row. People that come on holiday here, when I was 14, I was teaching people to row and had to row and skull and things like that, so yeah, I knew this area from very early on, but I’ve been lucky that I’ve worked all around the Island and out to the Channel Islands. Diving wise, I keep my boat in Yarmouth now. I kept it in Bembridge for 40 years, but I now keep it in Yarmouth because I work on the back of the Isle of Wight a lot, diving still. I’m still diving (laughs) and surveying. I was on the boat yesterday so you don’t only know, like the old fishermen in the old days would know the area here from say Sandown to Ryde, and across half way to the Mainland, but in modern times with faster boats you work a lot more area. I’ve worked a huge area out to mid-Channel, all round the back of the Isle of Wight, the Needles and round here, so yes, you do get to know it.
Lisa : How different are the waters that surround the Island?
Martin : How different are they? In what way … well, this end differs a lot from the other end of the Island because different tides obviously, different height of tide, the rock formations are different. You go round to say Chale Bay, I mean you look out the window here you’ll see that at low tide the rocks are half a mile, threequarters of a mile out, whereas if you go down to Chale Bay, you can step out off the beach and you’ll be over your depth in a very short time, in a few feet so fairly deep water up to the beach down there but then you go slightly West of that and you’ve got Allerfield Ledges which are the same as here. They extend a long way out, so it’s very, very different. There’s a lot of ledges off the back of the Island as well but when you get down off Ventnor, down that way, then the water is deeper. It differs a lot.
45 minutes
Lisa : Shall we get on to diving?
Martin : Yes.
Lisa : Can you tell me a bit about how you started as a diver?
Martin : How I started as a diver. Well, as I said to you before I spent a lot of time when I was a young lad, snorkelling off the Ledges, and you’ve either got that thing in you that finding something, it doesn’t matter whether you know you can pick up any item here like that [picks something up] it looks like a worthless piece of brass or a fishing weight but if you’re extracting that from the elements, there’s a special feeling to the fact that you’ve done it. It doesn’t necessarily have to have a great monetary value, it’s the fact that you’ve found something, and you wonder what that item can tell you. As a lad, I was always scrabbling around out there and I found all sorts of bits and pieces, nothing really valuable apart from a gold ring once I think, but as time went on, I knew that I loved it under water. I love the underwater world and I was totally at home with it. A lot of people I speak to even today say, “Oh, I tried that, but I didn’t like it, it scared me, it was claustrophobic” and everything but it’s like saying to me, “Go and drive a taxi.” I would hate to drive a taxi, it’s the last thing in the world I would want to do is drive around in traffic all day, so everybody’s different and that’s what makes the world go round. But, to answer the question, I moved on from snorkelling to thinking well, I’d like to get some breathing gear that you can stay down there and not have to hold your breath, so I bought some old gear when I was I suppose about 18 or something like that, 17 or 18, some old cylinders and a demand valve and I basically taught myself. Just gradually went down deeper and deeper and I was totally at home, you know, I had enough common sense to know the basic rules and you can read about what the basic rules were. Today that doesn’t happen. Everybody has to do a course and they progress through the qualifications, but in those days, I’m talking 1960’s now, when I came back from being at sea, I decided that wasn’t the industry for me, there was a seamen’s strike and I thought no, I don’t want to get involved in all this, so I came out of the seagoing career and thought well, what can I do now? I just happened to be in the right place. I did a couple of jobs and then I was asked if I would do navigational sexton plotting for a local diving company on pipelines across the Solent. They were doing all the remedial work on the cables and gas pipes off Gurnard over to Lepe, and they wanted someone who could dive and who could also use a sextant to plot horizontal angles ‘cos that’s how you did it in those days. You didn’t have GPS and things like that, so they said, “Oh well, we’ll see what you’re like on the diving” and I was fine on the diving ‘cos I had been doing quite a bit on my own, and I’m at home in the water, so they said, “Well, we’ll give you a job as a diver stroke hydrographer. You can do the plotting of the positions and be part of the diving team as well” and in those days, if they spotted that you weren’t any good at it, then you would be out. There’s a lot of people obviously wanted to get into the industry at that time, but IO stayed with that Company for a while and then I moved on to another Company in Cowes and that’s how you did it in those days. You didn’t go off and do a course and get a piece of paper and say, “Oh, I’ve got a piece of paper.” They wanted people with practical experience that they knew and could see you were OK in the water because the conditions in the Solent are pretty awful. Visibility no good, tides are strong, you’re working in black water all the time and a lot of traffic, you know Ferries and things going over the top. So, that’s how I progressed and then from that you progress up the ladder and go on to do other things. It’s like a natural progression. You go from commercial inshore diving, civil engineering diving, salvage work, and then I went to the Middle East on the oil fields out in the Persian Gulf so you get in to deeper work and then I was asked to go back to the people that I worked with before had gone to the North Sea on the deep work, and I was asked to … they asked me to come back to England and go on that. And then I went to the North Sea for quite a few years, doing the very deep diving, the saturation diving where you actually live in a chamber under a ship for a month (laughs), under pressure. It’s quite complicated to explain, but to save constant decompression from deep depths that used to happen, you could only do a short dive and then a long decompression, but they found that if you actually lived under pressure in a chamber which was pressured to the equivalent pressure … say you were working at 500 foot at the bottom of the North Sea, then they’d pressure the chamber to the same gas pressure and then you’d live in that environment and just commute back and forth in the diving bell under pressure which saved constant decompression. You could just do the decompression right at the end of the one month. It’s quite complicated to explain, but it meant that your decompression would be the same after a month as it would be after being down there for a few hours because your body can only absorb so much gas so you just stay under pressure, the decompression at the end will be the same. It was about 100 foot per day. If you were 500 foot, it would take five days at the end of the month to decompress you back to the surface. It’s quite complex but it was good. I mean there were a lot of deaths in the early days because as with the Lifeboat, the technology was very embryonic in those days, so technology moved on and the understanding of deep diving became better and there were a lot less deaths as you progressed towards the ‘80’s, but I lost a few friends in the ‘70’s up there because there were a lot of accidents and it was quite common. You never hear it nowadays and it’s very, very safe nowadays. I always had a love for shipwreck diving right from the start and it never went away basically, so I used all my time off, fortunately in the North Sea I ended up on a month on, month off basis which is great ‘cos you’re paid 12 months a year but you only work six basically, so I could then come back and go out and spend as much time as I wanted diving on shipwrecks. It’s great, it’s entering the time capsule. You go down there, you might only have a water column of 50 feet but you’re separating a history down there that might go back hundreds of years. It’s only 50 feet away but it’s underwater, but if you go down there, you enter that time capsule and every piece you pick up, you know, you pick up a piece like that. That’s 1627, that wreck went down, so I was the first person to touch that coin since 1627.Now you wonder who touched that it last? Who were they, where were they going, what was there name? And then you go into the research to find all that out. You’ll never find out who was the person who held it, but every item tells a story and you’ve got to be passionate about it. I am, I still am. I’ve never had gold fever. I’ve found a lot of gold and silver in my time. I’ve been really lucky because I’ve done 50 years of it. Inevitably by the process of elimination, you’re going to find a lot of stuff, but I’m not driven by gold or … it’s just the pure history of things. Things that appeal to me, most people want to find gold coins and gold bars and things. To me, I’d rather find something that’s got an intrinsic value, it might be a little bit whacky or something like those little cannons in there that I’ll show you in a minute, little tiny cannons. And to give an example, they came from off the back of the Isle of Wight and it was a wreck of about 17 … the first decade of the 1700’s and it was a wooden wreck so none of the structure left at all, nothing. It’s all just bits buried under the shingle and I gradually dug up these little cannons here, I’ll pull one out to show you, which someone on board had actually made a model of the ship that they were on so you can imagine this old sailing ship, a square rigger like Victory style thing and someone on board had made a model and made all these little guns by hand, because they’re not cast because if they were cast, they would have trunnions cast in to this, so these were turned up on probably a little hand lathe by someone in 1710 or whatever but they are all to the exact scale of the actual ship’s guns and the ship they were on, so that to me, I found all of these over the space of about 20 years, digging up the seabed and they’re all different sizes and they’re all different scales to the same ones on the boat so who made them? I’d love to know who made them. What was his name? Fantastic, and they’ve got little touch holes and everything. So, every item tells a story and I love things like that. A little bit whacky I know but its just different. Coinage is nice to find them and if you look at this and if you imagine … I like these coins. These aren’t particularly … well, they’re valuable but not hugely valuable like the gold ones but you imagine having a pocket full of those (laughs). You’d feel rich wouldn’t you, you’d also feel lopsided if you had them all on one side. And pieces of eight, you know the classic pieces of eight. They were all different, everyone was different because they were just cut out of bits of silver and made to the actual correct weight. But coinage went from one person to another, and to me that is a little bit impersonal. I like the personal items that mean more. I actually used to wear a piece of eight round my neck when I was in my youth and after I’d found my first one, and that’s the very one. In about 1973 or four or probably a bit later than that, when the ‘medallion man’ thing came in then I ripped it off and never wore it again (laughs) but that was my piece of eight that I used to wear around my neck for luck and that’s a genuine Spanish piece of eight like the pirate money, and that was currency all over the world. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Look at that one, haven’t polished that one up yet but it will be the same weight as the other one but a different shape. They just hacked it off a lump of silver. And these coins, these are really early. This is all local stuff, Isle of Wight stuff.
57 minutes 11 seconds
Lisa : About how many wrecks do you think we have around the Island?
Martin : Oh, over 2000 really.
Lisa : And how many have you dived on?
Martin : Ha ha, that’s a common question. I’ve never counted them up, but the estimate that I’ve come up with is probably around 700 I think, a lot, because I’ve been doing it for 50 years so I’ve dived a lot of wrecks and I’ve found a lot of uncharted wrecks that have never been found before which is always a thrill because you never know what you’re going to find. It’s a very complicated procedure because obviously everything you find, I’m really strict on that, is that you declare everything because obviously me having my own Museum, anything I put in there, the whole point of it is for other people to see it. If I wanted to live a lovely life I would sell the lot and go and live in the Bahamas and drinking large cocktails, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about the monetary value, it’s the fact that it’s out local heritage and people should be able to see it and understand it and be educated by it. Things like this, the medieval coins, these are 700 years old, these ones, and yet that’s just as it came up. You know, it’s not been cleaned that coin, that’s the weird thing about gold is that it comes up as it as it went down apart from … you might get a tiny little bit of blue coral growth on there in the right waters but things like that, I always try and find the story behind it and that’s more important to me than anything because the item without the story and the background and the provenance is not the same as … you know it’s just an item, but if you’ve got the story behind it … I’ve never found out what that wreck is.
Lisa : That was my next question actually. What kind of evidence do you need to tell you the name of a wreck?
Martin : Well, you always look for clues obviously, there is always going to be a clue about the period of the stuff you find. I mean that one, the only reason I can’t find that is because there is no record of any … if you go back before the 1600’s, theirs is very little information about any local wrecks. There’s a few but that obviously came in the middle of the night, there’s a wreck with Spanish and Portuguese coins on there. I found a ring on there and a few other bits but they didn’t give me … all I know is that it’s probably a European trading vessel because it had a mixture of currencies on there of different nationality but it didn’t give me a clue that I could actually follow up to find out what the wreck was ‘cos there’s nothing there apart from a few coins and a few items and that’s it, which is frustrating for me because nearly always I will identify something which will then lead me on to be able to work out what that wreck was and when it went in there. But that’s a frustrating one, I’m still working on that one. But, coming back to the declaration thing, you have to declare everything because it’s the way to record it in one way, but also it’s a way to legalise it in another. Everything I’ve got in the Museum has gone through the system. I’ve got files and files and files of paperwork declarations. They probably curse me over at the Receiver of Wrecks because I even declare, you know, copper nails and things that are worthless because if you retrieve them, theoretically you should declare them. It’s a long process, but everything has a story. This has got a great story. This was off … I was just diving … I tend to … like any job you get a nose for where is the right place to look and sometimes I dive on areas of barren seabed where there’s no sign of any shipwreck and just literally do it systematically with a metal detector, and I was diving one day on a flat piece of seabed with a few boulders and a lot of gravel and I dug that up, I dig one of those up and I found quite a few of them in the ensuing days but I couldn’t work out why they were there because there was no wreck there. When I got them home, I looked carefully at the … and if you look on that look you will see right on the base there will be a little … the base of the head. Pretty certain, yeah, I’m certain its on there. If you look on that, on the base on the neck you’ll see a little initial, an ‘S’ and that gave me a clue about the fact that they are British sovereigns, but they are minted in Australia, so they were Australian British sovereigns. You see that little ‘S’? So I thought well, what’s got an Australian connection with this area and there was a wreck a few hundred yards away that had gone in 1879 and beaten to pieces on the rocks and when I looked further into the story of it, and the Board of Trade enquiry about the loss and they always have an enquiry, I dug up that when the waves were sweeping this … it was literally being swept, it was onshore, on the rocks and the waves were beating on and they had bad weather, the crew were trying to get off and they were trying to get a line ashore and the locals were trying to help them, and the Carpenter who was on the deck with the young Cabin Boy called Willie Butt, and he was only 14, he said, “Willie, go down below and get my bag, it’s got my money in it” so Willie went down below and retrieved the Carpenter’s bag because the Carpenter didn’t want to go down and get it himself, obviously, and the Cabin Boy came up and on deck, a big wave came along, swept him off the ship clutching this bag, and he got swept away from the ship, and that’s what that money is. That’s the money, ‘cos it can’t be anything else ‘cos they’re Australian mint mark and that’s the only Australian ship that came in and it’s the only story that will fit. So, what you’re holding is a bit of history there, a bit of tragic history because the boy shouldn’t have died really, if he hadn’t been sent down below, it wouldn’t have happened. So, everything has a story, and I still love it now. I still love going out there and finding things. It’s Isle of Wight history, it means a lot because at the end of the day I’ve got a moral obligation to record it all, which I do, and also write it up which I will do when (laughs) … I’m starting to try and write the big diving book now and include everything into a proper publication because that keeps it alive. If I go and fall of a cliff tomorrow, then it’s gone. It’s only in here, a lot of it. I mean I’ve got masses and masses of files down below but a lot of the information about … I mean obviously I write everything down, but you’ve still got to take it from here to something which will stay alive as a historical record and it’s important to me. That’s why I did the book on the Lifeboat.
65 minutes 7 seconds
Lisa : What’s the oldest wreck you’ve worked on around the Island?
Martin : The oldest thing I’ve found is probably pre BC, you know pottery, but the oldest definite coin I’ve found was a Constantias first round gold aureus which is lovely and it’s from 294 to 302 AD and as you know the Romans came in AD 43 didn’t they I think, so it’s not off a wreck so I got excited when I found it. It was probably only 300 yards offshore, off the back of the Island and I thought, oh, a Roman wreck. I’d never found a Roman wreck, I’d like to find a Roman wreck but it wasn’t a wreck, it was down to coastal erosion because if you can imagine in Roman times, the land at the back of the Island which is all falling in the sea as we all know, would have been another half a mile further off. If you look at Atherfield, Blackgang area, that land was way, way off in those times, so someone lost that on the land and it became offshore in the sea. I found what we think was a Viking silver ingot. It’s the only other examples of that are in Viking hoards. These coins are from 1300-1400 and I found a gold seal ring, you know with the Coat of Arms on, two actually. One was around 1300 -1400 and the other one 1600 and the second one I managed to track down the family that the crest … I wrote to the College of Arms, there’s a lot of writing involved in finding out things. Google now is wonderful for finding stuff out because you don’t have to write to a Library somewhere now, you can actually Google the things and get a lot of information, but I wrote to the College od Arms and they said, “Yes, we’ve got that crest, that Coat of Arms and it’s from a family in Cornwall” so I wrote to the local family history society in that area of Cornwall and they came up with the family and in that family there was the guy of exactly the same period with the same initials as were on the inside of the ring, so that was result. I’m still trying to find out about the earlier one which is a prayer ring with Portuguese writing on but I’m still working on that. Had some response a few days ago but it takes years sometimes to find the right source of information. But it’s fascinating you know, when you think every one of those items if you look at it and think ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could actually talk and tell me the story about what happened on the night the ship wrecked and what happened when the minted that coin and who was the minting and the Assayer who has saved the gold’ and all that. It could tell you so much, so much.
Lisa : What about more modern wrecks, Wartime wrecks for example?
Martin : Yes, 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 tok of their shoes and did the death dance on the deck as it went under. True story, and I’m actually going to South Africa end of next week and I’ll be down there … I don’t know if you remember, last year there was a big centenary thing for the ‘Mendi’ ‘cos it’s 100 years, and Princess Anne was at the Hollybrook Cemetery. We did all these events at Portsmouth. The South Africans brought up a South African frigate with some of the relatives, military bands and everything and there was big old events in Portsmouth and Southampton but I’m going down to South Africa next week and I’m going to the townships and I’m going to meet some more of the families. I’ve met some of them already in Soweto, so that’s bringing it alive as well. So that’s one notable wreck. The other notable one for me was HMS Swordfish, which I found in 1983 which was supposed to be 250 miles away. Lost on 1940, and everybody thought it had been depth charged off the West coast of France because that’s where it was going. It was going down on patrol there to relieve another submarine called the ‘Usk’ and they maintained radio silence so they just had a predetermined time to relieve the other submarine down 250 miles to the West and the other submarine would come back, but unbeknown to anybody, including me because I didn’t know it was there, it came out of Gosport on the 7th November 1940, got off St Catherine’s, hit a mine and sank and killed all the crew, and it sat there until 1983 when I discovered it by accident, so that was a poignant one as well. Again, a lot of human element to that ‘cos I met a lot of relatives and that brings it alive really. Modern wrecks, lots of modern wrecks, steamships, from the 1st World War I found quite a few uncharted ones, off here, down off St Catherine’s, off the Needles, all over. We could talk forever about those. A lot of interesting ones though, but you’ve been in the Museum so you can see the sort of material that’s in there. A lot of steamship stuff.
73 minutes 6 seconds
Lisa : Can I ask you about the setting up of the Museum because the first Museum was in Bembridge, is that right?
Martin : Yes.
Lisa : So when did you decide that you wanted to put the objects that you’d found into a Museum?
Martin : It’s a good question and a lot of people ask me that and what happened was when I lived … I’ve lived in this house for 35 years but my previous house was in the village and I lived in a semi-detached house up in the centre of the village there and I had all this stuff that I was finding on wrecks, ‘cos I was finding a lot of things in the ‘70’s and had all this brass stuff everywhere and people said to me, “Crikey, you can hardly get in the place because it is so full of stuff” and I said, “Yes, I’m desperate to find somewhere to set up a little Museum to put it all in so that it can be on display rather than only the people that come to the house see it.” I wanted people to be able to see it and see all the stories behind it, so we looked around and eventually the local Bakery that had shut down some time before and become derelict, I actually worked there as a Baker’s Boy, I had a Saturday job when I was at school and delivered the bread and made it at 4 o’clock in the morning and there was a lovely smell. I’ll never forget that smell. You could always smell it as you came into Bembridge, just up over the hill as you come into the village. And it was like a building with a shop and a house all in one, and it was derelict, and a Company had bought it off the Baker, Mr Chick, and they were going to make a Laundrette out of it and they went broke, so I thought well, that looks pretty good. This was in 1977, and we bought it and turned it into a Museum and opened in June ’78. In comparison to what there is now , it’s only sort of fairly minimal. A few ship models and old diving equipment, wreck stuff that I had, all the brass work and everything like that but it just went from there really and then we were in Bembridge for 28 years and then outgrew the premises because not only was the parking no good outside, it got worse and worse and worse so the visitors couldn’t park anywhere so I started looking around. I wanted to go to Blackgang because that’s relevant to a lot of the stuff that I found is from that area, but that couldn’t be done at the time and we ended up moving to Arreton Barns in 2005 we started moving everything there and then opened in July 2006. And that’s where it’s been ever since. I could still do with somewhere twice as big because we had another barn at the back at Arreton Barns, you know, we turned it in to a display area, but unfortunately we couldn’t keep that barn, so we’ve now got just the main stone barn there and the other complex there. But we could do with somewhere twice as big, because I’ve still got lots of stuff in storage and that’s not what it’s about to me. What I want is for the public to see it, that’s the whole point. I don’t want it to be in store. I mean it’s like the Isle of Wight Council collection, I believe a lot of that’s in store as well, and it’s only down to space limitations. I’d love to have everything on display. You can see in the house here I’ve got very little. There’s a few bits and pieces but nearly everything goes to the Museum and that’s the way I feel it should be. I mean I could cover this … these walls with bits and pieces but it’s no good when people don’t come here and see it, they need to be somewhere where it can be seen. So that’s where we’ve been. It’s our 40th anniversary this year since opening and hopefully it will go on for another 40 years (laughs). I won’t be here to see it (laughs), you never know, could live to … you never know, it’s possible.
Lisa : In the Museum collection then, are there things that other people have given you or is it mainly just things that you’ve recovered yourself?
Martin : 95% is what I’ve recovered myself from shipwrecks and also what I’ve acquired myself over the years, be it ship models or marine antiques of some sort that are in character with the Museum. There’s a few bits and pieces that people have loaned or donated, like some of the ship models, but nearly all the shipwreck stuff is stuff that I’ve found myself.
Lisa : And you’re still diving now?
Martin : Yes, I still consider it my daytime job.
Lisa : And stiff finding interesting things?
Martin : Yes, I mean things have moved on. The electronics nowadays are so good. I mean I was quite forward thinking in the 1970’s when I invested in what they call a magnetometer, which is a proton magnetometer which you tow behind the boat and detect any metal on the seabed. Ferrous metal, magnetic metal, and that’s how I found some of the uncharted shipwrecks because the area had never been properly surveyed by the Hydrographic or the Navy in that time. It has now, it’s moved on a bit and as sonar became more advanced, I got a sonar as well, but when I look back on the sonars that I had then and what I’ve got now, I mean I can go on my boat now and go round and see a piece of rope on the seabed on the sonar, it’s that good. So, you can find a lot of stuff. I spend a lot of time tracking around, lining up targets to dive on. I’ve found lots of stuff this year. You find all sorts of things like a rudder off a ship that’s been wrecked further in but it knocked it’s rudder off on the way in, 300 yards out, and individual items you find easy but it’s getting the conditions for the diving because the water is not that clear around the Isle of Wight as you know, so the diving is always a backlog because you never catch up with all the contacts you found with the surveying. Yeah, I still do it and still my love to do it and I will be doing it until I physically can’t do it anymore, but I’m pretty fit so I can go on for a few years at least I would think. The important thing is that I enjoy it and its history isn’t it? You know, touching history. See, even that plate there look that plate is off a ship called the ‘Carn Brea Castle’ and that’s down off Mottistone. That plate was recovered at the time of when the ship was wrecked. Obviously one of the fishermen purloined that (laughs) at the time off the wreck in 1829 and it went through families of local fishermen and I knew the old lady whose grandfather had it, whatever, and I said to her, “I’d love to have that in the Museum because it’s a very significant wreck.” It was an East India wreck and it had wrecked off Brighstone and Mottistone in 1829. But it was the very first wreck that was ever used with the copper diving helmet so it’s significant. The Deane brothers who invented that old helmet. It’s the first wreck they ever worked on and it’s off the Isle of Wight so it’s historically important.
81 minutes 6 seconds
Lisa : Does the environment where you dive, dictate what you find in terms of different materials that survive?
Martin : It does, very much so. I mean wood doesn’t survive very well at all unless it’s really been buried in the seabed. I found quite a lot of wooden … the remains of three wooden wrecks last year and one in particular where it only dates back to the first part of the nineteen hundreds, there is quite a lot of timber left on that and I get excited about timber because you can learn a lot by the structure of a ship by looking at the woodwork that remains. Around here for instance, there’s wrecks round here where the timber doesn’t survive at all, or down off Chale, or Blackgang. You don’t see any timber remains down there at all. The nature of the seabed, and also now with all the dredging that’s been taking place at Portsmouth and Southampton, they’ve put about 10 million tonnes of sludge out off the Nab Tower which a lot of that is transient and it’s migrated down to round the back of the Island and created this sort of inch and half layer of sludge which is killed a lot of the eco system so you don’t see a lot of the fish that we used to see there. It’s just this layer of slime on the bottom. That doesn’t help at all, but nearly all the stuff that I ever find is buried. You see very little exposed on the seabed because the old wrecks just disintegrate and the woodwork rots away and then everything else the shingle covers up and you don’t see it, so you have to do everything by detection equipment. That’s why it’s not an easy thing to do and that’s why a lot of people aren’t doing it. If it was easy, everybody would be out there doing it. You have to be able to speculate and that was the advantage when I was working in the North Sea, when I was earning my wages in the North Sea and then coming back on leave, and having equal time leave, that I could not worry about having to earn a living in that one month off because I was being paid for the North Sea, so I could go out there and speculate time. You might have to speculate six months and find nothing and not many people are prepared to do that, whereas I’m still happy to do it (laughs).
Lisa : So can you just tell me about the process of excavating the objects? How do you do that?
Martin : Well, today, regulations have sort of prevented those methods continuing because what I always used to do is use like a big underwater vacuum cleaner. It’s like a pipe that you inject air into, and the air will always rush to the surface, obviously it bubbles, and create a vacuum in the tube so we would gently be able to dig holes with that. We had another device called a prop wash which is built on to the boat which redirects the … I had water jets on my last boat, very powerful water jets so it would redirect the jet steam downwards. It’s like a big bend and it would then push away the sand so you could dig like a 10-foot diameter hole gently, or quickly whichever way, but if you were working on archaeological stuff, you take away the very deep stuff and then when you get down near the bedrock, then you just sift it. So, you would just be able to see everything and not move it around. So, there are several ways of doing it. We had all the kit to do that but nowadays, all the regulations now prevent you from using air lifts and things and it’s gone ridiculous really. I’m glad I was doing it when I was doing it and well, I still do it but I do it on a lesser scale now where if I’m digging, I did by hand (laughs) and if you’ve got to did a deeper hole then you have to find a different way of doing it. But that’s pedantic bureaucracy for you. They don’t know what they’re talking about because the sad thing is, if you use a air lift and dig a hole say three feet deep, if the wind blows south westerly tomorrow, that will be filled in again and in my exposed, it might take away another four feet of sand just in one gale, so it’s ridiculous really. Legislation has gone crazy really, but mainly most of the time I systematically grid out a site and then I gently … if it’s within that much I can gently use my little underwater scooter, turn it round and it will just gently blow away the sand. There’re all sorts of ways of doing it.
86 minutes 3 seconds
Lisa : Some wreck sites are protected aren’t they?
Martin : Yes.
Lisa : At what point is that decided that that is a protected wreck site?
Martin : If it’s archeologically important, or at threat. I mean like the ‘Mendi’ that’s a classic one. When I found out the story of the ‘Mendi’ which is the one with 646 South African troops, when I unravelled the story, I tried to buy the wreck. I’ve bought quite a few wrecks. You could buy the wrecks in those days. Modern wrecks, not old wrecks, but anything that was within the insurance age like wartime, 1st World War, 2nd World War you tracked down the insurers and say, “I’d like to buy the rights of this wreck” and they’d say, “Oh yeah fine, give us £200 or whatever and it’s yours” so I bought quite a few. So, I tried to buy the ‘Mendi’ to afford it that protection because it was pre-1986 when the Military Remains Act came in which protects even Merchant ships. War Graves are War graves, you know. Royal Navy ships like the ‘Swordfish’ and the ‘Acheron’, that’s another one I found, a big destroyer with loss of life. If it’s had loss of life then it’s automatically considered a War Grave in the Royal Navy, but the Merchant Navy ships didn’t have that same protection, so I tried to buy the ‘Mendi’ to afford it that protection. It’s nowadays English Heritage, they’ve got ways and means of protecting wrecks that you mentioned like if they are historically important or archeologically important, you can get a Protection Order on them, but that now extends to all the wrecks. I bought a German submarine off there which I agreed to have protected because the hoards, you know the sport divers were getting out there and ripping everything off it , which they did with the ‘Mendi’ as well. Unfortunately I never tracked down the insurance people on the ‘Mendi’ so I couldn’t do anything about it but when the Military Remains Act came in in 1986, it should have stopped people but it didn’t so people were, you know, going out there after I’d left … when I discovered the story I left the wreck alone. Now there was a lot of lovely stuff on there that I could have taken off quite legally, but I didn’t want to do it because it’s almost like a poignant War Grave to me. Other people didn’t have that feeling and so a lot of wrecks do get protected, quite rightfully so, to stop people going there and it’s a hard one. You can’t police it really, you can police it to a certain extent, people know they will be prosecuted. There’s been a few prosecutions in recent years where people that haven’t declared stuff have been prosecuted and they’ve been fined very heavily. It’s like the ‘Mendi’ bell, for instance. The ‘Mendi’ bell was taken off after I’d found the wreck, so it was several years after. I didn’t go and look for the bell, and it was hidden away in Dorset by the recreational diver that found it and he didn’t declare it so no one could see it. You know, the significant bell like that and it’s only just now that Steve Humphrey, the ‘South Today’ reporter who chased the story for years, he was just interested … and the guy eventually got to his ‘80’s, the guy that had found it and sent Steve Humphries a message saying ‘if you’re at the gates of Swanage Pier at seven o’clock on Friday morning, then you’ll find the bell but I’ve got to remain anonymous’ so even though we know vaguely who is, that had it, he would have been prosecuted for taking it and not declaring it but at least it’s back in the public domain now. Sadly, well not sadly, hopefully it will go on proper display in South Africa. Theresa May has given it to the President. We had it in the Museum for a couple of weeks on loan with our ‘Mendi’ stuff and we were hoping that it would come to us but I don’t feel bad about it going to South Africa as long as it’s put on display in a proper place there. The Government down there aren’t the most reliable (laughs). I’ve been emailing the President’s Office in the last three weeks saying, ‘please will you tell me where it is ‘cos I want to come and see it on display when I’m down there in the next couple of weeks.’ Deathly silence (laughs). Hopefully I’m wrong.
90 minutes 41 seconds
Lisa : Are there places around the Island where there are more ship wrecks than others?
Martin : Yes. Someone rightfully said once, where there’s a reef there’s a wreck. If you look at Bembridge Ledge, not so much Bembridge Ledge because we’re sort of within the shelter, a certain amount of shelter, the inside of the Island, whereas on the back of the Island, with the prevailing winds as they were, coming from the south west, if you draw a straight line out from south west of say the back of the Island, Atherfield Ledges, the next thing is South America so you’ve got this huge amount of weather pushing up. Whenever there’s a gale from the west or south west, and the sailing ships obviously got driven in. They can’t just use an engine and drive in a straight line like ships of today, so if they couldn’t get away from the land, they were pushed in by what they call leeway and they would end up on the rocks so if you look at that whole stretch from St Catherine’s to the Needles, there’s probably 1000m wrecks down there from the old era so whatever sou-west is most likely to get a huge amount of wrecks. There’re wrecks everywhere but that’s where you’ll find most. You’re thinking now (laughs).
Lisa : Maybe I’m allowing you to think (laughs).
Martin : Well, what else do you want to talk about?
Lisa : I’m just looking at my list of questions.
Martin : Historically, the Isle of Wight waters are very important because just here, if we could have a time clock now and turn back 200 years, this would be full of sailing ships anchored here, waiting for the right wind ‘cos it’s not like the ships here can just pull their anchor up, fire the engine up, go where they like but if the wind was westerly in the old days, then all these ships would be here waiting for that wind to die down so they could work their way down Channel because they can’t sail into the wind. They can only sail across it and ships like the ‘Victory’ like the square-rigger ones, they would be lucky if they could sail at right angles so if they tried to sail off down to the west and the wind was from the west, they wouldn’t get anywhere. They would just be going up and down tacking that way and tacking that way but not actually making any progress into the wind. You know, the Clipper ships were a little bit better and the fore and aft rigged ships could point a little bit closer to the wind and they made some progress, but this would be full of ships. Even inside here, straight off here there’s the ‘Invincible’ wreck, the 1758 wreck, a very important wooden ship of that time, just of here there’s HMS Velox, 1915 that got mined off here in 1915, the ‘Empress Queen’ on the Ledge here, 1916, you could just rattle off loads and loads of names of wrecks but this was the main anchorage for the big square riggers in the old days because that’s where they would either go into Portsmouth if they were Naval ships, or just wait for the wind to be in the right direction to be able to get off somewhere else.
Lisa : You can just imagine them sort of rising from the ashes. Be full wouldn’t it?
Martin : Yes. Oh, I’d love to have a time machine. I would love it. I love it to even see the square riggers going past. In fact, it’s one of the things on my bucket list that I promised myself to do is go and do a trip on one of those classic old square riggers and hopefully we will do it. Well, we will do it. There’s no such word as can’t (laughs).
Lisa : Is there anything you’d really like to find that you haven’t yet in your career?
Martin : Um, what would I like to find? Well, it’s strange you know because I’m a great believer in this sort of visualisation thing. I’d found a lot of Spanish coins and coins from the 16, 17, 18 hundreds and I remember thinking once that I’d love to find some stuff from the old medieval writing man and lo and behold within weeks I’d found al these ones, which were medieval, so the older stuff I would like to find. I’d like to find some Roman stuff, anything that’s even older. I’d like to also do some of the really deep sea stuff, ‘cos we’ve got these little underwater cameras, you know, remote control ones and things, but some of the deeper wrecks, there’s been so many of the main targets found since the development of diving gear and electronic gear that a lot of the really deep wrecks now are the only ones that are significant to find, but there are … the one I really wanted to find was the HMS Victory 1744, which I looked for, for a long time on the Channel Islands. It got wrecked on the Channel Islands in 1744, it was built in 1737 so it’s the one before the Victory in Portsmouth, but that got found by accident and sadly the bureaucracy has prevented any salvage where it’s been found 10 years ago now by a Company called Odyssey and they’ve bee prevented by bureaucracy from doing the recovery operation. As a result of that, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish trawlers have been beating the site to death trying to drag stuff up. They know where it is because with this AIS, this Automatic Identification System, every ship … you could now look at that ship online, just go on AIS and it would tell you exactly where that ship is, exactly where it’s anchored. And the same as all the ships going up and down the Channel so when this Company found the Victory, people could see where it was and the fishing purchase. Dutch divers have been there trying to steal the bronze cannons and that was the one I really wanted to find but as I say, it was found by accident. But anything really, so long as it’s got history attached to it. Porcelain I love, I mean I love this stuff. Chinese porcelain like that one. This is stuff that we found in the Philippines. I worked in the Philippines, in the Far East a lot and we were looking for porcelain wrecks and Manilla galleons. There’s one porcelain wreck in English waters that I’d like to find, and I will keep looking for it because we’ve got all the kit to do it. It’s just getting the weather to actually get out there and physically do it. So, whatever, I’d be happy, whatever period as long as it’s got a story behind it.
Lisa : Thank you.
Martin : That it? Good.
Interview ends
98 minutes 33 seconds
Transcribed February 2019
Chris Litton