Henry Wrigley on Harbours

I had another very interesting thing. Supervising and Piloting the Medway Queen out of this Harbour.

Now, when I took the Salvage Team up there from London, they were wonderful people. Good Mariners and pretty tough and I took them up there and they were a bit bewildered ‘cos I insisted the men put a very large heavy hammer called a maul, into the workboat when I took Salvage Team to see this vessel which was in a sort of a Mill Pond at Binfield where the Ryde is at this moment and the first thing I did, I took this heavy hammer and swung it and swung it on the side of the ship and it went straight through.

So, I said, “OK, you’re going to salvage this ship” and the way it is going to be done it was fascinating, rather like getting the ‘Great Britain’ from the Falklands into Bristol, a large flat topped pontoon full of sections called poterdams, which you take to a site at least six metres preferably eight, depth of water, and you sink it and you float the ship over on the top, pump it out and hey presto, the ship is sitting on the flat pontoon and you tow it off to Chatham.

That’s the simple bit in description.

However, I turned round to these Salvage people and said, “Now, this does not move until you can guarantee it can stay afloat for 24 hours. I think I’ll change that to 48 hours” because if that sank in the fairway, it would have been our responsibility to make sure that fairway was cleared for the movement of shipping, and if it wasn’t clear, we could be sued what they call demurrage, which is the ship unable to conduct it’s business and the loss of business could be held responsible to the Harbour Authority and the poor old Harbour Master, so there’s a lot of legal aspects in the job.