Dan Snow's History Hit - Britain's Maritime History

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Is it even possible to imagine what Britain would have been without seafaring? Braving the waters beyond our harbours can be traced back eight and a half thousand years - the earliest boats made crossings as soon as Britain broke away from the continent. You can trace the ages of Britain through the vessels that have been launched to and from her shores - Roman warships, Viking longships, William the Conqueror's flagship Mora and many more besides.In this episode recorded at the 2022 Chalke Valley history festival, conservationist and author of 'The Ship Asunder', Tom Nancollas joins Dan to talk about Britain's seafaring history through three aspects of three vessels: the mast of the steamship SS Great Eastern designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the hull of the Rosebud- a Cornwall-based fishing boat at the centre of the 1930s Newlyn villagers protest to save their condemned properties, and the figurehead of the Rosa Tacchini wrecked on the Isles of Scilly.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. As you all know, Britain is the greatest maritime nation on planet Earth. About this, there can be no debate. And it's also impossible to deny that I love talking about that history on this little podcast of mine. And today we're going to take a luxuriant cruise through British maritime history. Because I've got Tom Nankalas on the podcast. He's a building conservationist, he's a writer, he is of Cornish ancestry, and he's written a beautiful book that attracted a lot of attention here a year or two ago called The Ship Asunder. He looked at 11 relics that together tell the story of Britain and the sea. We met at the Chalk Valley History Festival last year, so you can hear this alive

conversation. Some of you were there in the flesh, listening to this wonderful scholar talking about some pieces of ships, these tiny fragments that act as a lens and allow us to see the wider ship and the piece of history they represent. From objects carried by the sailors, to pieces of mast, to bits of ships' hulls incorporated in other buildings. These are the traces that our maritime history has left behind. And me and Tom, we investigate those traces. We're on the case. You're going to love it. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Thank you. Tom, do you write as a historian, a lover of the sea, with experience of it? Are you a sailor yourself? No, actually, Dan, I ride as a total

landlubber. That's the perspective I wanted to bring because no one in Britain is very far from the sea. Look at your family histories. I myself have a couple of seafarers. Most people do, really. So I wanted to celebrate the romance that we all feel about the glorious past that you mentioned just there. And some identifying episodes as well, of course. But what is interesting for me, and you bring this out in your book, is how central the sea was in our public life until very recently. You've got the Liverpool-Manchester Railway in 1830, and that's really when the rot sets in. And then with, obviously, modern communications, roads, container ports, and ships requiring less crew, we have lost

that connection to the sea in some ways, haven't we? A lot of authors like to talk about this idea of sea blindness, the idea that we see it less, even though it's there all the time. But actually, in putting this book together, I became convinced that that wasn't as much the case as is often said. I think you look at the marinas of Britain and they're full of, you know, yachts, pleasure craft, other things. People used to see for fun, for pleasure and leisure in huge quantities. And I think we have a kind of latent seafaring potential still there today. A new age of sail, maybe, especially if you look at the cargo ships now, like New Dawn sailors that are carrying imperishable goods from the South Americas and the like. People are thinking, well, actually, these huge container ships with all of the fuel they burn, are they

the right thing to be doing now? So a new age of sail, possibly. Who knows? That's true. That's true. There are millions of boat owners or watercraft owners in the UK, whether it's a paddleboard right up to a big yacht. What's really interesting about this book is you go around the country looking for those echoes of our maritime past, and you decided to do that through, well, really fragments of ships that have been incorporated into our terrestrial life. Well, totally, Dan. Yeah. So the question I set myself was what has become of the great ships of the past? You know, ships were the actors, the protagonists of human history until very recently, really, as well as the people, the ships that carried them to these places and bore them on their way with their names, with their glorious

stories behind them. Think of Bellerophon, you know, the ship on which Napoleon surrendered, which bore Nelson's body back to Britain. You know, what has become of that vessel? And the easy answer, the obvious answer is that it's disappeared. It's not strictly true, actually. And the fates of many ships are what I try and bring out in the book. It's more complex than it first appears. Bellerophon, for instance, broken up in Devonport in the 1830s. Parts of her found her way into a house built by the ship's surgeon, who bought some of her timbers long after she was broken up and why he would want to live surrounded by the timbers of the ship he sawed off legs and arms and stuff in it's a question which fascinated me i love that that ship was known as the billy ruffian by uh by nelson's men and so were you surprised when you

started looking for these things how did you come across all these fragments of some of the great ships in our history that are incorporated into houses and buildings and churches around the uk how did you where do you start looking for those things well you start with myths and start with local places and above all this is a book about uh the places all around us that have the most surprising maritime connections it's about the oceans under your feet really which exist even quite far inland there's a whole rumor mill and sort of hearsay attached to certain buildings. And it was a lovely challenge to try and prove or disprove those things. For instance, there's a church in Cornwall called St. Nicholas Lou, where I was able to verify the often told rumour that timbers from HMS St. Joseph, a first-rate ship of the line that was

captured by Nelson in the Battle of St. Vincent in 1797, were incorporated into this church when it was enlarged. You go there today and you have these wonderful old beams with a seemingly heft in the gloom, you know, just looming out at you. And the whole thing seems to creak in high winds as well, which is quite interesting. One of two ships captured by Nelson at that battle, as you all know.

Nelson's Bridge is the word for one ship of the line that he crossed in order to capture the second one. It was on Valentine's Day. So whenever I walk around on Valentine's's day i like seeing these young lovers out celebrating nelson's great achievement there nice of them to keep that tradition alive so you've got the church in lieu i really enjoyed that where else what other ship fragments do you find they are in the most unlikely place dan and i urge everybody here listening to go out and look at stuff that you think you know well and see what exists for instance those who are Liverpool fans in the audience I myself am one as well may or

may not know that the mast from the Great Eastern the last surviving bit of that enormous vessel now stands as Anfield's flagpole in Liverpool that's quite a weird kind of idea isn't it it's an amazing idea in that chapter I just want to stop there because that's so interesting eisenbard kingdom brunel we know about his wonderful ship in bristol it's been preserved rebuilt one of the great museum ships of the world but tell me about the great eastern well the great eastern is his largest and last vessel brunel is so well known for so many things and actually his career as a shipbuilder it plays second fiddle to his sometimes in in the stories of the man. There's a famous image of him with huge chains behind him. Yeah, the famous image of Brunel. Yeah. Yeah. And he's actually in the shipyard where Great Eastern was constructed. And the

look on his face there, I think, is that of a shipbuilder yet to see his vessel float, because he was building this very, very large ship at the time, the largest ship in the world, and was for a couple of decades afterwards, built so vastly in order to carry as much coal as possible to australia and back without the need to refuel built as a prototypical ocean liner actually but almost a couple of decades too early for this purpose and she didn't really find success economically in that venture so sort of limped around the coastlines um thereafter being sold between various owners and that's a kind of novelty because she wasn't obviously she's so big 30,000 hull plates of iron each weighing between three and five tons went into her construction iron which by the way was pickaxed from the fields of the

north in the midlands not in the thames where she was built so she's actually a ship of the north in my eyes really anyway so she was used as a liner that kind of didn't work out so another use was found for her. And this came along really sort of serendipitously, this particular use. And that was laying the undersea telegraph cables between the world's continents. She was the only ship big enough to be able to do this work, to carry the thousands of miles of cable in her belly. So she did.

She was a great success. She wired together America and Britain, Britain and India, and various other places. But in doing so, Deb, I think what's so interesting about this is that she brought about the decline of ships as carriers of news, because news now raced under the seas, right, between continents through the cable. And news was the most prestigious cargo that ships carried, really, wasn't it? You know, news of world events, seismic events, battles being fought, won or lost, all things which could affect the fortunes of a notion. So here was a ship, which by the way was a hybrid ship, so steam power with six sails, one for each day of the week except Sunday, and all that remains of her is amassed,

and amassed was the thing which once meant news, but no longer after she did her work. So a really interesting poignant tale there. At the time it was launched on the Thames, they couldn't launch it down the slipway stern first because it was longer than the Thames was wide. It was smashed into the other bank. Everything about this vessel was kind of a bit tragicomic in a way, you know, she was ultimately a misfit. She was too big for her surroundings everywhere she went. She never quite succeeded at anything she did except the one thing she did which turned out to be a hammer blow to the prestige of ships everywhere in a very small way or growing way and then she was laid up in the Mersey and broken up and it took two years 200 laborers and a newly invented wrecking ball to

take it to pieces because she's so well made and now all that remains of this vast iron behemoth is a mast which is quite ironic really when you think about as a steam vessel yeah it's wonderfully ironic. And I love that moment where they're dropping it sideways down the slipway into the Thames, and it gets stuck. And no one in history has ever moved this large and heavier object before, ever. Yes, that's right. I mean, Brunel, as you say, it's so remarkable. I really liked your bit when you went to the Scilly Isles and looked at figureheads, because I I've been there I don't know if anyone's been to the Silly Isles here there's a few nods could see they were notorious wreckers and retrievers weren't they on a good day and I like the way that the squire comes in and says you've got to stop wrecking retrieving and he starts collecting all these

things that come off shipwrecks what's it called Valhalla yeah Valhalla well those who've been to the Sillies will know Tresca where the nicest, most courtly style in many ways has this really strange collection of figureheads. Not like a collection you see in the docyards or in museums where they're arranged in a sort of typical kind of curatorial way. But here they're shoved into a purpose-built folly, sea folly really, made by this guy Augustus Smith, the squire of the islands. And they're displayed a collection of 19th century mercantile figureheads, which again is quite unusual because such figureheads usually weren't thought of as being worth preserving long after their ships had been broken up. Yet this guy did, and he was a sort of curious mix of passionate reformer, scientifically minded, progressive, took on the

Silly Isles and reformed them, improved them, resulted in improvements to the agriculture and economies of the islands. But he was a romantic at heart. And that's what I really like about him. You know, he was fascinated by these relics of the age of sail, which was then dwindling, you know, in the mid 19th century. In his diary, he talks about seeing steamships increasingly appearing around the islands. So I think he was gathering together these figureheads as relics of the immediate past, which he himself knew but also as symbols of something older and stranger and more powerful because that's what figureheads are about aren't they? Superstition and the belief that the ship contends with forces huger than

itself and the need to propitiate those forces or to basically just obtain luck however you might try. And you point out in that that the Royal George was fleeing down the channel after, well, was strategically withdrawing down the channel after a large Franco-Spanish fleet entered the channel in the American Revolutionary War. And a sailor on the Royal George put eye covers over the king's figurehead at the front so the poor, the former king would not have to witness this terrible scene of a great British ship kind of retreating. They symbolise the kind of soul of the vessel. Yeah, definitely. They symbolise the vessel's soul. They had eyes so the ship could see. That was another really important point. So without eyes, how could the ship navigate safely and competently? But also when a ship is broken up,

they're the parts of a ship which are most obviously recognisable as coming from a ship, because they're unmistakably made for a prow or for the bow of a ship. In contrast to things like bits of hull timbers, bits of hull metalwork, which may not immediately speak of the seafaring connections that those items have, the figurehead is about the sea and it's about facing down a really difficult wind or difficult sea conditions and guiding everybody to safety. I think of figureheads really, Dan, actually, as a kind of folk art, because that's what they are. And they're artists who are often unsung, not very famous individual ship carvers, had their works displayed on the international stage

in comparison to more formally trained artists, which I think is an interesting point. So what's the earliest ship or boat that you're interested in the book? How far back do you go? Well, it's the Middle Bronze Age, really, which is deep history, as you all will know. And the earliest vessel we have any substantive remains of in Britain is the Dover boat, which is really kind of beautifully neat, isn't it? Because Dover is this ancient seafaring location. It's the closest point in England to France. It's the shortest channel crossing. It's still the shortest channel crossing. It has a millennia-year-old visible history, but actually goes much, much further back than that below the soil. And in the late 90s, during the building of a bypass, what was discovered there in the soil was this middle

Bronze Age vessel with its bow, prow pointing out to sea, having been richly scuttled or dismembered so it couldn't sail again. It's this beautifully enigmatic thing, which looks a bit like a sort of Oxford or Cambridge river punt, that kind of appearance with a sort of flat scoop-like prow. And we have no idea what it was used for. It might have been a mobile kind of general store or a yacht, maybe, who knows? Or indeed a P&O ferry, early precursor of, let's hope they treat their sailors better back then. And the thing is, it's preserved now in the Dover Museum and it has this sense about it of seafaring in its first bloom, the infancy of seafaring, the start is it's preserved now in the Dover Museum and it has this sense about it of seafaring in its first bloom the infancy of seafaring the start of it all and you get that because it's this very fragile looking craft because it's so ancient but also because the

hull timbers were stitched together with fibers of yew there's not a single nail or mechanical fixing anywhere in this vessel which is for me by itself mind-boggling because how could such a fragile sounding thing resist the great forces of the channel even on a calm day? Yet it did. Well worth a look. It's very, very difficult to see in that museum because it's very dark, its conditions approximate to the soil, but you will be rewarded. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Britain's maritime history. More after this. history. More after this. I'm a spy doing whatever spies do. But what am I going to whip out of my pocket next? Careful. In this special month of patented, we're celebrating the 70th anniversary of James Bond by having a look at some of the inventions that have changed espionage.

by having a look at some of the inventions that have changed espionage. From gadgets and their creators to the cars and cocktails that make Bond look oh so effortlessly cool. Join me, Campbell, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a history of inventions, where I will have my can on a string up against the walls of some of the best historians in this field. Look forward to your company. mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So then let's come forward. There's no Roman vessels, is there, I don't think, in the

book? No, we don't have any substantive survivals, really. And those that we do, that I'm aware of, were found quite early on in the 20th century or 19th century when archaeology and the science of preservation was not where it is now. There was one Roman vessel actually found during the construction of County Hall in London where the LCC was based on the South Bank. And it was discovered in the 30s. And what they did was injected every single timber with glycerin to try and preserve it. And sadly, it all just crumbled into dust and is boxed up somewhere in the archives there. But no, we don't have a typically Roman vessel. We don't have a trireme, for instance. We don't have any bronze chisel-like prows, which these vessels possessed, as we know. So that's a tantalizing gap. And even into the Dark Ages, well, I shouldn't say Dark Ages,

early medieval. We have very few traces. We have imprints left in the soil by vessels like this. The most famous is the Saturn Who ship, rather than the actual survival. So it's only really when we get into the medieval period that we start to have big chunks of hull and other such things. What's the earliest one that you deal with in the book then? Well, the earliest thing is not a ship itself, actually, but a ship's trumpet from the Middle Ages, which is a very rare thing to find, actually, dropped overboard in Billingsgate at some point in the 13th century, Billingsgate in London being then the chief fish market of London, and found in the 1980s during excavations on Billingsgate Lorry Park

after the market had closed. And it's this beautiful, long-stemmed golden trumpet in four sections. And we know it was a ship's trumpet because in the medieval port seals, the really sort of interesting documentary evidence of the appearance of ships at this time, we see trumpeters in the sterns of these vessels blowing commands to the crew, essentially, relaying the captain's orders from the captain to the crew. And you can see them climbing up the rigging to set sail, dropping the anchor, et cetera. What's so fascinating to me about that is it speaks of a juvenilia of seafaring at this time. I mean, medieval vessels were, of course, seaworthy,

they were accomplished. There was a lively shipping industry in Britain at this time, you know, trade with the continent, with the Baltic, etc. But there's still this tentative sense of creeping from coast to coast, from haven to haven, not striking out into the depths of the open ocean, which comes with the elizabethan seafaring and a little before then in the case of scotland which is actually very different and has its own fascinating seafaring traditions so the ship's trumpet represents for me a kind of seafaring adolescence that britain seemed to have at this time communication at sea is hard it is a noisy old place it is dad are you a seafarer yes yeah so you're you're no not i

wouldn't put i wouldn't call myself a great seafarer but i like going on boats uh yeah yeah and uh it's hard it's very difficult to make yourself heard and understood on ships but also essential yes indeed and what i love is this trumpet was such an awkward object to have on a cramped boat deck for you know when you might just hit people with it and stuff like that and it's easy to see why it fell out of favor and was replaced by a whistle, a bosun's whistle, which is obviously far more convenient. And do you talk about the Mary Rose? Well, other writers more august than me have treated the Mary Rose dance, so I gave it a wide berth. What I did want to touch on there was the experiences of a diver who was sent down to try and raise some of the canon from the Mary Rose, a guy called Jacques Francis,

who was originally from Africa and one of the earliest recorded black people in Britain, who was employed as a specialist free diver, which is quite amazing. And we have his voice recorded in the court documents that you report. So his voice swims up from the depths, literally from the depths of history. One of the first black people to have their voice recorded, which is really, really powerful. Because someone was suing someone else. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The law is always there somewhere. Exactly, perfect. Where do you go on from that high medieval period into the early modern? Well, yeah, I mean, the Elizabethan period

obviously is the one everybody kind of thinks of as the start of seafaring in some ways. It's a convenient place to ascribe the start of ocean going to, even though that's quite a sort of oversimplification in some ways. But the galleons, the stories of the great seafarers like Drake and Raleigh, etc., loom large in the national mind, and they have done for many centuries. I mean, think of the Victorians putting up statues to

Drake on Plymouth Ho, you know, to commemorate his activities. When Britain then still had a very large, vast imperial navy, there was this inspiration, this going back to these very early Elizabethan seafaring figures. But what I find so fascinating about the Elizabethans is that we, again, have very little evidence of what their ships actually looked like, and almost nothing of the ships themselves. Yet these were famous, really, and they are famous. The Golden Hind and the Ark Raleigh, the Squirrel of Humphrey Gilbert. These are names which loom large in history, yet we know almost nothing about them. The typical galleon or the images of ships detailed from that time are very rare. There's a lovely bundle of papers in the Pepys Library in Maglev College, Cambridge,

called Fragments of Ancient English Shipwritery, which is a bit of a mouthful. But it's the only basically surviving bundle of Elizabethan ship blueprints that we have by a shipwright called Matthew Baker, who was one of the first in the 16th century to start writing down, calculating the ship's lines on paper instead of tracing them on a tracing floor. Early shipwrights, in fact, built like cathedral builders did, really, because they did the same things. They traced molds out on tracing floors and assembled the members from there. In the late 16th century, we moved to paperwork, we moved to calculations. I can't even make sense of Matthew Baker's long division, but I was never much of a mathematician. Anyway, those are very important because they give us a sense of flavor of what things like

Golden Hind actually looked like. Incidentally, all that survives of Golden Hind now is a chair in a library in Oxford. This is another point I try to bring out in the book, which is what has become of the great ships of the past? Well, some of them have been reincarnated as other things, as objects, as chairs, as tables, as keepsakes, as bureaus, as heirlooms, basically. And there's, I think in this country, in parlours up and down the land, on mantelpieces, on shelves and cabinets, there's millions of pieces, tiny pieces of the great ships of the past just lying there, radiating a kind of quiet intensity, which is quite something. I've got a lot of bits of HMS Victory in my house.

Not as much as I'd like, but lots of little teeny fragments. Obtained legally, folks, don't panic, I'll take the shipping bits off. For the greatest seafaring nation on Earth, we do have a fleet of historic ships, but actually there are amazing gaps, aren't there, in what we've been able to retrieve from the past. Yes, totally. And actually, the historic fleet is not as well known as it should be, really. You have some amazing, quite significant vessels like HMS Unicorn in Dundee. Unicorn being an almost completely original early 19th century frigate,

which was built in Chatham, towed up to Dundee, didn't have a sails then, and then immediately mothballed. So we have this incredible, intact example, authentic example of a museum ship. Because the museum ship does by itself, I think, raise interesting philosophical questions. It's like Trigger's broom, you know, and he feels on horses, like if bits have been replaced enough times, it's still the same broom. And actually, I think there does come a point with historic ships where they become effigies of their former selves. The outlines are there, and they're beautiful, but the fabric has been lost, right? The fabric has been substituted too many times. There's a lovely example of that as well in Port Merion in North Wales, the Italianate fantasy village by Sir Clough Williams Ellis,

the architect of the 20th century. He built an actual stone effigy of his yacht, which he lost in a gale on a sandbank called the Amos Reunis. And that concrete vessel is moored at the quayside forevermore in Port Merion, which is quite fascinating. And that's one way to answer the question, how do we, should we remember the great ships of the past, build stone effigies of them in every port? A bit unrealistic, I grant you. How do you feel when you walk around Cutty Sark or Victory that have been extensively rebuilt? Do you feel they're not essentially the ships as they once were? No, I feel madly in love with them, to be honest. I think especially with the experiences you can get at places like Victory and Great Britain, you know, the staff there and the organisations who've

cared for them and given them a new lease of life and displayed them have done such sterling work, actually. The one criticism I would make, actually, is of the Cutty Sark and the way that the architectural thing that that ship now sits in. It's a bit over-egging it, to be honest, all of that glassy thing. I think it would have just been better in a simpler way. But no, I think they have a very important role to play in conjuring up the great ships of the past, but also giving us that sort of proportional sense of what it was like below decks, you know, the cramped confines of the gun decks at Victory. Even the replica of Golden Hind in Southwark has an important role to play it may not be totally accurate because we can never know what golden hind actually was like

in measurement form but a very evocative experience isn't that the point we want to evoke these things and celebrate them i love any historic ship no matter how rebuilt it is the essence remains on this amazing journey that took you from Scotland to Siles to Kent, what do you reflect on the country as you're moving through it today and what it owes to our maritime past? I suppose the key thing is nowhere in Britain is very far from the sea. And that's true both in distance terms. I think the furthest place in land is about 70 miles from the nearest tidal saltwater. Last month, I did a sponsored walk there on a line. I walked from Port Merion to the place in land furthest from the sea, carrying an oar like Odysseus is advised to

do in the Odyssey to break the seafaring curse upon him. That was a very quick walk, actually didn't take very long. And there was still like a sea shanty group. There was a museum of maritime history. This is in Litchfield. So it's not very far away anywhere you go here. And actually, I spoke earlier of the oceans beneath our feet. You'd be amazed at the connections unlikely looking places now have, particularly those with medieval prominence, because medieval port cities and harbours often have been changed by tidal conditions, erosion, silting, so that they now look like inland places. Windchillsea is a very good example of that down in Sussex, where you have a port that was so important when it was washed away by a storm in the 13th century.

Edward I himself ordered its rebuilding and a new sort of pattern, a new street layout on a site nearby because of its importance to the wine trade with Gascony. And now Winchelsea though, because of the silting of its harbour in the early modern period, its seafaring coastline and stuff has moved far away

and it now looks like a bucolic country town. And you'd think it was until you set foot in any one of the 33 medieval cellars that Winchelsea has below it. A remarkable group of these spaces, which actually don't survive very much across the country, they were built to store barrels of wine and as showrooms and tasting rooms for medieval wine cellars. Could you have kept going? I mean, you chose 11 fragments of ships, presumably there's many more out there. There are so many fragments we have. There is so much to say. I really wished I could have written, for instance, about Scapa Flow in Orkney, you know, where the remains of the German Grand Fleet lie below the waters. And interestingly, a source of

low radiation metal to this day, because of course they were sunk there before the atom bombs were detonated there are many more and low radiation metal is important for making hospital equipment and stuff right so yeah yeah they tear sheets of metal off these wrecks that were sunk before 1945 and they have particular uses today i think i'd go to the dentist more if they had tools made from the grand fleet actually darn right as long as the tools weren't used on the Grand Fleet at the time, that wouldn't be very nice. Speaking of Grand Fleet, it was an act of barbarism not to keep a super dreadnought era battleship in this country. It's unbelievable. I'm never going to stop being angry about that. Yeah. But that's an interesting point they've

done, actually, because it shows, to our eyes, a curious way in which ships were viewed. They were viewed both with a huge ladle of sentimentality and a huge ladle of realism. And actually, things like Bellerophon, these great battleships, the extraordinary investments of their day by the governments of their day, just unsentimentally broken up, sold for scrap, etc., just let go of it. It's hard to fathom, isn't it? Especially ones with such significance. The only time it's really happened, that sort of deliberate preservation of the vessel is victory well elizabeth first tried it with golden hind but nobody really knew what they were doing so within 30 years it looked like the bleached skeleton of a horse apparently just quite

i like the way they tried to get keep golden hind if you ever want to make yourself very depressed folks go and google napoleonic era battleships that almost made it through to the present day. So many that made it through to the era of photography, for example, as you can see, one got shipwrecked on Blackpool Beach. It's very sad. The Foudroyen, I think, was sunk in gunnery practice by the Royal Navy in the 40s or something. Unbelievable.

Flying the French tricolour and the ensign, the two flags under which she served I love it last question even as we've got more sea blind very few of us will have worked at sea and seem depend on the sea day to day for our living do you think that deep connection is still do you still see it as you travel around Britain oh yeah I mean absolutely people still are fascinated by seafaring history is what is my experience of it. And there are still a great many people today with practical seafaring experience. My father-in-law does. There are many people who worked in the Merchant Navy, the Merchant Marine. One of the great unsung stories, actually, the Merchant Marine. Its importance to Britain cannot be overestimated. As I said before,

it's all there latently swimming around in our subconscious, in the nation's fabric as well. And I think as we turn to wind as a power form again, it feels like steam and engines were just some kind of vast interregnum, actually. So who knows what the future holds? I think that feels very true. Tom, thanks for coming on. Thank you.