HMS “Victory”

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 28th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, with the leave of the Committee, I will speak briefly in the gap. I had not expected to be here as I was taking part in a parliamentary visit to Bedfordshire earlier today, but we were back early and I was pleased to be able to come in and listen to this interesting debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Renfrew.

I speak as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on War Heritage. I will refer in my three minutes to an issue that was brought to my attention earlier this year: the looting of three Royal Navy cruisers that were sunk in the North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands in September 1914. HMS “Hogue”, HMS “Cressy” and HMS “Aboukir” were torpedoed by the Imperial German submarine “U-9” while on active service and lie at a depth of 33 metres. The majority of the crew of the three ships, around 1,500 naval personnel, lost their lives in the action; therefore, the wrecks are their war graves.

I wrote on behalf of the group to express our concern to the Dutch ambassador, Mr Pim Waldeck, and got a very sensible and helpful reply from him—but it contained a bit of alarming information. First, he reassured us that the Dutch Government take seriously the issue of illegal salvage or theft from shipwrecks around the Dutch coast. He said that approximately 1,500 shipwrecks were reviewable by the Netherlands alone; not all of them are warships or war graves, but obviously a significant number are. In the case of these three particular ships, he was unable to be too helpful because it was his impression that they had been sold by the British Government at some point in the 1950s. I sent his letter to the noble Lord, Lord Astor of Hever, with details of my concern and that of the group, and what he said indeed turned out to be the case. The noble Lord said that they were sold to a salvage company in 1954. The consequence of that was that all the protection that they would have had as war graves and heritage items was lost.

The purpose of my brief intervention is to draw the Committee’s attention to this disturbing situation that, where a wreck is sold for salvage, all protection for it is lost and, obviously, to express the hope that nothing similar happens in future.