Lord Patten
Main Page: Lord Patten (Conservative - Life peer)SS “Richard Montgomery”
Lord Patten Excerpts
Lord Patten (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, on the way in which he has assembled his arguments and the thoroughness with which he has presented them to the House—and also on the slight note of passion in his voice. Obviously he knows this subject extremely well. I have four points to make and none of them seeks to undermine health and safety matters—I am not a jeerer at health and safety matters at all. First, the excellent wartime tag, Keep Calm and Carry On, is a pretty good one provided that one is not complacent.
My second point is that risk assessments of threats to life and property are a real public good—of course, I agree with the noble Lord about that—whether on the coastline that we are discussing this evening where the Liberty ship “Richard Montgomery” rests or indeed all over London every time there is deep excavation or groundworks preparing a site for some heavyweight high-rise building to be constructed. The risks are always there, whether they are of unexploded bombs or risks to our architectural or archaeological heritage. Risks are there all the time.
In making my third point, I should declare where my interest has come from and how it has been piqued because this is not a well-known special subject for me in your Lordships’ House. A few years ago—I have always thought it was an excellent decision—I took the precaution of marrying an Essex girl. She was born and brought up in the northern part of Essex: estuarine Essex on the sea. That is one reason. Secondly, I learned a lot from her because her distinguished grandfather, Commander Lightoller, went down with the Titanic. He happily popped up again and survived and had the great honour of being played in “A Night to Remember” by Kenneth More. He was a very brave sailor in the First World War, cruising up and down in his destroyers in the North Sea dealing with U-boat threats and got a clutch of distinguished service crosses.
Towards the end of his life, he went out in his own ship, the “Sundowner”, from London down that very estuary, not very far from this wreck, and proceeded in Operation Dynamo to load up “Sundowner” with 127 soldiers and bring them back from Dunkirk. Four years later, of course, trying to help the Allied efforts, the ship that we are discussing came to an end. That is why I have been particularly interested in this. I have read quite a lot of the stuff to which the noble Lord referred and I will not repeat it, because he has given us a masterly tour d’horizon.
My fourth point, which is important for noble Lords to consider, is that no one, to the best of my knowledge, has died because of this wreck, including the very brave stevedores who went out on the wreck for some weeks, as the noble Lord said, trying to unload and empty some of the munitions from this Liberty ship before it sank deeper and the task became absolutely impossible. Nor has anyone ever been harmed who has been involved in the continuous and detailed monitoring of what may be the most monitored shipwreck in the world. I do not know whether it is or not, but it must be high on the list of those that might be—quite rightly. I do not know how much all this monitoring costs and I will not ask my noble friend Lady Barran to come up with a total figure because that will take a shedload of calculations from civil servants and take even more money away from what should be spent on continuing to safeguard this wreck by the detailed calculations and monitoring of the Department for Transport and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. Of course, we have had reassurances in the past from Mr Boris Johnson that, should his island airport ever be built quite close by, it would not be a problem—so I am reassured by that, as I am sure the whole House is.
The sorts of surveys that are being conducted are not cheap. More is being spent on the current environmental monitoring following the earlier wreck surveys completed by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in 2017 and 2018, and we are told to expect the report on the 2018 survey in the fourth quarter of this year. I hope that those responsible in the Department for Transport will ensure the publication of that environmental assessment. We certainly need to be told about it. Nothing is being wasted by all the money that has been spent. It has been spent to protect people, land and life. It has also led to considerable advances, which are not to be sneered at, in the science that has been developed in this monitoring, which should be welcomed.
Much good science has been spun off into marine archaeology and other sub-sea surface work, particularly the use of lasers, so monitoring is not a wasted undertaking in any sense at all. Others using such analytics might be helped in respect of maritime rescue in other ways. Of course, with the growth of data analytics worldwide, there are such a lot of wrecks like this around the world that I suspect there is a lot of big data analysis of the handling of such wrecks, albeit in different environments—not all in the plashy Thames estuary but in tropical waters and elsewhere.
All through this process, there has been a great advance in learning. However, I think that the next time—and I bet that this is the case in the fourth quarter—we have a report published, it will repeat that the risk of a major explosion is believed to be remote. “Believed” is a key word, because it protects the writer, quite rightly. It is their belief, and no one can be certain because some of the things that the noble Lord has pointed to could well happen. The risk is as remote or as present as it has ever been: I do not think that there is necessarily a cumulative growth in the risk. We need to continue monitoring, and so, with that thought in mind, I return to how I opened my brief speech and say, “Keep calm and carry on monitoring”.
Lord Greenway (CB)
My Lords, I share the gratefulness of the House to the noble Lord, Lord Harris, for introducing this short debate with some expert knowledge. He seemed surprised that the Liberty ship was built in 137 days. One of them was actually built in four days. Although they were built to last for only one voyage across the Atlantic, after the war many of these Liberty ships went on to work for the Greeks and other nations for some 20 years. They were not quite as rough as they were made out to be. I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, that I had the great pleasure of sailing across to Dunkirk in the “Sundowner” in 1990 on the 50th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation.
Lord Patten
If the noble Lord will allow me, I hope he will hitch a ride next year, in 2020, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the little ships going and coming back. The “Sundowner” will, for sure, be in that fleet of little ships.
Lord Greenway
I thank the noble Lord for the invitation, but I am chairman of the preservation society of the old London fire boat, the “Massey Shaw”, which is another Dunkirk veteran, so I may be committed already.
As we have heard, this wreck is surveyed constantly, at least once or twice a year. It was last done in February and March of this year, and another survey is due in August. Huge improvements in the efficiency of side-scanning sonar have meant that surveys can usually be accomplished in just two days—compared with many days, with weather hold-ups, in the past—and we can now measure very accurately any changes in the deterioration of the wreck, even down to centimetres.
The noble Lord mentioned the possibility of some of the bombs having spilled out of the ship. If they had done, they would have been quickly picked up by the new sonar, and there is no evidence that I can see that that has happened. In addition, a remote sensing tripod has been placed on the sea floor to measure any environmental changes—the noble Lord, Lord Patten, referred to this—including changes to the seabed, which is constantly scoured by the tide coming out of the River Medway.
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which is the official Receiver of Wreck in inshore waters, engages an internationally recognised survey company to carry out the work. It either uses one of its own vessels or, if that is not available, it takes one of the Port of London Authority’s well-equipped survey vessels, which have the added advantages of knowing the waters and being more or less on the spot, as they are based in Gravesend. I understand that a technical adviser from the MoD is on board at all times during the surveys.
I also understand that the Department for Transport has set up an expert advisory panel which initially met every two months but now, I gather, tends to meet whenever new evidence comes to light.
Sheerness is no stranger to explosions. On 26 November 1914, HMS “Bulwark”, a pre-dreadnought battleship which was moored a little way up the Medway, exploded while loading ammunition, killing some 750 of her crew. On 27 May 1915, HMS “Princess Irene”, a new ferry built for the Canadian Pacific Railway but taken up on completion by the Royal Navy for conversion to a minelayer, exploded while loading mines at a buoy off Port Victoria, which is approximately three miles west-south-west of Sheerness, prior to making her third voyage; 352 persons were killed, including most of the ship’s company and 78 dockyard workers who were on board to strengthen the improvised gun decks. It later transpired that the mines were in the process of being activated, but the job was done in somewhat of a hurry by untrained staff.
I now continue with the history lesson and turn to two subsequent ship explosions, which may have some relevance in terms of a worst-case scenario. On 6 December 1917, two merchant vessels collided at slow speed in what are known as the Narrows at the entrance to Halifax harbour in Nova Scotia. The departing Norwegian steamer “Imo”—I get confused here, because the International Maritime Organization is known as IMO—which had originally been built for the White Star Line, struck a French steamer, the “Mont-Blanc”, which was arriving from New York loaded with some 3,000 tons of gun-cotton and TNT and had barrels of benzol and picric acid on deck, all destined for the war in Europe. The shock of the collision dislodged some of the deck cargo, allowing vapour to escape, which was ignited by sparks as the two vessels drew apart. The burning “Mont-Blanc” drifted ashore near Pier 6 on the Halifax waterfront and exploded 20 minutes later, killing around 2,000 persons and injuring another 9,000. All structures within a half-mile radius were obliterated, with 400 acres seriously damaged. Some reports speak of a 60 foot tsunami which washed the “Imo” ashore on the opposite side of the harbour.
The second explosion concerned the “Fort Stikine”, another emergency war-built vessel, but not a Liberty ship—she was a Fort built in Canada. She had a part-cargo of 1,400 tons of explosives. When she blew up, it destroyed a large part of the dock area in Bombay in two separate blasts on 14 April 1944. Thirteen other ships were sunk and a similar number were badly damaged, while a shower of burning debris set fire to a nearby slum area. Some reports say that 850 people perished, but the exact figure is not known and it is likely to be a lot more than that. In addition, 50,000 people lost their jobs. To give some idea of the destruction, it took 8,000 men seven months to remove the debris and get the docks working again but, somewhat surprisingly, almost all the gold bars being carried by the “Fort Stikine” in 31 wooden crates, four to a crate, were later recovered.
I have mentioned these examples to indicate what can happen when an ammunition ship explodes, but in three of the examples I have given, heat was the ultimate cause of the blasts. In HMS “Bulwark”, explosives were being stored temporarily too close to a boiler room, and the “Fort Stikine” had developed a fire in her part-cargo of cotton bales, which were stowed beneath the ammunition. In addition, the Halifax and Bombay explosions occurred literally within their respective cities, which multiplied the damage.
Compared with these, the “Richard Montgomery” wreck is situated 1.5 miles off Sheerness and five miles from Southend, and the munitions remaining on board have now been submerged for 75 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said. A former bomb disposal expert who advised the Government on the cargo of the “Richard Montgomery” has said that water is a good mitigator in preventing detonations.
There are, of course, worries about Sheerness and the LNG terminal and storage facilities on the opposite bank on the Isle of Grain. The new storage tanks have nickel-something—I cannot remember the name—inside, with pre-stressed concrete outside and a reinforced concrete roof. They are a bit like a German bunker in many ways, so I am not certain that they would be too badly affected. However, I know that only a few weeks ago a new rail service started up to carry aviation fuel from there to Heathrow.
Some people have proposed either moving the whole wreck, which would be well-nigh impossible, or just removing the munitions. The latter course has been estimated to cost tens of millions of pounds and would probably involve the evacuation of Sheerness.
On balance and in conclusion, I tend to follow the line of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, that we should leave well alone but continue to monitor closely the gradual degradation of the wreck.