Visit to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard
David Marler (British Council 1962–2001)
Sixteen of us made the trip to Portsmouth, ably marshalled by Gillian Jones, despite the sometimes contradictory information available. We were there to see the Mary Rose in her new home and to take a trip round the harbour.
The Mary Rose is simply stunning. She was 34 years a King’s ship, spent 437 years as a grave at the bottom of the Solent and has so far spent 32 years being conserved. When I saw her last she was still being sprayed by a mixture of water and polyethylene glycol – a process which went on for 30 years after she was raised from the seabed – to saturate her now fragile timbers with preservative wax. Then, you could glimpse her only through something like a heavy downpour. Now, with the spray turned off, you can at last appreciate her size and solidity. When the four-year drying process is complete in about three years’ time, and the multiple black pipes pumping warm air over her have been removed, you will be able to see her – or the third of her which has survived – even more clearly.
But you can see enough to marvel at this mighty construction from pre-industrial England. True, she was only half the size of HMS Victory lying just outside the new museum (her hull was 110’ long by 25’ beam as opposed to Victory’s 220’ x 51’) but there is quite enough to marvel at.
And the new displays are brilliantly organised, so that you have walkways at each deck level of the ship, with the original starboard side visible through many windows to your right and a reconstruction of the port side with cannon and a wealth of other artefacts installed to your left, with galleries of contents – and even a skeleton or two – found at each level at the ends of the walkways, supplemented by touch-screen video information panels.
Mary Rose’s end remains something of a mystery. She had taken part in a good many skirmishes in the Channel in her long career – she was launched in 1511 when Henry VIII was only two years into his reign – without mishap. True, she had been substantially refitted or even rebuilt in 1536–9 (a costly business: could the timing have had anything to do with a sudden increase in royal wealth associated with the dissolution of the monasteries in those years?) so as to be able to carry many more heavy guns, but that had been six years before she went down, and in 1545, the year of her loss, she had sailed round from the Thames to the Solent, again without mishap.
On 19 July 1545 she sailed out with many other English vessels, under the eye of King Henry standing atop Southsea Castle, to do battle with a large French fleet which had had the temerity to attack the Solent. There was of course a Frenchman who claimed she had been sunk by French gunfire, but it seems profoundly unlikely that such an event would have gone unrecorded by the many other witnesses, quite apart from the fact the sinking of a wooden warship by solid shot (as opposed to a fire started by shot) was almost unheard of throughout the era of the sailing warship. It has been suggested that she made an exceptionally sharp turn after firing to bring her other broadside to bear, which caused her to heel so that her lower-deck ports took on water. But those were days before naval tacticians thought in terms of broadsides, and cannon from both sides of the ship were found still loaded, so it seems she went down without opening fire.
Or were there just too many men crowding her upper decks? Her rebuild may have made her inherently less stable than before, and a combination of a sudden gust of wind, reduced stability and a swarm of men perhaps congregated on the side nearest the enemy was too much for her. Perhaps they were not obeying orders to balance her fast enough – Sir George Carew, her captain, was heard to complain he had “a sort of knaves I cannot rule.” We may never know, but their tragedy – 400 drowned, 35 saved – has provided us with a phenomenal time capsule.
After that, our waterborne tour of the harbour, past the great Spinnaker Tower, HMS Warrior gleamingly restored to her 1860 condition and the Royal Navy’s slender remaining store of contemporary war canoes might almost have been an anticlimax. There lay our sole remaining aircraft carrier, HMS Illustrious – I remember attending a pleasant cocktail party aboard her in Alexandria Harbour – much reduced in effectiveness since she is designed to carry Harriers and still sports the ski-jump to launch them – but they have all been abruptly retired, so she lacks her strike force. There were two or three destroyers, a couple of frigates, and patrol craft, all looking suitably rakish, and a large Fleet Auxiliary able to help, we were told, with natural disasters anywhere in the world, but they seemed outnumbered by older warships engineless and awaiting the breaker’s yard. We may hope that the Navy will rise again, like Victory’s masts and yards (she was reduced to her lower masts at the time of the visit).
Be that as it may, we were all most grateful to Gillian for her efforts in organising a fascinating trip.
Portsmouth Historic Dockyard opens from 10am to 6pm (10am to 5:30pm November - March) throughout the year, except when closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. For full details of the attractions and prices see their web-site