This blog reproduces a paper/thread presented on 2 July 2020 at the Shaped by Steel Twitter Conference #SWOS20, organised through the Social Worlds of Steel project by Swansea University. Many thanks to the organisers, presenters and participants for a great conference!
Abstract
It is a paradox that thousands of monuments to UK steelmaking and manufacturing survive because of calamities and catastrophes. Around our shores, ships sunk c. 1850-1950 represent a crescendo of technological innovation and industrial production of critical importance to UK history in terms of economy, commerce and society. This extraordinary heritage is hardly recognised because it is underwater, yet it has little counterpart on land or amongst ships still floating: the built heritage of civil shipbuilding has largely been erased; there are no sizable cargo vessels of this period in preservation. Fortunately, advances in marine survey and imaging are making it easier to access and appreciate this heritage without getting wet.
Abstract
It is a paradox that thousands of monuments to UK steelmaking and manufacturing survive because of calamities and catastrophes. Around our shores, ships sunk c. 1850-1950 represent a crescendo of technological innovation and industrial production of critical importance to UK history in terms of economy, commerce and society. This extraordinary heritage is hardly recognised because it is underwater, yet it has little counterpart on land or amongst ships still floating: the built heritage of civil shipbuilding has largely been erased; there are no sizable cargo vessels of this period in preservation. Fortunately, advances in marine survey and imaging are making it easier to access and appreciate this heritage without getting wet.
Our increasingly digital world is making it easier to reconnect this steel on the seabed to documents, drawings, photographs and recollections that provide it with context and meaning. It is becoming possible to re-populate this maritime industrial heritage with the communities of shipbuilders, seafarers and travellers whose lives – and sometimes deaths – were entwined in these most complex of metal artefacts. In very few words, this presentation will outline the scale and character of the maritime industrial heritage lying just off UK shores and indicate avenues of recent research and engagement. Examples will be drawn mostly from the east coast of England, where direct links can be drawn between the industrial landscape that lies underwater and the men and women whose worlds were shaped by steel.
Thread
Good afternoon! I’m Antony Firth and I’m going to tweet about ‘Steel on the Seabed’. I’ll be referencing work with @HistoricEngland @HE_Maritime @Honor_Frost @SouterNT @HeritageFundNE @CITiZAN @IoSIFCA @TynetoTees @ukchp. Many thanks to all & to organisers of #SWOS20!
Good afternoon! I’m Antony Firth and I’m going to tweet about ‘Steel on the Seabed’. I’ll be referencing work with @HistoricEngland @HE_Maritime @Honor_Frost @SouterNT @HeritageFundNE @CITiZAN @IoSIFCA @TynetoTees @ukchp. Many thanks to all & to organisers of #SWOS20!
By ‘Steel on the Seabed’ I mean #shipwrecks from the period c. 1850-1950 – a period of numerous radical transformations in ships but also in the communities whose lives they touched. These historic steel artefacts within the marine environment still reverberate.
In 1832 before most were even built, Lyell surmised ‘It is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man [sic] will be collected together in the bed of the ocean than will exist at any other time on the surface of the continents’.
(Charles Lyell, 1832, Principles of Geography p. 244 https://archive.org/details/Lyell1837jf09J-c/page/244/mode/2up)
Ships are themselves social worlds of steel for the people who live, work and travel aboard. Plates, decks, boilers, engines and machinery are all shaped in steel to frame these floating worlds.
(see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1095-9270.12392; http://www.fjordr.com/fjordr-blog/hms-falmouth-a-town-class-light-cruiser-sunk-off-the-yorkshire-coast-in-the-first-world-war. #HMSFalmouth)
Beyond their hulls, steel ships shaped the social worlds of shipbuilders, dock workers, merchants, passengers & their communities at scales from local to global. Ships were also central to the supply of ore & coal, and to the delivery of manufactured steel products.
The fabrication and use of steel ships embodies so many lives: but the existence of most ships is fleeting. Their steel being eminently recyclable means that successful ships ended their careers in breakers’ yards.
Our built environment contains numerous reminders of industrial and transport heritage. But – with few exceptions – historic ships are absent from today’s ports and coasts. Although central to the history of many UK communities, cargo steamships now seem extinct.
(There are many wonderful vessels in @NatHistShips’ registers but preservation has been necessarily selective, not representative. https://www.nationalhistoricships.org.uk/the-registers/about-the-registers)
But I’m going to argue that steel ships still form part of our historic landscapes and seascapes, if only we look beneath the surface. Thousands of ships were ‘saved’ from the breaker’s yard by the catastrophe of sinking.
(see http://www.fjordr.com/uploads/3/4/3/0/34300844/firth_in_nt_views_issue_54_autumn_2017_-_online.pdf)
Steel shipwrecks resonate as facets of UK maritime and industrial heritage, if we choose to make them chime. Fortunately, numerous radical transformations in our own age are enabling us to rediscover, visualise and understand this long-hidden heritage.
Digital surveys, digitisation of collections and digital citizen science are turning underwater scrapyards back into meaningful places. Technologies are pushing us towards a national collection of extraordinary breadth and importance, if we want it.
(see https://skfb.ly/RICO; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-03635-5_12; #HMSFalmouth)
Steel shipwrecks are a vital component of the heritage of so many UK communities. They offer a fascinating – and creative – point of entry for the public in rediscovering unseen aspects of UK history, and present numerous avenues for research.
C19th & C20th shipwrecks tend to be viewed through the prism of warfare – with good reason: #WWI & #WWII had important maritime dimensions & caused massive spikes in shipping losses. But the history of ships sunk in wartime is not limited to the history of war.
The brutal attrition of lives and tonnage enables insight too. Mines, torpedoes and shells sliced through steel but also cut a section through the history of mid-C19th to mid-C20th shipping.
The same is true of people whose lives were taken while serving aboard. Firemen Said & Hamid – buried in a Whitby churchyard – remind us of the global character of the mercantile marine and the largely forgotten story of Black and Asian seafarers in the UK.
(see http://www.fjordr.com/fjordr-blog/the-worlds-war-on-the-east-coast; @PortPTUC http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/source-information/bame-seafarers-first-world-war/; https://www.gatewaysfww.org.uk/blog/bame-seafarers-first-world-war)
Steel lying on the seabed continues to embody the labour of shipbuilding communities especially on the Clyde and in the North East, including women who joined the workforce in wartime to carry out skilled and heavy marine engineering.
(see https://www.pinterest.co.uk/FjordrInfo/ecwcs-female-workers-at-swan-hunter-wigham-richard/; https://www.pinterest.co.uk/FjordrInfo/ecwcs-one-of-the-tyne-shipbuilding-yards/)
There is a direct relationship between the expulsion of women from marine engineering at the end of #WWI and the formation of the Women’s Engineering Society in 1919 @WES1919 #INWED20 #ShapeTheWorld.
(see https://blue-stocking.org.uk/2014/05/23/what-was-a-girl-to-do-rachel-parsons-1885-1956-engineer-and-feminist-campaigner/; https://www.pinterest.co.uk/FjordrInfo/ecwcs-armstrong-whitworth-elswick-newcastle/)
The landscape was also shaped by steel through women’s contribution to shipbuilding in other ways: Haverton Hill emergency shipyard on #Teesside was constructed in 1918-19 by women workers. The slips and basins they dug are still in use.
(see https://goo.gl/maps/9GwFzXgN5Uz8ioxz9; https://www.pinterest.co.uk/FjordrInfo/ecwcs-female-workers-at-furness-shipyard-haverton-/; and courtesy of @TeessideArchive @steel_stories https://teessidearchives.wordpress.com/2019/03/08/international-womens-day-women-building-furness-shipyard-haverton-hill-c-1917/)
Today, steel shipwrecks continue to shape the marine environment and the livelihoods that depend upon it. As inadvertent artificial reefs, shipwrecks provide habitats that are important for nature conservation, sea angling, recreational diving & commercial fishing.
(see https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/research/fish-and-ships/; http://www.fjordr.com/uploads/3/4/3/0/34300844/hnces_-_dorset_stour_and_tyne_to_tees_marine_area_-_fjordr_240120b_with_covers.pdf)
Shipwrecks can also be navigational hazards, sources of pollution & last resting places of many who have ‘no grave but the sea’. We often fail to deal with these monuments in ways that recognise the multiple dimensions of their past and present.
(see https://honorfrostfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/BRIJ5800-Multiwreck-A4-Report-WEB-0419-UPDATE.pdf. #ManagingShipwrecks)
The ships that lie around UK shores – through their misfortune and our good luck – are a vital component of our industrial and maritime historic environment. Next time you look out from the coast, have a thought for the steel on the seabed.
Thank you!