By David Walsh.
This is a copy of a piece published in the Northern Echo on the 1st October.
It was subbed somewhat, but here is the full version, in which I divulge some long last family shame.....................
I'm normally an easy going kind of fellow, or so I like to think. But just now and again I read of something that leads me into a paroxysm of anger. And when I heard of the projected stripping of a cargo of silver from a British merchant ship torpedoed in the last war, that anger rose to boiling point.
Why ? Actually from a very tenuous link. I want to speak of my late Uncle Albert, a fellow who made fleeting visits to our house when I was a schoolboy. Now Albert (he always insisted on his full first name, hating the use of Bert) was a man, who, in later adult life, I would have done my best to avoid.
For starters he seemed to be a bit of a chancer, or to frank, a waster. He was obviously the black sheep of the family on my mothers side. But as well as being a black sheep, he was also a black shirt, signing up to Sir Oswald Mosley's pre war fascist movement. This wasn't out of any love of their ideology - merely that their London HQ barracks provided free bed and breakfast for him when he was kicked out of the house.
He quietly dropped this part of his life when the prospect of war loomed, and thinking that he was in danger of the call up (and thus losing what to him was central to his life - his 'beer and bint' as he put it) he signed up for the merchant navy.
Big mistake. In the army, he might well have ended up in a cosy number somewhere, as many did. Instead he joined a profession which was at war from day one, as a sitting target for Hitler's U-Boats. For many crewmen their voyages were one way trips, with death coming through drowning, being scalded by superheated steam, burning alive in oil covered water, or, worst of all, slowly sinking into black oblivion while hanging on to wreckage or a half submerged lifeboat.
The dangers were immense. The rewards negligible. Indeed, the moment a torpedo burst through the hull of a ship, the unfortunate crew were struck off the shipowners pay book. It was those stories that Uncle Albert told me that stuck in my mind, and in a way, helped to absolve his many shortcomings.
So when I heard that Odyssey Marine, a U.S. based salvage and diving company were planning to strip the S.S Gairsoppa to recover a load of precious silver ingots, my blood began to boil. This, to me, is simple and pure grave robbing. The Gairsoppa, a humble tramp steamer originally built on the Tyne, went to the bottom of the Atlantic on a dark, wintry night in 1941. Only one man survived from a crew of 40.
Odyssey put a nauseous PR crafted spin on their activities. One of their managers was quoted in the Echo as saying 'by finding this shipwreck, and telling the story of its loss, we pay tribute to the brave merchant sailors who lost their lives'.
To this I can only reply with a four letter word - Tosh. (I would have wanted to use another four letter word, but it would not have been allowed by the editor).
The stark, simple truth is that there is cash here - big cash. The cargo of silver in the guts of this ship is worth £132 million if sold off on today's overheated metal markets.
If Odyssey are so concerned about homage to our dead merchantmen, then why are they not diving on to a ship that was carrying tins of corned beef ?
The answer is a short one. Greed.
You would have thought that someone in our government would have exhibited some moral qualms. After all, war wrecks are the property of the government. But not a bit of it. The Echo quoted a Transport Department suit as saying 'whilst we do not comment on the specifics of commercial arrangements, Odyssey were awarded the contract as it offered the best rate of return to HMG.'
So there we have it. The state has been often accused of selling the family silver for short term gain. But this takes us to a new grisly high - forcibly breaking into the coffins of brave men who died an appalling death. The fact that this, in the dry language of a Whitehall bureaucrat, is seen as a 'commercial transaction' is a measure of how eroded and how devalued the moral compass of our state has become.
I hope that when Odyssey's power shears and windy drills start to slice through those steel plates originally riveted in place by the men at Palmers Yard in Jarrow, the ghosts of all those men like my Uncle Albert rise up as one to haunt the imaginations and dreams of these millionaire desecraters when they think they are safely asleep in their Tampa penthouses.
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