ON TRAIL OF SUNKEN TREASURE, AGED 84
A DIVER aged 84 and his old team – the youngest in his 70s – are kitting up to find treasure on the bed of the North Sea.
Jeb Robinson will show there’s life in the old seadog yet as he searches the SS Benmacdhui.
The British cargo ship hit a German mine on December 21, 1941, burst into flames and sank 15 miles off the Durham coast.
The steamer was taking munitions to the Far East but a coin haul, including the rare 1941 Hong Kong 1 Cent worth thousands, may have been in the hold. In 1946 the Royal Navy used depth charges to destroy the munitions and to clear approaches to the Humber estuary.
That puts a question mark over how many coins can be found. When Jeb first salvaged scrap metal from the ship in 1976 he picked up a 1 cent Sarawak coin, from Borneo.
In later dives Jeb, who splits his time between the UK and Cyprus, found more coins.
He gave some to a Turkish pal but it was years before he discovered their worth.
Jeb said: “I found out five years later that he’d had them valued – and the Hong Kong cent was the most valuable. I was ecstatic, but pretty angry he’d waited so long to tell me.
“Now we’ve done research and discovered there could be more coins at the bottom of the hold.
SAFETY
“It’s now the only thing on my bucket list, to get back down there and find what’s there.
“I might be 84 but I’m as fit as a butcher’s dog, swim 12 months of the year and still go diving. It’s why I spend so much time in Cyprus.
“I train divers and I can get down to the wreck if I get the right team together. It would be an amazing way to top off my career, and I’ve had one hell of a career.
“I’ve been visiting and salvaging wrecks around the world for 60 years. The money would be nice, but at my age actually finding them would be more of a thrill.”
Jeb’s company Humber Divers Ltd bought the wreck from the Board of Trade in the 1970s. When the firm was wound up in the 1980s he transferred several wrecks into private ownership.
So he has the rights to salvage it, providing the Receiver of the Wreck, which
Coins found on SS Benmacdhui in earlier dive. Now Jeb, right, hopes to find many more administers salvage law, consents. Research has since found the ship’s manifest stated there were 13.5 tons of coins on board.
Only 100 or so Hong Kong 1 cent coins are thought to have survived World War Two – selling for up to £16,000 a time at auction.
The World Coin Price Guide says five million 1941 Hong Kong Cents were split into three lots.
Two batches were melted down by Britain and Hong Kong to pay for military gear. The third ended up on the seabed. The guide says: “The perfect combination of events has led this coin to become one of the most expensive and rarest dates of British Territory Hong Kong Cents”.
Jeb is seeking a financial partner for the operation. And he added, tantalisingly: “I’ve never had a full manifest of the cargo so who knows what else is down there.”
The ship, launched by Ben Line Steamers of Leith, is named after Scotland’s second highest peak Ben Macdui.