‘An anchor is the universal sign of hope. It celebrates stability, belonging and strength’
Expedition to locate the wreck of the iconic ship will help create a lasting tribute to her passengers…
IT’S HARDLY a dignified resting place. The Empire Windrush, one of Britain’s most famous ships, lies 2,800 metres down on the murky seabed of the Mediterranean. Wrecked and half burnt, this was the ship that in 1948 brought the first wave of post-Second World War Caribbean migrants to the UK – those now known as theWindrush generation.
Just six years later, on a voyage from Japan to the UK, an explosion occurred in the passenger liner’s engine room and fire quickly engulfed the vessel. Four engineers died but the rest of the crew and all the passengers escaped.
The ship herself, by then being towed by a Royal Navy destroyer, succumbed to the fire and slipped beneath the waves on March 30, 1954. She now rests some 23 nautical miles off the coast of Algeria.
The shameful story of how members of the Windrush generation were treated by the Home Office has now sparked a campaign to locate the exact position of the Empire Windrush’s watery grave.
The plan is to cut loose the ship’s stern anchor, and bring it home to Britain where it would be permanently displayed as a memorial to post-Second World War British multiculturalism.
It’s an idea first mooted by Max Holloway, 62, whose late wife Alice was descended from that famous Windrush Generation. He’s part of a campaign team that includes shipwreck hunter David Mearns, maritime archaeologist Jessica Berry, and Patrick Vernon, another descendant of theWindrush generation.
Together they hope to raise enough money to fund the project through public donations.
“An anchor is the universal sign of hope,” Holloway says. “It celebrates strength, stability, permanence and belonging – values very much associated with the Windrush generation, their descendants and all migrants who bring rich cultural diversity to our shores.”
SPEARHEADING any future expedition will be David Mearns, head of a Sussex-based shipwreck recovery service called Blue Water Recoveries. He’s confident he has located the final resting place of the wreck to an area of 36 square nautical miles. During months of research, he studied the mayday messages sent out by the burning ship during her final hours, and the eye-witness reports of the various rescue vessels.
He’s certain she’s lying in international waters, north of Algeria, at the base of what’s known as the continental slope – a declining section of seabed dropping down from the continental shelf – where it flattens out into the western Mediterranean.
When it comes to locating deep-water wrecks, there are few as experienced as Mearns.
A marine scientist and sonar specialist, he has spent the past 30 years scouring the oceans for famous, and infamous, shipwrecks – mainly for historical reasons, but also in support of criminal or insurance investigations.
He claims a 90 per cent success rate and his discoveries include HMS Hood, the Royal Navy battlecruiser sunk by the German battleship Bismarck; HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran, opponents in a Second WorldWar sea battle off the coast ofWestern Australia; AHS Centaur, a Second World War hospital ship sunk by a Japanese submarine off the coast of Queensland; Esmeralda, a Portuguese carrack that sank off the coast of Oman in 1503; and MV Lucona, a motor vessel sabotaged in an insurance fraud. Mearns also locates sunken aircraft. In 2011, he helped pinpoint the final resting place of Air France Flight 447, which had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean two years previously. And last year he found the light aircraft in which Argentinian footballer Emiliano Sala perished at the bottom of the English Channel. Mearns’s profession requires an unusual mixture of skills.The lion’s share of his work is spent in dusty archives and libraries, poring over maritime records, distress calls, and eye-witness reports.
He analyses ocean currents, weather reports, and the positions, speeds and bearings of the ships prior to sinking.
Once he has narrowed down his search area, he hires his vessel, equipment and team of specialists. Key to any search are devices known as side-scan sonars or multi-beam echo sounders which emit sound and listen for the returning echoes.
As the search vessel cruises up and down the search area, these devices (called “towfishes”) are normally towed behind on the end of long cables. While the acoustics bounce up and back from the seabed, they build up a computer image of the underwater terrain and, hopefully, any shipwreck or debris field lying on it.
Working with complex, expensive machinery, miles out at sea, is never simple. In his autobiography, The Shipwreck Hunter, Mearns describes the potential problems: “The main culprits are rough weather and equipment failure. But over the course of my career I’ve had projects stopped dead in their tracks for a host of other unexpected reasons, including ships breaking down or catching fire, injuries to personnel requiring helicopter medevac, loss of sonar towfishes and ROVs [remotely operated vehicles], and in one instance literally running out of food.”
In his industry, he explains how he is either a total success or a total failure. “It’s basically an all-or-nothing proposition, where you either find what you are looking for or go home empty-handed. The risks and rewards are great and so are the emotions that you go through as a result.”
Not that Mearns anticipates too much trouble in his hunt for the Empire Windrush. “I’ve previously found the wrecks of two merchant vessels in that part of the Med at a similar depth, so I know what we’re dealing with on the actual sea bed,” he says.
He’s confident too that the stern anchor will still be intact, even 66 years later.
A piece of film footage he has studied, shot by an aircraft that circled the ailing vessel during its final moments, shows much of the