Built by Brunel, saved by Smith - the men who put ‘Great’ back into Britain
Former News defence correspondent TIM KING says the recent revelation in our Remember When pages that the SS Great Britain could have come to Portsmouth instead of Bristol is only one facet of her story. Had it not been for a young Hampshire man, Brunel’s
WHEN the dismasted shell of the SS Great Britain was borne like a wounded hero on a stretcher home to her Bristol birthplace 50 years ago in July, a great sigh of relief went up 8,000 miles away at the bottom of the world.
The news acted like a swig of rum on the tiny community frozen in their winter solitude by the icy blasts which flay the Falkland Islands at that time of year.
Nobody among those 2,122 isolated people charted her laborious haul back to the country she helped to global prosperity than 32-yearold John Smith, who still lives in the dependency’s Lilliputian capital Port Stanley.
For John had just completed a notable double for Hampshire. In short – Brunel built her, Smith saved her. And the two men were born in neighbouring seaports just 20 miles apart.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineering mastermind who designed the SS Great Britain as the world’s first iron screw steamship and propelled us to 19th century maritime supremacy, was born in Britain Street, Portsea, in 1806.
John Smith, a former Royal Marine, was born in Southampton in 1938 – the year after the once proud vessel ceased active service as a wool storage warehouse at Port Stanley and was ignominiously scuttled at nearby Sparrow Cove.
When she floated again after 33 years on April 8, 1970 it was John’s skill, resourcefulness and intimate knowledge of old ships that played a vital role in her salvage, as his proud parents, Mr and Mrs Walter Smith, told me at their home in Grantham Close, Hamble.
Disaster struck the 3,000-ton Great Britain as she ran the savage gauntlet of Cape Hor n on her 47th voyage in 1886. Like so many ships before and since, she fled for the Falklands where she was written off as a wreck.
She was bought by the Falkland Islands Company – a similar outfit to famous global traders like the East India Company and current owners of the Gosport Ferry as the Falkland Islands Holdings Group – who used her to store local wool until the fateful day when even that lowly service was ended.
In 1968, the chances of saving her soared when a team of divers from the Portsmouth-based ice patrol ship HMS Endurance declared her hull sound.
Appeals were launched and the nation’s ship lovers rallied. All looked well until an ominous crack in the starboard side began widening under the lash of winds which frequently shriek off the Beaufort Scale.
John, who was spares manager for the Falkland
SS Great Britain in Great Western Dockyard, Bristol where she was built.
Islands Company and was the local representative of the Great Britain Committee, checked the 320ft hull and found an
8in crack had just prised apart each half of the ship, leaving a 13in difference between the bow and ster n sections.
After one of the worst Falklands winters in 1969, it was unlikely she would survive another without splitting asunder. But John realised the most imminent danger lay with the 20-ton main mast which had tilted alarmingly and was poised to smash through the deck.
This would have made salvage impossible so, at great personal risk, John and local fisherman Mickey Clarke secured the four-ton, 106ft yard which had been swinging at a hazardous angle.
Then they hammered wedges round the base of the mast, believed to be the biggest fitted to any sailing ship, and ensured that the Great Britain would stay in one piece for several months.
It was the respite needed to enable the salvage company to reach the Falklands with their unique 2,667ton submersible pontoon in March 1970 and start the successful three-week refloating operation which preceded the epic last voyage back to Bristol where she was launched by Prince Albert in 1843, passing en route under another Brunel icon – the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
There are some 150 wrecks around the Falklands, and losing a ship is an everpresent reminder to the Kelpies, as the islanders are known, that the islands are an ever-open museum to the tragedy of the sea, one that cost nothing to build, yet was paid for dearly in lives and cargoes.
Ships which crawled mortally wounded from battle with The Horn lie like unburied skeletons, thrusting their ribs from ragged clefts where they were tossed into the cemetery beneath the Southern Cross.
John’s father, Walter Smith, told me: “He always had his eyes over the horizon. He will never put up
with the pace of living here for long.”
After leaving school, he had jobs as a sailmaker’s apprentice and yacht’s crew before National Service with the Royal Marines.
Afterwards, he signed on with the survey ship Shackleton, which took him to the South Atlantic. He met his wife, Ileen, in Port Stanley where they were married on Trafalgar Day, October 21, 1961. They had three children.
Walter Smith said that despite their remoteness, they enjoyed a high standard of living in the Falklands where crime is almost non-existent and the islanders are fiercely loyal to the Crown.
During the 1968 showdown with Argentina, John’s creative skills earned him the readership of millions when he wrote two news features which were splashed across the Daily Express and he became the paper’s ‘man in the Falklands’.
Aided by a natural ability to sketch and illustrate, he built a reputation as an author and authority. His parents lent me a copy of his first book ‘Condemned at Stanley’, the only accurate history of wrecks lying in the port itself – a fascinating story illuminated with drawings, which attracted the attention of an
American publisher.
And when Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982, John kept a detailed diary which was later published as ‘74 Days: An Islander’s Diary’.
I recently contacted
John, now aged 82, but he has arthritis so severely in his fingers he could barely type a reply. However, he did mention that he often visited his grandmother in her cottage in Old Turnpike,
Fareham during school holidays and he used to fish in the River Wallington.
He said: “It does bring back some memories... elegant doorways at the lower end of High Street, a short cut called Lysses Alley, The Delme Arms, the Burstons’ pig and poultry farm. We always thought their daughter, Pamela, was rather posh.”
He remembered Corbett’s Café in West Street, a cinema opposite the bus station (there were two, The Savoy and The Embassy) and the shop next door where they sold Turkish cigarettes.
History will record Brunel’s magnum opus as a permanent reminder of his engineering genius, but it is very much the legacy of John Smith that sits in restored splendour in Bristol’s Great Western Dockyard where she was built.