The fate of Irish Lightships

Anyone got knowledge of the SS Isolda?

Theres some good info on a bbc page (WW2 Peoples war) but then that's about all I can find. There's also a PDF "A hell of an experience" by Richard Butler on the medal society of Ireland but there's a pay wall.

I particularly want to know is what the Germans had to say about it.

Well, no ideas from anyone yet. I have found another candidate for securing the ‘rail-rope’. It is normally used for holding soil pipes (Photo 1261).
I doubt if it will take the load if someone falls against the rail, so it may be necessary to install another taught wire just below the rope (Photo 1262), although I am hoping that one of you will come up with a better solution!
Meanwhile, Simon has not been idle. He has acquired a trailer-full of oil-based paint (Photo 1263) which, if nothing else, can be used as undercoat all over the ship!
David

Simon is here for Christmas, so we have been able to talk through things (many things!) about the ship. I have done a mock-up of the stanchions for him (Photo 1281) and, having seen the sample bracket, Simon is happy that they will do the job. When painted with the same dark paint as the bulwark and stanchions, the brackets will ‘disappear’.
Looking forward to Spring, Simon is determined to get going below deck. Ideally it will all be de-rusted and spray-sealed by the time Summer arrives.
So now, for 2015 at least, it’s goodbye from Santa Claus me (I did not have access to a fancy dress shop) …..(Phot 1282) and it’s goodbye from him (he didn’t need a fancy dress shop!).(Photo 1283)


David

Hi DavidGD, Just read your blog, pretty impressive the restoration you two have carried out.

In my last post I forgot to mention the 1916 Easter Rising episode when Cormorant was requisitioned by the Royal Navy on 1 May to house prisoners and handed back on 3 May. The Kingstown Naval Base Commander was Capt H.F. Aplin RN and the Irish Lights Superintendent was F.R.Foot. I have copies of the correspondence between Mr Foot and Capt Aplin. I also have a copy of the entry in Capt Aplin’s service record showing he was brought out of retirement and posted to Kingstown on 28 Dec 1915.
I also chose the wrong source for the details on the Lady Dixon’s foray into Pirate Radio. In 1961 John Thompson of Slough set up a company called “The Voice of Slough Ltd” which aimed to set up a commercial radio station in an ex-fishing boat. Arnold Swanson (a Canadian) provided finance, but subsequently left the project when it ran into difficulties and set up his own project GBOK (Great Britain OK). He bought the Lady Dixon to house the station, but it is not clear from whom.



For some time now Simon has been flying a skull & crossbones flag on the ship. For Christmas I bought him something more appropriate. After all, she is registered as an historic vessel with National Historic Ships UK. From them I obtained a ‘Defaced Ensign’, which is a normal red ensign with their logo added (Photo 1301). Such defacement sounds illegal but it is approved and even comes with a certificate.
You may remember a little puzzle I was investigating back in late August last year. Two smart doors in a photograph sent to me by Tony Lane (Photo 1302), turned out to be elaborate windows and the question was where they were/are located on the ship. The photo was taken by him in 2002.
I tried to match the walkway structure visible through the right hand window, but even with an on the spot inspection in October, I could not find anything similar. The clear view across to that blue boat should have given me a clue, as there has long been a boat moored opposite Simon on the other side of the walkway, which would obstruct the view. Well recently I have been toying with the idea of writing a proper history of Cormorant, putting things in chronological order, with appropriate photos. Whilst putting some of these photos into a special file, I came across one taken in 1997, when she first arrived at Hoo (Photo 1303). At that time she was moored right at the end of the walkway, at least a ship’s length from her current mooring. As you can see, there was nothing moored next to her and there would have been a clear view across the marina. More significantly the structure of the walkway at this point is so similar to that seen through the window, that I am sure it is the same (Photo 1304).
The windows therefore must be on the port side and as there are no triangular ceiling fillets in the kitchen and there are two in the photo, the windows must be the ones in the living room/ salon/ wardroom. They are now plain double glazed modern windows unfortunately.
Not an earth shattering discovery, but somehow a satisfying little bit of detective work!
David

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/01/20/the-little-lightship-with-a-big-job/

I think Simon and I now agree that the air driven nail chisel hammer is not the correct tool for removing all the peeling paint and loose rust down below. At a rough estimate there is about 1700 sq ft to tackle (Photo 1331) and the chisel method is too slow and too exhausting. The photo shows only the rear 25% of the lower deck area!
So, we are looking at DIY blasting and we have come across a ‘28 Gallon Abrasive Sand Blaster with Built in Vacuum’ (Photo 1332). The blurb states that it not only blasts, but it vacuums up the debris and even sorts the crud from the abrasive material. It sounds good, but I wonder. If any of my readers have any experience of such machines, or can advise on other perhaps more suitable models, please get in touch.
David

Blast it! I’m not swearing, I’m just identifying the problem. We have moved forward a little in that there seems to be little doubt that the best way to remove the peeling paint and loose rust down below, is to wet blast it. For those of you who have not come across this method, crushed glass is mixed with water and the slurry is propelled against the surface to be cleaned. On impact the glass breaks up further and is carried away, with the paint and rust particles, by the water. There is no need to wear a full breathing outfit as you have to do with dry blasting – a face mask will do. On the ship the used slurry/paint/rust mixture will find its way into the bilges. The bilge pump will have to put in some overtime, but at least there will be no sweeping and shovelling.
If that sounds too good to be true, it is! The blasting needs a compressor delivering over 150 cfm, which is far more than my DIY compressor can manage (14cfm). This job needs a trailer mounted compressor such as you see being used when the council digs up the road with pneumatic drills. Getting one of those out to the ship along the narrow walkway (Photo 1351) is out of the question. Does anyone know of a boat mounted compressor?
The obvious way to get round this problem would be to get the ship into a dry dock where the compressor trailer could come alongside. While it is in the dock we could apply some TLC the hull. There is a dry dock about 7 miles upstream from Simon, but the economics are daunting. In addition to the tug fees there and back, it costs about £400 to enter the dock, £400 a week while it’s in there and £400 to get out again and that’s before any work is done!! Does anyone know of an historic ship preservation fund?
David

Oh dear. That which we were all dreading has come to pass. Ena has departed to the ship’s graveyard (Photo 1371). Old age and neglect have ruined a once proud vessel and with nobody willing to come to the rescue, she has been doomed for some time. It is awful to think that she was the subject of an expensive TV restoration within the last decade and was up for sale more recently for £85,000. The graveyard and a gradual disintegration is her future, surrounded by the other wrecks on the shore of the Medway Estuary (Photo 1372 and 1373). You can see where she was patched up to keep enough water out for long enough to dump her.
On a more cheerful note, I have written to eight possible grant makers, just to see whether this project fits their ‘philanthropic profile’. If there are any positive responses I will agree with Simon a list of work packages. I do not think that we will be fortunate enough to find a single donor who will take on the bulk of the project, so there will have to be a series of applications, tailored to each donor. Notice the optimist belief that there will be multiple donors! The priority order will need some thought, but dry docking and hull maintenance must be high on the list. Wet blasting the inner hull below deck will be another package and Simon is in contact with a boatyard in Chatham who reckon there will be no problem doing the blasting 150 yards from shore. The spray insulation down below is another package. Fingers crossed.
Mervyn Hagger has come up with another historical snippet. On October 10, 1961 the 'Voice of Slough' project was reported by a newspaper account. However, by December 1961, Arnold Swanson moved in on the Voice of Slough and then started his own GBOK project (on cormorant/Lady Dixon) which was announced in the Southend Standard on 15th February 1962. This stated that the station would be broadcasting music, features and advertising 24 hours a day from a former lightship anchored near The Nore - the same location as had been planned for the Voice of Slough's broadcasting vessel, starting on 28th February 1962. When GBOK was raided the original Voice of Slough re-emerged under the new name of GBLN. While the GBOK project did not succeed, Andrew N. Thomas, top ex-BBC transmitter engineer had been behind the engineering side.
David

STOP PRESS: Our first funder response arrived today – positive but not until next year.

Lots of tit-bits lately concerning the Cormorant’s, or as she was by then, the Lady Dixon’s short-lived venture into pirate radio. These items come from Mervyn Hagger, Chris Edwards and their colleagues, who are working very hard to unearth the true story of the pirate radio era. Apparently much of what is commonly accepted as the truth is actually far from it. The items include reports from local newspapers and other publications. From the WPN & Advertisers’ Review, 16 Feb 1962:-

NEW “PIRATE” RADIO STATION PROMOTERS REVEAL THEIR PLANS
Radio Station GBOK – located in international waters at the Nore in the Thames Estuary – is to start 24-hour broadcasting to an area within a 150-mile radius of the transmitter on February 28th.
The company is headed by 56-year-old Canadian-born Arnold Swanson, who was originally technical adviser to “Voice of Slough”, a similar radio station planned by 42-year-old John Thompson, ex-journalist and Canadian broadcaster, He has now shelved his own plans to concentrate with Mr Swanson on GBOK.
GBOK will be situated on a Pilot Station and Lightship which will perform all the normal functions and duties of a lightship to sea traffic.

That ‘Pilot Station and Lightship’ was the Lady Dixon and, as we know, she never made it. I do wonder how she was going to ‘perform all the normal functions and duties of a lightship to sea traffic’ when her main mast, lantern and all heavy equipment were due to be removed as part of her preparation. Chris has sent me a photo from the National Archives of Lady Dixon waiting at the dockside for that conversion, (Photo 1391) which is the first photo I have come across of the ship between her working in Belfast Lough in 1957 and that 1991 photo of her painted bright red at Sittingbourne. She still has PILOT painted on her sides and sits low in the water, indicating that not only is the lantern still there but all the heavy machinery and anchor chains are down below. Thank you Chris (and the National Archives).
Just after receiving that photo, I learned of a photo of the Lady Dixon, which was published in the Times newspaper on 10th March 1962, just before she got stuck in the Pitsea mud. It cost me £33 to buy a copy and it should be here soon, but I will not be sharing it with you as they want another £75 to waive the copyright. Strange that it should cost anything to share a photograph of something you actually own!
George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces team has contacted Simon to ask whether he wants his project to appear on the program. Simon is already two years into the project and will probably be still going in another two years, so it is likely to be too long a timespan for television.
Finally, Simon has been advised by an experienced ‘wet-blaster’ that he would be better off getting a small team of labourers in for a week to strip the below-deck area by hand, rather than any sort of blasting. He would have to take a week off from his wallpapering business to supervise, but any lost revenue would probably be off-set by the difference in costs between manual scraping and wet-blasting.
David

Chapter 141 - 26 March 2016
While I struggle with the Byzantine machinations of Swanson/Thompson during the 1962 GBOK period, when they were trying to make Lady Dixon into a pirate radio station, Simon has been making great strides cleaning up below deck (Photo 1411). He has abandoned the air-driven nail gun and settled for a drill-driven wire brush. The result is a clean, but not rust-free surface, which is all that is required for the application of foam insulation. The drill is heavy and it is very arm-aching work (as was the nail gun).
It also produces a lot of dust and Simon has rigged up a ‘curtain’ to keep the dust from drifting up the spiral staircase into the kitchen. The curtain is one of several side panels from a marquee which he acquired for free some time ago and has been keeping just in case they proved useful. They have! (Photo 1412) Very sensibly he is also wearing a face mask, but from time to time he has to take a break and let the dust settle so that he can see!!
When he reached the stern post, where for a long time he has had a large sheet of plastic in place to catch the condensation drips (no longer required now that the deck is insulated), he was very disconcerted to find a very damp area where the two transoms at deck level came together. They were joined by a large ‘nose piece’ of what was once solid oak, but now was black, rotten, smelly wood. To investigate further he levered at this block to remove it, but stopped when water oozed out from beneath. This being below water level, he paused for thought and sought advice. He had a very uneasy night and had dreams about being trapped in a room rapidly filling with water!
The next day, with a fellow boat owner, he waited until the tide was out and the ship safely settled on the mud, then levered out that block. Yes there was water trapped below it, but cleaning and drying out the cavity showed that there was no obvious ‘hole’ in the hull. It seems that, in the two years since Simon bought the ship and put the plastic sheet there, all the condensation had run off and gathered in that area from whence there was no escape. We do not think the block rotted that quickly, but being bathed in water must have added to existing damage and created that worrying impression that there was a leak beneath.
Having eased his mind on that area, Simon then worried about more dampness nearby on the port quarter, which could not be blamed on the plastic sheet. Investigating the underneath of the upper deck, he found that where the old frame met the new steel plating, there was a cirular hole about 5 inches in diameter. It was plugged and had not been noticed when the steel plating was done. Taking out the crumbling plug revealed the underneath of the upper deck insulating sheets and the position was right up against the port gunwhale. (Photo 1414) A bucket is there to catch the water – evidence.
As the gunwhale has crumbled with rot in places and ‘repaired’ with cement, we guess that rain water gets through voids in the wood/concrete mixture, into the area between the deck plating and the insulation/ roofing felt layer. Some of this (most we hope!) escapes down the mystery hole. Due to the run of the iron ribs, the water has not contributed to the pool where the transoms meet, but wets the sides and the deck where it runs down into the bilges.
The leaky area of the gunwhale must be traced and sealed of course, but why is there a circular hole in the deck? I thought at first it was a deck light, but there were none in that area of the deck. There is a clue down below. Exactly below the deck hole is a concrete block set rather awkwardly into the ribs (Photo 1415) and it has a hole in it which is the same size as the deck hole. So something like a long, circular pole has been added to the structure at some stage, but there is no trace of any likely pole in the 1943 plans or any of the photographs of the ship over the years. Any ideas anyone?
David

You learn something new every day. I thought that ‘caulking’ a ship was just stuffing tarred rope into the cracks between boards. It’s a lot more complicated than that! To start with you have to remove what is left of the old stuff and that involves running an angle grinder along the gaps plus a bit of sanding. Then, to stop gaps closing up and boards perhaps shifting, pegs are driven into the gaps at intervals (Photo 1431). Hessian rope is twisted into a series of ‘figure of eight’ and then forced into the gaps.
Red lead paint is applied because putty comes next and the paint stops the hessian rope sucking the oil out of the putty (Photo 1432). The whole lot is then covered with tar-soaked hessian sheet which protects the copper plating (the flattened domestic hot water tanks!).
Then the large bolts which hold everything together have to be supplemented, or even replaced (some have crumbled to dust).
Another large vessel has been brought into the dry dock and is of great interest to Simon because it is having its insides coated with the foam insulation which Simon wants to use on his ship. It certainly transforms the look of old structures and walls (Photo 1433). Simon has of course made contact.
Meanwhile I am chasing details of Lady Dixon’s brief career as a pirate radio ship. In particular I am trying, through contacts in N Ireland and the USA, to find out who bought her from G.A. Lee and Co of Belfast in 1961 and how she ended up in the Thames Estuary belonging to John Thompson/Arnold Swanson. Then, when they abandoned the enterprise, who bought her and where she went. She was reported as being owned at some stage by Peter Horlock and moored at Mistley on the River Orwell in England. Actually, Mistley is on the River Stour, not the Orwell, which does not help my investigation! Does anyone know Mr Horlock?
David

As part of my research into the 1961/62 period of the lightship’s life – the period when she nearly became the first pirate radio ship in the UK, I have been trying to discover who brought her over from Belfast. The information I have is that at some stage she was owned by Peter Horlock and moored at Mistley on the River Orwell. Well that’s a bad start as Mistley is on the River Stour, not the Orwell. I wrote to the only Peter Horlock I could find in the area, but have had no response.
In the early 1990s the ship was owned by Graham Reeve and moored at Milton Creek, near Sittingbourne. This is credible as we have photos of her moored there – one showing her painted bright red (Photo 1451) and one from a Google aerial photo taken in 1991 (Photo 1452). Now I found seven Graham Reeves in the area and I wrote to all of them! I have had only one reply and although the chap is very interested, he is not THE Graham Reeves.
Next came Terry J Middleton who took the ship to its current mooring at Hoo. He lived on the ship for a while and later on another vessel, Scorpio at the same Marina. His last known address is in Sevenoaks, but when I sent a letter there, it was returned ‘gone away’.
So my fellow sleuths in the South East of England, can you find any of these gentlemen living in your area? Peter Horlock would really be a prize as he might have bought the ship from the GBOK people and that might lead to who bought the ship from G.A. Lee Ltd of Belfast.
Meanwhile Simon popped over to Chatham to see how LV16 is getting on. Readers will remember the big hole in the stern which had been made by gouging out rotten timbers. Repairs are in hand, but instead of felling an ancient oak and employing woodcarvers at 3p a day, a rather more modern technique is being used (Photo 1453).
The planks are caulked and the bolt holes sealed (Photo 1454) and then, before the copper plating is applied, Hessian and tar seal the whole thing in (Photo 1455).
I think Simon is hoping that all this will not be necessary when it’s his turn to put his ship into dry-dock!!
David