The following is an edited version of Peter Elphick's monograph, Frank Carr: Ship Saver, published by the World Ship Trust in 1996. Copies of the original, illustrated, may be obtained by writing to the Trust, 202 Lambeth Road, London, SE1 7JW, England, or via e-mail communication on the homepage.
It is not possible to name the first person responsible for the first ever saving, or attempt at saving, an old ship for the benefit of history.
The Royal Barge of Cheops is a candidate for the world's oldest preserved ship, but the man responsible for its entombment in 2500 BC never meant it to be seen again by mortal man. After its burial close to the Great Pyramid it lay undiscovered for over 4000 years.
Queen Elizabeth I of England might qualify as an early ship-saver. It was she who ordered Drake's Golden Hind to be put on public display in a dock at Deptford on the Thames. This was the first English ship to circumnavigate the globe, a voyage from which it returned loaded to the gunwales with Spanish gold. Elizabeth almost certainly considered the treasure more important than the circumnavigation, but anyway, she wanted her people to view the artifact involved. However, little if any effort was made to preserve the vessel, for not too many years later a French courtier noted that her weather-bleached frames looked much like the carcass of a beached whale.
In May 1621 the Pilgrim Father's Mayflower arrived back in England after her historic voyage, and exactly three years later a "decree of appraisement" was issued on the ship which was by then in ruins. In consequence she was broken up, and there is a tradition that many of her timbers were used in the construction of a barn at Jordans, near Chalfont St. Giles in Buckinghamshire, a Quaker settlement. (Jordan's Barn still stands.) Even if this tradition is true, it is unlikely that the timbers were saved as part of a deliberate policy to preserve as much as possible of the ship. Her historical importance would not have been appreciated at that time, and old ship timbers had been a favourite house-building material in England since long before that; many of the 16th century dwellings in the village of Dorney, near Eton, contain timbers that clearly were once parts of ships.
Just as it is not possible to name the first ship-saver, it is impossible to name the first person to protest the destruction of a famous ship. Perhaps the most famous of such protests, however, was that made in 1839 when the British painter J.M.T. Turner exhibited his "The Fighting Temeraire;" this was his personal criticism of the decision to sell to ship-breakers at Rotherhite this survivor of Nelson's fleet at Trafalgar. It had been the Temeraire (Captain Eliab Harvey) who dashed to Nelsons assistance during the battle.
The above examples serve to illustrate a time-honoured acknowledgement of the importance of floating artifacts at various stages of world history, but they do not help us to identify the first person involved in ship-saving.
It is possible, however, to name the man who since the end of World War Two has done more for the world's ship preservation scene than any other. That man is Frank Carr. At the top of the list of his many achievements in this field, are the roles he played in saving Cutty Sark and in the preservation of HMS Victory, arguably the two most famous of the world's preserved historic ships.
Frank George Griffith Carr was born in
Cambridge on 23rd April 1903. He was the eldest son of
Frank Carr MA, LL.D., and Agnes Todd. His was a close-knit family,
full of passionately followed hobbies and interests and good talk.
If his boyhood in the university town together with his family background did not engender a profound sense of history in young Frank, then it is likely that his school did. He was educated at Perse, founded in 1615, the year the English Merchant Adventurers were granted the monopoly of the export cloth trade. Perse is one of the oldest schools of the British public school system, a system that would be called "private" in most other countries.
Contemporary with his school days Frank learned to sail. In fact, in his book A Yacthsman's Log published in 1935, he tells us that his nautical career began in his bath. Certainly, he fell in love with the sea and with sail at a very early age. At ten he became fascinated by Thames and Medway spritsail barges when he saw some of them in the small drying-out harbour of Margate, Kent. The very first entry in his first diary, that for 1914, reads: "January 1st - went round the harbour."
He was fifteen when he acquired his own skiff-dinghy called Maud. In her and later in St. Hilda, he explored the estuaries, broads and fens of East Anglia. Later he bought the 6-ton Lily, a craft large enough to be taken out into the North Sea.
Frank went on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and there became President of the Law Society and of the National Union of Students. In 1926, he gained his BA and became Captain of Boats. Two years later he gained his LL.B.
While at Trinity hall he changed the Lily's name to Quickstep II, after Quickstep I, a boat owned by his grandfather. Now, any seaman, whether professional or amateur, will tell you that it is unlucky to change a vessel's name, especially when something nasty has happened to the previous holder of then new name. In this case his grandfather's boat had been run down and sunk off Gravesend. The portents were not good, and so it proved to be. Six months after the name-change, Quickstep II was driven under the counter of a Norwegian trampsteamer called Bogela after an accumulation of errors which Frank freely admitted were entirely his own. His father and younger brother who had been crewing for him, clambered up a Jacob's ladder lowered down by the tramp's crew. So ashamed was Frank, that at first he wanted to stay with his boat and try to get her clear of the steamer's propeller. His father managed to dissuade him from this course of action. "Don't be a fool, come up!" he called down. "I'll buy you another boat, I can't buy another son."
True to his word, Carr senior later bought Frank an ex-Bristol Channel pilot cutter called Cariad, and this time the name was left alone. It was in the early years of sailing this craft that Frank's dream of emulating Captain Slocum and sailing round the world took hold.
Frank's first trip in Cariad took place in 1926, his last year at Cambridge and the year of the General Strike in Britain. Quite extraordinarily, it was chartered to carry a cargo of potatoes from Portsmouth along the coast to Bournemouth. (It must be assumed that his craft, and perhaps others, was used as a means of cargo transportation as it was unaffected by the strike.) In fact, the strike had ended by the time he delivered his cargo, but the unusual weight aboard the craft had done her no good at all. However, with its seams re-caulked, Frank enjoyed many later cruises in Cariad while he studied law.
It was during this period that he met Ruth Burkitt who became his sailing companion and in 1932, his wife. Altogether he sailed Cariad over 36,000 nautical miles, sometimes alone, often with Ruth, and sometimes with good friends.
In 1927, in a display of thoroughness that was typical of him, he studied at the London County Council School of navigation and the nearby Signalling School, and passed the Board of Trade Yacht Master's examination. For part of the time during his studies he billeted himself at the Marine Officers' Hostel in Limehouse run by the British and Foreign Sailors' Society, and no doubt came into contact there with professional seamen. To make doubly sure of passing he shipped out for a fortnight aboard Phoenicia, an East Coast barge. They were surely a tough two weeks, but he thoroughly enjoyed them. In 1984 he was to write that those weeks "consolidated my enthusiasm for these splendid craft and the no less splendid men who sailed them."
The first money he ever earned was as temporary mate of a Thames spritsail barge called Davenport under Captain Tommy Strange. He joined her at Pin Mill on the River Orwell and made a voyage to Antwerp with a cargo of sheep dip; bringing back bog ore for the Gas Works at Ipswich. The voyage took five weeks and his wage was one pound a week "all found." It was, he said, "Youthful glorious adventure, and invaluable training in fore-and-aft seamanship." Throughout his life it gave him no small pleasure that the bargemen honoured him with their personal friendship.
In 1929 he was appointed Assistant Librarian at the House of Lords, a post he was to hold until 1947 except for a break for his war service years.
Gradually the dream of circumnavigation faded, but, as Frank's good friend Hammond Innes has written:
It was during these pre-war days that Frank wrote four of his six books. Sailing Barges, which became a minor classic, was published in 1931, and Vanishing Craft in 1934. A Yachtsman's Log appeared in 1935, followed a year later by The Yachtsman's England.
In Sailing Barges, the definitive work on British East Coast barges, he wrote a marvelously descriptive but brilliantly underplayed passage that could have been written only by a man who had experienced the tough conditions aboard such a barge at first hand.
Anyone who has sailed barge or wherry and has experienced the job of raising and lowering "all her gear" as quickly as possible, will know of the heavy work involved.
In 1938 Frank Carr helped create the Royal Naval Volunteer Sailing Association, and during WW2 served in the Navy, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander RNVR.
He had been back in his job in the House of Lords Library for only two years when, in 1947, Sir Geoffrey Callender, Director of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, died. Viscount Stanhope, Chairman of Trustees, invited Frank to apply for the post and his appointment was duly authorised by Prime Minister Clement Attlee.
In 1947 the Museum was in a sorry state. Created in 1934, it had opened its doors in 1937 only to close them again when war broke out two years later. During the war years the building was taken over by the Admiralty and its collections scattered nationwide for safe-keeping.
So to Frank Carr fell the task of virtually creating the Museum from scratch. In the almost twenty years he was in charge, and with at first only the smallest of staffs to help him - when he took over there was a staff of 33 and a budget of less than �21,000 a year - he laid the foundations of what has become the finest maritime museum in the world, and the foremost archive for maritime scholars. It was in his time that the Old Royal Observatory became part of the Museum.
As with anyone of heartfelt convictions at the head of a public organization, Frank made a few enemies on the way. He fought hard against a parsimonious Treasury for necessary funding; he was impatient of red tape and disliked bureaucracy. But to balance that grew a fund of goodwill from the many friends he made in Britain and worldwide.
Concomitant with his museum work there grew in Frank a belief that there was need for some old sailing ships to be preserved for posterity. "The men who built sailing ships put more than wood and iron into them," he once wrote. "They put their spirit into them. The ship itself is the thing. No model or photography can ever so well convey the atmosphere and spirit of an age that is gone. This is history!"
Through the many societies and trusts on which he was represented, and the medium of the many papers and letters he wrote, and through his boundless enthusiasm, he sought to awaken interest in saving parts of the maritime heritage. He was a central figure on the Victory Advisory Technical Committee from 1948 (until 1976) by whose efforts the funds were raised to preserve Nelson's flagship.
"Operation Mainsail" by Cedric Maggs MA FRSA
The scuttling of HMS Impacable, 2nd December 1949
In 1949 came a traumatic experience for Frank Carr when he witnessed the scuttling of HMS Implacable off Spithead after he and others had tried to save her. "I was there," he said, "and I wept."
When the next famous ship came up for scrapping, Frank was resolved not to fail. The ship was the clipper Cutty Sark, and fail he did not. During a period when Britain was striving to get over the effects of six years of total war, with money in short supply even for building houses on bombed-out sites, he drew upon the goodwill he had built up over the years and, with a mixture of audacity, hard work, and resourcefulness, succeeded. Amongst his distinguished backers was HRH Prince Philip, who made an appeal for contributions to save the ship. In 1957 the ship, safely in her berth in a specially built drydock beside the Thames, and hard by the Museum at Greenwich, was opened to the public by Her Majesty the Queen.
H.H. Kynett, founding chairman of Mystic Seaport in the United States, said of this achievement of Frank Carr's, "this campaign for the preservation of the Cutty Sark had yielded the finest result in maintaining any old ship in existence."
It was Kynett's Mystic Seaport concept that inspired in Frank the idea of setting up the National Maritime Trust in Britain, a sort of National Trust for ships. "The germ of the idea which took root in my mind and grew into a scheme for a British National Maritime Trust,' he said, 'had come from the United States, where the successful establishment of Mystic Seaport and the widespread interest in ship preservation provided me with both the inspiration and the spur to do more about our own maritime heritage."
He went on to say, "Early in 1960, rather less than three years after Cutty Sark had been opened to the public . . . a feeling began to form in my mind that we in Great Britain were still not doing anything like enough to preserve . . . the ships and fishing craft and other relics of our maritime heritage . . . Although we had a number of preservation organizations, like the Cutty Sark Society for larger ships and the Norfolk Wherry Trust for smaller craft, there was no co-operation between them. And none . . . was powerful enough on its own to command the "big guns" in public life who would be essential if sufficient funds were to be raised to finance the expensive task of ship preservation." Frank began to actively campaign for the formation of such a body.
Meanwhile, in 1966, the Trustees of the National Maritime Museum dismissed Frank Carr from his post as Director, two years before he was due to retire. No one seems to know the full circumstances behind this highly controversial decision, but it seems that the Trustees wanted a change of course. This, as Hammond Innes has noted, was a poor return for years of dedicated service. There were protests about the decision in the House of Commons, and Earl Attlee, who had appointed Frank, pressed the matter with the Government of the day. It was to no avail; the decision stood. Frank had earlier put forward the name of the person who should succeed him, Dr. Basil Greenhill, who in fact got the job.
Frank's energy and enthusiasm carried him through the trauma of that event. In this no doubt he was helped by HM the Queen conferring upon him the honour of Companion of the Bath in 1967. (He was made CBE in 1954.) He went on to other things, and in 1970 oversaw the establishment of the National Maritime Trust in Britain.
He had a continuing interest in the education and welfare of seamen and became a member of the Commission of the Seafarers' Education Service and a Vice-President of The Marine Society.
At one time or another, over and above the projects already mentioned, Frank played an active (often a founding) role in the Foudroyant Trust, The Norfolk Wherry Trust, the Humber Keel Trust, the Thames Barge Preservation Society, the Exeter Maritime Museum, the HMS Unicorn Preservation Society, and the Dolphin Sailing Barge Museum.
Another organisation with which Frank had close contacts was the Thames Barge Sailing Club. Elizabeth Wood, who assisted Frank on a revision of Sailing Barges, wrote in 1995, "The Club was founded in 1948, and in later years Frank often repeated the story of how Hugh Vaudrey had burst into his office at the National Maritime Museum and announced that they were founding the Club and that Frank was to be its first Commodore . . . it was as a result of that contact that the Club was able to use the Museum as its postal address, a link retained to this day, and our AGM's too, continue to be held there." On top of this Frank arranged for the Club to receive half the royalties of the new edition of Sailing Barges, and on his death the copyright was to pass to the Club along with all royalties.
As if all that was not enough, Frank held Vice-Presidencies of the Society for Nautical Research, the International Sailing Craft Association, and Mariners International. From 1978 he was International Chairman of the Ship Trust Committee, New York. He also became President of Thames Barge Sailing Club and the Thames Ship-lovers and Ship Model Society. His deep awareness of the need to interest youth in the sea was shown by his active role in the Ocean Youth Club.
In a letter published in "Sea History" in the fall of 1977, Commodore H.J.E. Van Der Kop, Royal Netherlands Navy, paid generous tribute to Frank. "We now have," he said, "a Netherlands Maritime Trust thanks to Frank Carr, who warmed us up for it in a radiant address . . . here in April 1976."
On December 29th 1979, at an age when vision and dedication has largely been lost in most men, Frank founded and directed a completely new organisation, the World Ship Trust. 'This may yet become the most widely known monument to his enthusiasm for old ships and his urgent desire to preserve some of the world's maritime heritage,' wrote Hammond Innes in 1991.
The Trust is a charity set up with the following objective:
The Trust, under Frank Carr, thus took upon itself the task of advancing to a word public the importance of preserving what Peter Stanford, President of the National Maritime Historical Society of America, has termed "transcendent ships;" that is, ships that from either an international or national point of view, based on special historic factors, are deserving of being saved.
At this point it may be as well to dwell for a while upon Frank Carr's objective for the World Ship Trust, for it is sometimes thought that the Trust was founded to back the preservation of any historic ship anywhere and irrespective of its condition. The fact that Frank chose for the Trust's logo a picture of the stern of Implacable whose demise he had so lamented in 1949, and that the Trust's motto is "Implacable, never again," has been taken to imply that he thought the ship should not have been disposed of at the time, and that the destruction of any old ship smacks of iconoclasm.
That is far from being the case. Implacable's condition in 1949 warranted no other end, and Frank was on the committee which finally reported unanimously "against the proposal for reconditioning and placing the ship in a permanent berth."
The Implacable Committee was a panel of experts which sat regularly in 1948, and up to the ship's scuttling in 1949. The two key players on it were Frank Carr and Colonel Harold Wylie.
The committee members were most assiduous in their search for ways to save Implacable, a 74, and the only survivor from the Battle of Trafalgar besides Victory herself. The ship had international connections, for as the Duguay-Trouin she had fought on the French side.
The minutes of the committee trace a growing realisation amongst its members that Implacable's plight was hopeless. The Foreman of Portsmouth Dockyard reported, "I do not consider the vessel to be repairable." He went on to describe some of the ship's timbers as "a mass of decayed wood which can be pulled apart by hand." A surveyor member of the committee reported, "I am quite convinced that the whole structure above the waterline would need rebuilding with new material." In a letter to the Portsmouth Evening News, Harold Wylie wrote of a "complete reconstruction from the waterline upwards." The estimated cost of the work required was �250,000 (over �3M at today's prices), a vast sum unavailable at that time for that purpose; and that was without any future maintenance finance, that rock upon which so many ship preservation projects have met their ends.
It is clear, therefore, that Frank Carr was well aware that the ship could not be saved, but that did not prevent him being deeply saddened by its scuttling. When he coined the phrase "Implacable, never again," he was saying that never again must a transcendent vessel such as she, be permitted to reach a state where destruction becomes the only option.
Unfortunately, the Trust's logo and motto and the demise of the ship which they highlight, has become a symbol for unthinking maritime philistinism, which the event and the deliberations leading up to it, demonstrably were not. As Colin White of the Royal Naval Museum at Portsmouth, has pointed out, the Implacable story provides us rather, with a dramatic demonstration of the costs involved in ship preservation, even before any consideration is given to future on-going finance, that requisite for proper maintenance.
No one knew this better than Frank Carr; over the years he saw many ship-saving projects come to grief under the piercing examination of persons expert in forward accounting. No one knew better than he that the funds available for ship preservation are finite and must be rationed. (On the other hand, no one knew better than Frank that if an enthusiast or a group of enthusiasts, decide for reasons of their own to support with their own time and money, the saving of a ship which they find of particular interest even though it may not appear on many people's lists of transcendent vessels, then it ill behooves anyone to dissuade them from their aim. Such dissuasion is scarcely likely to increase the funding for other vessels.)
The World Ship Trust is now in its eighteenth year [1996], and well on its way to achieving some of the aims Frank Carr had in mind for it. Members receive the World Ship Review three times a year, it holds an annual lunch, and had co-sponsored several conferences on ship and ship preservation matters.
But its two most significant achievements have been the publication of Norman Brouwer's International Register of Historic Ships and its Maritime Heritage Award to historic ships. The first is the only comprehensive list of preserved vessels [and significant remnants of vessels] worldwide, and a new edition of it appeared in 1993. [The third edition, revised and updated, is due in 1999.] The second is the most prestigious award available to historic ships, and one measure of its prestige is that the awards are almost always presented on the Trust's behalf by Heads of State. In 1992, after presenting one of the awards, HM King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, graciously agreed to become the Trust's Patron. [A full list of the awards presented to date is found elsewhere on this homepage.]
The Trust has also launched a new award for personal achievement in the ship preservation field.
In the same year that saw the birth of the World Ship Trust, Frank co-authored The Medley of Mast and Sail. In 1977 he produced a work on the marine water-colourist, Leslie Wilcox.
In 1985, Frank was interviewed by Michael Badham who subsequently wrote an article about him for "Sea History," autumn 1988. It gives us a general idea of Frank's ship preservation philosophy.
When asked, in view of the fact that the original oak in parts of Victory's hull was being replaced by longer lasting Borneo teak, what he thought of this technique, Frank replied that in nearly every case of ship preservation it is necessary to combine modern and traditional techniques and materials. He asked, did it really matter if what the visitor sees is "real," so long as he gets a general feel and view of how she once was? "There are those who are generally against ship preservation," he said, "unless the ships are preserved exactly as they were. They're against Cutty Sark being fitted out for visitors (which included having an access hole cut in her side), and having exhibits in the hold . . . My view is that it is much better to have a ship like the Cutty Sark . . . attracting sufficient people to go aboard [who] will provide the income necessary to keep her in perfect condition, not just for ten years or twenty, but for three hundred. Secondly, I want the child to go aboard . . . and be able to stand by the wheel . . . and imagine her at sea. That is why, to me, preserved historic ships, if they are exhibited with imagination, are the cathedrals of the sea . . . ."
The Cutty Sark - Frank Carr's Favourite Cathedral of the
sea
Frank's way was not the way of the traditionalist or academic purist, and when we stand on Cutty Sark's deck, whether we be child or not, we must thank heaven for it.
Frank Carr died in his 88th year on 9th July 1991. A Service of Thanksgiving for his life was held in the Chapel of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, on Thursday 10th October of that year. The list of those who attended is a measure of the esteem in which Frank was held throughout the maritime world. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who was so supportive of Frank's work, was represented by Admiral of the Fleet Lod Lewin.
The address at the service was given by Hammond Innes, who noted that the venue was a proper place for the event, being at the heart of Greenwich where Frank had lived and worked. Mr. Innes said that Frank would have been greatly touched that so many of his friends and fellow ship-lovers had come to remember him and wish him Godspeed now that he had embarked on the greatest voyage of all. The address ended with a line from John Masefield's "Dauber," a line that Frank himself had used to head one of the chapters in his own A Yachtsman's Log; words that emphasise the harmony of creations by both man and God.
Ships and the Sea; there's nothing finer made.
A memorial to Frank Carr, subscribed for by all the organisations he had been part of, is on display aboard Cutty Sark, his own especial cathedral of the sea.
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