‘After receipt of fresh information, the author will reassess the situation and this will be uploaded in due course.’

May 2023

The Naval Dockyards Society (NDS) is looking for Associate Officers

We are seeking applications for this post. START date: 22 April 2023. If appointed they will shadow current officers, take on mentored tasks for experience and support officers. They will provide a pool of trained personnel from whom to elect a replacement officer in the event of anyone retiring and relieve some officers’ workloads in the process.

To apply for this role, see full details at https://navaldockyards.org/the-committee/ and complete all the sections in NDS Associate Officer Application Form. 
Closing date: 31 March 2023

20 December 2022

Haslar Wall by Chris Donnithorne

Chris Donnithorne has written a further report: ‘Haslar Wall’ (January 2022) with the accompanying statement:

In December 2021, an apparently sound part of Haslar Wall was damaged by storm ‘Barra’, with the manner of failure looking remarkably similar to such events at Blockhouse. The full extent of the wall had not been considered before, for reasons stated in the original paper. This brief, produced as a result, and clearly directing attention to this aspect of the threat, was made available locally and subsequently to attendees of a meeting convened to consider such issues.

Caroline Dinenage (Gosport MP) – already briefed that wall failure here would become a national issue – chaired the meeting of interested agencies, national and local, and myself, on 28th January 2022. The agency attendees provided positive reports of their various activities regarding the wall and, in summary, assured the Chair that the harbour entrance was secure, there was no flood risk, and new owners could be expected to fund this sea defence into the future – to which the Chair announced that she was encouraged by all that she had heard. The wall issue now appears dead until the next big storm damage.

1 February 2022

Update to the Threat to Portsmouth Harbour

Chris Donnithorne, a former naval officer, has updated his paper which raises urgent concerns about the immediate and future viability of Portsmouth Harbour. The NDS  publishes it for public information and debate.

Portsmouth Harbour is an amalgam of natural and manmade events, originating when rising sea levels drowned the coastal plain after the last Ice Age. Its entrance has been kept clear by a scouring ‘double high tide’ and the influx of river water from the South Downs, but it has required occasional dredging at the harbour mouth to reduce the silt bar. With its creeks, streams and mudbanks, the harbour is a complex organism which is showing identifiable signs of stress.

See the update here  See more about the original paper and also Chris Donnithorne, below.

Dr Ann Coats
30 November 2020 (brought up to date 20 December 2020, with the update added 6 December 2021)

What’s Happening to Portsmouth’s Defence Heritage? Update.

Dr Celia Clark is reporting here on recent discussions regarding the future use of Tipner West site or Lennox Point as it has resently been renaimed.

In her article she also discusses the likely  fate of the Royal Marine Wardroom Eastney, which is shown below.

Eastney Barracks and Brent Geese

24 March 2021

Chris Donnithorne

Over a 30 year career as a naval officer, Chris Donnithorne became very familiar with Portsmouth Harbour, and he has subsequently spent as much time again carrying out archival research in the local area.

In this carefully argued and evidenced paper, Donnithorne demonstrates that the integrity of Blockhouse Point on the western side of the harbour entrance is ‘at risk due to rapid acceleration in seashore erosion, almost certainly caused by recent dredging, which included a significant part of Hamilton Bank, immediately to the South of the Fort.’ (p. 29).   Effectively the dredging has destabilised the harbour entrance, leading potentially to the loss of the deep-water harbour.

19 December 2020

Announcing the Award of five £1000 Grants by NDS to Small Dockyard Museum or Dockyard Heritage Site Projects

The 2020 Naval Dockyards Society AGM agreed that part of its small surplus of funds could be used to award five grants of £1,000 each to small dockyard museum or dockyard heritage site projects. It was felt that grants could make a real difference to the future enhancement of worthy museums or sites.

Successful applications were received from the following sites:

Bluetown Remembered (Sheerness)

The project will further raise the profile of Sheerness Dockyard and Blue Town heritage, run from Bluetown Remembered, a music hall built in 1841, later a cinema. One floor is dedicated to Sheerness Dockyard. It welcomes over 20,000 visitors each year. The NDS grant will fund a booklet on Sheerness Dockyard for all Sheppey schools, part of two Kent-wide schemes, Wheels of Time and the Children’s University, bringing in families from all over Kent. It will also finance six monthly lectures about the dockyard and Blue Town to encourage history groups to visit as well as locals. Preshow tours of the island and the dockyard will be used to help promote the dockyard to this wider audience. Special events for care homes will also be hosted.

 The Dockyard Museum at Antigua Naval Dockyard

Unveiling the 8 March Exhibition, 2020, at the Antigua Dockyard Museum

A multidisciplinary research, interpretation, and public outreach programme has been developed entitled ‘8 March Project’ under the theme ‘Dockyard History is African History’, to recover and interpret archival and archaeological evidence of the enslaved and free Africans and their descendants who made possible the naval dockyard at Antigua, established in 1725. The ‘8 March Project’ identified eight enslaved Africans who lost their lives in an explosion on 8 March 1744. These names launched a project to recover more names of enslaved Africans who worked in the yard, which has recovered more than 650 names. In 2021 the dockyard museum will initiate an expanded programme including creative works by students from Antigua State College and the local Cobbs Cross Primary School, telling the stories of enslaved workers. The students will bring parents and grandparents.

 Museum of Slavery and Freedom, Deptford

This embryonic organisation aspires to acquire permanent premises, working alongside Action for Community Development in Deptford. The project, ‘Chip on Your Shoulder’, will combine Deptford Dockyard history and the Museum of Slavery and Freedom (MōSaF). It will use the Deptford Pepys Resource Centre as an anchor hub for museum tours about Deptford Dockyard, its support of maritime communities, and its links to the African, Irish and Asian diaspora. Deptford is significant as it was home to John Hawkins who became a prominent early English slave trader. MōSaF will demonstrate how Deptford, London and the United Kingdom grew rich from the slave trade but also explore the extent to which freedom from slavery was won and celebrate the many cultures and peoples who live consequently in the UK. The Lenox Project has kindly offered £500 to help fund this project.

Sheerness Dockyard Preservation Trust (SDPT)

Sheerness Dockyard Church

1820s Sheerness Dockyard Model

SDPT was founded in 2014 to conserve the historic buildings of the former Royal Dockyard at Sheerness. The Trust’s focus has been to rescue and reuse the Grade II* listed former Dockyard Church, built in 1828 to the designs of George Ledwell Taylor, Navy Board surveyor. In 2001 it was gutted by fire. The Trust has developed a project to conserve the building and convert it into a mixed-use community facility with an events space, a business start-up centre for young people, and a permanent display gallery housing part of the 1820s dockyard model. This model will play a significant part in informing the public of the history of the dockyard and the church’s place in that community. The NDS grant will contribute towards the interpretation and conservation of the model.

The Unicorn Preservation Society, Dundee

The stern of HMS Unicorn

Robert Seppings, the Industrial Revolution & HMS Unicorn’. 2022 is the 200th anniversary of the keel laying of Robert Seppings’s frigate HMS Unicorn on No 4 slip at Chatham. From 1800, many factors affected ship construction methods and yard operations, such as the increased availability of consistent wrought iron and steam propulsion. Seppings developed wrought iron diagonal straps to increase the torsional stiffness of the hull and wrought iron knees, offering greater strength at less weight. HMS Unicorn is now the only remaining ship which fully illustrates Seppings’s approach. The grant will be used, with other funding, for an exhibition linking the Industrial Revolution, Seppings’s ship design and shipbuilding in Dundee and naval dockyards. It will utilise oral histories of those who worked in the Dundee shipyards and link outreach to relevant school curricula.

This was an exceptional event for the Society and it was very exciting to see the range of projects thus funded, reflecting the scope of dockyard cultural significance. The NDS is optimistic that these inputs will enable wider interpretation of dockyard heritage, ‘as an oak cometh of a litel spyr’ (Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Book 2).