A series of events and activities have been planned by the Mary Rose Trust to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the raising of Henry VIII’s flagship from the Solent seabed  Bruce Parker was the BBC’s commentator during the three-day television coverage of the momentous event which attracted an estimated worldwide audience of sixty million.

 

Although it’s the dramatic raising of the Mary Rose hull itself which gripped the nation forty years ago in October, 1982, my own association with the Mary Rose had actually begun more than fifty years ago in the early 1970s. I took a phone call in the BBC’s Southampton newsroom from Alex McKee, a Portsmouth marine archaeologist.  “You might like to come and film a Tudor cannon from Henry VIII’s flagship that we’ve raised from the Solent seabed,” he told me. “We know it’s from Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose.”

With a television crew, I set off for Southsea Castle. Alex described the circumstances that led to the sinking of the Mary Rose, pointing out the cannon’s HR VIII markings which confirmed it was part of the Tudor warship’s firepower.   He ended our TV interview with this:  “One day,” he said, earnestly, “we’ll bring up her up from the seabed -  she’s down there with literally thousands of artefacts.”

I returned to Southampton and told my programme editor that Alex Mc Kee was clearly off his head - “a complete nutter”, I think I said.  Nothing could be more preposterous than a wooden ship which sank more than four hundred years ago being recovered from the seabed and then brought ashore.

How wrong we all were. As time went by, more and more artefacts were recovered and a distinguished archaeologist, Margaret Rule, was beginning to enthuse about what lay deep down on the Solent seabed. “A Tudor time capsule”, she said, “ which may well turn out to be the most significant discovery ever, around our shores.”

By the early 1970s, the then Prince Charles had become seriously involved with the project and was soon diving on the wreck himself. In an interview, he described to me the chilling moment when he came face-to-face with the skull of one of the Mary Rose’s crewmen.

Hampshire Chronicle:

So it was that, forty years ago, the hull of the Mary Rose was, indeed, to be raised to the surface on a huge cradle. The BBC had decided to give extensive coverage to the lifting operation.  The yachtswoman, novelist and broadcaster, Clare Francis, was to be the onshore commentator at Southsea where huge crowds were expected and John Selwyn Gilbert, our producer and enthusiastic diver himself, was stationed on the Mary Rose guard boat, Sleipner. I was to be on the vast lifting craft, the Tog Mor, effectively a huge floating crane.

That weekend, the weather was quite appalling but, just as D-Day in the English Channel had a once-and-for-all window, so, too, the Mary Rose had to be lifted within a given time.  The £4 million operation had to be postponed twice in the space of that weekend, not just by the increasing wind and rain but by technical problems with the complicated salvaging apparatus and the floating cradle.

Saturday, October 9th, gave way to Sunday, the 10th, with a final order from Prince Charles, now head of  the Mary Rose Trust, that the operation must begin at seven a.m. sharp the following morning, Monday, October 11th.

A huge flotilla of small boats and warships had gathered off Portsmouth, TV cameras were in place to record the momentous event.

Worldwide interest had been gathering with an estimated TV audience by the Monday of a staggering 60 million viewers. The whole focus of the TV operation was now on the lifting vessel, Tog Mor, which was to raise the wreck, inch by inch, clear of the water.  The BBC, uniquely, decided to clear the schedule of all its BBC 2 programmes and would stay entirely with the unfolding drama in the Solent. (Except, that is, ‘Watch with Mother’, the BBC 2 Controller apparently fearing a backlash from the nation’s mothers if he’d ditched that, too.)

Within two hours of Tog Mor’s cables turning, the first jagged edges of timber had broken the surface. Guns were fired from the ramparts of Southsea Castle and ships’ sirens sounded from as far away as the Isle of Wight to mark the historic moment.

While the champagne corks were still popping ashore in Southsea, out at sea, any sense of celebration was knocked completely sideways by the most dramatic moment in the entire salvage operation, a near-disaster which millions of TV viewers so vividly remember.

One of the pins holding the lifting frame sheared, a steel line snapped and part of the eighty-ton frame smashed down on the hull. Leading the BBC commentary on the operation at that very moment, I was silenced with disbelief; I was later commended for saying nothing and letting the scene tell its own story – the truth, I now have to reveal, is that I was truly lost for words. In my defence, so too was the Mary Rose engineering advisor, Colonel Peter Chitty, standing alongside me.  We both fully expected the whole lot to roll over and go back to the bottom of the sea in a matter of seconds, smashed and lost for ever.

Prince Charles also admitted to being “horrified but thought the best thing to do was to be British and not panic."

The rest is now part of history itself. The hull was brought back to the very dockyard where she was launched in Portsmouth five centuries ago and sprayed for years with preservative. Tens of thousands of artefacts, in stunningly good condition, were recovered from the seabed and the Mary Rose museum, built completely around the recovered hull, is one of the finest of its kind in Europe, if not the world.

 

Visit maryrose.org/40 to find out more or to tell them WhereWereYouIn82 as you watched the raising.