Thetis Down by Tony Booth

Author:Tony Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen & Sword MARITIME
Published: 2009-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Raising the Dead

Although Cammell Laird received several letters from funeral directors offering their services for the burial arrangements, many more enquiries came from people wanting to enter the submarine and help remove the dead. Either through some morbid interest or genuine, though naive, offer of help, these started arriving long before she was even raised. In fact, the first letter arrived only two days after all hope of saving life was abandoned.

Albert Tucker was an ex-sick berth steward, now working as a clerk in the Admiralty’s Devonport Dockyard. ‘Experience has shown me that this type of work requires a great deal of tact and initiative’, he told Laird’s directors, ‘also it is a task which a good many would care not to undertake hence my reason for offering my services for this delicate task’. Albert certainly felt that should Laird need him, as he already worked for the Admiralty, he, ‘No doubt should have no difficulty in obtaining special leave of absence’.

Mr J. Westcott of Fleetwood in Lancashire said, ‘I am writing to ask you if you want anyone to help to get the men out of the Thetis. I am willing to go down in the sub to get the men out. I have bean [sic] on slimber [sic] jobs were [sic] we had to put the men in bags to get them out. I am a rigger by trade’.

Former stretcher-bearer and ambulance driver Owen Lewis Jones from North Wales seemed a more genuine offer. Owen claimed to have dealt with every type of battlefield casualty and was more than ‘willing to help’. Hospital worker Richard Jones wondered, ‘If you have the influence to suggest the point, I would like to volunteer to enter the Thetis with Stoker Arnold. I wrote to you last week. Please put it to Stoker Arnold. Yours Richard Jones’.

On 27 June 1939 J. H. Aldred told Laird, ‘I beg to offer my services on the recovery of the bodies in the submarine Thetis when it has been salved’. Somebody at Laird thought it prudent to underline in thick, red crayon the first eleven words. The forty-year-old Aldred went on to explain his qualifications for the job. ‘During the last war when the Royal Naval Barracks at Chatham was bombed, I was in charge of the party which [removed] the numerous dead. Waiting on you at your convenience’.

After Mr A. Nixon of Stockport offered his services, Laird replied, ‘We thank you for your letter of the tenth instant and will bear your name in mind should we require any work done of the nature referred to’. All the offers received this same more or less standard reply, rather like a publisher’s or a potential lover’s rejection. Although they do not say yes, they never quite say no, but between the lines they always mean never. No member of the public would set foot even near the salvaged wreck, let alone have access to her dead. It was highly specialized work, for which even the Admiralty had to seek instruction.

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