City of Adelaide - Doomed to die / Bruce Stannard reports on the wilful destruction of one of the last survivors of the great age of sail.
After 145 years as an icon of the British merchant marine, the City of Adelaide, the oldest surviving clipper ship in the world, is to be “disassembled” – bureaucratic doublespeak that means she will now be demolished.
Despite being ranked as one of Britain’s 10 most important historic vessels, City of Adelaide has spent the past 12 years high and dry on the banks of the River Clyde at Irvine, just south of Glasgow. Although the hull remains in good condition, the owners, the Scottish Maritime Museum, have failed in their repeated attempts to raise the £10 million needed for her restoration.
With mounting debts and no viable alternative, the museum was given permission to remove the ship from the protection of Scotland’s Heritage List. After an internal and external laser survey to record her lines, the bow and stern sections are to be cut off and re-housed in the nearby museum. The rest will go for scrap.
City of Adelaide was designed and built in 1864 by William Pile, Hay and Company of Sunderland on the River Wear in northeastern England. The ship has a length overall of 176.8 feet, a beam of 33.2 feet and a draft of 18.8 feet. Her registered tonnage was 791.
With no expense spared on her fit-out, she was lavishly furnished with polished mahogany panelling in her first and second class cabins and in her sumptuous main saloon. She was meticulously maintained and for 17 years rated A1 at Lloyds.
City of Adelaide was one of the earliest composite ships. Her riveted, iron framed hull, planked with the finest American oak and Burma teak, had exceptional strength and allowed her Captain, David Bruce, to drive her hard and fast as she ran her easting down in the Roaring Forties on the long passage through the Great Southern Ocean between the Cape of Good Hope and South Australia.
In 1869, just five years after City of Adelaide’s launching, the opening of the Suez Canal signalled the beginning of the end for the windships. Steamers quickly captured the most lucrative trades and although City of Adelaide carried on as a passenger ship until 1887, the handsome clipper suffered the indignity of being sold first as a collier hauling coal between the Tyne and Dover and then into the North Atlantic timber trade.
In 1893 her days under sail came to an abrupt end when the Corporation of the City of Southampton bought her and fitted her out as a hospital ship to deal with cases of infectious diseases arriving in the Port. She lay at anchor in the River Test near Southampton for 30 years before being sold to the British Admiralty.
Re-named HMS Carrick, she served as a sail training ship for the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve throughout the Second World War. It was as the RNVR Club that she spent the next 40 years moored in the River Clyde opposite the Customs House in the heart of Glasgow.
In 1990 the RNVR gifted her to the Clyde Ship Trust, which had hoped to feature her in a planned Clydeside Maritime Heritage Centre where she sank at her moorings.
In 1991 the ship was rescued by the Scottish Maritime Museum and hauled out of the water at Irvine, just south of Glasgow, to await restoration. In 1992, with £1 million in hand for her restoration, work started on phase one, but the museum quickly realised the task was going to cost a great deal more money than it had any prospect of raising.
While her clipper cousin, Cutty Sark, was given Heritage Lottery grants of £23 million in London, no such funding was forthcoming for the City of Adelaide. For 12 years the ship has sat high and dry under covers on her slipway at Irvine while various restoration schemes were considered and rejected.
Then, in February 2001 the financial dilemma forced the Scottish Maritime Museum to do something that no conservation body in Britain had ever done: it formally requested consent to demolish the ship.
The application was made despite the ship’s status as a protected A-listed historic structure, a status enjoyed by only a handful of other iconic British vessels like Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, the steamship Great Britain and the tea clipper Cutty Sark.
An unprecedented storm of international protest arose. Objections were made by individuals, universities and heritage bodies throughout the UK, Europe, the United States and Australia.
The furore was such that the Duke of Edinburgh as Chairman of Britain’s Historic Ships Trust, convened a conference in Glasgow in September 2001 to consider ways in which the ship might still be saved. The conference produced a lot of well-intentioned talk but no action.
The coup de grâce was finally delivered by the Scottish Executive. In 2002 the government in Edinburgh tied its funding for the Scottish Maritime Museum to the condition that none of its money was to be spent on City of Adelaide.
Notwithstanding the fact that the museum holds the major collections of Scotland’s considerable maritime history, it is now on “survival funding”, a drip-feed from the government that means the very future of the museum and its collections of national and international importance is now in question.