Down at Bristol’s biggest surviving shipyard, they’re restoring a historic paddle steamer with a heroic wartime story. Shipshape donned its safety goggles to watch the restoration of the Medway Queen at Albion Dockyard
There’s a lot of goodwill towards this boat. She saved 7,000 lives from Dunkirk, and a lot of those soldiers are still around. When they come and visit the boat I see tears welling up in their eyes, and they turn to me and say, ‘I owe my life to this ship.’” Andrew Summerell, MD of Albion Dockyard, is leading Shipshape around the rapidly filling carcass of the Medway Queen, a paddle-driven steamship with a rich history. The Bristol-based dockyard is currently re-hulling the boat in preparation for a new lease of life back in her native Kent.
Built in 1924, the MQ is the UK’s last surviving estuary pleasure steamer. Before World War II, she ran pleasure cruises along the Thames and Medway rivers: the war itself saw her most glorious chapter, making seven crossings to the beaches of Dunkirk and rescuing 7,000 men. A chequered post-war career included years of decay on the Isle of Wight (following a sojourn as a floating nightclub) and another two decades lying fallow back in Kent.
Then, in the 1980s, the Medway Queen Preservation Society (MQPS) was formed to try to save the ship. As a result of their efforts, the boat is now sitting in a Bristol dry dock, undergoing extensive repair work – and capturing much attention in Britain and beyond.
riveting repair
Andrew and his colleagues at Albion Dockyard are reconstructing the Queen’s damaged hull using the traditional method of riveting plates together, rather than the commoner modern practice of welding. As such, the new Medway Queen will be the first riveted paddle steamer built in the UK for some 60 years. Back in Kent, meanwhile, MQPS volunteers are working on all the boat’s recovered fittings – handrails, lamps, benches, vents and more.
Albion are essentially building a brand new boat, albeit following the original plans (the majority of which have survived intact) and re-using the original materials. “Many fittings have been saved – the paddles, crankshafts, main engines, portholes, pumps and so forth,” Andrew explains. “Many of the working parts have survived, as has much of the original deck planking and benches. These bits all came down to us from Kent on lorries, for us to build the hull around. In very simplistic terms, we’re building a watertight box (albeit a very elegant one) to house all the boat’s heritage bits and pieces.” They’ve even preserved the boat’s original steam engine, building their own boring machine to re-bore its cylinders.
carbon copy
This reconstruction of a historic boat is a vast, minutely detailed and, of course, expensive process. The MQPS won a Heritage Lottery grant to sympathetically dismantle the old boat, photographing every last detail (some 5,000 images) as they went so that it could be exactly reproduced. Another grant allowed them to put out a tender for a shipyard to build the new hull. That tender was won by Albion, whose skilled shipbuilders are replacing the hull via a succession of six-metre steel panels. Another grant (this one from the EU) will allow the Society to set up a workshop back in Kent to replace all the boat’s historic equipment. Albion started work in 2009 and aim to finish by March.
“There’s been interest across the world,” says Andrew, a naval architect who has worked at Albion (and Abels Shipbuilders, as it was previously known) for 15 years. “A few months ago two guys turned up from Norway just to watch the hydraulic riveting.” Some 98 per cent of the riveting is being done hydraulically – a newer, quieter technique than the traditional pneumatic riveting.
The other two per cent, though, is being done pneumatically – for which it took Andrew and the team two years to track down the correct equipment, via an exhaustive and ultimately futile internet search. Rescue came, though, from close to home. “One day I was talking to someone about our search, and he said, ‘Oh, you need to talk to this guy in Yate.’ One 20-mile round trip later, we had all the kit we needed.”