Looking out over the War Channels from the east coast, it is always necessary to exercise a little imagination to picture the wrecks that lie within view but unseen, beneath the waves. Even greater imagination is required to evoke the War Channels as they once existed: a complex system to defend vital maritime trade from mines and torpedoes, thronged with cargo vessels that were protected by all manner of small warships, airships and aircraft. There seem to be very few descriptive accounts of the War Channels, but in The Spider Web, PIX (Theodore Douglas Hallam) – a pilot flying anti-submarine patrols from Felixstowe – gives a sense of how it looked:
Fifteen minutes later we had the Shipwash four miles on our port beam, and were over the shipping channel which ran parallel with the coast. Here, as far as the eye could see in either direction, was a thick stream of cargo boats, of all shapes and sizes, ploughing along on their various occasions …
Even PIX’s word picture doesn’t start to convey the web of human connectivity manifest in the War Channels, or even in each voyaging ship. Every vessel was traveling to and from, built somewhere and perhaps destined to be lost elsewhere: designed, built, owned, skippered, crewed, loaded, unloaded, attacking, defended. The threads of many stories – individual, family and community – spill out across the seabed from the fabric of each wreck.
Fifteen minutes later we had the Shipwash four miles on our port beam, and were over the shipping channel which ran parallel with the coast. Here, as far as the eye could see in either direction, was a thick stream of cargo boats, of all shapes and sizes, ploughing along on their various occasions …
Even PIX’s word picture doesn’t start to convey the web of human connectivity manifest in the War Channels, or even in each voyaging ship. Every vessel was traveling to and from, built somewhere and perhaps destined to be lost elsewhere: designed, built, owned, skippered, crewed, loaded, unloaded, attacking, defended. The threads of many stories – individual, family and community – spill out across the seabed from the fabric of each wreck.
Conventionally, maritime archaeology concerns itself with recording and interpreting the material remains of shipwrecks on the seabed, often blending the physical evidence with documentary sources to develop narratives that make sense of the cottered threads. Technology is intrinsic to marine archaeology: a discipline borne of diving equipment that enables people to survive under water and driven increasingly by methods of remote sensing that build up a picture from the surface of what lies beneath. Revolutions in survey technology – bathymetry, geophysics, photogrammetry and position-fixing – are enabling researchers and the public to immerse themselves in 3D models and virtual reality without stepping into the water.
These technological developments are remarkable and stand to change our understanding and appreciation of history so long obscured. But technology is not the only means through which people can explore marine archaeology. Words written and spoken often sit alongside video, photographs and 3D models, and marine archaeology has some captivating authors. But not many instances spring to mind of marine archaeologists expressing their findings in poetry. Equally, not all audiences are gripped by the often-technical accounts of ships and shipwrecks with which archaeologists seem most comfortable.
I’ve been working with a poet, Winston Plowes, to see how we might bridge the gap between technical and creative accounts of the story of the War Channels in the First World War. This first example of Winston's writing relates to the loss of the Madame Renee off Scarborough, in which Iwai Sutoe was one of ten killed:
In His Mother’s Arms
by Winston Plowes
From Thames to Tyne that day in ‘18
he tended every stroke of her
up the eastern channel.
Till UB-30, languid in the bay
roused and spat its charge.
Torpedoed her side with a single strike
from that clear calm crescent.
Madame Rene broken backed
rocked him down like a mother.
6000 miles as the whale sings
from his home in Japan.
She drifted still, and now
all 500 tons of her lay sleeping
with Sutoe in her arms.
A buoy still floats above their heads
permanently tethered.
Marking the dreams of Kobe.
Coddled by this sea.
Crossing off the years.
Osaka Bay still listening.
The War Poets of the First World War are embedded in cultural life and school curricula, reflecting a creative engagement with the conflict as it was still being fought that continues with each reading over a hundred years after. The poems about the First World War that are best known are those prompted by the land war, especially the Western Front. However, poetry was also written about the war at sea and there were many examples published at the time, sometimes in poetry collections but commonly in other books and magazines. For example, there is a whole section on ‘The Sea Affair’ in The Muse in Arms, a collection by E.B. Osbourn of war poems published in 1917. Equally, Rudyard Kipling published a collection of poems and accompanying prose in 1915 called The Fringes of the Fleet about the activities of the Royal Navy on the east coast. The poems were subsequently set to music by Edward Elgar and attracted large audiences when performed. The poems are, perhaps, rather romantic and patriotic for current tastes but they still provide perspectives on the war at sea that chime in a different way to archaeological accounts.
One of Kipling’s poems in The Fringes of the Fleet, Submarines II (or Tin Fish), captures a sense of the war on the east coast:
The ships destroy us above
And ensnare us beneath.
We arise, we lie down, and we move
In the belly of Death.
The ships have a thousand eyes
To mark where we come …
And the mirth of a seaport dies
When our blow gets home.
The accompanying text makes it plain that Kipling is writing about British submarines, but it is also an apt description of the work of German U-boats on the east coast, of their difficulties in avoiding RN vessels, and of the consequences of a successful strike on east coast communities. Perhaps the ambiguity – even an equivalence – of submarine warfare on each side was in Kipling’s mind.
There are, therefore, echoes of poetry addressing the First World War at sea whilst it was still fought amongst our own use of poetry to explore wrecks of that conflict which still lie on the seabed. Blending past and present, Winston and I ran a creative writing workshop with the National Trust at The Word in South Shields as part of a HLF project in September 2017. Also blending our methods, the parallels between our different ways of seeing, archaeological and poetic, have been as interesting as the results: Winston turning over scallop shells in his hands as a prompt to words in the same way I might turn over an artefact to identify its age and use. Our workshop also involved a walk along the banks of the Tyne, each taking different clues from our surroundings to interpret a wartime landscape that is much changed but still present.
We will be continuing our undersea explorations of the north east's maritime past at a further workshop with the National Trust at Souter Lighthouse on Wednesday 16th May – details here. Please come and join us!
These technological developments are remarkable and stand to change our understanding and appreciation of history so long obscured. But technology is not the only means through which people can explore marine archaeology. Words written and spoken often sit alongside video, photographs and 3D models, and marine archaeology has some captivating authors. But not many instances spring to mind of marine archaeologists expressing their findings in poetry. Equally, not all audiences are gripped by the often-technical accounts of ships and shipwrecks with which archaeologists seem most comfortable.
I’ve been working with a poet, Winston Plowes, to see how we might bridge the gap between technical and creative accounts of the story of the War Channels in the First World War. This first example of Winston's writing relates to the loss of the Madame Renee off Scarborough, in which Iwai Sutoe was one of ten killed:
In His Mother’s Arms
by Winston Plowes
From Thames to Tyne that day in ‘18
he tended every stroke of her
up the eastern channel.
Till UB-30, languid in the bay
roused and spat its charge.
Torpedoed her side with a single strike
from that clear calm crescent.
Madame Rene broken backed
rocked him down like a mother.
6000 miles as the whale sings
from his home in Japan.
She drifted still, and now
all 500 tons of her lay sleeping
with Sutoe in her arms.
A buoy still floats above their heads
permanently tethered.
Marking the dreams of Kobe.
Coddled by this sea.
Crossing off the years.
Osaka Bay still listening.
The War Poets of the First World War are embedded in cultural life and school curricula, reflecting a creative engagement with the conflict as it was still being fought that continues with each reading over a hundred years after. The poems about the First World War that are best known are those prompted by the land war, especially the Western Front. However, poetry was also written about the war at sea and there were many examples published at the time, sometimes in poetry collections but commonly in other books and magazines. For example, there is a whole section on ‘The Sea Affair’ in The Muse in Arms, a collection by E.B. Osbourn of war poems published in 1917. Equally, Rudyard Kipling published a collection of poems and accompanying prose in 1915 called The Fringes of the Fleet about the activities of the Royal Navy on the east coast. The poems were subsequently set to music by Edward Elgar and attracted large audiences when performed. The poems are, perhaps, rather romantic and patriotic for current tastes but they still provide perspectives on the war at sea that chime in a different way to archaeological accounts.
One of Kipling’s poems in The Fringes of the Fleet, Submarines II (or Tin Fish), captures a sense of the war on the east coast:
The ships destroy us above
And ensnare us beneath.
We arise, we lie down, and we move
In the belly of Death.
The ships have a thousand eyes
To mark where we come …
And the mirth of a seaport dies
When our blow gets home.
The accompanying text makes it plain that Kipling is writing about British submarines, but it is also an apt description of the work of German U-boats on the east coast, of their difficulties in avoiding RN vessels, and of the consequences of a successful strike on east coast communities. Perhaps the ambiguity – even an equivalence – of submarine warfare on each side was in Kipling’s mind.
There are, therefore, echoes of poetry addressing the First World War at sea whilst it was still fought amongst our own use of poetry to explore wrecks of that conflict which still lie on the seabed. Blending past and present, Winston and I ran a creative writing workshop with the National Trust at The Word in South Shields as part of a HLF project in September 2017. Also blending our methods, the parallels between our different ways of seeing, archaeological and poetic, have been as interesting as the results: Winston turning over scallop shells in his hands as a prompt to words in the same way I might turn over an artefact to identify its age and use. Our workshop also involved a walk along the banks of the Tyne, each taking different clues from our surroundings to interpret a wartime landscape that is much changed but still present.
We will be continuing our undersea explorations of the north east's maritime past at a further workshop with the National Trust at Souter Lighthouse on Wednesday 16th May – details here. Please come and join us!