And what a challenge! Landing Craft Tank 7074 had settled firmly onto the bed of the Mersey, in a mute reproach to those who’d let her fall so far. Not ‘The Ship that Died of Shame’, as in Nicolas Monsarrat’s famous story about a motor gunboat turned post-WWII to worse and worse purposes till she seems to wreck herself in expiation; more ‘The Ship that Died of Sorrow’, as 7074, abandoned, slowly sank at her moorings in Birkenhead. So it took a very big, powerful crane and a set of mighty straps to raise her, oh so gently, onto the heavy lift ship that would take her south – to Portsmouth, close to where she set off to deliver tanks and their crews to join in the assault on Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. All filmed brilliantly, time-lapse, by independent producers True North.
FIRST, LIFT YOUR SHIP
20 March 2020
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About Rob
Rob is a TV producer, reporter and camera operator with 30 years of experience at the BBC, Channel 4 and ITN, in news, factual and documentary production. He is a four-time award winner, whose awards include a coveted Royal Television Society award for his work on Channel 4 News. His association with the Maritime Foundation goes back to 1995 when he won the first Desmond Wettern Maritime Media Award for a series of reports that led to a major documentary on the loss of the bulk carrier Derbyshire.