Tales from the Quarterdeck

Tag: Engineering

  • The Short Life of the SS Bessemer – 1875.

    The Bessemer. The Penny Illustrated Paper, 10 Apr 1875, p. 1.

    One September afternoon in 1874, Miss Bessie Wright cracked a bottle of champagne across the bow of a new steamer and sent it gliding into the Humber River.   Thus, one of the strangest vessels ever to come off a naval architect’s drawing board was launched.

    S.S. Bessemer Saloon Steamship was the brainchild of little Bessie’s grandfather, Sir Henry Bessemer.   He had found investors who stumped up some £250,000 to make his vision a reality.   The resulting paddle steamer measuring 350 ft (106.6m) at the waterline and had four paddle wheels, two on the port side and two starboard.   The fore and aft were identical, and there were two bridges and two helms meaning she could travel as quickly in either direction at an anticipated top speed of 20 miles per hour.    But what set the Bessemer apart from any other steamer was her swinging saloon.  

    Positioned in the middle of the ship was a 70 ft (21m) cabin, which would remain stable regardless of the pitch and roll of the rest of the vessel.   The gyroscopic apparatus powered by a dedicated steam turbine had been designed and patented by Henry Bessemer himself.   This complex piece of engineering was to ensure that the steamers’ first-class passengers were spared the indignity of mal de mer or seasickness in all but the roughest of sea conditions.   Second-class passengers were not so well catered for.  They would occupy a separate, more conventional cabin mounted upon the ship’s superstructure.  

    Sir Henry Bessemer.

    The Bessemer was purpose-built to negotiate the lumpy waters of the English Channel.   She would travel between Dover and Calais, and at her top speed, it would take just one hour to cross the 20-nautical mile gap.  Henry Bessemer was convinced that the first-class passengers would disembark as hail and hearty as they had boarded his modern marvel.    Nonetheless, the designers had thought to include two “retiring rooms” for ladies and gentlemen to “withdraw from the public gaze,” should anyone still feel the ill effects of the sea.

    Not surprisingly, the novel design attracted its fair share of sceptics.   Some naval architects felt the gyroscopic apparatus would do little to stop the saloon from pitching and rolling in rough seas.   Their main concern was that the mechanism would be unable to respond fast enough to the sea to ensure the saloon maintained its equilibrium.

    After the Bessemer had been launched it was moored in the Hull Roads while her plush interior was fitted out.   A Daily News reporter would later describe the Bressemer’s saloon akin to a “superbly furnished floating clubhouse.”   The steamer was furnished with a large smoking saloon, several staterooms on the upper deck, refreshment bars, an office for small parcels, umbrella and cloakrooms, and “delightful promenades high above the reach of ocean spray.”

    Deck of the Besser Saloon steamship. The Illustrated London News, 27 Mar 1875, p. 293

    The only hiccup while the steamer was being fitted out was when she dragged her anchors during a mighty gale that battered much of the UK on 21 October.   The Bessemer was driven onto a mudflat on the northern bank of the Humber River, but she was easily floated off at high tide on that same day.  

    By late January 1875, the Bessemer had completed her first set of sea trials on the Humber.   She reportedly steered well and reached a top speed of 18 knots (33 km/h).   Her gyroscopic apparatus was said to have performed splendidly, but that assertion would soon be brought into question.   

    In March, the Bessemer made the voyage from Hull to Gravesend on the Thames in 24 hours while steaming into a strong headwind. There, she underwent more sea trials, and on 12 April, the Bessemer Saloon Steamship made her much-anticipated first crossing to Calais. As the steamer had yet to receive her passenger certification from the Board of Trade, the only people on board were the crew and a handful of men connected with the company.

    The Bessemer. The Penny Illustrated Paper, 3 Oct 1874, p. 13.

    She left Gravesend at 8.30 on Saturday morning and made her way down the Thames and out into the English Channel.   There, she was buffeted by a strong easterly wind and heavy seas.   Despite the inclement weather, the passage was reported to have been “remarkably steady”, and there had been no opportunity to test the ship’s swinging saloon.   She averaged 11 knots (20km/h) for the 75 nm (145 km) passage and arrived in that French port at 3.30 in the afternoon.   There, a great many of Calais’ residents gathered on the pier to witness the arrival of the unique ship.   Unfortunately, as she was docking, one of her paddles was damaged when it struck the pier.  

    Finally, the big day arrived on 12 April 1875.   The Bessemer steamed out of Dover with 350 invited guests onboard anticipating being the first to see the swinging saloon in action.  Several members of the press were among them, no doubt there to extol the virtues of the fine new vessel.  However, the Observer’s correspondent, for one, was clearly underwhelmed by the experience.    

    He reported that the screws fastening the moveable saloon were never loosened, which would have allowed the passengers to witness for themselves the effect of Henry Bessemer’s invention.   Several reasons were put forward for why the gyroscopic apparatus was not employed, but the reporter wrote that he had been reliably informed that the equipment simply did not work.   It could shift the saloon from side to side, but it was not up to the task of “regulating the rise and fall of the saloon with sufficient precision to secure stable equilibrium.”

    S.S. Bessemer. By Henry Spernon Tozer – The Illustrated London News,

    To cap off the 90-minute non-event, the Bessemer entered Calais’s harbour far too quickly to manoeuvrer safely around the small, enclosed port.      The collision with the pier on her last visit to Calais had been attributed to the Bessemer’s poor response to her helm when travelling at low speed.   This time, the captain came in a little faster.   However, the steamer was caught in a tidal current and spun around.   The Bessemer struck the pier with considerable force but sustained little damage to itself.

    However, the same could not be said for the wharf.   “When at last the Bessemer was stopped, some 50 or 60 yards of the pier were knocked down like nine-pins in a skittle alley, and the water of the harbour was covered with broken planks and beams.”

    “The Bessemer is too long a vessel for Calais harbour,” the reporter opined, “there must always be a certain amount of risk in her entering so narrow a port with the velocity required to carry her across the bars.”   A month later, the Calais Municipality sent the Saloon Ship Company a bill for £2,800 to cover the cost of repairing the pier.

    The Bessemer saloon ship running foul of Calais Pier. The Illustrated London News, 15 May 1875, p. 20.

    That was the Bessemer’s final voyage but for her return to England.   The investors cut their losses, and the company was wound up.   The engines, the swinging saloon and other fittings were removed, and by the end of the following year, the remainder of the ship was sold off as scrap.   So ended the short but lively career of the Bessemer Saloon Steamship.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2024.

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  • Shipping Cleopatra’s Needle

    Cleopatra’s needle being brought to England, 1877. Courtesy, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

    In September 1877, a most unusual-looking vessel left the Egyptian port of Alexandria bound for England.   She was the brainchild of engineer John Dixon and had been purpose-built to carry a 200-ton stone obelisk to London.   “Cleopatra’s Needle”, as it became known, had been gifted to Great Britain almost sixty years earlier, but until Dixon came along, no one had found a cost-effective way of transporting the massive monolith to its destination on the banks of the Thames River.    

    The obelisk had originally been erected at Heliopolis near present-day Cairo in 1450 BCE on the orders of Thutmose III.    Two hundred years later, Ramses II added inscriptions commemorating his victorious battles.  Then, in 12 BCE, Cleopatra had it, and a second obelisk carried down the Nile to Alexandria and installed outside a temple to Julius Ceasar and Mark Antony, where they were eventually lost to time.

    While visiting his brother in Egypt in 1875, Dixon devised a plan to get the needle to London.   There had been a couple of schemes suggested in the past.   One proposed dragging the heavy monolith through the narrow streets of Alexandria to the port where it could be loaded onto a ship.  Another was to dredge a channel from the waterfront to get a ship alongside the monolith where it lay.   Neither was particularly economical or practical.   But, after taking a look at the obelisk in situ, Dixon thought he had the solution.

    “Cleopatra’s Needle as it lay.” Penny Illustrated Paper, 29 Sept 1877, p. 13.

    The obelisk was lying on its side, covered in sand behind an old quay wall about 4 metres above sea level.   On the seaward side of the wall, the sand sloped down gently to the water’s edge, eventually reaching deep water a few hundred metres away.   Rather than move the obelisk to a ship, Dixon proposed building a cylindrical vessel around Cleopatra’s Needle and, after removing a portion of the quay wall, rolling it down the slope and into the sea.   He estimated the venture would cost no more than £5,000 to get it to London and another £5,000 to have it installed on the Thames Embankment.   The cost was a far cry from the £80,000 the French had apparently paid to have one delivered to Paris in the 1830s.  

    With the government showing no interest in wearing the cost, it was up to private enterprise to come to the fore.    Dixon even offered to contribute 500 guineas of his own money to get things started.   But after two years of stagnation, a benefactor in the form of the noted surgeon and philanthropist Professor Erasmus Wilson stepped forward and donated the full amount.

    Logitudinal section of the Cleopatra Needle-Boat, Penny Illustrated Paper, 8 Sept 1877, p. 9.

    By May 1877, Dixon was back in Alexandria and had begun work excavating around the buried obelisk.   It measured nearly 21 metres long and was slightly over 2 metres wide at the base.   He began encasing it in an iron cylinder 28 metres in length and 4.5 metres in width.   To prevent the stone and hieroglyphs from being damaged, Cleopatra’s Needle was cradled by several iron interior bulkheads lined with timber.

    The vessel resembled a giant cigar tube and was now ready to be floated.   A path was cleared and it was rolled towards the sea.   However, when tugs took the tube in tow, they discovered she had filled with water.    A stone had punctured a plate while the tube was being rolled down the beach.   The damaged plate was repaired, and the tube pumped dry.     Ballast was added, and the odd vessel was towed to a waiting dry dock where the rest of the work would be completed.

    Captain’s Cabin (left), Main cabin (right), Illustrated London News, 26 Jan 1878, p. 96.

    A cabin large enough to accommodate four men was mounted on the top of the tube and a keel below.   A stumpy mast and rigging were installed, along with a rudder, wheel and associated running gear.   The Cleopatra, as she was named, was ready to make the 6000-kilometre voyage to London.   Not having the means to propel herself, she was to be towed to England by the steamer Olga.   The sail and steering gear were only fitted to ease the strain on the steamer.

    On Friday morning, 21 September, Captain Booth gave the order for the Olga to get underway.   As she cleared Alexandria Harbour, the Cleopatra followed in her wake, tethered by a pair of tow cables.  They chugged along at a steady six knots, which was about as fast as the Olga could go towing her cumbersome load.    It cannot have been a pleasant cruise for Captain Campbell and his men on the Cleopatra.   At first, she yawed terribly, pulling one moment to port and the next to starboard.   However, once the Cleopatra’s steering chains were tightened and the towing cables lengthened, she finally ran true behind the steamer.   However, that did not stop her tendency to porpoise.   Dixon, who was travelling on the Olga, wrote, “I have counted as many as 17 times a minute that her nose has been underwater, and then ten or twelve feet above.” 

    First night out in the Bay of Biscay. From a sketch by our special artist on board the tug Anglia. Illusgtrated London New, 26 Jan 1878, p. 92.

    Apart from a few minor leaks, which were quickly plugged with cement, the voyage was uneventful until they were about to cross the Bay of Biscay.    On Sunday, 14 October the Olga and the Cleopatra were off Cape Finisterre when they were caught in a violent storm.  They were lashed by huge seas and a Force 7 to 8 gale blowing from the southwest.   That night, the Cleopatra’s ballast shifted and she was thrown onto her beam ends.   Captain Campbell cut away the mast, but the vessel did not right herself.   With the Cleopatra floundering around at the mercy of the wind and the waves, Campbell fired off his distress flares.  Captain Booth sent six men across to help in any way they could, but they were lost in the maelstrom before they reached the heavily listing vessel.   Eventually, Campbell and his men climbed into a boat and were hauled across to the Olga with the aid of a rope.  

    Captain Booth had no choice but to cut away the Cleopatra as he went in search of his six missing crew.   After spending some time searching the seas, the effort was abandoned, and the Olga headed for Falmouth to report the tragedy.   However, a couple of days later, the Cleopatra was found adrift about 170 kilometres off the Spanish coast by the crew of the Scottish steamer Fitzmaurice. They had been en route from Glasgow to Valencia when they happened upon the strange vessel bobbing in the water. They took it in tow and delivered it to the Spanish port of Ferrol and reported their find to the British Vice-Consul.  

    “End view of the pontoon.” Penny Illustrated Paper, 29 Sept 1877, p. 13.

    Dixon offered the salvors £500 for finding the Cleopatra and its priceless cargo and taking her to port.    However, the Fitzmaurice’s owners claimed salvage rights ten times that amount.   The case eventually headed to the Admiralty Court, where the sum of £2000 was decided upon.   Meanwhile, the Cleopatra was towed the rest of the way to England, and up the Thames River to London, where it was to be installed on The Embankment.   There, the Cleopatra’s hull was opened up, and the obelisk removed none the worse for its long sea voyage.   Cleopatra’s Needle was erected on a new plinth where it still stands to this day.   A plaque commemorates the six men who lost their lives trying to save the Cleopatra and her crew.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2024.

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