The Hidden History of Harbours 2 Coast

This is Coast.

The sea is a great global highway.

As an island people, it's in our nature to reach out and explore,

the thrill of embarking on voyages big and small

makes our harbours hum with excitement.

In an age before air travel, these were our departure lounges.

Harbours have always been gateways to adventure.

With an insatiable appetite for those adventures,

we've constructed around 1,000 of these global gateways.

For centuries, people, goods and ideas

have flowed in between harbour walls.

If only these walls could talk.

Well, now they can.

We're here to reveal The Hidden History of Harbours.

Soaring high above the Cornish coast

it's striking how perfectly

people have moulded themselves into the landscape.

Man-made walls extend natural headlands

to create safe havens,

harbours, our own perfectly formed contributions to the coast.

# In Newlyn Town

# I was bread and born... #

Last few barbecued pilchards.

At Newlyn, the locals come to plug into the wider world,

but the harbour also hides a hidden history.

150 years ago, as tin mines were closing,

fishing struggled to keep the community going.

Down in the harbour, a new call was luring the men seawards.

On the other side of the world a gold rush has begun.

# To South Australia we are born

# Heave away, haul away

# To South Australia round Cape Horn

# We're bound for South Australia... #

The fishermen of Newlyn knew that 12,000 miles of wild sea

stood between them and the promised land.

Who would risk all for riches?

150 years ago, one little fishing boat made a remarkable voyage

from here to the other side of the world.

Have a look at this picture,

it shows Melbourne harbour in Australia,

absolutely crammed with shipping in the mid-1800s.

But look at this little boat here, it's got a sail on it

and on the sale it says Penzance, it's a boat called Mystery.

The Mystery, with seven men onboard, left this quayside in 1854.

Over 100 days later they reached Oz.

No fishing boat had ever made such a trip.

Their incredible achievement was a triumph of hope over experience.

They rode their luck in the roughest seas, gambling on a golden future.

# We're bound for South Australia. #

The men left behind wives, children, friends,

unsure whether they'd ever see their loved ones again.

Two of the men who made that momentous decision

were Philip Curnow Matthews and William Badcock,

no photos of their five crew-mates survive.

For years, their story has lain hidden.

Now I want to discover why the men risked everything

on that incredible voyage to Australia

in the small fishing boat, Mystery.

'I'm meeting the Captain's great-great-great nephew,

'Douglas Williams.'

Hi, Douglas.

As I understand it, back in the 1850s, you could buy for £20

a steerage class ticket all the way to Australia, one-way,

why didn't they do that and travel out there on an immigrant ship?

The whole thing was based on an adventure which took off

and came out of their control.

They certainly saved a fair bit of money by going that way,

the fact that they had a means of earning their livelihood

with The Mystery when they arrived there,

those were the two big factors.

This was a new life and a new deal

and they thought they'd have part of it.

Do you think they understood the risk?

I don't think they did.

I don't suppose any of them had been further than the North Sea

and around the Cornish southwest coast,

but they had a first-class navigator in Captain Richard Nicholls,

who was experienced around the world in cargo ships,

and they recognised that and they had an absolute trust in him.

Captain Nicholls' log details a great unsung feat

of British seamanship,

beginning on November 18th, 1854, leaving Newlyn.

Philip Matthews, William Badcock and their crewmates

had barely sailed beyond the sight of land before,

now off the tip of Africa,

they braved gales as they pressed on to Melbourne.

Of all the British vessels to make it to Australia, The Mystery,

the smallest and pluckiest of all, would never see home shores again.

The Mystery didn't come back to Newlyn,

but I've come along the coast to Plymouth.

Here, the spirit of Mystery lives on.

'This is an exact replica of the boat in which Captain Nicholls

'and his six crew set sail. Bringing her back to life

'was the dream of Cornishman and legendary sailor, Pete Goss.'

I can't believe that I'm going out to sea in this boat.

It's an amazing story.

We started with a chainsaw looking for fallen oak trees

to make the frames to build the boat.

Fashioning the Cornish oak into a seagoing craft

was a ten-month labour of love,

to honour the achievement of the original crew.

Really what this is about is celebrating, you know,

1854, those seven amazing men who really through hardship

and I think a bit of romance they wanted an adventure themselves,

sailed her to Australia, which is staggering, really.

For Pete there was only one way to appreciate fully

Mystery's epic voyage down under, to try it himself.

Later, I'll be discovering how they battled raging seas,

just like the original crew.

And what became of those Cornishmen who reached Australia 150 years ago.

# I saw the harbour lights

# They only told me

# We were parting... #

Blackpool lights up the coast every September.

It's a bright idea that keeps the summer season burning longer,

But then, this is an ingenious stretch of shore.

As they know at Barrow-in-Furness.

This harbour is the site where our nuclear subs take shape.

But there's another secret here, almost everyone's forgotten.

When boffins of Barrow were building a remarkable ship...

..an airship.

An uplifting tale Dick can't resist.

In 1911, His Majesty's Airship No.1

was beginning to take shape in Cavendish Docks.

Here, have a look at this.

this is the story of the airship sticking out of a massive shed

that was constructed to protect this weapon of war.

I want to know what became of Britain's airships,

and why this top-secret project was started on this part of the coast.

This was the man that Barrow was taking on,

the undisputed king of the air, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin.

His first Zeppelin rose to the skies in 1900,

three years before the Wright Brothers managed powered flight.

And the new threat posed by Zeppelins was alarming.

Britain's skies were wide open.

Suddenly we were in an aerial arms race with Germany.

In 1909, the Admiralty set shipbuilders at Barrow

the challenge of designing Britain's own Zeppelin-style airship.

To see how our airship took shape in this harbour,

I've come to Cavendish Dock with local historian Graeme Cubbin

to hunt for evidence for the top-secret project.

Graeme, have a look at this, it looks huge, where was it?

This is the airship shed built on Cavendish Dock

and behind us here you can see the remnants of the airship shed

you can see the remains of the foundations.

Those posts go for a very long way,

what length are we talking about, the shed and the airship?

The shed itself was over 600ft long and over 50ft wide.

The airship was 512ft long and when it was launched in 1911,

it was the biggest airship in the world,

far bigger than any of the Zeppelins that had been built.

Britain's first rigid airship floated on water

to make it easier to manoeuvre, an idea copied from the Germans.

But our engineers made a critical mistake constructing the shed

to house their creation

Zeppelin's airship shed was a floating shed,

and that enabled them to rotate the whole shed into the wind,

but Vickers built theirs over rigid foundations,

it couldn't turn so any airship coming out of this shed

would be subject to strong winds.

Unfortunately, it was a blustery day on the 24th of September, 1911

as His Majesty's Airship No.1 was made ready for manoeuvres.

We're here at one side of the docks, the shed would have been over there,

and the airship would have just been pulled out, towed out.

Yeah, it was very carefully planned.

It was towed out using small boats and horses,

so it was actually floating very lightly on the water

and could be manoeuvred to a mooring post in the centre of the dock.

No sooner was she free of the shed than disaster struck.

'Seldom does a picture sum-up a nation's humiliation so completely.'

OK, Graeme, what went wrong?

There was a gust of wind, the airship rolled slightly,

and as it was described at the time, there was a sound like

thousands of stones being tossed through acres of glass houses.

The stern-most part of the airship started to rise to the air,

Luckily the crew managed to jump into the dock,

no injuries were sustained,

but the airship was irreparably damaged.

It was a catastrophic failure.

This crunching set-back convinced the traditionally-minded top brass

of the Navy that Barrow's secret project

was just an ill-conceived aerial adventure.

Admiral Sturdee, the head of the inquiry

into Britain's airship disaster is reported to have said,

"The project was the work of an idiot."

Such was the humiliation

that the airship project in this harbour was halted.

What a mess!

But the Zeppelin soared on.

With the First World War looming,

like it or not, we were in a critical air race.

So the Admiralty had to swallow their pride

and set their sights on the skies again.

To succeed, we had to understand every detail of the Zeppelin's design.

To get an airship off the ground

you have to fill it with a gas that is lighter than the air.

They used hydrogen and they used lots of it.

But, surprisingly, an airship's outer skin isn't gas-tight at all.

The rigid frame and its canvas coating were there to protect

the fragile gas-type bags held inside.

Here the massive gas bags of the Zeppelin hang limp inside the frame,

waiting to be inflated... but what where they made of?

Now it's child's play to produce a bag

that can hold a gas for ages, but a hundred years ago

they didn't have materials like this, so what did they do?

Well, to get a futuristic airship to float,

they had to revert to techniques that were ancient.

Amazingly, the gas bags inside the most advanced Zeppelins

started their lives inside...a cow.

Open up the beast and there's a part of its intestines

known as the caecum, that's what held the hydrogen inside the Zeppelins.

It seems incredible, but cow guts were the secret ingredients

that meant that airships could float in the sky.

Giles, good to see you. How you doing? We're ready for this, are we?

I think so, yes, we'll have a go.

'Airships expert Giles Camplin knows the history

'but he's never handled the real guts of a Zeppelin before.'

We've got some straight from the abattoir.

Good Lord!

Is that what you expected?

This is the raw material.

That's not very pleasant.

It's horrible, it's disgusting.

But that, you can see there, is the sort of membrane

we're looking for, and that is gas-holding,

that holds hydrogen.

When they dry it and process it, it ends up like this.

You see, this is dry.

In the airships they kept it moist and flexible.

It's a natural membrane that's gas-tight.

'So can we make our own mini airship

'by filling this membrane with helium?'

I've done some very odd things in my time.

Right.

THEY LAUGH

This is disgusting, but the membrane is very impressive.

It's showing that it's gas-tight.

All this fat's got to be scraped off.

Yeah, all that's got to be scraped off,

and then the actual membrane bit, the very thin bit here,

would have been cut to make a flat square sheet

and then you could laminate the different sheets together.

And stick them together?

Stick them together, then put multiple layers in,

up to seven layers thick, you needed up to 350,000.

Some of the big ships had a million of these to make one airship.

What an investment in effort and time and cows.

I think this is practically ready to fly.

To get the Zeppelins out of their sheds,

millions of German cows gave up their guts.

Across Germany, farmers were mobilised.

They had to surrender the inside of their animals for the war effort.

But in Britain, airship production was still playing catch-up,

we struggled to gather the vast amount of cow guts required.

Well, we had a problem, especially in the First World War

and we were getting them from America,

they'd be coming into ports like Liverpool,

but they came in barrels, salted, they salted them to preserve them

because that was the best way of doing it,

and then they were soaked in solutions of glycerine and water

and then teams of women were processing them,

scraping the fat off,

getting them ready and layering them up to make these gas cells.

The smell must have been appalling,

must have been absolutely horrendous conditions,

but we had to catch-up with the Germans

cos the Zeppelins were coming over and bombing,

so that's what they had to do to make these amazing flying machines.

By the First World War,

we were still struggling to produce effective airships.

Meanwhile, the east coast, the Midlands and London

suffered the terror of Zeppelin attacks.

Bombing raids killed more than 500 people across Britain.

Only after the war, when the R80 came into service,

did we finally have a craft to match Germany's finest.

So much effort, and all in vain.

Planes would eventually blow military airships from the skies.

The airborne adventure we started in this harbour

never really did take off, but there's something about airships

that still seems futuristic, an alternative future,

the stuff of science fiction, kept in the air by cow guts.

This craggy coastline is sculpted by a sea

that crashes against granite,

and builds boatmen of steely resolve.

Historically, each little harbour was connected to its neighbour

by the sea, not the land.

The boats that used to chase the mackerel,

rarely strayed far from the coast.

Except for one remarkable mackerel boat, The Mystery.

Her seven crew sailed in 1854 from Newlyn.

It was a voyage that took them out through the Bay of Biscay,

down the coast of West Africa, past Cape Town and on to Melbourne.

A 12,000-mile gamble on riches in gold rush Australia.

When those Cornishmen set sail in 1854,

some of them had never been out of sight of land before.

I'm on an exact replica of their ship, Spirit of Mystery,

to relive a great unsung feat of British seamanship.

'To appreciate their astonishing achievement,

'Cornish sailor Pete Goss

'faced again every crashing wave from the original crew's trip.

'Pete built his boat from the plans of an 1850s lugger,

'correct in every detail.'

I can't help noticing, Pete, that you haven't got any winches

or mechanical aids to help you get these huge sparks up the mast.

No, no, this was as they would have sailed, so it's a handful of blocks,

a bucket and rope, needle and thread, go anywhere in the world.

'Battling the wind, I get a feeling of just how tough it was

'for the crew aboard The Mystery in 1854.'

-There must be a knack to this.

-You're right, it'll come.

You'll be running around by the end of the day.

That's it. Ready. That'll do. Yep.

'Sails hoisted, the Cornishmen faced over 100 days in open seas,

'with the same fearsome horizons.'

Up here on the bow, Pete, looking back,

I'm actually a little bit shocked at how small this boat is.

-It is a tiny, tiny boat to sail to Australia in.

-It is, yeah.

The further away you get from land, the smaller it becomes,

and you do, you know down in the Southern Ocean,

there is a sense of vulnerability, you're just out there

and you hope for the best and deal with what comes along.

'Pete's crew did have a few home comforts

'their intrepid counterparts couldn't have dreamt of.'

Pete, this is incredibly cosy down here,

but in the original Mystery this was a fish hold, right?

Yes, it was. This area here, our sort of cabin top,

would have been a fish hold, but we know that they decked that over

and we know that they put bunks and accommodation down below.

Are these working oil lamps, is this how you lit the cabin down here?

Yeah, we had oil lamps, we used a sextant to navigate.

The objective was to shine a spotlight on their voyage

and get to Melbourne with a real sense of their achievement.

Philip Curnow Matthews was one of those who made it to Australia,

and now, one of his precious possessions

has come home to Cornwall

This is his little personal compass.

How extraordinary.

Do you think that was sort of like a lucky charm

that he had with him on the voyage? It's very beautiful, isn't it?

I like to think it was, I kind of see that tucked in his waistcoat.

Matthews and his five crewmates put their life

in the hands of the skipper, Richard Nicholls,

who survives in the writings of his log.

And I love this bit, "Our gallant little vessel riding beautifully

"and not shipping any water whatever",

and your life is contained on this little Cornish walnut.

Captain Richard Nicholls was a man of few words,

but they sum up the extraordinary nature of the voyage.

"December 6th, 1854.

"Several flying fish came onboard during the night,

"crew overhauling, rigging and cleaning mast,

"airing nets and restoring hold."

Captain Nicholls refers to his crew simply as "the people".

When the boat was becalmed, he'd exercise them

with the fisherman's walk, six paces up and down the deck, endlessly.

After 50 days at sea, The Mystery stopped-over

at the tip of South Africa.

Nicholls noted the excitement,

"There were a great many visitors onboard.

"The Mystery being the smallest vessel ever from England."

But departing Africa, excitement soon turned to terror

in turbulent southern seas.

The Southern Ocean is the big focus, that's the big one, you...

you step into that and we had probably

every five days, on average, we'd have a big gale come through.

Walls of water pounded their tiny boat.

Pete's crew were fighting for their lives just like the original men

of the Mystery, 150 years before, as the captain's log records,

"5th March, 1855, a complete

hurricane, mountains of sea."

Pete only captured the start of this storm on his little camera.

Hailstones rattled down, then their world turned upside-down.

Just saw this great big sheer wall of water and shouted,

and then it's like a car crash, you only remember bits,

and I remember it went all dark,

getting knocked around in the hatchway

and then it felt like standing in a storm drain

with water pouring in and pushing up against it.

Andy was in the starboard bunk, he woke up and grabbed the boat

and swung over and realised he was sat on the ceiling,

so we'd got knocked upside-down.

Miraculously, the boat righted itself,

but deckhand Mark suffered a badly broken leg.

I'm sure I heard it, it was like a rifle crack.

I mean, my foot was tucked underneath the bench

and my foot caught on the post and that's what caused it to break.

In Melbourne harbour,

a hero's welcome greeted The Spirit of Mystery.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

When the original Mystery reached Melbourne in 1855,

she was the smallest craft ever to complete the journey,

but her seven-man crew sold Mystery to start new lives.

Phillip Curnow Matthew married and became a land surveyor.

He is buried in Melbourne.

Captain Nicholls eventually returned to Cornwall,

only to be killed by a horse-drawn carriage in 1868.

Who says worse things happen at sea?

After a spell in Australia, William Badcock and three shipmates

also came home to Newlyn harbour.

Perhaps the lure of Cornwall was just too strong,

but maybe what had really driven them on

wasn't the desire for a new life in Australia

but the spirit of adventure.

A wealth of hidden history lies in store for those

who explore our harbours.

Tales of enterprise, triumph and trade tell how Britain was born.

For me, the coast is most alive when you can see it at work,

and harbours are where you can see that happening,

where land and sea and people all come together

and where adventures are born.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd