The Mary Rose Reborn

King Henry VIII's famous warship the Mary Rose. During 2013, the BBC's

Robert Hall followed the construction of a new museum that

revealed the ship and the many stories hidden among its treasures.

In Portsmouth's historic dockyard, a flavour of the Tudor past. British

warships have been built and launched here for centuries. These

celebrations are in honour of just one. The pride of Henry VIII's navy.

The Mary Rose. It is a story which stretches back

half a millennium. A tragedy. A mystery. A tale of the patience,

expertise and determination which brought this maritime legend safely

to her new home. And which will teach us so much about the men who

served on her. It was the Titanic of its day, losing a huge chunk of the

population. It is as though we have the English tomb of Tutankhamen.

Except that it's put together deliberately. These represent a

particular moment of time. I think it is a duty to the crew of the Mary

Rose. It is their monument. And I think we have a duty to share it

with the public. If you pick up a ship from the sea bed, you are

taking on a responsibility for eternity.

There is the wreck of the Mary Rose. It has come to the surface.

What an amazing sight. On October the 11th, 1982, the Mary

Rose came home. Tragically sunk, lost for centuries. She had lain

within a mile of the docks where she was built.

I remember soon after we recovered her. Somebody said, why are you

standing there? What are you thinking? I'm thinking about, if

they had told me this could not be done, I would have believed them. It

was an impossible task. But with a good team, it worked. I was sent in

with a film camera, to record this underwater. And the ship was just

moving around. And the water sort of pumps, silty water, out from the

bottom of the ship. And it looked as though the Mary Rose was breathing.

When it was underwater, it belonged to us. But at last, on that day in

1982, we were sharing this ship with the world. The millions who watched

the recovery operation included an enthusiastic member of today's Royal

family. His thoughts were with the King who is said to be present on

that dark day in 1545. The fact it has been preserved makes it

worthwhile. I thought I owed it to him to make sure it came home.

Henry VIII is credited as the founder of the Royal Navy. And the

Mary Rose, named after his favourite sister, was the pride of the fleet.

When I look at this absolutely beautiful book. If we open it up, we

can see that actually, it was presented to King Henry VIII in

1546. And it is a declaration of the Royal Navy of England, composed by

Anthony Anthony, one of the Officers of the Ordnance. If we turn the

page, we will find the most important significance for us. The

only illustration we have of the Mary Rose. What it is depicting is

not necessarily the most artistically accurate illustration

of a naval ship. But what it shows is the four masted sailing vessel.

Bristling with guns. It shows a main deck and another two rows of guns on

top of it. 600 tonnes and carrying a crew of 400, Mary Rose had proved

herself in battle. She was the obvious choice to lead the fleet

against the threat of French invasion. But as the flagship tacked

across the Solent in a stiff breeze, horrified onlookers saw her heel

over. Shipping water through the open gun ports. She went down within

minutes. Most of her crew trapped under anti-boarding nets. Only a

couple of dozen survived. Swallowed by mud and silt, Mary

Rose, her crew and the contents, lay undisturbed for centuries. A time

capsule of Tudor life. Unique and precious. Now raised into a hostile

environment above the waves. There were quick decisions to be

made. The surviving starboard side of the ship could not be allowed to

dry out. Up here, we can see where we marked those three timbers with

the orange tanks. -- tags. They were the first ones the divers saw

underwater. From those and everything else here, it was

uncovered by the divers, by hand, during the excavation. That shows

what a Herculean task it was. But a round-the-clock spray water would

not be enough. It was time to seek advice. 1000 miles to the

north-east, Scandinavian colleagues could offer solutions from another

remarkable success. It is the story of the Vasa. Lost on

her maiden voyage near Stockholm 80 years after the Mary Rose tragedy.

And raised intact 20 years before the Portsmouth operation. Now

stabilised and the star of her own museum. Vasa was a pioneering

project in the field of raising an intact ship. Or substantially intact

big ship. And Mary Rose came along a generation after that. So Mary Rose

was able to learn from the mistakes that were made with Vasa. You could

say that. For example, in the conservation treatment, after the

ship was raised, this was the first ship that anyone triws to conserve

using polyethylene glycol. -- anyone tried to. Polyethylene glycol was

pumped onto and into every timber on this ship. It replaced the water

with wax. It was soon after the chemical. Then Mary Rose came along

and we were able to take everything that had been learned about how this

chemical behaves. And how it works in conjunction with wood. And

develop a more sophisticated and more effective treatment.

Back in Portsmouth, as the round-the-clock operation rolled on

inside the Mary Rose's protective tent, a major change is underway

outside. A ?35 million dream to build a state-of-the-art busy around

the ship, whilst leaving that sealed environment intact. -- museum

around. The building really is a sort of

diagram which encloses the objects inside, within the dry dock. If you

take the section of it where the dry dock goes around. There is the Mary

Rose on one side in its cradle. And we have put in a virtual hull on the

other. Then we have put decks between. That is the concept.

It is a memorial further 500 sailors that sank on board her. On the 19th

of July, 1545. It is about displaying the contents. This

extraordinary collection of Tudor objects. Nothing like it in the

world. And reuniting it with the ship. The previous museum was 500

metres away. It had no relationship to the hull. So bringing the two

together would enable the public to interpret the two together. To

understand what it was like to live on board and work on board and fight

on board a Tudor warship. Away from the building site bustle,

the Mary Rose conservation team was solving another problem. How to

reunite her with more than 19,000 artefacts recovered from in and

around the hull. So, what are you doing here? We are

removing some of these arrows from their treatment solution. They are

now ready to undergo the next process, which is to dry them. And

before we can do that, we have got to wash off the excess chemicals.

Then we will put them into a special machine to dry them very safely. How

many arrows have you had to do this with? Well over 3000 that we found

on the Mary Rose. These are examples of the Tudor Rose. You can see the

detail on them. You can see the detail of the fletching. The silk

binding that would have held the goose feathers into position. They

have lost their metal tips, of course. The corroded in the sea

water. -- they. So these have been in treatment solution for about two

years. In order to stabilise them. If we tried to dry these without any

treatment, they would just collapse and crack and twist. So this

chemical we use, it is quite viscous. It would prevent that from

happening. Preserving, cleaning and reconstructing, across the dockyard,

fragments of the past were pieced together. This is one of the many

books that were found on the Mary Rose. I think this one in particular

was found closed together. The books we have are mainly made from very

fine slivers of wood. Then leather is applied over the top. So you were

replacing tiny bits of leather. Is that what you do? Yes, I am. Like a

jigsaw puzzle? Yes. It is very painstaking. I have got this far. I

have the rest of this to put on there. How long will that take?

Quite a long time. Are we talking weeks? Not constantly, but a long

time. The arrows were on their way to the deep freeze. What we do, we

freeze the objects. So the temperature of the objects is down

as low as minus 30 Celsius. And then, we remove the air from the

chamber. So we have low pressure. Under those conditions of low

temperature and low pressure, the process is called sublimation. We

can safely move water from these objects without changing the shape

or size of the object. So it sucks up and becomes a gas? It becomes a

gas. When we freeze it, it becomes ice. And a low claim future -- under

load temperature, low pressure, it becomes a gas. So the gas comes away

from the object. And after being in this chamber for around five to six

weeks, we would have removed all the water. They will be solid? They

would be solid and dry. As the weeks tick by, a snapshot of

history was being assembled. Items hidden from view for so long would

soon be revealed. How many years have you been on the

project? 25 years. Did you realise what you were getting into? Not at

all. You have sections of rope which has survived? We have. That is a

piece of anchor cable and here are some leather shoes. In remarkable

condition, as you can see. Are you finding pairs of shoes? Some, yes.

We can see one of the gold coins recovered. One of 32 and this is a

gold angel. Pure gold. It is wafer-thin. Yes. I can pass you

that. How much would this be worth today? It is difficult to put a

value on things but for insurance purposes, probably ?50,000 because

of the provenance of it. How many have you got? 32 in total. And here

are some nit combs. Most of the crew would have had their own nit comb

for removing head lice and nits and cut from a single piece of boxwood.

Some of these were found in the pockets of the leather waistcoats of

the individual. You are not going to tell me the nits are still there?

You can actually still see some of the nits in that one. And then the

longbows. Wonderful longbows. 140 in total, and in remarkable condition.

So many people look at these and think they are replicas, because

they do not believe they are the real thing.

Weapons, clothing and personal possessions - threads which lead us

to the men who served aboard Henry's flagship, . Four centuries after the

crew were lost, we can begin to understand how they lived and how

they fought. The idea to give people access to

this is to pick out some key figures in the Mary Rose story, for example,

the master gunner, the surgeon, the carpenter. A certain number of

chests have been found where it is quite obvious who was the owner of

that chest. The barber surgeon has all his medical equipment. In some

cases, bodies were found which had clothing that would identify them as

archers, perhaps, or Gunners. By assembling all that material

together, you can tell the story of that person. You can have a case

dedicated to the man. He may have had a match for lighting the gun,

but he also had a gambling dice in his pocket. Through that method, he

actually came to life. We all know what people are most interested in

in museums are other people. The actor Robert Hardy, who shares a

life of performance with a passion for archery, has helped research the

men who made and fired the huge longbows. This one I have in my hand

is the lower end of the range of the Mary Rose bows. Behind in the cases

there are some 170 lbs draw weight bows. That is the actual weight in

poundage when you are fully drawing the bow. I am not the greatest

archer in the world, but I suffer from a lot of rickety bones and hard

tendons, just from the amount of archery I do. What those boys,

pulling these enormous weights, and pulling them for life and death...

The remains of 179 people were recovered from the wreck site, just

under half the crew. For the first time, visitors to the Mary Rose will

meet some of them face-to-face. The first stage was to produce a

mirror image of the original skull. Once the skulls have been scanned,

you can use the software that is available which can then fill any

gaps which may occur from areas you cannot reach. With this skulll, it

is difficult to get right into the eye sockets. From there, you can

move it on to get right into the eye sockets. From there, you can move it

onto a 3D printer, which will print out a fantastic material, that is

laid down in layers, about 0.2 of a millimetre thick each time. It

builds up a representation of the skull.

Stage two took the replica skull across the North Sea to a tiny

studio. A studio on the outskirts of Stockholm.

Here, Oscar Nielsen breathes and an canny life into old bones. His

patient fingers add muscles and facial features. His artist's eye

creating the skin tones and the tiny details which combine to bring

another person into the room. First I want to know about the

history of the time, so I tried to investigate as much material as I

can read, to know more about the time and the era. I want to know as

much as possible about the skeletons found on the ship. It is quite

surprising to find that all of those men that I worked with here, nine of

them, were quite young. Some of them just in their 20s. Even though they

are so young, they have severe traumas and stress on the skeleton,

coming from hard labour. Like this guy, who is supposedly an archer. He

had severe stress from training with the bow. I think he was like 25 when

he drowned. But if he had been living till he was 50 or something,

he would be crippled, probably. Back in Portsmouth, the pressure was

on, with the building virtually complete. Thousands of exhibits were

wending their way to display cases. Firstly, we are getting as much of

the work done before we get to the museum. All the mounting, all the

design and layout of where the objects go, and trying to get them

boxed up and sorted into specific groups. So we go into the store room

and know that this is case one, or case two. So then they have the

drawings ready and everything else they need.

Give or take, we've got about 14,000 to 15,000 items. A lot of the

artefacts have sections missing, which we replaced with frosted

Perspex. This gives the public an idea of the size, shape and length.

We cannot physically glue them together. We have to heat it, and

mould it and shape it to the article we are trying to support. This is

like a moleskin, which will protect the artefact from any scratches or

scrapes from the plastic itself, and also stops them slipping, because

it's got a bit of grip. Opening Day is on the horizon. There

is one more milestone moment. 30 years after they began treating the

Mary Rose, the conservation team have decided that the sprays can be

turned off. There is now enough preservative in the hull, the drying

process can start. At the moment, it is about 30 degrees and 90%

humidity. There is also things coming out of the wood, which is why

we wear the mask, and really there is the unknown element of what is

developing there. Once it goes off, we will have temporary dehumidifiers

which go along the scaffolding here. The idea is to get it down to 54%

and 18 or 19 degrees. We should be there within a day or so.

Loud and clear. We have just turned the sprays off.

This is a momentous occasion for the Mary Rose. We have been spraying for

over 30 years. So many people involved in the project, who have

contributed over the years. It is a really exciting thing to see. Now we

are ready for the next phase and what that brings.

For years, this was the image of the Mary Rose that visitors to home with

them. A remarkable discovery, but a dead ship. All that has changed. The

long months of research, restoration and reconstruction have allowed us

to see the missing half of the Mary Rose. The ship has come back to

life. The time for preparation and

rehearsal is over. The Mary Rose is open for business.

There are people going round with tears in their eyes. The people who

dived on it, who never thought this would happen. Yet here it is

happening. The Mary Rose deserves it, the country deserves it, and all

the people who are putting the work in our going around crying. It is

wonderful to see the ship come alive. We have related the man to

the object and to the ship on which he fought and served.

A page has turned, but we still have a great deal to learn about the Mary

Rose, her crew, their lives, and their death. This story is far from

over. We actually know the meal that these

people had just eaten. We know that the surgeon was attending to

somebody, because he had been away from his cabin at that early stage

of the journey. We know what was in people's pockets.

There was that terrible moment of sinking, and the silence. 450 years

below the waves, and then brought up with this miracle of restoration, so

we can see it and experience it again.

Hello. At least the weather is quieting down for Christmas Day in

self, the storm showing definite signs of easing. There is strong

wind across northern parts but that also will ease as we go through

tonight. Across England and Wales we have right wind but also some