Hampshire Countryfile

The ancient oak forests of North Hampshire.

Hundreds of years ago, wood from here was on the move,

sent to the boatbuilding shores of Portsmouth Harbour.

To celebrate that journey, a new 50-mile trail has been set up.

The Shipwright's Way winds from Alice Holt Forest

at its northern tip, to Portsmouth in the south.

And today, I'm walking a section of it,

starting here at the city's historic dockyard.

Nowadays, there aren't many of these around,

but I have managed to find a shipwright

that's still gainfully employed, and this is his ship.

Just a small one!

HMS Warrior. Commissioned in 1858,

she was the largest warship in the world,

60% bigger than her French counterpart

and with an iron hull four inches thick.

Bob Daubeney is the shipwright of this ironclad beauty.

So, Bob, what exactly is a shipwright?

A shipwright, you take the term "wright",

and it's someone who manufacturers things.

You've heard of the term "blacksmith",

and you had smiths that worked in metal,

you've got wrights, who tended to work in wood,

so you had a boatwright, a shipwright,

a cartwright, a wheelwright, there's a whole series of trades and skills.

And even though she's no longer at sea, then,

-is it a full-time job for you?

-Definitely, yes.

It keeps me on the go all the time.

-I've been here 15 and a half years now.

-Really?

We've repainted the whole of the deck, 1.07 million,

-two and a half years.

-Goodness me!

You've got to keep it watertight, got to protect the infrastructure.

It doesn't get any better than being a shipwright on a vessel like this.

Can you imagine coming to work here every day?

Oh! She is incredibly important. Did she see much action?

She never fired a shot in anger. She became a deterrent.

She had been created to such a strength,

there was nothing they could do to combat her.

But when it comes to keeping Warrior shipshape,

not all the jobs fall to Bob.

-You all right, Ian?

-OK!

Now, 60 foot up, Ian is replacing these things.

They're called the dead eyes and they connect all the rigging

to the ship and as you can imagine, at that height,

they get exposed to all of the elements, so they need an overhaul.

And the only way to reach them is by climbing the rigging.

Climbing!

So, that's where I'm heading.

-Getting there now.

-All right, mate?

-Hello, Ian, you all right?

-I'm good, how are you, all right?

-Yeah, nice to see you close up!

It doesn't bear thinking about, a young lad climbing up here

-in a storm.

-Yeah, tell me about all that!

Goodness me, but what a view up here!

What are we doing with these dead eyes?

As you rightly point out, these are exposed to all the elements.

This one here, we've cut away all the timber surrounding it.

Yeah. So, it's nice and loose now, all ready to come out.

It's important to kind of preserve all those details,

because you want this ship to kind of transport you back to

sailing down the Channel to go and stand up to the French

-and all of that.

-Yeah.

OK, so what it wants to do is slide up this way towards me a bit.

-OK.

-I don't know how loose it's going to be.

-There you go.

-We've got to have a bit of luck sometimes.

-That's it.

-It's free.

-That's it.

-There's some weight in it, like, isn't there?

-Yeah.

You can see the amount of rust that's built up here,

-you can see the way the timber's de-laminated.

-Uh-huh.

It's done well, it's served its purpose,

but everything comes to an end eventually.

It does make you think, Ian, the amount of people

that will have been up here doing this job over the years -

you know, pretty privileged, aren't we?

Well, yeah, it's nice for us to be able to show what we do.

-So often the jobs are out of sight for everyone.

-Yeah.

We like to show what goes on up here.

I'll be sticking around in Portsmouth's historic docks

to see how new technology is helping preserve

our most celebrated battleship.

We're exploring the Shipwright's Way,

a long-distance trail in honour of Hampshire's shipbuilding past.

It runs along this section of coast,

before passing north into the Hampshire Hills.

It's where I've got a behind-the-scenes appointment

at the Royal Marines Museum. Hi, lads.

-ALL: Hello.

-Not with them, sadly!

LAUGHTER

I'm in search of an object that was instrumental

in a secret military operation that began here in Hampshire.

It was labelled the most courageous raid of World War II.

This is it.

No, it's not a flatpack set of shelves,

it's actually a 70-year-old Mark II military kayak.

It's made of wood, with collapsible canvas sides

and it had to be collapsible, because it had to be transportable.

In 1942, a newly formed detachment of the toughest soldiers

were deployed on a mission in kayaks exactly like this.

The assignment was perilous.

The target was situated right at the heart of a port

in German-occupied France.

The kayaks were nicknamed cockles and the men who took part

in this remarkable mission became known as the Cockleshell Heroes.

Southsea Beach was where the formative heroes

learned to paddle in the autumn of 1942.

Kayaks had been recognised as the perfect tool

to deal with the enemy threatening our island nation.

I'm meeting Royal Marine historian Mark Bentinck.

Give me some texture as to

what was happening at that point in time, 1942?

Well, 1942 was a really bad year for Britain.

Our fortunes were at an all-time low.

But there was one particular problem, in that

individual German ships, fast merchant ships,

were bringing key materials into occupied Europe from the Far East.

25,000 tonnes of natural rubber had been imported through Bordeaux.

If we could intercept or damage this commerce, this would be very useful.

It was a year when desperate measures were required

to survive and actually win the war.

A team of Marines had volunteered for hazardous service,

unaware of the risky task that lay ahead.

They would serve under an experienced kayaker,

the strong-minded Major Hasler, nicknamed Blondie.

Hasler was quite a character, the leader of the group -

-what was he looking for in his team members?

-Initiative.

People who could do the right thing without being told what to do

and without waiting for orders. People with endurance and toughness

and determination, who weren't going to give up

and could survive the very tough conditions

of canoeing in enemy country in the winter.

Only later would the mission be divulged.

Codenamed Operation Frankton,

the secret raid would strike in early December, 1942.

A team of a dozen men led by intrepid Blondie Hasler

boarded naval submarine HMS Tuna

for what they thought was a training exercise.

It was only in the secure confines of the submarine

that the truth was revealed.

They were to raid Bordeaux and attack German merchant ships,

a task so dangerous, the chance of survival was tiny.

The kayaks would be stored in the torpedo hatches of the submarine

and then launched right here, at the mouth of the Gironde estuary.

The men would then have to paddle 100 miles

towards the city of Bordeaux,

evading the enemy and their guns along the way.

The goal was to attach limpet mines, like this one,

to the merchant ships that were in the port.

It was a ridiculously dangerous and risky mission.

Almost as soon as they'd left their sub,

they were caught in a huge riptide,

the first of many hazards that wiped out members of the team.

But as they approached Bordeaux, Hasler, the leader

and the most experienced kayaker, was still in charge.

He had learned to paddle as a child, here on Canoe Lake in Portsmouth.

And that's where I'm about to get a taste of what their voyage was like.

I'm taking to the water in a replica cockle

with ex-Marine Ray Cooper.

Ray, they're not that comfortable, I have to say.

You're only in it for a short time.

The guys that paddled these in 1942

had to make the best of the six-hour tide,

so they would be in them for six hours,

it was December, the weather was very, very cold.

They had to do everything, they were eating,

sleeping, you name it, in this space.

Everything, this was their workspace.

After that treacherous journey, two kayaks made it to the port,

but did they actually manage to damage any ships?

Yes, five ships were damaged and one was sunk,

which helped boost morale and also destroy the Germans' morale.

It made the Germans aware that they could be infiltrated,

which meant that they then had to bring more men into the area,

away from the actual front.

Only two men survived the journey back to Britain.

Blondie Hasler, the leader, was one of them.

Despite the lives lost,

Hasler's chancy undertaking had been a success.

But there's an astonishing twist -

Hasler and his men weren't the only team of British secret forces

targeting the merchant ships in Bordeaux.

Five months earlier, the Special Operations Executive

had sent their own team in by parachute,

Operation Scientist,

and their job was to blow up the same ships at the same docks.

Historian Tom Keene discovered another raid on the same port.

They were meant to liaise and they didn't.

So, Hasler's team went in, believing that was the only way to attack

those targets, and it manifestly wasn't.

On the night that Hasler's men finally reached Bordeaux,

this team, the Scientist team, were on their final recce

and what they were going to do was not paddle 100 miles down the river,

they were going to walk through the dock gates with passes,

with bombs in their knapsacks, and put their bombs on the boats

-from the shore side.

-Disguised as what?

Painters and workmen. They had the passes.

Does this mean, looking back now,

that it was a pointless mission in every way?

No, it doesn't.

The Cockleshell Heroes raid became THE iconic

Royal Marines small boat raid of the Second World War.

The Germans described it as the greatest raid of the war.

I think post-war,

Operation Frankton, the Cockleshell Heroes' raid,

changed the Royal Marines' perception of themselves.

It became the iconic symbol of all that they do best.

And at the Royal Marines Museum, the story of the Cockleshell Heroes

is still inspiring the military elite of today.

I've been taking in the historic dockyards of Portsmouth,

the home of the iron-hulled warship HMS Warrior

and the legendary HMS Victory,

a superstar of battleships.

Commissioned in 1778,

the Victory is the only surviving battleship to have fought

in the American War of Independence, the French Revolutionary War

and, most famously, the Napoleonic wars,

and she served on the forefront of naval warfare for 34 years.

It was from HMS Victory that in 1805

Lord Nelson led the Battle of Trafalgar.

He defeated the French, who were never again a threat to our island,

but in doing so paid the ultimate price.

In the ferocity of battle, he was shot and killed.

And it's because of Nelson's death

that she's one of the most famous ships in the world.

HMS Victory is now over 250 years old,

and as you can see, well, she is in need of a bit of work.

But she is about to undergo a £50 million restoration project

and some 21st-century technology is going to be used

to re-image this Georgian battleship in a digital age.

Lasers. Scanning every surface,

these machines are creating a 3D model of Victory

to help curator Andrew Baines

look after this vulnerable national treasure.

She is inherently biodegradable,

she's made of natural materials that will rot.

She's designed to operate in the most hostile environment

known to man at the time - the sea - for four or five years

before you bring her back and give her very extensive repairs.

So this is the Great Cabin on Victory.

This is where Nelson would have been based and quartered.

We're stood in the day cabin part of his quarters

and this is Nelson's breakfast table.

-And we're going to sit here, at Nelson's table?

-At Nelson's table.

What a feeling. It is, you can feel it. It's heavy, isn't it?

She's weighted with history.

Why did you decide to go for laser?

When we decide we need to take some planks off the ship

or we need to lift the mass out,

we can actually model the effects of that work

and work out the best approach we can take

so we don't put the ship at any risk

and we don't do anything that is going to damage the ship.

-So you can, kind of, do the work in the computer first...

-Yeah.

-..without actually making any mistakes?

-Yeah.

It looks incredibly detailed.

I mean, what level of accuracy are we talking here, Andrew?

The level of accuracy we've got, it's down to the millimetre.

If we were to stand here with a tape measure doing that,

it's going to take us a while.

So even all these little chips and flecks and all that stuff...?

Yes, it can feel all that, the original markings on the timber.

It can pick those up as well. Very, very detailed.

Victory's old plans have been outdated...

by this.

A view of HMS Victory that's never been seen before.

The beginning of a venture to preserve

one of the most treasured relics of our naval past.