The Pirates of Thames Forts

By Kevin Day

My friend Kevin treated me to a trip out into the seaward end of the Thames estuary to see the WW2 forts.  To get there, we traveled down to Kent, then crossed the bridge to the Isle of Sheppey, which is reminiscent of Orwell Bridge on our home turf.  Once on Sheppey we soon found Queensferry dock and parked up. There were lots of screaming kids and their parents at the jetty. Surely, we aren’t going to be seven hours at sea with those little horrors? But luckily enough they are just waiting for the Jet Ferry to Southend, off for shopping or McDonalds or roller-skating or whatever you can do in Southend to please the kids on a Saturday morning. After all they’ve all gone our boat’s owner, Martin Hurley arrives and gives us a brief briefing and I’m sure that he said the captain was his husband, but Martin doesn’t accompany us on this voyage. The captain is old – Captain Alan is his name – and the first mate leans over to talk to us; he’s a chunk of a man, a London/Essex type, although later he claims to be from Devon.

We board the ‘X Pilot’, formerly called the ‘Thames Pilot’, one of three pilot boats (for guiding freighters) built for the London docks in 1967. The captain is a little old man with a beard who disappears for a while until our first stop, which is to peer at the wreckage of USS Richard Montgomery. This is an infamous wreck that’s still full of explosives, and dangerous to approach. We arrived at an enclosure of warning buoys, in the middle of which 3 large masts still poke up from the water, their cant indicating the angle the wreck must be tipped, there below the waves. The captain emerged to tell us the sorry story. The Montgomery was sent over by the Americans, packed with every kind of munitions we needed for the war, but the Royal Navy took charge and told the ship to anchor at this very spot, which is much too near a sandbank. The Sheerness harbourmaster protested that it was the wrong place, but the Royal Navy knew better and overruled him. The harbourmaster desperately went up the Naval chain of command, trying to get her moved before the tide ebbed. But no sense could be made to them, the Navy even re-enforced their mistake with written orders. So, when the tide turned, she stuck on the sands, and a few days later broke her back and begun to flood. She was only a welded-up ‘liberty ship’ after all, built very quickly and cheaply – three ships every two days!  The Montgomery was named after an Irishman who fought against British in Canada during the American revolutionary war.

Not wishing to lose much-needed armaments and explosives, the Navy made frantic attempts to unload her using barges and stevedores from Gravesend but eventually no more could be done, and 1400tons of explosives had to be abandoned in the wreck. They presumed it would all be cleared up after the war, but the next seventy-five years simply compounded the British authority’s crime, with various opportunities to clear it up being missed. Some people believe it can’t be touched for fear of blowing Sheerness sky high in one great explosion of atomic proportions, but this doesn’t seem to be the experts’ considered opinion, and in the 1960s the Americans (who still technically own the wreck) offered to clear it up. But the British authorities turned them down. Even our Navy divers offered to sort it out, but Norman Tebbit forbade it.  What a self-inflicted mess!

After shaking our heads, we steamed out, the river banks dropping to the horizon as the Thames estuary widened into the North Sea. We would see various ships and although it looked like a big expanse, ships must travel within the buoyed channels because it is actually quite shallow, and has many sand banks and shoals. In the distance we can see the silhouettes of the Red Sands and the Shivery Sands Forts, but first our destination is Knock John Fort, the furthest one out. Kevin has brought binoculars and passes them to me when there is something interesting, like a large lifeboat coming out fast towards an inbound freighter, that pulled alongside for just a minute, then headed straight back to land. Did it take on an injured seaman to rush back to hospital? I say that the lifeboat is not a ship, because the mate, who spends most of the time steering our boat, told me “if you step down into it then is a boat, and if you climb up into it then it a ship.” He’s a large fellow and friendly enough, but we don’t have any great conversations. I suppose he meets too many chatty passengers in this game. The captain is beside him, asleep with his pillow.  He is very old. After motoring along at 8 knots, pushed by the pilot boat’s engine (a Kelvin), we get to Knock John fort.

This is a ‘Navy fort’ and was designed by an amazing man called Guy Maunsell. It’s the two-legged table type, with a big platform and a metal house on top, reminiscent of a destroyer’s bridge, completed with two wings projecting out at the top, for a captain to emerge from the wheelhouse and wave his arms or jump up and down and shout with a megaphone. They forts were prefabricated from steel reinforced concrete, hauled out on a giant concrete lighter which was sunk on the shallow sands. The forts had to appear overnight, because otherwise the Germans might attack them during construction, before their defensive guns were installed. Maunsell realised that something could be done to defend London from the terrible Blitz: the German planes coming up the Thames could be shot down. He was already a successful civil engineer and invented and designed these forts on his own initiative. But as we have already heard, the Royal Navy wasn’t particularly flexible, and didn’t accepts his proposals straight away. After frustrating meetings, Maunsell would reportedly return to his farm in Kent and swear at cows in a field about the idiotic Naval Officers.  Eventually he did persuade them to give him the go-ahead, and built the first of these ‘U’ forts in record time at a riverside concrete firm’s yard.  But when it was the fort was towed out to its assigned shallow spot (with an anti-aircraft gun crew on board), the Navy insisted they must be in charge. Uh-oh!

A film still exists of what happened next, because the valves to sink the barge weren’t opened to Maunsell’s instructions. The fort went down like the Titanic, teetering at 30degrees, with 120 unfortunate occupants screaming in terror. Luckily it straightened out when the barge hit the bottom. When the next forts were towed into place, Maunsell insisted that his own team from the private concrete yard (Riverside Cement Works), did the necessary sinking into place, and without people on board. There were 3 of these two-legged Navy forts, the Rough Tower is 12 miles off Felixstowe and has been occupied for many years by the Bates family as ‘the Independent Principality of Sealand’. Before that, it was the base of pirate radio station Radio Caroline, a more stable alternative to their previous pirate radio ships. The other forts have also been used at times for pirate radio stations, with those outside the 12miles territorial waters being the most sought-after [ed note: I once built and operated a pirate radio station in the 1980s in San Francisco].  Another Thames Fort was used as a pirate radio base, but when the pirates temporary left it unoccupied (one of them was injured and taken to hospital), the Royal Navy immediately moved in and placed demolition chargers to blow it up, leaving only the stumps of the legs.

After the 3 Navy forts were put in place, Guy Maunsell’s next idea was radically different for a series of Army-style forts. These we first seen at the Shivering Sands, and are rusty steel boxes as big as a house atop high up legs over the sea, four circular concrete pillars that tapper together under the structures like the alien tripods in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.  Again, Shivering Sands became useful after the war for pirate radio, and was once the base of Screaming Lord Sutch’s ‘Radio Sutch’. These Army forts are six separate structures grouped around a central seventh fort with L. Gardners and Sons generators supplying the rest. All but one has anti-aircraft guns on the roofs, while the off one has powerful search lights. They were linked by beams under the sea which enabled up to four forts at a time to be set in place by two floating barges besides the structures. They lowered the whole thing to the sea bed while keeping the barges to use another time. Less wasteful than the naval design. Once in place the six outer boxes were joined by cat walk bridges radiating out from the central one. These have all gone now. One fell onto the deck of a Norwegian freighter and snapped it off. After Lord Sutch moved in it was called Radio City. You can still see that painted on one of the rusty sides.  Reg Calvert worked for Radio City when he was shot by ‘the sinister Oliver Smedley’.

After a brief visit to a modern-day wind farm, we turned back towards the Red Sands forts. These are nearer to land and in better condition, with a complete set of seven structures, although the linking walkways are gone. They were occupied by the Army until the mid-’50s, and then in the Sixties for a brief while by the pirate radio stations, until Tony Benn shut them down with his Marine Broadcasting Act. One of these forts has had recent works done to it.  Our captain sadly told us about the Red Sands project that started about the turn of the century, when a low-level stage was built under the fort at the same height as the X Pilot’s deck. That way if you came in at the right time of tide you could just step across. Then they had a ladder installed to the hatch of the fort above.  They started to fix the windows, and put in new doors to the front balcony. But then something went wrong; he wouldn’t specifically say what, but I had the feeling there had been disagreements in the group, or perhaps funding ran out. So now Red Sands is abandoned again, and vandals have begun to break in. People from the online ‘urban explorer’ (urbex) movement have used modern cordless disc cutters to break the locks, and left the doors upstairs open, allowing the seagulls back in. Its all very sad. The Red Sands project had big plans starting with reclaiming one part of the fort, then gradually move back into the other six. One of them had already put up a rope bridge across. It now hangs down to the sea, broken and useless. What can you say?

As we leave this place, after some amazingly up close and daring passes, I look at the silhouette of the Fort and feel a mixture of sadness and inevitability. They are a bit sinister now, but they ‘did their bit’ in the war, shooting down over 20 enemy planes. That saved a lot of lives. And London Docks were vital to the war effort.  And later these lonely structures gave us free radio which is still carrying on with Radio Caroline and was an important part of our 1960s cultural revolution [note: the UK strictly controlled radio programming, with very limited rock music in the 1950s/60s.  Pirate radio filled the gap, and is still popular in the UK]. Are the Forts now to remain as a rusting home to seagulls?  They’ve been remarkably resilient for over 70 years, a real tribute to Guy Maunsell’s expertise. I wonder how much longer they can last? Some castle ruins are centuries old, but the sea is a harsh place, and steel is no match for salt air.