Happy Hundreth Birthday to the Liver Building
The Liver Building is one hundred today.
Remember that the Liver Birds on the top flap their wings, when a virgin walks past on the Pierhead.
The BBC did a piece about the anniversary this morning and in it Phil Redmond, said that “Liverpool is the Second City of Empire”.
Lakeside On The Slide
The leader of Thurrock Council has said that the development of Eastfield on the Olympic Park will harm the Lakeside Shopping Centre at Thurrock.
Let’s face it, Lakeside is a tired dump and impossible to get to be public transport, so it has no appeal for me. But then when Bluewater opened C and I always crossed the bridge to a much better place. As a coeliac too, where’s the gluten free food at Lakeside?
The Museum of London Docklands
I ended up here yesterday by accident, as I’d gone to Docklands to have lunch and got caught in the rain. So as it was free I went inside.
Museum of London Docklands
It was definitely worth a visit. I should say that it is very comprehensive and it will take at least three or four hours to see everything.
I particularly liked the section on some of the technology we used to invade Europe on D-Day. It’s the first place I’ve seen a detailed display about PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean), which supplied fuel to the invading forces using undersea pipelines. The museum also has a large display about the Mulberry Harbours, that were created to land Allied forces in Normandy. Some of the giant Phoenix caissons were actually built in the drained West India Docks, where Canary Wharf has now been developed. I have actually been inside the four Phoenix breakwaters, which were used to bridge the gaps in the dykes in the Netherlands after the terrible floods of 1955 and now form the Watersnoodmuseum.
It covers London Docklasnds from Roman times to the present and all of the important figures like the Brunels and Bazalgette are properly documernted.
During the Olympics, the Museum will become the German House. I wonder what some of them will make of the wartime section!
Ball Bearings, The Mosquito Airliner and The Gay Viking
This story from Coast last night was fascinating, as it told the story of how the British ran the German blockade of Sweden during the Second World War to obtain essential supplies of ball bearings and other advanced technology.
I have been fascinated by the Mosquito, de Havilland’s Wooden Wonder, since I was a child and after reading the definitive book on the aircraft about thirty years ago, I realised just what a superb aircraft it was. Last night, they showed rare film of Mosquito airliners of BOAC, running the blockade to Sweden to obtain the ball bearings.
But they could not carry very much, although they were successful despite being unarmed.The airliners had a pressurised cabin, so they could go very high and remember that at the time the Mosquito was one of the fastest aircraft in the world. So they relied on height and speed for defence.
This was where the Gay Viking and her siblings came in. They were fast motor gun boats, built by Camper and Nicholsons, who are more well-known for their yachts for the rich and famous. They could bring in forty tons of cargo. The trips are described on Gay Viking’s Wikipedia entry.
Jerry Couldn’t Put Up Coat Hooks Either!
The hooks for dressing gowns in the downstairs bathroom were hideous wooden ones, which if they’d cost a pound each in Dalston Market, you would have been robbed.
After taking one down, I found this behind it.
How Not To Put Up Hooks
So Jerry couldn’t even put up hooks in tiles without making lots of unnecessary holes. Note the two at the top as well!
Either that, or I’ve got woodworm that can chew through tiles.
London’s Floating Cinema
When I was watching the MS Deutshland leave, there was an interloper.
London's Floating Cinema
It is London’s floating cinema, that cruises the canals and rivers in the east of the city.
I’m Going Off The Angel
I don’t know why it is, but it seems to be getting impossible to go past the Angel these days without getting accosted by a chugger.
One day last week, it was a group wanting me to save the tiger. Of course, I want to save the tiger, but the way to do this is to put pressure on various countries that use tiger parts in quack medicine. So where are the protests in places like Beijing and Hong Kong? Annoying me, doesn’t help this at all.
Today it was more chuggers and a protest about saving the NHS. I was accosted by an obese man smoking a cigarette. When I said I don’t support protestors who smoke, I giot a mouthful of abuse. So I just walked on. The protest was also using the only dry place in the rain as a shelter, so we had to get very wet to get past. So not intent of just breathing smoke on us, they were trying to give us pneumonia.
The trouble is that to get across the road from the station to Waitrose, M & S, Chapel Market, the other main shops and the cinema, is that there is only one crossing, so you have to run the gauntlet of chuggers and protestors every time you do it.
Bring Back the Corvette
When I was watching the MS Deutschland depart yesterday, a Belgian ship the Godetia, was alongside the quay. Wikipedia says this about the history of the ship.
The Godetia is the successor of the HMS Godetia (K226), a British Flower class corvette which was manned by Belgian sailors during Second World War.
So what was a Flower class Corvette? There is a long wikipedia article here.
They were built as simple ships, originally to escort coastal convoys. But as the war progressed, and things got worse in the North Atlantic, these simple ships were used to protect convoys from U-Boats. I know a bit about this, as my next door neighbour in Felixstowe had served on corvettes during the Second World War. He could have written this.
Service on Flowers in the North Atlantic was typically cold, wet, monotonous and uncomfortable. Every dip of the fo’c’sle into an oncoming wave was followed by a cascade of water into the well deck amidships. Men at action stations were drenched with spray and water entered living spaces through hatches opened to access ammunition magazines. Interior decks were constantly wet and condensation dripped from the overheads.[9] The head (or sanitary toilet) was drained by a straight pipe to the ocean; and a reverse flow of the icy North Atlantic would cleanse the backside of those using it during rough weather. By 1941, corvettes carried twice as many crewmen as anticipated in the original design. Men slept on lockers or tabletops or in any dark place that offered a little warmth. The warships were nicknamed “the pekingese of the ocean”. They had a reputation of having poor sea-handling characteristics, most often rolling in heavy seas, with complete 80-degree rolls (40 degrees each side of the normal upright position) being fairly common; it was said they “would roll on wet grass”.[10] Many crewmen suffered severe motion sickness for a few weeks until they acclimatised to shipboard life.[9] It should be noted however, the general design of the Flowers was extremely seaworthy (just poor sea-handling characteristics), as no Allied sailor was ever lost overboard from a Flower during World War II, outside of enemy action.
So why should we bring them back?
Our armed forces are strapped for cash, just as those of virtually every other nation is.
We also are suffering from multiple threats like piracy around the coast of Africa and South-East Asia and probably other places soon, as the world economy gets worse. There are also fishery protection and humaritarian needs, where large ships are a massive overkill.
These uses will probably not meet anybody more heavily armed than with an RPG or a heavy machine gun.
So would a modern design built on a steel hull in larger numbers, be the ideal ship for these types of actions? Some years ago, there was a proposal for an Osprey class frigate, which would have been based on the profile of a cross-channel ferry. But the civil servants, who dispense what the Navy gets, decided in their wisdom that the sleek aluminium hulled ones were so much better. I always remember talking to an officer on a Sealink ferry, who had gone to the Falklands War. He said that the seas were so bad, that the ferries had to slow down to allow the sleek naval ships to keep up.
Interestingly, the Americans have come up with the concept of a Littoral combat ship.
I suspect that there is a sensible design in there, which would probably be something like this.
- Steel hull and superstructure
- Small crew, but the ability to cater for quite a few more.
- Ability to carry a modular mission payload. Just like Thunderbird 2!
- Ability to land and refuel a helicopter and/or perhaps a drone.
- Diesel engine powered
- Moderate range and enough speed to get out of the way of pirates with RPGs in rubber boats
- Good commuication and other systems, so that groups from different navies could work together in serious situations.
I also feel that if the modules could be similar in size to standard shipping containers, then when there is a humanitarian emergency in a place that is difficult to get to, then they can be used to bring in supplies and equipment. All this would need would be for the ships to have similar module loading.
Perhaps what is needed is something with the seaworthiness of a lifeboat, the strength of the average ferry and the adaptability of a Lockheed Hercules!
The Balaena Lives
Not quite, but there is a lot of Balaena thinking behind Shell’s new FLNG.
So what was the design I worked upon in Cambridge for Balaena Structures all those years ago like?
The problem with offshore oil platforms is that they are very expensive and once they’ve extracted all the oil from the oilfield on which they sit, they are very difficult to take down.
In the mid-1970s, some very clever structural engineers from Cambridge University came up with a design for a reuseable platform, that could be built in a ship yard, that would normally build supertankers.
The design was simply a steel cylinder, perhaps about a hundred metres long and thirty or so in diameter. I can’t be sure of the size as it is nearly forty years ago and I have kept no records. The idea was that it would be built horizontally and then towed into position, where it would be turned through ninety degrees to sit on the ocean floor above the oilfield.
So the eventual bottom end was closed off and would have had a skirt that sat in the ocean floor and held the platform in position by a sort of gum boot principle. The other end was also closed and supported a square working deck about twenty metres high on a stem about the same length.
My part was to do the calculations on the upending, which would have been accomplished by letting sea water into the enormous tank under control.
The calculations were not that simple, but because of my dynamic simulation experience, they were well within my compass and I was able to do them on a simple time-shared computer.
I did prove that because of the vast weight of steel and the not inconsiderable weight of sea water, that the Balaena would install itself as designed. Sadly it was one of those projects that after a considerable amount of effort never came to fruition.
Some other points about the design should be noted.
- The tank could be used to store the oil extracted and this could then be pumped to a waiting tanker.
- When it needed to be moved, the tank would be emptied and at the appropriate point, the Balaena would float vertically. It could then be towed still upright to a new position.
All of this might seem rather fanciful, but I suspect that some of the ideas in the Balaena have been used successfully in the other designs.
I started talking about the Balaena, when the Deepwater Horizon blew up in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time I was lying on a bed after a serious stroke in Hong Kong. I imagined an empty Balaena ready and waiting floating horizontally in the sea within a few hundred miles of the clusters of oil platforms. It would differ from the 1970s platform design, in that the working deck would be much simpler and probably only there to control the pumping. It would also not have a complete bottom to allow the oil to enter the tank.
Could it have been towed to the site and upended over the leaking well, as a crude but effective cap? The oil would still float to the surface, but inside the tank of the Balaena, from where it could be pumped out.
The idea may still be fanciful, but I can guarantee that the structure would upend as required, just by adding sea water to the tank. I did the calculations to prove it in the early 1970s.
Auf Weidersehen, Deutschland!
I couldn’t resist going to Docklands to see the departure of the MS Deutschland.
It was a tight squeeze to get out.
I think we’re going to see more ships like the MS Deutschland entering the docks at Canary Wharf and berthing on the South Quay. I suspect that a lot of people are wishing that the lock connecting the West India Docks to the River Thames was built a bit larger by the Victorians. This was published by Motor Boats Monthly.
The manoeuvre took just under three hours, and a huge amount of skill to complete. The ship itself is 175.3m long with a 23m beam, and the lock is just over this at 178m long and 24.4m wide.
So it was a very tight squeeze. Note that the largest ship of the nineteenth century was the SS Great Eastern, which wouldn’t have fitted into the lock to get in and out of the docks.
The Anonymous Widower 