The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

By The Society for Nautical Research and the Lloyds Register FoundationSociety & Culture Education History

The Mariner's Mirror Podcast episodes

July 25, 2022 The Wreck of the Andrea Doria Part 1: The Events
We continue our mini series on maritime disasters with the extraordinary tale of the Andrea Doria, a magnificent Italian passenger liner lost off the coast of Massachusetts in 1956 when she was rammed by another liner. The Andrea Doria was built in the 1950s, born from Italy’s bruised pride after the Second World War, and seen as a way to put Italy back on the map as a major player in the world of transatlantic travel. She became a hugely important ship for the Italian nation, a true icon of Italian culture and history. Launched in 1953 to great fanfare and fitted with the most exquisite Italian art, she enjoyed a successful career – though cut far too short by the events of July 1956. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Pierette Simpson who, as a child, witnessed those terrible events and has since dedicated her life to sharing the story of the Andrea Doria so that it is never forgotten. Pierette is the author of Alive on the Andrea Doria!: The Greatest Sea Rescue in History and the award-winning docufilm Andrea Doria: Are the Passengers Saved?

This episode is Part 1 of 3. Part 2 will include two more eyewitness accounts including an interview with Mike Stoller of the legendary songwriting team Lieber & Stoller who wrote hits for Elvis and Ben E. King. Part 3 will be focussed on the wreck itself and includes an interview with marine explorer John Moyer.
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40 min
July 20, 2022 Iconic Ships 18: Sutton Hoo
We continue our mini-series on Iconic Ships by looking at the magnificent Sutton Hoo ship - placed inside the burial mound of an Anglo-Saxon king in the seventh century in what proved to be the richest intact medieval grave ever discovered. The riches of the tomb are now on display in the British Museum and a fantastic new project is underway to recreate the vessel itself which did not survive the centuries, though enough evidence of it did to allow us to understand and recreate it in detail. This was a crucial period in maritime history in northern Europe when, in the aftermath of Roman occupation but prior to the Viking invasions, the maritime cultures developed their own tradition of sailing and oared craft. And yet it is a period about which we know very little indeed. This project is set to transform our understanding of Dark Age seapower. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Tim Kirk, Master Shipwright of the project, and a man who knows more about the Sutton Hoo ship than anyone else alive...
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38 min
July 14, 2022 Iconic Ships 17: Henry V's Grace Dieu

In this episode we head much further back in time than we have ever dared before for an Iconic Ship…to find out about Henry V’s ship Grace Dieu, launched in 1418. And what a ship she was...

Henry only reigned for ten years but in those years he worked harder than any of his predecessors to build a navy designed to destroy French seapower. His ships were not just barges designed for transporting armies to France, but great warships built for prestige and power. It is during Henry V’s time as king that one of the finest of all medieval warships, Grace Dieu, was constructed. Contemporary descriptions marvelled at its size, and modern historians were cynical until her wreck in the River Hamble near Southampton was surveyed. These investigations proved that her mainmast was 200ft tall: she was nearly three times larger than Henry VIII’s Mary Rose which was built nearly a century later, and no warship that rivalled her for size was built for another 200 years.

To find out more about this remarkable feat of construction and the vision to attempt something apparently impossible, Dr Sam Willis spoke with Susan Rose, a legend in the world of medieval maritime and naval history.
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38 min
July 03, 2022 Iconic Ships 16: SS United States

Our 'Iconic Ships' series continues with the magnificent SS United States, published on the 70th anniversary of her maiden voyage. Launched in June 1951 she was the last remaining American superliner from the golden age of transatlantic travel and was built specifically to break the transatlantic speed record. On her maiden voyage she made the transatlantic run in just three and a half days. To this day, she still holds the trans-Atlantic speed record: no other passenger ship has crossed the Atlantic faster in either direction. Not only built for speed, her design was also innovative for a number of different reasons, all of which are crucial in the history of ship design, and in particular in the history of safety in passenger ships, at a time when America was wrestling with Russia on the world stage. With lessons having been learned from the Second World War, in this period passenger ships were designed in a way that made them easily convertible into troopships. Her designer William Francis Gibbs famously summed up his achievement: 'You can’t set her on fire, you can’t sink her, and you can’t catch her.' The SS United States has remarkably survived the years and today sits at Pier 82 on the Delaware River in Philadelphia while money is raised and plans set in place to preserve her for future generations. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Susan Gibbs, granddaughter of William Frances Gibbs, the ship's visionary designer and President of the SS United States Conservancy, the body dedicated to her preservation.

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28 min
June 28, 2022 Maritime Innovation 1: The Propeller
The first of a new mini-series on maritime innovations, we look at the history of the propeller. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Joanna Mathers, Head of Collections at the SS Great Britain Trust in Bristol. This episode was inspired by the discovery of an unusual design for a propeller in the collections of the Lloyds Register Foundation: the 'De Bay Propellor' invented in 1876. Of a very unusual design which involved two interlocking propellers, the De Bay propellor was just one of numerous attempts to improve the propeller in the nineteenth century. To make sense of this we have created an animation of the propeller which can be seen on our YouTube Channel and also a short animation on the general history of propellers. In this podcast episode we find out all about the transition from sail to steam, from paddle wheels to propellers, and all of the problems face by maritime engineers and the solutions that they proposed. A particular focus is paid to the ss Great Britain, the iron-hilled, steam-driven passenger liner designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the 1840s, because of its important position in the history of marine propulsion.
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31 min
June 25, 2022 Maritime Motherhood Part 2: Hannah Davison's Scrapbook
Part two of our special episode looking at the remarkable life of Hannah Davison, wife of Captain Davison of the steel barque Alice A. Leigh/Rewa and mother to six children. The Davison family were something of a maritime Von Trapp family, and wherever they arrived in port they appeared in the local newspapers. Hannah carefully kept any newspaper cuttings that mentioned her family and her exploits. The stories included how the vessel survived a typhoon, was nearly torpedoed by a German U-Boat when the First World War broke out, births, deaths and illnesses of her children. There are also recipes for the kids and some of their drawings. The scrapbook now survives in the collections of the New Zealand Maritime Museum/Hui te Ananui a Tang-aroa. Check out our YouTube page for a video exploring the life of the ship and the Davison family.
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21 min
June 25, 2022 Maritime Motherhood Part 1: The Davison Family and the Alice A. Leigh/Rewa
Join us for the fantastic story of Hannah Davison who gave birth to six children on board the barque Alice A. Leigh (renamed Rewa in 1921), a steel barque which sailed the world between 1889-1930. The largest vessel ever built at Whitehaven in Cumbria, this four masted barque plied the world's sailing routes with a variety of cargo before joining a New Zealand wool merchant's fleet in 1921. Her story is particularly rich because of the family of Captain Davison who lived aboard. His wife Hannah was mother to their six children and kept a detailed scrapbook of their lives. Their large maritime family was well known and featured regularly in local newspapers. The scrapbook now survives in the collections of the New Zealand Maritime Museum/Hui te Ananui a Tang-aroa. Check out our YouTube page for a video exploring the life of the ship and the Davison family. Finally, damaged by a storm, the Alice A. Leigh/Rewa was sunk as a breakwater in Hauraki Gulf, Aukland, New Zealand where her semi-submerged wreck can still be easily seen and provides a tourist attraction for snorkelers and divers.
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34 min
June 15, 2022 Dressed to Kill: A History of Naval Uniform
What did people wear in naval battles and why? The adoption, style and development of naval uniform is a hugely significant subject - one which helps us understand not only the development of the navy as a fighting body but also the forging of national identities, gendered identities and notions of social hierarchy. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr Amy Miller, Curator of Decorative Arts and Material Culture at Royal Museums Greenwich. Amy has used the remarkable and extensive collections at the National Maritime Museum, along with personal papers, diaries, fiction and period artefacts to help us understand these wonderful garments in their social and economic contexts in her book Dressed to Kill: British Naval Uniform, Masculinity and Contemporary Fashions, 1748–1857.
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46 min
May 29, 2022 Maritime Disasters: Empress of Ireland
On 29 May 1914, the magnificent passenger liner Empress of Ireland sank in the St Lawrence River with the loss of over a thousand people. A full two years after the Titanic disaster, this was a vessel with adequate lifeboats and watertight compartments, and yet she foundered in just fourteen minutes after a collision with a Norwegian collier - ss Storstad - which punched an enormous hole into her side allowing 60,000 gallons of water in. More passengers died in this tragedy than eitherTitanic or Lusitania, both of which have featured in our Maritime Disasters series. She was one of the first two passenger liners built especially for the Canadian Pacific Line’s growing emigrant trade from Liverpool to Canada, her sister ship being the Empress of Britain and they provided a weekly service for emigrants, starting in the Spring of 1906. With so many years of service behind her the Empress of Ireland has an important position in the history of thousands of Canadians today. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dan Conlin, curator at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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31 min
May 28, 2022 Great Sea Fights: The Battle of Solebay, 1672
Our Great Sea Fights series continues on the 350th anniversary of the Battle of Solebay, fought between the Dutch and the allied English and French off the eat coast of England, and one of the hardest-fought battles of the Age of Sail. To find out more Dr Sam Willis spoke with Dr David Davies, historian and author of the Journals of Matthew Quinton, a series of historical novels set in the seventeenth century navy.

This was a fascinating and important period of naval history when so much was still being learned about how to actually fight at sea in broadside-armed ships, and in particular in enormous fleets: in this battle the Dutch had 75 ships and over 20,000 men and they took on a combined fleet of 93 ships and over 34000 men – that’s 108 MORE ships than fought at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. It is also an unusual example of the English actually co-operating – or at least trying to – with the French.

The battle was fought during the third Anglo-Dutch war, a prolonged period of intense commercial rivalry between European powers which had begun some twenty years before hand with the First Anglo-Dutch war in 1652. By 1672 both sides had landed mighty blows but the Dutch and English engines of war that were producing ships and keeping them at sea was now working as well as it ever had, and to complicate matters the French now had a formidable fleet of their own.

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39 min

About The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

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The world's No.1 podcast dedicated to all of maritime and naval history. With one foot in the present and one in the past we bring you the most exciting and interesting current maritime projects…