SS Great Britain.

Way back in July 1970, I watched, on television, this great hulk being hauled up the River Avon by an ocean going tug to her hew home in Bristol’s Floating Harbour. She had travelled, on a specially built pontoon, across the Atlantic from the Falklands where she had been scuttled in 1937 before being refloated for the final few miles up the narrow river. She was designed and built in Bristol by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1843, 21 years before he built the Clifton Suspension Bridge. She was an innovative vessel having an iron hull and a steam driven screw and was, for some reason unknown to me, clad in wood. The Blip is shows the rivets that held the wood (now rotted away) onto the hull. These features made her by far the longest (82 metres) and heaviest (1,961 tonnes unladen) ship of her age with a final passenger capacity of 730 and 1,200 tons of cargo.
 
She served for 30 years as a transatlantic passenger ship before being converted to a sailing cargo ship but, four years later was damaged in a storm and deemed unsafe. For the next fifty years she served as a floating store in the Falklands until she was considered too unsafe even for this. Four years later, in 1937, she was taken to Sparrow Cove and scuttled.
 
So, a year after she arrived, I took my girlfriend (two years before we were married) to see her, an impressive vessel even in her state of decay. You could appreciate the immense size of her and how she had been constructed. At this stage, we could only walk around the outside. But a better opportunity would arise after we were married.
 
I don’t know the exact date the original photographs were taken but 1971 is the year written on the negative sheet.
The two extras show different parts of the ship.