Sitting on the Dock of the Bay

Despite both of us being retired, we never seem to have the time to do things together, so have instigated “day trip Thursday”. We will try and go somewhere different each Thursday and just enjoy a day out together.
Sadly, most of the National Trust properties around here (got to make the most of our membership!) are either closed on a Thursday, or not open until Easter. The only place we could find that was a) local, b) free and c) we’d not been to before, was the Dock Museum at Barrow-in-Furness.
And what a fascinating place it was. It tells the story of Barrow’s rise from a sleepy rural village at the start of the 19th Century, to a Victorian Iron and Railway town, following the discovery of high grade iron ore. Subsequently, the iron works gave way to shipbuilding, which continues in the town to this day with the building of Royal Navy nuclear submarines.
One of the surface vessels built there was HMS Sheffield, launched in 1971. Vickers also developed the Corvus Chaff Launcher seen in todays picture. This was a defensive system designed to fire clouds of aluminium foil at approaching missiles, hopefully confusing their guidance and making them miss their intended target.
Those with a long enough memory will recall that HMS Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet missile in the Falklands War in 1982. The information panel in front of the Corvus launcher records that a factor in the ships demise was the non use of that system. It does beg the question as to why it was not fitted, given that it was made in the same place as the ship. Royal Navy penny pinching perhaps?