The Raising of the Mary Rose

Not Just the Tudors

History Hit

History

4.8 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2022

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Forty years ago on 11 October 1982, after 437 years under water, Henry VIII’s warship, the Mary Rose, was raised from the seabed of the Solent. But how was such a remarkable feat achieved? How did they go about conserving a Tudor warship and the many objects which were on board? And what has been learned about the people who went down with her?

In the second part of Not Just the Tudors’ mini-series to mark the 40th anniversary of the raising of the Mary Rose, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is in Portsmouth to find out more from Dr. Alexandra Hildred - who was part of the team that excavated the Mary Rose; Professor Eleanor Schofield, the Deputy Chief Executive at the Mary Rose Trust; and Hannah Matthews, a Curator and osteoarchaeologist who has been closely examining the Mary Rose’s human remains.

The Senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	40 years ago this month on the 11th of October 1982 after 437 years underwater,
0:14.5	Henry VIII's warship The Merry Rose was raised from the sea bed of the
0:18.9	Solent. But how had they gone about finding a lost
0:23.6	judo ship buried deep in the silt of the sea bed? In fact, immediately after the
0:29.3	Merry Rose sank in 1545 there were attempts to retrieve her, but it soon became a
0:34.5	simple salvage operation to recoup her guns using expert African divers. We'll
0:40.1	learn more about this in our next podcast, but in 1552 where no more could be
0:44.8	done the wreck was abandoned and her location was forgotten. In 1836,
0:51.1	brothers John and Charles Dean discovered her sight and recovered several large guns,
0:57.6	but because her hull was largely buried under the sea bed they believed that the
1:01.4	Merry Rose must have been destroyed and so left the rest of her alone. It wasn't until 1965
1:08.4	that modern attempts to retrieve the Merry Rose began. In today's podcast we'll learn about
1:13.8	how she was raised, how one goes about conserving a judo warship and the many objects which were
1:20.1	on board and what we can learn about the people who went down with her.
1:32.9	Dr Alexandra Hildred was part of the team who excavated Henry VIII's warship 40 years ago
1:38.9	and is the head of research and curator of ordinance and human remains at the Merry Rose Trust
1:45.2	and I spoke to her at the Merry Rose Museum. It all started in the mid-60s. It was basically after
1:50.5	the war, scuba equipment which had been used a fair amount in second world war was now more
1:54.7	accessible and cheaper for people to use and a lot of sub-acroclubs in various towns began to appear
2:01.0	and locally the Talsi sub-acroclub, Alexander McKee who's a naval historian who lived close
2:06.6	by here was a member of the club and decided he wanted to look for historic ships within the
2:10.8	soul and the Merry Rose being the one that would be the sort of rose in the crown and so they
	...

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