Another Opportunity to Talk about Ernest Cox

Posted 28Aug18.

“What happened during World War One that nobody talks about today?”

One of my favorite stories from the First World War actually took place in 1919 – the scuttling, and later (partial) salvage of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow, in Scotland.

To summarize, the German sailors were fairly pissed that they were dishonored and forced to keep their once-proud warships at Scapa Flow while the details of the Armistice were being hashed out. The British really didn’t care all that much – they had a case of Charlie Sheen-esque “Winning!” on their mind and the Germans could deal with it or… well, the had to deal with it.

German leadership decided it was best to give the British the nautical finger to whatever plans they may have had for the captive warships, so they petulantly scuttled them all on 21 June 1919. 52 of the 74 ships were outright sunk… and they sat there as the salvage costs projected by the Admiralty outweighed common sense.

Enter Ernest Cox – a scrap metal dealer, with more determination than fear. He bought the salvage rights to the scuttled fleet after a day’s research, and set out to raise what he could scrap with no formal training in marine salvage.

And raise them he did. The man was effectively and functionally nuts. He argued with his workers, raised what were the largest ships ever to be raised at the time, circumvented the effects of national coal strikes by using the German coal from the sunken ships, created resourceful and innovative methods of compacting the superstructure into the hulls of inverted ships, and only lost £10,000 during the 8-year operation. From the Wikipedia entry (my son left my copy of The Man Who Bought a Navy by Gerald Bowman back in Hawaii): “Cox’s company eventually raised 26 destroyers, two battlecruisers and five battleships.”

So.

A guy who bought a sunken fleet… with no background or education in raising said fleet… who actually did manage to raise a respectable number of ships…

Yeah, stories like these are forgotten by most but inspiration for others.