BOOKS The Return of the Great Britain, by Richard Goold-Adams (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1976, 226 pp., 16 pp. illus., index, $15). Richard GooldAdams is one of those quiet, determined people one learns it is very good to have on one's side in life's battles. Certainly it was a very good thing for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's superbly innovative steamer Great Britain (built in 1844) that Goold-Adams picked up her cause, her battle for survival, in what must be ranked as the greatest ship-save of our time, and perhaps of all time. Think of it! The task was nothing less than to recover a rust-weakened 3,000 ton hulk from the remote Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic (near the latitude, and in the weather system of Cape Horn), and bring her home to the dock she was built in a century and a quarter earlier , in Bristol, England , there to undertake her complete restoration and permanent establishment-all this to be done working with no initial financing or resources of any kind but a few dedicated people. And all this to be accomplished by the volunteer effort to be raised in a socially divided and practically bankrupt nation. What of the prize to be won, the Great Britain herself'? Goold-Adams describes her this way: "As first planned, when her keel plates were laid down in her present drydock on 19 July 1839, the big new ship was to be of 2936 gross registered tons, and a paddle steamer. She was expected to be called the City of New York. And it was only during her actual building that Brunel gained enough knowledge about the revolutionary new technique of screw propulsion to make the tremendous decision to adopt it for his great ship. Plans were switched, the existing engines were to be swung round at right ,angles to drive a propeller shaftanother piece of pioneering machinery-and the name was changed to that of the country itself: Great Britain. Other features to make history included the first wateright bulkheads, first virtual double bottom, and first balanced rudder. This was in fact to be among the dozen most significant ships ever built by man, even to this day." Well, Goold-Adams led, and in your reviewer's opinion largely embodied the effort that saved this prize and successfully placed it in the drydock in Bristol that the builder had adapted to accommodate the construction of what was then by far the world's largest ship. This was accomplished in 1970 after un-
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precedented, gale-burdened salvage work in the Falklands, after the unprecedented tow of the huge, graceful hull (atop a giant pontoon) the length of South and North Atlantic Oceans, and after the difficult, inches-to-spare movement up the River Avon and into drydock, whose only precedent was the hulk's first movement through that tricky course, in reverse direction, after her launch 127 years earlier. Goold-Adams' s account of all that went into this is meticulous and full of the honest doubts and disagreements and joys of achievement in the venture. The style of his leadership is well reflected in what he writes of his thoughts for a broadcast a few awestruck hours after Prince Philip had seen the ship into dock. "I had been desperately keen," he says, "that something at least should be said about our plans for the future, and that the impression should not be left with the viewers as I felt it had been in a previous BBC broadcast about the salvage on 13 June that this was the end of the road, a romantic and fanciful story, but one with no underlying sense of direction, management or objective ... this time I felt it had been possible to give the answers. ' · 'If it was a miracle,' I concluded, 'for this great ship to come slipping up the Avon out of the mists of history, it was also one that we, who are concerned in it, are determined to carry through to its full completion.' " That determination, backed by a strong sense of ultimate objective, by coherent direction and careful management at each stage of the project, is clearly what saved.the Great Britain and is making her restoration the brilliantly successful undertaking it is today. What we have here is a remarkably clear, compelling and faithful accounting of a unique project. It is the only such full account that we have anywhere of what it takes to save a ship. Perhaps in Goold-Adams we have one of the few principals who could log his own watch on deck so dispassionately, and with such careful analytical attention to the underlying factors that breed success in great undertakings.PMS NOTE: This book is available for $15 postpaid from NMHS.
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