People and places
Tudor Times: UK and Swedish pupils at the Mary Rose
Anglo-Swedish connections – the Mary Rose and the Vasa Beth Baxter, Tilly Goldman and Mimi de Trafford on a nautical partnership between schools Each autumn, 45 Swedish sixth formers visit the UK aboard their tallship TS Gunilla. They link up with students from Portsmouth Grammar School (PGS). Following a workshop in 2019 at the Mary Rose and an Anglo-Swedish Model United Nations Conference, we three PGS IB Diploma students were inspired to work towards our Portsmouth Youth Ambassador Award by exploring an unusual international connection between our respective nations. [Portsmouth Youth Ambassador Award is an initiative from Shaping Portsmouth, an organisation that seeks to foster cooperation between local business, education and the community. To achieve the Award, young people complete a project in which they engage with an aspect of the city and communicate what they have learned to others]. This article presents a flavour of our findings. What and where? In 1545 Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, sank in the Solent: the stretch of water between the Isle of Wight and the south coast of the UK. Eighty-three years later, in 1628, the Vasa sank on its maiden voyage, immediately after leaving Stockholm harbour. Although it is widely believed that the Mary Rose Autumn
Spring |
| 2020
too sank on her maiden voyage, the ship had actually already been in service for thirty-four years, although recently re-fitted. The remains of both ships are now displayed in their respective cities, Portsmouth and Stockholm. Contrasts and contexts? The Mary Rose was built between 1509 and 1511 in Portsmouth; ironically, the place in which she would sink four decades later. Both the Vasa and the Mary Rose were built in anticipation of being highly symbolic of the power that their King possessed, each becoming the flagship of the fleet. When built from 1626 to 1628, the Vasa demonstrated the strength of Sweden during the aptly named ‘age of greatness’, as the country developed into a prominent and powerful nation. The Swedish dominated the Baltic, which perhaps made all the more ironic the fact that their navy lost both the Vasa and two other ships in the space of a month. The somewhat anticlimactic forms of their demise – poor planning (Vasa), running aground (Kristina) and a storm (Riksnyckeln) – greatly contrasted with the loss of the Mary Rose in battle.
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