The SS Great Britain

Stephen Richards

Since it returned from the Falkland Islands in 1970, the SS Great Britain has been a powerful symbol for the city of Bristol and its maritime history. The ship was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and was launched at Bristol in 1843; she was both the world’s largest ship and the first screw-propelled ocean-going passenger liner. Her full story, now told in the most recent incarnation of the SS Great Britain Museum, is one of innovation, determination, long-distance travel, and longevity.{1}

I first visited the ship’s museum ten years ago and have been back many times since. The quality of its presentation has improved steadily over the years, but I have always felt that it had yet to realize its full potential. Happily, this is no longer the case: after thirty-six years of continuous refinement, the SS Great Britain Museum now offers an experience that is quite extraordinary. This is due in part to the ship’s imaginative new setting, completed in 2005, which cleverly encloses its climate-controlled dry dock beneath a thin layer of water and glass. The visual impact of this new arrangement is stunning, for the ship appears to be floating on water, with its stern towering above the waterline in all its restored glory.

Visitors can walk around part of this new dock when they enter the museum, but they cannot access the ship from this point. Instead, they are ushered into a new exhibition gallery located in one of the historic buildings that flank the ship. Once inside, a multitude of displays on several floors tells the story of the ship, providing visitors with an understanding of the historical context of the SS Great Britain before they reach the main attraction, the ship itself (this approach echoes that of the Mary Rose in Portsmouth). The exhibition building is long and narrow, and the main route through it is via a ramp that runs along the length of the space and gradually rises to the second floor, where the entrance to the ship is. There is also an elevator, which helps to ensure that this second-floor entrance is accessible to all visitors.

Fig. 1 So how do you get fresh milk on a voyage across the Atlantic? The cow on the deck of the SS Great Britain. (Courtesy of R. Gwynne.)

Within the exhibition building, the story of the ship begins with its service on the Falkland Islands, its salvage, and its long journey back to Bristol, illustrated with original footage from a television documentary projected onto a large screen. I found this to be one of the most interesting aspects of the ship’s history, and the fact that the SS Great Britain survived for so long as a coal hulk makes its restoration story even more impressive. However, this part of the display is located close to the building’s entrance, and at the time of my visit the crowds of people entering the gallery made it difficult to watch the film. Judging by the popularity of this part of the exhibit, its placement should be reconsidered.

The remainder of the indoor exhibition consists of traditional graphic and text panels displayed along the length of the ramp. These panels focus on the key stages of the ship’s history, from luxury Atlantic liner to emigrant clipper, troop ship to windjammer, and finally to its days as a coal hulk. During the ship’s first couple of years of service she crossed the Atlantic several times until she ran aground on the sands of Dundrum Bay in Northern Ireland. Having suffered little damage to her hull, the ship was eventually refloated and, in 1852, was fitted with a new 500-horsepower Penn engine, a 300-foot-long deck, and new passenger accommodations. From 1852 to 1876 the ship served as an emigrant clipper and frequently traveled to Australia, South Africa, and New York. During the Crimean War, in 1855, she was chartered by the British government and became a troop ship. Then, in 1882, the vessel was converted into a fast three-masted sailing ship, and in this guise she became a cargo-hauling windjammer. In 1886, she was damaged rounding the Cape and forced to put to shelter in the Falkland Islands. The cost of repairs was deemed too great so she was eventually sold as a storage hulk in Port Stanley. After several decades the ship ceased to be watertight and was therefore towed a short distance from Port Stanley, skippered in shallow water, and abandoned to the elements. In 1970, the ship was finally refloated as part of a dynamic salvage attempt and returned to Bristol on a barge.

Fig. 2 One of the scenes illustrating life onboard the SS Great Britain. (Courtesy of R. Gwynne.)

The panels along the ramp are lively and to the point, successfully presenting key aspects of the ship’s story to a broad audience of nonspecialists. Complementing the panels’ interpretive text are an array of original objects that illustrate the ship’s many voyages and, more importantly, the experiences of some of the people who lived and traveled on it. The overall pace of the indoor exhibition is good, although the flow of visitors moving up the ramp can make it difficult to dwell in one place to study a particular display.

There are also a number of large interactive mechanical displays within the exhibition building. The most imposing of these demonstrates how the ship’s propeller could be disengaged from the driveshaft and lifted out of the water. The instructions are confusing, but in the end a joint effort with several other visitors enabled me to complete the sequence of lifting the propeller and re-engaging it. Other interactive elements are geared toward a younger audience. These include a dressing-up box, which contains a number of reproduction costume items for visitors to try on, as well as a facsimile of the ship’s wheel, where one can pretend to steer the ship on a westerly course. The building also houses a display of some of the ship’s REVIEW original masts and hull plates, which are arrayed along the walls or suspended from above. The panels that accompany these original parts use them both to explain the archaeology of the ship and to remind visitors of its condition when it arrived in Bristol in 1970.

At the top of the ramp visitors board the ship itself. A choice of audio guides is available at this point, each of which enables guests to tour the ship from one of four distinctive points of view: that of first-class passengers on their way to Australia; that of third-class passengers making the same journey; that of the ship’s cat (an audio guide to the ship for children); and, finally, that of a maritime expert who takes visitors on a technical tour. But I decided to go it alone and began my tour on the ship’s main deck. Vast and uncluttered, the deck of the SS Great Britain is a perfect place to take in views of Bristol’s famous waterfront. As I strolled along the deck, however, I was surprised to hear the faint sound of a mooing cow. Curious, I traced its source to one of the deckhouses, where I was presented with a display featuring a full-size model of the ship’s cow. A simple but effective trigger causes the cow to moo each time someone walks past (during my visit, this was popular with children and adults alike). Next to the display, an interpretive panel clearly explains the need for and supply of fresh milk on a four-month journey (fig. 1).

FIG. 3 A view of the ship’s corroded hull from beneath the glass canopy. (Courtesy of R. Gwynne.)

From the deck, visitors enter the ship at one of two points and are then free to wander around its cabins, all of which have been restored to show what they would have looked like when the ship was in her prime. Although the cabins’ furnishings are clearly new, they effectively convey a sense of what conditions would have been like during a voyage—depending on the passenger or crew member’s status, of course. Indeed, the marked difference between the experiences of first- and third-class passengers is dramatically illustrated within the cabins by way of tableau scenes complete with full-sized figures, sounds, and even smells. Some of these scenes convey the less savory realities of a long journey, such as sea sickness, the presence of rats, and the difficulties associated with giving birth onboard (fig. 2); others use humor to make a point, such as that which aurally depicts a passenger rudely occupying one of the latrines.{2}

One of the most dramatic features of the restored ship is a replica of the engine used to drive its propeller. The original engine was an enormous 1,000-horsepower, cross-wise, double-diagonal, two-crank machine with two cylinders. The replica of this engine occupies a space inside the ship three stories high. Its designers have cleverly reproduced the form and bulk of the original engine without replicating its weight, and because the engine rotates, it helps to convey a sense of the scale and power of the original.
Toward the front of the ship, visitors are led along a mezzanine walkway into a part of the ship that is totally unrestored and without decks. This stands in marked contrast to the way the rest of the ship is presented, and it dramatically illustrates the sheer size of the hull, its volume, and, most importantly, its construction. This enables visitors to more fully appreciate not only what the ship was like before its decks were restored, but also the extent to which its hull is now corroded.

FIG. 4 A typical interpretive panel explaining the long-term challenge of preserving the hull of the ship. (Courtesy of R. Gwynne.)

After I explored the interior of the ship I went through a portal that led me down inside its dry dock and under its hull. This is truly a magical space—and warm, too, for the canopy of rippling water and glass panels that encloses the dock seems to produce a greenhouse effect (fig. 3). On closer inspection, I found that the higher temperature was actually the work of the dry dock’s climate-control plant. Housed in a large container along one of the dock’s walls and fully explained in a series of panels, this system also reduces the chamber’s humidity to prevent further corrosion of the hull (fig. 4). In addition, double doors at the entrance serve as an airlock to help maintain the dock’s environment. By enclosing the ship’s dry dock in this dramatic fashion, the museum has hit upon a truly elegant solution to a complex set of problems: from below, the canopy of water and glass protects the hull of the ship from further corrosion, and from above, it makes for a dramatic presentation of the ship as a whole.

It is easy to see why the new SS Great Britain Museum won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums and Galleries in 2006, as well as the European Museum Foundation’s Micheletti Prize in 2007. The secret of its success rests in the way it combines a fabulous artifact with an engaging narrative through sensitive and simple interpretations that foster an understanding of why the ship is important and what life onboard was like. What most impressed me about the museum was how it managed to create something new and engaging with relatively simple, tried-and-true display techniques. In a world in which sophisticated mechanical and software-based interactive displays are fast becoming the norm in museums across the United Kingdom, the SS Great Britain Museum stands as a refreshing alternative. In this case, less is definitely more.

{1}For a virtual tour, visit the museum’s web site at http://www.ssgreatbritain.org (accessed 5 October 2007).{2}The full-size figures used in these displays warrant further comment. Over the last decade, the use of realistic figures in exhibits such as this has largely fallen out of favor, for unless the figures are of outstanding quality, visitors often find them to be much too fake and therefore unconvincing. Onboard the SS Great Britain, however, this is not the case. Admittedly, the figures used in its displays are not of the best quality, but as arranged within their settings, they do help to make the experience of life onboard the ship more real for visitors.

Stephen Richards is head of Creative Development at the National Railway Museum in York.