Who Set Fire to the Cutty Sark? ; She Was Once the Concorde of the Seas. Now She's a Burnt-Out Ruin.The Mail Takes the First Tour and Finds an Intriguing Clue to the Cause of the Blaze
Summary
YOU smell her before you actually see her. And she looks even worse than she smells. Here is a national institution, a monument to the ingenuity and audacity of imperial Britain and its merchant mariners.
Or at least she was. As I am granted the dubious honour of the first guided tour of what remains of the dear old Cutty Sark, I feel as if I am looking round a giant barbecue,not the Concorde of the 19th century.See the full content of this document
Extract
Who Set Fire to the Cutty Sark? ; She Was Once the Concorde of the Seas. Now She's a Burnt-Out Ruin.The Mail Takes the First Tour and Finds an Intriguing Clue to the Cause of the Blaze
Dangling beneath her once-proud decks in foul-smelling, sepulchral gloom, it is hard to imagine future generations will have the chance to marvel at a beautiful piece of Victorian engineering that shrank the world by sailing round it faster than anything before.
To anyone with any appreciation of this country's maritime past, it is a profoundly sorry sight. But there is much more to this than meets the eye.Aside from the mystery of what caused last month's blaze and the Mail has learned this would not be the first case of arson on this site in recent yearsthe scene of devastation could have been very much worse. So is this death or rebirth for the great Cutty Sark? It was in the early hours of May 21 that fire broke out in the hold of t...See the full content of this document