averilburystedmunds: Maunsell Forts

A Maunsell Fort
Each fort was a cluster of seven individual giant boxed
steel structures on top of huge reinforced lattice girders

I half heard an allusion to “Shivering Sands” on Radio Four a few days ago and began to listen to a broadcast on what I eventually understood to be the Maunsell Forts. They were/are off the coast near Whitstable in Kent apparently, and I was mystified that, after living in Kent for over 30 years [until 2015] and with a stepson living in Whitstable, that I had never before heard of these forts.

Possibly 1939
My youngest brother, who lied about
his age, was fighting with the
Sherwood Foresters at Monte
Cassino when he was only 17.

It is a long time since WW2 [1939-1945] during which time I grew up through Primary School to Grammar School in 1945. I do have strong contemporaneous memories of those years, but they are of sisters, childhood, playing and den-building over long summers in the large wood next-door to our garden and of the daily play-time with ‘my gang’. And of course, importantly, avoiding my father when possible. I did know that Hitler was bad and that Uncle Joe Stalin was good. Two of my half-brothers were in Army uniform; the other two were not, one being a train driver [essential to the war effort] and the other pronounced unfit to serve after an horrendous car accident. I knew that Johnny Ball who lived nearby had been killed in the war and that there was an American Army camp in the big field beyond the wood next-door and when soldiers from there walked past our front gate, my sister Esme and I knew to shout, “Have you got any gum, chum?” and we were sometimes rewarded. Rural Nottinghamshire was spared the terrors of London bombing although one of our favourite games was, ‘Being Bombed Out’ (which we had never experienced!)

S S Richard Montgomery 1940

The Port of London had always been one of the busiest in the world and at the height of WW2 it remained one of the few ports still able to receive ships containing valuable supplies to keep the country on its feet. As a result, the shipping channel, visible from Whitstable, became a frequent target for German mines as well as serving to guide enemy bombers to the capital. The enemy mine-laying in that channel, was so successful that, by 1940, over 100 British ships had been sunk in the Thames Estuary. Something had to be done!

Guy Maunsell, a highly-respected civil engineer, interested in concrete and the recent progress in experimenting with concrete for non-traditional

Guy Maunsell 1884-1961

use, was approached to come up with ideas to deal with the problem. He had gained useful experience of concrete design and construction techniques through his involvement in the building of the Storstrom Bridge in S.E. Denmark.

He proposed Martello-like constructions, suitably amended. [The Martello Towers were land-based coastal fortifications built during the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century.] Maunsell created plans to build off-shore forts, built on concrete bases, towed out to sea then sunk into the sea bed. Despite his designs, ready by November 1940, being met with some doubt, nevertheless, his plans for four gun-emplacements/off-shore forts were given the go-ahead on 6 March, 1941, built for the Royal Navy, to his design, and installed between 1942 and 1943. Each fort accommodated [one suspects, to Spartan standards] up to 265 men on five floors and they manned and maintained anti-aircraft guns mounted on the top ‘deck’ of each fort. During their time in operation, the Red Sand and the Shivering Sand forts between them, shot down 22 German aircraft and 30 V1 doodlebugs [flying bombs]; they also participated in the sinking of the one U-Boat successfully dispatched! Several more forts, for the Army, were similarly installed in the Mersey Estuary, a total of seven Maunsell Forts in all.

Locations of the seven Maunsell Forts

When the war ended the sea forts remained manned until 1953 when there was talk of dragging them back to shore to be dismantled but this idea proved too expensive, and so, stripped of all machinery, they were abandoned. They have become an embedded part of the coastal view with artists and photographers including the forts, huge and stark and striking, in Whitstable photography projects.

Over the years a number of pirate radio stations have used them for illegal broadcasting; Screaming Lord Sutch for Radio Sutch and Invicta Radio were two in the Sixties. In the summers of 2007 and 2008, Red Sands Radio, commemorating the pirate radio stations of the Sixties, briefly operated from there until the fort was declared unsafe and moved to Whitstable.