Glover gives keynote address at Marine Museum’s Annual Meeting May 27; Rideau Canal exhibit proposed. 


 

The devastating fire on board the Cutty Sark emphasizes for us all the fragility of even the highest profile, well protected and funded marine museum and heritage site. I doubt I was the only one who went looking for their souvenir guide book to remember what had been and to speculate on what has been lost. I am sure we all wish the friends and staff of the Cutty Sark well as they begin their painful process of assessment.

It gives us cause to re-examine where we stand at the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston. We too have a ship. The “Alexander Henry” may also be considered a museum in her own right, showing us living and working conditions of her period and the state of naval architecture at the time of her building. But we are very fortunate to be the stewards of a larger collection. The library and archives includes the German and Milne papers - the naval architects who designed the ship. We also have the Port Arthur Shipbuilders collection - the yard where she was built. And of course we have the vessel as an artifact.

These archival collections do not stand alone. They have the supporting context of other shipyard and design collections from both similar and earlier periods. Some may remember seeing the book of drawings by John Scott Russell, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s collaborator, on display at the time of the opening of the Gordon Shaw Study Centre. And the collections relating to the Calvins and Garden Island also provide interesting points of comparison and departure.

Please allow me as a retired naval officer to highlight another collection that is extremely important - the Grant MacDonald drawings and portraits. When that was opened in 1987 I seem to remember that every naval historian or embryonic naval historian in the country was here. That is how important that collection is. While I was at the Directorate of History in Ottawa working on RCNVR officer training for the official history of the RCN, I had occasion to use not only that collection, but also one if its supporting collections, the Wilfred Bark letters.

RCN centenary in 2010.

It is through its collections that any museum is able to interpret the past, how we got to where we are now, for a larger audience. I know the museum is already planning for 2010, the centenary of the RCN. We need to be reminded that in the shipyard on this site, nine corvettes were built for our navy and served in the Battle of the Atlantic. Two of them were sunk. HMCS Charlottetown, built in 1941, was torpedoed in the St Lawrence River on September, 11 1942. Nine sailors were lost. HMCS Trentonian, built in 1943 and commissioned here in Kingston, was torpedoed on February, 12 1945 and sunk with the loss of six lives. On both November 11 and Battle of Atlantic Sunday we solemnly intone that “we will remember them,” but we cannot remember what we do not know. One of the roles of museums such as ours is to educate the public and succeeding generations using their collections.

Rideau Canal exhibit proposed.

I believe the museum is also considering a major exhibition for next year in conjunction with an important international conference. The World Canals Conference will be meeting here in Kingston in September, 2008. This year they are meeting in Liverpool. Go to the web site to see for yourself what the Liverpool conference will be like and consider what this will mean for Kingston. An exhibit about the Rideau Canal could be a tremendous supporting and complimentary event. It could also tell us something about the early years of Kingston.

Who has stopped to think that the street layout of what is now the Parliament Hill and market area of Ottawa was done by Lieutenant-Colonel John By. Look at the street names: Wellington in front of Parliament Hill for the great victor of the Napoleonic wars, Master General of the ordnance and therefore responsible for the Rideau Canal project, later Commander in Chief of the army, and briefly Prime Minister; York in the market, for a royal duke and great military reformer; Dalhousie, for one of Wellington’s generals in the Peninsula Campaign and subsequently the Governor-in-Chief for British North America, and George, Clarence, Sussex and Wurtemburg - all names associated with the royal family.

An exhibit about the Rideau Canal mounted for next year’s World Canals Conference here could tell us much about the men who built the canal and the influence they had shaping and building Kingston. Planning of such exhibitions requires institutional stability as a necessary precondition. Major funders want an institution to have at least a five year window of stability, and in practice that means ten. Professional staff, and a museum cannot really fulfill its mandate without them, need to be able to research and develop the story line for an exhibit, collect the necessary materials, perhaps through loan arrangements, plan the display and write the supporting text without such distractions as having to plan for the dissolution or move of the institution. A community that does not ensure its museums have such security really does not appreciate, let alone understand its museums and cultural heritage. They are not stewards of their inheritance. Collections without physical security will perish. Whether it is by fire, as with the Cutty Sark, or through neglect is of little importance, the loss remains the same.

Challenges and options.

We have two challenges before us: the permanence of the museum in this location, and the future of the Alexander Henry. Let me discuss first the lease arrangement and future museum location. The bottom line, as described to me this past week by Glen Laubenstein, the city’s CAO, is that both the city administration and the federal government want the museum to stay where it is. I would therefore conclude that the correspondence of last year that required the museum to prepare exit plans might be now described as an unfortunate wrong turn down a dead end.

We must ensure there is not a similar false turn in the future.

As we all know, the federal government owns the building, the land and the adjacent water rights. For most of the time the museum has occupied this building, the property owner has not maintained it. A new owner would therefore be confronted with some considerable expenses for maintenance and repair. That is one problem. A second problem is environmental. It is an anomaly that probably extends to most national governments that while they make the rules for their country they do not always consider themselves bound by them. We all know that this was an industrial site and there are very real reasons to believe that it may be what we call a “brownfield”. The city administration has been unwilling, and I am sure you will say rightly so, to assume this property with the unfunded unlimited liability of an environmental clean up.

Simplistically, there are two options. Either the federal government cleans up the contamination or they make a commitment that once the property has changed hands, an arm of the federal government will not come after the city with an order to do that which the federal government did not.

There is one final complication. There are several agencies of the federal government involved:

·        Public Works wants to dispose of the property in accordance with a recent policy that excess lands be disposed of at market value:

·        Parks Canada, which includes the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board, has some interest in the future of a national historic site:

·        and then the Departments of the Environment and of Fisheries and Oceans are “standing by” for the brownfields and water rights’ issues.
 

City staff have been asking that the government appoint one contact person with whom we deal who will coordinate all the federal concerns and be person, authorized to speak for the federal government on all issues. That request is seen to be reasonable. The delay has been personnel changes at senior levels of the federal civil service. Such an appointment is expected “soon,” which I understand to mean a couple of weeks.

Very positive meeting.

This week just past Glen Laubenstein met in Ottawa with a Public Works ADM. He described the meeting to me as a “super meeting.” The federal government understands our concerns about past maintenance and environment, and acknowledges that they are reasonable.

The current thinking is that the lease between the city and the federal government should be allowed to lapse. As the direct property owner, the federal government would then be able to use federal financial resources for building maintenance and repair. When those matters have been addressed, and there is resolution on the environmental concerns, the building would be leased back to the city for $1. In the meantime, the museum would remain here as a direct tenant of the federal government. That seems to me to be a workable solution at the inter-government level.

Now we need to identify what concerns the museum might have with that arrangement, and bring them to the table for discussion.

Moving the “Alexander Henry”.

And then there is the “Alexander Henry”. She cannot remain where she is because the Block D development deflects the prevailing westerly winds thus causing her to surge in her berth, and chafe lines. She has to be moved, and the logical place is into the graving dock. That is not a new idea. It was part of the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Centre that the museum board considered about ten years ago. But we are hearing a lot of sucking of back teeth. If there is much more of it, the weather people may be investigating an unusual low pressure system over Kingston, and worry about a possible hurricane. I hope it is not obstructive obfuscation.

In January we thought we had a tight time line for the end of November lease expiry. Well, now we have a very tight time line. If the Henry is to be moved into the dock this year, the water levels are such that it has to be done not later than the end of June. If that does not happen, as she cannot stay where she is, she will have to be moved to an interim berth with all the additional expenses and security risks.

What are the problems? People who are paid to worry and to ask questions but not answer them, fear that the dock might collapse, or that the ship might pull out the bollards. Let’s look at the structural integrity of the dock. We know that its age is not a contributing factor for its collapse. The graving dock at the naval dockyard in Esquimalt is older. The financing to complete it had been one of BC’s terms for entering confederation. That dock is in constant use. A phone call to the appropriate people at CFB Esquimalt would, I am sure, provide much information about their structural concerns, (if any), and how they have addressed them. I am of course assuming that the docks are sufficiently similar that the experience may be transferable. They are close in age, so I doubt the construction techniques were vastly different, and the same man, Henry Perley, built them both. His 1886 survey of the Esquimalt dock, extending to over 1,600 pages, is available at the McGill University archive. He has also described how he built the Kingston dock: “The dock is built of limestone from quarries at Belleville ... As stretchers could not be less than 4 ft in length with a bed not less in width than 1½ times the rise, the smallest stone that could be used weighed over three tons ... The whole of the masonry was laid in a compound of one of Portland cement to two of sand ... a constant testing was carried on during construction. Samples were taken from every tenth barrel as delivered, and tested for fineness by the whole sample passing through a 2,500 sieve. Briquettes of neat cement, after remaining for twelve hours in the air and seven days clear in water, gave an average tensile strength of 445 lbs per square inch.”

Given the weight alone of the stones, I have difficulty imagining a lateral pressure from an unknown source that could cause the walls of the dock to collapse inward. How could the ship, moored in the flooded dock, pull the bollards out? Rather than raising a question, sucking teeth, shaking a head sagely saying “I don’t know, I’m not sure about this” and walking away, let’s investigate the question. Francis McLachlan has, and he also very kindly spent some time walking me through some of the technical points. He has advised the consultant engineers that the construction of the dock as described by Perley can withstand a working pressure of 500lbs/sq inch. If floating braces were placed between the dock walls and the ship’s side, the ship being moored with heavy hawsers to each side, the maximum pressure would be 50lbs/sq inch according to his calculations. In sixty knots of wind - or if you prefer metric, over 100 kilometres an hour, (and how frequent is that in Kingston?) - no one hawser would have enough pressure on it to break one of the bollards, and ripping one out of the stone is hard to imagine. At some future time the dock may be drained. Bureaucrats and their paid consultants are asking what effect that might have on the stability of the dock. Every winter the Rideau Canal and all its locks, which are not dissimilar to a drydock, are drained. I am told this dock had been drained for extended periods of time over winters, and I believe the same is true of Esquimalt. But people seem to have overlooked the fact that dry docks are meant to be dry. They are flooded only to take a ship in or out. The evidence is there for those who want answers. But best of all, with respect to concerns about liability, I am again advised that the museum’s insurance would ‘save the crown liable’ for moving the Henry

I understand engineering opinion is divided. I think it is time to look to those who have not only engineering experience, but also marine dock experience. There comes a point when the museum, having done its due diligence, must look doubting Thomases in the eye and say, “your questions are not good enough - here is our evidence. Show us yours. Time will not wait on your delays and vapours. The ship must move by the end of June, or are you going to pay for the costs of an interim move, and assume liability?” Why is all of this important? It comes back to being stewards of our collections and of our maritime heritage. As a user of the library and archives, as a visitor to the museum, I am persuaded that the Great Lakes Heritage Centre idea of ten or so years ago is a necessary plan for the future that allows the museum to grow, and better fulfill its mandate to the community. That centre will be a tremendous asset for the City of Kingston. The plan calls for the ship to be in the dock. Recent waterfront developments are forcing the move of the ship.

Large vessel pier possible.

Moving the ship will also permit a future development of a pier for larger vessels, such as HMCS Halifax that has to anchor off, and cruise ships. That is good for the City of Kingston as well. The museum has a long term plan about which all of us - museum members and city - should all be excited. As stewards who appreciate and understand our museums and cultural heritage I would urge you all to keep up the pressure on your City Councillors; MP, Peter Milliken, and Senator Hugh Segal who is a supporter of the government, to make sure the Alexander Henry is properly safeguarded and the question of the lease is seen through to the final conclusion, not shelved because a temporary fix is at hand. And remember, the ship has to move by the end of June. I trust we will now allow ourselves to be diverted again by an unfortunate wrong turn down a dead end.