00:00From the sea to the docks.
00:02The SS Richard Montgomery's masts have now made landfall at Chatham's Historic Dockyard.
00:08The 82-foot steel structures have now been cut to around half the size and are laid out for public
00:15view.
00:15Ian Clark, who runs his own restoration company, has been contracted by the dockyard
00:20to do a condition survey of the masts and look at options for long-term conservation.
00:25We're just entering into that preliminary phase now, where we're carrying out some closer inspections
00:32and then later in the year I'll be presenting the options appraisal to the stakeholders
00:38and then moving forward, hopefully sometime during 2027 we'll reach an agreement and the conservation process will start.
00:48And it isn't just the masts that have been brought here. Various artefacts from the ship have been salvaged too.
00:54So there are a few other objects that were brought up with the masts, mostly winches,
00:59effectively parts that were on the davits and the masts themselves.
01:04Of varying conditions, they have not fared quite as well as the masts in terms of their condition.
01:09We are, again, going through the process of assessing their condition and looking what we can do with them.
01:14But the conservation process of the masts won't be simple.
01:18Corrosion over time could make things trickier.
01:21That rusting process can be really quite fierce.
01:26So we need to understand how much of the risk it is, how we mitigate that risk, how we suppress
01:33that risk
01:34and what that might look like going forward.
01:37So this masts behind me was just in the water only a couple of months ago
01:42and now it's here at Chatham's Historic Dockyard.
01:45So what are the next steps in the restoration journey?
01:48We will do our best to look after them in this short term whilst working with the Department for Transport.
01:53Long term, we'd love to see them have a suitable home.
01:56We'd love them to be accessible to the public because objects like this are to be seen.
02:01Therefore, they tell a really important local history story.
02:04And regardless of where they end up long term,
02:06we're just really interested that we can play a role in making sure that people can still see them for
02:10years to come.
02:11It will be years before the masts of the SS Richard Montgomery have a permanent home,
02:16but for now they'll remain aground here at the Dockyard.
02:20Justine Latter, the KMTV in Chatham.
