It is amazing what one can buy online these days. Recently, Dom Robinson, 53, a diver and shipwreck aficionado from Portsmouth, Hampshire, saw an ad on Facebook Marketplace for a World War I shipwreck for sale for just £300. He couldn’t resist, so he snapped up the wreck of the 3,000-tonne SS Almond Branch.
SS Almond Branch, a steam-powered cargo ship built in 1896, was torpedoed by German submarine UB-57 near Mevagissey on November 27, 1917, and has rested 58m underwater off the coast of Cornwall ever since.
Every shipwreck has a legal owner. In Britain, the government sold a number of them into private hands to be salvaged after the end of the Second World War.