Fifty-one years ago today, 100,000 people lined the banks of the River Avon in Bristol as the SS Great Britain returned to her birthplace. In the intervening years, the rusting hulk was meticulously restored to her former glory and now rests in the drydock where she was built. As a museum ship, she is visited by between 150,000 and 200,000 visitors annually. Here is an updated repost from several years ago about the grand old ship, followed by a video about her return to Bristol in 1970.
In the spring of 2016, I visited the museum ship SS Great Britain, in Bristol, UK. When she was launched in 1843, the iron-hulled luxury passenger steamship SS Great Britain was described as “the greatest experiment since the Creation.”
The brainchild of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the SS Great Britain was the largest ship of the time. At 322 feet long, she was the longest ship of her day. She was so large that it took a year to get her out of Bristol Harbor, requiring both dredging and the partial dismantling of a lock. She was powered by 1,000 HP steam engines, the largest engines of any ship in her day. Rather than turning paddle wheels, the engines turned a screw propeller. Great Britain‘s main propeller shaft, built by the Mersey Iron Works, was the largest single piece of machinery ever fabricated. She also had six masts, to carry sails when the winds were favorable and/or when the engines broke down or the propeller’s blades fell off, as they did on the second voyage.
The single most remarkable thing about SS Great Britain is simply that she survived. She continued earning her living for close to a full century. She operated for only about a year in her intended service, as a luxury passenger liner between Bristol and New York. She was run hard aground off the coast of Ireland in 1846 due to a navigational error and was refloated in 1847.
In 1848, she was sold, refurbished and put into the Australian immigrant trade. Because the distance between Great Britain and Australia was too far for her supply of coal, she changed from being a sail-assisted steamship to becoming a steam-auxiliary sailing ship.
After almost 30 years in the Australian emigrant trade, her engines were removed and she became a pure sailing ship, a windjammer, carrying coal.
In 1886 after a cargo fire aboard, Great Britain was condemned in the Falklands and sold as a coal barge. In 1937, she was scuttled and abandoned and remained so until in 1970 when she was carried back to Bristol on a barge to begin her restoration and a new life as a museum ship.