DOWN UNDER

Evening Star, Issue 19800, 25 February 1928, Page 16

DOWN UNDER

A FAMOUS SHIPLIFTER DIVER DESCRIBES ADVENTURES Giant liners may plough the mighty ocean, timing their arrival to the hour. Believers in the yesterday of wooden ships and iron men may sigh that romance has gone out of the sea, but listen to the plain, unvarnished tale of Charles Percy Lambert, world salvage master and diver, and decide for yourself (says tho Sydney ‘Sun’). For thirty-two years he has been diving in all parts of tho world from Iceland to Hongkong, and now he has arrived in Australia to become associated with Mr A. H.. Albert, Sydney’s well-known diver. A book might well be written around nany episodes of Ifis life. .Take, for example, his work in tho recovery of nearly £500,000 worth of treasure from tho liner Oceana which sank in twenty fathoms in the English Channel, off Eastbourne, in 1912. Lambert in this effort established a world’s record for treasure recovery. Ninety thousand pounds’ worth of the treasure was in boxes of 5,000 sovereigns, and the remainder in silver bars each of 801 b. Tho diver took his life in lus hands when, bursting through gratings, he made his wav to the eerie darkness of the bullion chamber abaft the saloon. An interesting phaho was that the underwriters had mot the full claims of the owners of the silver, paying out as a total loss. During tho months it remained in the liner at the bottom of the ocean the price of silver advanced 2d an ounce; consequently, the underwriters cleared £30,000 after all expenses had been paid. Seventeen people lost their lives in the wreck, including a prominent English manufacturer. Mr Lambert war. asked to try and find his will and personal papers in a brief bag in the trunk in his cabin. The cabin was three decks below the saloon, but the will was soon in tho hands of the executors. Lloyd’s underwriters have a good friend in Mr Lambert. He saved them £400,000 in 1921 when he travelled to Sardinia in their service to find a vessel which sank off the coast. He discovered her sixteen miles from land after months of search. . She was in twenty fathoms, and his investigations soon convinced him that she had been deliberately cast away through. the opening of tho main and bilge injections and Hie feeding valves of the various tanks. Through bis evidence Lloyd s won the law suit which followed. Many amazing adventures befell Mr Lambert during the war ns an Admiralty diver under tho noted expert Commodore (then Captain! Sir Frederic Young. Mr Lambert was in the salving of the first submarine mine layer Britain obtained from tho Germans. She was diasod ashore on Cork Shoal, off Harwich, in 1916, with twelve mines in her. Before tho crew left they blew holes in her bottom, and released two of tho mines. Mr Lambert and a colleague wont below to survey the submarine with tlie idea of subsequently lifting her, and found the released mines below the tubes. Those they secured by reeving wire, ropes post tlie upper mines through the mine tubes and then fastening them to the sinkers of the lower mines. With the risk of explosion gone, tho submarine was next pccnrcd, lifted, ami docked. Seventy men lost their lives Hi rough tho collision of tho E 4 ami the EH. during the manoeuvres. Uilh crews were lost with the exception of one man, a stoker, who had sworn that no submarine could trap him. Nobody would follow him when he rushed into the engine room and closed the door. His whole hope, was centred on the big trap hatch between . the engines. Ho opened the circulation valves and allowed tho engine room to fill with water,

jnid took tip bis position close under the hatch. When the water was nearly up to his neck, be gave the door a push to get out Driven by the air, which had been highly compressed by the rising water, "the door flew up, but the pressure of the water outside slammed it down again, cutting off the fingers of the stoker’s right hand. He pluckily waited for equilibrium in tlie pressure of tlie air and tho water, then forced tho door open, and escaped. Mr Lambert assisted in salvage operations, and the submarines were taken to Harwich, where medical men removed the. bodies. The next submarine on which JMr Lambert was engaged was tho Kl 3, which sank off the Clyde with eightysix men. The ventilation valves in tlio boiler room had been loft open, and within five minutes forty-four men in the afterpart of the submarine were drowned. Mr Lambert worked .with a naval rescue party in liberating the other forty-two mon—ono of the biggest and most precarious rescue feats of onr time. Perhaps Mr Lambert’s closest call was in lifting a lighter load of girders at Dolagoa Bay, East Africa. A girder suddenly shifted, broke his arm, and pinned him down. Tho nearest diver was 300 miles away, so he dug himself out with his diver’s knife, cutting a hole in the boulder clay and crawling under the girder. The diver was strengthening a railway bridge fifty miles from Beira—tho piles had been scoured away by floods—when one of his boys was grabbed by a crocodile in passing him a spanner. Five minutes later tho crocodile swam to tlie surface with the hoy in liis mouth, and started to bury him in the mud They got the crocodile with a rifle, and rescued the body, and, much to their surprise, tlie skin was hardly broken. Tho boy bad been drowned. Mr Lambert was last stationed in the West Indies, and, apart from the attraction of Australia through association with Diver Albert, one of his chief reasons for coming to Sydney is to enable his family to grow- up in a land of opportunity.