Sunken Ships and Iron Men

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 731, 17 July 1953, Page 18

Sunken Ships and Iron Men

HE last time the salvage ship Foremost 17. visited Auckland with a batch of gold bars from the wrecked Niagara; NZBS commentators went on board and recorded descriptions of the ship's method: of operation for a halfhour programme called Niagara’s Gold.

Interviews with diver John Johnstone and Lieutenant C. W. Chadwick, R.N. (retired) were included in the programme, and as this issue of The Listener went to press it was planned to broadcast it from 1YA on the evening of the day the Foremost 17 came back with the last of the gold which could be recovered. The programme will also be heard later from other NZBS stations. Niagara’s Gold tells first the story of the early Niagara salvage attempts made by the Johnstone brothers in 1941, when gold worth more than £2,000,000 was brought up from the séa bed off Whangarei Heads. The Niagara, which sank without loss of life on June 19, 1940, was the first fatality from a pattern of moored contact mines secretly laid at night by the German raider Orion only six days earlier. She carried 590 ingots of 24 carat gold, each weighing a quarter of a hundredweight, and stacked in 295 boxes. The total value was £2,500,000. The first attempt to bring up the gold was one of the great treasure hunts of the war, and a major feat of maritime salvage. In this second attempt, made to recover the ingots which could not be

located with the equipment ‘used in 1941, interest has been aroused by the use of a robot device known as the "Iron Man," designed to pick up small but valuable objects from. the wreck. The operator of this robot was Lieuten-

ant Chadwick, who describes his experiences inside it in the programme. The commentator is Dick Gutteridge and’ the script is by Arthur E, Jones. The programme was produced in the» Auckland studios of the NZBS.