HL Deb 27 April 1954 vol 187 cc7-17

2.49 p.m.

LORD GIFFORD rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what action they propose to take upon the Report of the Inquiry into the loss of the "Empress of Canada," with a view to minimising the risk of similar disasters in the future. The noble Lord said: My Lords, many noble Lords have come here to-day to hear the economic debate to be introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, which follows my Question, and I assure those noble Lords that I do not intend to detain the House for very long. At the same time, I make no apologies for raising this matter of the "Empress of Canada"—in fact, I think it is a useful curtain-raiser to the economic debate, because the fire in the "Empress of Canada," and other fires in passenger ships in port which I propose briefly to mention, have caused an enormous drain on the financial resources of this country. I am not going to attempt to estimate what this figure would amount to, though perhaps one of the economists among your Lordships—Lord Brand, for example—could do so; but it must be many millions of pounds in material, labour lost and passenger-carrying capacity, and so forth. Therefore, as I have said, although my Question relates to the "Empress of Canada" I should like to bring to your notice the fact that there have been other serious fires in ports of the United Kingdom in the last few years, and I will mention the most important ships. These were the "Empire Waveney" (17,000 tons), the "Empress of Russia" (17,000 tons), the "Monarch of Bermuda" (22,000 tons), the "Prague" (4,000 tons), and the "Kronprins Frederik" (4,000 tons). I believe that every ship that I have mentioned, with the exception of the last one, has been a constructive total loss. In the case of the "Kronprins Frederik," she has been well over a year out of commission and will be coming back into service in a few weeks' time only after an almost complete reconstruction.

The seriousness of this matter was realised some little time ago, and when the Party of noble Lords opposite were in power a Working Party was appointed. That Working Party made a most admirable Report, which I have studied, and it seems to me a very great pity that many of the recommendations which they made do not appear to have been adopted—a point which was stressed in the findings of the Court of Inquiry on the "Empress of Canada." I will deal briefly with some of the most important findings of the Court of Inquiry. I think the outstanding one is that the problem of fire in ships in port and out of commission is an entirely different one from that of fire in a ship when she is in full commission at sea. When a ship is at sea, the nerve centres of that ship are on the bridge, with the officer of the watch, and at the control platform of the engine room, where the engineer officer of the watch, and perhaps also the chief engineer, are on duty; quite properly, all instruments, fire alarms, telephones and other communications centre on those two points.

When a ship is in harbour, however, the bridge is deserted, and the engine room may be dead; so that, if the communications still centre on those points and the alarm bells ring, nothing whatever happens because nobody hears them. Noble Lords who have served in the Royal Navy will know well that when a ship comes into harbour the focal point or operation centre changes: it changes to the gangway, where the officer of the watch is located. All sentries and other people on duty, look-outs and so on, know where the officer of the watch is to be found. He can receive messages and alarms; he is able to take responsibility, in case of fire or other emergency, initiating the appropriate action. I realise that in a merchant ship the problem is very different, but I still think that some lessons can be learnt from Naval practice. When reading the Court of Inquiry Report it appears to me that no kind of operational centre was provided in the "Empress of Canada." There were isolated patrols on their particular beats, but there was no instruction: nobody knew to whom he ought to go, or where the responsible officer was to be found who would take the appropriate action in case of fire. I think that really is the crux of the whole matter.

The second point which I have picked out from the findings of the Committee of Inquiry is the lamentable delay in calling the fire brigade. The fire took place on a Sunday afternoon, which, of course, is a rather somnolent period, when people are not perhaps quite so awake as at other times. A watchman on a grain elevator actually saw smoke coming from the ship at 3.25 p.m. He took some action—he hailed the ship—but nobody seemed interested, and absolutely nothing was done. Twenty minutes later, at 3.45 p.m. two of the owners' shore gang on the boat deck saw smoke coming out of a porthole down below. They looked at it, and sucked their teeth; but again did nothing about it. I feel that it is one of the tendencies of the present day that people will stand by and do nothing, rather than accept a little responsibility. I think it is very important that everybody, even the most junior person on board, should realise that it is necessary and desirable that he should take some positive action when an emergency arises, instead of fearing to push himself forward and take responsibility. As I say, the fire was seen at 3.25 and 3.45 p.m. but no action was taken to call the fire brigade until 4.10 p.m., three-quarters of an hour after the fire was first seen. Not unnaturally, by that time it had got well out of hand, and the efforts of the fire brigade were useless.

The next serious defect which I wish to bring to your Lordships' notice is the fact that there was no water in the ship's fire main for fighting the fire. Nor at any time during the course of the fire, so far as I can gather, was water got into the fire main, which remained useless. Such water as did get to the fire came from hoses brought over the gangway and from floats outside the ship. This, of course, was extremely discouraging to the patrolmen and others who were attempting to get the fire under control. It is interesting to note that this very point was particularly stressed by the Working Party, who said that they regarded it as absolutely vital that water should always be available in the ship's fire main, and that, if it was not available, a temporary fire main should always be rigged. It is not a difficult thing, if the ship's pumps are not working, to connect shore hydrants to the ship's main. There are various ways of doing it, and it seems to me that this elementary precaution was badly neglected.

When I first went to sea, one of the first things that I was told by my commander was that it was the duty of every junior officer to know his ship. When I say "know his ship," I do not mean just knowing one's way from one's cabin to the anteroom to get a tot of gin; I really mean knowing the ship. To know a ship of any size means putting on a pair of overalls and crawling about storerooms and hundreds of compartments, probably for a whole week. In fact, when one joined a ship one was always allowed several days in which to get to know her—and even then, of course, one did not really know her. It has been said that there are only two people in a ship who really know her: one is the senior engineer and the other is the warrant shipwright. Both of them probably have served in her since the first keelplate was laid. That, in fact, is why they are always appointed at a very early stage. It seems to me that in the present case no responsible person was available who really knew the ship. Noble Lords will remember that, after the fire, the ship capsized due to the pumping in of water. One of the main contributory causes of the ship's capsizing was the fact that there was nobody there who really knew the ship, because, when water was pumped in on the starboard side to try to right the ship, it immediately ran across to the port side, through a cross drain which nobody knew existed; and in consequence the vessel then capsized. Also, no attempt was made in the early stages to close fire and water-tight doors—largely, I think, because there was nobody immediately available who knew exactly what doors ought to be closed. If these doors had been closed, it is quite probable that the fire would have been isolated.

The Court of Inquiry were unable to establish the exact cause of the fire, but they indicated the very strong probability that it was caused through clandestine smoking. There is no doubt, as anybody who has served in a ship under refit will know perfectly well, that a good deal of clandestine smoking does go on among workmen on board. It is a difficult thing to cope with. It seems to me that the best way of dealing with this evil is to cultivate a sense of honour and public opinion among the dockyard workmen, and to point out to them, by propaganda and other means—and I think that this is where the trade unions could help greatly—the very grave danger of smoking on board a ship that is under repair, and particularly the avoidance of carelessness with cigarette butts.

I have tried to give, as briefly as possible, what are, in my view, the main reasons for the loss of this great and valuable ship. I hope that the Government will take energetic steps to bring the Report of the Working Party, and also the Report of the Court of Inquiry, to the attention of all the appropriate authorities, the shipowners, the dock authorities and so on. I hope that all concerned will take this matter to heart. I consider that, when a large ship goes into port, a conference should take place, attended by all the interested parties, to decide on an operational plan for firefighting, and that after the conference has taken place, very clear written instructions, which do not seem to have been in existence in the case under discussion, for combating fires in the particular ship concerned should be given to those responsible on board and should be posted up clearly in strategic parts of the ship. To my mind, it is absolutely essential that an operational centre should be provided, from which there should be direct communication with the fire brigade, the harbour authorities, and so on, and that everybody should know where this centre is and where the responsible officer in charge of fire-fighting arrangements is to be found. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hawke, who is to reply will tell us what action has already been taken. Doubtless, many of the suggestions which I have made to-day have already been considered. If not, I hope that they will be of some assistance in solving this grave and difficult problem.

3.7 p.m.

LORD ELTON

My Lords, arising out of my noble friend Lord Gifford's Question, I should like to make one suggestion to Her Majesty's Government. It is a brief suggestion. Before doing so, I ought perhaps to declare a limited interest in the question, in the sense that I am a director of a company, one of whose subsidiaries is one of the companies which manufacture the new incombustible materials which ought to be more widely used in shipbuilding. I gather from answers given in another place that the attitude of Her Majesty's Government is likely to be that the "Empress of Britain" was built before the International Convention of 1948 and before the subsequent British Rules for construction were framed, and that they are perfectly satisfied that the British Rules as they stand are adequate.

I want to ask the noble Lord, Lord Hawke, and through him, the Minister, to consider whether, in view of the fact that incombustible materials have become available for sterling only within the last twelve months, these Rules, framed way back somewhere about 1948, do not need revision. As I understand it, the present requirement of the Rules is an alternative; either a ship must be fitted with mechanical sprinklers, in which case any sort of structural material could be used—wood or, for that matter, I think, matchwood: provided there are sprinklers there, you can use any kind of structural material you please—or, alternatively, incombustible materials must be used. The use of incombustible materials is the American practice, for in America incombustible materials have been available for about fifteen years. The use of sprinklers is the British practice, for in Britain indestructible materials have only just become available. I should have thought it more or less self-evident that, rather than require a crude alternative such as that, it would be better to require both sprinklers and indestructible materials: and, secondly, that if one or the other had to be required, then indestructible materials would be preferable to sprinklers. For after all, the use of indestructible materials for your cabin walls means that, although a dropped cigarette may start a fire in the cabin, the fire cannot possibly go beyond that particular cabin.

Against the automatic sprinkler it has to be remembered that any mechanical system can go out of order, and is particularly likely to go out of order when there is a fire. Sprinklers did not save the Monmouth Paper Mills, where they were fitted, and where there was a great fire not long ago; nor did they save General Motors, in America, from the destructive fire in a building in which sprinklers were fitted. What is to be said in their favour is largely psychological—a passenger likes to see something fitted for his safety. Even so, I should have thought he would prefer to see a notice roughly to the effect that "Your cabin is built of incombustible materials. You can burn it out if you like with a dropped cigarette, but no fire originating beyond your own cabin walls can possibly put you in danger." I should have thought that that would have been, even psychologically, more satisfactory for the passenger. The other great advantage of a sprinkler system is that in the large rooms of a ship like the "Queen Elizabeth" it may check the fire before it can reach the cabin walls where, if incombustible material is used, it will inevitably be checked.

My Lords, that is all I have to say. These materials have been available for sterling during the last year or two. They are not more expensive, and they are not harder to use than wood; but the shipbuilding industry, like most of us, including noble Lords opposite, is naturally conservatively minded. They love wood. They have had very unfortunate experiences recently with some substitutes for wood; consequently they are most reluctant to use these incombustible materials which are now available. I think that if it is left merely to the free play of commerce the use of indestructible materials will spread comparatively slowly. I would ask the Minister to consider whether or not he considers it a responsibility of Her Majesty's Government, in the interests of safety of life at sea, to do what he can in one way or another to encourage the use of these materials, remembering that there are no regulations whatever in force in respect of freighters or tankers, which represent 75 per cert. of our tonnage and which now carry quite a lot of passengers—and of course their crews, whose lives are just as valuable as those of the passengers. So that the question I am putting to the noble Lord, Lord Hawke, is merely whether he will reconsider the existing regulations in the light of the fact that new materials have become available since the regulations were drawn up.

3.14 p.m.

LORD HAWKE

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Gifford need make no apology to the House for bringing forward this very important matter of the loss of these great ships, and in fact my right honourable friend the Minister of Transport is extremely grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to make a few remarks on the subject. The facts as presented by my noble friend were, so far as I could detail them, absolutely correct in every particular. In 1948, as a result of experiences after the war, when several substantial ships were destroyed by fire, the Minister of Transport of the day appointed a Working Party. Their task was to see what recommendations could be made towards the prevention of these fires and towards firefighting on ships in ports or repair yards. I must emphasise here that we are not dealing with ships at sea, and as my noble friend, Lord Gifford, pointed out, conditions in harbour are very different, very much more dangerous. This Working Party reported in November, 1949, and their Report received wide publicity throughout the shipping industry. They analysed the causes of the fires started in the three previous years, 1946 to 1948, and suggested the proper precautions that should be taken. Incidentally, it may be of interest to know that in those three years there were 837 fires in ships in port in the United Kingdom, and of these no fewer than 354 were believed to be caused by burning and welding apparatus, and 102 by smoking. Very many of these fires were, of course, small, but in the years since the war there have been eight major fires in passenger ships in port. The noble Lord listed them all, except the "Oronsay" in 1950, which was not a complete loss.

The Working Party suggested a number of detailed steps which should be taken, but their main conclusions can be summed up in some very simple rules: first, the establishment of clear instructions and practices for fire prevention and fire fighting—the point my noble friend emphasised; secondly, the employment of the right type of man as patrolman; and thirdly, co-operation with the repairers in preventing fires. The fire in the "Empress of Canada" occurred on Sunday, January 25, 1953. She was lying in the Gladstone dock at Liverpool, with her port-side to the wharf. Repair work was being carried on by some 291 workmen of the contractors, and there were about thirty-five men employed by the owners aboard, with a duty officer, two engineers, and an electrician of the day. The ship was not in commission. Between 3.25 and 3.30 p.m. the man in charge of a grain elevator moored on the starboard side of the ship saw smoke coming from "B" deck. He hailed the ship, but nothing came of it. A quarter of an hour later, two of the owners' shore-gang saw fire coming from over the bulwark from "B" deck and they took no action. Then at 4.10 two of Harland and Wolff's men discovered the fire, took prompt action, went on shore and called the fire brigade from the shore offices. The fire brigade from Bootle turned up in two minutes, but the fire had taken such a hold that when, by 8.35, the pumping of water had to be stopped because the ship then had a list of 17 degrees, the fire was still raging furiously. After that, the ship slowly filled, through water entering the hull through various unsealed orifices that were below the water, eventually capsizing at 1.38 in the morning of January 26.

At the subsequent Inquiry, question 56 put by the Ministry to the Court is, I think, the important one. The question and the answer given were as follows: Were the recommendations of the Report of the Working Party on Fire Prevention and Fire-Fighting in ships carried out? Answer: Some of the more obvious discrepancies between the routine in force and the principle recommended by the Working Party may be listed as follows:—

  1. (a) No liaison existed between the owners and the fire brigade in relation to the ship.
  2. (b) Fire patrol frequency was below the recommended standard; clock patrols operated only at night, and at the time of the disaster personal alarms, as for example whistles, were not supplied.
  3. (c) A direct telephone line from ship to fire brigade was not available.
  4. (d) The fire main was uncharged and no alternatives had been instituted.
  5. (e) Fire doors and watertight doors were not closed.
  6. (f) Gas cylinders would not appear to have been dispersed as widely as possible."
The Court of Inquiry suggested that the probable cause of the fire was a cigarette end in one of the cabins, B.29–53. Some of these cabins were used as mattress and pillow stores, and there is no certainty that they were locked. The whole circumstances, as my noble friend has said, were unfortunate. And the alarming thing is that after the Working Party had reported and produced a well-thought-out series of measures for the prevention and extinction of fires of this sort, their conclusions should have been ignored to so large an extent.

The noble Lord, Lord Elton, has asked me about rules for construction. The rules for construction for British ships include a sprinkler system. Some foreign instructions go in more for non-inflammable substances. My noble friend has brought to the notice of the House a substance which has not been manufactured in this country until recently and which is incombustible. I do not want to pursue the noble Lord further down these paths, because he, of course, is a director of the company that makes this material, and I find that I am a shareholder. Therefore, I think it would be wrong for me to discuss the material in question: I understand it is sold in quantity.

LORD ELTON

My Lords, may I just correct the noble Lord? I am not a director of a company that makes this material; I am a director of a company one of whose subsidiaries is one of the companies which make it.

LORD HAWKE

I accept that. But I can assure my noble friend that my right honourable friend the Minister is always examining problems of this sort, and if a new situation has arisen in this matter I have no doubt he will look at the construction rules again. Now the Minister has carefully considered the findings of this Court of Inquiry, and has decided that the best thing he can do is to call a meeting of all the organisations which have any responsibility for seeing that ships in port are properly protected against fire. The object of the meeting will be to find the best means of seeing that the recommendations of the Working Party are strictly carried out, in particular the recommendations as regards patrolling, because in the prevention and the speedy putting out of fires the human factor—the quality and the frequency of the patrols—is obviously the most important. Then my right honourable friend thinks that if a drive can once again be instituted to bring the recommendations of the Working Party before the people responsible in these matters it will give the best chance of lessening the number of fires and seeing that those that are started are put out quickly. I hope that my answer is satisfactory to my noble friend.

VISCOUNT CALDECOTE

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down could he say whether the Minister has sufficient power to enforce the requirements of the Working Party by inspectors or other means?

LORD HAWKE

The Working Party report is naturally not a statutory document, and the Minister, in matters of this sort—I am speaking now subject to correction—has not, so far as I am aware, statutory powers on the subject. But I can assure the noble Lord that in the shipping world if the Minister of Transport expresses a strong wish that wish is very nearly as good as a statutory power.