Society of Bexhill Museums
We heard about four local wrecks - the English warship 'Anne' in 1690 off Pett Level, one of the 30 new ships approved by Charles 11 in 1670; The 'Amsterdam' in 1749, the Dutch East Indiaman, off Bulverhythe on its maiden voyage to Batavia; The Danish ship 'Thomas Lawrence' in 1862 en route to the Caribbean - and how in the 1980s Customs and Excise still wanted the customs duty when 500 bottles of cognac were eventually brought ashore!
Finally the 'Storaa', originally a Danish merchant ship, torpedoed in November 1943, 10 miles off Beachy Head and in which 21 men died.
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Hide AdThe story of the subsequent struggle through the courts resulted in this being the first merchant ship to be protected as a war grave by law as recently as May 2007.
The next lecture entitled Four Brothers And A Friend Called Dan about the experiences of a Sussex village whose sons served with the Sussex Regiment during the Great War, is at 2.30 pm on Wednesday, January 21, at St Augustine's Hall, off Cooden Drive.