For a rundown and rather unremarkable seaside town which is somewhat past its heyday, Sheerness-on-Sea has some extraordinary claims to a place in maritime history.
It was here — not far from the ugly new Tesco and McDonald’s that replaced the amusement park near the seafront — that Nelson’s body was brought ashore in a barrel of brandy after he died at Trafalgar.
It was from here, too, that the Fighting Temeraire, a heroine of that battle, left on her final journey to the breakers’ yard further up the Thames — a moment so gloriously depicted in the oil painting by J.M.W. Turner.
Sheerness can also boast of being the place where the Victorians perfected the design of the ship’s anchor, which is now standard on vessels across the world.
But none of this preoccupies locals any where near as much as the relic of their more recent history which lurks ominously off the Kent coast, in full view of the communities which it threatens.
‘We’re on a constant knife edge because of that thing out there,’ says David Robinson, 71, who has stopped to chat to me on the deserted promenade.
‘I’ve lived here all my life and not a day goes by when I don’t think about what will happen if that b***er blows.’
He points out to sea where, little more than a mile from the beach on which children still build sandcastles, the masts of a sunken ship can be seen jutting eerily above the waterline. Officially, this wreck is known as the SS Richard Montgomery but locals have another name for it . . .
When it sank in these waters towards the end of the World War II, the Montgomery was loaded with 7,000 tons of wartime bombs.
It’s estimated that anything from 1,400 to 3,000 tons of explosives are still packed in its water-logged hull, and it has been said that their detonation would cause one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions ever — 700 times the size of the bomb which claimed 168 lives in Oklahoma City in 1995.
