Sutton Hoo steamship hulk in Suffolk gains legal protection

The hulk of a 19th century iron steamship abandoned in a river on the Sutton Hoo estate has been given legal protection by the government.

The Lady Alice Kenlis was designed by Hercules Linton, the Scottish shipwright who later designed the tea clipper Cutty Sark.

The ship was built in Glasgow and launched in December 1867. It was named after Alice Maria Hill, the daughter of the Earl of Hillsborough who married Lord Kenlis the same year.

The Lady Alice Kenlis was used as a cargo ship, carrying cattle, goods and passengers between Northern Ireland, Scotland and England. It was briefly used as a ferry, and in 1913 was converted to a suction dredger and reregistered in Bristol as the Holman Sutcliffe.

The ship was partially dismantled in the 1930s, and the remains of the hull were towed to its present location in the River Deben in Suffolk and scuttled in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

“Hulks” are ships that have been abandoned, partially dismantled and stripped of fittings, rather than “shipwrecks”.

After designing the Lady Alice Kenlis, Linton formed a shipbuilding company, Scott and Linton. The Cutty Sark was among the vessels built by the company.

The famous ship was a state-of-the-art Victorian tea clipper, one of the fastest of its kind and capable of making the journey from Sydney to London in 73 days. It is now part of the Royal Museums Greenwich by the River Thames in south London.

Two years after the Cutty Sark’s launch, Scott and Linton went bankrupt.

Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, arts and heritage minister, said the Lady Alice Kenlis was an “important piece of our national heritage”.

Its hulk “offers us an important insight into the work of Hercules Linton, who – as the designer of the Cutty Sark – became one of the most notable shipwrights of the 19th century”.

Angus Wainwright, an archaeologist at the National Trust, which owns the Sutton Hoo estate, said: “Although we knew that the Lady Alice Kenlis was an interesting ship, we didn’t appreciate just how historically important she was.

“This is now our second scheduled ship at Sutton Hoo, as we also look after the site where the famous Anglo-Saxon burial ship was excavated in 1939.”

The ship’s protection as a scheduled monument was granted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on the advice of Historic England.