The British were accused of putting on display rare cannons made for King Henry VIII which were stolen from Irish waters, declassified papers reveal.
Two 9ft x 6″ bronze barge cannons were removed in the early 1970s from a shipwreck near the Metal Man at Tramore Bay on the Waterford coast. They belonged to HMS Post, a warship, which sank off the coast of Ireland in 1566.
They were allegedly put on display as a tourist attraction at the Royal Armouries and Tower of London, with no reference to Ireland.
The allegation that British treasure hunters found the cannons and used a trawler to illegally remove them from the seabed before smuggling them to Britain in a camper van led to a lot of adverse publicity in the early 1990s.
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The cannons were bought by a Tower official, Howard Blackmore, at a garage in Essex in November 1972 after being tipped off by a British arms and armour dealer.
On June 17th, 1993, then acting keeper of Irish antiquities of the National Museum of Ireland, Eamon P Kelly, travelled to the Tower of London to complete an extensive report on the allegations by examining the Tower’s own files.
His report said the cannons are known as “sakers”, bear the Tudor rose, and are two of “only 10 examples of cannon cast by the Owen brothers known to exist”.
Kelly’s report said Tower records confirmed that in 1974 the keeper of antiquities at the Ulster Museum, a “distinguished scholar” called Laurence Flanagan, “was of the view the guns had been removed from Irish waters in doubtful circumstances”.
He said Maurice Craig of the Maritime Institute of Ireland had also raised concerns at this time, saying he “advised [the Tower] that both Irish and English law had been broken [during the acquisition of the items] by the failure to report the cannon to the Receiver of Wreck”, an official body which records when – and where – potentially important items have been found.
When confronted with the suggestions that the cannons were illegally removed from Irish waters, Blackmore, the keeper of the firearms at the Royal Armouries, disputed the provenance of the cannons and suggested they might have been raised from the Sussex coast.
In June 1993, Kelly concluded that British officials were “aware the guns have been found off the Irish coast”, and under international law were Irish property.
After receiving Kelly’s report of June 1993 that the guns were “Irish State property under Irish law”, Irish officials wrote to Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office seeking immediate return of the cannons.
Kelly concluded that no money should be paid to the Royal Armouries, as the evidence suggested they were not “good faith purchasers”.
A letter from the Chief State Solicitor’s office indicated that the National Museum of Ireland would not pay anything for the return of the cannons “given the circumstances of the case”.
The saga made it to the Sunday Times and the Sunday Press. It would appear that the Tower of London stood firm and asked the Irish authorities to provide evidential proof suitable for a court a law that the cannons had come from Irish waters.
A report in the Sunday Press from July 1992 quotes the keeper of the Tower of London, Graham Rimer, defiantly stating that the Irish case “has not been proved and we are not prepared to take their word for it”.
The files do not suggest that cannons were ever returned to Ireland.
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