A shipwreck hunter who has been made an OBE has said he hopes an anchor from the boat that brought the first Windrush generation to the UK will be recovered in the next year or so.
David Mearns, a marine scientist and oceanographer based in Midhurst, West Sussex, told the PA news agency that recognition for services to locating and recovering historic shipwrecks in the New Year Honours may boost the mission.
HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks in Essex on June 22 1948, carrying primarily Caribbean migrants answering Britain’s call to address post-war labour shortages.
It sank off the coast of Algeria in 1954.
The Windrush Anchor Foundation has been set up to recover the 1.5-tonne anchor and bring it back to the UK to go on permanent display, and US-born Mr Mearns said around £2 million is needed.
He hopes the project will happen in 2026, saying next summer is “probably too early”.
The 66-year-old said: “We want to recover that stern anchor, restore it, and bring it back to England and use it as a centrepiece in a public monument, a memorial to celebrate the contributions that the Windrush generations and their descendants have made to this country in terms of immigration and a positive force for multicultural Britain.
“I will volunteer my time gladly to make that project happen – it’s five years in the making, and hopefully this OBE will help raise the profile of that.
“I don’t know how many people have ever gotten any kind of award for shipwreck hunting, that’s got to be close to a first, but that’s the other side of it, the difficulty, the challenge, and why these things are so so hard to do.”
He added: “If that was my 30th (discovery) and I found no other shipwrecks after that, I’d have had a very full and successful career, but that means an awful lot to me and to a lot of people.”
Mr Mearns also led the successful search for the wreck of the British warship HMS Hood, which was sunk by the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941, killing 1,415 men.
The wreck was located at a depth of 9,843ft (3,000m) in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland in 2001.
In 2019, Mr Mearns directed the privately-funded search for the Piper Malibu N264DB plane which was carrying Argentine footballer Emiliano Sala and pilot David Ibbotson after it disappeared over the English Channel en route from Nantes in France to Cardiff.
The wreckage was found north of Guernsey.
Earlier this year, he was involved in the expedition to locate the ship on which Sir Ernest Shackleton made his final voyage.
Quest was found in the Labrador Sea off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada in June.
Mr Mearns said he has located 29 major shipwrecks.
On his honour, he said: “I grew up as an American and things like this don’t happen to us, so that’s something to get used to.
“I’m very proud that my work is being recognised, and also what I do is so unusual, it’s an atypical career, and so it’s nice for my line of work to be recognised this way.”
