Irisbrook

Ship collisions were hardly unusual in the crowded waters of the English Channel, but the loss of Irisbrook on 25 March 1911 was more dramatic than most. She collided with the French steamer Ville de Bordeaux off the Sussex coast. Neither ship survived.

A Sunderland-built steamer

Irisbrook was built in 1902 by J. Blumer & Co. at Sunderland's North Dock. A steel screw steamer of 2,759 gross tons, she was built for the SS Tregenna Company Ltd and operated by Miller & Richards. Her machinery was typical of the workhorse cargo steamers of the period: a three-cylinder triple-expansion engine supplied by two boilers.

By March 1911 Irisbrook was under the command of Captain D. Kerr and carried a crew of 27. She was outward bound from Britain for the Amazon, having sailed from Swansea via London with a mixed cargo including coal, patent fuel and general goods.

The collision

During the night of 24–25 March 1911, Irisbrook was passing through the English Channel when she encountered the French cargo steamer Ville de Bordeaux near the Royal Sovereign Light Vessel, off Beachy Head.

Ville de Bordeaux was travelling in the opposite direction. She was on passage from Brest to Dunkirk and, unlike the heavily laden Irisbrook, was sailing in ballast.

The two ships collided with sufficient force to leave both mortally damaged. Contemporary reports placed the collision around ten miles east-south-east of the Royal Sovereign Light Vessel, although the recorded positions associated with the loss vary.

There was little time to save either vessel. Between them the two steamers carried 49 men, who abandoned ship in their small boats as Irisbrook and Ville de Bordeaux foundered.

Forty-nine men in the Channel

Despite the loss of both ships, the collision did not become a human disaster. All 49 members of the two crews escaped.

The following morning the survivors were found by a tug and brought ashore at Newhaven. Neither vessel had been carrying passengers. Within a matter of hours two sizeable cargo steamers had disappeared beneath the Channel, while every man aboard them had survived.

It was an unusually fortunate outcome to a collision violent enough to sink both vessels.

So where is Irisbrook?

More than a century later, the story becomes rather less straightforward. The location of Irisbrook's remains has not always been clear.

An earlier wreck position south-west of the Royal Sovereign Light Vessel was for many years associated with Irisbrook. That identification was ultimately rejected. Historic England now records the old position as a "dead" wreck record — effectively a position retained in the historical record but no longer considered to represent the ship.

Instead, the probable remains of Irisbrook are believed to lie close to those of Ville de Bordeaux. The identification of the wreckage in this area has itself had a complicated history, with one site formerly charted as Ville de Dunkirk, despite no corresponding vessel being known to have been lost there.

Two wrecks, one collision

Surveys and diving have gradually made sense of what lies on the seabed. Two wrecks have been recorded close together, with the evidence pointing towards them being the ships lost in the collision of March 1911.

The relationship between the wrecks is particularly striking. Later investigation of the site identified as Ville de Bordeaux reported that her bow remained embedded in the stern of Irisbrook — preserving on the seabed the physical consequences of the collision that sank them both.

Objects recovered from the area have added to the confusion rather than completely resolving it. Artefacts from the wreck sites have at various times been attributed to both Irisbrook and Ville de Bordeaux, reflecting just how closely their stories — and apparently their remains — are intertwined.

The wreck today

The wreck believed to be Irisbrook therefore represents more than simply another lost merchant steamer. Together with Ville de Bordeaux, the site preserves the aftermath of a single accident in which two ships were lost within moments of one another.

That also makes Irisbrook a useful example of why identifying shipwrecks is not always as simple as matching a charted obstruction with the name of a lost vessel. Positions recorded at the time of a sinking could be approximate, later surveys might encounter several wrecks in the same area, and names attached to sites could persist long after the evidence supporting them had disappeared.

In the case of Irisbrook, more than a century of records, surveys, diving and recovered objects have gradually shifted her probable location across the seabed. The wreck may have been lost in 1911, but establishing precisely which remains belong to which ship has proved a considerably longer process.