Incredibly, Tryon's deputy was none other than John Jellicoe. His escape that day off Lebanon probably did for the German High Seas fleet, when Jellicoe met them off Jutland in 1916.Francis treats the wreck as a British maritime grave and merely looks through the cabin windows - there is a silver salver visible through one of them - but presumes there are still bones, Tryon's included, in the buried part of the Victoria Poor Tryon. For young Christian Francis, provoked by old fishermen's stories and the Admiralty documents he read in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, has found Tryon's flagship 480ft down, remarkably intact and - even more extraordinary - standing vertical, its bows buried deep in the Mediterranean seabed, its huge twin propellers pointing upwards and illuminated by the faint Mediterranean sunlight. Francis works with two British divers and three Poles, and they all produced their amateur videos for me Shoals of fish sweep past the propellers. I could read the Victoria's name on the stern.There is Tryon's cabin, the iron landing from which he saw the Camperdown bearing down upon him, the Victoria's 10-inch rear gun still in place, her 12 side-cannons still mounted to repel the Germans she would never fight in the First World War.
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Grass, as the American poet Carl Sandberg observed, always covers the graves Aircraft fragments disintegrate in the air. But beneath the seas, like the Titanic, our folly remains sacrosanct and eternal. Tryon, it appears, was a Smith in the making.A stern disciplinarian - "taciturn" and "difficult" were among the lesser characteristics that his subordinates identified in him - he also had, like Smith, a reputation as a fine seafarer; he was, in fact, every schoolboy's nightmare, an impressive man who wanted obedience rather than initiative. His enthusiasm - for history as much as for diving - is infectious and he happily printed off for me the one thing I more and more come to love in journalism: archives, papers, the official records that the "centres of power" produce to justify their folly - or to pass the buck. In this case, the whole sorry story was contained in the Royal Navy's court-martial proceedings of 1893 "to enquire into the loss of Her Majesty's Ship Victoria". It opens the door to spiritual maturity and freedom, without which religion becomes moribund and dangerous. My point is that you have to have the key figures, but you can range round them."The initiative, backed by the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg and the children's laureate Michael Morpurgo, will also question whether basic reading and writing will be essential skills in 10 years.
The QCA will publish a leaflet aiming to ask "the questions to shape the future of English". The exercise will also gather ideas on how to encourage children to be more creative and suggest a new school qualification in creative writing may be needed.Motion, professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, says the English 21 initiative would be an important way of putting creativity back into the heart of English teaching "This is a conversation that badly needs to happen. The questions might be nebulous at the moment, but they are important. I think over the years there has been a general squeeze on creative time in schools and we need to redress the balance."I've got involved with this because it is absolutely adjacent to the heart of what I am doing as Poet Laureate. I set up a scheme called Writing Together, to bring writers into schools.
