Divers’ Tudor gun haul caused British-Irish rift

A pair of rare Tudor bronze cannon were lifted from a shipwreck off Ireland by scuba divers and sold on with “no questions asked” for display at the Tower of London some 50 years ago, according to newly released state documents from the Irish National Archives. 

The Irish authorities demanded that the Tower return what they described as the “illegally smuggled” guns – and decades later, amid fears that the Provisional IRA might target the Tower in reprisal, the dispute was reactivated.

The 2.7m cannon were said to have been taken from a shipwreck off Great Newtown Head in Tramore Bay, Co Waterford on Ireland’s south-east coast in the early 1970s. 

Bearing Tudor rose emblems, they had been cast for King Henry VIII in the 1540s by Owen Brothers Royal Gun Foundry in London. Only eight other examples of this type of ‘saker’ medium cannon had ever been located.

Irish wreck-diver Eddie Bourke in his book Shipwrecks of the Irish Coast wrote that the only early Royal Navy ship unaccounted for in the area was the brigantine Post. Lost in 1566, it had been built four years earlier but armed with older guns. 

Trawler, pit & camper van

According to press reports in the 1970s, after the cannon had been raised and taken ashore on a trawler a “gang of British treasure-hunters” had hidden them in a farm silage pit before smuggling them to England in a camper van. 

Allegedly sold at a “knock-down price” of £3,250 to a Tower of London official, they were then said to have turned up on display at the Royal Armouries Museum in the White Tower.

The released documents indicate that the National Museum of Ireland, Department of Foreign Affairs and chief state solicitor had repeatedly demanded the guns’ return. The divers had broken both Irish and English law by failing to declare their discovery to the Receiver of Wreck, they claimed.

In 1992, with the two cannon then valued at around £60,000, the Royal Armouries Museum had expressed a wish to resolve the situation – partly out of concern that it could encourage the IRA to target the Tower. By the following year, however, it had returned to its position of requiring proof that the guns were Irish state property.

In 2003 the National Museum of Ireland announced in its annual report that Irish ownership of the cannon had finally been accepted and the dispute settled. The guns were understood to have been returned to Ireland – although their current whereabouts are unclear. 

Also on Divernet: London divers discover 1650s bronze cannon, Cannon ‘twinkled like gold’ on lost wreck, Now you see it…, Diver’s discovery could be earliest ship’s gun