The Royal Engineers Museum is delighted to announce a £233,976.00 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to save its collection of original plans of Mulberry Harbour and making them accessible to visitors and online users.
Made possible by money raised by National Lottery players and in the 80th Anniversary year of the end of World War Two, this project will increase public understanding of the innovation and creative problem solving essential to the Allied victory.
This project will focus on the engineering heritage of the War, in particularly archive and artefacts relating to one of the War’s most audacious engineering achievement, the Mulberry Harbours.
These floating harbours were an engineering solution to one of the most pressing challenges facing Allied Commanders in their overall strategy for victory in Europe. It was accepted by all that War against the Nazis would only end when campaigns in the south and east were joined by a major invasion from the UK and push into Germany, bringing the full might of US and British industrialised warfare into play. Seaborne invasions were, and remain, one of the most hazardous of military operations and successful landings would need to be quickly resupplied by huge numbers of men, ammunition, food, vehicles to breakout of the beachhead and expand into France. Problematically, French ports were too heavily defended for attempted capture in the first assaults.
The solution to this problem sounds simple; if you cannot capture a harbour, you bring your own.
Royal Engineers led the design, building and post-invasion operation of temporary floating harbours, larger than Dover harbour, off Normandy. Taking just weeks to build and costing £926 million in today’s money, after five months of operation the Harbours had carried 220,000 soldiers, 40,000 tanks and vehicles and 680,000 tons of stores to the Front.
The creation of these, as well as the contribution and experiences of 45,000 Royal Engineers, civil engineers and workers of 600 construction companies are reflected in our Collection.
Over the next two years the National Lottery funded project will enable the conservation and digitisation of 1000s of original blueprints and plans of Mulberry Harbour, wartime models as well as our original anchor. From summer 2025 these can be explored through a temporary exhibition at the Museum, complimented by a changing online exhibition on our website, digital catalogue records, events, talks and social media content.
New volunteer groups will support this work and there will be an opportunity for anyone involved to develop skills in areas as diverse as museum conservation, cataloguing, digitisation, 3D scanning, image rendering and website design.
Visit the Museum website www.re-museum.co.uk for more information on how to get involved.
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