Why every diver ends up at the Thistlegorm eventually

Ask ten divers to name a wreck and most will say this one. The SS Thistlegorm is not the biggest ship on the seabed or the oldest. She is famous for one reason: her cargo is still there.

Trucks. Motorcycles stacked on the trucks. Rifles, boots, aircraft wings, railway wagons. And out on the sand, two full-size steam locomotives that were blown off the deck the night she sank.

That is why you go. Not to look at a hull, but to swim through a warehouse that has been sitting on the bottom of the Red Sea since 1941, off the tip of the Sinai near the Ras Muhammad National Park, in around 30 metres of water.

An ordinary ship on an extraordinary errand

There was nothing special about Thistlegorm when J.L. Thompson and Sons launched her in Sunderland in April 1940. She was a plain cargo steamer, 126.5 metres long, built for the Albyn Line. Because it was wartime she carried a 4.7-inch gun on her stern and a machine gun against aircraft.

She made three trips: steel rails from the United States, grain from Argentina, rum from the West Indies. Then, in June 1941, she loaded for Egypt.

The cargo was for the Allied army in the Western Desert. Bedford trucks, Universal Carrier armoured vehicles, Norton and BSA motorcycles, Bren guns, ammunition, radio sets, Wellington boots. On deck sat two LMS Stanier Class 8F locomotives with their tenders, meant for Egyptian National Railways.

The long way round, then the wait

The Mediterranean was too dangerous, so she sailed around Africa via Cape Town and up into the Red Sea with the cruiser HMS Carlisle for company. A collision in the Suez Canal blocked the way to Alexandria. In September 1941 she dropped anchor at Safe Anchorage F to wait for the canal to clear.

She was still waiting on the night of October 6.

Two German Heinkel bombers had flown from Crete looking for a troopship. They never found it. They found the anchorage instead, picked the largest ship in it, and put two bombs into hold 4 at half past one in the morning. The ammunition stored there did the rest. Four sailors and five gunners died; HMS Carlisle picked up the rest.

The blast tore the locomotives off the deck and threw one to each side of the ship. Captain William Ellis was awarded the OBE. A crewman named Angus McLeay got the George Medal for saving a shipmate.

Found, forgotten, found again

Jacques Cousteau got there first, in the early 1950s, with directions from local fishermen. He lifted a motorcycle, the captain's safe and the ship's bell, and put the wreck in National Geographic and in his book The Living Sea.

Then everyone forgot about her for almost forty years. Only the fishermen knew.

When Sharm el-Sheikh turned into a dive town in the early 1990s, a boat called Poolster relocated the wreck with a tip from an Israeli fishing captain. In 2007 The Times listed her among the ten best wreck dives in the world. She has been busy ever since.

What you will actually see

The explosion took away much of the midships superstructure, so the holds are open to you. Go in with a plan for what you want to find:

• Hold 1: Wellington boots and motorcycles.
• Hold 2: trucks with motorcycles loaded on them, rifles, Westland Lysander wings, Bristol Blenheim tailplanes and about twenty Bristol Mercury engine exhaust rings.
• Around the ship: Universal Carriers, RAF trolley accumulators, two Pundit Lights.
• On the sand: one locomotive off the port side by the blast area, the other off the starboard side level with hold 2.

You will not be alone down there. Tuna and barracuda patrol above the deck. Batfish hang in the open holds. Look closer for moray eels, lionfish, stonefish, crocodilefish and scorpionfish, and expect a turtle or two.

See her while she lasts

The Thistlegorm is rusting fast, and the boats that make a living from her have not been gentle, tying up to weak parts of the wreck and pulling sections down. In 2007 conservationists installed 32 mooring buoys to stop that. By 2009 every one of them had been dragged away. Boats moor to the wreck again.

In 2021 the photographer Simon Brown stitched 15,005 frames into a single scaled image of the whole ship and won a Royal Photographic Society award for it. It may end up being the clearest record of her there is.

When you dive her, log it properly in Scubaspot: the hold you went into, the locomotive you found, the photo of the motorcycle that everyone takes and nobody regrets. Eighty years on, she deserves a good entry.