HMAS Castlemaine - Wonderfully Preserved History

Welcome to this video kindly sponsored by Rec Watches. Now in the Second World War, in the Battle of Britain, it is often said that Britain was alone, but that is not entirely true. Many men from all over the world came to help. Pat Hughes, an Australian, was one of According to them, he was an absolutely excellent pilot in just 3 weeks of flying he scored 17 victories against the LT waffer in a Mark 1 Spitfire x49, unfortunately his habit of getting too close to the plane he was shooting at made him took out of heaven. at the end of that period, when his plane was hit by debris from his last victim, but approximately 2 and a half decades later, his plane was found and excavated and in the 21st century it was donated to the Hunter Fighter collection to restore much of that.

Material is being used in the restoration, but some parts are not usable and that is where Recc comes into play. They have produced a line of watches that incorporate some elements of x49 and some of the profits will help in the restoration of this. Legendary planes, if you want to have one, the latest batch is available with a 25% discount for pre-order on the recreation website link below in the video description, so many thanks to the recreation and, speaking Of other things, the Australians are good at restoring the HMS. C I issue M now for those of you who are thinking about moving forward.

I'm sure they went to other places in Perth than rotten Nest Island on their trip to Australia. Yes, you are right, I visited a couple of excellent museums and we will see them in due time, however, today we will briefly move forward to the next city on last year's Australian tour, at least at the time of recording, and that, Of course, it was Melbourne. Melbourne saw quite a few different cities. The attraction visited the H shelf because there are a lot of coastal fortifications, a submarine that is literally lying on its side in a marina, but today we are looking at the Main Castle of Hmas and honestly I have to say that this is probably the museum ship better restored. ones I've been on or certainly in the top three, now keep in mind that there is a difference between restored and in condition so know that there are many museum ships in absolutely excellent condition but many of them came out of naval service. or out of naval reserve in reasonable condition and then maintained, as we will see later, Castle M has been heavily restored and is in very good condition, so all praise for her crew, as I told some of them at that time.

If you had told me that it had been the ceremonial flagship of the Royal Australian Navy before being handed over directly to the Museum's service, I would not have doubted it, as you can see in this aerial photo I took with my drone, it is very well maintained, but Let's learn a little more about the ship and then we'll climb aboard. The castl M was one of 60 BST-class Corvettes built in Australia, 56 of them for the Royal Australian Navy and four for the Indian Navy now, while if you've seen the Sackville video, you may recognize the general design as something similar to a flower class and in fact that was the starting point of the design that the Australians put together the Bathurst class with adaptations and improvements compared to the flower class specifically for the type of service they thought it would the ships would experiment in the waters of the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

Castle M herself was the third of eight ships docked at Williamstown Dockyard and her ship was laid down on 17 February 1941; Shortly after, she was launched on August 7 and commissioned the following year, on June 17, 1942. Once launched, she would provide extensive service in the Pacific Theater during the remainder of World War II, including in the sea ​​and around New Guinea, not only on anti-submarine patrols. and minesweeping operations, which is what it had been designed for, but it also transported troops and supplies to and from that particular theater, it also performed the more regular and expected escort work escorting several merchant ships and their convoys were attacked repeatedly.

Despite its relatively small size, you can see that you know people to climb on the ship, as in this Drone video, it could actually carry up to 300 troops if it were absolutely necessary to orbit, the supplies would not last long in that case, for As it was a relatively short trip, its final mission in World War II was to support the reoccupation of Hong Kong in September 1945, because many of the Japanese garrisons needed surrenders individually and during World War II ended in collapse. almost 120,000 million, not bad for a small ship that only moves about 650 tons while soaked and thanks to its amazing Providence it only extracts 8 and a half tons of water.

One of the differences between a Bathurst and a flower class is that the flower class only has a single screw, while the Bathurst has two screws, each driven by a vertical triple expansion engine, but the top speed is similar with several boats of both classes capable of making between 15 and 16 knots. This isn't exactly going to set any speed records, but it's more. more than enough to escort most merchant convoys, the only drawback to this particular speed regime is that it meant that the Corvettes tended to have to stay fairly close to their convoys because the speed difference was not enough for them to normally They could easily overtake them if they moved behind their ships into the distance, which is why refrigerated and escort destroyers were invented with the potential for air attack from Japanese aircraft a little more frequent in the western Pacific and Indian Ocean than maybe it could be an airstrike from the Luft wafer.

Considered a threat in the Mid-Atlantic, she is equipped with somewhat heavier anti-aircraft weapons that we will see a little later. You can see some of the visitors aboard Castle Main exercising the 40mm guns there, but of course primarily an anti-submarine warship, the guns, if not used in the anti-aircraft role, have a limited anti-surface role, but that would be particularly useful if, for example, a submarine appears nearby because some of those large Japanese submarines were quite heavily armed. Castle Man's active service came to an end in December 1945, when she was commissioned. She would later become a training ship and then, as we will see a little later, she would end up as a museum ship.

She is one of the two baaths who survived. class, the other is

hmas

Wala or Wala possibly um, which is grounded, which means Castan is the last one left afloat these days. It works like a museum. It is a completely non-profit organization. Everyone on board is a volunteer and therefore dependent on the visiting public. public and their admission fees and the small gift shop to keep the ship afloat and in operational condition, so if you find yourself in Melbourne and can find your way to the gem pier definitely go and visit it, it's really excellent. Adding to the experience, there is also a surprisingly good fish and chip shop on the land side of the pier.

Fortunately, although she spent quite a bit of time as a training ship, there wasn't a huge amount to cut to restore her to a World War II era. The main difficulty when that project was carried out was actually finding parts to restore on her, you know, things that had been removed from the ship rather than modern things that were added, but the result gradually decreases relative to your point of sight. in the wonderful waters of Melbourne Harbor so if we go on board now, this is our first ship of the World War II era tour and as you can see we're starting at the bow so we'll start at the top covers and we will work.

Our way next and then we head further down, so as we start we have, of course, the anchor machinery. All of this is in very good condition. You'll see it more and more as we go around the ship, but by the time you get here you already know the condition. This ship is absolutely cool, so obviously right on the bow you have your flag. This is a slightly later design, not adapted from a whaler. We actually have a popular Sal that is quite high above the water for a boat this size. she will give you better seat maintenance and you will see that the arch shape is also much better for seat maintenance, which I hope a picture will appear right here or maybe around here.

I do not know where I am. In the box now we are going to turn 180° and take a look at the first part of the ship's armament, which is the deck gun, and you will be surprised, plus there are some additional features that you don't know about. seen on most escort deck guns from the early part of the war, so what we have here is a 4 inch deck gun, now you might be thinking, well that's not exactly unusual for a British escort or Commonwealth WWII and To be correct, a 4 inch deck gun is pretty much the standard, however one thing you may notice is that compared to many, this gun is somewhat longer and also It's a little higher off the platform and if you look at the setup you'll notice that too. that the hand sites as well as the opening for the gun itself are considerably higher now, the reason is that this is a ha gun, which is a high angle gun, a dual purpose gun, this is a brand of 4 inches 13, I think maybe 23, but I think the marking says 13, which means it can actually be used against aircraft.

Now you will remember quite a few Flower Closs River class escorts etc, many of the earlier warb built ones, their deck guns were intended to be single purpose, or anti-s surface or perhaps dual purpose, but probably only in name, since this is a fully capable 4 inch gun and not just because they have actually kept this gun in such a condition that you can work on it and train it with the help of one or two subscribers that have shown up, we are actually going to do let this move so I hope no one else shows up because they might get hit in the head by a 4 inch gun but they really see it coming so now we have two.

Men, I'm on the left controlling the vertical and we have someone on the right controlling the horizontal, so if we train low port side, imagine a radar on the port side, um surface. Aim as fast as we can, let's go right and now. We're going to look for incoming aircraft on the starboard, starboard and high side as quickly as we can and then return to the center position. That's an experience you don't normally have now. Unfortunately, the gap block has been completely welded together. uh there's no chance of this going live soon Timber oh is this just a Timber fix?

It may come into operation very soon. So, regarding what I said before, I just found the plate and the plate says 4 in h a l a MTG. Mark 23 actually made by the ordinance factory in Bendigo or dendo Bendigo Bendigo there you go it's useful to have an Australian vetted in Beno 1944 and this is the 100th gun so you've just had your two plates sides here again. have a photo or something and your center pedestal, so this is an over the deck mount. There's also some really really nice artwork on the side here that shows the crew aggression, which again we'll cut into a side piece, so this either side of the 4 inch gun we have one of these this one is painted green because it's on the starboard side the other one has a red nose this is a paravan you have probably seen some other parav veins on other ships there is one in Texas there are several on some of the ships we have seen before this one is a little more bulbous a Bit like a short torpedo, unlike the others which tend to be cylindrical and you can see how it is positioned. up, this is how the chains would attach, they'll slide down and then you have these fins.

Now it wouldn't run through the water like this, it would run through the water basically turn 90°, so this will point. That way, these fins will keep it stable and move it away from the ship and that will keep the Tau chain between the ship and the paravan, which means that it will be the chain that will do the anti-mine work because that will cut off the movement. line for the mine and then the mine will jump to the surface where anyone with anything larger than a rifle or potentially a rifle if you're a good shot can take it out so we put it back there this is just for handling um. and of course, paravanes of different shapes work better at different speeds.

Being a small escort, it doesn't need to go particularly fast, so it can afford to have a slightly more bulbous and slightly heavier energy vein which will then have a bit more cutting power, which is necessary due to at the slowest overall speed it will travel at, so the ship has additional anti-aircraft defense in addition to the 4-inch high angle at the top.front in the form of two 20 mm orans on each side of the bridge on the wings. one on the starboard side is no longer present, there is only the mounting point, but the one on the port side is still here now because this is a very small boat, so to give you an idea, this is the bridge wing, so it's basically parallel with the port side of the ship and then past the canyon, this is where the super structure starts and where the camera is is the center of the ship, so it's not particularly wide, there's not a lot of space and from the ladder here to the hatch to The bridge is right here, so for the safety of visitors, you will notice that there is a cable there that prevents me from singing it completely and I suppose also the cannon, if it is too low, it will probably make noise there, but we can get it closer there.

So you can see the front of the standard 20mm or gold barrel. This isn't really proof against much more than maybe shrapnel. You know even a machine gun bullet will go through this, but it's better than nothing. You have your canister for your 20mm rounds would have been plenty. There are more around here and this doesn't have a gun pit because again this is just a bridge wing so you would mount it with the shoulders like this and then you would raise and lower it, obviously this has been locked into place and that probably gives you as long as you don't want to hit anything after probably about 180 or maybe 200° of Arc Fire to defend the port side of the ship and then the corresponding one on the starboard side, although interesting, means that if a plane is making a direct attack run towards the bow or stern of the ship, these guns probably won't be able to target the attacker, so you will depend on the 4 in or the captain to take the ship to the starboard portal to unmask one of these. but there is a heavier 40 mil bers AR that we will look at a little later and to give you an idea of ​​how compact this all is, the camera is now about a meter and a half away from the oron and moved about a meter from where It was before this was one of the two flag lockers, one here and one right there and they are right below the signals so if you need to send a signal to someone by flag, which to be honest, is your main way Signaling.

In World War II you have radio to a certain extent, but if you want broadcast security or just more general day-to-day practice or want more than one person to know what you're doing, what you need is to have flags. now they are flying a four flag sign right now so the image will appear right after this and once again you know in the comments see if you can figure out what that sign says and here is the sign in question as seen from below and with a little more zoom. I appreciate that you may not be able to work out exactly what those overhead flags are, so if we look at a drone shot, we can zoom in and you can see all the way up there, on the port side, and that signal flies quite a bit.

Happily, in the breeze, you notice that there is also the white nson, which is correct for the period because of course the Second World War, so now we are at the rear end of the main superstructure of the Castle. This is, of course, a 40mm cannon from Bofa. Originally on its rear arm, we have seen the 20 mil forward as it was originally launched, the 20 mil would have been here and there would have been a pair of Lewis guns on the bridge wings, but luckily someone San turned around and figured there were a Lewis gun. It's not the best anti-aircraft weapon in the world for World War II, so they decided right: we're going to put something a little bit heavier, so this is the 40 thousand bofer and very gently we're going to turn it to starboard and then we're going to turn it to starboard. turn to port because it is very well maintained so it still works and then we will bring it back to the center.

The glamorous assistant on the left will raise or lower it and then we'll put it back on. Again so as not to eliminate half the people watching and then we're going to do a much faster track so you've seen on American battleships how fast or not fast manual turning is on a quad. which also obviously weighs considerably more, but if we're in a bit of a hurry and someone's coming in on the port side, then I'm a terrible person because I just sent over to the Starbur side, but assuming we do, yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily something you want to do when the enemy is at close range, but if a plane is at greater range, you have your manual sights, so you can scan the sky for a plane that's over a thousand yards away. away isn't really outside the Realms of possibility and of course towards the end of the war they would have been talking about kakari attacks which means they line up with you, you line up and then it's a question of how many 40 bullets mm.

Can you get close to them before they get uncomfortably close to you now thanks to a slightly faulty battery? Those were all the images I managed to get of the ship that day, apart from the Drone images you saw earlier. I have some movie. Engine room footage taken with a slightly less stable camera, but I think the engine room tour is probably a topic for a separate video at some point, perhaps looking more broadly at the machinery; However, we also have a lot of static photos. We can look at some other parts here on the castl M upper decks starting, of course, with the bridge or perhaps more accurately, the superstructure in general, as you can see that it is not the most elegant or aesthetically pleasing unit in the world.

It's a big metal box but it works and that's what's important. Now up here on the bridge you can see a wide variety of different equipment on the left. There you have some voice tubes to communicate without the need for power. Of course we have the ship's helm in the middle and just in front of that with the red and green balanced Ferris masses next to it is of course the ship's compass, but what is this on the little tripod closest to we? Well, the ship has several compasses that you have. Of course the traditional magnetic compass, as we said, with the Ferris balance masses on either side because of course the hull is Ferris and without them the compass would point in all sorts of directions except the one it's actually supposed to. must do it and you can also see there that I have a small inclinometer so you can tell how much the ship is leaning at the time you are reading on the compass, but the ships of this period had, as we said, not only more than one compass but more than one type of compass. the one on the gray tripod that you saw in the foreground of the previous photo, as you can see here from this look down, is a super gyro compass, that's pretty important because of course something could happen that affects the magnetic compass while the motorized gyroscope In theory the compass should not be subject to the same problems and now of course something like a hard, strong blow to the place where the gyroscope was could affect the gyrocompass and therefore , you would turn to the magnetic compass for navigation, which means it's not just In a case of everything, we have two compasses, so something you know someone breaks one or a bullet goes through it and we'll be fine.

This actually ensures that the ship is proof against very specific types of failures that could nullify the functionality of one or the other. another of these two units and here we not only obviously have a voice tube on the left but on the right we have two ceasefire buttons. It may not be clear unless you have a particularly large screen, but the two ceasefire buttons actually say ceasefire point 303 to port and cire 5mg to starboard, so in addition to the orans on the bridge wings, which are 40 mil bers Center AR and 4in forward, the ship also has a number of caliber machine guns to defend itself, now with machine guns not necessarily. the most powerful or effective air defense weapons in World War II, even on a ship of this size, but one is better than nothing and two are still quite effective against submarines and small boats that the main castle expected to encounter during its service. war.

Being outdoors is relatively rare. This is a radar display designed to operate in open elements. When you look at most museum ships from World War II, you will see that they hid their radar equipment well concealed and sometimes well protected. also in the case of some later cic, but space is so important aboard Castle Main that something like this, which while not necessarily a particularly late edition, is still something very, very new at the time it is built the boat simply has to be placed. wherever there is space available and if that space is right on the edge of the enclosed structure, you can see the hatch to the right, then those of you who are trades will have to live with it now. from Star Trek, the original series, you might think this looks a lot like Mr.

Spock's scientific scanner viewing area and well, this is where the inspiration came from, obviously not unique to Castle M, but to many teams of World War II radar that they have operated. outdoors or in bright conditions they would have these visors so you could actually see what the relatively weak phosphor screen was showing you. Now they haven't turned on the radar, but they have put up some sort of tracery, which gives Do you have any idea by looking down what a radar operator might expect to see? At least he knows this is an interpretation. The part in the middle looks more like what you would actually see with this type of radar with some sort of map overlay placed there. give you some context of where you actually are because you know that coastlines don't tend to stick out naturally now again.

If you have a big screen you might be able to read this yourself, but for those of you looking at mobile, these are the dials and buttons by which you would actually control what you see on the radar and of course you would have to learn what each of them were like to the touch because your head will be stuck in that viewing tube which potentially partly explains the different shapes or it could just be that those are the replacements that came about over time who knows anyway this says on the top left the PP unit of the plate because this is the most advanced non-oscilloscope version of the Royal Australian Navy radar pattern number 520 and its serial number 145, the button on the far left or dial is the range , so it will show you kind of zoom in or out and it has three settings a b or c, currently it's set to B Then you have the centering and then the dimmer so you can make it brighter or darker.

The small button just above the dimmer is the heading set. Then you have the course. Check the video gain and finally on the far right, calibrate and talk about it. electronic sensors you should really pay attention to the aztec hutch or what we call sonar and yes it is pretty much a hutch in fact I'm pretty sure that in some countries if you had a rabbit in something this size you would probably be ready to be an animal. cruelty, but anyway, if you were the operator of the AIC, this is where you would sit in a nice wooden box closed in a very, very hot tin box in a very, very warm ocean.

I hope they keep it stocked with lemonade while You can see that it has its own voice tube to communicate the actual equipment there and a little wooden stool to sit on and that's as basic as it gets for early sonar equipment. To be honest, I probably have it relatively good because, as you'll see. We'll see a little later in the year, when we look at Diamantina, they actually have it even worse, so here's a little closer look at the equipment, much closer to the older radar equipment than the PBI range radar that supports the boat. now or and you actually know sonar equipment as you would occasionally be.

The port trade later on, whether it's the waterfall type of display which is what you can get up there in the top left, will be in a very rough form and is even more similar. than you would be looking at with at least passive and then active sonar now just on top of the bridge super structure and taking care that there is a search light. The signal light, as you can see, has multiple shutters there so you can use it. to point out things in Morse code or use it to point out various things that you might want to illuminate it at various stages and this part of the ship is generally not accessible to visitors, so you can see some of the guys that are down there. the bridge level, which is the highest level you normally reach, but the crew will be kind enough to place a safety lock.

I don't know what it's called a blind plate, I think a blind plate, then the ladder that allows you to stand on it. the super structure that allows you to access this platform and, in theory, if you are angry enough, climb the mast, but, as you have probably already deduced from one of my videos on the USSNew Jersey, I'm not the best person in the world for Heights. and two, this is as high as you can safely go, you could get away with climbing the mast steps, but they couldn't necessarily guarantee it, so now I didn't, in contrast to some of the anti-submarine escorts that the powers of aess that I had at the time that castl M entered service, even these relatively small, you know, three figure displacement, Alli escorts had considerable amounts of electronics on board, so the electronics that are represented in the ship as it is at the moment include a high frequency radio direction finder. configure a medium frequency receiver and a low frequency receiver, you also have the azic that we have already seen and two types of radar type 272 and type 286, so you have two radars, three different types of radio receivers and direction finding equipment Plus . a sonar and of course some iff markers as well as some of those systems are contained in this attractive two tone gray trash can style installation, in the middle of the mast and then at the top of the mast, there you can see one of the radar antennas. obviously that radar can do a full 360 turn and is hidden under the dumpster, there you can also see that is the position of the search light bulb, uh, and the signal lamp, which again emphasizes how compact this boat really is and it's also at the top here.

With a pair of ship's binoculars, several of these would have been mounted to allow lookouts to go around the entire ship and of course this enhances the vision of the Mark 1 human eyeball so you can spot things really far away with a little more of detail and with Lenses of this size also have a degree of low light gathering ability, although not as much as some like the Japanese Knight Optics, but hey, that's why you have the radar and there's the city skyline of Melbourne on the right and some industrial cranes in one. of the coasts.

You can actually look through these binoculars as you can see that they are manipulable as well, but it turns out that with the camera I was using I couldn't get a decent shot through my camera lens through the binocular lens to show you what that you can see through established lenses. I think in my experience it only works with cell phone cameras and I think the cell phone at the time was in a bag further down on the bridge superstructure. a Carly float or a very close relative thereof. Now, as I mentioned in some other videos, you will see them scattered around especially British and Commonwealth ships in World War II and at first glance it might look like some sort of primitive rubber raft or rubber boat, but actually one of the things that hadn't been appreciated were that the boat's boats would probably end up smashed or punctured when the boat sank and they really needed to be used, and well, the rubber inflatable things would too. it gets punctured, so although it looks like a rubber boat, what it actually is is a pretty solid outer ring made of buoyant material, but like I said, solid materials exactly what you put in it depending on who made it and the area of wooden slats in the middle is suspended. of its buoyancy ring and that will actually work fine if you throw it in the water since it's wooden it will float but once you have people in it it will sink slightly under the water so it's more of a safety container for people than a fullon water raft and that would at least keep you alive for a while, there would also be some emergency supplies stored on or nearby in times of war, so when you see people talking about Carly floats, this kind of things and some larger variant are More or less what you're looking at, the advantage of course of having a solid but floating method of floating is that this thing can be riddled with shrapnel and bullets etc. and it doesn't really compromise both its ability to float.

The only danger is that of course it is slightly flammable but hopefully if the ship is on fire you would remove this from the ship rather than let it burn now of course on the back end we have already seen those two paravanes. or we saw one of them in the video, now you can see the other one, but again you can appreciate how small this boat is when you look at it, you know how messy the deck space is, you can see it on the right side of the picture. On the port side of the ship you have the 303 uh machine gun that was mentioned on the bridge.

You also have the position, but not the gun itself, for the 50 caliber that is on the star side, then you have these two. large sets of winches here in the foreground, which is what is needed to transmit the paraban. You have two small cranes in the back to lower them down the sides. Now on a battleship, all of this would be incidental on a 600+ ton Corvette, this is you. We know that they take up large amounts of real estate that are now hidden among what are actually some traditional depth charges. A ship like Castle M would typically carry around 50 depth charges, at least not on paper, during its active service career, obviously the crew would usually hide some elsewhere.

Also, these are in the AR file so you may be able to see them hidden in the main image we saw a little earlier and the ship lists that they would carry 30 normal depth charges and 20 heavy depth charges, which presumably means a lot . More explosives would probably be those from the AR and the normal ones would be in the projectors on both sides. There is also an m board because what makes a good minesweeper is also a good minelayer, so you know the ship would carry mines occasionally if necessary. disrupting enemy shipping, although it's not really a typical Corvette activity because generally laying mines, unless you're mining known passages for enemy submarines, tends to be more of a front-line duty and although the First class toilets were combat ships, you probably wouldn't want to take a 15 knot boat in front of the Imperial Japanese Navy for most of the war, but speaking of things that can be projected into the sea, you can see just behind one of the projectors of depth charge, this particular unit is known as a Mark 2 depth charge launcher and can catapult that depth charge to about 40 yards or so.

These are also known as depth charge mortars or sometimes depth charge guns, depending on the shape of the actual launcher they may also be known as k gun or y gun. This is because they are essentially small cannons, they use an explosive charge to generate pressure which then catapults the depth charge. The main difference between this and a real cannon is that in a real cannon you would load the projectile into the gun and it would have an open hole and away, the shell would go in this case. As you can see, the depth charge is mounted on this bracket or yoke, so when the charge is fired, you can see that there is a small bottle of compressed gas up there. which helps store the gases produced by the explosion of the charge, so it's more like a big push, so this Yol will project forward and the depth charge with it, but of course the charge of Depth will not be maintained safely.

The pin will have been removed and therefore when the Yol stops briefly and abruptly, the depth charge continues. The useful thing about this type of projector is, of course, that it projects over the side, in this case on the starboard side, which shortens the space between the loss of asdic contact when the boat passes over the target and the fall of charges on the enemy submarine, you will notice that this ship is too small in the way it is configured to have a hedgehog launcher installed which would give it a head start. launch capability against enemy submarines Now one of the other fun things aboard the ship is the engine telegraph.

Now you may be more accustomed to seeing many engine telegraphs that are mounted more vertically, i.e. the cylinder or the disc, depending on the type of telegraph. It will have its face vertical unlike here where the faces are horizontal and there will be a lever that goes up above and around it in this case, however, it has a dial that you have to turn a little to change the position of the indicator. obviously it will then be transmitted to the engine room below, well let's see how it works, then I can't believe there's an operator in there now.

I briefly mentioned that Castle M had a bit of life after World War II, so we'll just go. To dig a little deeper into this video, the ship spent about a decade in the reserve fleet before being assigned as a training ship, which we mentioned earlier specifically, was supposed to be a training ship for engine room artificers. and the rights to the ship, which meant that most of her equipment on deck, everything we've seen so far, was considered unnecessary and all of that was stripped away, so it would then have to be restored, so this is their training ship, as you can see.

Some of the rather empty interior spaces of her were also converted for training uses, including damage control training compartments, etc. But as time went on it became less and less relevant in this role because of course it had triple expansion vertical engines and by the mid-1960s these were generally extremely rare pieces of equipment in the Royal Australian Navy and therefore were not as relevant for training new engineers. In 1969, she was listed for disposal and looked like she would follow most of her sisters to the scrapyard, but a group of volunteers who were actually initially trying to preserve the Ironclad hm vs Cerberus expanded their reach to try also to preserve Castle M and as you can see from these photos she was not in the best condition in the world, in fact I am going to read an extract from the HMS Castle M website which describes the situation they faced, so originally there was the HM vs service trust, which later became the Australian Maritime Trust and which was established in 1974 to take responsibility for the restoration and preservation of the ship by then Castle M was little more than a rusted and gutted Hulk, stripped of all her deck fittings, winches and armament inside were not much better, there were no lighting fittings or bridge equipment below deck, the engines and boilers were all in pieces, work transferred the ship from Hmas cus to Melbourne started at Earnest, the ship had to be tested and inspected by Hammer for the return to Melbourne and her role as a historic ship, a detailed inspection of the engines and boilers found that it was too costly for them to be Reed for the ship to continue.

Arrangements were then made for towing at her expense and in February 1974 a group of volunteers arrived at the ship to prepare her for the SE and the long finger back to Melbourne because, by the way, H meerus is a training. HMV S servers are the Ironclad rack. Melbourne Harbor Trust Committee Commissioners offered the use of a spring at South Warf just below Duke and Or's Dry Do, which is now the permanent poly spring. Woodside hm Castleman was towed from hm serus to her new birth in June 1974 and once she was safely secured alongside her cleaning and restoration began, the ship was open to the public almost immediately negotiations began with the Victorian Government for the lease of the Duke site, but before it was completed it was announced that a new river crossing would be built downstream and this effectively Landlocked, Castle M, the maritime trust began negotiations with the Port of Melbourne Trust to birth the ship at Jem Pier Williamstown, near the shipyard in which it was built, those negotiations were successful and the ship was moved to its new birth in September 1976 and as you can see in the photos above they had a lot of work to be done, but as you can see in this photo in the engine room, they have done a fantastic job, so thanks once again of course to the volunteer crew of HMS castl M for allowing us all the board and allowing us to tear up the ship pretty much wherever we wanted and obviously thanks again also to all the wonderful subscribers from Australia who came to say hello and to those of you who agreed to appear on camera helping to operate the various weapons. and track the drone as it went around the ship for a little extra entertainment, so again obviously if you find yourself in Melbourne go visit the old castle and you won't be disappointed, it's definitely a wonderful ship.

We need to continue to conserve her and hopefully she will stay at G Pier for a long time, so next time we tune back into Australia we will be back in Perth, but again, that's for another video, thanks. That's all for this video, thank you. To note, if you have a comment or suggestion for reviewing a boat, please let us knowknow in the comments below, don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry questions.