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It takes a particularly salty sea dog to board ship on the kind of November day where the rain cuts sideways through the sky and the wind-chill prompts a five-degree difference between actual and perceived temperature. As luck would have it, I have salt water in my veins, and the good ship Cutty Sark, backdrop of the 2025 Sea Shanty Festival, is land-bound — separated from the gunmetal depths of the Thames by a busy piazza and a branch of Nando’s.
If you want to hear some shanties, a type of traditional maritime work song, Greenwich is the perfect setting. Not only is it the filming location for every costume drama made in the last 30 years, but its baroque waterfront heritage site is also home to both the Royal Naval College and a music conservatory. It feels almost impolite not to bellow out a few verses of “John Kanaka” if you’re in the area.
And bellow they do! Today, the great and good of the UK’s thriving shanty industry are here to celebrate the 156th birthday of the Cutty Sark. The festival is taking place both in and under the vessel itself: on the ‘tween deck, which is floorboarded and has a low, iron-beamed ceiling; and on the dry dock beneath, the ship’s metal undercarriage slicing dramatically through the centre of proceedings.
Unlike other historic ships preserved across the UK, the Cutty Sark didn’t fight great battles or carry kings across oceans. She zipped to the Far East and Australia from Britain to collect cargoes of tea and wool for the Empire, but the real magic happened when she was plucked from obscurity and wreckage in Falmouth by Wilfred and Catharine Dowman in the early 1920s, sensitively restored and put to use as a cadet training school. I’m told all this by Katherine, a performer irresistibly attired in a tweed skirt-suit, pearls and the green, white and purple sash of the WSPU. Katherine works with Royal Museums Greenwich and thought the narrative around Cutty Sark’s legacy was rather too masculine, so today she is here to tell the story of Catharine — Courtauld heiress, Suffragist, boat saviour — which she does with a twinkly-eyed conviction that would make Judi Dench proud.
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