Oral History Gallery

Extract Text (Duration01.34)

So what I done was I went to North East London Polytechnic and studied under water technology, and there I met some people who were working on the Mary Rose, Pete Minskoff and he said, "Ah you must come down Pete, it's a real good laugh." So I went down and I was just absolutely dumbstruck, because I was joining in 1980 when you had, the gun deck had been exposed so you'd swim to work... well you had to, you know, you had to learn the site and all that and the visibility was usually really bad, but sometimes the visibility would open up and you'd go down and you'd swim to your workplace through a Tudor gun deck, it was just like unbelievable. There was so much stuff coming up because there was so many people working there that we had, I mean there were the bones of a whippet-like dog that really impressed me and they were excavated perfectly by these guys, they were, you know, I mean they were just brilliant and of course the thing they put, Adrian put me to work in the orlop deck which is like where all ballast is, you know, and I found a skeleton and I thought, cor Christ this is great, and I was just like, I was just, I just, I was incredulous. All of the archaeologist when I left, they sort of signed one of Margaret Rule's books for me and all of them put, you know, what, when, why, how, cause I was always asking questions.