The Scottish Maritime Museum, which has been served with a notice to remove the remains of the historic clipper, City of Adelaide, which it owns, from a slipway on the Clyde, is calling for the submission of tenders to demolish it.

After rotting untended on the slip at Irvine since 1992, full restoration is lijel to cost around £20 million.

This amount is a serious setback for some special interest groups who hope to buy her and transport her elsewhere for such restoration.

The clipper was built in Sunderland in 1864 and Peter Maddison, Chair of the Sunderland City of Adelaide Recovery Foundation, still hopes to raise enough cash to transport the ship.

There is also an energetic group in South Australia with a plan to preserve rather than restore her. Their declared intention is to make an offer enabling her return to South Australia in time for South Australia’s 175th Jubilee in 2011. They see the precedent of New Zealand’s Edwin Fox Museum as a good role model showing how a similar sized ship that has been preserved rather than restored. (The Edwin Fox was built in Sulkeali on the Ganges Delta 1853 and was later used by the British Government as a troop ship in the Crimean War, reputedly also carrying Florence Nightingale there.

The Australian interest in the City of Adelaide – apart from her name, which is not coincidental – is because the ship, 6 years older than the Cutty Sark, was built to carry emigrants to South Australia.

The Australian campaign group says: ‘Over a quarter of a century the City of Adelaide carried emigrants from, in particular, England, Scotland, Germany and Ireland to South Australia.

‘Today, approximately one in five South Australians are descended from one of her passengers.

‘As the only surviving sailing ship built to give regular passenger and cargo service between Europe and Australia, the City of Adelaide represents a whole foundation era of Australian economic and social history.

‘It is difficult to imagine a more vital icon of the making of modern Australia, and of the relationship between Britain and the Australian colonies’.

The Sunderland campaign group to recover the ship put the City of Adelaide above the Cutty Sark in terms of British significance. It points to the fact that National Historic Ships committee included the City of Adelaide in the top ten of the core collection list of nationally significant vessels in the UK.

The Sunderland City of Adelaide Recovery Foundation website carries a first calss account of the ship and some great photographs.

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