MS Herald of Free Enterprise — She Sailed With the Bow Doors Open, 193 Dead

On the evening of 6 March 1987, the roll-on/roll-off ferry MS Herald of Free Enterprise put to sea from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge with her bow doors still open, took water onto her car deck as she gathered speed, and capsized in about ninety seconds just outside the harbour, killing 193 of the 539 people aboard. She was a Townsend Thoresen vessel on the short Zeebrugge–Dover crossing, and she rolled onto her side in shallow water so quickly that there was no time to launch boats or organise an evacuation; most of the dead were trapped inside as the sea came in. It was the worst British peacetime maritime disaster since 1919.

The immediate cause was simple and entirely avoidable. The assistant bosun, Mark Stanley, whose job was to close the bow doors before departure, was asleep in his cabin and did not do so. The chief officer, Leslie Sabel, responsible for ensuring the doors were shut, did not confirm them. The master, Captain David Lewry, took the ship to sea unable to see the bow doors from the bridge and with no instrument or signal to tell him their state; he assumed, as the company’s custom invited him to, that they were secured. The ferry was also trimmed by the head — sitting low at the bow on ballast carried to match the Zeebrugge ramps — so water reached the open door sill sooner as speed built. Once it entered the long, undivided car deck, the free-surface effect capsized her almost instantly.

The Formal Investigation under the Merchant Shipping Act 1894, conducted by the Wreck Commissioner Mr Justice Sheen and published as Report of Court No. 8074 on 24 July 1987, looked beyond the three men on the spot. While each had failed in his duties, the underlying fault lay with the company. From top to bottom, Sheen held, the body corporate was “infected with the disease of sloppiness”: management had ignored repeated warnings from masters that ships were sailing with bow doors open, refused requests for indicator lights on the bridge, and run an operation in which no one was clearly responsible for the safety of the open car deck. The verdict was that the directors and shore management bore a heavy share of the blame — organizational and operational, not merely a verdict on the sleeping seaman.

The case became a landmark in English law precisely because the corporate fault was so plainly stated. The subsequent prosecution, R v P&O European Ferries (Dover) Ltd, established for the first time that an English company could in principle be indicted for manslaughter; but the trial collapsed in 1990 when the judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to convict any individual senior enough to be identified as the company’s “controlling mind,” so the company too was acquitted. The gap that acquittal exposed eventually drove the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007.