Today we start a recuring series based around the adventures of Dom Robinson, who runs the Deep Wreck Diver Youtube channel. Dom is doing his own form of local history detecting. In his case by visiting shipwrecks!
Most things you buy on Facebook Marketplace are a gamble. A bicycle with one functioning brake or a set of golf clubs from a man who is reluctant to explain why he is selling them.
Dom Robinson bought a World War One shipwreck.
The SS Almond Branch has spent the last 109 years resting 58 metres below the surface of the English Channel, off the Cornish coast near Mevagissey. She weighs 3,000 tonnes, stretches 330 feet from bow to stern, and she cost Dom £300. He’d bought bikes off Facebook Marketplace with more hassle.
But this was the purchase that launched a thousand headlines. The BBC ran it. Popular Science ran it. A story about a diver buying a piece of rusting Victorian ironwork for slightly less than the cost of a weekend away turned out to be precisely the kind of news the internet had been waiting for.
But the story behind that headline is worth telling properly. Because the Almond Branch is more than a novelty purchase. She is a real ship with a real history, crewed by real men, sunk by a weapon that killed one of them, and she has been sitting on the seabed while the twentieth century happened 50m above her.
The ship
The SS Almond Branch was built in 1896, a steam-powered cargo ship of the kind that plied the world’s trade routes for decades without attracting attention. She was not glamorous or fast. She carried cargo all over the world in the unglamorous, essential way that keeps civilisations running. The maritime equivalent of a delivery van.
By the time she met her end, she had been requisitioned as a defensively-armed merchant ship. The British government, facing the reality of unrestricted submarine warfare, had begun bolting guns to civilian vessels. A gun mount still survives on the wreck today, though the gun itself is long gone.
On November 27th, 1917, the Almond Branch was sailing off Dodman Point when a torpedo from the German submarine UB-57 struck her. One man died in the sinking.
UB-57 was a formidable machine. Commissioned just four months earlier, she had already sunk dozens of merchant ships across the English Channel and the Western Approaches. Her commander that autumn was Kapitänleutnant Otto Steinbrinck, one of the most decorated U-boat officers of the war. The Almond Branch was, for UB-57, simply another entry in the log.
The submarine’s own end came nine months later. On August 14th, 1918, three months before the Armistice, she struck a mine in the English Channel and went down with all hands. Thirty-four men. It was only in April 2025, almost simultaneously with Dom’s purchase of the Almond Branch, that UB-57 was positively identified on the seabed. History has a way of surfacing at poetic moments.
How a shipwreck ends up on Facebook Marketplace
This requires a brief explanation of one of Britain’s more eccentric institutions.
Every shipwreck has a legal owner under British law. When the Almond Branch sank, the government processed an insurance claim and became the legal owner of the wreck. When they decided, in 1978, to recoup some of their losses, they sold her into private hands. The buyer hoped to find something valuable among the remains. He found, as Dom later described it, a big pile of rusting iron.
Decades passed. The wreck sat on the seabed. The original buyer apparently got on with his life, and that big pile of rusting iron became something he was open to passing along.
Which is how it ended up on Facebook Marketplace at £300.
The official body responsible for recording all of this is known as the Receiver of Wreck, a post that has existed in various forms since the medieval period, and which, until 1997, came with the statutory power to “hurt, maim or kill” anyone who obstructed the receiver in their duties. The modern version is rather more bureaucratic. After Dom completed the purchase, the Receiver sent him a letter confirming he was now the legal owner of the SS Almond Branch.
He has kept the letter. It seems like the sort of document one ought to frame.
What £300 actually buys you
It does not buy you a diving site you can fence off. Other divers were visiting the Almond Branch before Dom bought her, and they will carry on now. Ownership of a wreck in British waters is not the same as ownership of land, you cannot exclude anyone.
It does not buy you anything of obvious monetary value. The gun is gone. The cargo has turned into fossilised barrels (of what, we don’t know). What remains is iron, encrusted with a century of marine growth, home to shoals of fish and the odd curious seal.
What it does buy you is the right to be consulted if anything significant is found. If a diver recovers an artefact from the wreck, they must report it to the Receiver within 28 days. The Receiver then contacts the owner — Dom — to ask whether he wants to keep it or relinquish it.
The ship’s bell, for instance, is missing. Someone took it at some point in the last century. If it ever turns up, it goes to Dom first. He has made his position on this clear: hands off his bell.
It also buys something harder to quantify. Dom had already dived the Almond Branch before he bought her, with his friend Rick Ayrton, in January. He knew exactly what he was getting. A pile of rusting iron at 58 metres, resting in the cold dark off the Cornish coast. But there is something about swimming around a wreck and thinking: this is mine. It is a feeling that makes sense only to a certain kind of person — the kind who spends their weekends in cold water looking at things that have been broken for a century.
Dom’s wife Suzi was furious, incidentally.
Why the story went everywhere
The purchase attracted attention from the BBC, from American science publications, from diving forums and local history websites and places Dom had never heard of. It was, briefly, the sort of story that restores one’s faith in the internet.
The reason, when you think about it, is obvious. It is the most unexpected sentence in the world: you can buy a World War One shipwreck on Facebook Marketplace. People scroll past ambitious listings for a pre-loved mattress, and somewhere in that stream there was a piece of the Great War. The story of a torpedo strike, a man who died in 1917, and a German submarine that would be sunk nine months later.
Facebook Marketplace contains multitudes.
The government stopped selling shipwrecks around twenty years ago, so opportunities of this kind are genuinely rare. Dom had always fancied owning one — it is the sort of ambition that sounds eccentric until you explain it, and then sounds either more or less eccentric depending on your audience. When the listing appeared, there was only one possible response.
“I’m having that.”
The SS Almond Branch will stay where she is, 58 metres below the surface, exactly where the UB-57 left her on that November morning in 1917. She is home now to marine life that would have baffled the crew who sailed her, and she carries a history that most people driving past the Cornish coast will never think to wonder about.
Dom has a video on his channel in which you can see the wreck for yourself — what she looks like now, a century on, and what remains of the story she carries. It is well worth your time.
You can always count on English and Welsh law to throw up some strange cases and shipping law is certainly at the weirder end but it's always interesting.
I rarely read whole articles. You pulled me in again, Neil