Between the devil and the deep blue sea

There are trainspotters and plane-spotters, so it should come as no surprise that there are also people who spend their days obsessed with passenger ferries.

For the community of people obsessed with ferries, specifically roll-on roll-off ferries of the 1960s and 1970s, the Earl William is relatively unremarkable. The ship was built in 1964 in Norway and bought by the British Railways Board in 1976 to sail between the Channel Islands and Portsmouth, under the nationalized Sealink brand.

In 1984, with privatization in full swing, Sealink was sold to Sea Containers, a sprawling company belonging to the charismatic US entrepreneur James Sherwood, owner of the Orient Express, close acquaintance of the prime minister and a Conservative donor. The state livery was taken off the Earl William’s funnel, though the new branding – ‘Sealink British Ferries’ – still projected the image of a stirring national industry. Sea Containers, for tax purposes, was registered in Bermuda.

I became interested in the Earl William not because it was one of three revolutionary ‘Thoreson Viking’ roll-on roll-off ferries built in the 1960s, nor because of its spectacular end: in 2011, repurposed as a floating hotel in Trinidad and Tobago, it hit an oil-drilling vessel off the coast of Venezuela while being towed for repairs, and sank without a trace after causing $100-million worth of damage.

What drew me to the Earl William was its use over the summer of 1987 as a floating immigration detention centre moored at the port of Harwich, Essex, holding people from Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Uganda, the Seychelles and Nigeria, and – its largest constituency – 60 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. It was the first time the UK had ever used a ship as a migrant detention centre and, once everyone was on board, it was the largest in the country.

In 1983, almost 200,000 Tamil refugees fled Sri Lanka, amid pogroms and the violent rhetoric of politicians from the Sinhalese majority. They presented Tamils, many of whom had roots in southern India, as foreign usurpers. Though there had been a sizeable Tamil population in Sri Lanka since at least the third century BCE, in the 19th and 20th centuries a large number came to the island from southern India to work on tea and coffee plantations – the island came under British rule in 1833 and remained a colonial possession until 1948. During this period, the British engineered preferential access to employment and education for the Tamils over the Sinhalese.

By the 1940s, roughly 60 per cent of civil-service jobs were held by Tamils, who made up around 15 per cent of the population. When Ceylon became the independent nation of Sri Lanka in 1948 and the Sinhalese majority took over, Tamils became the focus of popular resentment for their preferential treatment by the British. The first anti-Tamil riot took place in 1956 – the Gal Oya massacre – in which over 150 were killed. Further pogroms followed in 1958, 1977 and