A few masts sticking out of the Thames Estuary are enough to support an entire private web archive.
Visit the SS Richard Montgomery Matter
The SS Richard Montgomery was an American Liberty ship that grounded and broke up in the Thames Estuary in August 1944 while carrying wartime munitions. Much of the cargo was removed, but explosives remained aboard and the wreck has been monitored ever since.
That much is established history.
The website built around it goes much further.
A research pile with an argument attached
SSRichardMontgomery.com collects an unusual mixture of primary material, technical documents, photographs, maps, press reports, parliamentary material, Freedom of Information links, and personal interpretation.
Among the material linked from the site are original ship records, an accident report, photographs of the wreck and unloading operation, risk-assessment documents, navigation charts, historical newspaper material, and a scanned ship log. One surviving log scan is visibly marked as a declassified United States merchant-vessel record from 1943.
The site also makes much stronger claims about the scale of a possible explosion, government secrecy, surrounding infrastructure, and other hazards. Those claims should be read as the site’s argument, not automatically as independently established fact.
That distinction is important because it is also what makes the page such a good old-web artifact.
This is not a neutral museum database. It is one person assembling evidence over years because he believes an official story is incomplete. The result is messy, repetitive, opinionated, and full of material that would otherwise be scattered across reports, newspaper archives, government pages, PDFs, and dead links.
The homepage still behaves like a hand-maintained research desk. New notes sit beside material from decades earlier. Technical references sit beside television clips. Serious archival documents sit beside blunt editorial commentary.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because the old web was full of people who did not wait for institutions to organize a subject for them.
Sometimes that produced excellent indexing.
Sometimes it produced arguments.
Often it produced both on the same page.