Eleanor Schofield on conserving Tudor warship the Mary Rose

November 4, 2025·28 min·2 clips

Eleanor's daughter Violet was found to have tumours in both kidneys at nine months old while undergoing mandatory Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome screening.

The setting does a lot of work here. The programme comes from the Mary Rose Museum at Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard, with an audience in the room and the ship itself sitting at the centre of things. Khalili opens with the Tudor scene. Henry VIII is at South Sea Castle in July 1545, watching the Mary Rose sail against the French fleet before it sinks in front of spectators. The cause is still left open. French firepower, weather, and human error all stay on the table, which gives the episode a nice restraint before the conservation science begins. Recovery took centuries. More than 400 years after the ship went down, the Mary Rose was salvaged in 1982 and became less a finished exhibit than a very long problem to manage. Schofield keeps the story practical. She talks about minimal intervention: protect the hull, but keep it as authentic as possible. PEG is the polymer at the centre of it. Once it enters the wood, it remains there, becomes part of the structure, and helps the timber keep its shape without constant seawater spraying. Smaller artefacts would be easier. They could go into tanks with rising PEG concentration, but the ship was too big, and the museum still wanted people to be able to see it. Spraying was the workable compromise. Khalili notes that it lasted nearly 20 years before Schofield's work shifted toward drying the hull and figuring out what might happen next. Drying brought its own dangers. A freeze dryer can help with smaller objects, but not with a Tudor warship. So the answer was controlled air. Tubes around the ship were designed around airflow, temperature, speed, and humidity, so the hull would dry as evenly as possible. Schofield's job became watchful: track the changes, read the data, and use the evidence to decide what would protect the ship over time.

As heard by us

A careful conservation episode that keeps the Mary Rose feeling present, not distant.

The episode treats the Mary Rose as a conservation problem as much as a wreck story, and that is what gives it weight. Eleanor Schofield walks through the slow, awkward work of keeping waterlogged timber from falling apart, with PEG treatment, drying, and the museum setting all…

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Why you'd press play

For the science of keeping a Tudor warship standing.

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