On the evening of March 6, 1987, the Townsend Thoresen roll-on/roll-off ferry Herald of Free Enterprise sailed from Zeebrugge in Belgium for Dover with 539 people aboard — 459 passengers and 80 crew. She left the berth with her bow doors, both inner and outer, fully open. No one on the bridge knew: the doors could not be seen from there, and the ship had no indicator lights to show whether they were shut.
The assistant bosun whose duty it was to close the doors was asleep in his cabin, having just come off duty; the chief officer responsible for seeing them closed did not do so, and the master, Captain David Lewry, sailed without confirming their state. Trimmed down by the head from ballasting to reach the Zeebrugge ramp, the ferry gathered speed, and her bow wave poured through the open doors onto the undivided vehicle deck. Within minutes the free surface of the floodwater destroyed her stability, and she capsized — coming to rest on her side on a sandbank in shallow water, the only reason the toll was not far worse. Of the 539 people aboard, 193 died and 346 survived.
The formal investigation under Mr Justice Sheen concluded that the capsize was partly caused by the serious negligence of the master, the chief officer and the assistant bosun — and partly by the fault of the company itself. In the report’s most famous sentence, Sheen found that “from top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness”: masters had repeatedly asked for door indicator lights and been refused, standing orders were unclear, and sailings were driven by pressure to leave the berth on time. The master’s certificate was suspended for a year, and the chief officer’s for two.
A coroner’s inquest returned verdicts of unlawful killing, and P&O European Ferries — as the company had become — was prosecuted for corporate manslaughter, the first such case in English law. It collapsed in 1990 when the trial judge ruled that no single directing mind of the company could be identified with the fault; but the prosecution established that a company could be indicted for manslaughter at all, and it set in train the campaign that produced the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007.
The disaster reshaped ferry safety. Britain created the Marine Accident Investigation Branch in 1989 to investigate accidents independently of the regulator; indicator lights and camera monitoring of bow and stern doors became mandatory, with the doors closed and locked before departure; and international rules on ro-ro stability, draught marks and damage control were tightened through SOLAS — work that led in time to the safety-management accountability of the ISM Code.