HMS SULTAN SUPER SENTINEL

The Super Sentinel, registered number DX 9048, is now approaching 83 years old, and she has been Navy property for almost 45 years of that time. She started life right at the end of the '20s and was first owned by W M Brown, West Country wood transporters, in 1930.

Soon after DX 9048 was built, Sentinel's Shrewsbury works began producing steamers with conventional gear-boxes and differentials to keep up in a market becoming more and more preoccupied with petrol power.

At the end of her third year, DX 9048 went back to Sentinel at Shrewsbury to have her acetylene lighting system replaced by a 12 volt electrical system, and her solid rubber tyres swapped for pneumatics. Then she went back to Browns and laboured on with planks of wood until 1937.

She spent the war idly; there wasn't coal to spare to fire her and in 1953 she reached a low ebb when she was acquired by J W Hardwick & Sons, a firm of scrap merchants. That could have been curtains for the old steamer; petrol and diesel trucks were now far more versatile and powerful, but the Suez crisis intervened. DX 9048 was readied for service again since she was one of Britain's few self-propelled vehicles that required oil for no more than lubrication. But she never fired a shot in anger. The powers-that-were said she wasn't economical. But now, at least, she had been refurbished.

In 1960 she was sent on permanent loan, to HMS Sultan in Gosport, Hampshire. Here is where she assumed the role she still plays today. A decade later, when they'd done a good deal of painstaking restoration work on the old Sentinel, the Navy acquired her for a knock-down price - £1250. Nowadays she's worth considerably more to the right buyer,