tendering for contracts to scrap surplus railway locomotives, rolling stock and associated equipment for British Railways. The majority of the GWR King Class locomotives were withdrawn late in 1962, with ten allocated to Cox and Danks for disposal. On 1 April 1970 the company, by then part of the Metal Industries wing of Thorn Electrical Industries, became a subsidiary of the Six Hundred Metal Holdings group owned by George Cohen's "600" Group. German High Seas Fleet Lacking work, by 1924 he turned his attention to the wreckage of the High Seas Fleet, scuttled at its moorings in the natural harbour of Scapa Flow in Orkney, off the North-east coast of Scotland in late June 1919. Though initially written off by the British Admiralty as unsalvageable, the recent rises in the price of scrap metal had changed the value of the wrecks to the extent that they would now be profitable to lift, based on Cox's estimates of the quantity of high quality Krupp steel armour alone, before taking into account non-ferrous salvage. Ignoring expert opinion, his initial investment was to buy from the Admiralty the rights to salvage two battlecruisers – and – and twenty six destroyers. The two heavy ships were both accessible from the surface; Seydlitz was often mistaken for a small island as her port flank stuck perhaps six metres out of the water, and Hindenburg was upright with her decks awash. Cox's idea was to raise the Hindenburg and use its twenty-six thousand ton hull as a floating platform from which to enable salvage of the other ships. This was ultimately to prove impractical, as several attempts to lift the Hindenburg ended in failure, due to the hulk's instability and the likelihood of its capsizing whilst being pumped out, as it was sitting on rock and not shingle as had been first supposed. He took his reparation ex-German floating dock, once used for U-Boat testing and sectioned it lengthwise to salvage the first of his destroyers, which was then cleaned and converted into a floating workshop. His team was composed of local labour supporting a core of hired divers and skilled salvage men from all over Scotland; after some practice they were raising a destroyer every four to six weeks, with the fastest lift being accomplished in just four days. Heartened by this, Cox bought the rights to the remainder of the sunken fleet, and proceeded