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Ali Sandeghi was woken just after 5am yesterday by something he took to be a crack of thunder.

But what had seemed like the opening salvo of a storm was really the sound of one of the great deck planks on the Cutty Sark splitting as fire tore through the old ship.

Opening his curtains, Mr Sandeghi saw tall yellow-or-ange flames leaping skywards from the centre of the vessel.

Firefighters were already on the scene in Greenwich, having reached it four minutes after being called at 4.46am by the nightwatchman at the ship.

Initially there was little they could do to halt the spread of the flames that burst from the centre of the Cutty Sark and raced along her old tarred timbers.

Mr Sandeghi, 18, filmed the scene from his bedroom window with his mobile phone, capturing explosions of flame from the heart of the ship and a thick cloud of smoke.

Similar pictures from CCTV cameras had, a few minutes earlier, stunned officers in the control room at Greenwich police station.

“There was real shock as we saw the first pictures; the ship was well ablaze,” said Inspector Bruce Middlemiss. “Then lots of people were running to their cars and rushing to the scene.”

An hour or so later Simon Beames, the architect for the ship’s restoration scheme, was woken by his four-year-old son, who has developed a habit of listening to his dad’s answer-phone messages.

“Daddy,” he said, “the Cutty Sark is on fire.”

By the time Mr Beames arrived at the dry dock by the Thames, a familiar location to millions of tourists and London Marathon runners, the fire was under control. But the investigation into what caused it was only just beginning.

Early assessments by the ship’s trustees said the blaze would add at least £5 million to the cost of the continuing £25 million conservation project and delay its reopening to the public beyond 2009.

But there are also fears that temperatures of 1,000C (1,832F) at the height of the blaze may have caused irreparable damage to the famous tea clipper’s unique iron hull.

Police said the incident was being treated as suspicious and that they were following a number of lines of inquiry. A Fire Service investigation unit examined the scene and police dogs were brought in to search for traces of any accelerant.

The CCTV footage will be scoured for evidence of vandalism and police records are being examined for any indication that someone may have had a vendetta against the Cutty Sark Trust. But investigators are aware that the fire could easily have been an accident; there were flammable materials inside the protective hoarding erected around the ship.

As the smoke cleared the clipper was revealed to be in a sorry state. Above deck were the skeletal remains of a canopy which had been erected to protect the ship’s restorers from the weather. Its tarpaulin covering had burned away and the heat of the fire had partly melted the glassfibre wall of a marquee housing a temporary exhibition of ship’s artefacts.

The ship’s weather deck and tween deck were both damaged beyound repair and the lower deck reduced to a pile of sodden black ash.

Urgent repair work began to bolster the giant wooden props that keep the ship stable in its concrete dock.

But the greatest threat to the Cutty Sark’s future lay in the damage that was most difficult to see. The most pressing concern of the ship’s curators is that her iron hull, designed in 1869 by Hercules Linton to maximise her sailing speed, had buckled in the fire.

An initial examination indicated that the frame had expanded during the fire then contracted again. But what long-term impact that process has had will not be known until structural engineers can analyse the hull this week.

“When you lose the original fabric, you lose the touch of the craftsmen, you lose history itself,” Richard Doughty, chief executive of the Cutty Sark Trust, said. “What is special aboutCutty Sark is the timber, the iron frames, that went to the South China Sea. To think that is threatened is unbelievable.”

Mr Beames, the ship’s architect, said preserving the hull was essential to the future of the Cutty Sark.

“The frame is what we are most concerned about and we are looking for any signs of distortion,” he said.

“The shape makes the Cutty Sarkwhat it was, the epitome of excellence in her type of design – a very complex, curved form, just as significant as Frank Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim [in Bilbao].” The restoration began six months ago and most of the ship’s original artefacts had been removed for safe keeping. The masts and rigging, master’s cabin, wheel, teak coachwork and jolly boats are in the Historic Dockyard at Chatham, in Kent. “Nannie”, the Cutty Sark’s witch figurehead, was in the temporary exhibition alongside the ship and survived.

Before yesterday, the restoration fund already had a shortfall of £7 million in public donations. The trust said the blaze would add at least £5 million to the sum needed to restore her.

Marine archaelogists will meet next week in Edinburgh to draw up plans to dismantle the only other surviving tea clipper, the City of Adelaide, built in 1864 and left for the past 16 years to rot on a slipway beside the Scottish Maritime Museum, in Irvine, Ayrshire, after attempts to raise £10 million for her restoration failed.

The museum is to carry out a recorded deconstruction of the ship and parts salvaged and shared with other museums.

David Thomson, the museum’s director, said yesterday that it would be the most “dignified” solution.

Tall tales of a tall ship

— More than 15 million visitors have boarded Cutty Sark since she has been docked at Greenwich

— She achieved a record-breaking wind-powered voyage from Australia to England – 67 days in 1885 via Cape Horn

— Cutty Sark’s most celebrated master, Captain Woodget introduced a breed of collie dogs to New South Wales. He was also a good amateur photographer, taking photos at sea – including an encounter with an iceberg

— Cutty Sark is the first preserved ship open to the public since Golden Hinde was exhibited in Deptford, southeast London, in 1580

— Cutty Sark was a modern vessel in her day. She had lavatories – “the heads” – at a time when answering a call of nature was usually done by squatting over the ship’s side

— The “Hell Ship” voyage in the early 1880s was triggered when seaman John Francis was killed, the crew held a mutiny and Captain Wallace committed suicide

— She carried 32,000sq ft (9,700sq m) of canvas sails, equivalent to the area of 11 tennis courts

— When the weather was good all on board worked at least a 12-hour day, seven days a week. In bad weather they would be on deck far longer

— Passing Cape Horn, the deck would be washed down by the breaking waves and the ship would heel 40 degrees

— Cutty Sark was under Portuguese ownership from l895 to 1922 and renamed first as Ferreira and then as Maria do Amparo

— On the bow of the ship is the motto: “Where there’s a Willis a way”, a play on the name of the first owner, Jock “White Hat” Willis

— Scott & Linton, the first shipyard involved in making Cutty Sark, went bankrupt as it struggled to cope with the vessel’s exacting specifications. She was completed by Dennys

Source: Press Association

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