Lifeboat Heroes: Outstanding RNLI Rescues from Three Centuries

by Edward Wake-Walker

  Lifeboat Heroes

  Outstanding RNLI Rescues From Three Centuries

  Edward Wake-Walker

  In memory of those who have given their lives to save others at sea.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1. Douglas, Isle of Man, 10 December 1827

  2. Skerries, Co Dublin, 17 November 1858

  3. Appledore, 28 December 1868

  4. Newcastle, County Down and Ilfracombe, Devon, February and December 1874

  5. Ramsgate, 6 January 1881

  6. The Mexico disaster, 9 December 1886

  7. Fraserburgh, 30 June and 7 September 1909

  8. Ballycotton, 11 February 1936

  9. Cromer, 6 August 1941

  10. Humber, 6 January 1943

  11. Moelfre and Holyhead, Anglesey, 2 December 1966

  12. Humber, 14 February 1979

  13. Penlee, 19 December 1981

  14. Hayling Island, 25 October 1992

  15. Lerwick, 19 November 1997

  16. Torbay, 13 January 2008

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) has awarded the Bronze, Silver or Gold Medal for deeds of outstanding bravery on more than 2,000 occasions. How do you select just a handful of these to represent nearly two centuries of heroism on the high seas?

  If this book is to live up to its title, it must give an account of how the legendary names in lifeboat history earned their status. Men such as Hillary of Douglas, Fish of Ramsgate, Blogg of Cromer, Cross of the Humber, Evans of Moelfre, Bevan of the Humber and Clark of Lerwick secured their place in these pages because the story told is an example of just one of a string of medals they have won in their lifetime. There are others, perhaps not so nationally famous, such as Henry Alexander Hamilton of Skerries, Andrew Noble of Fraserburgh and Rod James of Hayling Island who nevertheless were recognised by the RNLI on more than one occasion and deserve a share of the limelight.

  Other criteria also helped to shape this collection. To explain how the lifeboat service developed and survives so successfully to this day as a largely volunteer organisation, relying on people’s donations rather than the government for its funding, it was important to choose rescues at reasonably regular intervals throughout the RNLI’s history. Also, to show the universal influence of the charity, incidents from all corners of the United Kingdom and Ireland are included. It surprises many people that the RNLI has for so long been able to impose such high operating standards on groups of local volunteers who, by their geographical remoteness, might not normally be the most natural followers of head office rule books. The role of the lifeboat inspector, outlined in the story of Captain Charles Gray Jones’s action-packed year of 1874, was, and still is, crucial in maintaining those standards.

  Then there were the incidents that, by their very enormity and tragedy, affected the fortunes of the Institution. With the wreck of the Indian Chief off the Kent coast in 1881, there were victims and there were heroes. The survivors’ story and that of the Ramsgate lifeboat crew who saved them was graphically relayed in the national newspapers of the day and brought the work of lifeboatmen into the consciousness of people across the land. When the Mexico ran aground in the Ribble estuary five years later the heroes became the victims when two lifeboats capsized and 27 men were drowned. This time the Victorian press and public began to ask if enough was being done to safeguard lifeboat crews. Procedures about the decision to launch a lifeboat were reviewed and lifeboats were designed with greater stability. The disaster also inspired the first street collections for the lifeboats, bringing the appeal to modern industrial cities, often far from the sea.

  Nearly a century later, just before Christmas in 1981, when the Union Star turned turtle and Penlee lifeboat was smashed to smithereens under a Cornish cliff, killing everyone involved, again the nation woke up to the brutality of the sea and the bravery of those prepared to face its fury. Sympathy for the families of lifeboat crews provoked a golden era of fundraising for the RNLI, allowing an accelerated programme of boat building, providing more powerful and responsive lifeboats. These gave their crews a much better chance of survival working close to the shore or alongside a floundering vessel in the worst of weather.

  The ‘Original’ lifeboat. Thirty-one of these self-righting vessels were built for service around the coast of Great Britain and Ireland in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (RNLI)

  It is a grim fact of life that only when the inadequacy of tools for a specific job become tragically apparent are people inspired to find a remedy. Most turning points in the history of the lifeboat service are examples of necessity spawning invention and, at times, intervention. When the ship, Adventure, came to grief in a storm at the mouth of the Tyne in 1789 and thousands watched as her crew drowned, one by one, a committee of South Shields citizens resolved to find a boat which could survive such conditions and offer a chance of rescue to such casualties. The resultant self-righting design by Henry Greathead, the ‘Original’ lifeboat, replicated and exported to other coastal communities, became the vehicle which would inspire the veteran Manx lifesaver, Sir William Hillary, to campaign for a National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, as the RNLI was christened at its foundation in 1824.

  A further disaster at the mouth of the Tyne in 1849, this time to a lifeboat similar to the ‘Original’, when 20 of her crew were lost during a rescue attempt to a wrecked brig, roused the RNLI out of the torpor that had overcome it only a few years after its establishment. Under a new President, the Duke of Northumberland, there was determination to update lifeboat design and to produce boats that could be sailed as well as rowed and whose stability, buoyancy and self-righting ability would encourage their use throughout the land.

  When the first motorised lifeboat was introduced in 1905, again on the Tyne, there was effectively a mutiny by the Tynemouth crew who would no more trust an internal combustion engine than put the devil in charge of their boat. Only nine years later, however, the superiority of motor lifeboats was proved beyond any argument by men from the same station who steered their latest petrol-fired boat 45 miles down the coast to Whitby in a wartime blackout and a storm. The Whitby pulling lifeboats had had to abandon heroic attempts to rescue the last survivors from the wrecked hospital ship, Rohilla, but the Tynemouth boat got to her and brought the people to shore.

  Fraserburgh lifeboat station has had much more than its share of tragedy, as well as triumph, as Andrew Noble’s story will help to illustrate. Twice since the war, in 1953 and 1970, the town’s lifeboat was turned upside down, both times with the loss of all but one of the crew. It was these disasters to non-self-righting Watson class lifeboats, coupled with another in 1969 when the Longhope lifeboat also capsized with the loss of her entire crew, which convinced the RNLI that every all-weather boat built from then on should be able to right herself. They have remained so to this day.

  The introduction of an inshore lifeboat fleet cannot be attributed to any single event, rather a growing perception in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the increasing number of yachtsmen and others seeking pleasure from the sea needed a faster response than could be offered by heavy nine-knot wooden lifeboats. The story in this book of the rescue of the people aboard the sail training ketch, Donald Searle, floundering in shallow water off Hayling Island, gives as good an example as any of the indispensable attributes of an Atlantic 21 lifeboat with its shallow draft, its forgiving inflated tubes, its speed and its manoeuvrability.

  There is an obvious common thread w
hich runs through all these stories and that is one of a team of volunteers pitting their strength and ingenuity against wind and waves for the chance of saving life. Modern lifeboat crews may no longer be made up of a few local fishing families and will, instead, be men and women drawn from every trade and profession practised within the vicinity. They will each have received specific and detailed training and will not simply be chosen on their skill and strength as an oarsman. Unlike some of their Victorian predecessors, their family’s next meal will not depend on the small allowance they are given for the time they spend at sea. And on the whole, thanks to today’s equipment and technology, they will usually spend that time at less risk and in less discomfort.

  But the sea, in its worst mood, is still capable of testing the skill, nerve and stamina of a modern lifeboat coxswain and his crew to just the same extent as it did the man at the helm of an open pulling lifeboat. The problem of putting your boat alongside another wallowing or stranded vessel is as frightening a challenge as it ever was. And the determination and strength required by a crew to dislodge limpet-like survivors from the railings of their doomed ship has been a constant requirement throughout the centuries.

  The question that remains at the end of all these stories of extraordinary bravery is: why do they do it? No one has ever become rich out of volunteering for the lifeboat. In fact, nowadays, where time is money, crewmembers afford huge amounts to train and exercise as well as to be available when the call comes. Whatever the motivation, be it a sense of duty, of tradition, of belonging to a team where winning is saving someone’s life, there is still no shortage of men and women keen to join their local lifeboat station. Perhaps this book will help some of the newest recruits to understand what it will mean to serve the RNLI when sea and weather throw down their severest challenges.

  1. Douglas, Isle of Man, 10 December 1827

  Sir William Hillary, founder of the RNLI, earns his first Gold Medal for bravery when he and his son, Augustus, take the Douglas lifeboat out to the Swedish ship, Fortroendet, aground on St Mary’s Isle and rescue all 17 crew and passengers.

  The Isle of Man had its Governor General, the 4th Duke of Atholl, to thank for becoming one of the first places in the British Isles to operate a lifeboat. The duke, an active member of the Royal Humane Society, ordered the lifeboat to be kept in readiness for the all too frequent shipwrecks which plagued the east coast of the island at the turn of the 19th century. The lifeboat, one of the 31 built to the same plans as Henry Greathead’s Original, arrived in Douglas in 1802, although, along with most of the other original 31 lifeboats, little was recorded about her use. It is known that the boat was eventually lost in December 1814 after she broke from her moorings in a gale and was dashed to pieces at Douglas Head.

  By then, however, the tradition of giving help from the shore to endangered seafarers had become well established and it was against this background that one of the island’s more colourful inhabitants would eventually earn his place in history. Sir William Hillary, Bt, had settled in Douglas after losing his own and his wife’s fortune in the patriotic, if rashly extravagant, formation of a private army to supplement the war effort against Napoleon. The semi-autonomous status of the Isle of Man, negotiated by the 3rd Duke of Atholl when he sold his family’s sovereignty of the island back to the crown in 1765, provided Hillary with the legal refuge he sought from the debts and the wife he had abandoned in England.

  Hillary, who was brought up as a Quaker, had a natural concern for the poor and dispossessed and a soldier’s instinct to take personal action when that seemed to be required. When, in December 1822, three fishermen from Castletown on the south of the island drowned while rescuing the crew of a Royal Navy brig, the Racehorse, Hillary successfully campaigned for the Admiralty to provide their widows and children with a serviceman’s pension. Earlier that same year he had persuaded some retired naval officers and local fishermen to join him in launching a number of frail rowing boats into Douglas Bay in a storm and saved six different ships from destruction.

  Hillary had offered all the fishermen who had accompanied him that day a cash reward from his own fast-dwindling funds, knowing that they could not afford to risk leaving their families penniless, should the rescue mission end in disaster. By now Sir William’s grand vision for the future of lifesaving had begun to take shape. The establishment of a national institution, funded perhaps by the Admiralty, which rewarded local rescuers for putting out to those in peril from shipwreck and which provided boats designed specially for the purpose, became his goal.

  Again with his own money, he printed 700 copies of a pamphlet in 1823 entitled, An Appeal to the British Nation on the Humanity and Policy of Forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck. These he circulated to the many influential and aristocratic friends he had made in his days as equerry to Prince Augustus Frederick, the ninth child of George III.

  Sir William Hillary, founder of the RNLI and three times Gold Medal winner for bravery. (RNLI)

  Although considered a very worthy aspiration, no state-funded body saw it as their responsibility to adopt such an undertaking. Eventually, however, Hillary’s cause was taken up by a Thomas Wilson M.P., who re-issued the appeal to wealthy philanthropists, and whose influence and patience brought together the historic meeting in London of churchmen, politicians and financiers which formalised the foundation of the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck as a charity on 4 March 1824.

  Hillary was rightly regarded as the founder of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, as it later became known, but his influence over it was always going to be limited by his enforced exile in the Isle of Man. Instead, equipped with the first lifeboat to be ordered by the Institution, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the business of running an exemplary outpost of the organisation at Douglas.

  Sir William had two children, a twin son and daughter, who, after his escape across the Irish Sea in 1808, would become strangers to him. Scars from the broken marriage had healed sufficiently, however, that in the summer of 1827 his son, Augustus, a 27-year-old captain in the 6th Dragoon Guards, accepted an invitation from his father to visit the Isle of Man so that the two might get to know each other. It turned out to be a longer visit than originally planned, partly because father and son got on extremely well together but mainly because Augustus fell in love with the daughter of one of the island’s judges, Deemster John Christian. During his courtship of Susanna Christian, Augustus Hillary found himself in a position to put his credentials as a worthy future husband and son-in-law beyond any doubt.

  It was on 10 December 1827 when the island awoke to the sound of a brutish gale and heavy rain beating against the windows. As ever, when the wind blew hard from the east, the people of Douglas kept an anxious eye out to sea for any vessel struggling against nature to keep clear of their rock-strewn lee shore. There was just such a ship, although they would not see her yet. She was Swedish, the Fortroendet of Karlskrona, carrying cargo and three passengers from Marseilles to Glasgow.

  Her master, Andrew Kerman, realising the weather was deteriorating as the southern tip of the Isle of Man hove into view, knew that he needed to find shelter. His aim was to make for Douglas, but he first made a short stop at the small south-eastern port of Derbyhaven, to take on four extra crewmen and a local pilot as this was a dangerous and unfamiliar shore.

  As the ship fought her way round Douglas Head in the strengthening gale, it became painfully obvious to the captain and pilot that the bay would offer them precious little shelter with the direction that the wind was now coming from. But to try to make the harbour entrance or even to continue to sail northwards were too risky, so the only choice was to drop anchor in the bay and hope that the gale would abate.

  Any relief the skipper might have felt when the anchor held, vanished moments later as a huge sea forced his ship’s bow upwards, snatching the cable taut. All aboard felt a dull shock and immediately the vessel sw
ung round, broadside to the waves and began drifting unfettered towards the shore. Now there was nothing for it but to hoist enough canvas to make an attempt on the harbour entrance. This meant an approach with wind and seas full on the beam; the Fortroendet heeled over at an alarming angle, her crew clinging to the deck for dear life. Captain Kerman held this course for a few minutes until, fearing imminent capsize, he steered head to wind and ordered his crew to let go the spare anchor.

  By now a crowd had gathered on the foreshore at Douglas, each rain and spray-soaked onlooker exchanging theories with their neighbour on what the captain should do next to save his ship or what his likely fate would be. Sir William Hillary and his son were among them but they, rather than watch a shipwreck unfold, were working out ways that they might help the captain. If a line could be put aboard the ship from the shore, she could, perhaps, be hauled into the harbour. Hillary ordered a mortar apparatus to be made ready for that purpose while he and his son made for the lifeboat. If the mortar failed to deliver a line, then maybe the lifeboat could take one out to the ship.

  Just as Hillary, his son and some retired naval officers were clambering aboard the lifeboat, a cry went up from the onlookers; the Swedish ship had once more broken her anchor cable and was drifting through the breakers towards the off-lying St Mary’s Isle. They saw her progress suddenly halted as she grounded and then heeled over precariously onto her side. Her rudder had been torn away and water began to flood in through a gash in her hull.

  Now all able hands ashore set about getting help to the crew and passengers. As well as the lifeboat, a ship’s boat from the Royal Navy cutter, HMS Swallow, and two harbour boats, ill-suited for the conditions, were making their way out towards the wreck. The lifeboat, ahead of the rest, headed out to sea, beyond the wreck and when Sir William gauged that he was directly upwind of her, he let go an anchor and veered down upon her, his oarsmen struggling for control through the heavy breakers.