Lifeboat Heroes: Outstanding RNLI Rescues from Three Centuries

by Edward Wake-Walker

  We expected her to right herself but she remained bottom upwards. Some of us managed at length to crawl out. I and Richard Robinson held firmly onto the rowlocks and were buffeted about considerably. With some difficulty I got underneath the boat again and spoke, I think, to Henry Robinson, Thomas Jackson, Timothy Rigby and Peter Jackson. I called out, ‘I think she will never right; we have all to be drowned.’ I heard a voice — I think it was Henry Robinson’s — say, ‘I think so too.’ I got out again and found Richard Robinson fairly done. He leaned heavily on my arm and I think he must have been suffocated. Another sea came and when it receded, he had disappeared and I never saw him again. While underneath I called out to my brother, ‘Clasper!’ — that is a sort of nickname we gave him — but I could get no answer.

  The boat eventually drifted bottom upwards to the shore and those who were rescued, like myself, clung to her. I don’t know what became of the rest, I was so exhausted. I remember seeing two or three struggling to reach the boat, but I do not know who they were. I drifted with the boat to the beach and staggered home, about three o’clock in the morning. I never saw any of the other lifeboats.

  The aftermath of a shipwreck; the Mexico sits high and dry on the sand as salvors set to work. (RNLI)

  When the initial shock and horror of these disasters had been fully absorbed and at least some of the circumstances understood, public attention naturally turned to the organisation which supplied the lifeboats and encouraged crews to launch them in conditions such as those prevailing on that December night. In its leader on Saturday 11 December 1886, The Times thundered:

  To praise and lament the heroism of the men who thus gave their lives is well; and some pride must mingle with the sadness caused by the story. But other reflections must arise when the circumstances are considered. What mockery, delusions and snares are lifeboats which, when upset, do not right but drift about helplessly! What a scandal to intelligence and humanity that brave men should be persuaded to risk their lives in boats so unsuitable for their work as the Southport and St Anne’s must have been!

  Had a tithe of the ingenuity and capital devoted to the improvement of torpedoes been expended in improving lifeboats, how different would have been their condition! Perhaps the brave crews will not have died in vain if their loss impressively directs attention to the imperfections of many of the present lifeboats, their inadequate buoyancy, their want of propelling power in face of adverse winds, and their general unfitness for much of their work. The cruel disaster may perhaps impress upon some minds the fact that the only kind of navigation in which invention has moved little, and which still depends chiefly upon men’s arms, is that concerned with the saving of life.

  On the following Monday, The Times published a terse response from the RNLI which pointed out that in the previous 32 years, self-righting lifeboats had been launched nearly 5,000 times on service and had saved upwards of 12,000 lives. Although boats had capsized on 41 of these occasions, only 18, including the Mexico disaster, had resulted in loss of life. In all, 76 lifeboatmen had lost their lives on service, representing one in 850 of all the men who would have been involved.

  In spite of this statistical rebuff, the criticism must have stung the RNLI. A joint Board of Trade and RNLI inquiry, while finding no major fault in the way lifeboats were operated, did expose some weaknesses. Why did Southport lifeboat not right herself? The capability was inherent in her design and she, as with every new lifeboat, had successfully been put through the test to prove it. The conclusion was that the weight of the men hanging on to her and possibly the effect of the anchor which had just been let go, prevented her coming upright. The feeling was that the St Anne’s boat only remained upside-down because she capsized in the shallows where the self-righting action would have been hampered.

  The fact that the Lytham lifeboat survived without a capsize in those conditions convinced the RNLI that improving stability in all lifeboats should be their main aim. Already 75 boats had been fitted with water ballast tanks similar to the Lytham boat. That work would now be accelerated. After the disaster, Southport and St Anne’s received sailing lifeboats with drop-keels, to be moored at the end of the pier and to supplement their carriage-launched boats.

  The Times seemed to suggest in its leader that it was primitive in the late 19th century for lifeboats still to rely solely on muscle power. It is likely that the RNLI’s development of steam-driven lifeboats was given new impetus by this event, although the first one did not appear until 1891. The concept was not practicable in most locations, however, and it would not be until the late 1910s that crews began to put their faith in the internal combustion engine as a substitute to their arms.

  Looking at the incident with 21st century eyes, it seems extraordinary that the inquiry was not troubled by the lack of co-ordination between the lifeboat stations involved. It is probable that the Lytham boat had rescued all the men from the Mexico before either of the other two lifeboats had even got close to the scene. But in those days, when the only known communication at night in a storm was a light or a flare, there was little chance of one lifeboat realising another’s actions or distress, even if they knew they had launched.

  And what of the men who lost their lives? Was there more that they could have done for their own safety? The inquiry found little to fault at Southport, and although some of the crew had apparently remonstrated with their coxswain for keeping the boat too often broadside to the sea, this was seen as something almost impossible to avoid in such conditions.

  At St Anne’s there was more to be concerned about. It seems that the coxswain of the lifeboat, William Johnson, a 35-year-old fisherman, was very sick with consumption and had not been expected to live longer than a few months. Two or three of the other crewmembers were also not strong men, one of them having only had ‘a basin of gruel all day’, apparently stinting himself on behalf of his wife and children. The station’s honorary secretary was unaware that the lifeboat was being launched, so there had been no one in authority to question the fitness of the crew to put out that night.

  It is important to remember that in those days, to a poor fishing community, the few shillings to be earned by volunteering to take an oar of the lifeboat was a considerable bonus. A man who was not eating so that his children could would also have the greatest incentive to hurry to the lifeboat when a distress went up. The need to ensure that the decision to launch was made by the honorary secretary who remained ashore became very obvious to the RNLI following the inquiry.

  To a Victorian public, whose every newspaper was filled with the account of 27 selfless, brave, impoverished lifeboat volunteers sacrificing themselves in a winter storm and leaving widows and scores of children bereft and penniless at Christmas time, this was a tragedy on a scale that even Charles Dickens would not have dared to invent. Their response was immediate; a fund to benefit the families was established and donations poured in so that it finally realised some £50,000.

  One man was pivotal, not just in the establishment of the widows’ fund, but in harnessing the wave of sympathy and admiration for lifeboat crews which swept the nation for the lasting good of the RNLI. Charles Macara, a Manchester businessman, owned a bungalow amongst the houses which were springing up in the new resort of St Anne’s. He was a member of the St Anne’s lifeboat committee and, when anxious relatives waited for news on the morning of the 10 December, they gathered round his house as he was the only man in the town to own a telephone. Sadly, the enquiring telegrams he ordered to be sent up and down the coast all came back with negative replies.

  After the disaster he wanted to do more for the RNLI and decided that the Institution’s income was dangerously dependent upon a wealthy but narrow group of subscribers. His idea was to bring the appeal of the lifeboat service to the man in the street — quite literally — by parading an RNLI lifeboat through the streets of Manchester and asking shoppers and onlookers to place their silver and copper donations in purses attached to long poles. The first of t
hese ‘Lifeboat Saturdays’ took place in 1891 and the idea soon caught on in other large cities throughout Britain. This method of collecting soon evolved into the Lifeboat Flag Day that we know today and is believed by many to have been the original inspiration for all charity street fundraising.

  7. Fraserburgh, 30 June and 7 September 1909

  Andrew Noble, coxswain of Fraserburgh’s pulling lifeboat, earns the Silver Medal twice in the same year for rescues to herring drifters at the harbour mouth.

  At the time of writing, Charlie Duthie is the lifeboat operations manager at Fraserburgh lifeboat station. He is the man who decides to send the lifeboat out through the east-facing harbour entrance when a call comes, often when the weather and sea are at their most treacherous outside this fishing port on the exposed north-eastern shoulder of the Aberdeenshire coast.

  With the powerful, high-tech Trent class lifeboat at his crew’s disposal, the decision to launch is not usually as difficult to make as it used to be for his predecessors. In the early days of motor power, they had to weigh up the chances of a single 40hp engine propelling the lifeboat safely through the entrance with waves sweeping across it in a north-easterly gale. Earlier still, and it was only the power of ten or 12 men at the oars that stood between a successful rescue and disaster.

  Tragically, the town of Fraserburgh has encountered more than its fair share of lifeboat disasters. Early on the gale-swept morning of January 21, 1970, Charlie Duthie, then a regular member of the crew, arrived breathless at the station to find that the lifeboat had launched moments earlier without him. His frustration at missing the shout turned later that day to a feeling of bemused horror when he heard that the lifeboat, a 46ft 9in Watson class, The Duchess of Kent, had been pitch-poled, bow over stern, by a gigantic wave while attending to a Danish fishing vessel 40 miles out into the North Sea. Five out of her six-man crew drowned underneath the non-self-righting boat; the sixth, John Jackson Buchan, was thrown clear and was saved, clinging to the up-turned hull, by another vessel which had been standing by.

  Seventeen years before that, on 9 February 1953, six out of the seven men aboard The Duchess of Kent’s predecessor, John and Charles Kennedy, had also been drowned when the lifeboat capsized at the entrance to Fraserburgh Harbour while escorting fishing boats to safety. So much of the important business of Fraserburgh lifeboat was conducted at the harbour mouth throughout the station’s history. For fishermen returning with their catch, the lights of Fraserburgh might have been a welcome sight but they also knew in bad weather that they were approaching the most perilous moment of their expedition. For Andrew Noble, the town’s most decorated coxswain, the harbour entrance was the scene of his greatest triumphs but also his ultimate tragic demise.

  Andrew Noble took over the position of coxswain in 1887. In his time as coxswain he would see the transition from oar and sail power to motorised lifeboats but it was while still at the helm of a pulling boat in 1909 that, twice within the same year, he earned the Silver Medal for bravery in full view of the townspeople of Fraserburgh.

  The first occasion was in mid-summer when the southerly track of the migrating herring shoals had reached the waters off Scotland’s east coast. The lucrative herring industry was at its peak in the early 1900s and vast fleets of drifters were constantly at work between the fishing grounds and the harbours of Arbroath, Montrose, Aberdeen, Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Macduff, Banff, Buckie and several more.

  A summer gale sprang up from the north east on the morning of Wednesday 30 June 1909 and, much to the concern of everyone ashore, it was sending powerful breakers directly across the harbour entrance at Fraserburgh. The brown sails of the approaching and heavily-laden herring fleet were in sight. Two hundred boats, in all, were about to run the gauntlet across the line of rampaging seas. No one was surprised to see the lifeboat launch and take up a position in the channel ready for any emergency, as the drifters drew close to the pier heads. The men of the rocket brigade were also setting up their lifesaving equipment on the South Breakwater.

  A sizeable crowd was forming on the opposite pier to watch with breathless anxiety as each boat made its run for safety. While some made it through in a relative lull between waves, others were lifted high onto the crest of a roller, carried out of their course and spun round so as to be heading straight for the South Breakwater. Drastic avoiding action saved most from destruction, although several suffered broken mizzen masts and the Heatherbell of Rosehearty had all her nets washed away as she fell from the top of a wave, missing the breakwater by inches.

  The Henry and Elizabeth of Nairn was not so fortunate. Just as her master, William Barron was lining her up for the entrance, a towering breaker smashed into her side, enveloped her and left her lying on her beam ends, her mainsail submerged. Six of the seven people on board had been able to clutch hold of something to keep them in the boat. One man, though, Alexander McIntosh, was in the water. None of his shipmates had seen him go but the crowd on the breakwater had and they were shouting for someone to save him. He fought like a fiend to keep afloat as waves broke over him but then, quite suddenly, he threw up his hands in despair and disappeared beneath the surface, never to reappear.

  Meanwhile, the five men and the boy still aboard the capsized fishing boat were relieved to feel their vessel heave back upright after her mainsail burst, releasing the water which had been holding her down on her side. The drifter was, however, now powerless to save herself and her crew, realising at last that one of their number was missing, clung helplessly to their vessel as she drifted down the outside of the south breakwater, bumping over the rocks near the retaining wall of the reclaimed ground.

  Coxswain Andrew Noble, standing in the stern of the 12-oared, self-righting lifeboat, Anna Maria Lee, would have seen the knock-down and heard the shouts from the people on the pier. By the time his oarsmen had brought the lifeboat close to the stricken vessel, the man in the water had vanished and it was the men still aboard the now grounded fishing boat who were his main concern.

  Manoeuvring round the lee side of the Henry and Elizabeth, the lifeboat crew got close enough to put a line aboard. This gave them the means to haul themselves alongside the casualty long enough for one man to leap between the two vessels. Although aground, the herring boat would occasionally be lifted high above the lifeboat before falling again onto the rocks and threatening to crush the lifeboat as she drew close.

  Somewhere in the chaos, the yoke of the lifeboat’s rudder was destroyed so the coxswain could no longer control it from inside the boat. Instead, with the six survivors aboard, the lifeboat had to work her way out of the surf with the coxswain at full stretch over the side of the boat, manipulating the rudder with his bare hands. Spectators on the pier held their breath as they watched the lifeboat lifting nearly vertically on the crest of a wave, half her length clear of the water, before her bow crashed down into the following trough. Each of these convulsions weakened Andrew Noble’s grip on the rudder and every passing wave threatened to wash him over the side. But the men at the oars kept stubbornly to their task and, yard by yard, the lifeboat drew closer to the harbour entrance.

  June 1909: with a line aboard the stricken herring boat Henry and Elizabeth, Andrew Noble and his crew haul themselves close enough to allow survivors to scramble aboard the lifeboat. (RNLI)

  A huge cheer rang out from the people gathered on the breakwater when they could see the lifeboat was suddenly clear of the breakers and under the shelter of the tall harbour wall. From the events they had just witnessed it was an immense relief that more vessels and more lives had not been lost. That relief would, of course, have been little comfort to the widow and four children of the unfortunate Alexander McIntosh.

  Coxswain Andrew Noble and his crew won many plaudits. One eyewitness, a Captain F.J. Noble of the Fraserburgh Harbour Board made this comment:

  Well, I confess, I’ve seen some seamanship in my time, in all parts of the world but I never seen with my two eyes a boat handled like yon in my l
ife. When I saw the lifeboat make for the back o’ the South Breakwater where the breakers were raging among the rocky shallows, I tell you honest, I thought it was madness. I stood there stunned and waited for the moment of destruction. But nothing could have defeated yon brave fellows. Talk about cool courage. They picked their way to the wreck as dainty as a lady when she goes shoppin’. The rescue was grand and the return to the harbour without even scratching the paint, a miracle. Andrew Noble has a fine record as coxswain of the lifeboat, but this last feat, in my humble opinion, is his greatest.

  The Committee of Management of the RNLI must have agreed whole-heartedly with such an assessment when they decided to confer the Silver Medal on Andrew Noble at their meeting in London on 12th August 1909. Little did they expect that, only two months later, they would be examining yet another report and recommendation to recognise Coxswain Noble’s bravery after a second rescue in very similar circumstances.

  Another unseasonal gale, this time from the north west, had grown into a fury by the morning of Tuesday 7 September, sending towering breaking seas crashing into the North Breakwater of Fraserburgh Harbour and making the entrance a life or death lottery to negotiate.

  This did not deter a small number of fishing boats that needed to get out of the ferocious weather to land their catch. At lunchtime on that day, only a few onlookers were present to see a steam drifter loom out of the haze which enveloped the bay and make her run for shelter. She happened upon a lull at the bar and made it into sheltered waters with little difficulty. Then the shape of a close-reefed sailing boat, the yawl Zodiac of Buckie, appeared. Three massive waves caught her on the broadside in quick succession and swept her past the entrance. It looked as though she would be carried up among the rocks on the south side but she recovered enough way to allow her back in between the pier heads.