by Neil Oliver
Among other things, Morton told him: “We have one woman and two children aboard.”
“Sorry,” came Smith’s uncertain reply. “Say again.”
Morton had to repeat that his wife and stepdaughters were aboard.
A winchman was lowered from the belly of the helicopter, down into the suffocating soup of gale and foam and spray. In a hurricane at sea, the air is made more of water than anything a person can breathe, but the winchman did his best to assess the situation on the deck of the Union Star. Below him he could see, rising and rolling, the fresh green paint of the brand-new deck. For a few seconds he glimpsed a pair of pink court shoes as one of the girls contemplated making a run toward the lights of the helicopter. It was not to be. The wind was threatening to snap the rotor-blades. Far from making a rescue, the pilot was fighting just to stay in the air. Defeated, he pulled back to a position from where he and the winchman could watch whatever the approaching lifeboatmen might try.
In the wheelhouse of the stricken coaster, Morton listened as a new voice came over the radio. It was that of Trevelyan Richards, now within reach of them after an hour-long voyage through impossible waves and about to make his first move.
“Do you want us to come alongside and take the women and children?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” said Morton. “The helicopter is having a bit of difficulty. So if you can pop out and get the women and two children off, I’d be very much obliged.”
Pop out and get the women and two children off. Very much obliged. It sounds so calm and reasonable and yet 36-year-old Morton’s predicament was as bad as it could have been. Maybe his pregnant wife and two stepdaughters were within earshot—back from the deck and taking shelter while they could. No doubt he wouldn’t have wanted to make matters worse for them by letting them hear how anxious he was and so he would have swallowed it down and tried to do what good husbands and fathers do: be brave.
What Trevelyan Richards and the rest of the crew of the Solomon Browne certainly knew, even if Morton didn’t, was that the rocks of the Cornish coast were looming closer with every passing second. If something were not done immediately, the coaster would be smashed to pieces.
Through that maelstrom of wind and water Trevelyan Richards plowed his course. Once again Morton told his wife and daughters to make their way down on to the deck, there to ready themselves to leave the Union Star.
I don’t suppose there’s any way to teach coxswains like Trevelyan Richards how to do what they do in the teeth of hurricanes. It must come only from years spent learning the lessons of the sea. He charged at his target with all the power the Solomon Browne could give him, judging the waves, the rise and fall of the coaster rearing many feet above them like a cliff of steel. As the helicopter pilot and winchman looked on, the lifeboat made one run after another in an attempt to get into a position from which they could take the crew to safety. Time and again they were driven off.
At the subsequent inquiry, held at Penzance, a letter from pilot Lieutenant Commander Smith was read outloud: “Throughout the entire rescue the Penlee crew never appeared to hesitate,” he wrote. “After each time they were washed…or blown away from the Union Star, the Penlee crew immediately commenced another run-in. Their spirit and dedication was amazing. They were truly the greatest eight men I have ever seen.”
Trevelyan Richards’s calm, matter-of-fact voice came over the radio again.
“We’re going to make an attempt to come alongside,” he said.
“OK, skip,” said Morton. “Yup.”
It’s all so free of drama. The two men talked to one another without a hint of panic or of fear, their quiet words more humbling than any battlefield command.
A local news reporter was braving the hurricane up on the cliffs at Boscawen Cove. Through the blinding rain and wind he could just make out the outline of the coaster and, dwarfed beside her, the Solomon Browne. As the waves and gale pushed them toward the coastline, the two vessels were bow to bow: David and Goliath. A wave picked up the lifeboat and tossed it on to the Union Star like driftwood. She slithered and screamed across the green of the larger ship’s deck, crumpling steel guardrails like pipe cleaners before rolling off, stern first, into the roiling sea once more. According to the reporter and the helicopter pilot, this happened not once but twice. The Solomon Browne weighed 22 tons, but to a sea driven by a hurricane she was as inconsequential as a cloud of foam. Thanks to watertight compartments fore and aft, she was self-righting and bobbed like a cork in most conditions—but pitted against Cornish rocks and mountainous seas, she was as fragile as an egg.
For a few moments the lifeboat stayed in place alongside the much larger vessel, held there as if by providence or collective will. As the reporter and the helicopter crew looked on, a handful of shadows leapt from the deck of the Union Star, out into the smothering, whirling blackness and down into the outflung arms of the lifeboatmen waiting so very far below.
“Penlee lifeboat calling Falmouth Coastguard,” said Trevelyan Richards, calm as ever. “We’ve got four off, male and female.”
It was Dawn Morton, her two daughters and one of the coaster’s crewmen. Of course, that could never have been enough for the coxswain and the crew of the Solomon Browne. Now the lives aboard both vessels were mixing together and becoming one, all 16 of them woven together.
Trevelyan Richards took his boat back alongside the coaster once again. He was after every last man and his crew expected no less. The reporter watched, and the crew of the helicopter too. Falmouth Coastguard could only listen to their radio. What came next was everlasting silence.
“Penlee lifeboat,” called the coastguard. “Penlee lifeboat. Falmouth Coastguard. Over.”
Nothing.
The coastguard repeated his call over and over, not believing.
No one knows for sure what had happened; the full facts of that night, the minute-by-minute details of 16 lives fought for, were lost along with so much else. What does seem certain is that the two vessels came together in the dark one last time. Falmouth went on calling out to them.
It’s thought that perhaps they’d been driven too close to shore and that finally a trough between waves exposed the jagged and unforgiving rocks of the seabed. Both vessels then received damage too great to be survived.
William Trevelyan Richards, James Stephen Madron, Nigel Brockman, John Blewit, Charlie Greenhaugh, Barrie Torrie, Kevin Smith, Gary Wallis, Henry Morton; and James Whittaker, mate of the Union Star; George Sedgwick, engineer; Anghostino Verressimo, crewman; Manuel Lopez, crewman; Dawn Morton, pregnant with her third child; Sharon Morton; Deanne Morton—all of them lost.
Brockman and Greenhaugh were married fathers of three children each. Madron was a father of two, as was Blewit. Smith was a merchant seaman, home on leave. He’d been too young when he first joined the crew, lying about his age in his eagerness to be among them all. The Solomon Browne was smashed to pieces, matchwood; the wreck of the Union Star was found next morning, upturned and washed against the base of the cliffs. Of the 16 who were lost, only eight bodies were recovered—four from each vessel.
Mousehole is a small village. The loss of eight fathers, brothers, uncles and sons was a horrible wound. William Trevelyan Richards was buried on the morning of Christmas Eve, Nigel Brockman in the afternoon. There were more funerals to come.
The loss of the Solomon Browne with all hands is still, more than 25 years on, the last time the RNLI lost an entire crew. May that sad record stand for evermore. Trevelyan Richards was posthumously awarded the Institution’s gold medal for bravery. The rest received posthumous bronze medals. The Penlee lifeboat station was awarded a gold medal service plaque.
Communities that live by the sea and on the sea always say they understand the risks and expect loss of life from time to time. But how can anyone really understand or expect what happened to the men of the Solomon Browne?
On the morning after the tragedy, volunteers stepped forward to fill the empty places. Ju
st as strong as the sense of grief, perhaps even stronger, was pride in what the lost men stood for. Duty pulled the new crewmen forward as irresistibly as a tide. Neil Brockman was one of them and today he is the coxswain of the new lifeboat. His own son is eager to join him and even to replace his dad if the time comes. Brockman understands the need. He gives thanks that he had his own father until he was 17—other children in the village lost theirs while still babies or too young to remember the lost men.
“I’ve got no doubt in my mind that when I’m on my lifeboat with my six crew these days, there’s eight others there with me,” he said. “No doubt in my mind at all.”
The new lifeboat is based a few miles from Penlee now, at nearby Newlyn. The old lifeboat house at Penlee Point stands empty as a memorial to the men of the Solomon Browne.
Nearly an hour after the last transmission from Trevelyan Richards that night, a lookout on the cliffs swore blind he saw the lights of the Solomon Browne, making her way home.
Dusk is drowned forever until tomorrow. It is all at once night now. The windy town is full of windows, and from the larruped waves, the lights of the lamps in the windows call back the day and the dead that have run away to sea.
Every year, at eight o’clock on December 19, the Mousehole Christmas lights are turned off for an hour as a mark of remembrance.
William Trevelyan Richards’s mother, Mary, spoke about the last time she saw him that night. He took the call, put on his coat and said good-bye to her. It might sound commonplace and routine: the coxswain of a lifeboat is called out countless times, and, every time he leaves, must say farewell. Mary saw her son off to the lifeboat again and again over the years, and welcomed him back after every call but one.
Although I have no real cause to, I think there was something different about that night—and that both of them knew it even as it began to happen.
Like Trevelyan Richards, it somehow seems to me, Mary knew their good-bye in the face of the hurricane was forever.
“With that he was gone,” she said. “And the door slammed behind him in the wind.”
A few good men
Why is it harder to hear about acts of bravery carried out within our own lifetimes than in distant moments from the past?
I was 14 at the time of the Penlee lifeboat disaster and I remember the reports in newspapers and on television—footage of the search for survivors, the wrecked hull of the Union Star. On the 25th anniversary, the British Broadcasting Corporation screened a documentary that looked back at the events of that night. It was called “Cruel Sea,” but Neil Brockman said in his interview for the piece that you couldn’t blame the sea for anything—the sea just does what it does.
Hardest to listen to were the recordings of the voices of William Trevelyan Richards and Henry Morton as they talked politely to one another over their radios about what needed to be done.
Even 25 years later it struck me as a brave move by the producers, to go back to that village and interview those hurt by the tragedy. Wounds like those never go away. I don’t think I could have steeled myself to make those first phone calls.
The bravery of the Penlee lifeboatmen and their successors has a rawness to it—a rawness that it’s harder to feel when reading about stories from more remote history. Men caught up in events of the 19th century or earlier can seem unreal—like comic book characters from Boy’s Own adventure annuals. And so it matters to remember fresh bravery too—the better to reinvest the characters from long-ago dramas with all the flesh and blood of the living.
Robert Falcon Scott feels distant, long lost and almost unreal, like a fictional character or a figure from a legend. But it’s possible to get closer to him by hearing about the years before he became fixed in history as Scott of the Antarctic. He becomes more real still when you know that exploring the southern continent—and finally struggling toward the South Pole itself—wasn’t even his own idea. In The Voyage of the Discovery he wrote: “I may as well confess that I had no predilection for polar exploration.”
But before any excitement of that order—life-threatening, testing hardship on the great southern continent—he had to concentrate all his energies on succeeding as an officer of the Royal Navy.
After his time on the Britannia, he saw service aboard Her Majesty’s ships the Boadicea, the Lion, the Monarch and the Rover. He spent the winter of 1887–88 at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, where he passed his lieutenant’s exams. He was a good and diligent student, but never top of the class.
The inspiration for those voyages to the Antarctic came originally from Sir Clements Markham, secretary and later president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Like Scott, Markham was a Navy man. In 1850–51 he was aboard the Assistance when it went in search of survivors of Sir John Franklin’s ill-starred expedition of 1845 in search of the North West Passage. There wasn’t a single member of the party to be found, of course, as all 129 lives had been lost.
Markham left the Navy in favor of a career in the Civil Service. By 1877 he had moved on again, this time to concentrate on his fascination with geography and, more particularly, the work of the RGS. He had developed a detailed knowledge of Antarctica at a time when no one else much cared for the place. For Markham, however, that great, uncharted wilderness of the south represented an opportunity to underline the pre-eminence of British exploring zeal. It lay unclaimed by human hand, or even foot, and Markham was determined that it should have the British flag unfurled upon it as soon as possible.
While Scott was still serving aboard the Rover, Markham had identified the young sub-lieutenant as a candidate for the job of leading an expedition to explore the southern continent. It was Markham’s belief that youth was a vital qualification for exploration. It was all very well, he thought, to have wise old heads back at home making plans and offering up the fruits of their experience. But the job of going to new places was for young bloods alone: “How can novel forms of effort be expected from stiff old organisms hampered by experience?” he asked.
He pointed out that no useful work at either the North or the South Pole had been undertaken by men over 40 years of age, and the best pioneers had been nearer 30. What he didn’t know—or didn’t say—was that the polar regions take a terrible physical toll on the human body. When conditions are right, or rather wrong, the place is just one big dead zone. The fact is that the bodies of younger men and boys—still blessed with the recuperative powers of youth—have the best chance of repairing themselves and staying alive in temperatures of 40 degrees below and worse.
Antarctica was certainly a new and unexplored territory. For millennia before anyone set foot on the place, its existence was just a myth. Greek philosophers had argued that a great body of land had to exist on the bottom of the world to counter the weight of all the continents at the top. Captain James Cook came within 75 miles of it in 1773, but never saw land. The great navigator was of the opinion that the place had to be so barren that there was no point trying to land there anyway.
The Russian Thaddeus von Bellingshausen was first to lay eyes on the edge of the continent in 1820, and in the following year Captain John Biscoe sailed right around it. In 1895 an eight-man team aboard the whaler Antarctic made the first confirmed landfall. But exploration of the place in any meaningful way would have to wait.
At 2,800 miles across and with an area of nearly 5½ million square miles, Antarctica is the fifth largest continent on Earth. That it had resisted investigation for so long was largely due to its extreme isolation—600 miles from the tip of South America and 1,500 miles from Australia. It is surrounded by the Southern Ocean, the most challenging and unforgiving body of water on the face of the planet. Life must fight a constant battle to survive on the landmass at its center, the vast majority of which is permanently covered by ice. For large parts of the year the continent is either in total darkness or bathed in constant sunlight.
A 25-year-old Norwegian by the name of Roald Amundsen was among an international expedition
to Antarctica led by the Belgian Adrian de Gerlache in 1897. Their ship became trapped in the pack-ice and Amundsen and the rest became the first people to spend a winter enfolded in the continent’s unremitting darkness. It was a grim foretaste of what awaited all the others who would venture there in the future.
Suffice it to say that by the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica was considered a forbidding place that called out only to the hardiest and most eccentric souls.
This is what manly men are all about. There are many fine qualities to be acquired in libraries and universities and other places of learning. Many men have lived noble lives without ever straying more than a few miles from home. They’ve raised families, held down jobs, paid the bills and done what’s right. Those are good men too.
But there’s a wide world out there beyond the horizon and its far-flung places demand a different sort of man. I’m not saying he’s better, or that he’s the only sort worth being, but we need him as well. He walks a different path, and to the beat of a different drum.
John Paul Jones and the Birth of the US Navy
Every year, in June, a United States Navy man-o’-war drops anchor outside the gray harbor walls of a quiet little town on the northwest corner of England. Then a delegation of her sailors, their milk-white dress uniforms as dazzling as freshly capped teeth against the gunmetal tones of their surroundings, boards a smaller vessel that brings them through the harbor mouth and up to a sheltered berth. They are expected, and no paperwork or payment is required by the harbormaster for their stay. From the quayside above comes a cheerful call of “Welcome to Whitehaven” from a smiling local dignitary. The sailors mount the worn stone steps and are accompanied to a ceremony held in their honor. Usually, weather in that part of England being what it is, a gentle, steady rain falls throughout the formalities, drumming a soft tattoo on the specially erected canopy above their heads. On behalf of the people of the United States of America they hear that they are welcome friends and guests and that they enjoy “the freedom of the harbor.” The first time this ceremony was held, in 1999, the assembled Marines listened while a proclamation was read out. It formally forgave the US Navy for a raid on the town carried out by a few hundred of their ancestors in 1778 (the intention that evening, in fact, had been to raze the place to the ground, leaving nothing but charred embers). The document was then signed by representatives of both sides and copies were sent as far as the desk of President Bill Clinton and the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. This little town, with a population today of around 25,000 souls, therefore has good reason to remember the American Revolutionary War (or the American War of Independence, as it’s still known by most people in these parts). For the conflict that gave birth to a nation was brought to Whitehaven on the night of April 23, 1778, by one of its own sons—a man remembered in America as Commodore John Paul Jones, father and founder of the US Navy—and in Great Britain as a gardener’s son, traitor and pirate from Arbigland Estate, Kirkbean, southwest Scotland.
