The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  Worse even than mad watchmen was an older, more familiar problem. In his deposition to the Board of Trade during the enquiry into the Harmony wreck, William Burnie, factor to a local landlord, reported that the island’s only policeman had been of little help, since at the time he was ‘in liquor’. Below was a footnote from Thomas Gray: ‘These definitions puzzled me a little. As far as I can make out, it appears that in Barra a man is not “drunk” unless he falls down and cannot get up. When he is abusive and violent, and does not know what he is about, he is only “in liquor”.’

  The official correspondence also makes clear just how many Receivers faced a choice between turning a blind eye or becoming Charles McColl. Angus Maclean, Receiver of Wreck on Tiree between 1946 and 1960, chose the former course. A comfortable, round-faced man, he sits in the sunlit front room of his house in Scarinish, surrounded by ornaments and ticking clocks, and balances each question carefully before answering. When he does reply, it is always with courtesy, but never with more information than strictly necessary. So what did he do when he heard of a wreck ashore on Tiree or Coll? He smiles. ‘I wasn’t going about looking for things like that, I was waiting for somebody to come to me with a report of whatever they’d got. And if they didn’t come, that was OK.’ The smile gets wider. ‘There was an awful lot of stuff like timber washed ashore, but most of it really was pretty much useless, saturated with thick black oil, and nobody wanted to touch that stuff.’ So the job required some diplomacy? ‘Oh yes, yes, yes. I turned a blind eye to many things. You had to, really, you had to. I don’t think it would be possible to do it any other way. If you tried to be strict about the whole thing, you’d be liable to get lynched some nights.’

  He has a point. Born and bred on the island, Maclean had to balance his status as the only official on the island responsible for enforcing the wreck laws with his role as part of a small local community. Should he have upheld the letter of the law and inform on his friends, or should he have remained quiet, as a native of the islands? Besides, if a major shipwreck incident had occurred on his patch, he had few options available to him. He could have summoned the aid of the island’s one policeman or sent for delayed reinforcements from the mainland. But long before some notional troop of ‘the Receiver’s dragoons’ arrived, he would have been outnumbered and overpowered. Worse than that, he would have been ostracised by his own friends and relations. The wisest course of action, as he points out, was to sit safely at home watching the ships pass by.

  ***

  It wasn’t just the Hebrideans who took a good wreck for granted. Further down the west coast, other local communities proved equally enterprising. So enterprising, in fact, that witnesses at the 1839 Commission, appointed to consider the establishment of a rural constabulary, alleged that the wreckers of Cheshire made the efforts of those in the Scillies, Norfolk and Scotland look like polite little trifles. Successive witnesses gave an image of a coastline populated by corrupt magistrates, indifferent shipowners, petrified Lloyd’s agents and murderous locals.

  Why this should be so is not immediately evident. True, the coastal communities around Liverpool and the Wirral were poor, remote, and believed they had a perfect right to the ‘sea’s bounty’, but so did Orcadians and Cornishmen. True, they had plenty of shipping to choose from and few lawmakers to prevent them, but so did both the Hebrideans and the north-eastern wreckers. And true, they lived on a hard coastline with plenty of hazards and a seascape full of sandbanks, but so did the Deal men and the beach companies of Norfolk. At first glance, there was nothing singular in the geography or environment around Hoylake, Wallasey and Liverpool which should so explicitly have marked it out for lawlessness.

  Part of the answer to their ferocity lies not by the shore, but in the nearby city. Like many other coastal areas, the area around Wallasey and Hoylake was populated by a small number of close families bonded to one another through many generations. After taking the evidence of one witness from among ‘the lower classes of population’ from the area, the commissioners reported that, ‘They intermarry, and are nearly all related to each other . . . The[y] pretend to be fishermen, but though the witness has been at Hoylake for some time, he has not seen or tasted any fish.’ As elsewhere, the locals made most of their living from wrecking. But unlike anywhere else in Britain, the Cheshire men lived right next to a major city. Not only did Liverpool’s port provide plenty of shipping to plunder, it also provided an excellent marketplace for selling off whatever could be stolen. Whereas in Cornwall a salvaged grand piano would end up gracing the wrecker’s own house, in Cheshire, that same grand piano would have been flogged off through a network of fences within hours of a ship running aground.

  According to the commissioners: ‘Much of the property is sold in the villages and adjacent districts, but most of the plunder is taken to Liverpool and there sold at the marine store dealers. A great quantity of plundered property (indeed, nearly all the unsold portion) is concealed underground . . . Strangers come from all parts and deal with them, so that there is no occasion for them to run the risk of taking it to Liverpool, as they might be stopped.’ In other words, the Cheshire men had the best of both worlds: they wrecked among friends and sold among strangers.

  And there were plenty of strangers. By 1800, the city was handling 140,000 tons of shipping a year, much of which was travelling to or from America and much of which was laden with valuable raw materials and manufactured goods. Since journey times across the Atlantic were fastest from the north west, the vast majority of cargo vessels disembarked from the Mersey.

  But it was not freight which made up the bulk of Liverpudlian traffic. It was the Irish. Out of the 4,000 ships a year entering or leaving Liverpool by the end of the eighteenth century, 2,300 were on their way to or from Ireland. The numbers of migrants coming to Liverpool in search of work or a passage to the New World inevitably meant that many got caught between ship and shore, unable to find a job, unable to pay for a passage, and thus unable to contemplate much more than a life of beggary and a punctual death. Unsurprisingly, criminality flourished. Destitution and anonymity gave the lawbreakers’ work a barbarous edge, exacerbated by territorial disputes between Cheshire men and Liverpool incomers. John Taylor Gregson, formerly a master mariner and then a Lloyd’s agent, stated in his evidence to the Commission that: ‘If a Liverpool man were to go to assist, there would be jealousy directly; they do not wish to have those people among them. When the Sophia was on shore, two or three boats’ crews used to go off: they were very insolent wreckers from Liverpool; they would go and take the copper off the vessels’ bottom . . . I said, “You must not do this, this is plunder.” “We are not taking anything.” I suppose every man has a right to take what is here, as much as another.’

  Not that wrecking was a new phenomenon in the area. It was said that seventeenth-century Liverpool shipowners had protested against the planned construction of a lighthouse near Hoylake on the grounds that the wreckers would only create false copies and thus lure even more ships to a premature end. Like many parts of the country in which both smuggling and wrecking were endemic, there was supposed to be a network of tunnels leading through the soft local sandstone of the beaches to nearby roads or safe houses from which the criminals could make their escape. Over time, the Cheshire wreckers’ methods had also become more extreme than in other parts of the country. An unnamed local witness to the Commission declared that:

  On many occasions when wrecks have taken place he has known the produce of their plunder to have been openly hawked about for sale; butter 2d. and 3d. per lb., rum 4?. and 5s. per gallon, fine gown prints 3d. and 4d. per yard, and many other articles in the same proportion; and the bodies of the drowned persons are almost invariably stripped of every thing valuable, money, watches &c. About three or four years since, the ‘Grecian,’ Captain Salisbury, was wrecked off the Cheshire coast; Captain Salisbury was drowned, and when his body was found it was stripped of every thing, and whilst on the shore waiting to be
conveyed to some house for holding an inquest, his finger was cut off to secure his ring. The body of a female was washed on shore, when a woman at Moreton [a nearby village] was proved to have bitten off the ears to obtain the earrings.

  This was wrecking of a different order entirely. Pilfering things from grounded general cargo vessels was one thing; gnawing dead women’s ears off was quite another.

  Matters reached crisis point in January 1839 when three large first-class packets bound for America and carrying both general cargo and emigrants were driven into the soft sand of the Burbo and West Hoyle banks during a hurricane. The Hoylake lifeboat was despatched to the scene and managed to rescue many of the survivors. Despite the numbers of corpses washed ashore over the next few days and the presence of the Liverpool police, the local wreckers were out in force. The Liverpool Mercury, suspicious about the circumstances surrounding the wrecks and hinting that the light vessel guarding the East Hoyle bank had come adrift at the vital moment once too often for credulity, noted that:

  it is scarcely two months since she parted her moorings before a gale and came into port. To us this is very extraordinary and inexplicable . . . We lament to find that those infamous wretches, the wreckers, have been at their fiendlike occupation, both on the Lancashire and the Cheshire shores, plundering what the elements had spared, instead of seeking to alleviate the calamities of their fellow creatures . . . about a score of police officers were sent over to protect property and to disperse the ruffianly marauders . . . Twenty-five or twenty-six of the wreckers were taken into custody, but, from having been lodged in an insecure place, twenty of them contrived to regain their liberty.

  And elsewhere, it was noted that:

  The wreckers who infest the Cheshire coast were not long in rendering the catastrophe a source of emolument to themselves. The property of the passengers and crew were plundered by them to an alarming extent. The steward, who had in his trunks sixty watches and other articles of jewellery, found on regaining the vessel that the whole had disappeared.

  During the hearings it also transpired that the Commissioner of the Liverpool Police did not have a very high opinion of those whom he was supposed to serve. Asked if the wreckers had any respect for the existing law enforcement methods, Mr Dowling was unequivocal. ‘A wreck takes place, and the wreckers, unless prevented by the assistance of the police from Liverpool, plunder and do as they please . . . if the vessel is sufficiently injured to form a wreck, the accumulation of wreckers is the most instantaneous thing you can imagine. They see from their residences what is likely to happen when a vessel is on the coast. They look out for it and they are there before we can possibly get to them.’

  As successive witnesses made clear, effective policing had proved impossible. Since Wallasey possessed no local force of its own, it was the constabulary from Liverpool who made the journey over the Mersey every time a ship ran aground—a trip which took time, organisation and expense. If the police were lucky enough to reach the scene before every last rivet had been stripped and hidden, then they were usually undermanned and overwhelmed. Unlike other areas, there was no provision for backup to be provided by the army or the coastguard. Faced with hordes of feral locals, the police had occasionally applied to local magistrates to create one-off ‘special constables’, a process which only took up more time and which did not, in the long term, prove particularly effective since the local Cheshire magistracy resented the incursions onto their turf. On the rare occasions when the police had been able to make arrests, the local magistrates threw the resulting cases out of court. As Dowling put it:

  On the occasion of a man having been taken into custody for stealing a tarpaulin which was found in his possession, a magistrate of the county of Cheshire came to me while the man was in custody, and said that it was a trifling thing, and asked to look at it. It was shown to him. He said that the man ought not to have been taken into custody; that he was a very good man, generally speaking, and that it was too trifling a thing to take a man into custody for, and endeavoured to persuade me that I ought not to proceed against the man for it.

  In theory, the police should also have been assisted by Lloyd’s agents, who were responsible for collating details of shipping casualties and for doing what they could to ensure wrecks were correctly salved. In practice, the local agent was often too terrified to step outside his front door. According to Dowling, ‘the agent employed upon the coast there for Lloyd’s . . . has frequently applied to me, stating that it was perfectly useless his attempting to interfere; he was in danger of his life if he attempted to go out of his house. He was threatened that unless he retired, he should be marked. He said it was no use interfering even with a number of men, unless they went armed. Such was the state of things, that he resigned the agency.’ Given the chaos of existing law-enforcement methods, it was small wonder that the wreckers treated the police with such contempt.

  Matters altered slowly. Over the course of the nineteenth century, communication, transport and law enforcement around the Wirral area did improve, even if human nature did not. When the brig Elizabeth Buckham was driven ashore in November 1867 with a cargo of rum and coconuts, events took the traditional course. According to a local witness, one woman who lacked any receptacle from which to drink the rum removed her own shoe and used that. Most of the wreckers became so drunk that many fell unconscious on the beach. The combined might of the new Wallasey police force (all five of them) spent the evening hauling them out of the way of the rising tide.

  ***

  In many parts of the west it was not the intervention of the police or the coastguard which prevented wrecking, it was the lighthouses. Until the 1840s, wreckers on Tiree had the additional advantage of the Skerryvore Reef, eleven miles off the south-west tip of the island and the most efficient shipwrecker on the whole of the west coast. When Robert Stevenson, the National Lighthouse Board’s chief engineer, conducted a preliminary survey of the reef in 1830, he found that rents on the side of Tiree closest to Skerryvore were higher than those further away. Wrecks were so frequent and their cargos so lucrative that wrecking had become an accepted part of the local economy. Robert’s son Alan calculated that at least thirty vessels had been wrecked on the reef between 1804 and 1844, and that, ‘It is also well known that the Tyree Fishermen were in the constant practice of visiting the Skerryvore, after gales, in quest of wrecks and their produce, in finding which they were but too often successful.’

  The Duke of Argyll owned Tiree and his factor was responsible for setting local rents. For those tenants who lived closest to the reef, the sum included a premium for the benefits of any wreck from Skerryvore. Often, however, the factor also claimed that wreck for himself or for the Argyll estates, and squabbles could break out between tenants and factor over the extent of the rake-off. It took Alan Stevenson four years to build the lighthouse on Skerryvore and a further two years before the lamp was lit. Almost immediately the numbers of wrecks around Skerryvore slowed. From being an island considered so closely associated with wrecking that half the houses were built of ships’ timbers, Tiree became an island with one of the lowest accident rates in the Hebrides.

  For a while, the lighthouses did the wreckers out of a job, though two world wars did make a significant difference to local casualty figures. Between 1939 and 1945, 3,500 British and Allied merchant ships were sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic. The British merchant navy lost over 32,000 men, and the Royal Navy almost 51,000. Only a small percentage of those losses occurred around the Scottish coastline, and escorted vessels always had a better chance of surviving the journey than unescorted ones. But the casualties remained appalling and the cost was always too high for comfort.

  In many parts of Britain, there is also the suggestion that the various lighthouse authorities were instructed to dim or extinguish their lights at moments when it was thought German warships would be lurking around the Minch or the Hebridean Sea. By 1941, the British had broken the Enigma code, and were thus able to provid
e some advance warning of German intentions to crews making the journey. In theory, the lights would be dimmed every time enemy ships were likely to be approaching and then turned back on to full power when the Allied convoys passed.

  James Taylor, chief executive of the Northern Lighthouse Board, remains unsure of exactly what went on, and points out that much of the information remains classified even now. ‘As I understand it, the lights didn’t operate normally, they operated on reduced range. But if you knew a convoy was coming—and that was something the lightkeeper was told—then you put the light back on to full beam. We’ve still got those lights. If you’ve ever been to a lighthouse and there’s a little plastic lamp in the corner, that’s them. They’re still there. The emergency light in the corner was called the Scheme R Light, and every now and again, the Admiralty, the Western Approaches command, would say to the Commissioners that this was the light that they wanted to use, and it had a range of about four miles as opposed to 24. That’s what you’d normally use. But then when a convoy was coming, you’d put the big light on.’ Was there ever a point when the lights were totally switched off? ‘I don’t think so. The short answer is, I don’t know. They may well have been.’