The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  There’s nothing subtle about the east coast. To the west there are mountains and cliffs, rocks and unexpected islands; to the south there are quicksands, white cliffs, and smuggler’s coves. On the north there are 12-knot tidal races and a plunging coastline. But the east coast is more pragmatic. There’s always a sense of incompleteness on the east, a sense that whoever designed this place got called away at the crucial moment. All the essential elements are here, but the adornments which soften or lift a place are missing. Though there are cliffs and beaches, they aren’t particularly spectacular. The North Sea can’t be bothered with the complicated geological novelties of Britain’s Atlantic front. It doesn’t do whirlpools or white cliffs; most of the time it doesn’t even do a decent safe harbour. Instead, the east coast does the three slabbed lines: earth, sea, sky, each element stacked in rigid accordance with the rule of thirds. And that’s it: just a bald arrangement of greys and browns painted just the same way from Margate to Thurso. Sometimes the combination of cliffs and water achieves a brutal kind of grandeur, and sometimes—on a sunny day—it almost looks majestic. The east coast can certainly put on a fine storm or a pleasing beach walk. But there is never anywhere here which makes you want to run away to sea. Gaze out from a headland on the east coast, and all you end up wondering is what’s for tea. The west coast speaks of dreams. The east coast just whispers ‘piss off’.

  But it is not water which dictates the east coast’s character. It is the wind. Though Britain is a narrow land, there are still supposed to be distinct east-coast attributes: strength, caution, parsimony, and an unforgiving spirit, as if the wind has sidled through the cracks in people’s characters and tightened them against the world. Every mariner who ever sailed these seas dreads that wind’s unpredictability and its violent switches of temper. The North Sea is a small, steep sea, bounded by the Continent on one side and Britain on the other. When the wind and weather rise on the west, the resulting waves have 4,000 miles of open ocean to roll, a distance which gives them both momentum and regularity. The North Sea gets the same combination in a more restricted space, so each wave will be steeper, each squall more abrupt, and each wind a little chillier.

  There are other weather conditions particular to the east coast. There are the haars, those cold other-worldly mists rolling inland from the coast and rendering everything—people, cars, trees, buildings—as no more than lonely arrangements in grey. A haar also changes the definition of sound so that normal city noises become ghostly silhouettes of their usual reality. But the haars also have their opposites. The spectral quietude of the sea fogs is offset by something which happens much more rarely, but which undoubtedly lives up to its local name. In Norfolk and Essex, where the coastline is low and the point where land meets water remains debateable, certain configurations of wind and tide can force a surge called a rage. Once every fifty or sixty years, a high spring tide in flood combines with a heavy swell and a wind pushing away from the coastline. The wind holds the tide back, but if that wind turns, all the pent-up power of the water is unleashed against the land. Instead of moving steadily from north to south and round through the English Channel, the sea behaves instead like a tidal bore, swinging round and rushing inland.

  The last major rage was in 1953, when large parts of north Norfolk were entirely overwhelmed by water. In many low-lying areas, the sea simply swatted the sea defences aside, raced over the breakwaters and invaded the living rooms of half of Norfolk’s coastal towns. In total, 32,000 people had to be evacuated, and over 300 lives were lost. Richard Davies remembers the last rage well. ‘I was eight or nine, and I remember my father getting me out of bed and taking me up onto the cliff to watch the storm. And he said, “I hope you never see this again in your lifetime.” That was bad. It blotted out the pier, the promenade, lifted the lifeboat out of the boathouse, took half the land with it . . . ’

  The rages are a reminder—if any were needed—that this corner of the country is not stable. The west’s reefs and rocks may be hazardous, but at least the majority of those hazards do not shift or alter. On the east and south coasts, things are not so concrete. This is a land which picks itself up and walks, perpetually in retreat from an old enemy. What is coast and beach today was a hill or valley yesterday. In the nineteenth century, long-lived residents reported that ships sailed in places where crops had once been grown. England’s fat haunch is losing weight by the year: south-east England is currently sinking relative to the sea level at the rate of a foot a century, while the coastline itself recedes steadily inland.

  The process of loss is caused in part by East Anglia’s position. As the sea rounds the north coast of Britain and funnels down towards the Channel, it picks up speed and momentum. Caught between island and continent, and driven onwards by the wind, it strikes East Anglia’s protruding coastline with huge force. Since that coastline is geologically unstable, the land cannot resist. The cliffs are built up from layer upon layer of clay, chalk and sandstone, all with differing densities and all with differing capacities to resist the sea. Each accumulated winter’s worth of gales undercuts the cliffs a little further, while rainwater sidles between the expanding cracks and pushes yet more of the county over the edge. Over the centuries, the North Sea has managed to eliminate around eleven separate towns along this stretch of coastline. The most famous is Eccles. Originally a village of 2,000 acres, it ended up with its church tower stuck like a rock stack in the middle of the advancing beach.

  Travelling round East Anglia in 1722, Daniel Defoe was struck by the process of erosion. Orford, he noted, ‘was once a good town, but is decayed, and as it stands on the land-side of the river, the sea daily throws up more land to it, and falls off itself from it, as if it was resolved to disown the place, and that it should be a sea port no longer’. And Dunwich ‘is manifestly decayed by the invasion of the waters . . . [it] is, as it were, eaten up by the sea; and the still encroaching ocean seems to threaten it with a fatal immersion in a few years more.’ The Haisborough Sands, now eight miles out to sea, were once part of the mainland. Bromholm Priory was eleven miles inland in the twelfth century; now it is half a mile from the coast. In just under four decades, between 1915 and 1953, Caister was supposed to have lost 200 foot of beach. The local response to the sea’s encroachments has been to keep adapting. In many areas sea defences have been built and have held, but in some parts of the county the population has had—almost literally—to pick up its buildings and run. At Sidestrand, when the old church was threatened with immersion in 1880, it was moved stone by stone a mile or so inland.

  The changeable coastline is part of the reason that the east coast has so few safe harbours. Here, what you see is what you get. And what you get are variations on the basic theme: high cliffs, a deep sea bed, long fingers of corrugated rock poking out from the coast, a sandy beach with rocks below. Offshore, ships had to pick their way past several notorious sandbanks: the Dudgeon, the Gunfleet, the Kentish Knock, the Haisborough. Captains negotiating their way southwards would be faced with a gamble: to give the coast a wide berth—avoiding the major hazards, but also increasing the danger if bad weather overtook them—or to sidle along close to the coastline and hope they would have time to bolt for the closest land. Ships caught somewhere in the 150-odd miles of ocean between the Humber and Harwich had no choice but to run before the wind or to risk calamity. Though in many places breakwaters and sea defences were constructed, a high sea often made it impossible for boats to nip back safely between the harbour walls. Even in relatively placid conditions, vessels could also find themselves trapped on a lee shore and drifting towards the submerged rocks. Ships heading down from Thurso would find themselves plummeting towards Morayshire’s coastline, while boats from Scotland and the north east would collide with Norfolk’s unforgiving flank.

  The skippers of vessels in these waters knew what was going to happen, and they knew that—very likely—there was nothing they could do about it. The consequences of that danger can be understood just by
glancing at a map of the distribution of the RNLI’s lifeboat stations around the British coast. The south and south-west coasts are well covered, but there are also areas where fewer stations have been established: nothing between Portree and Lochinver, only one along the north coast, surprisingly few around Oban. The east coast has about ten lifeboats to every inch: Dunbar, St Abbs, Eyemouth, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Seahouses—at times it seems almost as if there must be a boat for every inhabitant.

  That disproportion is also played out in the statistics. As previously explained, it is not Cornwall or the Pentland Firth which have the dubious honour of the highest number of shipwrecks per mile of coast. It is Durham, a tiny county with a tiny sliver of coastline, with 43.8 losses per mile. Further south, Norfolk has 25.6 and Suffolk 25, both of which make south Cornwall’s total of twenty wrecks per mile seem almost modest. Further north, over 1,200 casualties have been identified in the stretch of coastline between Duncansby Head and Stonehaven. Much of that total is explained by the type of traffic using the North Sea. Generally, the Atlantic got the glamour and the North Sea got the work. Shipping around the west or south was rich and varied, but on the east, there was coal. Just coal. Coal from Newcastle and to Newcastle, coal from northern ports to southern ones, and—later—coal to fuel the colliers themselves. Occasionally, for variety, there would be fishing boats, passenger steamers, or freighters carrying goods to the Continent. That comparative uniformity of traffic, and the fact that the majority of vessels were making short journeys close to the shoreline, does much to explain the atrocious casualty rate.

  All of which makes the history of wrecking in the area something of a curiosity. It was one thing for the Cornish to plunder an East Indiaman stuffed with desirable merchandise, but it was quite another for someone in Norfolk or Lincolnshire to wreck a collier owned or crewed by someone as poor as the wreckers themselves. Though they might get some temporary warmth from the stolen coal, the boat would not be worth much. It would have no special equipment and no costly navigational equipment—nothing but the basic boat-building materials they could have found on their own doorsteps. Worse, since that collier or fishing vessel might belong to a port only a few miles away from the wreckers’ own territory, there was the very real possibility that looters were merely robbing their own kind.

  Nevertheless, wrecking remained as animated here on the east coast as it was in other quarters of the country. When Daniel Defoe reached East Anglia he claimed to be ‘surprised to see, in all the way from Winterton, that the farmers and country people had scarce a barn or a shed, or a stable; nay, not the pales of their yards and gardens, not a hogstye, not a necessary-house but what was built of old planks, beams, wales and timbers etc the wrecks of ships, and ruins of mariners’ and merchants’ fortunes’. More than a century later, the situation had not altered much. In February 1837, the 160-ton Raby Castle was wrecked and driven on to the beach at Cley while on its way from London to Stockton with a valuable general cargo. Both crew and passengers were rescued, but as the Norwich Mercury later reported, a free-for-all ensued:

  Immediately after she broke up, the beach was strewn with Spirits, Wine, oranges, nuts, toys, Hampers, boxes etc. The scene beggared description. The most outrageous and beastly conduct was exhibited. There, might be observed a group breaching a spirit cask and letting it run into their oilskins, hats, shoes etc. There, another stood filling their pockets and handkerchiefs. Further on, another party secreting a cask etc, until a more favourable opportunity presented itself of disposing of it, and all this in the face of day and in a civilised country. Plunder, wholesale plunder appeared to be the order of the day in spite of contingents of coastguard men. Many who were charged to watch the property became themselves intoxicated. Many were conveyed from the beach, literally dead drunk, and it is with disgust that we add that many women were in the same state.

  So effective were the wreckers that only £800 worth of goods were recovered from a cargo originally valued at £5,000. As J. M. Bate, the commanding coastguard officer for the area subsequently reported, his men had an additional problem in persuading the wreckers to stop looting. ‘In many cases, the [Coastguard] have difficulties to contend with, it appearing to be a generally conceived opinion that they act without authority, and are doing so from interested motives.’ If the wreckers regarded the Coastguard as mere criminals in uniform, in other words, then it was not surprising that robbery went unchecked.

  One hundred miles further north, the Haddingtonshire Courier was roused to popeyed horror by the events of October 1864. During a heavy storm, a ‘neat and well-built’ French schooner named the Louise was driven onto the reefs near Scoughall on the North Berwickshire coastline on a Saturday night. As with the SS Politician on Barra, the Louise was carrying a cargo of hard liquor, though in this case the drink in question was not whisky, but brandy—no tons of it, half in casks and half in bottles. By the time the crew and skipper had been rescued, the brandy had begun to float ashore. ‘Truth compels us to state,’ continued the Courier, ‘that, in connection with the stranded cargo, the conduct of many of the country people who had been attracted to the spot was in the highest degree reprehensible. We are willing to believe that it was not till after the last man was landed from the vessel that they began to help themselves to the brandy; but, once they commenced, they were not slow in availing themselves of the opportunity to make themselves for once at least in their lives acquainted with the taste of genuine cognac. One cask after another, which had been washed out of the bottom of the wreck and partially stove in, was surrounded by groups of country people—young lads and boys being among the number—and the contents drank of so freely and recklessly that scores of them sank down beside the barrels in a state of helpless intoxication . . . The scene witnessed on Sunday afternoon on the wreck-strewn beach at Scoughall was utterly disgraceful to the character of the people who took part in it, and would seem to indicate that where strong drink can be surreptitiously obtained, neither the honesty of some of our Scottish peasantry nor their respect for the sacredness of the Sabbath are proof against their desire to get it.’

  Sabbath or no Sabbath, the ‘Scottish peasants’ were obviously not that quick off the mark; out of 2,000 casks of brandy, 1,000 were ultimately preserved by the coastguard intact. In a subsequent letter to the Courier, the local customs official, Mr Brodie, attempted to restore a little of his countrymen’s dignity. ‘All that were found intoxicated—and their numbers were greatly exaggerated—were Irish or farm labourers from a distance, and strangers to me,’ he wrote. ‘It is a pity that the disgraceful conduct of a very few should detract from the meritorious conduct of the many.’ However his version of events is contradicted by one local woman born after the event who was told that ‘everyone drank brandy, and it is said even the pigs were drunk. The inhabitants hid brandy on the links and then drank so much that when they again became sober, they could not remember its whereabouts.’

  If the Raby Castle and the Louise illustrated the conventional side of east coast wrecking, then there were other elements which were not so familiar. The most striking variation was in the evolution of the Norfolk beach companies. Beachmen were a singular breed, combining the roles of salvor, hoveller, pilot, fisherman, lifeboatman and wrecker all in one semi-official package. In the century or so between 1780 and 1870, a series of companies were established along the length of the north Norfolk coastline, each with its own boats, look-out posts and equipment, and each with between twenty and thirty members. Like the hovellers of the Kent coast, the beach companies evolved as a response both to the need for guiding and provisioning the ships passing their stretch of coastline, and in order to take advantage of the almost limitless opportunities for salvage. Unlike the hovellers—or, indeed, wreckers in any other part of the country—they were regulated, ordered, paid, and organised all the way from the coxswain at the top to the company cat at the bottom.

  In their own way, many of the beachmen were also legal experts as well. Since
they spent much of their time in court, two or three company men would become fluent in the high grammar of maritime salvage law. In most respects, their boats—the Norfolk yawls—were oversized versions of the Pentland Firth yoles: large, clinker-built, undecked vessels with a single lug sail and enough space for about twenty oarsmen. The yawls were speedy and capacious, with a wide beam, a shallow draught, and a moveable keel which could be hauled on board as soon as the boat touched the beach.

  The first law of all beach companies was that only those who touched the boat were eligible for a portion of the salvage. The rule included the crew and those who helped launch the boat, but not the lookouts or absent crew members. When a vessel at sea in trouble was spotted, lookouts (either posted along the cliff tops or in specially built huts on stilts) would alert the waiting men. A crew of around twenty-five would rush down to the beach and launch the boat into the water, rowing like fury towards the wreck. In most areas along the north Norfolk coastline, there would usually be two or more company yawls competing against each other, so the trip from shore to ship (most likely undertaken during a gale, and in filthy sea conditions) would also be a race, since the first boat alongside the wreck would also be the one which got the best loot. Assuming the vessel had not yet capsized or broken up, they would then begin haggling with the captain, trying to convince him that he and his ship were in mortal danger and that his only chance of saving her was to engage the beachmen. Rookie captains, fearful and responsive, were easily convinced, but experienced ones—especially those who knew the coastline and its companies well—were not. As in Kent, many captains regarded the beachmen as no better than organised extortionists, and were fully aware that as soon as they agreed to take a tow line, they would be sacrificing a sizeable portion of their vessel’s value. In cases where the captain was only a hired hand appointed by a distant shipowner, this was less of a problem. But when the captain was also owner and skipper of his own vessel, or when he feared for his future position, the disputes could be long and acrimonious. In practice, this could lead to the curious sight of a captain debating the finer points of salvage policy with a boatload of beachmen amid the shrieks and cracks of a Force-10 gale. Occasionally, the beachmen hurried the argument along a little. When faced with a particularly intransigent skipper, anchor chains might mysteriously break or otherwise sound hulls spring leaks. In the beachmen’s view, they hadn’t risked livelihood and limb in order to exchange an hour’s worth of legal pleasantries.