Like many families in Cromer, before the tourist industry began to develop, the Davies’ made extra money through hovelling or membership of one of the local beach companies. When does he think the beachmen lose their murderous edge? ‘Oh well, you’re going back a long, long time—early 1800s, I should think. Late 1700s maybe. It evolved into the lifeboats. But they were wrecking all the way through. They wreck now.’ The RNLI? The British charity that today has an almost 100 per cent public approval rating, a £100 million annual turnover and a record of saving over 136,000 lives? Is he really serious? ‘There would be wreckers in the lifeboat, yes, of course. They were all wreckers.’
Davies pauses again. It is evident he knows what he’s talking about. ‘If they were called out to a wreck, and they’d got all the crew off safely and they knew the boat was going to sink, what’s to stop them pulling the clocks off the wall, taking the barometer and the compass and the prize? The crew would go aboard with a sack, a screwdriver, a knife, and get what they could. They’d go in the wheelhouse and had a little look around with a screwdriver or something. They’d have the compass off the gimbal if they could get it, they’d have a clock—anything out of the wheelhouse, they’d have anything what was going. The bell . . . You’d know the boat was going to go down soon, and you’d look around the bridge, and you’d think, “I’ll have that.” It would just go to waste otherwise, wouldn’t it?’ Well, yes, but . . .
‘The first priority is get your people off, and if the ship was breaking up, the next priority is to get off what you can.’ He laughs; a huge, contented sound. And did the RNLI know about it? ‘Of course they knew about it. We weren’t pinching from a thing what was still alive, if you get me. If that ship was breaking up, then no-one was going to get it. Now the wreckers nowadays are going there in rubber suits and diving down and wrecking. But we wrecked it before it was underwater.’ So the lifeboat volunteers regarded wrecking as payback for the risks they took? ‘That’s right, yeah. As long as there was no-one hurt over it. You’d save the crew and if you went back the next day to just check over, and she’d gone to pieces, well, you’d just help her out a bit, wouldn’t you? The lifeboat crew would be there at a wreck first, and if they got some perks off it, well . . . They were doing it for free, and they didn’t get much out of it, did they? But you didn’t do it for money. You know, if you could save a life, that’s it.’
On the other hand, there are alternative methods. Why, for instance, did the lifeboatmen not just claim salvage? In cases where the ship can be refloated and towed, the RNLI does still (reluctantly) permit claims by lifeboat crews. ‘Oh, yes, they could claim salvage, but it was much easier just to wreck,’ says Davies. ‘If you were going to do the salvage, you had to have a good solicitor, you needed a Lloyd’s Open Form, you’d need to prove your claim, and you’d be up in front of the courts no question. And the RNLI don’t like them doing it, the RNLI wash their hands of it. You have to pay the RNLI for the fuel, and if you damage the lifeboat, you got to pay for that.’
Any prize was doled out in just the same way as the beachmen had doled things out many generations before. ‘The way it went, the coxswain would share the prize out when they got back home, otherwise the mechanic and the shore crew wouldn’t have got anything. It made it fair that way. It was the coxswain’s job to dole it out fairly—they’d have a raffle sometimes. The hovel would all go in the far part of the lifeboat, and they’d come home and have a share out. They’d put it in lots, so say there was twenty people, and you had twenty lots, and you’d put the lots all in a different place, and then you’d turn the fellow round so he’d be facing all the crew, and someone would shout, “Whose is this?” And he’d say “That’s so-and-so’s.” You’d go all along the line—“Whose is this?” “That’s so-and-so’s.” “Whose is this?” “Give that to my brother”.’
So, I ask, looking around the room—the brass lantern, the engraved mirrors, the polished candlesticks—have you ever done any wrecking? ‘Me?’ He looks up, wide-eyed. ‘Never done any wrecking in my life.’ His wife Julie—a tall, quiet-spoken woman who now manages the family fishmongers—walks into the room. ‘Yes you have,’ she says drily, ‘you’ve wrecked my life.’ Davies roars with laughter. ‘Just after we were married I came back home with some contraband,’ he says after she leaves the room. ‘My wife looked at it, and she looked at me, and she cried. She said, “Is this the kind of man I’ve married?”.’ What kind of contraband was it? ‘Fags, drink. I brought them over from the Continent, and brought them up here stuffed down inside my boots.’ So what was the best wreck you’ve been out to? ‘The wreck itself is good. Any wreck. There’s been some odd things—Henry Blogg [the UK’s most decorated lifeboatman, and a distant relation of the Davies family] had a St Bernard dog once. I’ve found a canary—my mother kept it for years—and the cage as well.’ He points to a couple of things standing in the grate of the fireplace. ‘These are all off wrecks. I’ve got a ship’s lantern there, that was the stern lantern off one, that was. I got that the next day. That old tabernacle there, that come out of another one. My mother’s got a clock, I can’t remember what ship that come off.’
As in other parts of the country, a wreck in Norfolk was an event, an impromptu local festival. ‘During the war, there was a ship that went on the sandbank full of oranges. There was no fruit in the country, and there was that many oranges coming ashore, people was waiting for a full box and the lifeboat was steaming through an orange sea. The sea was all orange, just coloured orange. There was everyone down there. All the women from the country were coming down, biking down with the kids and filling their sacks full of oranges. They hadn’t had no fruit. They started off with anyone who had a van or a vehicle would fill it up with oranges, go up to Norwich market, and start flogging them oranges, because there hadn’t been no oranges during the war, had there? And then there was vanloads going everywhere—London . . . All black market, just orange upon orange.
‘Then there was a general cargo vessel wrecked on some rocks off Cromer, what we call a shoal. It was carrying everything—whisky, tools, dolls, bikes—everything. Being wartime, they had to get everything off. All the fishermen were down there, on the beach. When the tide went out, they could get in the holds, and they started emptying stuff. The lifeboat crew were all down there as well. Everyone had a new bike, my daughter got a new doll, and I got the whisky. Because of the way the ship had settled, there was water slopping in and out of the hold, and some of it had got into the whisky. If you got a clear bottle then it was still alright, but if it was cloudy, the sea-water had got in and you had to throw it down the toilet. That film Whisky Galore—that was everywhere. My mother had three or four bottles in the cistern.’
And what would you do if a ship went ashore today? ‘If a timber ship sank today, you’d still have to have all the wood. Half Cromer would be along the beach with barrows. When it happened in the past, my father and my grandfather would be out there so fast . . . They’d get the wood and they’d make chicken sheds and pig styes out of it and then they’d sell them round the town. The rest of the wood they’d sell to the local builders. The builders knew where it came from, alright. But my father would stop them getting to the beach.’ How? Davies inclines his head. ‘Oh, he’d ask them nicely, of course,’ he says sarcastically. ‘They controlled both sides of the beach. They could stop anyone else getting down there. My grandfather always knew where the ship had sunk, they knew what the tide was doing—the builders didn’t, and it was usually a long time before the coastguard turned up.’Julie comes in again, holding a load of fresh ironing and wanting to know about Davies’s plans for the evening. They talk for a while and I loiter by the kitchen door, looking up at the line of framed RNLI commendations and the paintings of old lifeboats rowing through vast grey valleys of ocean.
A few minutes later I am on the coast road to Sheringham. There on the main street is the local RNLI shop, bright and professional, and filled to the rafters with the kind of things
you never knew you needed: pads to kneel on while weeding the garden, faux fur cushions, clogs, biscuit barrels, lifeboat microfleeces, torches, bird-feeders, sweatshirts, aprons, and the inevitable little model boats. The shops have come a long way since the days when all you could find was a lifeboat tie pin, though at present the shop’s only customer is a fat pigeon with good manners and an eye on the till. This is the familiar side of the RNLI, the spruce red-white-and-blue Institution commanding the boundless goodwill of the British people. Unlike many large UK charities—Oxfam, Greenpeace, Save the Children—it is not affected by a perception that it is a political or campaigning institution. It exists simply ‘to save lives at sea’, and leaves the majority of the campaigning work to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
Standing here in the shop surrounded by tea towels and garden truckles seems a very long way from Davies’s tales of bare-knuckle wreckers. Given the minuscule numbers of prosecutions for wrecking, it would be hard to verify his account, though it undoubtedly makes sense. But he has done no more than to openly state what Matt Lethbridge on the Scilly Isles had hinted at, what David Stogdon in Caithness had guessed, and what I have also been told off the record in several other parts of the country. I also suspect that it is no coincidence that the most highly decorated lifeboatmen are also those who turn out to know most about the RNLI’s shadowy early history. Firstly, the majority come from the old local families who have lived in one area for generations, and who—like Davies—know every last puddle in the place. Modern RNLI volunteers are far more likely to be incomers—dentists and doctors and teachers—who have moved from the city and who want to contribute to their adopted communities. And secondly, the older lifeboatmen’s individual histories speak for themselves; they have nothing to prove.
The RNLI and every other international lifeboat service has for many years considered it an article of faith that to save a life will prove its own reward both in this world and the next, and that no price should ever be put on that service. In fact, like many of the British institutions or services most closely associated with humanitarianism—the lighthouses, the fire brigade, the ambulance service—the lifeboats were originally established not through some sudden collective impulse of compassion, but because it was found to be cheaper to save lives than to waste them. Besides, why should the RNLI have to maintain an image of spotless heroism when their crews were drawn from the same communities as those who built their houses and furnished their parlours with wreck? After all, if you were standing in the wheelhouse of a sinking ship surrounded by a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of electronic equipment or a case of best malt whisky, if you knew the crew and passengers were safe, and if you knew that from now on it was a straight contest between you and the phytoplankton, what would you do? If you’d just risked your life to save the lives of others, then who really has the right to quibble about the disappearance of a clock or a brass compass? I think I prefer my heroes to remain human. And to have boats floating through their flowerbeds.
Epilogue
‘No photographs,’ says Ajay without turning his head. ‘Apologies. Photographs is not permitted at Alang.’ There is a silence. I should have known. The Indian government has never been keen on photography at its official installations, and whipping off a dozen or so films of an internationally infamous ship-breaking yard in a country apparently intent on war with Pakistan seems, on reflection, to have been a little overoptimistic. Outside the car windows, two warthogs bristle at us from the summit of a rubbish heap. Is there any chance of obtaining temporary photographic permits? Another silence, during which both Ajay and Mr Patel try to look as if they do not understand the question. ‘We go at Alang,’ Ajay says, sounding his horn irritably at a passing cyclist. ‘You will see.’
At this time of year, downtown Bhavnagar is a cheerful place. Every few yards, a boy sits by the side of the road, winding an endless line of pink string onto a hexagonal metal frame. Beside the wheels are wooden stalls selling paper kites in bright sugar-spun colours, while passers-by stand and wait to have their choice of kite attached to a length of the string. Out in the street, Ajay has to dodge to avoid the people practising their flying technique in the middle of the road—men in office clothes, schoolchildren, even a couple of policemen. Mr Patel points to the small paper squares dipping through the sky. ‘January every people do kites in Gujarat. Today is people practise for festival.’ I look up. Each of the telegraph wires along the road has a line of torn paper bundles hanging down like multi-coloured fruit bats. A soldier runs across the road in front of us, holding his pink string high above his head, indifferent to the traffic. Ajay opens the car door, spits out a mouthful of betel juice in the soldier’s direction, closes the door and drives on.
Beyond the edges of Bhavnagar, the kite-fliers are replaced by opulent fields of onions and mango trees. Parties of schoolchildren walk along the side of the road, all the girls in dark glossy pigtails and blue uniform salwar kameez, all the boys in shorts. We pass temples, mountains, canyons in the tarmac. Though it is January, it is a hot afternoon. When I open the window, clammy lungfuls of air rush in, flavoured with salt and exhaust fumes. The journey begins to take on a pleasant monotony; emerald fields, stalls, an occasional abrupt thumping as the car’s suspension protests at another pothole. Having recovered from the earlier awkwardness, Ajay has moved on to the safer conversational ground of the caste system. ‘I am Brahmin,’ he says. ‘Bhatt is name for Brahmins only. Brahmins are high caste. Priests and religious peoples only.’ He slaps Mr Patel softly on one knee. ‘Mr Patel is Rajput. Not so high as Brahmin.’ Mr Patel smiles.
Ajay is the younger of the two, and they are professional equals, but it is always Ajay who touches Mr Patel in that affectionate sexless Indian way—his arm across the gear stick, the faint click of a gold ring against the back of the passenger headrest. Both of them were born and raised in Bhavnagar. Ajay trained as a civil engineer, spent a while in Bombay and then returned to Gujarat when Alang was set up in 1983, having realised that marine engineering along the Gulf of Cambay was likely to be more lucrative than writing reports on road surfacing aggregates. ‘High margins,’ he says simply, when I ask what brought him back here. ‘Good business, high margin. Here is good work, life, opportunity. At Bhavnagar and Alang I am meet peoples from all countries, have good businesses, be close at Mumbai.’
Ajay takes a couple of calls on his mobile, arguing rapidly and snapping the phone closed with a dismissive flick. Mr Patel stares out of the car windows at the roadside stalls selling tepid Pepsi and the dull blue sky. Once in a while, we pass a truck laden with ropes or stacked with long metal canisters moving slowly down the road. Men crouch on top of the trucks, nesting in the coils of the ropes and watching the countryside pass by.
Twenty kilometres out of Bhavnagar, the scene changes abruptly. Under the shade of a large wooden shed, ten or fifteen lifeboats lie beached in the middle of a field. The sun has faded their paintwork from emergency red to romantic pink, and a thin brown dust covers their gunwhales. A line of lifebelts has been strung from the eaves of the shed above a pile of fire hoses coiled one on top of the other. ‘Scrap,’ says Ajay, nodding towards the sheds. ‘Scrap shipbreak plot.’ The fields of crops and the roadside shrines vanish, replaced by row upon row of small allotments on both sides of the road. A little further on, Ajay stops the car and we get out to wander among the stalls, observed but unchallenged.
Here in the middle of the hot green fields is everything it takes to make a ship except the sea. Vast engine parts turned verdigris with exposure, satellite masts, lifebelts, porthole glass, rolls of lino flooring, stacks of sheet metal, security doors, lists of health and safety rules in Greek and Russian, coffee machines, industrial mixers, a whole empty audience of armchairs, crockery, fridges, anchor chains, ropes, cupboards, filing cabinets, port and starboard lights, an angled pile of files in Serbian, Italian, Turkish, Dutch and Japanese, radar operating instructions, Admiralty lists of lights, a first-aid box, m
irrors, tables, sheets of glass with their edges shining sea-green in the sun, doors, windows, plates, salt and pepper shakers, empty gas cylinders, pots, jam jars, runcible spoons, samovars, colanders, a stack of bright stools, fire exit signs, muster instructions, industrial cake mixers, ancient computers, a Russian station bill, curtain materials arranged by colour, a plan of a long-dead ship’s layout in French, a small icon of the Virgin Mary, a picture-postcard painting of an imaginary rural scene with the legend ‘They Conquer Who Belive [sic] They Can’ written above it . . .
A lopsided ‘LIGHT OFF’ notice bangs softly against a pillar and a stack of dirty mattresses sags in the dust. One plot is selling reading matter: salvage guides in Russian, manuals for long-obsolete electrical parts, bowed paperback copies of Wilbur Smith or Jackie Collins. Another table has a pile of Admiralty Instructions to Mariners dating back to the 1950s. The only thing missing among all this reading matter is the library of porn traditionally considered necessary to keep most ships afloat. Here and there someone crouches beside a large pair of scales, weighing scraps of steel or polishing an unidentifiable lump of metal. Some of the allotments show a very Indian gift for presentation: a line of upended sinks being used to weigh down a shed roof, a skein of ladles and spoons tinkling like wind chimes in the breeze, a stack of colanders with flowers growing through their holes, someone using red and green port and starboard lights as illuminations round a small private shrine to the Hindu god Ganesh. A woman in a dark sari sorts through old materials, holding a remnant of an orange curtain up to the light, haggling idly with the stallholder.
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