Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (3 page)

The Penlee Lifeboatmen

Mousehole is a dream of a Cornish fishing village: white painted granite cottages, a single winding cobbled street with a few lanes running off it. Lying three miles to the west of Penzance, it probably takes its name—pronounced “Mowzol” in the Cornish way—from the narrow entrance to its harbor. One of the breakwaters was built at the end of the 14th century, the other 1,000 years before that. The harbor mouth can be closed with wooden beams, to keep out tidal surges. Southerly gales have long been the bane of this part of Cornwall, and Mousehole is a place that has learned the ways of the sea.

Tradition has it that as the village prepared for Christmas one year long ago, the sea was too rough for fishing boats to venture out. With the inhabitants facing starvation, one Tom Bawcock braved the gale and landed enough fish to feed every man, woman and child. The catch was turned into “Stargaz y Pie,” in which the fish are cooked whole with their heads sticking up through the crust. This is the dish still eaten in the village every December 23—Tom Bawcock’s Eve—at least by those who know their history.

Dylan Thomas spent time hereabouts and may have immortalized the atmosphere in his imagined village of Llareggub in
Under Milk Wood.
In recent years Mousehole has been taken over by “second-homers” who’ve pushed house prices beyond the reach of locals. Now most of the cottages overlooking the harbor lie empty for 10 months of the year while their owners earn city salaries to pay for their part-time dreams. And while they sleep elsewhere, their empty houses in Mousehole are left, as the Welshman once said of other homes, blind as moles. Thomas told a friend he’d written his play after World War II to remind himself there was still beauty in the world. And yet, “the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widow’s weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

During the Middle Ages the harbor bade farewell to pilgrims making for Santiago de Compostela and the Holy Land. In 1595 it was raided and burned to the ground by Spanish soldiers. Dolly Pentreath, the last person to speak only Cornish, died here in 1777 at age 102, and there’s a memorial to her in the local church.

In a place of honor nearby is a memorial to eight Mousehole men who knew the sea and so understood—in the way that only seafaring men do—the danger they faced as they answered a call for help on the night of December 19, 1981.

The Morton family was having an unusual start to the Christmas holidays that year. Henry Morton was the captain of a brand-new 1,400-ton coaster, the
Union Star.
She was on her maiden voyage from the Dutch port of Ijmuiden to Arklow in Ireland’s County Wicklow with a cargo of fertilizer. So they could all be together for the festivities, Morton had collected his wife Dawn, 32, and her two teenage daughters Sharon, 16, and Deanne, 14, en route. Counting the captain, there was a crew of five. The addition of Morton’s family brought the head count to eight. In fact, Dawn was several weeks pregnant so perhaps nine was a more accurate total of the lives aboard.

By December 19 they were in trouble. The weather had deteriorated during the trip and by teatime that day they were in the grip of a full-blown hurricane, 60-foot waves and winds gusting to 100 miles an hour. Eight miles east of the Wolf’s Rock lighthouse in southwest Cornwall the
Union Star’
s engine failed. Seawater got into the fuel line somehow, and despite the efforts of Morton and the rest of the crew they couldn’t get her started again. She was dead in the water.

The first offer of help came from a nearby Dutch tug, the
Noord Holland
, also making her way through the English Channel that night. Her captain wanted to put a line aboard the
Union Star
and take her in tow—but that would have made her “salvage” and Morton
balked at the cost. Unaware of how much danger he was in, he told the
Noord Holland
thanks but no thanks and turned instead to the rescue services.

“
Union Star
calling Land’s End Coastguard,” he said calmly into the radio. “We are approximately eight miles east of Wolf’s Rock. Engines have stopped and we are unable to get them started at the moment.”

A Sea King helicopter was scrambled from the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose and word was sent to alert the lifeboat crew at Mousehole.

Fifty-six-year-old coxswain William Trevelyan Richards was at home watching television with his widowed mother, Mary, when he got the call. Some of his crewmen, he knew, would be in Mousehole’s Ship Inn. It was the last Saturday night before Christmas and, bad weather or not, celebrations were already under way. The rest of the men were likely at home with wives and families, listening to the worst storm in living memory as it screamed its fury at the sea and sky.

Trevelyan Richards put on his coat, said goodnight to his mom and stepped out of the door into the howling dark. Down at the Ship Inn he asked for quiet and told them the situation. He needed seven volunteers and a dozen men raised their hands, including the pub’s landlord, Charlie Greenhaugh.

Down at the boathouse, fish salesman and lifeboatman Nigel Brockman, 43, turned up accompanied by his 17-year-old son, Neil. They’d been at home watching television with the rest of the family when word of the call-out reached them. Neil was a crewman too—a volunteer of just a few months’ standing, but Trevelyan Richards wouldn’t risk two members of the same family on such a night and refused to take him along.

“I was absolutely gutted,” Neil told a newspaper 25 years later. “If you’re on the crew, you always want to go.”

The lifeboat was the
Solomon Browne
, a 47-foot Watson Class vessel—shaped a bit like those little Royal National Lifeboat Institution collection boxes seen on the bars of pubs throughout the British Isles. “Funded entirely by voluntary contributions,” they say. She was built in 1960 at a cost of £35,000—the money coming from the wills of three women, Miss Lydia Mary Dyer Browne of Launceston, Miss Sara Wilhelmina Davies of Timperley, and Miss Blanche Waterhouse of Huddersfield. This is the way and the form of the RNLI—it’s a gift we make to each other.

She bore the unmistakable livery of purple hull and orange cabin—colors which, in the seas around the British Isles, mean so much more to stranded mariners than the reds and yellows of onshore rescue vehicles mean to British drivers. Nothing compares to the sight of an orange and purple outline appearing over the horizon of waves, its crew made larger than life by their puffy waterproofs and crash helmets, and bearing down upon you with the promise of continuing existence. “Guardian Angel” is an expression that’s bandied about quite a lot nowadays—but the men of the RNLI are the real deal.

Although the
Solomon Browne
was crewed by Mousehole men, she was stationed at Penlee Point and was generally known as the Penlee lifeboat. There had been a lifeboat there since 1913, and 91 people had owed their lives to the bravery of its crews down through the years. Many medals had been awarded to crewmen past and present before that night of all nights on December 19, 1981.

The men who climbed aboard along with Trevelyan Richards were second coxswain James Stephen Madron, 43, assistant mechanic Nigel Brockman, 43, emergency mechanic John Blewit, 43, Charlie Greenhaugh, 46, Barrie Torrie, 33, and 23-year-olds Kevin Smith and Gary Wallis.

It took masterful seamanship to get the
Solomon Browne
out onto the water that night. By the time those men arrived at their lifeboat station they were fighting to stand up in the face of a full-blown
hurricane—the kind of weather event most of us will never even see. Yet they looked out into the dark of that winter’s night, at 60-foot waves whipped up by 100-mile-an-hour winds, and decided to get aboard a 47-foot boat and head out into it. Remind yourself that they’re volunteers, who do the job because they know what it’s like to be on the sea when it all goes wrong. They understand what it means, and rather than stay safe on dry land while it all plays out, they find it easier to go out there and help. I find it almost impossible to imagine bravery like that.

The very existence of the RNLI is down to one Englishman, a Yorkshire-born Quaker called William Hillary, who never learned to swim. They say that in the old days, fishermen and sailors chose not to master the art—it gave them more respect for the sea.

In the days before he concerned himself with the plight of shipwrecked sailors, William was a soldier and adventurer who used his wealthy first wife’s money to fund a private army to stand against any invasion by Napoleon. King George III eventually gave him a baronetcy for his trouble.

In 1808 Sir William moved to the Isle of Man, with a new wife, and there he heard many tragic tales of local lives lost to the sea. The worst had been the loss of the Manx fishing fleet in 1787, when around 50 ships and more than 160 crewmen drowned in Douglas Bay. Caught out in a storm and running for safe haven, they foundered on rocks. There was no rescue service then, of course, and no one thought of making an attempt to pluck those souls from their watery graves.

And then in October 1822, Sir William watched with his own eyes as the Royal Navy cutter
Vigilant
made an attempt to sail out of Douglas Bay into a storm. She was caught by the wind and waves and driven onto rocks.

Sir William ran from his home overlooking the bay, down to the harbor wall, and there promised to pay any men who would help
him crew a rowing boat and make some effort to help the sailors. Enough volunteers stepped forward to man two boats and they braved the storm to reach the stricken vessel. Fixing lines to the
Vigilant
, they managed to pull her back toward shore—close enough for rockets to be fired from the beach, carrying hawsers that could be used to draw her closer still. Despite ever-worsening conditions, Sir William and the rest of his volunteers then rowed back and forth between the
Vigilant
and the beach, eventually saving nearly 100 lives.

Sir William saw at once the need for an organized rescue service, teams of men all around the coast ready to brave the worst weathers for the sake of those in peril. He began a campaign and by 1824 the ‘National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck’ was born. In time it would be renamed the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Down through all the years from that day to this, the RNLI has remained independent and voluntary. Government doesn’t pay for it, so the men in gray suits don’t get to say how it’s run, which is probably just as well.

For his bravery during the subsequent rescue of members of the crew of the
Fortrondet
, Sir William was awarded one of three gold medals he would collect during his time as a lifeboatman. Of more significance to him that day, though, was the fact that he was accompanied during the rescue by his son Augustus, who received a silver award. It would not be the last time that a son would follow a father into the role of lifesaver.

The steep slipway was being pounded by waves as big as houses, but perfect timing and judgment from Trevelyan Richards enabled them to break through into deep water and head off toward the last known position of the
Union Star
. It was 12 minutes past eight.

First to the scene, however, was the
Sea King
helicopter, flown by Lieutenant Commander Russell Smith, a United States Navy pilot on exchange with the Royal Navy.

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.