Lifeboat Heroes: Outstanding RNLI Rescues from Three Centuries Read online

  Dick Evans, B.E.M., retired as coxswain in 1970 but his second remarkable career with the RNLI was only just beginning. Most lifeboat coxswains would sooner face 40ft waves and a blizzard than stand up before an audience to talk about their adventures at sea. Dick Evans, however, was a natural orator who was able to hold an audience rapt as he recalled in lilting, almost poetic, tones his absolute moments of truth alongside stricken casualties. He was worth a fortune to the RNLI in public relations and was responsible for many wills to be altered in favour of the lifeboat service. He was twice invited to speak at London’s Guildhall, the second time at the RNLI’s 150th anniversary dinner. There was not a dry eye in the house. Neither was there when Dick was ambushed by Eamonn Andrews to appear as the subject of This is Your Life — and he still remains the only lifeboatman to have appeared on the Michael Parkinson’s chat show.

  12. Humber, 14 February 1979

  Coxswain Brian Bevan of the Humber makes history as the only man to win Bronze, Silver and Gold Medals within the space of less than two months. His Gold Medal rescue is to a small Panamanian cargo ship, caught in a Force 9 and sinking 30 miles out in the North Sea. Bevan succeeds in taking off her four-man crew in massive seas with the skipper, the last to leave, hauled to safety minutes before the ship rolls over and sinks.

  Those who volunteer to crew their local RNLI lifeboat soon discover the true meaning of the word commitment. It is not just that you are constantly at the beck and call of a pager which will summon you to sea at the most inconvenient of moments and often for hours on end, you also need to be available for regular exercises, to attend training courses and to become involved in PR and fundraising exercises throughout the year.

  If that is commitment to the cause of saving life at sea, how does one describe the sacrifices made by those who opt to become lifeboatmen at the Humber lifeboat station on the utterly remote tip of Spurn Point? With no other means of employment for miles around, every member of the crew there is full-time with the RNLI. Housing is provided for seven families and each crewmember works five days on, one day off, with every seventh weekend also off-duty. The nearest shop and village school is at Easington, eight miles away, so wives and children of the crew are making almost as many sacrifices to the lifeboat service as their husbands.

  There is no other RNLI station which is run in the same way, but its location, alongside the deep-water channel of the Humber Estuary with easy access to the North Sea, is so advantageous that it is well worth maintaining. The job of coxswain is even more important than usual here because it has to include the duties of the station manager, which means taking the decision to launch the lifeboat as well as commanding her at sea.

  In 1975, Brian Bevan, who had begun his RNLI career as a volunteer crewmember at his home town of Bridlington, was made the new superintendent coxswain at Humber. His father had been in the Navy and then a Coastguard officer and Brian could not keep away from the sea as a boy. He used to skip school to go fishing and, at the age of 12, spent six weeks away from home in Grimsby during the school holidays, working on a fishing boat. He, like so many fishermen, never learnt to swim. He once recalled: ‘I were chucked in at deep end when I were at school. I were frightened to death and I’ve never been in since. Besides, it’s too bloody cold round here for swimming.’

  He was only 28 when he was given the post, which made him the youngest coxswain in the country, but it would not be long before he was setting even more impressive records aboard the Humber lifeboat.

  When he took up his post, the City of Bradford III was still on station. She was a conventional nine-knot wooden hulled Watson class lifeboat which had given sterling service at Spurn Point since 1954. But Humber was one of the busiest lifeboat stations and Brian Bevan knew that a lifeboat of the RNLI’s most modern design, the Arun class, had already been allocated to the station. Although the introduction of the 14-knot Waveney class lifeboat in the late 1960s had moved the speed of all-weather lifesaving up a gear from the plodding eight or nine knots of conventional lifeboats, it was not until the Arun design was perfected and coming on stream in the mid-1970s that a true revolution occurred in the capabilities of the RNLI.

  Superintendent Coxswain Brian Bevan. (RNLI)

  Here was a self-righting lifeboat, capable of 18 knots, with twin 460hp diesels offering lifeboat crews power and manoeuvrability unimaginable aboard a Watson class with her 50hp engines. The speed of the Arun meant that they were being called to emergencies much further out to sea than previously and with her watertight wheelhouse, they had the use of the most sophisticated electronic equipment to assist their search and rescue.

  Thanks to an appeal by the Lord Mayor of Bradford, the Sheffield Lifeboat Fund and a donation from the International Transport Workers’ Federation, City of Bradford IV, the seventh Arun class to be built arrived at Spurn Point in 1977. This was a time when the traditionalists were still somewhat sceptical about the effectiveness of what appeared to them an awkward and oversized vessel. One retired coxswain was heard to remark that it would be like taking a block of flats to sea while others were uneasy about a lifeboat built out of fibreglass — how could plastic be stronger than mahogany?

  If they wanted a young man capable of dispelling such doubts once and for all by his actions aboard their new class of lifeboat, the RNLI made a sound choice placing an Arun under the command of Brian Bevan. Within the space of 46 days, in the winter of 1978/9, he carried out three outstanding services aboard the City of Bradford IV, which earned him the unprecedented accolade of a Bronze, Silver and Gold Medal, all presented at the same ceremony.

  His Silver Medal came after he and his crew spent 12 hours at sea in an easterly gale and blizzards, going to the aid of a Dutch coaster, Diana V, whose cargo of maize had shifted and which was threatening to capsize in heavy seas, more than 70 miles out from Spurn Head. Bevan met the ship as she limped towards the Humber estuary and ran in alongside three times to take off all on board except the skipper. He stayed on board to save his ship, which he did, reaching the Humber with the lifeboat as escort in the early hours of December 31 1978.

  The Bronze Medal was won in equally hostile and wintry conditions only a day after Brian Bevan and his crew had survived the circumstances which had led to his Gold Medal award on St Valentine’s Day 1979. Although utterly exhausted, the crew answered the distress call of a Romanian freighter, the Savinesti, with engine failure 37 miles to the south east of Spurn Point. This time, although no one needed to come off the ship, the lifeboat spent 15 hours at sea standing by in mountainous seas while the freighter limped back to the safety of the Humber.

  What were the circumstances, then, which, barely 24 hours earlier, persuaded the RNLI that Brian Bevan should receive the highest honour for saving life at sea and his crew, Second Coxswain Dennis Bailey, Mechanic Bill Sayers, Assistant Mechanic Ronald Sayers, Dennis Bailey, Jnr, Peter Jordan, Sydney Rollinson and Michael Storey, the Bronze Medal?

  A north-easterly gale, gusting to Force 9 and increasing; snowstorms; midnight. Difficult for any east coast lifeboatman to sleep easily when the weather is in that sort of mood at that time of year. The last thing they want is a call but somehow they expect one.

  It is 13 February 1979. Brian Bevan is woken three minutes before midnight by the Coastguard. A small cargo vessel, the Revi, Panamanian registered and carrying silver sand from France to Newcastle, is in distress 30 miles north-east of Spurn lightvessel. Heavy seas have ripped away her hatch covers and water is entering her hold.

  Brian’s wife, Ann, is drowsily aware of the sound of the gale outside, but she has never seen her husband frightened and has great confidence in his skill at the helm. ‘Tara love’, she murmurs and goes back to sleep.

  Eighteen minutes later and eight men, including the coxswain, are aboard the 54ft Arun class lifeboat, City of Bradford IV. She has slipped her mooring in the shelter of Spurn Point and is heading into the darkness out to sea at full speed.

  Now she is clear of the Hu
mber, climbing and falling from mountainous head seas. The impact into the trough of one 20ft sea opens every electric breaker and plunges the wheelhouse into darkness. The coxswain reduces speed to 14 knots, the waves increase, some as high as 35ft.

  The lifeboat has made 50 minutes of gruelling progress when the Revi puts out an even more urgent distress: she is now slowly sinking. She requests the British ship Deepstone, which is already standing by, to stand in close to. The lifeboat still has eight miles to run.

  The lifeboat crew get their first glimpse of the casualty at 1.36am. Her master, in a desperate attempt to make the River Humber, is steaming at full speed towards them, his ship continually buried by the huge seas. The wind is at Storm Force 10 as the lifeboat takes up station close astern of the Revi.

  A few minutes pass, then the master radios that he is slowing down. He wants two crewmembers taken off. Coxswain Bevan asks him to stop so that he can work out the best way to carry out this apparently impossible request. He tells the master to steer south at slow speed and to have the two men on the boat deck on her starboard quarter, ready to jump.

  Then the lifeboat moves in, fendered on the port quarter and her crew ready on the foredeck, their lifelines secure. The lifeboat edges in under the casualty’s starboard quarter and a huge wave crashes over the port quarter, completely engulfing the coaster’s stern.

  Brian Bevan throttles full astern just in time to see Revi’s bulk fall back down, missing his foredeck by inches. Again and again the lifeboat makes an approach and is forced back, the casualty often towering 20ft above the heads of the men on the foredeck. At last the right moment comes and the two crewmen are able to throw themselves into the waiting arms of the lifeboatmen.

  With two of his men safe, Revi’s skipper hopes to continue the desperate run for the River Humber, but it is not to be. Only five minutes pass before the accommodation begins to flood, the cargo of sand shifts and the ship is listing 45 degrees to port. Now he and the mate must abandon ship.

  His final act at the helm is to turn the bow to the west to give a lee on the low port side. Meanwhile the lifeboat crew are fighting to secure fenders, this time to the starboard side, and to make themselves fast to the pulpit rails. The Revi is clearly sinking, she is down by the bow and seas are sweeping clear across her full length.

  A massive sea breaking clean over both vessels forces the lifeboat contemptuously away from the side of the casualty as Brian Bevan makes his first approach. Unflinching he comes in again; another thunderous wave hurls the lifeboat aside. Only on the twelfth attempt does the sea provide sufficient respite for the mate to jump six feet from his position on the ship’s port quarter. He lands in the arms of the lifeboat crew who break his fall and hurry him below.

  The Revi is now at a crazy angle; her bow is below the waves and her stern juts clear of the water, menacing the lifeboat with a lethal blow if she dares to come close. Her master is praying that the coxswain will dare. He is hanging on for dear life to the outside of the stern rails, ready to jump. Nine times the lifeboat gets close but not close enough. On the tenth the stricken vessel’s stern suddenly soars 20 ft clear of the water and then plummets towards the lifeboat’s foredeck and the crew immediately beneath.

  Only the coxswain’s lightning reaction — ramming the throttles full astern — and the power of the Arun class engines avert a total tragedy, literally by inches. Then three successive seas cover the Revi completely. The lifeboat crew cannot believe their eyes as the water clears and the captain is still seen hanging onto the stern rails. But the ship is about to roll over. Bevan decides on a dash in to the casualty in a trough between two waves. The lifeboat drives in under the port quarter, strikes the stern, but the captain is able to jump. He lands on the very edge of the lifeboat’s deck and is only prevented from being lost overboard by the strong arms of the crew. Five minutes later the Revi rolls over and sinks.

  The four dazed and bedraggled survivors are eventually put ashore at Grimsby and taken into the care of the Mission for Seamen. Brian Bevan and his crew snatch a bite to eat and then sail back across the estuary to their mooring where they arrive at 7.20am.

  Reflecting on the incident several days later, Brian Bevan recalled the moment the Revi’s captain made it safely into the wheelhouse of the lifeboat:

  He’d taken his boots off and he’d cut his foot but he was calm as anything. He said, ‘Are you the skipper?’ I said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and we shook hands.

  You feel very chuffed when you do a job like that, when normal ships are running for shelter and you’re going out.

  He then went on to consider what had led to their success, much of which was patience, waiting for the right moment to make a run in and the right moment to grab a man to safety. He also praised his crew:

  Nights like that sort out the men from the boys. The success of that rescue was the crew. There were eight of us because the second cox’s son had come with us and if there’d been a weak link in the chain we couldn’t have done it. Nights like that you have a full time job watching yourself without having to keep an eye on a weak link. We’re all pretty close.

  13. Penlee, 19 December 1981

  Trevelyan Richards, coxswain of Penlee lifeboat, is lost with his seven-man crew and all those he was attempting to save from the coaster Union Star, driven by a hurricane up against a jagged Cornish cliff-face. This heroic rescue attempt, which earned Richards the RNLI Gold Medal posthumously, had a profound effect, not just on the village of Mousehole where the coxswain and crew had lived, but across the RNLI and the nation.

  For most people in their twenties and even early thirties, the name Penlee will mean nothing. It sounds Cornish, but search for it on a map and you will find neither village nor settlement with that name. For those who can remember some of the events of the 1980s, the name may well conjure up a tragic story about eight brave men which dominated the news in the days before and after the Christmas of 1981.

  Penlee lifeboat takes its name from an insignificant rocky point under the toe of the Cornish peninsula, just beneath the coastal road which runs between Newlyn and the huddled village of Mousehole. Nowadays, Penlee lifeboat is a powerful Severn class which lies afloat in the busy fishing harbour of Newlyn, but in 1981 a 47ft Watson class lifeboat, Solomon Browne, sat in her boathouse at the top of a slipway, built into the rocks of Penlee Point. The boathouse still stands today, just as it was at the moment the lifeboat launched for the last time into the howling night of Saturday 19 December 1981, deliberately and hauntingly preserved as a memorial to her crew.

  Earlier on that Saturday, Mick Moreton, the 32-year-old master of the newly built 1400-ton coaster, Union Star, had seen his well-laid plans begin to come unstuck. Maybe he had not gained permission from his owners, but no one would be any the worse off if he made a slight detour in his ship’s maiden passage from Holland to the Irish Republic to pick up his wife and two teenage step-daughters from Brightlingsea in Essex. It would add about seven hours to the Ijmuiden to Arklow run but he would still be able to deliver his cargo of fertilizer in time and it would give his family a pre-Christmas treat.

  The treat began to turn sour when the weather took a rapid turn for the worse as the coaster progressed down the English Channel. Soon she was corkscrewing through heavy seas, whipped up by gale force winds from the south. The forecast was that these would increase to Force 10 before any improvement could be expected. They were conditions that would certainly put the new ship through her paces, even if they would also convince the skipper’s wife and family never to hitch a ride with him again.

  Then, as darkness fell, the persistent throb of the Union Star’s engine suddenly ceased. Lights flickered and went out, to be replaced by the dim glow of emergency lighting. The only sound was of the wind howling through the rigging and the hull churning in the swell as the vessel rolled drunkenly, broadside on to the weather.

  Ships sometimes break down at sea and can drift for long periods while thei
r engineers make the necessary repairs without it causing undue anxiety aboard. Here, though, however much Mick Moreton was determined to show calm and confidence, he realised that some extra precautions were necessary. At 6.04pm he called up the Coastguard at Falmouth to tell them of his engine problem and his position which by his reckoning — his radar had gone out of action with the power failure — was eight miles east of Wolf Rock. This would put him about six miles off the south coast of the western tip of Cornwall and he would be drifting towards it at a rate which was very difficult to gauge. He asked that a helicopter could be made ready, in case the situation deteriorated.

  In the course of the next 15 minutes Falmouth Coastguard contacted HMS Culdrose where a Sea King helicopter was prepared for action; they also asked the Penlee lifeboat coxswain to anticipate a launch and they radioed the salvage tug, Noord Holland, which was moored in Mounts Bay, off Penzance. It was not an easy situation for the Coastguard officers that night. The message from the Union Star had only been precautionary and they had been given no idea how quickly her engine could be fixed. They had to rely on the skipper to judge the urgency of his predicament and he was still sounding calm and in control and seemed far from issuing a Pan broadcast, (i.e., ‘Urgent help required but not in imminent danger’), let alone a full Mayday. He had also refused a tow from the Noord Holland, fearing a large bill for his owners which still might not be necessary.

  But with the ferocious weather that night, the Coastguards were extremely concerned. A sector officer was sent to the Land’s End station to try to locate the Union Star on the radar. It soon became clear that she was drifting towards the shore at a far greater rate than her skipper had supposed. By 7pm she was barely three-and-a-half miles from the coast. At roughly the same time, her engineer had diagnosed the engine problem: seawater had somehow got into the fuel supply. Even in calm conditions it would have taken a good two hours to remedy. Now, hurled about the engine-room and in semi-darkness, a miracle was needed for the task to be accomplished in twice that time.