Lifeboat Heroes: Outstanding RNLI Rescues from Three Centuries Read online

  Although there were always three crewmembers tending the lifeboat while she was alongside in Cobh, some managed to snatch a little sleep while they were ashore. Early in the morning of the 12th, however, Patrick Sliney and his men were once more negotiating heavy seas as they made their way back out to the lightship. The wind had dropped to some extent and fog had set in; the sea did not seem to go down. This would be a day of standing by. HMS Tenedos had to take her leave but the Isolda, an Irish Lights vessel, was on her way from Dublin.

  The weather was in no mood to give respite. By the evening, the forecast was predicting more gales. The lifeboat could not leave the lightship unattended overnight so she stayed, her crew out of food, utterly exhausted and constantly fighting a battle with gravity as their boat rolled and climbed and plummeted in the heaving Atlantic.

  By daybreak, just after 7am, the coxswain was forced to return to Cobh as his petrol was getting low. By the time he and his crew reached harbour, they had been standing by for more than 25 hours. They were starving and soaked to the skin by the seas which had been breaking over them throughout their vigil. There followed an anxious wait for a fuel to be brought and it was not until late afternoon on the 13th that the lifeboat was back in the vicinity of the lightship. The weather had got noticeably worse and it was getting dark, but at least the Isolda had now arrived.

  Her captain told the coxswain that he would not attempt a tow till the morning and was going to stand by all night. Patrick Sliney knew that, for the second night running, he would have to do the same. The south-easterly gale was growing in strength by the minute. At 8pm a giant wave burst over the lightship and swept away one of the two red lights hoisted at the bow to warn shipping that she was out of position.

  With growing anxiety, the coxswain took the lifeboat round the lightship’s stern where, with the help of the searchlight, he could make out the crew huddled in the stern, their lifejackets on and drenched by every sea as it broke over the vessel. Worse still, the wind was veering more southerly and, if it shifted any more to the west, the lightship could not avoid being swept on to the Daunt Rock which was now only some 60 yards away.

  Another brief exchange between the Isolda’s skipper and the coxswain determined that there was nothing that the support ship could do in such heavy seas but that the men on board the lightship were now in grave danger and needed desperately to be taken off. It cannot have been a more daunting prospect for a lifeboat crew. The vessel was often hidden by breaking seas; when the searchlight did pick her out, she could be seen straining violently at her cable, plunging and rolling to impossible angles and thrusting her stern high into the sky. If that was not enough to ward off any approach, she was also fitted with anti-rolling chocks which stuck out more than two feet on either side of her, threshing the water menacingly as she rolled.

  The least dangerous approach for a lifeboat would normally be to let go an anchor and to drop down with the wind towards the casualty. Patrick Sliney knew this was out of the question here because of the lightship’s cable. Instead, having shouted instructions to her crew, he began a quick run in from astern of her and as he drew close to her port side, called on the crew to jump for the lifeboat. They only had about a second to make their leap — the time in which it took the coxswain to go from full ahead to full astern.

  To remain alongside any longer would have been suicide; the lifeboat could at any moment be crushed as the ship rolled or swept towards the cable at the bow and instantly capsized. On the first approach one man jumped; on the second, no one dared. On the third, five leapt aboard together but on the fourth the lightship swung violently towards the lifeboat and crashed down on her, smashing the guard rails and damaging the fendering and part of the deck. The man working the searchlight leapt out of the way, only just in time and miraculously no one else was hurt. The lifeboat drew back and ran in for a fifth time but neither of the last two men on board would jump. Instead, they simply clung to the rails, apparently frozen with fear.

  The Ballycotton lifeboat crew, including four members of the Sliney family, photographed soon after they had come ashore from their 76-hour mission to the Daunt Rock lightship in February 1936. Left to right: Michael Walsh; Mechanic Thomas Sliney (coxswain’s brother); Second Coxswain John Lane Walsh; John Sliney (coxswain’s brother); Coxswain Patrick Sliney; Thomas Walsh and William Sliney, the coxswain’s son, holding a dog. (RNLI)

  For the next approach, Sliney sent some of his crew forward, something he had resisted up to now for fear of seeing them swept overboard. As the lifeboat came close, they reached up and grabbed hold of the two men, prizing them from their perch and tumbling them unceremoniously onto the deck of the lifeboat. One of them cut his face badly as he hit the deck and the other injured his legs, but they were safe. The lifeboat crew did their best to tend their injuries as Patrick Sliney reported his mission accomplished to the Isolda and set a course for Cobh.

  On the passage back, the strain of the last few days became too great for one of the lightship’s crew and he became hysterical. It was all that the lifeboat crew could do to hold him down to prevent anyone being hurt or knocked overboard. The lifeboat eventually arrived at Cobh at 11pm. The crew spent the night there before setting off for Ballycotton the next morning, arriving home just after midday.

  The Daunt Rock lightship herself did survive the storm. Her cable held long enough to allow the Isolda to attach a tow in more moderate weather on Friday 14th February. She arrived in Cobh harbour that evening.

  The June 1936 issue of the RNLI’s journal, The Lifeboat, deemed the Daunt Rock lightship rescue to be ‘one of the most exhausting and courageous in the history of the lifeboat service’. The Ballycotton crew had been away from their station for 76½ hours, 49 of which had been spent at sea in bitterly cold rain and sleet and under constant onslaught from heavy seas breaking over their open lifeboat. Every man came back suffering from colds and salt-water burns and the coxswain from a poisoned arm. In the 63 hours between leaving Ballycotton and landing the survivors in Cobh, they had only had three hours’ sleep.

  Coxswain Patrick Sliney was duly presented with the RNLI Gold Medal for this service while his second coxswain, John Lane Walsh and his brother and mechanic, Thomas Sliney, received Silver Medals. The remainder of the crew consisting of his other brother, John, his son, William, Michael Walsh and Thomas Walsh were given Bronze Medals.

  Today, more than 80 years on from this epic rescue, the pride of the people of Ballycotton for what that 1936 crew achieved and for the medals they were awarded is still plain to see. The station itself exhibits many mementoes of the event including a plaque on the exterior wall. But it is not just history that continues to inspire the lifeboat operation in Ballycotton, the Sliney and Walsh families are still very much involved. Patrick Sliney’s grandson, Colin, has recently retired from the crew but his son, Tom, is now an active member and represents the fourth generation of his family to go out in the lifeboat. Two other descendants of the Daunt Rock rescue crew are also to be found aboard today’s lifeboat, namely Michael Walsh, the mechanic, grandson of his namesake and Redmond Lane Walsh, grandson of the second coxswain.

  9. Cromer, 6 August 1941

  In one of Henry Blogg’s most famous Gold Medal rescues, six merchant ships from a wartime convoy run aground on Haisborough Sands and begin to break up. Two lifeboats from Cromer and the Great Yarmouth and Gorleston lifeboat rescue all the surviving crews from the six steamers in turbulent and very shallow seas. Of the 119 men saved, Henry Blogg rescues 88.

  Henry Blogg was a man of magnificent deeds but of very few words. His unequalled record of lifesaving and bravery at sea led him to become as famous in his day as any politician, sportsman or film star; yet he must have been a great disappointment to journalists trying to colour their accounts of his rescues with words from the great man. He felt, like many lifeboatmen before and after him, that whatever he told a newspaper would look boastful on the page, so it was better to say nothing.


  It is rare for someone to gain such celebrity without ever living more than a few hundred yards from the house where they were born, but Henry Blogg seldom left Cromer, except when invited to London to receive one of his many awards. On one occasion, during the centenary of the RNLI in 1924, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace along with six other RNLI Gold Medal holders to receive the Empire Gallantry Medal from King George V. When he returned to Cromer, his wife, Ann, was eager to know all about it but all he would say to her was that he felt glad to be home.

  Henry Blogg was born in 1876 to the unmarried Ellen Blogg who, with her other child, Mary, lived with her parents in a fisherman’s cottage in Tucker Street. He was sent to Goldsmith’s School where he showed he was quick to learn and had an unusually retentive memory. He took no part in games, however, never learned to swim and was not good at defending himself against bullies. He left school at 11, by which time his mother had married John James Davies, who was second coxswain aboard the lifeboat. Henry worked for his stepfather who had three fishing boats and very quickly learned the skills required to handle an open sailing and rowing boat. In the summer he would supplement his income hiring out towels and bathing dresses at a penny a time and helping to get the horse-drawn bathing machines down to the water’s edge in the cause of preserving the modesty of Victorian ladies.

  By 1894, at the age of 18, Henry Blogg was deemed a strong enough oarsman to take his place as a member of the lifeboat crew. His stepfather, John Davies, retired as coxswain of the lifeboat in 1902 and Henry was elected second coxswain. By then he was a married man having wed Ann Brackenbury, a local girl, the year before. They had two children, a son who died in infancy and a daughter who tragically did not live beyond her early twenties.

  Blogg bore his personal trials in the same way he handled the vagaries of the sea: with quiet steadfastness. He was a man who did not drink, did not smoke and did not swear, but even as a young second coxswain, he commanded the respect of his fellow crew. His modest humour and kindly nature endeared him to them; his skill as a seaman inspired their confidence; and his resolute decision-making, judgement and fearlessness made them look to him as a leader. In 1909 he was unanimously elected the new coxswain of Cromer lifeboat.

  Even those who understood the qualities of Henry Blogg would never have predicted the extraordinary career he would lead during his 38 years as coxswain. They covered the two World Wars, each of which caused east coast lifeboats to attend an unprecedented number of emergencies. Blogg won his first Gold Medal rescuing survivors from a Swedish ship blown to pieces by a German mine in 1917. He went on to win two more Gold and four Silver Medals, a record of gallantry unlikely ever to be equalled. In all his years as a lifeboatman — he retired at the age of 71 — he had been involved in the saving of 873 lives. It was grimly appropriate that even at his death, seven years later in 1954, it should come after he had collapsed while helping three fishermen, two of them his nephews, whose boat had sunk in sight of Cromer Promenade.

  The Second World War was the busiest and the most dangerous period in Henry Blogg’s career. When the lifeboat launched, he and his men were not only on the lookout for rogue waves, shoals and strengthening winds, there were mines, enemy planes and e-boats to avoid as well. Even if it was often still the sailor’s oldest enemy, the submerged sandbank, especially treacherous off the Norfolk coast, which was the ultimate cause of a shipwreck in those years, wartime conditions such as coastal blackouts contributed greatly to these accidents. They also made search and rescue all the more challenging. Blogg won two of his Silver Medals rescuing crews from grounded merchant ships during the war, the first in 1939 when the Mount Ida was wrecked on the Ower Bank and the second when the English Trader ran onto Hammond Knoll in October 1941.

  But it was in the summer of 1941 when the mettle not only of Cromer lifeboatmen but of the Great Yarmouth and Gorleston crew as well was put most sternly to the test. Before dawn on the morning of 6 August, a convoy of merchant ships, escorted by the destroyers, HMS Wolsey and HMS Vimiera, was making its way south down the east coast of England, travelling through the narrow waterway which was kept buoyed, lighted and swept of mines and which, off the East Anglian coast, was known as E-boat Alley. This was where Allied ships came into the range of the fast German torpedo boats whose raids out of the captured Dutch ports had taken a considerable toll on merchant convoys.

  The weather on this particular morning would have made life difficult for raiders, however. A gale was blowing from the north west with a rough sea and squalls of wind and rain making visibility very poor. It would have been difficult in those conditions to make out the markers of E-boat Alley and as the convoy passed between the notorious Haisborough Sands to port and the Norfolk coast eight miles to starboard, skippers could only follow the ship immediately ahead, trusting that the leading vessel was on course.

  Somehow, though, they were steaming too far to the east and, at about four in the morning, the most easterly vessel struck the sands. Before she could give any warning, five more ships had ploughed into the bank, their stunned crews looking out over an expanse of boiling white water while their stationary vessels shuddered and groaned beneath them as wave after wave broke against the hull.

  Whether the escorting destroyer captains thought at first that the vessels might refloat or that their own ships’ boats would be able to rescue the crews without further assistance is unclear, but it was not until four hours after the groundings that lifeboat help was requested. By then, every available boat was required, the call having gone out to Cromer, Gorleston, Sheringham and Lowestoft. Cromer’s No. 1 lifeboat, H.F. Bailey, launched from her boathouse at the end of the town pier soon after 8am. Henry Blogg and his crew had about 17 miles to cover and were first on the chaotic scene some 1 hour and 40 minutes later. They had been told little other than that their presence was badly needed, so when they came across six steamers, the Oxshott and the Deerwood of London, the Gallois of Rouen, the Taara of Parmu, Estonia, the Aberhill of Methil, Fife and the Paddy Hendly[1] at varying stages of disintegration on the sands, they realised there was an enormous task on their hands.

  Where should Henry Blogg and his crew begin? An R.A.F. aircraft flew overhead, the two destroyers stood off in deeper water and a whaler which had been launched from one of them was attempting to take men off the wrecked ships in the steep breaking seas that rampaged over the sands. Although, against all odds, the whaler had got most of the crew of the Taara to safety aboard one of the destroyers, 12 men from other ships were already dead, drowned in their attempts to swim to the warship’s boat.

  The ship appearing to be in most desperate trouble was the Oxshott. Henry Blogg could only make out her funnel and upper deck as white water cascaded over her decks. He could also discern a dark and shifting silhouette just aft of the tunnel which, as the lifeboat grew close, revealed itself to be a huddle of 16 men, the entire ship’s company, roped together and clinging on to each other or any remaining hand-hold on the engine-room roof. They could feel and hear their vessel breaking up beneath them and knew there was little time left. Blogg very soon realised that there was nowhere left on the ship’s deck to secure a line from the lifeboat and that he had to get as close as possible to get the men off. A gaping crack had opened up in the iron plates on one side of the engine room and without hesitation the coxswain pointed his bow straight at it.

  More than any man, Blogg knew the strength of a lifeboat hull. This was not the first time that he would take the calculated risk of driving his boat right over the deck of a sinking vessel. This time, though, his plan was to wedge his bow into the crack in the ship’s side so that he could hold the lifeboat there with the pressure of the engines while the survivors came aboard. Wave after wave fought to dislodge the lifeboat from her precarious position but each time the coxswain drove her back and held her there while the 16 men scrambled aboard. All the while, seas would wash over the lifeboat and then abandon her so that she would crash down on the deck beneath her kee
l. It was obvious to the crew that she had been fairly badly damaged, although the extent of it they could not tell.

  At last all men were aboard and Blogg shouted to his mechanic to go hard astern. The lifeboat slid off the steamer’s deck and back into the fury of the fast-ebbing shallows. With a grapnel line still attached to the Oxshott, the lifeboat was able to veer down on to the next ship aground, the Gallois. Her decks were still above water and Blogg was able to hold the lifeboat alongside, her head to the seas, while 31 men shinned down ropes or jumped aboard. One of them mistimed his jump and fell into the sea but the Cromer crew were swift to pull him aboard, unhurt.

  With 47 shivering survivors taking up every space aboard the lifeboat and weighing her down in the shallow water, there was an urgent need to offload them. Blogg headed off the sands and steered towards one of the destroyers where the men were exchanged for a few tots of heartening Royal Navy rum. As the lifeboat pulled away from the destroyer’s side, her crew caught sight of the familiar shape of Cromer’s second and smaller beach-launched lifeboat, the Harriot Dixon, which had just arrived on scene and was heading for her sister boat to find out what was required of her.

  Cromer’s second lifeboat, Harriot Dixon, and her crew at sea in 1942. (RNLI)

  When the two lifeboats were alongside each other, Henry Blogg asked his nephew, Second Coxswain Jack Davies, to go aboard the Harriot Dixon and take command. His experience that morning of taking two ships’ crews off the sands would be invaluable in the further rescue attempts. Blogg, aboard the H.F. Bailey, now turned towards the next ship, the Deerwood, whose bridge was the only part of her that was visible above the crashing waves and the only refuge for her 19-man crew. For the second time that day he drove over the bulwarks of the submerged vessel and held his position against the bridge by working the engines, all the time risking more damage to the lifeboat’s hull. With all 19 men aboard, he pulled away and looked about him to see where he should go next.