Lifeboat Heroes: Outstanding RNLI Rescues from Three Centuries Read online

  He headed for the Aberhill, lying in the surf with her back broken. Then he noticed another lifeboat along the steamer’s lee side, amidships. She was the Louise Stephens, having battled her way up from Great Yarmouth and Gorleston and her coxswain, Charles Johnson, and his crew had got lines aboard the ship to secure her long enough for the entire crew of 23 to be taken off. Meanwhile, Cromer No. 2 lifeboat had made for the Taara where eight men were still waiting to be rescued. This ship had also broken her back and both her stern and her bow were under water. Using a similar technique to Henry Blogg, Jack Davies held his boat against the steamer’s bridge, working the engines and keeping his head to wind and sea while the men clambered aboard.

  The tide was still ebbing but there was still a sixth ship, the Paddy Hendly, to attend to. It was Henry Blogg’s turn again, and once more he steered the lifeboat alongside and held her there while the last 22 men leapt aboard. Now the water had become so shallow and the lifeboat so weighed down with survivors that she began to bump the bottom as she pulled away from the wreck. Then the lifeboat came to a sudden halt as the entire length of her keel dug into the sand. Any sea breaking over her now would capsize her and wash every man aboard away. Coxswain Blogg watched helplessly as a very large wave loomed up on the port side. To everyone’s huge relief, it broke just before it reached them and lifted the lifeboat off the bottom. The engines were thrust full ahead and in 20 yards, they were back in the deep water.

  It was 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Three lifeboats had saved the lives of 119 men. Two more lifeboats, from Sheringham and Lowestoft, arrived on the scene to find that the rescue was over and so turned for the long and gruelling journey home. Harriot Dixon, the Cromer No. 2 lifeboat, transferred her survivors to a destroyer and headed back to Cromer beach. The larger Cromer lifeboat could not have been rehoused up her slipway in that weather, so she followed the Great Yarmouth and Gorleston lifeboat back to Gorleston Harbour. Before she got there she met a destroyer and put the 41 men from the Deerwood and Paddy Hendly aboard her.

  By the time the H.F. Bailey tied up alongside at Gorleston, she had been at sea for nine hours. Blogg and his crew made their way to the Mariners’ Home for food and hot baths, possibly reflecting on the extraordinary seaworthiness of their boat in spite of the damage that day’s work had inflicted on her. She had three holes in her bow; eight feet of her stem had broken away along with 20ft of fender. The brass bolts that had held the stem in place had been driven inwards through eight inches of oak and had pierced the air-cases inside the hull.

  This epic rescue not only yielded Henry Blogg’s third Gold Medal, but also Silver Medals for Jack Davies, (who took command of Cromer No. 2 lifeboat on the sands), and for the Great Yarmouth and Gorleston coxswain, Charles Ambrose. Leslie Harrison, coxswain of Cromer No. 2 boat, his mechanic, Harold Linder, Blogg’s mechanic, Henry Davies, and the Great Yarmouth and Gorleston mechanic, George Mobbs all received the Bronze Medal.

  Henry Blogg was further honoured for this rescue when he received the British Empire Medal, the news of which came only very shortly after he had heard that the Empire Gallantry Medal he had been awarded in 1924 was to be replaced with the George Cross. He remains, to this day, the only lifeboatman to have received this award.

  10. Humber, 6 January 1943

  Robert Cross, legendary coxswain of the Humber lifeboat, based at Spurn Point, spends a gruelling night in an easterly gale among the wartime defences and sandbanks at the mouth of the Humber. He first rescues five men adrift on a floating gunnery platform, then he takes 19 men off a Royal Navy trawler which had run onto a shoal.

  Unless you are a seafarer or a hardened wildlife enthusiast, you might be hard put to locate Spurn Point on a map of England. It is certainly not a place you would happen upon by accident. It consists of a three-and-a-half mile long spindle of sand and shingle which curls south and westward into the mouth of the River Humber at the southern end of a sweep of the Yorkshire coast which begins at Flamborough Head.

  The narrow spit is only 55 yards wide at certain points and in recent years the fragile roadway along its length has been washed away by high tides and heavy seas on a number of occasions, isolating its more bulbous head from the mainland. Any visitor to this beautiful but desolate spot may not think that too important until they arrive at the very tip where they will find evidence of more human activity than they probably expected.

  Spurn Point has always provided a highly strategic base for Humber pilots who are able to meet vessels entering the estuary to guide them into Grimsby, Immingham, Hull or Goole. Their operation today is part of the Associated British Ports’ establishment maintained at Spurn to control all the shipping entering and leaving these ports. Until the need for a lighthouse was supplanted by electronic navigation equipment in 1986, Trinity House have always had a major part to play, originally responsible for the pilots and maintaining the light. They also ran a lifeboat station at Spurn from 1810 until 1911 when the responsibility was handed over to the RNLI.

  From the outset, the RNLI realised that the only way to guarantee a lifeboat’s availability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in this remotest of places was to keep a crew permanently housed at Spurn. Unlike every other station of the RNLI, the crew would have to be full-time as there was no other way of earning a living on the peninsula. Houses were built for them and their families and a unique lifeboat community was established which endures to this day.

  One man, Robert Cross, knew the station both before and after its adoption by the RNLI. He joined the crew at Spurn in 1902 and stayed there for six years until he had saved up enough money to buy a share in a drifter when the herring industry was at its height. Barely a year into his new occupation, however, a tragic event affected him profoundly and changed his life forever. Several cobles had been caught out in a gale and he volunteered to go out with the Flamborough lifeboat to look for them. Two of the cobles were lost, one of them with Robert Cross’s brother and two nephews aboard. From that day he decided his mission in life was to save people from the sea and turned to the RNLI for a permanent post. It was how he came to be appointed the first RNLI coxswain at Spurn Point, a position he would hold until November 1943 and which would make him one of the most decorated lifeboatmen to have lived.

  His career as coxswain, similar to that of his famous east coast contemporary, Henry Blogg, spanned both world wars and was exceptionally busy, not just because of war casualties but because of the immense amount of traffic using the waters around the Humber Estuary in times of war and peace. By the declaration of the Second World War, Robert Cross’s record was already an extraordinary one with two Silver Medals and a Bronze to his name, all for rescues to vessels trapped on the treacherous sandbanks which litter that part of the coast. In October 1939 he again risked life and limb saving seven men by breeches buoy from their trawler, aground on the Inner Binks, a notorious shoal close to Spurn Head. He had not yet been presented with the third Silver Medal this rescue had earned him when, the following February, he and his crew were called to another trawler, the Gurth, foundering on a shoal to the south of the estuary. In gale force winds, snow and total darkness, Robert Cross, in spite of a vicious ebb tide, repeatedly manoeuvred his lifeboat alongside the swamped trawler and took off her nine-man crew. The RNLI awarded him the Gold Medal this time, and he also learned that he would become the first person ever to receive the newly instituted George Medal.

  A year later, in February 1941, Cross was again involved in a medal rescue, this time a bar to his Bronze, when he took the lifeboat into an area thick with enemy mines to rescue the crew of a ship flying barrage balloons which had run aground on the southern shore of the estuary. By now the mouth of the Humber had become a navigational nightmare. Hidden sandbanks were the least of any skipper’s concerns. German mines could be lurking anywhere, dropped by aircraft for whom the Humber was a prime target. Much had been done to guard the estuary from attacks from the air and by submarine but these defences were as much a haz
ard as a help to the local lifeboat and all friendly shipping.

  Two steel forts, built on piles above the sandbanks, overlooked the estuary from either side. Between them a defence-boom ran right across the river-mouth, a three-mile line of buoys with massive balks of timber chained between them, each one bristling with steel spikes. Suspended beneath these timbers were steel nets reaching to the sea-bed, ready to trap any submarine raiders intent on causing havoc up-river. All the Humber’s legitimate traffic had to pass through a 100-yard gap in the boom, between the gate-ships which could lower and lift the nets, and keep to a narrow channel which would be cleared morning and evening by minesweepers.

  Guns, searchlights and mines were hidden in the dunes of Spurn Point and iron hedgehogs were set on the sand below high-water to prevent enemy aircraft from landing on the beach. Anchored just inside the defence boom lay the Phillips defence units, huge iron buoys mounted with anti-aircraft guns together with military trawlers flying balloons.

  However much these defences may have deterred a human enemy, they only served as playthings for the Humber’s much older adversary: the easterly gale. On the evening of 6 January 1943 a brutal, freezing wind carrying horizontal snow came whipping off the North Sea. For anyone daring to put their head out of doors at Spurn Point, the pummelling of the gale and the crashing of an angry sea meeting the strong ebb tide out in the estuary, would be all that they could hear. Robert Cross could well imagine what the people out in the thick of it, manning the gate-ships and the defence units, were having to endure. Then, shortly before 8pm, he knew that he and his crew would have to go out there too.

  The No. 1 Phillips defence unit had broken adrift from its mooring and had run onto the north side of Trinity Sand, inside the boom. The lifeboat station at Spurn was positioned just on the seaward side of the boom so it meant that Robert Cross would have to take his twin-engine, 45ft 6in Watson class lifeboat, City of Bradford II, through the gap to reach the stranded gunners. As they headed towards it, the crew of one of the gate-ships attracted their attention and, using a megaphone, was able to tell them they could turn again for home; a tug had got to the unit and towed it to safety. The lifeboat crew were thankful for such a short mission on a night like that, they had been at sea for less than half an hour.

  Just as the laborious process of re-housing the lifeboat at the top of the slipway was complete, the telephone rang again. A trawler was aground on the Binks, on the south-eastern side of the head. Robert Cross knew, with an ebbing tide, that the lifeboat would not be able to get close to her and, cold and miserable though her crew would be, that the trawler would lie quiet on the sands until the flood tide. He sent his crew back home, advising them to get some sleep as they would be needed in the early hours of the morning when the tide came in.

  The gale would not allow them to wait until then. At 10.50pm the telephone rang in the coxswain’s house again. It was the port war signal station to say that another of their Phillip’s defence units, No. 3 this time, had broken adrift from her moorings and was entangled in the boom on its inner side. The crew were summoned from the beds they had just crawled into and hurried down to the lifeboat station. From there they could see red distress rockets shooting skywards from the defence unit and the men on board making desperate signals for help. At any moment the ebb tide could sweep them over the boom and out to sea.

  The 45ft 6in Watson class lifeboat City of Bradford II, stationed at Spurn Point between 1929 and 1954, launches into the Humber (P.A. Vickery)

  Searchlight operators from the shore directed their beams onto the scene as the lifeboat approached from the seaward side. They were of arguable value to the coxswain as they tended to blind him and his crew as often as they showed the way. Robert Cross nevertheless succeeded in placing the bow of the lifeboat against the boom four times, enough to allow all five gunnery men to jump aboard. The yard-long spikes protruding from the boom had done the job they were put there for, however, inflicting serious damage to the lifeboat’s stem and bow planking.

  Fortunately, the damage was by no means enough to put an RNLI lifeboat out of action and Robert Cross headed back to the station to land his survivors. By now there was no point in re-housing the lifeboat as she would soon be needed for the stranded trawler, so he tied up alongside a patrol vessel to wait for the flood tide.

  Just after 3am the next morning, the lifeboat cast off, rounded the head and, despite the heavy snow showers and pitch darkness, found the Admiralty-owned trawler, Almondine, lying on her side on the sands. A strong spring flood tide was swirling over the Binks at a rate of six knots and seas appeared to be breaking from all directions. An unequivocal signal flashed from the trawler’s skipper that he wanted her crew taken off. His port side was under water and heavy seas were constantly enveloping the vessel.

  The coxswain began his first approach, head to tide, aiming to come along the trawler’s lee side. He managed this and his crew passed a line to the trawler where it was made fast. Then the tide caught the lifeboat and swung her sharply round; the rope broke, the lifeboat heeled over and her mast crashed against the Almondine, snapping it like a matchstick. With his radio now out of action, Robert Cross prepared for his next run in. In all, he made 12 approaches, dashing in swiftly, first from the trawler’s bow end, then from her stern. All the time waves were sweeping over the lifeboat, hurling her about and occasionally forcing her hard against the trawler. This only added to the earlier damage to her stem and planking which was now holed above the water-line. Sometimes the lifeboat pulled away from the trawler empty-handed; at others one man was able to jump or be wrenched aboard; occasionally as many as three came on board at once.

  After 45 minutes, 19 men had reached comparative safety aboard the lifeboat. Only the skipper and officers remained on the trawler which was now showing signs of re-floating. She was more upright and was shifting with the seas. Her skipper hailed the lifeboat and asked the coxswain whether he thought they should come off or stay aboard. Before Robert Cross could answer, the trawler’s lights went out and he lost sight of her in a blizzard of driving snow.

  For the next hour and a half, the lifeboat, with the help of her searchlight, scoured the sandbanks and entrance to the Humber for the vanished trawler. They found nothing and eventually returned to the station to land the 19 bedraggled survivors. Robert Cross immediately telephoned the port war signal station and learned to his relief that a tug had just reported finding the Almondine drifting in the entrance to the Humber and had taken her in tow. Her remaining crew were all accounted for.

  The award of a bar to his Gold Medal was the least the RNLI could do in recognition of Robert Cross’s courage and 12 hours of exertion that night. His reserve motor mechanic, George Richards received the Silver Medal and the five other crewmembers, the Bronze. Robert Cross decided to retire later that same year; he was 67 years old and as well as the seven RNLI gallantry medals to his name, he had played a part in saving the lives of 453 people.

  11. Moelfre and Holyhead, Anglesey, 2 December 1966

  Richard Evans, coxswain of Moelfre lifeboat and Harold Harvey, inspector of lifeboats for the north west, win Gold Medals off the north coast of Anglesey rescuing 15 men from the freighter, Nafsiporos, in hurricane force winds.

  With the useful benefit of hindsight, some might have concluded that the drama of rescuing 15 men from the crippled Greek freighter, Nafsiporos, in a hurricane barely a mile off the North Wales coast need never have been acted out. After all, the 1,287-ton ship with the four men who refused to abandon her, ended up moored safely alongside the Liverpool dock at the end of the momentous episode.

  As it was, three lifeboats, one from the Isle of Man and two from Anglesey would encounter some of the worst weather ever experienced in the history of the RNLI and both the Welsh boats would come perilously close to disaster along the ship’s side for the sake of her crew. For the men at the helm of both these lifeboats, life afterwards could never be quite the same again; Lt Cdr Harold Harvey, th
e inspector of lifeboats for the north west, who happened to be visiting Holyhead when the lifeboat was called out, became the first RNLI inspector to win a Gold Medal for bravery. Dick Evans, coxswain of the Moelfre lifeboat, gaining his second Gold Medal, had instantly earned the reputation of ‘RNLI legend’, to sit alongside names such as Robert Cross of the Humber and Henry Blogg of Cromer.

  If Harold Harvey’s participation in the events of 2 December 1966 had been coincidental there was, by contrast, something almost pre-ordained about Dick Evans’s involvement that evening. Richard Evans, born in Moelfre in 1905, was destined, through family circumstances and an all-consuming passion for the sea, to be a mainstay of the local lifeboat crew. His father, a sea captain, crewed the lifeboat when he was at home on leave. Both his grandfathers had also been on the crew, one of them as second coxswain. Dick himself spent his childhood, when Chapel and a strict school regime would allow, as crew on his grandfather’s 20ft sail-driven fishing boat and dreaming of the day that he would take command of his own ship.

  That day came earlier than he could ever have imagined. He joined the crew of a coaster at only 14, and then moved rapidly up from able seaman, second mate, chief officer to skipper of the 320-ton Colin not long after his 23rd birthday. His first outing on the pulling and sailing lifeboat had come when he was only 16 when the crew were called to a schooner adrift in a gale and rescued the men aboard her.