by Tom Blass
And yet there are flashes of radiance in these accounts. One diarist recorded taking a class to picnic among the dunes, where they ran races, counted the nests of sandwich terns and collected shells and tide-stranded fish. Another entry recounted how, the morning after a shipwreck, the school closed in acknowledgement of its students’ right to gather the spoils thrust upon the beach – a valuable supplement to meagre family incomes.
In the summer the children sold trinkets to the tourists who disembarked each weekend from the Cleethorpes steamer to play on the sands and ride upon the sail-powered ‘bogey’, a trolley on rails that hurtled from the very base of Spurn to its tip, commandeered for games when not in the service of the military camp maintained to protect the Humber from invasion. The tiny train was rendered useless decades ago by Spurn’s refusal to adhere to the course of its rails. Now, where the old track is not overgrown or covered by dunes (sleepers dozing beneath a blanket of sand) it meanders hopelessly out to sea. For Spurn is perpetually on the cusp of change, lengthening and shortening and narrowing and broadening. At high tide it is less than a dozen yards wide. Walking the path that runs along its spine is like a giddying sortie across a tightrope or being caught between the jaws of a great beast almost safe in the knowledge that they will never quite meet. Sometimes when the tide is abnormally high and the wind blows hard from the east, the waves cut across the narrows and the jaws clamp shut.
We had a near miss, driving south from Sandy Beaches in fading light with the waves on the Humber side of Spurn lapping hard at the edge of the road. Where the road stops we encountered a car-load of sea pilots about to take the night shift in their control tower at the mouth of the river: ‘Turn back!’ they shouted over the wind. ‘There might be a breach.’ And turn back we did, holing up at the Crown & Anchor, a pub which must count among the most exposed in Britain, where the music was too loud, but where Larkin, on his long cycling trips from Hull, almost certainly once rested sore feet.
In the pub we ate battered cod and browsed back copies of the Yorkshireman. Only yards away the Humber carried on bullying at the shore. The wind had picked up, and the trees began to scream, and I felt for but almost envied our friend from Corby in his caravan. Rocked as he must have been by a storm that had hurled down the Humber from the west and was predicted to make landfall in the Netherlands by noon the next day.
When the wind blows from the north sweeping in from the North Atlantic, the sea rasps away at the coast like a great tongue. In 1843 the parishioners of a church at Kilnsea – a village as close to Spurn as it has ever been advisable to erect anything of substance – woke to find their cemetery ripped apart by such a storm, its dead tossed onto the beach and into the sea. Within days they had packed the retrievable remains into carts and headed five miles inland, reinterring the bodies and rebuilding the village. Erosion has brought Kilnsea back to the coast once more.
Holderness, the steep isosceles from which Spurn protrudes at the south-east corner, is soft, upstart land. A mere two million years ago this was a shallow bay in a warm sea. Then it froze, locking out life for a millennium before the ice retreated, depositing in its place the existing sediment of boulder clay, gravel and fossils. When the Romans invaded, the shoreline lay some three miles closer to the Continent than it does now, but by the time the Domesday Book had been completed it had already lost a third of that breadth. Each year the land retreats another ten feet. It is the fastest-disappearing coastline in the world. With every passing month, the clay cliffs slump upon the beach in slices and dissolve. Most geological changes occur over the course of tens or hundreds of millions of years. On Holderness whole cycles are squeezed into human lifetimes.
Sometimes the owners of properties on the cliffs put them on the market despite or because of the fact that they are only a garden shed away from oblivion. Occasionally they find buyers, such being the quixotically entrancing hold of imminent doom, but ultimately Holderness has no hope other than to follow in the wake of a catalogue of towns – Tharlsthorp, Frismersk, East Somert, Penisthorp, Orwithfleet, Sunthorp, Ravenser and Ravenser Odd – each of which now lies beneath the waves. A locally produced guide to the lost villages of Holderness invites its readers to stand at Spurn Point, gaze out to sea and into the mouth of the Humber, and invest in the churning waters sufficient imaginative powers to resurrect those once-thriving communities.
Ravenser – Hrafn’s Eyr, or Hrafn’s Sandbank – was always a nowheresville, even at the end of the first millennium, but it warranted a mention in the Icelandic sagas as the place from which the Norse army of Harald Hardrada embarked on its voyage home following its defeat by Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge. Its near-namesake and neighbour Ravenser Odd grew up much more quickly, first as a place where fishermen could dry out their nets, and in quick succession were built a busy harbour, customs house, windmills, prison and churches. It boasted a royal charter, levied dues on ships and sent men to fight wars against the Scots, but against the ever-scouring sea all was hubris, all in vain. Within a few decades of its charter, Ravenser Odd was taken back by the sea. The inhabitants had only themselves to blame.
The town . . . lay open to devastation from floods and inundations of the sea which surrounded it from every side like a wall, thus threatening its imminent annihilation. And so with the terrible vision of waters seen on every side, the besieged persons . . . preserved themselves at that time from destruction, flocked together and tearfully implored grace . . . by all its wicked deeds, and especially wrong-doing on the sea, and by its evil actions and predations, it provoked the vengeance of God upon itself beyond measure.
Thus at least was the explanation provided by monks of a nearby abbey.
It was fanciful but pleasurable to imagine, as we lay beneath electric blankets at West Farm B & B with a wolf of a gale hammering at the windows and the trees, that timelessly entwined in the moaning and carrying-on were the howls of the penitents who may or may not be forgiven but are as good as forgotten. Ask any local where they believe Ravenser Odd to have been located and they’ll point variously to any sandbank. ‘We think it was possibly there – or there.’
Anticipating their descendants at Kilnsea, the surviving inhabitants of Ravenser Odd gathered up their dead and moved them for reburial to drier land, while at around the same time the town of Dunwich in Suffolk was suffering the same indignities, which the poet A. G. Swinburne captured hundreds of years later in his infectiously arhythmic (and excruciatingly long) poem ‘By the North Sea’.
Tombs, with bare white piteous bones protruded,
Shroudless, down the loose collapsing banks,
Crumble, from their constant place detruded,
That the sea devours and gives not thanks.
He may also have had Ravenser Odd in mind.
By morning the wind that until dawn had been shaking the windowpanes had lost its thump, and we walked the four sandy miles to the point almost unmolested other than by a squall that blew out like an ambitious but abandoned fancy. Spurn had not been breached. The tide had ebbed, and where the water had come up to the road the day before, the foreshore shone like silver beneath bright sun. Almost as if in atonement for its earlier frolics, the sea had thrown any number of treasures onto the sands: lobster legs, whelk sacs, mermaids’ purses, starfish and, most pleasing of all, sea urchin shells in every size but identically proportioned, like Russian matroyshka dolls. And though every discovery, whether moss agate, a sea-changed bottle or tree stump, constituted occasion for delightful meditation on how small things succumb to the forces of time, we succeeded in arriving at the little settlement of buildings that comprises the sum of human habitation on the point.
Before setting out for Spurn I had contacted the local wildlife warden, a man called Andy Gibson, who now waited for us by the pilot boats’ quay. A big, ruddy, soft man in the Yorkshire mould, he made an ideal custodian for Spurn, a plain-speaking scholar, spending his working hours scratching the sky with his binoculars, tending, supervising a
nd thinking – mostly about Spurn and about the birds that he delicately untangles (hot beating hearts, easily snapped legs and wings) with his large hands from the mist nets he sets to monitor seasonal migration.
Man, he said, had played push-me pull-you with the point for too long. Gravelling and cobble extraction, mostly for the paving of London mews, had weakened Spurn while the sea defences had prevented it from following its own course. What would happen if it was just left? It was a contentious issue. As a realist, he knew that the mouth of the Humber would silt and the channels quickly become unnavigable. Ships would founder and the ports of Immingham and Hull would lose trade. All of which he understood. But from one stance, even as a thought experiment, it would be intriguing to turn Spurn back to nature.
Not that it seemed to have been overly tamed. The human presence on Spurn is so obviously temporary, consisting of a pilots’ tower rising from the dunes like a periscope, a scattering of ancient weatherboarded huts used as sheds, a jetty for the lifeboat and the pilots’ boat, and the lifeboatmen’s buildings – a cluster of modern(ish) but not unpleasant two-storey cottages. Simple and suburban as they are, the buildings represent the culmination of two centuries of remarkable history. For while the Spurn community has also included at various points pilots, naturalists, soldiers and hermits, the lifeboatmen are at the nub of it. Without them, Spurn would revert to the remote, unsocialised appendage of land jutting into the North Sea that it is always about to become.
Spurn had been hungry for a lifeboat for years before it finally arrived. In most coastal settlements the task of saving lives at sea was undertaken by local fishermen. On Spurn there existed no permanent community with the boat or other requisite wherewithal to step into the breach. Local newspapers had been petitioning for the establishment of a lighthouse station since before 1800. It was essential because, as one concerned local wrote to Trinity House around 1805,
When a ship takes the ground upon the Shoals called the Stoney Beach, as frequently occurs, the tide gradually leaves her in apparent safety and the crews, if strangers, imagine that on the return of the tide the ship will ride off without further damage or danger. The people on shore, from constant experience, know that on the return of the tide the conflict between it and the current of the Humber occasions such a surf that the ship will inevitably beat to pieces and the crew perish. Yet the people on shore have not means of affording help to the mariners or even of communicating to them, though within a comparatively short distance, the peril of their situation, so that the mariners might in many cases, find safety in their own boats.
Thus, he said, ‘the mariners wait with patient confidence and the people on shore with the most distressing anxiety, till the awful period arrives – when the ship is lost and the people perish’.
In the early 1800s the Lord of the Manor of Spurn, Burton Constable, decided that the responsibility for establishing a lifeboat rested in his hands. The idea was that while the lighthouse commissioners of Trinity House would be responsible for the governance of the lifeboat, Constable would provide the land and commit money. He thus funded a lifeboat built to the latest design and a carriage by which it might be conveyed to the sea. Constable also (in his beneficence) provided the lifeboatmen with rights over his land, reserving for himself and his family the privilege of collecting fossils and such Royal Fish (whales, dolphins and sturgeon) as might become stranded. His motives were driven ‘solely by motives of humanity’, his agent told Trinity House, he himself having no financial interest in the shipping trade.
The much-anticipated vessel arrived in Spurn in the autumn of 1810 from the respected boatyard of Henry Greathead of South Shields. It was ten feet at the beam, three times as long, and shipped ten oars, moving with equal ease in either direction so as to obviate the need for turning. It was, Greathead acknowledged, not a boat easily managed by novices, and he advised that the crew should begin practising with their new boat as soon as its varnish had dried. The words SPURN LIFEBOAT were carefully painted in bold black letters across the shiny white gunwales.
On 4 November 1810 the boat successfully hauled a vessel called the John and Charlotte from the sand upon which she had run aground, and everyone involved with the rescue hailed Spurn’s new enhancement as a great success – briefly.
Constable’s plan envisioned sufficient funds (three shillings and sixpence daily) to pay the crew to train on a regular basis, building stamina, pride and morale, but for the most part the scheme was designed to be self-financing. A disused barracks building would be converted into a pub which the lifeboat master would run to generate income, selling beer and stores to the crews of passing vessels – but also to his own lifeboat crew, a perquisite they heavily resented. It was little inducement for the lifeboatmen to stay in their posts. They received only a breadline stipend, supplemented with the ‘opportunity’ to load gravel and cobbles onto passing ships. But locals (‘Countrymen’) came to the point and took the work from them, sometimes waving pistols. Being so far away from any justice of the peace or court, a brutish ‘law of the dunes’ applied on Spurn in which any semblance of order stood as close to being breached as the point itself. Thus the role of lifeboat master required mustering a semi-starving near-mutinous crew into something akin to a purposeful body of men while also defending their rights against resentful local interests.
The first master fled within a month. The second, Robert Richardson, was made of grittier stuff, committing himself to serving out a term of thirty-one years and a month. But the North Sea wind seldom brought him anything good. On 27 December 1811 he wrote to the Brethren at Trinity House: ‘There is three Countrymen that always brings guns with them to Spurn, which is William Wilson, Robert Bird, Thomas Bird, which if they are suffered to do I am confident my Life will fall a sacrifice the first opportunity.’ Relations between crew and master were also strained, small grievances flourishing like weeds. Richardson complained that the men were often drunk and frequently challenged him to fights. On the occasion of one 1811 rescue he was obliged to take the lifeboat out alone – either for the reason that the crew were off the point at the time and couldn’t be summoned, or simply because they refused to show up.
Intransigence and insubordination were not solely characteristic of Richardson’s watch. One June day in 1858 a successor, William Willis, was having his three o’clock supper when a crewman he had dismissed, ‘a blackguard by the name of Bell’, arrived at his house accompanied by three cudgel-bearing companions and their wives, who collectively ‘abused him most shamefully’ to the point that he ‘risked being maimed’. The wives, ‘three viragoes of the first class, a disgrace to their sex’, were, he said, most ferocious in their ‘urging on’ of Bell. Of Bell himself, whose language was so crude that it was unfit to be heard by ‘anyone with a spark of decency’, he had earlier written that he could find ‘no better specimen of a bad man’.
Debt, poverty and miserable living conditions plagued the lives of the early lifeboatmen and masters. Another new broom feared that he was subject to a whispering campaign, telling his employers his correspondence was not safe, there being ‘so many enemies about’, and his living quarters were such that ‘when the wind blows it is almost fit to blow one out’.
Against such a backdrop of suspicion, recrimination and freely waved flintlocks, confrontations with the sea were, if perilous, at least less emotionally taxing. But even here human capriciousness could intrude on the otherwise pure struggle with the elements. In the 1880s the authorities were alerted to a fad newly prevalent among bored local youths whereby ‘the Life Boat Men are frequently called out at night by the exhibition of red lights, flares and rockets, which appear to be signals of distress but which are found upon arriving out to have been exhibited merely for sport by the crews of fishing smacks’. And it was commonplace for captains to refuse assistance (as in the case of the Industry) out of misplaced pride, and for crews to drown within the sight of land.
Order and civilisation came to Spurn
gradually, in belated step with the march of technological and spiritual progress. In 1839 the lifeboat crew complained of the absence of both church and school, and in the 1850s the local chapter of the Primitive Methodists stole a march on their established rivals by visiting the point each week to conduct a service. In 1867 the wife of a lifeboatman opened a school in her own home. Newfangled paddle steamers brought increasing numbers of day trippers from Cleethorpes and Grimsby. And in 1919 the lifeboat station came under the authority of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and bestowed upon Spurn its first motor vessel, the Samuel Oakes. By all these increments (not least among them the building of an electric telegraph to supersede a mechanical semaphore), Spurn came into the fold of modernity.
There have been sixteen lifeboats since Greathead’s nameless vessel, each generation faster, sturdier and more unsinkable than the last. For all the excitement that accompanied its launch, the original Spurn lifeboat of 1810 was a perilous tub compared with its 35-knot, self-righting, 1,200-horsepower counterpart of today. And its coxswain no longer keeps a tavern or has a need to fend off dangerous ‘Countrymen’. Andy Gibson introduced me to the man who held that post – Dave Steenvoorden – pushing through a white-painted sprung gate which read NO ENTRY EXCEPT ON RNLI BUSINESS into a sort of temporary structure which was Dave’s office and where he was making tea. It was not a busy or cosy interior, but decorated with whiteboards and photographs of lifeboats and the great coxswains of yesterday.