The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  Groves, however, has got into the swing of things. He fires up the outboard again, and we fly round the bay, spraying to a halt inches from yet another monstrous rock. He points southwards. ‘Out there,’ he says, ‘that’s where the Association went down, and all the other ships with her. They’re diving the site at the moment. With recent shifts in the sand and improvements in dive technology, they’re finding parts of the lost fleet they could never have expected to locate before. Over there’—further westwards, just beyond the visible horizon—‘are the Retarrier Ledges. Somewhere over here are also the remains of seven East Indiamen who went down at different times. And here’—pointing backwards towards St Agnes—‘is the wreck of the TW Lawson, one of the largest sailing vessels ever built. She broke her back among the Western Rocks.’

  Being the closest of the inhabited islands to the Western Rocks, St Agnes had such a ferocious reputation that the islanders acquired their very own patron saint of wrecking, St Warna. To the south of the islands are the Lethegus Rocks, where two ships lie, one on top of the other—the first of which, the steamship Plympton, sank while looters were still stripping her insides. We set off again on a breezy tour of the rocks to the north-west of St Agnes: Moinnow, Hellweathers and the Old Woman’s House. Further east, the rocks are lumpier again, as if the land had been beaten into giant cobbles. Whirling round and round from reef to reef, I feel disorientated, unsure any longer which island is which and which rock hides which wreck. Seen from different angles, the reefs all look the same, each spike the colour of dried blood. The land is all pale, sandy coloured and flat, and the rocks are all hostile. I cannot work out which island is St Agnes, or Annet, or St Mary’s. As he points out one wreck site after another, Groves’s voice takes on a lugubrious note, a kind of doleful satisfaction in all this demolition. If I feel lost on a sunny day, I wonder, what did the people who had sailed across the Atlantic feel when they found themselves trapped here?

  On the way back, Groves races the boat right up close to one of the coves on St Agnes and stops. ‘This was our most recent wreck,’ he says, and points over towards a narrow shelf of rock overlooked by a looming great lump of squared-off granite. ‘It happened a couple of years ago. Cornish fishing boat, at night, bad weather, and the man on watch couldn’t disengage the autopilot. There were four crew and the others were all asleep. The lookout realised they were heading straight for the rocks at full speed, but by the time he discovered it, there was nothing he could do and there was no time to issue a Mayday call. They struck the coast just here. The boat sank so fast the crew had to swim upwards to get out of it. A couple of the crew didn’t survive.’ I look at the rocks and think about that Cornishman, alone on watch, unable to disentangle the electronics. He knew what was about to happen and he must have been aware of the Scillies’ reputation. What must he have felt, watching his own destruction approaching him at 15 knots? And how many men’s bones already lay beneath his feet?

  By the time we have belted back to Old Town, and I have unstuck my notebook from the soaking boat, the Scillies have begun to feel infected with these deaths. Walking back through Hugh Town, the light catches the water and throws flickers of sunlight onto the walls of the houses, making the whole place seem as if it were just on the verge of floating away. Seen with the Western Rocks still in mind, the holiday yachts still plinking at their moorings all look like shipwrecks that haven’t happened yet. Perhaps that is my fault for expecting the past to be a comfortable place, and for believing that clear-cut divisions could exist between the sea and the shore.

  ***

  Gibson & Kyne stands on a sunny side street in the centre of Hugh Town. It’s a quiet place with an old-fashioned 1960s fascia and operates as bookseller, stationer and gallery. On the wall at the back of the shop are a series of black and white photographs, each showing a shipwreck with the name and date of its demise written underneath. Most are of sailing ships, which—given that sails had been almost entirely eliminated in the larger vessels by the early years of the twentieth century—makes most of the photographs impressively ancient.

  Many of the photos have evidently been taken by a large-format camera with a long exposure in difficult conditions. In one or two, the camera seems to have been shaken by some unseen force. The sea has been blurred to a silvery softness, sails have slapped back at just the wrong moment, and in one print the entire body of the ship seems to have been caught just at the point of dissolving into the water. In others, everything is crisp and coldly detailed. Ships with their decks almost entirely submerged sail into bays above which wait crowds of sightseers in bowler hats and pelisses; ships with their sterns already submerged; ships embayed; ships half-drowned in sand; ships apparently sailing straight into the base of lighthouses. Some look at ease in their unintended resting places, as if they’d just taken a brief stop in an unexpected mooring. Others are torn and piecemeal, their masts snapped midway, their sails slopping over the decks. What is striking about the pictures is not only their cumulative effect—enough shipwrecks to fill a wall—or what they depict, but their loveliness.

  Shipwrecks in other parts of the country generally end up with nothing more than a grainy, indeterminate shot taken in bad weather from a difficult angle by the local newspaper’s resident snapper. Usually there are rocks in the way or the storm has obscured the detail, or the ship itself is too far away to be clear. Even when the pictures do reveal more than just storm-force conditions, most twentieth-century shipping would hardly inspire poetry. But these photographs are unquestionably beautiful. Not, one supposes, that the crew and the passengers of these wrecks cared much for looks as they sped towards their graves. But in showing these ships and the people surrounding them with such care and veracity, the photographs do give them back some final dignity.

  Reaching round the wall is a much more recent picture, taken in colour and evidently of the Cita. A man is standing in the open-ended doorway of a container. He is holding a bunch of trainers by the laces and passing them over to a group of waiting women. In the picture, he is smiling. When I look up at the man behind the till, the smile is the same. He nods. ‘That’s me,’ he says, pulling out a large box from under the desk, opening it and flicking through a stack of prints. All the pictures are of the Cita, of islanders waist-deep in waterlogged clothes, of cracked containers, and of the hull itself before it sank. He did well from the wreck. He managed to find a load of laminate flooring, but—since it was dark when he collected it—it was not until he came to install it that he discovered that he had picked out two different types, one of which was darker than the other. Still, a two-tone new floor is better than nothing. ‘We were just tidying up,’ he says equably. ‘Nobody else seemed to want the stuff, so we took it.’

  The man behind the desk is Peter Kyne, son-in-law of the man who took many of the photographs. Frank Gibson is the fifth member of four generations of Gibson photographers. His great grandfather John Gibson, who lived into his nineties, was a fisherman who taught himself how to use a camera. By 1866 he had learned enough to leave the sea and set up his own business as a general photographer who took pictures of shipwrecks where and when they occurred. His sons Alexander and Herbert joined him in the business, and in time Alexander’s son James took over the studios in Penzance and St Mary’s. Frank, James’s son, succeeded him, and has in his turn been succeeded by his daughter Sandra.

  Each member of the Gibson family photographed far more than wrecks, though it has become the wreck pictures for which they are best known. In person, James’s son Frank Gibson is small, wiry, and vivid. At his house in the thin strip between Hugh Town and Porthcressa, he waits on the doorstep with a sailor’s sense of punctuality and leads me through to the lounge. There is a clutter of tripods and filters in one corner, but otherwise the room is neat and sunny, without any of the detritus of the habitual wreckers’ den. The shelves are filled with pictures and souvenirs, things collected on his many postretirement travels around Britain and Europe. He is evidently
a strong man, with sharp blue eyes, and a pair of eyebrows so large and lively it seems he’s got a couple of cairn terriers strapped to his forehead. He is also clearly a man at ease with being interviewed. Every time there’s a wreck in Cornwall or the Scillies, every news organisation in Britain contacts the Gibsons. Their reputation goes before them: both John Fowles and John Le Carré have written introductions to books of Gibson photographs.

  When the Gibsons first began taking photographs, they used the wet collodion process, a method which often proved cumbersome and wasteful in the field, but which also produced some of the most striking images of the sea ever taken. The first John Gibson built up a network of friends and informers who would let him know when and where a wreck was likely to take place. He and an assistant would set off up the coast in a pony and trap, or set sail in a four-oared boat, taking an old-fashioned glass plate camera, a tripod, and a small wheeled cart to serve as a portable darkroom. If they were lucky, they would reach the site of the wreck before darkness, and before the ship sank.

  ‘Our people in those days had a business in Penzance,’ Frank explains, ‘and that was how they were able to get all those Cornish wrecks. It was quite a lot of work. They had these great tripods, these great massive cameras, the boat would be rocking around. Amazing photographs for those times. And the quality—these days, you use 335 millimetre or something, there’s no comparison between ours and what they did. These modern cameras doesn’t stand it like these old ones would. Those old ones didn’t have these intricate shutters, and that’s what gets damaged with salt water. They were primitive—all they had was a bellows and a back screen, and a lens stuck on the front.’

  Even when conditions were good enough to get a clear shot, the Gibsons’ work would only be half done. Because the silver nitrate would begin to ionise in the fresh air, the exposed plates would have to be developed within an hour, otherwise the image would fade. ‘I’ve still got the original glass plates, and I used to have to hand-print them,’ Frank continues: ‘The old photographic process of hand-printing required an awful lot of afterwork with the brush, and painting over spots and everything. This is where the art comes into it—you get the picture that you envisaged when you took it. You’re there taking this picture and you see this dramatic sky and everything. Well, from a straight print, it looks nothing. You’ve got to work on it, you know, with dodging, and printing and so on, until it’s your idea of what you saw.’

  Once finished and retouched, the prints would then be sent to the relevant organisations. ‘Being down this part of the world, you were a long way from civilisation as such, weren’t you? Now, my daughter, if she gets a picture which is worthwhile, she can email it just like that. In my early days, I couldn’t do that—I had to get it over to Penzance to catch a train . . . you know, you were twenty-four hours out of date before you even got the thing to the right people.’

  But why did the Gibsons start on the wreck pictures in the first place? ‘I’ve been told but I don’t quite know if it’s right, that the shipping companies were interested from an insurance point of view. That’s what I’ve been told, but I begin to wonder—I think they were just interested in that sort of thing. You know, if you’re born in an island or around the sea, anything around the coast, it’s the first thing you notice. I think one only has to look at the number of people on any coast who will just go along to see a wreck. Not necessarily to go and pick it over, but just to go and see it. It seems to create an awful lot of interest in people.’

  Frank’s grandfather, Alexander, and great-uncle, Herbert, were the family members who got the most impressive shipwreck images. Though capable of using steam, many ships were still designed and built as sailing vessels during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the sheer volume of shipping passing the coasts of Cornwall and the Scillies ensured a steady level of casualties year after year. Add to that the persistent hazards of faulty instruments, erratic charts, human error and a dark coastline, and it was small wonder that to the Gibsons, they were, ‘a different world. The [ships] were so beautiful, they were. The unfortunate thing about those sailing ships in some of the pictures we got—they were 100 days out of Australia, and that was their first landfall. What a terrible experience . . . You know, sailing for 100 days to get to England, to Falmouth and end up on the Lizard.’

  Frank himself has not seen many wrecks. ‘There’s been very few major wrecks in my time, there really hasn’t. Our photographic collection was built up in my grandfather’s time, from the 1880s upwards, and wrecks were ten a penny then . . . I’ve photographed the Torrey Canyon, the Poleaire, a Russian fishing boat up on the Seven Stones . . . What else? God, I’m getting old, I’m forgetting.’

  And what of the wreckers? The Gibsons must have been aware of them: those black-clad watchers in many of the photographs were not always just sightseers. ‘In the 1800s, I don’t say it gave them a living, but by gosh, it was essential, you know, because they were very very poor in these islands in those days. Before Augustus Smith came, these islands were extremely poor, so shipwrecks were terribly important to people. I don’t believe the story that they attracted them to shore, I don’t believe that one bit. But if a wreck occurred, they were there as quick as lightning.’

  He remembers being told the story of the Schiller disaster, though it was many years before his time. ‘They salved a lot of cargo, a lot of American green banknotes, but nobody knew the value of them. All these green notes were coming ashore, dollar bills, and one particular man paid kids a shilling a bucket for them—“You go round, pick up all these, I’ll give you a shilling a bucket”. Well, the kids were enjoying themselves, they thought they were wealthy with a shilling, I suppose. He built houses and God knows what on the strength of that. Oh yes, that’s a nice little story, that one.’

  Two streets away, Matt Lethbridge and his wife Pat are contemplating a quieter retirement than Frank Gibson. When I call round the door is opened by a man with white hair, a half-moon smile and a pair of eyebrows even more extravagant than Frank Gibson’s. (Perhaps, I think, this is the pure-bred Scillonians’ defining physical characteristic: a pair of eyebrows as wild as gorse. It certainly runs in the family; some years ago, Matt’s brother Richard wrote a volume of memoirs simply entitled Behind the Eyebrows.) Matt shows me into the front room, where his wife Pat sits smiling in one of the armchairs. The room is packed to the eaves with watery memorabilia—family photographs, cups and tankards, a cabinet-full of flotsam, pictures of storms and boats, and laid into a folding coffee tables, a series of expertly painted ships. On the pelmet above the curtains is a row of small china cats.

  Matt guides me over to the sofa on the other side of the fire, and I explain my mission. Both Matt and Pat look at me with caution, but not with unkindness. Sitting side-by-side—Pat nearest the fire, Matt nearest the door—they touch each other’s hands on the armrests occasionally; a quick, open gesture of affection. Matt is younger than his voice on the phone; only his hands and a faint whitening round the irises of his eyes betray his age. Several people have told me that Matt is not a man to suffer fools, and I have come prepared for a sharp exit. As it is, both he and Pat are far more generous and forthcoming than I have any right to expect. ‘Won’t you,’ says Pat after five minutes, ‘take off your jacket?’.

  For three generations, the Lethbridge family have been involved with the Scilly lifeboats. Matt is {the third of four brothers, three of whom have worked alongside each other on the St Mary’s boat—at one time, with their father and uncle, there were five Lethbridges in a crew of eight men. Did he choose to volunteer? ‘I didn’t want much choice,’ he says, laughing. He was taught to sail by his father and his uncle, and learned navigation the old-fashioned way, through trial and error. ‘In Dad’s time, in my early days, a lot of the navigation and things like that were just rule of thumb. I mean, in around the islands, we wouldn’t use a chart at all, no matter how dark or how foggy the night was. It was all in your head, you know,


  and you were safer using your own knowledge than you were working on the chart.’

  Matt started out lobster fishing around the Scillies. The fishing alone taught him all he needed to know about island waters. At one stage, he had ten strings of pots, all in different places and each tied together with hemp rope. When the rope became waterlogged it would sink and only rise again when the tide slackened. Matt would have twenty minutes to find the rope and haul the pots. ‘So you had to know exactly what time to be in that area, what time that tide was going to change in that area, and you had to know that for each one. The best local knowledge of anything is an inshore fisherman. You can’t beat that knowledge.’ Having learned his ropes, he then graduated to the lifeboat.

  Inevitably, once working for the RNLI, Matt was involved with many of the area’s most notorious shipwrecks. ‘To be honest, the bigger they are, the better as far as the lifeboat’s concerned, because you’ve got more chance of getting a sheltered spot and more chance of being able to get people off from a bigger ship than you are a smaller one. The larger ships draw a lot of water. You’ve got to know the area yourself as well, and the angle the ship is lying and whatever, but you can say, with a ship that size, you’re going to be able to get alongside it somewhere.’

  To make such bold calls, he must have had considerable faith in his own judgement. ‘Oh yes, you’ve got to act confident,’ he says with equanimity. ‘But there again, anybody who grown up in that area, who’s been working on the sea all their life, now, who’s got more confidence or a better judgement? Alright, some of them will make mistakes, but their judgement is the best judgement of anyone in the world, isn’t it?’ To this end, ‘I never drank. None of our family ever drank. My dad always used to say that booze and boats don’t go together. Another thing he used to say, well, if anything happened to the boat—the lifeboat and the crew—at least they would know it wasn’t through drink. Lives wouldn’t have been thrown away because the captain was drunk. There was three of us, two of my brothers with me in the boat, and none of us drank. We went out on a New Year’s Day, one o’clock in the morning, something like that, and everyone on the boat was sober because it was a dirty night and they knew it was possible that the boat would be wanted.’