The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  It is this, and what he regards as the monolithic ignorance of the present-day lifesaving services, which most exercise him. Take salvage, for instance. From its beginnings, the RNLI has always allowed lifeboatmen to claim salvage, but never encouraged the practice. Those who do wish to claim it have to ensure both that they pay for the use of the lifeboat, and that they claim for a lower value than a dedicated salvor would receive. ‘As I say, salvage in general was a laugh. I mean, we towed in lots of boats and so on like that, but most of the time the lifeboat didn’t claim salvage anyway. Well, to be quite honest, this is the stupid part again, the courts never give lifeboats a fair salvage.’ Why not? ‘Well, because they just expected them to do it for nothing. Simply because the lifeboat didn’t usually claim salvage, they thought they never should, you know. But they were all men earning their living, and they got to give up their time to go in the lifeboat anyway. I mean, many of the yachts won’t take a tow from a fishing boat because they can get it for nothing from a lifeboat, you know. But you would still have to pay for any damage you done to that lifeboat, you would have to pay for all the fuel, and so on. You’d have to pay for the cost of using the boat. But the Institution itself wouldn’t support you on a salvage—in fact, they would punish you for it rather than support you.’ What about the theory I’ve heard from other lifeboatmen that the lifeboats were once crewed by wreckers? ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, ‘wreckers were saving lives before the Institution was formed. The reason the Institution was formed was to provide them men who were losing their lives in their own boats with a better boat to do the same thing as they were already doing. I don’t care how big a wrecker they were—you might get a very odd one who just don’t care at all—but 99 per cent would save lives first. Life would come first, no matter how big a wrecker they were.’

  There would also be good pickings to be had simply from wandering the foreshore. Since wrecks were so frequent, the Scilly Islanders maintained a strong and long-established sense of beachcombing decorum. ‘In those days it was respected law—it was unmade law, but it was a respected local law—that if you picked up a plank and you stood it up against the cliff or something, nobody would touch it. If you couldn’t get it above the cliff, then you pulled it above high-water mark and you put a stone on it to say, this has already been found. And nobody would pinch it, or very few people would in them days.’

  And did the ‘finders keepers’ rule also extend to corpses? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘with bodies sometimes, the person who picked up the body was probably saddled with the job of burying it. Around these coasts, around here, there’s lots of bodies around the sandy shores and things. There is an awful lot of superstition. Luckily, in that respect . . . ’, he leans over, raps the wooden table and chuckles, ‘ . . . touch wood, that sort of superstition never worried me. I was only sixteen when the war broke out and I worked under the Navy then. Part of our job was to collect bodies from torpedoed ships, or anything that washed inland from the islands. So I become immune from superstition in that respect. I mean, a body can’t hurt you, can it? All you can do for a body is to show respect in the way you handle it. I mean, I didn’t like handling dead bodies, nobody likes bodies, you don’t want to see them and you’ve got every sympathy with them, but it didn’t mean a thing to me as regards superstition of finding a body in the water. I mean, I’d rather have it aboard the boat than leave it there in the water.’

  It is not just superstition, but old law which affects attitudes to bodies, however. ‘The laws and that were a bit funny—they still are,’ Matt continues. ‘If I was fishing three and a half miles off, and I picked up a body and brought it in here, I would be responsible for burying it. I would be forced to have it buried properly, in a church, a coffin, everything. But if I picked it up within three miles, the national line or whatever, then the council’s responsible for burying it.’ And there’s another thing, he says. ‘This is going back years, but if I picked up a body, I would be awarded five shillings for picking it up. There’s an old story of one bloke picking up a body, and it was too dark to bring it down to report it, so he put it in his boatshed, and he slept in the boatshed with it in case somebody stole it!’ The story is true; in nineteenth-century Cornwall—which at that time included the Scilly Isles—a bounty of five shillings was offered for those who recovered shipwrecked corpses.

  And what of those infamous Scillonian traditions? Does he think that the islanders ever deliberately caused wrecks? ‘I’m not saying they couldn’t arrange a wreck. There have been cases of it happening.’ Would it, I ask nervously, have been something that he took an interest in? ‘Like I say, as regards that, what we call salvaging from boats itself is just, um . . . When we went out in our own boats, that was salvaging. I’ve never got a bloody bob out of salvage, not that sort of salvage, not really. Very little.’

  How about the general cargo vessels? ‘Oh yes, you got a lot of fun out of that. There was at the beginning of the war, the Longships. She was a good wreck, she had everything. The lighthouses were all gone out and she run on the Seven Stones. She had everything, she had suits of clothing, bolts of material—suiting material, dress material, just ordinary sheeting material—and she had bundles of sheets and blankets and clothes, barrels of apples and there was a lot of drink, bottles of all sorts, and there was potatoes . . . I don’t know, everything. All the islands was clothed, all the washing lines was full, the bushes was full of drying clothes.’ He laughs. ‘But she stayed afloat out there, which was very rare, so the boats had a go at her. I’ve always said that the first long trouser suit I had was from the Longships.’ ‘There was another man,’ he recalls, ‘who went out on one of the boats to the Longships. And when he came ashore—he was a bit rough really, he never dressed up or anything—but when he come ashore, he had three suits on! Never looked so smart in his life. He had the shoes with it.’

  He stops for a minute, and then adds reflectively: ‘It was good fun really, an awful lot of it was good fun. But I mean, really, in our case there was a lot to be gained, because people couldn’t afford much in them days.’ What was the best thing he ever found? ‘I salvaged a clock once. It was a beauty. It had the three minutes’ silence on it. I just took that for a souvenir really. So I had this, and it worried Pat so much, I said, alright, I’ll get rid of it. So first time, I took it down the fishing store, and then Pat knew I hadn’t really got rid of it. So then I said, alright, and I took it out to our allotment where we used to keep the chickens and I put it in the chicken house.’ He laughs, and she smiles. ‘Eventually, she gets it out of me, because she knew I wouldn’t tell a downright lie, you know, so I had to admit I still had it and I’d put it in the chicken house. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. In the end I got so fed up I went out one evening and threw it over the parapet of the bloody quay!’

  But as he points out, he could have had much larger prizes. ‘I’ve had chances to have stuff which were illegally salvaged by divers and things, and I never take it, because I always used to say, well, what’s the good of it? I can’t show it to anybody without taking the risk of being summonsed. So there was just no point in it. I mean, there were stupid little things—bits and pieces I used to take as souvenirs, like a pair of dividers. I had one or two of them off a chart table. That brass lamp up there, that come from the Longships. It’s of no great value or anything like that. That little pot there come off a ship, and the little jug. One of the other wrecks, there was serviette rings, that was the Captain’s serviette ring. My next brother down, Harry, he had the mate’s ring, and the other brother had the engineer’s. These here,’—he points to two large brass engine telegraphs by the door—‘they weren’t actually salvaged, these come off a boat we towed in one time, a big steamer. The captain gave them to Pat—I said I didn’t want them. So they’re hers really. They are nice, aren’t they?’

  They are nice. Both have been polished to a high shine and show the Lethbridges’ house pointing full steam towards France. All these things—the pain
tings on the tables, the tillers, the serviette rings, the lamp—are no more than the ornamental evidence of a life spent surrounded by water. Nothing about them, or in Matt’s conversation, indicates that he was at one stage the most highly decorated lifeboat coxswain in the country, or that he has been the recipient of three RNLI silver medals for gallantry. Some time after I meet him, a poll in the Scilly News voted him the ‘Greatest Living Scillonian’. When he mentioned the fact that the lifeboat crews risked their lives every time they took the boat out, he does so almost with a sense of squeamishness, as if saying such things amounted to melodrama or sentimentality.

  Walking back through the thin streets of Hugh Town, past the flocks of old folk, I think of Scilly’s two extremes. Nothing in this place ever seems to match up. The Abbey Gardens and the Western Rocks; the Cita and the Schiller; Defoe’s allegations and Lethbridge’s courage. Creation and destruction; fertility and death. Does anyone ever really find out what’s going on under these waters and beneath those eyebrows? Standing on the quay, looking at the sea slopping softly against the stones, I think what a lovely place this is for a visit, and how little I would like to sail by on a dark night.

  West Coast

  South Goodwins Light Vessel, wrecked during a 1954 gale on the Goodwins.

  The wreck eventually came to rest on the very sands she was designed to warn other ships against.

  The abandoned island of Stroma in the Pentland Firth.

  Bella Bathurst

  Interior of one of the semi-derelict crofts on Stroma.

  Bella Bathurst

  Willie Mowatt MBE, ‘Chief Pirate of the Pentland Firth’.

  Bella Bathurst

  Figurehead in Augustus Smith’s Valhalla Collection on Tresco in the Scilly Isles.

  Bella Bathurst

  Figureheads in the Valhalla Collection.

  Bella Bathurst

  The Western Rocks.

  Bella Bathurst

  A selection of whalebones washed up and left on Stroma.

  Bella Bathurst

  Whalebones in the Natural History Museum’s collection.

  Bella Bathurst

  Portrait of Patrick Colquhoun in the Marine Police Museum in Wapping.

  Bella Bathurst

  A plaster model of a dolphin in the Natural History Museum’s collection. Because of the difficulties inherent in preserving cetacean specimens, the museum originally made life-sized plaster models. These have now been superseded by lighter, fibreglass versions.

  Bella Bathurst

  Richard Sabin, curator of the Natural History Museum’s cetacean collection and UK strandings co-ordinator, with a mummified sperm whale’s heart.

  Bella Bathurst

  Models of the Victorian river police in the Marine Police Museum.

  Bella Bathurst

  A river policeman’s cutlass.

  Bella Bathurst

  RMS Mülheim on the rocks at Land’s End in April 2002.

  Bella Bathurst

  Local historian Joe Mills.

  Bella Bathurst

  Mike Pearce.

  Bella Bathurst

  The Mildred struck Gurnard’s Head in Cornwall in April 1912 while carrying a cargo of slag from Newport to London.

  Gibson family

  The Seine, a French bounty clipper which ran ashore in Perran Bay in 1900. Two weeks after she grounded, the little that remained of her was sold for £42.

  Gibson family

  One of the shipbreaker’s recycling stalls at Alang in Gujarat. The scales are used for weighing scrap steel.

  Bella Bathurst

  Old navigation lights and porthole glass on a shipbreaker’s stall at Alang.

  Bella Bathurst

  Old deck lights found on a shipbroker’s stall at Alang.

  Bella Bathurst

  Matresses found on a shipbroker’s stall at Alang.

  Bella Bathurst

  FIVE

  West Coast

  In 1947, the writer George Orwell rented a place on Jura, a Hebridean island shaped like an elongated raindrop overlooking some of the filthiest seas in Europe. Barnhill, a farmhouse tucked right up on the island’s north-eastern edge, satisfied Orwell’s desire for distance. It is five miles down a track impassable to anything but tractors, and twenty-five miles from the nearest shop. Anyone wishing to get in or out of the area would either have to walk or take a boat across the Sound of Jura to the mainland.

  While he was at Barnhill, Orwell began work on the novel which was to become 1984, his apocalyptic fable of the individual within the totalitarian state. During the summer months, Orwell spent time with his son Richard (then still a toddler), his sister Avril and his nephew and niece Lucy and Henry Dakin. For much of the time the group pottered about the island, tending the land, mending boats and wandering out on occasional picnics. In August, Orwell proposed a camping expedition over to Jura’s western side for a couple of days. On their way back to Barnhill, he took Henry, Lucy and Richard with him on the boat and set off for home, skirting along the island’s northern tip. It should have been a brief and unexceptional trip; as it was, Orwell met the Gulf of Corrievreckan.

  Many years later, Henry Dakin gave his version of events to Orwell’s biographer, Bernard Crick:

  When we turned round the point, there was already a fair swell, the boat was rising and falling a lot, but we were not worried because Eric [Orwell] seemed to know what he was doing . . . But as we came round the Point, obviously the whirlpool had not receded. The Corrievreckan is not just the famous one big whirlpool, but a lot of smaller whirlpools around the edges. Before we had a chance to turn, we went straight into the minor whirlpools and lost control. Eric was at the tiller, the boat went all over the place, pitching and tossing . . . so much that the outboard motor jerked right off from its fixing. Eric said, ‘the motor’s gone, better get the oars out, Hen. Can’t help much, I’m afraid’.

  Henry unshipped the oars and they made their way unsteadily over to a small island nearby.

  Even though that bit of it was very frightening . . . Eric didn’t panic, but nobody else did either. Indeed, when he said he couldn’t help you very much, he said it very calmly and flatly.

  Having arrived within touching distance of the island, Henry leapt out of the boat and onto the rock with the painter rope in one hand. As he did so, the boat capsized, pitching Orwell, Lucy and Richard into the water. Orwell swam back, and managed to rescue both children from beneath the boat. All three hauled themselves onto the rocks, righted the boat and secured it. According to Henry, Orwell remained unperturbed.

  We were left on this island . . . with the boat, one oar, a fishing rod and our clothes. Eric got his cigarette lighter out—never went anywhere without it—and put it out on a rock to dry. We had not been there for three minutes when he said he would go off and find some food. A slightly ridiculous thing, it struck me afterwards, because we had had breakfast only two hours before and the last thing that any of us was thinking of was eating or of hunger . . . I thought we were goners . . . He [Orwell] almost seemed to enjoy it. We waved a shirt on the fishing rod about, and after about one and a half hours a lobster boat spotted us and picked us up.

  Orwell’s own account of the incident is laconic:

  On return journey ran into the whirlpool and were all nearly drowned. Engine sucked off by the sea and went to the bottom. Just managed to keep the boat steady with the oars, and after going through the whirlpool twice, ran into smooth water and found ourselves up abt. 100 yards from Eilean Mor, so ran in quickly and managed to clamber ashore . . . Most of the stuff in the boat lost including the oars . . . We left Glengarrisdale at abt. 10.30, which was abt. 2 hours after high tide, & must have struck Corryvreckan at abt. 11.30, ie, when the tide had been ebbing about three hours. It appears this was the very worst time, and we should time it so as to pass Corryvreckan in slack water. The boat is all right. Only serious loss, the engine and 12 blankets.

  Orwell’s insouciance was misplaced. Corri
evreckan is not for absent-minded writers in small boats. In fact, it is not really for anyone at all. Corrievreckan is the largest whirlpool in European waters and the second largest whirlpool in the world, superseded only by the true Maelstrom off the Lofoten Islands near Norway’s west coast. Sailors have always considered it one of the great maritime dragons, up there with Portland Bill, the Alderney Race or the Men of Mey in terms of risk and challenge.