Had he come across instances of wrecking before then? ‘Not directly, not causing vessels to be wrecked. It’s a hearsay thing. But I am quite confident that it did happen, because certain areas, like this one, tended to be much more insular than they are now. People tended to stick more in their own little communities, and because of the poverty, any shipwreck would produce vast wealth for a small community, vast wealth. I mean, it would provide more than enough timber to keep them going for all their needs, for housing and repairs and stuff like that, and the cordage and the rope and the sails—just the basic ship itself would bring a tremendous amount of riches. I’m sure that it must have happened at some stage. Whether it happened to any great extent, well, that’s another matter. I’m quite sure that it probably did happen, I’m sure it’s not just folklore.’
The Maritime and Coastguard Agency evidently believes that wrecking occurred, though I suppose that even the knowledgeable and pragmatic Collier could be dismissed as yet another Outsider. I say goodbye to Collier and walk across the road. On the door of a nearby pub, there is a notice: ‘Don’t Bomb Iraq, Bomb Brussels Instead.’ Inside, folded away from the midday heat, are a group of men in jeans and lumberjack shirts. The television is on and the sunshine through the windows flings beams of orange and gold light to the floor. The men gathered round the bar have evidently been there for some time and will be there for some time to come. As I walk in, they are clustered around a tall man standing slightly to the left of the bar, reminding him—in stereo and at length—that he recently failed to answer one of the preliminary questions on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire correctly, a question apparently so simple that only donkeys and foreigners could possibly have got it wrong. Their target smiles back, neither shamed nor riled by the insults.
I wait by the door, watching the half-full pints glowing in the shadows and the layers of gauzy fag smoke drifting sideways through the draught. Finally, the man on the barstool turns. ‘Yes?’ he says. Does anyone know any wreckers round here, I say. ‘What?’ he says. A wrecker, I say. Wreckers. ‘Wreckers?’ he says. ‘What sort of wrecker?’ He looks hostile, all goodwill gone. False lights, I say. People who plundered ships. People who once lured ships onto rocks. Whisky Galore, Jamaica Inn, the Cita, that sort of thing. I now have the undivided attention of all the men in the bar, and only the TV is still laughing. People, I say hastily, who could theoretically have lured ships onto rocks. The men gaze at me—my bag, my Dictaphone, my librarian’s smile—for a long time. No-one says anything. It’s for a book, I say, looking at the floor. The silence continues long enough for the traffic noises outside to become audible and to overhear the conversation between two dog walkers out on the street. Perhaps, I think, as I listen to the receding footsteps, I could run away and get a proper job, a job in an office involving spreadsheets and meetings and half an hour set aside every day for kicking the photocopier. Not a job which involves walking into fishermen’s pubs and asking complete strangers if they or their forebears ever took part in the kind of illegal maritime activities which gave Cornishmen a bad name, and if they would furthermore be prepared to discuss those illegal activities on the record, thus potentially opening themselves up to criminal prosecution several decades after the actual event.
‘Mike Pearce,’ says the man on the stool. ‘Mike might talk, if you ask the right questions.’ For a moment I just stand there, so startled not to have been either lynched or drowned that I cannot move. ‘He’s in The Dolphin every lunchtime. You’ll catch him there.’ I smile gratefully and walk back into the sunshine. Sure enough, across the road in the shadows of another bar is Mike Pearce: late middle-age, rough white hair, the rolling walk of a landsick man. When I explain my mission he chuckles. ‘Give me a moment,’ he says, ‘and buy me a drink.’ I get him a pint, and leave him to gather his thoughts. After a few minutes, he beckons me back over to the bar, breathing heavily into the Dictaphone. Like Joe Mills, he wants first of all to emphasise the difference in definitions. ‘Put it this way, the word wrecker covers a lot of things. It’s such a bad theory—I mean, if you pick up a lump of wood, you’re wrecking, if you went aboard a ship, you were wrecking. A lot of people would call it looting, but it were wrecking, same again. I reckon half the houses in Scilly, and even over here in Newlyn, I reckon half the timber in those houses came from out of the wrecks. Only some of these’—he gestures southwards, down towards Mousehole and Newlyn’s seafront houses—‘is paid for, I reckon.’
Pearce has lived in Cornwall for well over twenty years, though he was born and brought up in the Scilly Isles. Does he know if his own family were wreckers? ‘I suspect so, put it that way. My grandfather was a very respected man in Scilly, and he used to have a pilot gig of his own. He came from St Martin’s, but what he got up to I don’t know.’ Are the Cornish different to the Scillonians in their attitude to wrecking? ‘Yes, they are. They are. Altogether. I think they’re more . . . they’re more . . . ’, he pauses. ‘There wasn’t really much in it—they’d both do anything for a bit of wrecking. Where we [the Scillonians] would cheer for the merchant men that was on these ships, they would come to make sure they were first at the wrecking. All from the Lizard side and that, it was what they could find first, and then they’d look after the crew. But in the old sailing days, they used to fear the Scillies, because they had a ferocious name. They had a worse name than round the Lizard and that way there.’
But it was the Cornish who became notorious, I say, not the islanders. ‘Yes, yes, I know, they do have a bad reputation. But the thing was, everybody knew the Scillies, and that was the first port of call you hit, so you used to get more wrecks there than what you did over here. Certain ships like the TW Lawson, the biggest sailing ship ever made, she sank there. The men over there risked their lives—and some of them lost their lives—rescuing the crew off her. We had a different look at life over there, we did, to what they did in Cornwall. Our advantage comes from the sea, and we relied on wrecks, because we were all fishermen and things like that. We’d say, look out for the crew first, but in Cornwall, half the people weren’t even seamen—they were farmers. They were used to doing the wrecking, but they didn’t have the same thought about the men at sea as proper seamen does. They’d say, “to hell with the crew, we’ll have the cargo first”.’
So what would happen when they got news of a wreck? ‘If you could get aboard of her, you would get aboard of her—it was as easy as that. First thing would always be to make sure the crew were safe, and then grab what you could. Don’t matter if there’s police and customs sitting on every rock—there’d be a way to get aboard her somehow. After that, it’s fair game. And if the weather was too bad and she was breaking up, you’d put your boat so as to pick up all the jetsam and flotsam out of the water then, and then wait ashore when the wind was the right way—we knew exactly which tide she was in. So you used to follow the flotsam around, you know. But it’s surprising what used to get washed ashore. We used to like finding them big bales of crepe rubber. Crepe, you know, like what teddy boys used to wear on their shoes. There was quite a lot of them used to wash up, and they were worth quite a bit—a tenner a bale. That was quite a lot of money for them days.’
Which were the best ships? ‘Oh, general cargo, yes, definitely, definitely. You’d find out what it was, you know, and if it was general cargo, you used to smile and if it carried coal you used to . . . He scowls theatrically. ‘The only thing any good then was things like what was in the galley: bottles, fags—nothing else was much good. You couldn’t dive on her for scrap or nothing like that, because we didn’t have no diving suits.’ And would they expect to fight the customs for possession? ‘In them days, if you picked up a matchstick, you had to give it to the Customs, and they’ve got to prove who has the ownership of it. And if they can’t prove who owns it, then you get it. Oh, the Customs were very strict on these things—anything you salvaged had to be declared to ’em by law.’ It sounds, I say, almost as if you treated it as a kind of game. ‘Oh, y
es, yes, with who could get away with it. You’d have one man distracting them, someone else as lookout, someone going out at midnight, going out in a gale of wind, getting aboard of her, things like that. They’d think “Oh, it’s lashing down with rain, nobody’ll be there tonight”, and we’d already been there!.’
What was the best thing he ever got from a wreck? He takes a long thoughtful sip from his pint. ‘The first banana I ever seen came off a wreck. That was off a tank landing craft that went ashore in Scilly. We went aboard of her, and wondered what these things were hanging up, and they were bananas.’ He stops, then starts again. ‘There was another one. I can’t think of her at the moment, but she went on the Scilly rocks. Italian job. The Isobel? Mussolini struck a medal for all the local people who saved her crew off her. I’ve still got my grandfather’s medal at home, signed by Mussolini. She went down, but she had everything from grand pianos to cattle aboard of her. There were men on Bryher seen burying grand pianos. I remember a grand piano in our house, in our front room. My father used to play it quite a lot.’ And no-one ever had any suspicions about how it had got there? ‘Well, everybody knew, didn’t they? On a small island, you can’t keep nothing quiet. Everybody knew.’
Where did people usually hide things? ‘The pond. The field. Or in caves. On the seafront, under rocks. If you know a place, you’ll always find somewhere. With the pianos, they waited six months till everything had cooled off, then they dug ’em up and . . . ’, he shrugs, ‘we had pits already dug on the farms. As soon as we got ashore, we buried it. All ready, it was. Covered it over, and that was it—nobody ever found it. It was in the field—under barn floors was easy to find. We daren’t hide anything near the houses, so we put it in the pond.’
He remembers other wrecks, other storms, whole households of wreckage. ‘I got a radar set off one, I got a lifeboat off one. Oh yes. When I left Scilly, I loaded up all my furniture and I came across in that lifeboat. I had everything in it—television sets, everything, even household coal I had. I remember a good wreck in the 1950s. There was quite a controversy about her because certain people took a lot of the captain’s personal gear and things like that. They had the Lloyd’s detectives trying to trace the stuff. Her cargo weren’t no good, but she had good pickings on her from up the crew side of it. We were aboard of her that night [she was wrecked] but the lifeboat couldn’t go to sea. They knew roughly who it was because they knew there was only one boat good enough to get out there, and she was missing from her moorings in St Mary’s. And then the lifeboat went out, and they had to stand off. Next morning, it was still very bad, mountains of sea going in, and the lifeboat thought they’d try and get out there again. And when they got out, there was nothing left. We’d been aboard of her that night.’ What did you get off her? ‘Oh, quite a lot of things. Well, I had a lot of things: boots, radar, bearings, compass, chronometer, all the stuff from the wheelhouse. But somebody nicked the captain’s best silken hat and all that lot, and he didn’t like that.’
He sits reminiscing for a while longer, stopping and starting, breathing into the tape recorder. So if a general cargo ship went ashore now, what does he think would happen? ‘Well, you’d have the fishery protection boats there, you’d have the Customs cutters there, but there are so many of them these days with the drug smuggling and that, I reckon they would just completely put a circle around it. They’d have helicopters, all these things there. It would make it harder.’ So does he think wrecking has finally died out? He shakes his head, vehement. ‘It’s never died out. Never has died out. You don’t get so much of it now because of all these modern navigational aids and global navigation and all that, but it’s still there.’
He’s probably right. The Cita provided plenty of modern proof that the spirit of wrecking remains alive and well. And—though Mike Pearce is keen to draw a distinction between the methods of the islanders and the mainlanders—it probably would not have been the kind of difference that a shipwreck victim would have noticed. Besides, in many areas, people risked their own lives to make sure that crew and passengers on shipwrecks reached the shore safely. In the majority of cases, it was probably fair to assume that the wreckers were neither so callous nor so interested in the survivors that they would risk either injury or murder. They would save or assist shipwreck victims and consider their subsequent plunder as due repayment-in-kind. So why then do most Cornish people become so indignant when accused of wrecking? Perhaps because they know that while the county may still profit from selling skulduggery back to the tourists, it has also been affected by the ineradicable suspicion that anyone landing at its ports cannot always be guaranteed a helpful welcome.
Walking back across the harbour after saying goodbye to Mike Pearce, it occurs to me that, technically speaking, even he isn’t properly Cornish. He might have been a wrecker, and he might have lived here for over twenty years, but still . . . Later on, in one of the local libraries, I chat to one of the archivists about the research I’ve been doing. She shakes her head. ‘You won’t find anything like that here,’ she says. ‘Maybe in the eighteenth century, but even then it was nothing like as bad as people from Outside said it was.’ And so we’re back where we started. What the English might say is their own misguided business. But the Cornish will sell you one thing and tell you another; they’ll sell you the image of the false light, and tell you till the end of time that there is no such thing as a Cornish wrecker.
The East Coast
EIGHT
East Coast
Some people ornament their gardens with gnomes. Some people like sculpture, or gazebos, or patio sets. Richard Davies has boats. Two of them, upended, their prows setting a straight course for the sun and their sterns sailing along six feet under. The boats are painted black and red and are the first thing anyone who comes to the house will see. They stand proudly above the surrounding hedges and trees, sailing away to their ethereal destinations. These two additions to the local horticulture are Davies’s way of telling the world (or at least a small Norfolk section of it) what he is and what he stands for.
The sea is everywhere here, lapping at the doorsteps, watermarking the walls. Davies and his family have been part of that sea for as long as anyone round here can remember. He is the ex-coxswain of the Cromer lifeboat, and one of a long line of Davies to make a living from fish. He’s a thick-set, gingery man, blunt-spoken and solid as a tank. He recently retired from the RNLI and now devotes much of his time to running the family fishmongers in Cromer, though he has kept the look of the sea about him: electric blue eyes and the appearance of someone so at ease out of doors that he seems outsized inside. Meet him in the street and you might guess at his profession, but what you would not get is the fact that he and his family have between them been awarded three gold, five silver and nineteen bronze medals by the RNLI.
During the twentieth century, lifeboat medals were awarded sparingly and only for exceptional valour; a gold RNLI medal is now considered the equivalent of the military VC. At home in East Runton, Richard has so many framed copperplate commendations for his work that they stretch halfway up the stairs. And the two boats moored in his garden: proof both of his erstwhile profession and his continuing interest in wreck.
The pattern of Davies’s life was set as soon as he was born; he would be a fisherman, and he would be on the lifeboat crew. Was his father a fisherman? ‘Yes, and his father, and his father . . . There’s seven generations of fishermen in our family.’ And you wanted to be, as well? ‘No bloody way, no,’ he says vehemently. ‘But there was no question; I had to be, and that was that.’ Why? ‘Because my father said so. I said to him, “I want to be a farmer, I’d rather work on a farm.” He said, “You’re going out.” Then I said, “I want to go in the Navy.” He said, “You’re going in the bloody Navy—the Cromer Navy!” And that was it.’
Having learned his trade in the fishing boats, Richard was then recruited to the lifeboats. When did he first volunteer? He shakes his head. ‘It weren’t like that.
You didn’t volunteer, you were just put into it. There weren’t no choice, there weren’t no choice at all. I know it’s supposed to be a volunteer service, but that’s not how it was here—if your father was a fisherman, you were expected to be in the local lifeboat crew, because he’d been in it, and his father, and his father before him. And before they worked the lifeboats, they were wreckers.’
He stops. For a couple of seconds, he looks at me, a level gaze with an edge of defiance. He knows what he is saying. Back in the age of Nelson, when his great-great-great grandfather was still alive and before the lifeboat services had been established, the Davies family were wreckers, just the same as all the other fishermen in Cromer. ‘Have you heard of the hovellers?’ Yes, I say; there were hovellers down in Kent, servicing the ships on the Downs. ‘Well, up here, the old boats used to be called hovellers, and the crew were called hovellaires.’ And hovelling was one step up from wrecking? ‘Yes. They was pirates, if you like. They had these fast, shallow boats, and there’d be a race between the different families—they always went for the prize, they were racing each other to get out to the wreck first, racing each other. The first boat got the best pickings, and the last boat would bring the bodies out. The first got the free-for-all, and the last got the mean pickings. A wrecker didn’t go after human beings. They left them. They was just dead weight. And that was how the RNLI started, no matter what the official history says. They was wreckers first.’
***
If the Stroma men made wrecking an art form and Cornwall made it a trade, then on the east coast it finally became an industry. Wrecking on the east had a professionalism which set it apart from the amateur efforts of ship-lifters in other parts of the country. Here, wrecking was business as well as pleasure, a semi-legal occupation protected by law and practiced in daylight. In the work of the beach companies, the hovellaires and—later—the tug men, wrecking developed a respectability and status which was absent elsewhere. The combined efforts of so many different sub-species were ultimately responsible not only for developing much of the modern-day salvage and diving industries but for openly acknowledging what the rest of Britain could only hint at. Whereas wreckers elsewhere did everything they possibly could to avoid detection, the local solution to the problem of dealing with cheap vessels carrying valueless cargoes was to walk straight into the nearest court of law and ask for a slice of both. The ancestors of today’s professional salvors were wreckers born and bred, and the RNLI owes its current impeccable reputation to those ambiguous beginnings. Because, as Davies and his compatriots point out, all anyone could do round here was to make the best of a very bad sea.
The Wreckers Page 27