Once agreement—however reluctant—was reached, the beachmen would instantly begin salvaging both ship and cargo. In the early years of the companies, the beachmen’s first priority was to save property, not life. A crowd of wailing women and children clinging to the foredeck of a sinking freighter might look affecting, but it would not help put food on their tables. According to Richard Davies, any survivors ‘had to pay. And if they didn’t have the money, the beachmen let ’em stay. If you took your ring off and gave it to them, then you might get in the boat. People would say nowadays, “Oh, no, but they’d get the survivors off first.” Well, that’s a load of squit. Those men were hungry, they had families to feed. You can’t feed families on dead bodies and you can’t feed them on live bodies unless those bodies are going to pay you. But if you could salvage things, then you could sell them.’
Davies looks at me again, that same slight defiance; judge them if you dare. Those passengers who were beyond saving were also ignored. Bodies were, literally and metaphorically, dead weight. ‘It was a hard life round here; most people was just trying to survive. If you was starving, and you can get money out of ship’s cargo, you aren’t going to bother saving anyone, are you? If you was filling your boat up with prize, think how much space and weight a body would take up. You wouldn’t want a dead body if you could have something valuable instead, would you? It’s like Lockerbie, isn’t it? If you get piles of money falling out of the sky, you’re not going to leave it lying in a field. It’s just human nature.’
Besides, it would rarely be the best of the beachmen who dealt with survivors anyway. Assuming three or four different company yawls had all raced out to the wreck, the first boat would take the best of the cargo and equipment and the following crews would get whatever was left, including—in many cases—all that could be stripped from the corpses of the dead. ‘When they was wrecking, they’d take clothes off the bodies as well,’ says Davies. ‘If he’s dead, he ain’t going to want them no more, is he? So you looked at it, specially if he had a nice-cut jacket on, and you didn’t have nothing, you had rags. And then you’d go out on a Sunday and stick your chest out. Everybody would know exactly where it came from, but they don’t ask questions, do they? Ask no questions, tell no lies. And if there was dresses or shoes, they’d have them for the wives. Socks, boots, jewellery, everything. Oh, yes. In the First World War, how many British soldiers do you think wore German boots? My grandfather, he fought in the war. There were a couple of dead Germans close by him, and he could see they had decent boots—his army boots were worn out. He got the first one off the body, put it on, perfect fit. He took the other one off, and it still had the German’s leg in it. Gave him a fright, but he still kept those boots.’
If the vessel could be refloated, it would then be towed to a safe harbour. If it could not, then the beachmen would offload as much of the cargo as possible onto their own boats and return to shore. Once back on dry land, the real work began. Having itemised their various gains, and, if possible, patched up and refloated the vessel, the beachmen would then present their case for a salvage award to the local Admiralty court. As direct descendents of the old vice-admiral system, the courts were responsible for the settlement of disputes between shipowners, salvors and Lloyd’s agents over salvage. The courts were supposed to be impartial—as courts generally are—but the majority of judges regarded the beachmen at best as a necessary evil and at worst as a kind of maritime Cosa Nostra, lying, extorting and, if necessary, killing their way to a living. Thus most Admiralty court disputes followed a familiar pattern: captains and shipowners would argue that both cargo and vessel were worth nothing and the beachmen had rendered either minimal assistance or none at all, after which the beachmen would argue that the vessel was worth a small fortune and that they had been single-handedly responsible for saving every last plank. The judge was responsible for finding some cheerless middle ground between the two positions, and for setting a percentage of the total value as a salvage award. Finally, either the shipowner or the shipowner’s insurance company would—with bad grace and loud complaint—pay the beach company. Returning home, the beachmen would then share out the payment in lots to all those who had touched the boat before she launched.
Though the early history of the beach companies was relatively lawless, its later development intersected with the establishment of the lifeboats. Once the lifeboats became involved, the incentive to kill or abandon survivors of shipwreck diminished. The first beach companies were founded in the 1780s; a quarter of a century later, the first lifeboat was stationed at Cromer. In 1823, the Norfolk Association for Saving the Lives of Shipwrecked Mariners was established (initially acting as an entirely separate entity to the RNLI), and provided an additional six lifeboats plus six mortar lines at points around the coast. With the evolution of the early lifeboats (and their eventual amalgamation into the nationwide service) the beachmen began concentrating solely on salvage.
But as salvage flourished, so the companies dwindled. By the late nineteenth century, salvage had become a daylight occupation with the dignity of obligation and the endorsement of law, a profession which no longer settled its differences on a dark beach with a crowbar, but on paper in court. To be a good salvor required skill, foresight and nerve, a shrewd understanding of oceanography and fluency in several languages. Though born out of criminality and regarded with suspicion, it gradually gained both an acknowledged role and a veneer of respectability. As one nineteenth-century law historian put it, salvage ‘offers a premium by way of honorary reward, for prompt and ready assistance to human sufferings; for a bold and fearless intrepidity; and for that affecting chivalry, which forgets itself in an anxiety to save property, as well as life’. Then, as now, its aim—as defined by the International Salvage Union—is that ‘the salvor should be encouraged by the prospect of an appropriate salvage award to intervene in any casualty situation to salve the ship, property, and, in particular, to save life and prevent pollution’. In practice, most shipowners afford the salvage industry the kind of grudging respect that the general public gives to morticians or rat catchers; they know they’re there, they know they’re necessary, but they don’t ever want to have to make use of them. At the same time, it is also true that salvage retains something of its old reputation for rapacity, and stories still persist about clusters of vulturine tugs in pursuit of a kill.
Syd Weatherill, Ben Dean and John Porteus are all amateur salvors who have spent their working lives probing the reefs and bays of England’s north-east coast. Based in Whitby, they set up a salvage company concentrating on the recovery of non-ferrous metals (gold, silver, brass, copper, lead) from wrecks in the area. They exemplify the adaptability and resourcefulness of the east coasters, and their ability to turn even the most unpromising cargoes into hard brass. Most wrecking in the area, Dean thinks, was mundane. ‘When ships came ashore here, it was mainly people going down and salvaging some of the coal for their own fires, or wood to make sheds. It wasn’t really expensive cargoes until the wars, when ships were carrying more expensive things. But still, it was mostly small stuff.’ Syd Weatherill interjects. ‘It would be coal. People could use coal, and if you could get a few bags of it, that was just great. They’re still picking up coal further north, from the tips. I have a relation up near Newcasde and she said her family used to go to the beach and collect what we call brash, small fine coal, and wrap it in newspaper, and it would be fine, wouldn’t it? It was something for nothing for the poorer people.’
The relative uniformity of traffic on the east meant that salvors usually knew what they would be dealing with. ‘Round here, most ships would be carrying coal or iron, or they’d be bulk carriers carrying a single cargo,’ says Dean. ‘If you wanted a diverse cargo, it would all be in containers. A lot of foreshore recovery work, or salvage, in the old days during our lifetime, was timber, deck cargo. At one time, North Yorkshire and Durham were big coal-mining areas, all using pit props which came from countries which had lots of
little trees to make pit props from, like Scandinavia. Props were pine, and at all the major ports—Whitby, Hartlepool—there used to be stacks and stacks and stacks of them waiting to go to the mines. They had to be dried out because they were lighter when dry, and when they lost their weight they could be handled easily down the pits. But while they were standing in stacks, of course they were very handy for people who fancied a bit of firewood. Then they went on to steel girdering, and that particular trade stopped.’
As Dean points out, part of the reason why the salvage industry became so strong along the east coast was the time and effort required to deal with metal-hulled vessels. ‘Steel ships, they’re not so easy to loot. They don’t break apart. You go with a horse and cart, and go aboard a steel ship that’s come ashore, and you’ve got 40 foot of straight steel to deal with. It’s not so easy, and the authorities can control it better. The old wooden ships were the ones which were good for wrecking because they had a shallower draught, they’d drive well inshore on the beaches and rocky areas, break up and the cargo would be just littered about.’
A wooden ship could be wrecked and picked clean within hours, but ‘when a ship came ashore in this area, we all knew, and there was a certain amount of excitement. We call them rockers round here, a rocker was a ship come ashore on the rocks. And then there would be a little bit of a race to try and do some salvage, to try and get a line on board, to help take a kedge anchor off, or something like that. That was really where the money lay, in trying to be part of the salvage crew.’
In the past the main salvors around Whitby would have been fishermen. ‘You hear these apocryphal tales, when a ship comes ashore and somebody gets to know about it, the seamen running down to their boats, carrying their sea boots over their shoulders so they’re not disturbing anybody, all of them going down in this rush, because it was the first to get a line on who had the chance for some salvage.’ Dean adds, ‘The removal in a gentlemanly manner of other people’s equipment and possessions is universal, and everlasting. Where the sea meets the land, there’ll always be a place for the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the person who’s going to be able to survive in a basically hostile situation. The fishermen and the smugglers and the wreckers: they’re a breed, a certain type of resourceful person. You can use the coast—you can catch fish or you can collect bits washed ashore, or climb the cliffs and get eggs to feed the family, but all of those things are extremely risky. And wherever the sea meets the land, the risk factor is there all the time. It’s quite unforgiving. If you get the wrong side of the tide, that’s it. So it breeds the type of person who is aware of their environment, lives with their environment, and their environment has shaped their lives.’
Part of which, I say, relies on the perception that the sea washes things clean of ownership. ‘Yes,’ says Dean, ‘but everything is still owned by somebody. The vast majority of people, particularly people who aren’t on the coast, think it doesn’t belong to anybody. But everything in the sea belongs to someone.’
John Porteous points out that if a cargo of coal came ashore now, few people would bother gathering it. ‘It’s all electricity now, and the coal comes from Australia,’ adds Dean. Weatherill nods. A lot of the stuff that comes on the shore now, even good timber, a lot of it would just be left. Nowadays, if people want timber, they’re not using it for fires like they used to, so a lot of it just gets wasted. You look at the timbered roofs in old houses in Whitby, and they’re totally salvaged. Specially the ones that haven’t been too much renovated, and you find ships’ timbers in the beams. I think this community itself has changed vastly over the years. Once upon a time in Whitby and Staithes and Robin Hood’s Bay, the community was local. Everybody knew the person next door, and the sons and daughters were living in a very tight community. And people in those days were quite poor, and the beach was the place to find odd bits of this, that and the other. There’s odd ones that still comb the beaches for things, but they’re very few and far between. They don’t need to nowadays. If a small trawler came ashore now, nobody would really be interested, would they? It’s got no non-ferrous metal on board like the old ones, it’s just a heap of scrap really. And nobody’s interested in the metal because it would cost them too much to do anything with. So unless it had a cargo on board which was of any value, everybody just forgets about it, don’t they. That tramp down at Salford—that came ashore, and it was just left.’
‘It’s down to what makes the working communities on the coast tick,’ says Dean. ‘When we started diving in the 1950s, we’d all been on the beach since lads. And then we got involved in scuba diving. I would think, though it’s a gross oversimplification, that’s where the beachcombers went. It’s a strange thing, but beachcombing moved out. We moved out and went down, and we found things. And the strange thing about divers and particularly salvage divers is that once they’ve seen something on the bottom that they think they can get at, you will shift anything to get it. It’s just the fact of doing it. We’ve raised old fishing boats, and when you first see them on the bottom, you’ve got to get it. And you make a small profit by selling them back to the insurers. We’ve taken fishing boats apart on the bottom of the ocean, so we could sell their engines and their machinery and suchlike. The last stuff we brought up, about five years ago, was a great big lump of lead. When we first started, we would have thought, that’s smashing, that’ll pay for the fuel for this job . . . But nobody wants it. Not worth the value of carrying it, even. When we were wrecking, we were mainly looking for the non-ferrous metal to salvage. But a lot of the younger divers are not wanting to do that. They want to see a wreck in order to tick it off in their book—it’s like bird-watching. So the vast majority are sports divers. But for us, it was different. We were more like the old beachcombers rather than what the modern divers are like.’
Back down in Norfolk, Richard Davies made his living by more conventional means. He might have been a reluctant recruit to the fishing grounds, but there is no question that he was a skilful one. ‘I picked it up as I went along. I watched my father, and I learned like that. The whole Davies family were known for being good fishermen.’ And what does he consider makes a good fisherman? ‘A good fisherman is someone who can put food on the table at the end of the week. Never mind knowing the sea or the area or the fish, that’s all that counts in the end. I’ve had old people in the town coming up to me and saying, “If it wasn’t for your grandfather, we’d have missed a lot of suppers.” Their sons were killed in the [First World] War, and there’d be no-one to be the breadwinner, and if it wasn’t for my grandfather hanging a bag of something on the door—a couple of crabs, a bit of cod, whatever he had that week—on the door, they’d have gone hungry. He’d get stuff off the local poacher to give to people when he didn’t have any fish.’
The local fishing industry is now depleted, but it is not yet dead. Richard’s son John has taken up his father’s trade, though Richard hopes for better prospects for his grandson. ‘There are about twenty-five fishermen in Cromer now. There’s mainly crabs, whelks, cod—not so much of the cod now as there used to be, but we’re good, we look after the stocks. In the 1950s there was maybe sixty full-time fishermen. At one stage it went down to about fifteen—after the war there was a whole generation missing, killed. I had two uncles drowned in 1953 at the time of the Coronation—I can remember all the flags out, the celebrations, coming home and being told they’d drowned.’
The Davies family was also helped by the beginnings of mass tourism. ‘In the summer, my family would be doing the beach thing—they had bathing huts down on the beach. It was big business at one time. They had seven or eight people hiring out the bathing huts and the bathing costumes. In those days you wouldn’t buy a swimsuit, you’d hire them—those big things, with the stripes, great big things, like a music-hall comedy turn. They’d look stupid now. They’d do the bathing machines as well, hiring those out. My father had both sides of the beach—my father would walk four miles every day before scho
ol to pick up the carthorses from one of the local farmers, take them down to the beach, and they’d be towing the bathing machines up and down the beach all day. The women would go into the water in the bathing machines, everything hidden except their heads—like swimming in a tent.’
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