The destruction of the SS Forfarshire on 5th September 1838 had little to distinguish it from other British shipwrecks of the period. The 1830s was a particularly calamitous decade for seafarers. A government report totalled upwards of fifteen hundred wrecks and strandings having occurred around the British Isles between 1833 and 1835 alone. The location of the disaster, the Farne Isles in Northumbria, was a known graveyard for unwary vessels in rough weather with as many as 40 vessels coming to grief there over the previous century. Three ships had been lost with all hands there during a winter storm in 1823. The fact that the Forfarshire was a steam-ship was not especially notable. Many other steam-propelled vessels had been lost; a natural outcome of the new technology. The number of deaths recorded in this instance, estimated at around 40, was not especially high. The wreck of the paddle-steamer Rothsay Castle, for example, lost off Anglesey in 1831, had claimed as many as 130 lives. That women and young children were among the casualties was also the norm in a period before ‘women and children first’ became the accepted code of practice.
The fact that a handful of passengers had been rescued from the Forfarshire was unremarkable; informal lifeboat stations were already established around the British Isles, and brave lifeboat crews habitually plucked survivors from the claws of death. Even the fact that the rescue had been carried out by a lighthouse keeper was not all that startling. Many such men before had distinguished themselves in picking up passengers and crew left stranded on the rocks and isles surrounding their place of work. Indeed, none of these aspects of the Forfarshire wreck would have kept it in the public eye very long were it not for one remaining and wholly unusual fact. This was that accompanying William Darling on his mission of mercy at daybreak on 7th September 1838 was a young woman; the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, Grace.
Grace Darling was, royalty notwithstanding, Britain’s first female media celebrity, and her name still has currency in the 21st century, albeit predominantly as part of school curriculums and publicity for the RNLI. But sex alone does not fully account for the young woman’s enduring fame. These pages explore the other factors that led Grace Darling to become Britain’s first modern heroine.
The Islands
Island shipwrecks seem to have a particular hold in the British national psyche as evinced by their centrality to early English literature; Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The story of the Forfarshire would also inspire writers, most notably the poet William Wordsworth.
The islands where she came to grief, though hardly comparable, are some of the most inhospitable in the British Isles. As one biographer put it, the Farnes are ‘not a pleasant group of islands; they are rather an archipelago in which sunken rocks and submerged shoals appear and disappear according to the tides which run unusually high at times’ [1]. Among these troublesome masses of rock are the Inner Farne and Longstone, upon which lighthouses still operate today, the Brownsman, site of an earlier lighthouse, the Knavestone, and the Great Harker, upon which the Forfarshire struck. Even the more substantial islands in the group are marked by ‘extreme dreariness. Not a tree nor a bush, hardly a blade of grass is to be seen’. It is a harsh landscape not dissimilar to that inhabited by Charlotte Bronte’s wildly unorthodox heroine Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, published a decade after the disaster. However, the islands themselves, even in Grace’s time, were hardly remote, being ‘only an hour’s row in fine weather from the Main, and fishing boats were constantly plying between the islands and Bamburgh and Seahouses’, on the Northumbrian coast. [1]
The Wreck
By 1838, steam was already in the process of replacing sail as the primary means of marine propulsion, a fact JMW Turner was the same year endeavouring to symbolise in his painting of ‘The Fighting Temeraire’. , which juxtaposed one of Britain’s most celebrated sailing ships-of-the-line ethereally with a smoke-belching, steam-powered tug. The Royal Navy had commissioned their first armed steam vessel, HMS Dee, in 1832, but merchant paddle-steamers had begun to replace sailing vessels on coastal and cross-channel routes in the 1820s.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Forfarshire was a modern and relatively large steam-ship undoubtedly added to initial public and media interest in the disaster. The 450 tons burden vessel had been built by Thomas Adamson of Dundee for the purpose of transporting passengers and cargo between Tayside and the ports of Northeast of England. Entering service in May 1836, She had commenced her latest voyage from Hull to her home port at dusk on 5th September. Soon after departure, the Forfarshire experienced a serious leak in her boiler, which as only got worse as the voyage wore on and as the weather turned nasty. Despite continuously manning the deck pumps, the flooding inside the engine room eventually got to the point where the ship’s boiler fires were dowsed. Sails were set in an attempt to keep her off the land, but the Forfarshire was drawn inextricably and fatefully towards shore amid gale-force winds, a heavy swell, and dense fog. At around 3am on the 6th, the ship ran up against the Great Harker rock and rapidly broke in two. Most of those aboard were carried away by the surging seas. A handful of crewmen and one passenger were able to slip away in a lifeboat while nine others were left stranded on the rock itself.
A particular aspect of the Forfarshire disaster that caused an initial stir was the actions of her skipper, John Humble. The experienced captain, who had drowned along with his wife, had had ample time to put into a safe harbour after learning of the problems in his engine room. Although he could not have anticipated the extreme weather ahead; one of the worst gales in living memory, he would have known that a total engine failure would put him at the mercy of the prevailing elements. A hastily convened inquest after the tragedy unequivocally determined the deaths of those aboard to be the result of their being ‘wrecked on board the Forfarshire steam packet by the imperfections of the boilers, and the cupable negligence of the captain in not putting back to port.’ [1] This headline-grabbing verdict stood for some time until a second inquest largely exonerated Humble, putting the disaster down to the weather alone.
The Forfarshire wreck was perhaps slightly unusual in that the forward part of the ship did not sink and remained visible from the mainland and to passing ships and morbid travellers for many weeks until it was broken up. One such witness, described as ‘an intelligent gentleman of Berwick’ gave the following over-romanticised description of what remained to a local newspaper:
‘The most striking object in the wreck is the mass of machinery. Cylinders, pistons, tubes, pumps – the whole engine in short, with all appliances and means to boot, there lies one glorious chaos and wild heap. The machinery bears every mark of having been first rate manufacture and the fallen pillars and arches seem to remind one of the prostrate ruins of some Grecian temple. Another attraction is the figurehead – a full-length sylph-like female figure, gilded – which with waving hand and a smiling mien, yet stood gaily erect amid the scene of ruin and desolation.‘ [2]
Nevertheless, neither the ship itself, her exposed remains, nor the controversial actions of her captain would have been enough to sustain public attention in such a local disaster as that of the Forfarshire. Afterall, there was more public interest in the recently inaugurated transatlantic passenger services, spearheaded by Brunel’s Great Western, which had entered service in April of that year. In 1841, the first disaster involving one of these new breed of ships would occur when the SS President, then the world’s largest ship, was lost with all hands. Why should the wreck of a comparatively small coastal steamer be remembered today above those of the SS President and a thousand other more notable shipwrecks that occurred over the course of subsequent decades?
Bow Creek to Anatahan 