If you trace the curve of the bay past St Michael’s Mount, past the almost-grave of the Long Rock sperm whale, forever newspaper-print coloured in my mind, past the fisherman’s statue, past Newlyn town, the rows of houses start to thin out, the hedges thicken and eventually you will come to the old Penlee lifeboat station. The negative space of the station marks Mount’s Bay as powerfully as the Mount itself, a lacuna in the coastline. It comes up in almost every conversation I have while I am in Newlyn, a fissure in the town’s communal history. I think of the life class teacher who told us bodies emerge on paper not by our sketching out limbs and skin, but by attending to the parts of the frame empty of the human form. So too can a place’s present shape be better understood by discovering what has been lost from it.
I pass the old lifeboat house most mornings on my sunrise runs along the coastal path towards Mousehole, which are timed so that I arrive back in Newlyn just as the harbour is lit by the new sun and the last of the day-boats slip out through the gaps on their way to fish beside Wolf Rock. The station itself lies just below Penlee Point, where the coastline pushes out into the sea. As you approach it by foot it resembles a break in the landscape – a false end to the bay, which can only be reconciled as part of its wider curve if you are on a boat looking back at the land. From the sea, all of the coast’s difficulties, its blemishes and pockmarks, smooth right out into one undifferentiated line of land.
The current Penlee lifeboat station, found above the small boats’ pontoon at the back of the harbour car park, holds a central position in the town. Its many crew members pass back and forth through its doors each day, drinking coffee and eating cake together, yarning about the sea and discussing any recent distress signals they have answered. Apart from Patch, the lifeboat’s coxswain, its crew are all volunteers – members of the community who join out of a shared understanding that the environment just beyond their homes can be treacherous and that those who face it day after day need protecting from the storms it brings. The number of people who join the lifeboat crew speaks again to the ardent belief felt throughout the town that you ought to do things for the place you live in, a fellowship that is dying out elsewhere. Those who become crew are akin to family. Cod tells me that, after his illness, while he was not well enough yet to go to sea, the lifeboat is where he would come to feel part of things.
I arrive late back at Penzance train station following a day spent in Falmouth to catch a meeting being held at the Penlee lifeboat house. The wind scrapes the air clean. Figures along the platform blow on their cold pale hands; illuminated only by the tall lamps casting stripes of light down the platform, they appear disembodied, each pair of hands rubbed together in a circular motion. The wind has picked up and, as I rush along the darkening prom, sea spray comes flying up over the low wall. Reaching the lifeboat house, I try to open the door into the poky building – set to be torn down and rebuilt with two floors and a visitor’s centre in the new year – but it does not give. I push harder and hear a yelp come from the other side.
‘Hang on!’ comes a chorus of voices. There is some shuffling and grumbling and then the door opens just wide enough for me to squeeze through. The room steams with people. Every person I have ever met or seen in passing around Newlyn seems to be lined up along the edges of the room like a tin of sardines. I settle on the floor cross-legged to listen to the impassioned voices discuss the evening’s agenda, while outside exhausted fishermen drag boxes of crab up from the pontoons in the settling dusk. Strewn across the table at the centre of the room are countless drawings and photographs of a traditional counter-stern fishing boat – a kind of lugger whose aft overhangs above the waterline – as well as an elegant glass bottle containing a perfect replica of her. The name painted on the side in curly letters is Ocean Pride PZ134. Tonight’s meeting has been set up to initiate the lengthy process of locating and bringing her back to Newlyn, where she had spent most of the last hundred years working with Newlyn crews, until all trace of her was lost at the start of the last century.
The Ocean Pride was built in 1919 at Peakes shipyard in Tolcarne, an almost identical vessel to the Rosebud. There is a photograph of her mid-completion, the lines of her wood-carved ribcage fluent and feminine, each suture polished down until it would be hard to believe she was ever comprised of distinct parts. Every time a new boat was built at Peakes the villagers would drag her down the slip – a task sometimes requiring over a hundred people – coaxing her into the harbour waters like some part of a baptism ritual.
There is nothing half-hearted about community projects in Newlyn. If there is a case one person believes in, it rapidly becomes a town-wide concern – especially if it has anything to do with the sea or fishing. Most of the people at the meeting have some connection to the Ocean Pride. Each articulates how their parents, grandparents, friends, husbands fished on her or repaired her when she needed care. She was ‘a lovely boat’, ‘a happy little thing’, they say, one after another.
Every fishing vessel in Newlyn holds within it a remarkable chain of lives – intricate family trees contained within their sea-marked hulls. When I return late and see the lights of the boats in the harbour, I hear their hulls rocking mysteriously, their sails murmuring and parts clinking. I imagine these ancestors of the town telling one another stories about the places they have been, the things they have seen, like narwhals narrating their sea journeys to one another through the clashing of their horns.
It was the Brownfield brothers of Mousehole who originally commissioned the Ocean Pride. Nim, one of the original shipwrights who worked on her, tended to her lovingly throughout her time in Newlyn. As such he knows her every part, intimately. Her bends and keel were elm; her deck yellow pine; other parts besides were pitch pine, the type of wood for which shipwrights created the saying: ‘If it lasts twelve months, it’ll last a lifetime’; the rest of her locally grown oak coming from perhaps as nearby as the woods at the edge of Newlyn. These old luggers, built from natural materials sourced from the surrounding area, were as Cornish as the men who fished on them.
For the first years of her life she worked with a crew of six out of Mousehole as a long-liner and pilchard-driver – luggers designed to catch pilchards by drawing a net all the way around the shoal, similar to how Danny on the Golden Harvest fishes for them now. In 1937 she changed hands and was bought by George Pezzack of Mill Lane, Mousehole, and Mary Ann Tripp of Gulval. In 1948 she returned to the Brownfield family once more, bought by Joseph Brownfield, her skipper, and a Mrs Jean Herds.
Someone interrupts the line of ancestors to recount an extraordinary story about Joseph Brownfield. After he sold the Ocean Pride he went to work at Shippam’s, the sardine canning factory in Newlyn, and ended up on one of their posters displayed at Paddington station. A young woman saw the poster of Joseph looking out of the wheelhouse window, smoking his pipe, and told her companion: ‘I am going to marry that man one day’. That same summer the young woman came down on the train from London to holiday in Penzance and was surprised to run into the very man from the poster. She quickly became Joseph’s ‘Sweetie Pie’ and they married the next year, living in Newlyn together for the rest of their lives.
In 1953 Edward Charles Downing, grandfather of Patch Harvey, the coxswain of the lifeboat, became skipper of the Ocean Pride, followed in 1971 by Thomas Bodilly Simons, at which point her ownership was transferred to Ian Prestage Childs from Newlyn. In 1991 she was decommissioned, along with many other fishing boats in Newlyn, as a result of new stringent laws about the number of boats that were allowed to work out of the port. Like old employees trying in vain to keep up with the newest technology in their office and at last replaced by younger, more efficient workers, these old boats slunk back to the edges of the harbour.
Once her fishing career was over, the Ocean Pride stayed in Penzance for a few years, operating as a pleasure boat and making leisurely trips around Mount’s Bay. Finally, she was bought by someone outside the county, who sailed her out of Mount’s Bay one day, then out of Cornwall altogether.
Patch sent out the first feelers in 2016 to recover his granddad’s old boat, discovering her at a boatyard in Rye in East Sussex. It turned out her last owner had run out of money to restore her and moved to the Canary Islands, abandoning her there in the harbour. Patch points out the low-resolution images of the Ocean Pride in her current state. The photo displays a husk, a bedraggled, broken thing with decaying exposed wood, wholly unrecognisable from the photos of the glossy fishing boat sailing back into Newlyn harbour in the sixties. When he first saw those pictures of her in the muddy waters at Rye, Nim the shipwright says it just about broke his heart – ‘How anyone could leave a boat in that condition. I have no idea.’
To transport her back to Newlyn harbour will be an expensive undertaking, but there is no question amongst those assembled as to whether it is worth the money or not. In the eyes of the town, to let the Ocean Pride fester in a Sussex harbour would be equivalent to leaving an elderly member of the community stranded far from her home on her deathbed.
In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘The Bight’ – the name for a geographical curve in the land like that of Mount’s Bay – she describes the old, forsaken boats left along the shoreline: ‘like torn-open unanswered letters./ The bight is littered with old correspondences’. The Ocean Pride lies prostrate in Rye harbour, the ink from the stories written into her body running and leaking away into the water with no one to reply to them. The simile works in both directions: each letter to friends and family back home is a boat setting out – to respond is to keep those relationships afloat, as the regions between us grow wider.
On a final weekend return to Newlyn before Christmas, I hear that the Ocean Pride had just returned home to Newlyn harbour and is now resting on the beachfront at Sandy Cove. It will be Nim who teaches the young shipwright coming to work on the Ocean Pride the art of repairing the lugger. The letter of his life as a shipwright will not be left unanswered but transmitted on to younger generations through the Ocean Pride herself. When I ask Nim if he has a similar personal connection to many of the other boats he worked on in Newlyn harbour. ‘It’s not the boats,’ he corrects me. ‘It’s the people – the owners, the skippers, the deck hands, the other shipwrights – every person connected through those boats.’
Where the present-day Penlee lifeboat station buzzes with life in the town, the windows of the old one at Penlee Point are cracked, its once white walls discoloured and dappled by time and tide; weeds climb up its exterior. If it were not for the memorial garden and plaque set up beside the coastal path, you would be forgiven for assuming it was just another inexplicably abandoned building, like so many others stood above the sea in this part of Cornwall. But this station once housed the Solomon Browne lifeboat and the plaque commemorates the sixteen lives lost on 19 December 1981, a Saturday, when its crew responded to the mayday call of the cargo ship, MV Union Star.
The radio communication between the Falmouth coastguard and the Penlee lifeboat that night has been preserved and drills straight back through to that violent December night.
Falmouth coastguard, Falmouth coastguard. This is Penlee lifeboat calling Falmouth coastguard.
Penlee lifeboat, Falmouth coastguard. Go.
We’ve got four men off. Hang on, we’ve got four off at the moment – male and female. There’s two left on board.
There comes a cracking noise and then static.
Penlee lifeboat, Falmouth coastguard. I understand you have four off and you say there’s two left on board. Over.
Static.
Penlee lifeboat, Penlee lifeboat, Falmouth coastguard. Over.
The static comes again.
Penlee lifeboat. Penlee lifeboat, Penlee lifeboat, Falmouth coastguard. Over.
The same phrase is repeated again and again, the coastguard holding back from his voice any recognition of what the lack of response might mean. Only the progressively shorter pauses between his messages provide a hint of the rising dread that must have been felt amongst those listening back on the land. I imagine it must be similar to the feeling doctors experience when watching waves of a heart rate monitor thin out into a single line of bright silence.
When the crew of the Union Star, a new vessel on her maiden voyage from Denmark to Ireland with a cargo of fertiliser, found themselves in hurricane conditions, and being dragged by winds surging at up to 90 knots towards the rocks at Boscawen Point, its mayday call was picked up by the coastguard at Falmouth. On board were a crew of five, plus the captain’s pregnant wife, Dawn, and two teenage stepdaughters, whom they had picked up en route.
Eight miles off Wolf Rock, the 50-foot waves reaching right over the top of the lighthouse, the Union Star’s engines failed. Though a salvage tug, the Noord Holland, known as ‘the vulture of the sea’, was called upon to tow her in, the Union Star’s captain, Henry Morgan, refused it, believing they might be able to restart the engines before matters worsened. But the waves grew higher and the coaster blew closer to the treacherous formation of rocks jutting out from the coast at Boscawen Point. When it became clear the Union Star’s power could not be revived, a Sea King helicopter was scrambled from RNAS Culdrose to rescue those on board.
Finally, after hearing the Sea King was unable to get close to the Union Star, the Solomon Browne, a 47-foot wooden lifeboat, coxswained by Trevelyan Richards and crewed by seven volunteers from Newlyn and Mousehole – their day jobs ranging from fishermen to telephone engineers to the landlord of the Ship Inn – was made ready. In fact, eight men responded to the call that night, but seventeen-year-old Neil Brockman was sent away because his father, assistant mechanic Nigel Brockman – the same person Nim had once tricked into believing he had to paint the Wolf Rock lighthouse – was already part of the crew and Richards did not want two men from the same family out in such dangerous and unrelenting conditions.
At 8.12 p.m. the lifeboat launched from Penlee Point to meet the coaster as it drifted amongst the rising waves out by Lamorna. It took Richards several attempts before he at last got the Solomon Browne alongside the Union Star, at which point they managed to start helping the crew to jump across from the wheelhouse, beginning with the captain’s family. The very last message radioed back to land from the lifeboat was: ‘We’ve got four off…’.
Those who were in Newlyn and Mousehole on 19 December 1981 remember what they did that day in minute detail, in that way you do when a date is wrenched out from the ordinary passage of time – each memory gone over until it becomes worn and threadbare, like a dog-eared book.
Retired fisherman and crab processor called Mike Dyer, great-nephew of Robert Hichens who survived the Titanic, remembers going over to Penzance to play snooker at teatime. As he drove home along the front he saw the waves flying up over the prom and when he walked in the front door he announced to his wife, Rose: ‘You’ll remember this night, all right, what with the wind blowing like it is.’ Later that day, he got a call from a friend in Falmouth asking him if he could check whether his boat was withstanding the weather in the harbour. Once he had, Mike tells me, he got back into his car and, when he let the handbrake off the strength of the wind pulled his car along the quay on its own accord. ‘It wasn’t one of these light modern cars either,’ he adds. ‘It was a two-litre Triumph.’
‘It was the saddest thing we ever knew in this village,’ Pat, the former landlady of the Fishermen’s Arms, tells me from her front room overlooking the harbour. ‘It was terrible. Terrible and unnecessary,’ she sighs, directing my gaze through the window to where the Noord Holland salvage tug had once been moored, which perhaps could have rescued the Union Star before the conditions had worsened if the captain had not refused it. ‘A waste of lives.’
In his history of Mousehole, Mike Buttery suggests that he and his friend were the last people to see the stricken lifeboat in the water. That night, he says, ‘We searched every rock from Lamorna to Mousehole’ but found nothing. ‘In our hearts we knew there would be no survivors.’ The grief experienced throughout the villages around Mount’s Bay was compounded by their imaginings of what had happened to the two crews in their last moments. It is thought that the Solomon Browne was dashed against the hull of the Union Star, before the two were smashed by the waves into the rocks at Boscawen. The next day Butts went to find the Union Star’s final resting place, discovering her upside down straddling a gully. He notes that her lights were still on and ‘the sound of metal grinding on rocks made some people’s teeth go on edge’.
When the full extent of the tragedy became clear, Mike Dyer found he could not stay inside, doing nothing, and so he set off along the coastal path to Lamorna Cove. As he rounded the cliff path he saw the body of his friend from the lifeboat crew laid out on the rocks, beside the body of one of the daughters of the Union Star’s captain. ‘They were still together, like,’ he says, along with various bits of wreckage from the Solomon Browne that the sea had brought up into the cove.
Two days later, the Union Star had broken into two pieces. ‘By the end of December,’ Buttery continues, ‘she was in three pieces. Great lumps of her iron sides were missing and that made it easier for the waves to do the damage. By mid-January only bits of the Union Star could be seen at low water.’ The sea dragged the tragedy out, taking its time to pull the last remnants down to its eventual graveyard.
While both villages tried to cope with what happened that night, swarms of journalists were making their way to the end of the line to broadcast the story to the world. They went from door to door, asking anyone and everyone to narrate the events that had taken place to them, how they felt and if they would give a statement for television. Even today, there is residual anger directed towards the press regarding the way they swept in that Christmas, allowing the town no time at all to grieve or process their trauma in peace. After the cameras left, a silence hung over the area. People gathered at friends’ houses just to sit with each other. No one wanted to be alone, but no one could speak much either. ‘It was as if the whole bay had the life knocked out of it,’ David Barron remembers.
There are several fragments of poetry that Joan Didion returned to after the deaths of her husband and daughter. One of these was from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Heaven-Haven’:
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come.
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
When I first read these lines they sounded like a resignation. Every fisherman I have met who has had a loved one die at sea, chooses to do the opposite: to be where the storms come, not just to live through grief, but to confront it head on, out there, in the water.
A few months later I take out a book of Hopkins’s poetry at the British Library. In its printed version there is a subscript to ‘Heaven-Haven’ announcing its subject to be ‘A nun takes the veil’. Hopkins’s lines, it turns out, are not about grief but finding grace. Mount’s Bay holds all of the things that have happened in Newlyn and the surrounding villages. It remembers and is marked by what the sea has taken from it and what it has brought to the shore. Storms still come to the villages along the bay. The lives they take are not hidden in silence; they are commemorated, celebrated.
The morning after the disaster Neil Brockman, the seventeen-year-old whose life was saved by the coxswain’s decision not to let a father and son crew the boat that night, persuaded his mother to sign the papers that would allow him to join the new volunteer crew. With him that same day, a group of men, mostly fishermen, turned up at the lifeboat station to occupy the space left in the crew by those who had died. Brockman would go on to become coxswain of the lifeboat himself, while his son joined the lifeboat service in 2012. On 19 December each year, there is a service at Paul parish church for those lost in the Penlee disaster. Last year a new community hall was opened in Mousehole called the Solomon Browne: a name that once stood for the villagers’ commitment to protect one another from the storms that come, now able to do so once again.