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“In medieval times the Downs were a place where the King’s Ships assembled during the numerous wars with France. The Downs began to rise in importance during the Elizabethan era, when English maritime interests were expanding. They were also used for a base for warships and for ships bound on Ocean voyages, they called here to collect food, mail and the final compliment of passengers. The best place to land was the shingle beach at Deal, and this town grew up largely to aid the service of passing ships. In fact no town in Britain owes its existence more to beach boats than Deal.”47 The Deal boatmen were subsequently regarded as of such importance to English maritime affairs, that they had become exempted from the press gangs of the Royal Navy. Not only did the local boatmen attend to the needs of passing shipping in the Downs, but they would also often act as Pilots, such was their knowledge of the local waters.
With the introduction of Steam powered shipping, their followed a decline in the supremacy of the Deal Lugger around the coast of Kent. Mr. Robert Simper, in his book on the subject of Britain’s Beach boats explains that the Deal Lugger owed its origins to an evolution of the open Galley punts of the 1770’s. These light and fast galley’s could reach France in about three hours, and if unfortunate enough to be spotted on the return trip, they could be landed on the Goodwin Sands, and dragged easily across to the other side, slipping quietly of to the shore undetected and well ahead of any nearing Revenue Cutter. These Galley’s were also very good at passing efficiently through the uncertain waters thereabouts and many a ships Captain would make efforts to obtain a Deal built Galley whilst laying up in the Downs.
Between 1850~1874 there were upwards of twenty luggers operating from Kingsdown alone. Galley’s and Luggers were sometimes lost, and it is known that between 1860 ~ 87 fifty three Deal men were thus drowned, usually whilst undertaking the dangerous manoeuvre, common practice off Deal of running alongside a steamer and ‘hooking on’ or attaching fast a tow rope. The Steamships were not hindered by having to wait for a favorable head wind, and would proceed to their destination with but the minimum of stops, and then only in the foulest of conditions.
From about the 1880’s the Navy therefore no longer required the shelter offered in the Downs on such a regular basis as had been formally the case during the ascendancy of the great sailing ships. Naval Steam Tugs would ply the shipping lanes picking up the sailing vessels, upon completion of their ocean journeys and escort them under tow right through the Downs into the Thames. With this decline in ‘Hovelling’ around the Downs, the boatmen returned more fully to fishing for a while, although as we shall see below their were still very many more wrecks yet to happen. Nevertheless the end of an era was nigh on in hand and by 1923 only six galley’s remained on Deal beach, yet still four of these had retained their position on that famous beach in 1952. Yet to a number of the towns councilors, eager to please visitors, pleasure boats were welcome on the Deal beach, but boats for fishing and Hovelling were not encouraged, on the grounds that their activities were not what the visitors wanted.
The increased supply of fish imported to Deal following the decline in Hovelling was so extensive that a fish cannery was started up in 1892. This industrious development to the local economy was supplied by about thirty Luggers already working from Deal, Walmer and Kingsdown, with another group of Fishermen working out of Dungeness. The overall enterprise following from this was said to have provided employment for about three hundred people. So prolific became this local boom that fish stocks became endangered and the fish paste factory that sprang up sometime after the Canning plant finally shut down in the 1930’s as a result of exhausted fish stocks. It is known that Robert Holbourn of the Deal Lifeboatmen was amongst those boatmen that engaged in fishing during this period.
A study of other members of the family further reveals a continuing involvement with the noble traditions of seafaring. It is interesting to note that one of the daughters of Stephen J. Holbourn by his wife Ann (nee Adams), born in 1838, was an Emily Holbourn, (b.1867) who in turn married to a William Blackman, whose subsequent Grand daughter, Phyllis (b.1929) married a Richard Percival Edward Dibden (b.1930). This is probably no more than another of the many curious coincidences on the Holbourn family tree, but I wouldn’t be half surprised to discover a genealogical link somewhere between this Richard Dibden and the famous Secretary of the RNLI, Charles Dibdin, after whom four of the Deal Lifeboats were named.
Charles Dibdin died in 1910. He began his adult life as a Bank clerk, working for the Savings Bank of the General Post Office, but so impressed the authorities with his abilities, that had he lived just a little longer by 1910 he would have received a knighthood from King George V.th Sadly the premature death of Dibden denied him that honour, Dibden however was motivated and led the organisational drive behind the successful ‘Civil Service Lifeboat Fund’ and became its Honorary secretary in 1870. In 1883 he left the civil service to become the third secretary of the Lifeboat Institution, thus to be retained until his death. Even after this change Charles continued to direct the work of the ‘Civil Service Fund’ which by the mid~1950’s had raised a sufficient subsidy alone to have provided for the addition of over thirty new Lifeboats.48Perhaps a little more famous than this well respected figure, was an ancestor of the same, also named Dibden, who many generations before had written the shanty, ‘Tom Bowling’~ described as a masterpiece, by that veteran amongst seaman Bill Adams. Adams who had to be sure of being able to make himself heard by his crewmen above the various sounds of the sea during, the heaviest of gales was described as having a pleasing singing voice, who with his crew would no doubt have kept the boatmen’s spirits high with such shanties during the long hours of their duty on the Lifeboat, named after the latter~day Dibden.
Thomas Dibden also wrote the patriotic play ‘The British Raft’ from which the song ‘The Snug Little Island’ was taken and first sung on Easter Monday at Sadler’s Wells in 1797, quickly gaining an immense popularity throughout England. This was at a time when the importance of the Downs, and Deal beach as a naval base saw a gradual increase, until at its peak in 1809 some 750 ships lay off the Downs, to load troops for an invasion of Holland.49 The operation of taking out the soldiers was undertaken by about one hundred of the Deal Luggers. In the early nineteenth Century the boatmen of Deal, Walmer and Kingsdown were numbered in excess of over a thousand, their characteristic dress included tall hats and ‘pumps’. Although the end of the war in 1814 saw a decline in the fortunes of the Deal boatmen, with the reduction of ‘Men O’War’ anchored at the Downs, the Boatmen once again fell upon harder times.
In settled weather the Deal boatmen would often take out pilots, dredge for lost anchors and supply ships with fresh food, but when the wind rose to gale force, the Deal boatmen came into a league of their own. Wind bound ships would then begin labouring under the enormous seas and drag their anchors. The Deal boatmen took out spare anchors and chain. These anchors had been previously lost by other ships, then found by the boatmen by grappling, were offered back to mariners in need, at a cost for their effort. The anchors were stored in a field at the back of the town and brought to the beach on carts, to be loaded on the Luggers as needed.
It was on the 14th of October of 1881 during ‘a very heavy gale of wind’ that had been blowing all day from the west, with the relative safety of the anchorage in the Downs having become filled with ships and others still in pursuit of shelter. That one such vessel, the ‘Ganges’, having returned from the channel, rather to hastily dropped her anchor against a strong tide, causing the long chain cables to snap close to the anchor leaving the ship helpless, trailing its cables from her bows. The trailing cables prevented the ship from being got before the wind so that she began to drift dangerously toward the Goodwin Sands. The ‘Ganges’ had been a fully rigged ship, but the crew had evidently neglected her sails which were then torn adrift and blew to ribbons. The sizeable strips of heavy canvas ‘cracked like monstrous whips with deafening noise, thrashing the masts and rigging, and rendering any attempt to furl them or cut them away, perilous in the extreme’.
It has been implied that a manner of some incompetence was to bring the ‘Ganges’ to her predicament that fateful day and that, of the 35 crew on board, aside the Captain, mates, petty officers and apprentices a number of foreign seamen referred to as ‘Lascars’ might have been incapable of the task they were engaged upon. This observation was followed up by the original author with a note extracted from a Board of Trade report into merchant seamen that concluded ‘we always keep a few Englishmen among the crew to lead the way aloft on dark and stormy nights’. In any event, such a night was this.
The first attempt at rescue came in the form of a powerful tugboat whose crew had managed to get a line to her, but then failed to be of any assistance, being dragged toward the Goodwins with the ‘Ganges’ themselves. Only when the substantial 15~inch hawser parted, however, did her crew give up the effort, returning to land. By this time the ‘Ganges’ was seen, burning flares and blue lights for help from the ‘Gull’ Lightship which fired guns and rockets at intervals of five minutes, this being the recognised summons to the Lifeboats. Aware of the plight of the stranded ship even before the ‘Gull’ began to signal, the Deal boatmen were preparing for action. Thomas Adams, one of the boatmen, alerted the Lifeboat Coxswain to the fact that the tug’s attempt had failed and Cox’n Robert Wilds then gave the order to muster by ringing the alarm bell to summon his crew. ‘As it was one of the wildest nights on which the Deal Lifeboat was ever launched, the very best men on Deal beach came forward to the struggle for a place in the Lifeboat, and out of their number a crew of fifteen was got’50As Roberts, the second Cox’n. was at this time afloat in his lugger, putting an anchor and chain on board another vessel, the ‘Eurydice’, Tom Adams took his place on this occasion and helped Wilds steer the Lifeboat, which literally ‘flew before the blast, to the rescue’. The Lifeboat had been previously stripped in readiness for the perilous undertaking, : ‘reefed mizzen and double~reefed storm foresail.’ With the squalls of the tempest being regular ‘smokers’ such that the crests of the waves were blown into the ‘astonished’ air in ‘smoking’ clouds of spray, the crew had regularly to haul down the reefed foresail, to proceed under bare poles into the hurricane.
For his £1/~ pay the Lifeboat service saw good value in the deed that was to be performed by Henry Marsh51 that night. “Not withstanding the splendid services of the Deal Lifeboatmen in many a heart stirring rescue, they seem utterly unconscious of having done anything heroic. This is a remarkable and most interesting feature in their character. . . .The noblest, the purist motives and impulses that can actuate man glow within their breasts, as they risk their lives for others’52 The ‘Ganges’ had come to settle on the middle part of the Goodwins, with the sea breaking ‘mast high’ over her. All lights and flares had gone out and the Lifeboat crew had great difficulty in locating her, but somebody on the doomed ship again was able to set the blue lights ablaze thus guiding the Lifeboat finally to the wreck.
To compound the difficulties they appear to have made for themselves, and just moments prior to the arrival of the Deal boatmen, a number of the shipwrecked crew attempted to lower one of the ship’s on board life raft. One English apprentice and four of the Lascars immediately sprang into it only to find themselves faced by an unenviable crisis with the boiling surf raging around them. The little craft was overturned in moments with the result that, except for one of the foreigners, who grasped onto a chain~plate, all were lost, ‘their drowning shrieks being only faintly heard as they were swept into the caldron of the Goodwins to leeward’. With the arrival of the Lifeboat it was discovered that the wreck was facing approximately north, so that the wind and the sea were pounding on to her broadside with a strong tide running in the same direction right across the ship.
The fury of wind and tide compelled the boatmen to lower their anchor to windward of the wreck, between her and the land in order to avoid being swept away or come under the very real danger of being hit by the fearful danger of falling masts. In being unable to reach the stern of the vessel, they hauled up anchor, with great difficulty and repositioning the Lifeboat veered down upon the ships bows. Once upon the wreck and in looking up they could just about make out the jib~boom and bowsprit, which was covered by the terrified men hoping to be able from there to drop into the Lifeboat. ‘as they were hoisted up on the crest of a great breaker, which also filled them, the great iron martingale, or dolphin striker of the vessel, pointed like an arrow, came so near the Lifeboat that the men saw that a little heavier sea would have driven the spear head of the martingale through the Lifeboat.’ With one of the crew narrowly escaping being thus impaled, they once again returned to the position of their anchor, again with the greatest of difficulty, but not before shouting out to the shipwrecked crew that they were not going to be abandoned.
The Coxswain’s official report merely read : ‘We succeeded in getting alongside after a long time and with great difficulty, through a very heavy sea and at great risk of life, as the sea was breaking over the ship.’
With the Lifeboat riding windward of the wreck and line having been gotten over to the ‘Ganges’ a weightier cable was additionally set fast to the ship, and in order to make a safe evacuation of the rescue of the distressed Sailors it was thought wise to put one of the Lifeboatmen aboard the wreck. It was Henry Marsh who volunteered to jump into the boiling surf with a line tied round his waist, to be dragged through the breakers to make the wreck. With heavy seas thundering all over the vessel, it was a miracle that Marsh achieved his objective. With his companions thinking him either mad or lost to the waves, he fought through the sea and struggled up the ships side, against which he was at least once heavily dashed but soon gained a place on the deck, at once giving confidence to the stranded seamen, who then must have only realised then that this brave man that had put himself at such risk was at least sixty five years of age.
Meanwhile the vessel had been ‘thumping and beating out over the Goodwins’, and was at length, finally wrecked and stuck fast no more than an hundred yards from the safety of deep water, having been hauled miles across the Sands, the Lifeboat following, almost to the outer edges of the Goodwins. The ships masts still held, up to this point, when on the ‘Ganges’ listing over to the east, or away from the wind and sea, loud noises of cracking beams and the harsh and sharp snapping of timbers breaking could be heard. This caused the crew to panic, and perhaps instinctively, fearing the worst, again rekindled the ships blue distress light. With the Lifeboat closing up underneath, the big ship again reeled inwards toward the boatmen, adding the greatest danger and urgency to their undertaking. Seventeen members of the ‘Ganges’ crew, including its Captain were hurriedly directed onto the lifeline that Marsh had established, and with the greatest of good timing the Ramsgate Lifeboat
The names of the crew of the Lifeboat on this occasion were :~
R. Wilds, (Coxswain), Thomas Adams, Henry Marsh, Thomas Holbourn, Henry Roberts, James Snoswell, T. Cribben, J. May, T. May, George Marsh, H. Marsh, R. Betts, and Frank Roberts.
Much has been written about the legendary heroism of the Deal boatmen, yet it was that sometimes even those who knew the treacherous waters thereabouts were themselves lost to the Sands. For it was in the nineteenth Century (about 1878)53 that a number of experienced boatmen of Deal, respectively named Bowbyas, Buttress, Erridge54 and Obree, having landed their Deal Galley punt on the Sands, whilst trying to recover some deposits of coal from a wrecked collier were to disappear without trace. They had been seen, it was later reported by a passing barge, running about the sands, waving, which the barge man thought was but the antics of a number of holiday makers on some wild excursion.
In the words of Thomas Stanley Treanor : “About One O’clock on Sunday, December 28th, 1879, a gun from the South Sand Head Lightship, anchored about a mile south of the Goodwins, and six miles from Deal, gave warning that a ship was on the dreadful Sands. It was blowing a gale from the South West, and the ships in the Downs were riding and straining at both anchors.’~ ‘As the various congregations were streaming out of Church, umbrellas were turned inside out, hats were blown hopelessly, wildly seawards, and children clung to their parents for shelter from the blinding spray along Deal beach.~ Just then, in answer to the boom of the distant gun, the bell rang to “man the Lifeboat” and the Deal boatmen answered gallantly the summons. A rush was made for the life belts. The first and second Coxswains, Wild’s and Roberts, were all ready, and prepared with the key of the Lifeboat house, as the rush of men was made.~ The first thirteen men who succeeded in getting the belts with the two Coxswain’s formed the crew, and down the steep breach plunged the great Lifeboat to the rescue’55The Reverend, who liked to tell a story, continues : “ There were three vessels on the Goodwin’s : the fate of one is uncertain ; another was a small vessel painted white, supposed to be a Dane, and she suddenly disappeared before my eyes, being probably lost with all hands; the third was a German barque, the ‘Leda’, homeward bound to Hamburg,
Thomas Stanley further explains that from the beginning of the Sands, the wreck ‘lay a long mile right into the very thick of this awful surf, into which the Deal men boldly drove the Lifeboat’ Having made about half that distance they watched the mainmast of the vessel go over, and then in a crash, down came the mizzenmast, over the Port side, taking with it the spars and confused rigging. So that a wild mass of wreckage still hung by the shrouds and other rigging about the quarter and stern of the doomed ship ‘beating her planking with thunderous noise and tremendous force’. ~ Nothing but experience and the faculty of coming to a right decision in a moment, amidst the appalling grandeur and real danger which surrounded them, enabled the Coxswain to anchor, as ever in the right spot, having made proper allowances for the set of the tide, the sea, and the wind. Dedicated skill was likewise required of the rest of the crew who needed to man the sails and mast. They dropped anchor therefore nearly a fifth of a mile ahead of the wreck and well on her starboard bow. Thus overboard went the anchor ‘taking with it coil after coil of the great white five inch cable of Manilla hemp ; and to this they also bent a second cable, in order to ride by a long scope, thus running out about 160 fathoms or 320 yards of cable.’
With the wreck having been turned seaward under the might of the lee tide and the water level falling with an ebb tide the sea was fiercely beating across the Sands and outward across the bows of the wreck. If the anchor cable were to part, a real danger existed that the Lifeboat might be dashed against the ship with the full force and not a man would have survived to tell the tale. The Lifeboat was however gradually veered down to come in along side the ‘Leda’ and while still at a considerable distance from the wreck and its precarious tangled rigging, there, clinging to the bulwarks ‘in a forlorn little cluster’ were a party of Germans, who now waved, signaling to the boatmen for whom they had been watching in hope, throughout their difficult approach.
To secure a line a stricken vessel such as this, the Lifeboat carried a simple device which consisted of a slender piece of cane (approx. 15mm in diameter) to which would have been fitted a lead weight at one end. To the end of this cane would have been further attached a long lightweight line, the length of which would have been stored ready in a bucket neatly coiled. Aloft, and tied himself, to a cable held by other boatmen, one of the crew stood onto the gunwale and such a device was thrown out to the wreck, still some twenty yards distant, which at great risk a German sailor seized. Having hauled it in, he would have found that the boatmen had bent onto it a weightier rope.
Before any chance of getting closer presented itself, with wave after wave thrown against them a huge sea arose suddenly ahead of them and the Coxswain sang out a warning to take cover just in time and all were covered in a ‘hollow green sea, so far above their heads that it seemed that as they gazed into its terrible transparency that the very sky had become green, and it broke into the Lifeboat’, hoisting her up to the vessel’s foreyard, then plunging them dramatically down and down again. As a result of the sudden cascading motion of the sea that had descended upon them, the bilge~piece of the Lifeboat came into contact with the top rail of the ‘Leda”s bulwarks, so that the collision stoved in her fore air~box. With this, it seemed that all attempts to help the seamen in distress on the wreck had been washed away.
Looking foreward as the Lifeboat emerged, the first and second Coxswain’s, who had been continually holding the Lifeboat to a steady position, still standing aft on their raised platform, could see only the boiling foam. ‘Looking Aft as the noble Lifeboat emptied herself, the crew saw the two Coxswain’s waist deep in throth, and the head of the Norman post aft was invisible and under water.~ We were all “knocked silly by that sea”, said the men, and they found that two of their number had been swept aft and forced under the thwarts or seats of the Lifeboat’ 56 All crew nonetheless having been accounted for, alone in those waters again with undaunted courage, set about their primary objective, the rescue in hand.
The Leda.
George Philpot resumed the task of securing the two lines they needed attached to the wreck, to procure a ‘rough ladder or “cat’s cradle”’ for the German crew to clamber spread eagled across, over the dangerous chasm, some thirty feet, having first ensured that he was lashed to the Lifeboats mast, to prevent him from being swept overboard and also leaving his hands free, his immediate concern was in that he had to ensure that the ropes were tightened or slackened as required, given the uncertain swelling and falling of the tides. Philpot had to be in such a position that required the head of the Lifeboat ‘to get a hard sheer off from the ship, to counterbalance the tide and sea sucking and driving her towards the wreck’ In this manner, holding on for their lives and during intervals presented by the raging sea twelve of the German crew had made it across into the Lifeboat, when one German, ‘seeing her sheer closer than usual towards the vessel, jumped from the topsail towards the Lifeboat. Instead of catching her at the propitious moment when she was balanced on the summit of a wave, he sprang when she was rapidly descending ; this added ten feet to the height of his jump, and he fell groaning into the Lifeboat.’ Last of the men to be taken of following several more heavy waves, and as conditions were worsening, was the Captain. Had he not hesitated, and gone speedily across the ropes, he would sooner have been safe in the Lifeboat, but for that momentary reflection, he was consumed amidst a ‘moving mountain of broken water, one of the most appalling objects in Nature’ ~ which swept clean over everything before it on the deck, also covering the Lifeboat and all on board her. ‘Everything was blotted out by the green water, as they once again wrestled in their strong grasp of the thwarts, while the roar and smother of drowning rang in their ears.’
Gasping and half blinded, as the Lifeboat once again emerged from the sea, the boatmen quickly realised that the Captain who had escaped the full force of the great wave, was hanging from the rope by one hand, and on the point of dropping. The ropes had become entangled one across the other, and Philpot, still lashed to the mast, immediately and with great dexterity untangled the ropes, placing one under the leg of the exhausted Captain, who was called to and encouraged, as the boat rose and fell. Where upon he reached the strong and generous hands of the boatmen that pulled him in, to the last man, with perhaps a relived cry of ‘all saved’.
It was rightly considered far to dangerous a sea to risk returning against the current to retrieve the anchor, and so they set the foresail hoisting just one of its corners, to cast themselves toward the land, and away from the wreck. With all in readiness the cable was cut through with an axe. No sooner had they moved off than they were once again assailed by a huge wave heading straight at them, but it was to late to Haul down the foresail and the ‘monstrous sea’ struck the bows and burst into the sails, quickly overpowering the Lifeboat. With both Robert’s and Wilds straining at the yoke~lines, the little boat was swung right round before the wind, and was shot forwards with and amidst the sea, but the noble deed was not to end in disaster. A passage across the shallow broken waters brought them closer to the shore, where they were found by the Kingsdown Lifeboat coming out to meet them.’ The Germans at this point had joyfully broken into song with “Danke Gott, Danke Gott!”~ grateful beyond expression for their marvelous deliverance on Deal beach. The names of the crew who on this occasion manned the Lifeboat were :~ Robert Wild’s (Coxswain), R. Roberts (2nd Coxswain), Thomas Cribben, Thomas Parsons, George Pain, Charles Hall, Thomas Roberts, Will Baker, John Holbourn, Ed Pain, George Philpott, R. Williams, Will. Adams, H. Foster, and Robert Redsull. ~ Of these men, poor Tom Cribben never recovered from the exposure and strain.
47 : ‘Beach Boats of Britain’ Robert Simper, Boydell Press. 1984.
48 : The Lifeboat Story. P. Howarth :1957.London.
49 : Robert Simper, ‘Beach Boats of Britain’ : Boydell Press, 1984.
50 : Heroes of the Goodwin Sands. Rev. T.S. Treanor 1898.
51 : ‘The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (paid) the men who form the Lifeboat crew on each occasion generously and to the utmost limit their funds will admit.~ but no money payment could compensate the men for the risk to their lives~ lives precious to women and children at home ; and no money payment could supply the impulse which fired these men and supported them in their work of rescue.’ : T.S.TREANOR.
52 : ‘A Lifeboat rescue killed poor Robert Wilds, the Coxswain of the Deal Lifeboat. The Second Coxswain of the same Lifeboat (1903/4) E. Hanger, was struck down after a rescue by pneumonia. J. Mackins, the Coxswain of the Walmer Lifeboat, was also seized by pneumonia after a splendid service across the Goodwins, when his Lifeboat was buried 30 times in raging seas ; S Pearson, once Cox’n of the Walmer Lifeboat, died of Bright’s disease, the result of exposure ; and on the occasion of the rescue of the ‘Ganges’, one of the crew, R. Betts, had his little finger torn off. ~Treanor.
53: (p26), ‘Heroes of the Goodwin Sands’ T.S.Treanor,1898.
54 : ‘In 1863 the crew of a Kingsdown lugger rescued the crew of the vessel ‘Cornelia’ on the Goodwin Sands. Four were named : Erridge, Laming, Kingsford and Crow ~ names we begin to know as Kingsdown men of valour and compassion’ Arnold T :’The fishing village of Kingsdown’.
55 : 'Heroes of the Goodwin Sands’, Treanor. 1898 The Religious Tract Society.
56 : The Rev’nd TS.Treanor, : ‘Heroes of the Goodwin Sands’. 1898