Author: History

The Manx Advertiser newspaper article on 10 October 1822 describes the wreck of HMS Vigilant on St Mary’s Rock in Douglas Bay, Isle of Man, 4 days earlier. It shows how Sir William Hillary had first-hand experience going to rescue people from shipwreck.
A resident of Douglas, Hillary watched the wreck from the harbour with a gathering crowd. Compelled to help those in peril, he urged bystanders to help him row out in the harbour’s pleasureboats to rescue the ship’s crew, offering them money from his own pocket as a reward.
It was Sir William Hillary’s experience of coordinating this rescue that convinced him of the need for an organised nationwide lifesaving institution.
The newspaper extract goes on to describe two further wrecks caught in the storm to which Sir William Hillary gave assistance.
Later in the same year, in December 1822, HMS Vigilant was the very ship that HMS Racehorse came to escort back to England when it was wrecked off Langness Point (see also Source 2).
The wreck of HMS Racehorse prompted a letter from Sir William Hillary to the Admiralty requesting that the families of the Manx men, who had lost their lives going to rescue HMS Racehorse’s crew, would be provided for.
As a result, the Navy awarded pensions for these men’s families and payments for the men who had gone to the rescue of HMS Vigilant, but Sir William Hillary still wanted to do more to improve the safety of those at sea.
In February 1823 he began his campaign by publishing his famous pamphlet: An Appeal to the British Nation on the Humanity and Policy of Forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck.

The Start of the RNLI

An Early Lifeboat

This is the Zetland, built by Henry Greathead of Redcar near Middlesbrough who built lifeboats between 1801 and 1880

Source 6: The Original lifeboat
In 1789, a ship named Adventure ran ashore in the mouth of the River Tyne during a violent storm. The rough seas prevented local men from doing anything to save the crew with the boats they then had and many of the Adventure’s crew drowned.
This disaster inspired The Gentlemen of Lawe-House, a group of local businessmen from South Shields, to place a newspaper advert for a competition to design a rescue boat to go out to shipwrecks. They offered a reward of 2 guineas [£2.10] for the successful design.
The competition received worthy entries from William Wouldhave and Henry Greathead but the group nevertheless decided neither design would be an outright winner. Instead, the committee used ideas from both and produced a final design for a lifeboat. They offered 1 guinea [£1.05] as a reward to Wouldhave, who took offence at having his prize-money halved and rejected his winnings. They asked Henry Greathead to build the design they had completed and thus Henry Greathead went on to become known as the inventor of the lifeboat.
His first lifeboat was aptly named Original. Over the following 2 decades, over 30 of Greathead’s lifeboats were built for orders around Britain’s coast and abroad. The images all show the series of Original lifeboats, the first type of boat known as a ‘lifeboat’.
An extract from the Caledonian Mercury in 1801 shows not only the success of Greathead’s lifeboats but how the British press supported the campaign to bring this valuable invention into general use.

Captain Manby’s lifesaving apparatus
Captain George William Manby dedicated much of his life to the invention of lifesaving devices. He witnessed the wreck of the naval ship Snipe off Great Yarmouth in 1807, which claimed over 200 lives. This tragedy inspired Manby to come up with a way of reaching out to help ships in danger near to shore.
Captain Manby’s lifesaving apparatus fired a mortar that launched a rope out to distressed ships. The rope between the ship and the shore then enabled those onboard to try to get ashore. For ships foundering near the shoreline, Manby’s invention was a literal lifeline.
Between 1811 and 1821, Captain Manby tirelessly promoted his invention to gain support for the lifesaving at sea movement.
The principle of Captain Manby’s invention is still used by today’s lifeboats in some sea rescues (now known as line-throwing apparatus).
Illustration of sailor in distress by Manby Courtesy: London Metropolitan Archives/Royal Humane Society
Parliamentary debate on Captain Manby’s lifesaving apparatus, 14 June 1811, vol 20 cc625–6
Courtesy: Parliamentary Archives, London

The Wreck of the St George

One of the earliest lifeboat stations
One of the earliest pieces of evidence proving the existence of
a boat kept on the coast at Formby for the sole purpose of saving
lives at sea is an extract from the Liverpool Common Council
meeting on 2 April 1777.
Although the boat was not at that time called a ‘lifeboat’, Formby
was, nevertheless, credited as being one of the first lifeboat stations.
The extract shows how Liverpool Town Council funded an organised
system of rescue from shipwreck at the mouth of the River Mersey.
As the second busiest port in Britain at the time, Liverpool was
pioneering in the area of lifesaving at sea. For example, Dr Thomas
Houlston set up the Liverpool Institution for Recovering Drowned
Persons in 1775. Like the Royal Humane Society based in London
(established in 1774 and then called the Society for the Recovery
of Persons Apparently Drowned), this organisation aimed to retrieve
and resuscitate victims of drowning with specially trained medical
assistants and also provided payments to bystanders who rescued
them. William Hutchinson, the Liverpool Dock Master and Water
Bailiff (1759–93), was another man influencing Liverpool’s humane
movement. His text, A Treatise on Practical Seamanship (1777),
promoted safe navigation and rescues to ships in distress.
Such schemes and books intended to confront the British public
with the inhumanity of leaving others to die at sea.
It is thought that Sir William Hillary, who campaigned to set up
the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck
(now the RNLI), would have been aware of these Liverpool schemes
for lifesaving at sea.

A lifeboat saving part of a crew near Tynemouth 1803