Gales and stormy seas mean extra work for the RNLI. Over the last few months its lifeboats have been extra busy. Among the callouts, they assisted a French trawler when she lost power and her steering failed leaving her at the mercy of thirty foot waves off the Cornish coast. In Port Talbot, they towed a cruiser without engine to safety; and off the coast of Sunderland they rescued two teenagers stranded on rocks with an incoming tide.
Heart-warming and heroic as such stories are - there’s also something reliably familiar about them. Rescues in harsh conditions are what the RNLI does. After all, since its foundation 190 years ago, it has become one of our favourite charities, the dependable saviour of anyone finding themselves in peril at sea.
That said, it seems odd that few people recognise the name of the RNLI’s founder, Sir William Hillary, let alone know anything about his struggles. And yet, outside the RNLI headquarters in Poole, Dorset there’s a dramatic sculpture showing drowning mariners being saved from the waves emblazoned with his family motto, ‘ with courage nothing is impossible’. It is hard to pin point a reason for his disappearance from public consciousness. His life was eventful enough to be the stuff of fiction: a blend of financial tribulation, privilege, scandal and heroism. And there’s substance to his story. A cache of manuscript letters in the RNLI library gives vivid insight into the risk-loving man who lobbied the highest echelons of society to achieve his aims, and, despite being unable to swim, took to the lifeboats himself in the most vicious storms to save stranded mariners.
When Hillary was born, in 1770, travel beyond Britain’s shores depended on the sea, and shipwrecks were all too familiar tragedies. With few purpose-built lifeboats, and no national organisation to coordinate them, even vessels foundering close to shore had little hope of being saved. This fact was brought home to Hillary, when, following a series of private disasters, he was forced into exile in the Isle of Man. Witnessing shipwrecks in the stormy Irish Sea, he became convinced such disasters could be alleviated. And so his campaign began.
Were the scandals littering his private life to blame for his subsequent disappearance in the shifting sands of time, or was it simply a historical blip? The only thing we can say for certain is that 190 years on, Hillary’s colossal achievement in making the sea safer for all of us deserves greater recognition.
The Lifeboat Baronet: Launching the RNLI by Janet Gleeson is available from The History Press.