No.32: The Matchless Tragedy

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Caught in a Squall

As the holiday season draws to a close, it seems apt to look at summer holidays in times past.

A recent PastScape correspondent, Mr Simon Williams, drew my attention to the Matchless, lost in Morecambe Bay in 1894, an example of a wreck largely overlooked by history because she was very small and the incident, in terms of both crew and passengers, involved the working class. On 3rd September a little fishing vessel of ‘Lancashire nobby’ type, working as a pleasure craft for the holiday season, took out a party of visitors who had left behind their lives in the textile mills across the Pennines for a week. Crossing the Bay on an excursion to Grange-over-Sands, their vessel capsized in a sudden squall, turning a day trip into a tragedy.

Sketch from the Lancashire County and Standard Advertiser, 7th September, 1894, as drawn by an eyewitness to the Matchless tragedy.
Sketch from the Lancashire County and Standard Advertiser, 7th September, 1894, as drawn by an eyewitness to the Matchless tragedy.

 

Mr Williams, a local historian, has not only offered further information to improve the record based on his researches, but has also turned the research into a very interesting book (available directly from him at simon@mottramroad.freeserve.co.uk, £5). He also told me about another excursion in the same area in 1850 which turned into tragedy, involving a party of middle class Mancunians and their boatmen who failed to meet their boat at the end of a day out at Grange-over-Sands.

These two stories reveal that opportunities for leisure filtered down the classes within the space of half a century. In between 1850 and 1894 we see mass tourism taking off. By the same token, a shipping accident could impact on huge numbers of people simultaneously: several hundred lost their lives when the Princess Alice went down in the Thames in 1878, drowned, pulled down by weeds, trapped in the wreckage, or poisoned by raw sewage.

At an earlier date fewer numbers were involved, since opportunities for leisure were confined largely to the gentry. Our earliest account of a wreck involving an excursion party was in 1733 when ’13 or 14 gentlemen and ladies, having been at Mr Weld’s seat’ and their boat capsized off Weymouth in an accident very similar to the Matchless. From a fairly early date owners of fishing vessels exploited the possibility of supplementing their income by taking on these well-heeled passengers: at Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1739, ‘two masters of fishing smacks, to wit, Hanks and Stebbing, with a young gentleman from London, and three servants, going to take their pleasure in a boat at sea near Berwick, the boat was cast away, and every soul lost.’

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, we see a number of accidents on the Yorkshire coast as Scarborough and other Yorkshire resorts became fashionable. The dangers of such excursions extended beyond squalls to human error, as one such incident at Whitby in 1802 demonstrates.

The account is injected with a vein of grim humour:

‘On the 6th inst. a sailing boat, with 7 persons in her, belonging [to] Whitby, was . . . nearly cut in two, by a vessel under full sail coming out of the harbour. Some saved their lives by swimming; others were picked up alive by boats: amongst the latter was a ci-devant serjeant of the Durham militia, who had nearly left his “blooming bride” of fourscore to lament his premature death.’

It is notable that most of these incidents took place in September rather than earlier in the summer, but then, of course, in the 19th century, the extent of the holiday season was influenced by the “Wakes weeks” in which factories closed down at different times in different places. It was also not defined by compulsory education in the way it is now.

No.31 The Travelling Menagerie

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Noah’s Ark

After last week’s edition recounting my challenge to go quackers retrieving soggy bread out of the water, I received another challenge: the most unusual livestock or ‘animal passengers’ on board a wreck. Never one to shirk a challenge . . .

We don’t have anything quite as extensive as the wreck of the Royal Tar which went down with circus animals off New England in 1836.

Elephant tusks are regularly reported as cargo, but in 1730 a live elephant died in the wreck of an East Indiaman. It wasn’t just any old elephant, but a ‘fine white elephant, for whom 500l. (£500) had been offered the same day’ and ‘perished in the flames’ when the Marlborough Indiaman docked in London. There is something ironic about surviving the travails of an arduous journey from the East Indies only to perish on arrival. Poor thing.

Shipwreck seems to have been a recurrent theme in the export of exotic animals, which is hardly surprising, given the distances involved from their places of origin, and their subsequent fate of being exhibited around Europe to paying audiences, which might have happened to our elephant had it lived. When you come to think about it, this theme of the wreck of a travelling menagerie is literally as old as the Ark (!) and has inspired countless works of literature, right up to the Life of Pi.

Clara the rhino was pretty much contemporary with our white elephant and was likewise brought over to Europe on a Dutch East Indiaman from her original home in Indonesia. She was an absolute sensation, and is immortalised in paintings for the rich and handbills for the poor. A very well-known image of her exhibited at Venice in 1751 is in the National Gallery, London.

Shipwrecks featured heavily in the real-life tale of Clara’s adventures, very ably told by Glynis Ridley in a recent book although she luckily survived every time. It was a PR gift and simply made her seem more interesting. Ms Ridley also draws attention to the sad tale of Dürer’s rhino, drawn, but clearly not from life, in 1515, which also perished in a shipwreck bound for Italy as a gift for the Pope.

Closer to our own time, the Terukuni Maru struck a mine in the Thames Estuary in 1939. She was an unusual wreck for two reasons, firstly in being a rare Japanese casualty of the Second World War prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Secondly, all hands were saved including a doggy passenger and an unusual stowaway, a disorientated falcon which had flown on board at Beirut. One of the crew cared for it all the way to London, although the more superstitious members of the crew felt it was a bird of ill-omen. Having had its feathers ruffled, it was placed in the care of London Zoo and featured in the Illustrated London News.

Animals have been a regular theme of Wreck of the Week and there will be more essays on other animals in future editions. See No.5 for dogs aboard wrecks and No.22, for those common stowaways, Rattus norvegicus.

Wreck of the Week No.30: The Staff of Life

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Our Daily Bread

Recently a colleague challenged me to name wrecks with an obscure cargo, thinking that bread would be too difficult to find. Off the top of my head – as we were in a respectable hostelry at the time! – I mentioned a number of local ships I knew of, laden with provisions to take to market, some of which must surely have involved bakery goods as well as groceries and livestock. However, back in the office, I thought I’d better do some digging.

One good example is a wreck that has come down to us only as “Owner Owen’s Trow“, belonging to Gloucester, which sank after colliding with a larger vessel in the Severn in 1751, “which greatly damaged her cargo” of “grocery”. Local papers at this time seem generally to refer to Severn trows by owner rather than by any name the vessel may or may not have had.  For an image of what a trow looked like, have a look at the signboard of the Llandoger Trow pub in Bristol.

I suggested also the raw material of wheat, for example the wreck of the Caledonia in 1842, again inbound to Gloucester with wheat from the ‘bread basket of Russia’ at Odessa. Keeping with the pub theme, to this day there is an Odessa Inn at Tewkesbury, which is on the Severn and must refer to this trade.

Well, as they say, an army marches on its stomach. Virtually every time I found a mention of bread or provisions, it was in relation to victualling a campaign or a fleet. We have a number of such records from the Middle Ages, the earliest being in 1296 at Lytham, “with goods and victuals for the castles in North Wales”. This one was followed in 1302 by another victualler feeding Edward I’s army, lost off Hartlepool, while in 1305 another ship was lost off Cumbria, laden with corn and other provisions for “the maintenance of the king’s subjects in the war” in Scotland.

We only have three specific mentions of bread. One was the Rebecca, exporting bread from Stockton-on-Tees for Barbados, lost at Boulmer, Northumberland, in 1691. The Charming Sally was outward-bound to victual the English army at Quiberon Bay in 1760, when she was lost in the Cattewater, just as she was leaving Plymouth. This shows the support for one of the most famous British campaigns of the 18th century, one of those that shaped modern Canadian history.

Likewise the Swift victualler was lost in convoy off Portland, similarly bound for Canada, in 1776, laden with what every sailor needed: rum and bread. “Oh! dreadful sight!” wrote a witness, as she was consumed by fire.

The long distances involved in all three cases shows us that in all likelihood we are probably looking at the famous hard tack or ship’s biscuit. Have a look at one here.

Wreck of the Week No.29: The Supposed Svodohy

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It’s All Greek to Me

Welcome back to WOTW following a little summer sabbatical. I trust you are all enjoying the weather!

Profiling a group of wrecks recently, I spotted one called the Svodohy, said to be a Greek brig lost off Lundy in 1883. The name didn’t seem at all Greek to me, but was reported as such in the Board of Trade Casualty Returns (the Victorian annual statistics for shipwrecks). I smelt a rat and called up 19th Century British Newspapers Online (most local libraries subscribe, a hugely useful resource).

Contemporary newspapers revealed various versions of her name, together with equally various versions of her home port, and likewise the master’s name varied from the BOT report. The one thing that they all said, however, was that she was Greek. Usually when this sort of thing happens, it’s a sure sign that foreign lettering, whether on the ship’s side, or as entered by the master in official records, hasn’t been read properly, in this case the Greek alphabet. The most convincing version came from her departure port at Cardiff where they would surely have had access to the port records: hence this report called her Zoodochos (Pigi). I realised that in Greek letters it must have read, probably all in lower case, ζωoδοχος; most likely probably if painted cursively it bore an even closer resemblance to Svodohy, with, for example, the unfamiliar final letter ‘s’ looking like a loose ‘y’. Zoodochos Pigi is one of the epithets of the Theotokos (Mother of God) in Greek Orthodoxy, so this seems on the right track, as, of course, saints’ names have historically always been very popular for ships.

There is a similar case with a 1946 Greek vessel charted as the OHPA, and mysteriously untraced, which, of course, was easily traced once Greek ΘΗΡΑ was transliterated as Thira, unlocking access to further references in the contemporary press..

I find both errors slightly odd during a period when far more people learnt Greek at school than they do now, even if they promptly forgot it as soon as they left . . . !

Such access to a Classical education had its effects on ship names at an earlier date in England. An 1808 wreck rejoiced in the pseudo-learned Greek name of Chrononhotonthologos. 

In fact, it is a name from the English-speaking world, inspired by ‘the most tragical tragedy that ever was tragediz’d’ by Henry Carey in 1734, republished as one of ‘the most esteemed farces on the English stage’ in 1786. It was performed as far afield as Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1818, so the ship operated during the currency of the play. Why the owner named his ship thus is anyone’s guess, and there’s probably a very good story here we know nothing about.

At least it was certainly more distinctive than your average Betsey and probably jumped off the page in arrivals and departures lists, which was always good news for people looking for ‘when their ship came in’.

28. A Tourist Attraction

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A copy of her own article sent in by a member of the public sent me on a very interesting trail this week, updating our records for surrendered U-boats.

During the period 1919-1924 a number of surrendered U-boats were lost under tow en route to the breakers or destined for French service as part of war reparations, or sometimes just stripped and abandoned.

Today’s wreck is the U 118 in April 1919, as plenty of images survive of her wrecking. Both she and another U-boat were under tow from Harwich to Cherbourg under the escort of the French destroyer François Garnier when they both broke tow and went ashore in different places either side of Beachy Head. The François Garnier requested permission to try and sink the clearly floundering U 118 by gunfire, but whether U 118 washed up at Hastings before this could happen, or whether their efforts to sink her were unavailing, is unclear.

This was just one of many wreck incidents of all kinds which became tourist attractions in their own right, and it took place just before Easter 1919. Of course souvenirs were taken . . . ! She was the subject of many postcards charting her deterioration as she keeled over on the shingle ridge and was broken up in situ. The most interesting is an aerial view, which we take for granted nowadays, but think back to 1919, and it must have been quite a novelty. I don’t know if ‘barnstorming’ was a popular activity as early as 1919, but by the 1920s it was a feature of the British seaside holiday (my Dad went up in a biplane at Clacton, aged 5, in 1927). I’d like to imagine that Hastings in 1919 was the place to go on your holidays, with a wreck as an added bonus!

Quite often, the U-boats’ precise identity wasn’t really uppermost in the minds of people who were simply determined to scrap them, with further information being lost as they have passed out of living memory. There is some argument as to the identity of the second U-boat, which stranded by the Seven Sisters cliffs west of Beachy Head, although I think that a contemporary Times report identifying it as UB-121 has some weight. Whichever one it was, it smashed straight into the remains of the Oushla, which had stranded in the identical spot in 1916. Have a look at the picture gallery for the Oushla here.

27. The Scum of the Earth

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It seems apt to quote Wellington’s words on the men who served under him as we contemplate the anniversary of his victory at Vitoria in Spain, 200 years ago today.

The ‘scum of the earth’ had to come from somewhere – and had to be despatched home afterwards. Wherever the British fought, troopship wrecks followed, and are part of the heritage of Britain’s military campaigns abroad. Though we have no known wrecks of transports sinking in English waters in the aftermath of Vitoria itself, we do in fact have wrecks of troop transport vessels from earlier in the Peninsular campaign.

The appropriately-named Dispatch from Corunna which struck on Black Head on 22nd January 1809 was too early to have come from the famous battle of that name, which took place on 16th January.

Instead she contained survivors of the 7th Light Dragoons, who had been decimated at the previous battles of Sahagun and Benavente, and were to be further decimated by this particular wreck. On the same day, at almost the same place, on the notorious Manacles, HMS Primrose was lost carrying dispatches in the opposite direction, outward-bound for Corunna.

Although the name ‘Manacles’ comes from the Cornish Maen Eglos, simply meaning ‘Church Rocks’, the name has been assimilated to an English word with a degree of appropriateness, conveying overtones of chaining or imprisoning ships upon the reef, a fairly common process for names of shipwreck features.

In the local church both wrecks are commemorated, as are others of different dates. For the Dispatch there is a wall monument to the 7th Light Dragoons, also known as Hussars, topped by a dramatic image of a ship coming to grief. Beneath is a trophy, as these sculptural embellishments are known, with the flags and arms pointing downwards to symbolise death.

26. Totes Meer

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There can only be one wreck of the week this week, as everyone is talking about the Do17 Flying Pencil recovered from the Goodwin Sands on Monday. Rather than commenting directly on the wreck, I would just like to set it into some sort of historical and cultural context.

We know from our records that the Do17 was one of 12 aeroplanes which were shot down or crashed on the shore on the same day, as the Battle of Britain raged: three in the Humber area, the remainder over Kent and Sussex.

As far as I am aware all the aircraft lost on that day came down into the sea: none crashed on land. Three German aircraft, a He111, a Me109 and our Do17, were lost as against 9 British: two Defiants from the same squadron which attacked the Do17, two Hurricanes, two Spitfires and three Hampdens.

Overall Historic England’s records show that some 433 German aircraft were lost during WWII, of which approximately 364 are known to have been shot down in or near the sea. Undoubtedly there is some under-reporting of both terrestrial and maritime losses of aircraft, an issue not confined to the German side. It is therefore impossible to say definitively from the data available that more German aircraft were shot down over the sea than they were over English territory, but this looks largely to be the case.

It seems apt then, to look at Paul Nash’s painting, Totes Meer. It was actually inspired by a dump at Cowley in Oxfordshire of crashed German aircraft seen in a terrestrial context, but reworked by Nash into a ‘dead sea’ of twisted wreckage, waves upon waves of German aircraft crashing upon an English shore.

It is virtually contemporary with our Do17, being painted in 1940-1 as part of Nash’s work as an official war artist. Hindsight colours our view of the painting, since we know the outcome: it is easy to forget that, at the time it was made, the war hung in the balance. Did contemporary viewers see each crashed German aircraft as one less to rain bombs on Britain, or do they represent a force as unending and as unyielding as the sea? Or are both views tangled up in the wreckage?

A very visible wheel, not unlike the still inflated wheel seen on the Do17, lends the mangled heap the appearance of the eye of a beached whale or school of whales, reinforced by exposed wing struts suggesting baleen plates. A beached whale is an animal out of context: so, too, are these aeroplanes, lying in the sea instead of flying through the air.

25. Spontaneous Compostion

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No, this is not a spelling mistake from the subject line but a bad pun. (Is there any other kind of pun?) The Russo-Finnish barque Ymer caught fire and exploded in 1910 while at anchor with a cargo of “organic manure”. (See WOTW 6 on the Venscapen for more on Russo-Finnish barques.)

Spontaneous combustion of cargo occurs occasionally in the record. Hay is one known offender in this respect, with approximately 6 known hay barges lost to fire, and coal is another. Naturally, it is combustible, or it would not have been intended to be burnt as fuel, but it was somewhat unexpected to find it burnt prior to delivery!

A collier exploded in this way before she even left the Tyne with her cargo in 1857. More worryingly, another collier caught fire at sea in the Downs en route from Hartlepool for Dieppe in 1873.

There were other examples elsewhere, and the situation was deemed serious enough for a Royal Commission on the Spontaneous Combustion of Coal to be set up in 1876, which looked, among other things, at whether different types of coal were more subject to spontaneous combustion than others. It seems that the cause was often inadequate ventilation in cargo holds.

24. The Concrete Jungle

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I’m always keen to make links between terrestrial and maritime monuments, because the connections go beyond the obvious port and harbourside infrastructure, but I think today our key word is infrastructure in a wider sense.

Inevitably, many cargoes are those to do with building projects, and today’s example is one of these. It doesn’t actually involve a wreck as such. In July 1906 the Socoa struck some rocks near Cadgwith Cove, a moment when a wreck incident became a faraway casualty of a major event triggering worldwide headlines, the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906 – for she was laden with cement to help rebuild the city.

Fortunately she was refloated, even though she was clearly in a bad way. See this image here, where she is evidently awash at high water.

Visit here for more images.

Some sources say that the cargo was “jettisoned” to help get her off following the stranding, with some remaining in situ solidified underwater. However, the cargo is reported in a position about half a mile further east, off Enys Head. Either that position is incorrect, or the cargo was truly jettisoned rather than offloaded, as the ship must have been in difficulties before she struck the rocks.

There is, of course, a transmogrification process in place: from the cargo of cement as carried to the solidified concrete in the post-wreck phase . . .

If anyone knows anything about this underwater obstruction, do get in touch, as I am keen to build more evidence for the post-wreck archaeology!

This isn’t the only odd bit of concrete near Cadgwith, though. As part of the Defence of Britain anti-invasion database project some years ago, we recorded all sorts of pillboxes and tank traps, so here’s another nearby “funny lump of concrete”.

It comprises a WWII anti-tank trap at Cadgwith itself, angled so as to prevent any tanks from penetrating inland once they had caterpillared perpendicularly up the cliff. It would have been more logical to locate it below for beach defence, but it would, apparently, have been a hindrance to the local fishermen.

23. Dunking the Witches

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I promised you more on ‘unbooked passengers’ last week, and if you were anticipating stowaways, that’s a story for another day. Today’s wreck in 1667  is included more for the completeness of the record (because it appears in shipwreck lists elsewhere) rather than bearing any very close relationship to reality. It is certainly a very good candidate for the strangest wreck record I have ever come across: the letter in which it appears, although one of the State Papers (1) appears to be relaying little more than local gossip and is somewhat garbled.

The sequence of events appears to be as follows: the correspondent wrote from Harwich, ‘They tell a strange story at Ipswich of one of their ships that was lost in the late storms’. Two Ipswich ships met one another at sea, suggesting that they were crossing one another,  perhaps northbound and southbound respectively in the North Sea (possibly colliers). Instead of exchanging news, ‘speaking’ as it was called at the time, the crew of the first ship gave their love to all their friends and relations at home, as they had given themselves up for lost.

On being asked why this was so, ‘the first ship replied that they had long laboured to free their maintop, where sat a couple of witches, but by all that they could do, could not remove nor get them down, and so they were lost people.’

At least one passenger had taken ship on this vessel, having previously been on board a ship lost at Scarborough Roads (so he might have been a nervous passenger anyway) but interpreting the place of loss as between Scarborough and Ipswich begs more questions than it answers.

The request to ‘send their love’ suggests the doomed vessel was outbound from Ipswich: for this to be a plausible request the second vessel taking the message home must have been inbound to Ipswich. Yet the passenger had lost his ship in Scarborough Roads, so it seems strange that he was apparently outward-bound from Ipswich.

Possibly, instead, the two ships had crossed north of Scarborough, and the second vessel was homeward-bound from somewhere like Newcastle: the place of loss would then have been further north, between Scarborough and Newcastle. This conjecture, however, is simply based on the prevalence of the collier trade on the east coast in the 1600s, and recorded, for example, by Defoe.

This isn’t the strangest thing about the supposed wreck, though. This is a unique – in English waters anyway – example of a ship being said to be lost to witchcraft. Some of those on board survived, since the supposed witches were then clapped into jail. Possibly they were arrested simply because they survived their dunking in the sea – after all, witches were supposed to be guilty if they floated, and innocent if they sank! This was rather hard on all the innocent people who suffered under the notorious 17th century Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, who, of course, was active in northern Essex in the 1640s. One wonders whether this ‘wreck’ is a legacy of Hopkins’ reign of terror.

Update 14.02.2014: While running a query today I came across another wreck with a tinge of the supernatural which I just had to add to the blog. The events a hundred years later seem to be real enough, and there is nothing unusual in a ship being cast ashore ‘in the late storm’ in 1766 on an area of the coastline that was fairly well-known for wrecks. Something was clearly preying on the master’s mind, and he (or, as the original source implies, if you read it carefully, his ship, which gives the story an even greater supernatural tinge!) decided to lay the blame for the wreck at the feet of a supernatural ‘woman’ who ‘belonged to the merchants of Hull’, to which port he was bound.

‘Newcastle, Sept. 27 . . . We are informed that the sloop William and Ann, of Port Seaton, James Scott, master, from Hull for Leith, with bale goods, which has been drove ashore at Blyth, in the late storm, went [sic] on the 11th inst. to one of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the county of Northumberland, and made the following deposition, that on Monday the 8th, being about 10 leagues from the land, he went into the cabbin, where he found a woman standing; and on enquiry how she came there, she said she came out of the hold, and belonged to the merchants of Hull: on which he offered to lay hold of her, when she vanished. He then came on deck, where he saw a man come out of a block, and another on the mast, with feet as big as hogsheads, blowing the sails, and legions of the devils floating about the ship, who carried her over an exceeding high rock, where she was wrecked, and the crew with difficulty saved. Quere, if the ship was insured?’ (2)

Rather than a supernatural apparition, it seems likely to be a psychological manifestation of some concerns about his reception on arrival at Hull.  The newspapers may have had something of this nature on their minds: by ostensibly asking if the ship was insured against supernatural peril, might they have been poking a bit of fun at the owners and gently hinting at insurance fraud and a guilty conscience?

(1) Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Charles II, 1667-8, 2 November 1667, No.27

(2) Newcastle Courant, 27th September 1766, No.4,697, p2