Grace Darling (1815-1842)
Grace Darling was born in Northumberland, in 1815, the seventh of her parents’ nine children. Her father, William Darling, like his father before him, was a lighthouse keeper, He first kept the lighthouse on Brownsman Island, in the Outer Farne Islands. That lighthouse was not well located and many ships foundered, so a new lighthouse was built on one of the outermost islands. William Darling moved his family to the recently built Longstone Lighthouse in 1826, when Grace was eleven years old.
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
On the night of 6th September, 1838, during a fearsome storm, a steam ship, the Forfarshire, was en route from Hull to Dundee. On board were 62 crew and passengers, when the engines failed. Suddenly, a huge wave lifted the ship and cast it onto the low-lying island known as Big Harcar. Immediately, it broke in two, one half sinking within fifteen minutes, taking with it dozens of passengers and children, who had had no time to escape from their cabins. Nine survivors succeeded in launching the ship’s lifeboat, and were rescued by a passing sloop and taken to safety in South Shields. Another nine, eight men, one of them badly injured, and one woman, managed to scramble onto the rocks.
In the early morning of 7th September, Grace Darling saw the wrecked ship on Big Harcar and then noticed movement and realised there were survivors on the rocks. She and her father, thinking that conditions were so appalling that the North Sunderland lifeboat, (now Seahouses) would not be able to put out, took to their rowing boat and rowed across to Big Harcar.
On arrival, William Darling clambered onto the rocks, leaving Grace to control the rowing boat in the heavy seas, using the oars to manoeuvre it away from the jagged rocks but keeping it close enough for the survivors to struggle into it. Four of the men and the woman, Mrs Dawson, whose two young children had drowned, were rowed back to the lighthouse. Grace remained there to care for the survivors with her mother while her father and three of the men returned to Big Harcar to rescue the remaining four men.
The lifeboat had set out from Seahouses – Grace’s brother, William Brooks Darling, was one of the crew – but it reached Big Harcar after the rescue had been completed, and picked up the bodies of Mrs Dawson’s children and a clergyman.
Conditions were so grave, and deteriorating, that they thought it unsafe to try and return to Seahouses, and were forced to remain at Longstone Lighthouse for three days, before the storm abated.
The story of the heroic rescue made headlines around the world. Grace Darling was a slightly-built young woman, an unlikely heroine in the eyes of many, and she became a celebrity. She found the constant attention uncomfortable, but her actions were celebrated by painters and poets.
The Royal Humane Society awarded her and her father Gold Medals, and the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck (now RNLI) gave them Silver Medals for Gallantry. Queen Victoria sent Grace £50 with a personal note, and one of the oldest hotels in Melbourne was named the Grace Darling Hotel, opening in 1854.
In 1842, Grace Darling became ill with tuberculosis, (then known as consumption) and died in Bamburgh, the village of her birth. Hundreds of people attended her funeral at St Aidan’s church, within which is a stained-glass window to her memory. She lies buried in the churchyard, where a monument was raised to her depicting her holding an oar. It is in an elevated position in order to be visible to sailors at sea. The original edifice became badly eroded and is now inside the church. It was replaced with a replica.
Bamburgh dedicated a museum to her life and to the life of the area, in which the sea continues to play such a significant part.
