Forgotten history

Tweet

There are so many bits of history that are just overlooked or forgotten. Often it’s because they were so routine that people just didn’t think to mention them, and it’s only looking back that they might seem extraordinary. One such is this snippet that I came across in the magazine of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). Titled ‘ladies who launch’ it describes how, in places with shingle beaches such as Dungeness, local women would launch the lifeboats by laying heavy wooden skids across the shingle and then dragging the boat over them. Then once it was launched they would piggy-back the men across the beach and into the boats. It doesn’t explain why they did it all this way. In those days there were no slipways so the only way to get the boat into the water was to physically drag it there. And of course the lifeboats were big wooden open rowing boats. They were either dragged by men and women, or else horses would have to be begged and borrowed from all the farms around to do the job. What I can't imagine is how they launched a heavy boat in rough seas and didn't just have the waves throw it back at them! These were also the days before lightweight thermals or waterproof clothing, so I can only assume that the women carried the men into the boats so that they wouldn’t get completely soaked before they even started. Rowing a heavy boat out into a stormy sea when you’re already half frozen would make it all so much harder. On the same page you can read another extraordinary rescue story – in 1899, twenty men and eighteen horses took 11 hours to haul a 10-ton lifeboat 13 miles to a safe launch site – and amazingly it was worth it and all the crew of a stricken sailing ship were rescued. Lucky the ship wasn’t in immediate danger of sinking! You can read more details of that rescue here https://rnli.org/about-us/our-history/timeline/1899-launch-from-porlock-weir