Lifeboat Heroes: Outstanding RNLI Rescues from Three Centuries by Edward Wake-Walker

Author:Edward Wake-Walker [Wake-Walker, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapere Books
Published: 2021-02-06T22:00:00+00:00

9. Cromer, 6 August 1941

In one of Henry Blogg’s most famous Gold Medal rescues, six merchant ships from a wartime convoy run aground on Haisborough Sands and begin to break up. Two lifeboats from Cromer and the Great Yarmouth and Gorleston lifeboat rescue all the surviving crews from the six steamers in turbulent and very shallow seas. Of the 119 men saved, Henry Blogg rescues 88.

Henry Blogg was a man of magnificent deeds but of very few words. His unequalled record of lifesaving and bravery at sea led him to become as famous in his day as any politician, sportsman or film star; yet he must have been a great disappointment to journalists trying to colour their accounts of his rescues with words from the great man. He felt, like many lifeboatmen before and after him, that whatever he told a newspaper would look boastful on the page, so it was better to say nothing.

It is rare for someone to gain such celebrity without ever living more than a few hundred yards from the house where they were born, but Henry Blogg seldom left Cromer, except when invited to London to receive one of his many awards. On one occasion, during the centenary of the RNLI in 1924, he was summoned to Buckingham Palace along with six other RNLI Gold Medal holders to receive the Empire Gallantry Medal from King George V. When he returned to Cromer, his wife, Ann, was eager to know all about it but all he would say to her was that he felt glad to be home.

Henry Blogg was born in 1876 to the unmarried Ellen Blogg who, with her other child, Mary, lived with her parents in a fisherman’s cottage in Tucker Street. He was sent to Goldsmith’s School where he showed he was quick to learn and had an unusually retentive memory. He took no part in games, however, never learned to swim and was not good at defending himself against bullies. He left school at 11, by which time his mother had married John James Davies, who was second coxswain aboard the lifeboat. Henry worked for his stepfather who had three fishing boats and very quickly learned the skills required to handle an open sailing and rowing boat. In the summer he would supplement his income hiring out towels and bathing dresses at a penny a time and helping to get the horse-drawn bathing machines down to the water’s edge in the cause of preserving the modesty of Victorian ladies.

By 1894, at the age of 18, Henry Blogg was deemed a strong enough oarsman to take his place as a member of the lifeboat crew. His stepfather, John Davies, retired as coxswain of the lifeboat in 1902 and Henry was elected second coxswain. By then he was a married man having wed Ann Brackenbury, a local girl, the year before. They had two children, a son who died in infancy and a daughter who tragically did not live beyond her early twenties.

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