HistoryHistory
Penlee Lifeboat Disaster
A hurricane off Cornwall, a coaster without power and eight volunteers from Mousehole who went out anyway: the facts of Penlee.
On 19 December 1981 the Penlee lifeboat Solomon Browne was lost with all eight of her volunteer crew off the south coast of Cornwall while trying to rescue the people aboard the stricken coaster Union Star; all eight people on the coaster died too, sixteen lives in all.
The distress call and the launch
The coaster Union Star was on her maiden voyage, from IJmuiden in the Netherlands to Arklow in Ireland, when her engines failed in heavy seas. She was a new vessel registered in Dublin, carrying five crew and three members of the captain's family. She lost power about eight miles east of the Wolf Rock lighthouse and was driven by the wind towards the cliffs near Lamorna, in hurricane-force conditions, force 12 on the Beaufort scale, with enormous seas.
The Solomon Browne, a wooden 47ft Watson-class lifeboat built in 1960, launched from the Penlee lifeboat station at Penlee Point, near Mousehole, at 8.12pm. Coxswain Trevelyan Richards had picked seven men to go with him.
What happened at sea
After several attempts to get alongside the coaster, the lifeboat crew took four people off. The last radio report told the Coastguard that four had been rescued and that two were left on board; then nothing more was heard. Rather than turn for shore, the crew appear to have gone back in for the others. Both vessels were lost with all hands. The pilot of a rescue helicopter at the scene later called it "the greatest act of courage that I have ever seen".
The formal investigation into the disaster found that the loss of Union Star was caused by the failure of her engines after seawater contaminated her fuel, together with the extreme severity of the weather and her capsize on or shortly after stranding.
The people lost and how they are remembered
The eight lifeboatmen, all Mousehole men, were coxswain Trevelyan Richards, mechanic Stephen Madron, assistant mechanic Nigel Brockman, emergency mechanic John Blewett, and crew members Charlie Greenhaugh, Kevin Smith, Barrie Torrie and Gary Wallis. Coxswain Richards was awarded the RNLI gold medal posthumously and his crew bronze medals.
Within days of the disaster, enough people from Mousehole had come forward to form a new lifeboat crew. In 1983 the station moved to Newlyn, while the old boathouse and slipway at Penlee Point have been kept by local RNLI volunteers much as they were in December 1981, alongside a memorial garden laid out in 1985. The buildings and garden are now Grade II listed. Each year on 19 December, Mousehole dims its Christmas lights in memory of the crew.
