Ray, Pennant 837

In one of the photos the crew can be seen on the bow of the boat awaiting rescue via the breeches buoy. One of the crew was my grandad, Frederick Williams.

Then there is a photo of The Tryphena which suffered a broken steam pipe and was being towed back to port by the Oswy in 1929 but twice struck the North Pier in heavy weather and was driven onto the beach.

Her crew was rescued by the rocket life-saving brigade; the Tryphena broke her backbefore she could be salvaged. On the top right-hand side of the photo can be seen the rocket in flight and its smoke trail behind it, carrying the rescue line to the boat.

Grandad said it took three attempts to get the line to the boat. Grandad told me the boiler was well above safe pressure as the shipper had asked for “All she can give.” Grandad said, ‘If up give her anymore she will blow.’ The skipper’s reply was, ‘Well we will either be blown to pieces or drown, I need more steam.’ At some point Grandad was called above decks and as he arrived on the deck there was a loud explosion as the boiler blew up. Grandad said he would probably have been killed or seriously injured if he had still been in the boiler room. Although the early steam engines (late1700s) ran at pressures very close to atmospheric, a hundred years later engineers were building steam engines with pressures tens or even a hundred times atmospheric pressure (think: equivalent to the ocean at 3000 feet depth). You can imagine that it wouldn’t be pleasant to be around one of those exploding. 

There is no photo of the Gorleston Rocket Brigade, however there is a photo of the Wellington Harbour Board Rocket Brigade posing with their lifesaving equipment, in New Zealand, 1910, to give an idea of what a brigade might look like.

There is a photo is of my grandad, Frederick Williams, the stoker on the Tryphena, being brought ashore by a breeches buoy. A breeches buoy is a rope- based rescue device used to extract people from wrecked vessels, or to transfer people from one place to another in situations of danger. The device resembles a round emergency personal flotation device with a leg harness attached. It is like a zipline. The breeches buoy may be deployed from shore to ship, ship to ship, or ship toshore using a Manby rocket system which allows evacuation of one person at a time.

A line is attached to the ship, and the person being rescued is pulled to shore in the breeches buoy.

Captain George William Manby FRS (28 November 1765 – 18 November 1854) was an English author and inventor who lived in Gorleston-on-sea. He designed the breeches boy apparatus for saving lives from shipwrecks, that was used to safely rescue my grandad and the rest of the crew.

Today, the seafront looks very similar to how it’s always looked; however, the town looks old, rundown and sad. I am ashamed of how it looks. I'm a pessimist, so I think things will get worse, I believe mankind goes from, oppression to conflict to chaos and back to oppression.