Spare a Penny for the Lifeboats?
The first known street collection in the world in aid of a charity.
It was early December 1886, and with a Mr Reginald Bushell, Hinderton Lodge, Neston, reporting abnormal barometric readings on his weather apparatus, the full blown north westerly gale was showing no sign of abating as it continued to wreak havoc on land and sea alike.
The Anglesey and Caernarvonshire coasts were said to be strewn with wrecks. The conditions were so atrocious that the skipper of the Liverpool-registered barque Lariscourt (1113 tons), having departed Newport bound for Western Australia, was forced to run her ashore on the sands at Port Talbot to save her from being wrecked. Even so the sea was such that the crew had to take to the rigging to survive.
The brigantine Petrel, with a cargo of marble for Belfast, was driven ashore at Treyarnon Bay, Padstow, and became a total wreck. Meanwhile the mail steamers City of Berlin, Catalonia, and Nova Scotian, all reported heavy weather, adding at least twenty-four hours to their schedules.
On land, it was reported that houses in Porthmadoc, Criccieth, and Pwlhelli, had been demolished by the high winds and that a train on the narrow gauge Ffestiniog Railway had been blown off the track. Houses in Nantwich were flooded when the Weaver burst its banks.
On 9 December, with the gale blowing west north westerly, the Hamburg-registered iron-hulled barque Mexico (400 tons) on passage from Liverpool to Guayaquil, Equador, was driven onto Horse Bank, a sandbank off Ainsdale near Southport, Lancashire.
Lifeboats from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) stations at Southport, St Annes, and Lytham, would be launched to go to the stricken vessel’s assistance. First to answer the barque’s distress signals was the Southport boat Eliza Fernley, but as she closed to attempt a rescue, she was struck by heavy seas and capsized.
Around twenty minutes after the Eliza Fernley launched, the St Anne’s boat Laura Janet was also launched. Her crew rowed her out for several hundred yards then hoisted sail. What might have been the last sight of the Laura Janet were two red lights observed approximately two miles off Southport.
The Lytham lifeboat Charles Biggs was on its maiden rescue mission. Her crew rowed the entire way from their launch point and, despite being almost swamped by heavy seas, succeeded in rescuing all twelve crew members of the rigging of the Mexico. Coxswain Thomas Clarkson was later awarded the RNLI Silver Medal for this service.
Some two hours after capsizing, the battered upturned Eliza Fernley was washed ashore at Birkdale. Miraculously, there were two survivors from her crew of sixteen. They were John Jackson, West Street, Birkdale, and Henry Robinson, who lived in Boundary Street.
Both men had managed to escape from under the capsized boat and had clung onto the keel. Utterly exhausted the men made their way home to raise the alarm. Unaided, Jackson crawled most of the way. Robinson was more fortunate. He came across a man named Rimmer who helped him home. Rimmer then went to Birkdale Police Station and reported the loss of the Eliza Fernley. Rescue parties were quickly organised, and it is reported that four other crew members were found barely alive though non survived.
The disaster left thirteen widows and fifty children without a father. Margaret Wight lost her husband Peter on the Eliza Fernley. She also lost her brother Timothy Rigby, her uncle Thomas Rigby, and her cousin Henry Rigby. The shock was so great that the following day Margaret gave birth to a still-born baby boy.
Also lost on the Southport boat was Henry Hodge (43), a fruiterer from Lord Street who also owned two fishing boats. On hearing the lifeboat call, the father of seven answered without hesitation despite his son Henry junior pleading with him not to go. Just before boarding, Henry handed his son two gold rings saying, “Take these home, love. Good night.”
When Henry Hodge’s body was found, his watched had stopped at 12.40am.
Fearing the worst for the Laura Janet, the Blackpool lifeboat Samuel Fletcher had been launched from the Promenade to search for the missing lifeboat. On crossing the bar, a tremendous wave washed coxswain Robert Bickerstaff overboard. Robert managed to grab hold of a lifeline and was eventually pulled back aboard.
At St Annes a pilot was taken aboard, and the Samuel Fletcher carried out a sweep of the banks between Lytham and Southport. Nothing was found. At dusk the lifeboat put into St Annes and her crew returned to Blackpool by train.
In the meantime, the upturned wreck of the Laura Janet had been found ashore. There were no survivors from her crew of thirteen.
Within hours a Disaster Fund had opened to aid the widows and orphans left unprovided for.
A collection held at the Palace Hotel, Southport, on Friday 10th, raised £120 in twelve hours. Additionally, the mayor of Southport, Mr J Unwin, was among eight local residents who donated £100 each. The RNLI added a further £2000 (approx. £214,000 in 2024) and Queen Victoria and German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm I (of Prussia) also contributed. Before the year was out, the fund had reached £31,000 (approx. £3,316,000 in 2024).
On Saturday 11 December, Queen Victoria penned the following entry in her private journal.
“A dreadful misfortune has happened on the Lancashire coast, the loss of life boats, & many lives, a terrible & inconceivable thing!”
The disaster was soon attracting the attention of poets. The Christmas Eve edition of the Blackpool Gazette & Herald published J Fisher’s The Wreck Of The Barque Mexico. During January 1887 the Fund awarded the three lifeboat committees £200 each to erect memorials.
Five years after the loss of the Eliza Fernley and Laura Janet, Sir Charles Macara, the chairman and managing director of Henry Bannerman & Sons, and Bannerman Mills, was so concerned for the widows and orphans of the lifeboatmen that he and his wife Marion not only donated, but they also decided to organise a large-scale fund-raising event. Aided and abetted by the mayors of Manchester and Salford, Sir Charles established the Manchester & Salford Saturday Fund to make a public collection in aid of the RNLI. At the time the organisation was running an annual deficit of around £33,000. (approx. £3,451,000 in 2024). Additionally, Marion Macara founded a Ladies Guild that would help organise street collections.
The Saturday Fund event was held over three days commencing Thursday 8 October 1891.
There were collecting boxes throughout the city and special collections held at factories and mills. Corporate donations were positively encouraged.
As to the organising of the event a Manchester Evening News journalist wrote: “In fact everything legitimate has been done to draw the penny from the humble well-wisher and the shilling or sovereign of those who are more blessed with this world’s goods.”
On the Thursday and Friday, the lifeboats Three Brothers from Southport and one of the two boats stationed at St Annes together with their crews, were paraded through Manchester and its suburbs. They were accompanied by bands from the Training Ship Indefatigable and the Blackpool Lifeboat Band.
On the Saturday, the lifeboats left Piccadilly at 2.00pm again accompanied by the bands from the Indefatigable and the Blackpool lifeboat. However, they were joined by a third band, the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Alexandra Band from Newton Heath. The parade would then make its way to Belle Vue Zoological Gardens.
At around 4.00pm and again at 7.00pm, both boats were launched on the lake at Belle Vue. They would then undertake various evolutions including capsizing to show off the boats’ self-righting capabilities. There were exercises involving rocket apparatus and rescuing shipwrecked mariners from a mast by breeches bouy Special mention was made in Belle Vue advertisements that the evening performance would be enhanced by the use of electric lighting.
Those spectators who stayed on after the boats had finished their 7.00pm performance would be in for a treat with fireworks and Danson’s unrivalled spectacular The Battle of Inkerman.
In all, what had been the first recorded charity street collection in the world raised £5000 (approx. £522,802 in 2024). The Saturday Fund continued to hold events up to 1910 when the organising was taken over by the RNLI.
Marion Macara’s Ladies Guild proved inspirational and within a decade at least forty other Ladies Guilds had been set up around Britain and Ireland. They were responsible for a doubling of RNLI income.
Of the original Disaster Fund of 1886, the last of St Annes recipients was Sarah Tims who died in 1934. The balance of the fund stood at £9487 (approx. £558,766 in 2024) was paid over to the RNLI.
The Southport and St Annes lifeboats disaster remains (2024) the worst loss of RNLI crew in a single incident.
And what of the Mexico? For a couple of months until she was refloated off the Southport foreshore, she became something of a tourist attraction. She was refitted and re-registered in 1889 and made a voyage to the Falkland Islands. In February 1900 she was sold to Norwegian owners and renamed Valhalla. On 27 February, Valhalla bound from London to Grangemouth with a cargo of loam, ran ashore at Tantallon, North Berwick. Her crew of ten were saved.
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