Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys Read online

  Some of his early diary entries suggest he suffered from the great blight that is mild depression, or just good old-fashioned existential angst: “this slow sickness which holds one for weeks,” he wrote, “how can I bear it? I write of the future, of hopes of being more worthy, but shall I ever be? Can I alone, poor weak wretch that I am, bear up against it all? How can I fight against it all? No one will ever see these words, therefore I may freely write: What does it all mean?”

  Poor weak wretch! This is marvelous stuff for us! These are the innermost thoughts and words of the young man destined to be Captain Scott of the Antarctic! This means you don’t have to be born manly and heroic. You can start out weak and feeble and progress to manliness by sheer force of will! And all that introspection and self-doubt confessed to the pages of a diary: there’s hope for us all.

  Scott was born on June 6, 1868, in the family home, a place called Outlands just outside Devonport. In all, there would be six children for churchwarden John Scott and his wife, Hannah—including Grace (known as Monsie), Rose, Robert, Kitty, Ettie and Archie. He was probably named Robert after his paternal grandfather, a Navy man who had reached the rank of purser by the time he retired. Family legend had it that they were all descended from one John Scott—a Jacobite sea captain who’d been captured and hanged for his part in the ’45 Rebellion (another great story—another layer of glamour and intrigue). His middle name, Falcon, was the surname of his godparents, and his family and close friends always knew him, not as Robert, but as “Con.”

  In the quest for manliness, it doesn’t hurt to have a cool name like Con, especially when it’s short for Falcon. Names matter, and can set a young man off toward a manly destiny right from the word go. I went to school with a boy called—and I’m not making this up—Steel. Imagine growing up with a name like Steel. You couldn’t help but be straight-backed with a firm handshake and confident gaze if your mom and dad had decided to name you after something hard, sharp and shiny! My niece went to nursery school alongside a boy called Luke Walker. Nothing unusual or obviously cool in that, you might say. Little Luke’s middle name, however, was Skye—spelled like the island off Scotland’s northwest coast. So, Luke Skye Walker—a boy could go far with a name like that.

  All three of grandfather Robert Scott’s brothers went to sea as well, so it was an obvious career path for young Con, in spite of the reservations of the doctor. The historic port of Plymouth was just up the road from the family home—further inspiration for a life before the mast—and after a few years of being coached for a Navy cadetship, he boarded the training ship Britannia at age 13. He took his exams in 1883 at just 15, and was subsequently rated as a midshipman.

  It’s impossible to know what means Con Scott used to transform himself from a sickly little boy into a young man capable of putting up with, even thriving within, the unremittingly harsh world of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. For boys like Scott the training was little changed from that dished out in the days of Admiral Nelson, with severe discipline enforced by beatings and extra drills. Regardless of the weather they would be sent up the rigging, to heights of 120 feet or more, to literally “learn the ropes” while the deck rolled beneath them and their perches swung sickeningly. They slept in hammocks slung close together below decks and there was neither acknowledgment of, nor sympathy for, any of the natural feelings of homesickness, fear or lack of confidence. Where did Scott find the emotional and physical strength to cope with it all? Who did he model himself upon? Whose example did he try to follow?

  Was he inspired by the thought of that shadowy Jacobite ancestor, perhaps? Or had he read and been told about the lives of other manly men?

  Growing up close to Plymouth he would have known by heart the stories of the great seamen who’d sailed from there into their places in history. Sir Francis Drake set out to tackle and defeat the Spanish Armada; Sir Walter Raleigh departed for Guinea; and, in 1576, Sir Martin Frobisher set sail with the Gabriel and the Michael in search of the fabled North West Passage to Cathay.

  In Robert Falcon Scott’s day all young boys knew the lore of the heroes. In order to become manly men, they needed to know how manly men behaved—how they carried themselves, how they lived their lives and, when necessary, died their deaths.

  The world he’d been born into in 1868 was one unrecognizable to us. It was a place so different from the one we know—in terms of our values and morals at least—that it’s as distant as the imagined world of Homer.

  The American Civil War had ended just three years before. The Crimean War of 1854–56 was only a dozen years distant. Legendary conflicts like the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1838 (and the disastrous retreat from Kabul that ended it in 1842) and the Indian Mutiny of 1857–59 were still well within living memory when Con was a boy. Such stories! Such lessons to be learned!

  Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865, in Bombay. At the age of five he was sent to live with a foster family in Southsea, back in wet and draughty England. He was desperately unhappy. But Kipling would of course grow up to deliver many of the lines that helped shape the attitudes and aspirations of generations of manly men:

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings

  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss

  And lose, and start again at your beginnings

  And never breathe a word about your loss

  If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

  To serve your turn long after they are gone

  And so hold on when there is nothing in you

  Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

  So this is not about wanting to fight or to kill or to die, far from it—it’s about wanting to value an upright and noble way of living. It’s not about conquering or wanting to build empires, either. Men like Kipling, Raleigh and Frobisher and dramas like Afghanistan and the Crimean War and the rest have other things to say; they tell us that there are bigger stories to be told, and parts for us to play in them. One of the lessons to be learned from the old stories was that being a man meant there were more important things to think and care about than your own wellbeing.

  When boys like Con Scott realized this—boys with weak chests and nervous hearts, who felt faint at the thought of suffering or at the sight of blood—it must have brought feelings of release and relief. It was possible to change, to become more than they had been before!

  What is also true, of course, is that there are still brave men. It’s not as though they’ve stopped turning up when need arises, far from it. It just feels sometimes that we’ve stopped paying them the attention they used to get—the attention they deserve.

  In his own time and after, Scott would cast a long shadow against which young men would measure themselves. But examples are still being set, shadows cast, and the bravery of good men is as constant as the sea.

  The Penlee Lifeboatmen

  Mousehole is a dream of a Cornish fishing village: white painted granite cottages, a single winding cobbled street with a few lanes running off it. Lying three miles to the west of Penzance, it probably takes its name—pronounced “Mowzol” in the Cornish way—from the narrow entrance to its harbor. One of the breakwaters was built at the end of the 14th century, the other 1,000 years before that. The harbor mouth can be closed with wooden beams, to keep out tidal surges. Southerly gales have long been the bane of this part of Cornwall, and Mousehole is a place that has learned the ways of the sea.

  Tradition has it that as the village prepared for Christmas one year long ago, the sea was too rough for fishing boats to venture out. With the inhabitants facing starvation, one Tom Bawcock braved the gale and landed enough fish to feed every man, woman and child. The catch was turned into “Stargaz y Pie,” in which the fish are cooked whole with their heads sticking up through the crust. This is the dish still eaten in the village every December 23—Tom Bawcock’s Eve—at least by those who know their history.

  Dylan Thomas spent time hereabouts and may have immortalized the atmos
phere in his imagined village of Llareggub in Under Milk Wood. In recent years Mousehole has been taken over by “second-homers” who’ve pushed house prices beyond the reach of locals. Now most of the cottages overlooking the harbor lie empty for 10 months of the year while their owners earn city salaries to pay for their part-time dreams. And while they sleep elsewhere, their empty houses in Mousehole are left, as the Welshman once said of other homes, blind as moles. Thomas told a friend he’d written his play after World War II to remind himself there was still beauty in the world. And yet, “the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widow’s weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

  During the Middle Ages the harbor bade farewell to pilgrims making for Santiago de Compostela and the Holy Land. In 1595 it was raided and burned to the ground by Spanish soldiers. Dolly Pentreath, the last person to speak only Cornish, died here in 1777 at age 102, and there’s a memorial to her in the local church.

  In a place of honor nearby is a memorial to eight Mousehole men who knew the sea and so understood—in the way that only seafaring men do—the danger they faced as they answered a call for help on the night of December 19, 1981.

  The Morton family was having an unusual start to the Christmas holidays that year. Henry Morton was the captain of a brand-new 1,400-ton coaster, the Union Star. She was on her maiden voyage from the Dutch port of Ijmuiden to Arklow in Ireland’s County Wicklow with a cargo of fertilizer. So they could all be together for the festivities, Morton had collected his wife Dawn, 32, and her two teenage daughters Sharon, 16, and Deanne, 14, en route. Counting the captain, there was a crew of five. The addition of Morton’s family brought the head count to eight. In fact, Dawn was several weeks pregnant so perhaps nine was a more accurate total of the lives aboard.

  By December 19 they were in trouble. The weather had deteriorated during the trip and by teatime that day they were in the grip of a full-blown hurricane, 60-foot waves and winds gusting to 100 miles an hour. Eight miles east of the Wolf’s Rock lighthouse in southwest Cornwall the Union Star’s engine failed. Seawater got into the fuel line somehow, and despite the efforts of Morton and the rest of the crew they couldn’t get her started again. She was dead in the water.

  The first offer of help came from a nearby Dutch tug, the Noord Holland, also making her way through the English Channel that night. Her captain wanted to put a line aboard the Union Star and take her in tow—but that would have made her “salvage” and Morton balked at the cost. Unaware of how much danger he was in, he told the Noord Holland thanks but no thanks and turned instead to the rescue services.

  “Union Star calling Land’s End Coastguard,” he said calmly into the radio. “We are approximately eight miles east of Wolf’s Rock. Engines have stopped and we are unable to get them started at the moment.”

  A Sea King helicopter was scrambled from the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose and word was sent to alert the lifeboat crew at Mousehole.

  Fifty-six-year-old coxswain William Trevelyan Richards was at home watching television with his widowed mother, Mary, when he got the call. Some of his crewmen, he knew, would be in Mousehole’s Ship Inn. It was the last Saturday night before Christmas and, bad weather or not, celebrations were already under way. The rest of the men were likely at home with wives and families, listening to the worst storm in living memory as it screamed its fury at the sea and sky.

  Trevelyan Richards put on his coat, said goodnight to his mom and stepped out of the door into the howling dark. Down at the Ship Inn he asked for quiet and told them the situation. He needed seven volunteers and a dozen men raised their hands, including the pub’s landlord, Charlie Greenhaugh.

  Down at the boathouse, fish salesman and lifeboatman Nigel Brockman, 43, turned up accompanied by his 17-year-old son, Neil. They’d been at home watching television with the rest of the family when word of the call-out reached them. Neil was a crewman too—a volunteer of just a few months’ standing, but Trevelyan Richards wouldn’t risk two members of the same family on such a night and refused to take him along.

  “I was absolutely gutted,” Neil told a newspaper 25 years later. “If you’re on the crew, you always want to go.”

  The lifeboat was the Solomon Browne, a 47-foot Watson Class vessel—shaped a bit like those little Royal National Lifeboat Institution collection boxes seen on the bars of pubs throughout the British Isles. “Funded entirely by voluntary contributions,” they say. She was built in 1960 at a cost of £35,000—the money coming from the wills of three women, Miss Lydia Mary Dyer Browne of Launceston, Miss Sara Wilhelmina Davies of Timperley, and Miss Blanche Waterhouse of Huddersfield. This is the way and the form of the RNLI—it’s a gift we make to each other.

  She bore the unmistakable livery of purple hull and orange cabin—colors which, in the seas around the British Isles, mean so much more to stranded mariners than the reds and yellows of onshore rescue vehicles mean to British drivers. Nothing compares to the sight of an orange and purple outline appearing over the horizon of waves, its crew made larger than life by their puffy waterproofs and crash helmets, and bearing down upon you with the promise of continuing existence. “Guardian Angel” is an expression that’s bandied about quite a lot nowadays—but the men of the RNLI are the real deal.

  Although the Solomon Browne was crewed by Mousehole men, she was stationed at Penlee Point and was generally known as the Penlee lifeboat. There had been a lifeboat there since 1913, and 91 people had owed their lives to the bravery of its crews down through the years. Many medals had been awarded to crewmen past and present before that night of all nights on December 19, 1981.

  The men who climbed aboard along with Trevelyan Richards were second coxswain James Stephen Madron, 43, assistant mechanic Nigel Brockman, 43, emergency mechanic John Blewit, 43, Charlie Greenhaugh, 46, Barrie Torrie, 33, and 23-year-olds Kevin Smith and Gary Wallis.

  It took masterful seamanship to get the Solomon Browne out onto the water that night. By the time those men arrived at their lifeboat station they were fighting to stand up in the face of a full-blown hurricane—the kind of weather event most of us will never even see. Yet they looked out into the dark of that winter’s night, at 60-foot waves whipped up by 100-mile-an-hour winds, and decided to get aboard a 47-foot boat and head out into it. Remind yourself that they’re volunteers, who do the job because they know what it’s like to be on the sea when it all goes wrong. They understand what it means, and rather than stay safe on dry land while it all plays out, they find it easier to go out there and help. I find it almost impossible to imagine bravery like that.

  The very existence of the RNLI is down to one Englishman, a Yorkshire-born Quaker called William Hillary, who never learned to swim. They say that in the old days, fishermen and sailors chose not to master the art—it gave them more respect for the sea.

  In the days before he concerned himself with the plight of shipwrecked sailors, William was a soldier and adventurer who used his wealthy first wife’s money to fund a private army to stand against any invasion by Napoleon. King George III eventually gave him a baronetcy for his trouble.

  In 1808 Sir William moved to the Isle of Man, with a new wife, and there he heard many tragic tales of local lives lost to the sea. The worst had been the loss of the Manx fishing fleet in 1787, when around 50 ships and more than 160 crewmen drowned in Douglas Bay. Caught out in a storm and running for safe haven, they foundered on rocks. There was no rescue service then, of course, and no one thought of making an attempt to pluck those souls from their watery graves.

  And then in October 1822, Sir William watched with his own eyes as the Royal Navy cutter Vigilant made an attempt to sail out of Douglas Bay into a storm. She was caught by the wind and waves and driven onto rocks.

  Sir William ran from his home overlooking the bay, down to the harbor wall, and there promised to pay any men who would help him crew a rowing boat and make some effort to help the sailors. Enough volunteers stepped forward to man two
boats and they braved the storm to reach the stricken vessel. Fixing lines to the Vigilant, they managed to pull her back toward shore—close enough for rockets to be fired from the beach, carrying hawsers that could be used to draw her closer still. Despite ever-worsening conditions, Sir William and the rest of his volunteers then rowed back and forth between the Vigilant and the beach, eventually saving nearly 100 lives.

  Sir William saw at once the need for an organized rescue service, teams of men all around the coast ready to brave the worst weathers for the sake of those in peril. He began a campaign and by 1824 the ‘National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck’ was born. In time it would be renamed the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Down through all the years from that day to this, the RNLI has remained independent and voluntary. Government doesn’t pay for it, so the men in gray suits don’t get to say how it’s run, which is probably just as well.

  For his bravery during the subsequent rescue of members of the crew of the Fortrondet, Sir William was awarded one of three gold medals he would collect during his time as a lifeboatman. Of more significance to him that day, though, was the fact that he was accompanied during the rescue by his son Augustus, who received a silver award. It would not be the last time that a son would follow a father into the role of lifesaver.

  The steep slipway was being pounded by waves as big as houses, but perfect timing and judgment from Trevelyan Richards enabled them to break through into deep water and head off toward the last known position of the Union Star. It was 12 minutes past eight.

  First to the scene, however, was the Sea King helicopter, flown by Lieutenant Commander Russell Smith, a United States Navy pilot on exchange with the Royal Navy.