For Those in Peril Sea Fever

Over the last century, people have been drawn to the sea for different reasons -

for fishing, for trade,

and for pleasure...

..but they have always been at its mercy.

The unpredictability of nature

and its inherent hostility to us,

has a nasty habit of catching us out.

And when people have been caught out,

they have relied on the bravery of lifeboat crews, coastguards,

and men and women from the air/sea rescue services.

This ship was sunk, the sea was covering it and the waves were running at 15-20 feet.

That's when things got a bit more serious

because I knew I was the one that was going to have to go down there.

We were a young crew. And we'd never seen this before,

never seen a vessel so large actually sinking.

Just occasionally, home movie makers managed to film some of these acts of heroism.

And their films, together with the memories

of those involved, tell the story of why a few people risk their own lives

to save the lives of others,

how they harnessed new technologies to help them,

and why, in spite of all this, the sea continues to claim so many lives.

# Hear us when we cry to thee

# For those in peril on the sea... #

The conditions must have been horrendous, absolutely terrifying.

It was hit with that 90-mile-per-hour gale.

We never found survivors.

Off Britain's coastline lie the telling reminders of the ever-present dangers of the sea.

For centuries, people set sail with little hope of being rescued if they got into difficulty.

But, by the middle of the 19th century, a network of support was beginning to emerge.

At first, the life-saving equipment they used was rudimentary.

But, over the decades,

the rescue services became much more sophisticated.

What stayed constant was the terrible, unpredictable power of the sea itself.

I remember particularly the night my father was drowned.

It was a terrible night.

There was never a night like it. We have lots of gales here.

We have lots of them.

But there was never a gale like that.

I remember the words being said, when the rocket went off,

I said to my sister, "Dad isn't going out tonight, is he?"

So she said, "Yes, he'll be all right, my boy, he'll be all right."

And then I heard my mum say, "You won't go out tonight, William?"

She must have raised her voice.

He said, "I'm going out, Grace.

"I'm going out to do my duty."

The duty that William Barber's father was doing that night

was to serve on the St Ives Lifeboat.

The lifeboat went out because there was a call for a boat called The Wilson.

And she was in difficulties.

Actually, not far off Sennen.

And the word came in that Sennen Lifeboat said

they can't launch, it was too bad a conditions, they couldn't go out.

Our coxswain said, "I'm going out.

"Is anyone coming with me?"

Six others answered the call that night.

They included William's Uncle Matthew, and the coxswain, Thomas Cocking.

The lifeboat launch that day was about two o'clock in the morning.

Got around the headland and got hit with a wave and capsized.

Three of the crew got washed out of it.

They managed to hang on, tried to restart the engine.

Then she capsized again, a couple more blokes got washed out.

Then they hung on again, just hung on. She rolled over a third time.

And then she rolled up onto the rocks at Godrevy.

Seven out of eight men gone.

The scale of the tragedy struck a chord with the nation.

Newsreel cameras arrived in time to film the aftermath.

It was devastating inasmuch as nearly every family was affected

and, of course, there were no chapels big enough for the funerals, really.

People came from all over Cornwall.

My great-grandfather was the coxswain, and I had two great-uncles

who were in the boat as well,

my grandfather and his son were drowned, and his son-in-law.

My great-auntie that night, she lost her husband, her father and her brother.

The tragedy of January 1939 remains the worst disaster in the history of the St Ives Lifeboat.

And, although three members of the Cocking family were drowned,

it didn't stop them from continuing their commitment.

Like his father before him, Tommy Cocking is today its coxswain.

It's been a long family history, it goes back generations and generations.

My great-great-great-grandfather, I think, was maybe the first one.

I think there has been a Cocking in the St Ives Lifeboat for over 150 years.

Tommy's family would have been amongst the earliest volunteers

for a charity that began in 1824.

Today, he's one of 4,500 crew members of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution

based in more than 200 stations around our coastline.

The vast majority remain volunteers.

There is a certain amount of excitement, I suppose, adrenalin kick.

Without saying the old cliche, "Oh, it feels nice when you save someone," it really does. That is a fact.

Every community that has a lifeboat, I think, thinks a lot of it and are very, very proud of it.

That's the crew of the boat, 1935-36.

That's my great-grandfather, that's my grandfather and that's my dad.

That's another one there with the crew pulling the boat out,

with the launchers pulling the boat out by hand.

# Who will man the lifeboat Who the storm will brave?

# Many souls are drifting helpless on the wave

# See their hands uplifted... #

In those early days, even launching a lifeboat was a difficult and risky business.

Well, they used to pull the boat right out in the sea, men up to their necks in water,

to get that boat afloat, to go to a rescue.

This footage is taken from promotional films made by the RNLI in the 1930s,

a time when Martin Roach was growing up in St Ives.

They used to row them.

Yeah. They were hard men in them days, very, very hard.

They would have to row... row clear of the beach where they were launched,

and if they were going a distance, they would sail,

but when they were going to do an actual job, they would have to take the sails down and row,

so that they could get alongside the casualty.

HE LAUGHS

They were very hard men, they were. Hard.

The turn of the 20th century,

the lifeboats were, in the main, pulling and sailing boats.

By 1911, there were only 13 with engines.

Their equipment was very basic - they had obviously the sails,

oars for rowing.

The crew would have worn just their oilskin jacket

with a cork life jacket, which was invented in 1854.

The lifeboat crew had no more protection on their boats

than many of the people they went to rescue.

The early lifeboatmen were very much on their own -

a local response to a local problem.

Traditionally, of course, life-saving provision comes from local communities -

the fishing communities which banded together to provide

safety boats that could go and rescue their fellows at sea.

They were all fishermen, the majority of them.

So, men, perhaps like my father, he wasn't in the crew,

but he would go when the rockets went, he would go down there.

And if perhaps they were one short, or two short,

he would go in their place,

until such times as he was a recognised member of the crew.

That's the way they used to do it, that's the way I did it.

They all turn out to help, to do what they can.

There was a community spirit.

The co-ordination of rescue service wasn't as it is today

with the telephone network or a radio network.

It was line of sight, it was mark one eyeball,

it was rockets, it was people who lived on the coast and understood what they might be seeing,

who communicated things and passed by word of mouth. It was a bit ad hoc.

It certainly worked,

but I'm not sure I'd want to rely on it too much.

Despite the efforts of the lifeboat service,

many lives were lost at sea, many of them close to the shore.

From the 1930s onwards, amateur film-makers began to capture the drama

of wrecks and rescues along Britain's coast.

One of these film-makers was a Cornish man, John Stevens,

seen here with his children, in his own film.

John filmed in St Ives in the 1950s,

and he captured the early days of the local rescue organisation,

the Volunteer Coastguard.

His son, Frank, has kept his films.

Quite often, when Dad went out with his camera,

especially when it was sea rescues and coastguard practice, things like that,

if I was around, I would tag along.

It was always exciting to go and watch.

There have always been people whose job it is to watch and guard the coast.

At one time, their main concern was smugglers and pirates,

but by the 20th century, they were also looking after ships and coastline safety.

In St Ives, as in other coastal communities,

volunteers were using basic life-saving equipment

to rescue people from cliffs or from ships foundering close to the shore.

Coastguards would go up to the coastguard station,

which was above Porthminster Beach in St Ives

and there was a garage up there where they stored life-saving apparatus.

And they piled all the stuff on board, all the people alighting,

the crew jumped on the lorry, about eight or ten of them.

Health and safety? Forget it.

Jumped on, climbed on top, and off they went, hanging on for dear life,

and the apparatus then would be taken to where the casualty would be.

When the St Ives Coastguard was called out on a day in September in 1952,

the potential casualties were in the heart of the town.

A violent storm had driven a naval minesweeper aground in the harbour.

Frank's father was there to film the unfolding drama.

The ship was in danger. I mean, it's on the rocks.

Whether there was a possibility of capsizing, I don't know.

But the crew had to be taken off.

Also watching the drama was Paul Moran,

who was a young boy at the time.

I ran down to Westcott's Quay where this drama was taking place.

The weather was absolutely ferocious.

There was a gale-force wind blowing,

the seas had heaped up in St Ives Bay.

There was spray everywhere,

it was very dramatic and I simply had to get down there.

I looked at this huge mass of this boat,

which was lying offshore about 200 yards.

The tide was coming in, there was spray everywhere.

Very dramatic scenes.

While the storm raged, John Stevens filmed the rescue operation.

The volunteers set up a piece of equipment

that in those days offered the best hope of rescuing those on board.

The breeches buoy apparatus was invented by Henry Trengrouse,

actually a Cornishman who lived in Helston.

He had witnessed the disaster of HMS Anson in 1807,

where unfortunately 60-odd people had died because they couldn't be rescued.

So he invented the breeches buoy apparatus.

You simply fired a line, by a rocket.

Once this line was attached to any mast or part of the ship,

you could then use a pulley system, and people would clamber in to the little pouch there, the breeches,

and people on shore would haul this person ashore, one at a time.

And in that manner, you could rescue the people on the boat.

Very simple, very effective.

But it did need a lot of people on shore to be able to hold the lines,

so that they could be hauled ashore.

Battling through atrocious weather, the volunteers managed to save the lives of 62 sailors.

It was no accident

that the first organised attempts of life-saving at sea

had focused on ships close to shore.

That's where ships and sailors were most vulnerable.

Most ships can cope with bad weather.

They have trouble in extreme weather,

but, by and large, they cope with making an ocean voyage.

The problem occurs when you approach land -

off-lying rocks, darkened coasts, sand banks and tides.

If you can't see where you're going, you've got a problem.

HORN BLASTS

HORN BLASTS

Well before the days of lifeboats and coastguards,

we in Britain had already developed a protective network

to help sailors in danger off the coastline.

It's often said that lighthouses are signposts of the sea,

because if you imagine yourself out in the middle of the sea,

with nothing there, just a pure, black night,

you literally won't know where you are.

But when you notice a light flashing at a regular interval,

you think, "That's a lighthouse."

Basically speaking, because each one has an individual characteristic,

a sailor or mariner out at sea can instantly tell where they are.

The idea of using raised lights to guide ships dates back to ancient Egypt,

and records show that Britain had its first lighthouse by the 13th century.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were over 250, most of them controlled by Trinity House.

Trinity House is one of the three general lighthouse authorities for the UK and Ireland.

It was founded in 1514 by Henry VIII,

originally as a charitable institution

to provide for "decayed mariners," as they were called in those days.

But it then developed into a service for providing lighthouses, buoys, beacons and lightships,

particularly during the Victorian age -

the great age of lighthouse building.

They were almost always built in beautiful locations and often had an air of mystery about them.

Gerry Douglas-Sherwood's imagination was fired and he applied for a job as a keeper.

I think the appeal was really

the fact that it's such an unusual occupation.

It never entered my mind to become a keeper, I didn't know the position existed.

It was something you read in storybooks.

To see it on the printed page, it's a regular salary.

You got moved around England, Wales and the Channel Islands.

I love travelling anyway, so it had great appeal.

There is a lot of romanticism about lighthouses,

and the one question most people ask is,

"What's it really like to be a lighthouse keeper?"

Well, I've just done morning watch.

I tried to get in bed for a few hours' sleep.

It's now just gone five...

HORN BLASTS

HORN BLASTS

..and that's my alarm call.

It's been going more or less since I got in bed, so it's pointless staying in.

This is Peter Halil who, like Gerry, used to be a lighthouse keeper.

The world of the keeper was a difficult one to film,

but Peter's home movies, shot in the 1980s and '90s,

give us an insight into a way of life that had changed little in generations.

It suddenly dawned on me that nobody seemed interested in preserving the life of a lighthouse keeper.

So...I decided to see if I could do it.

So I got myself a video camera and taught myself what to do.

I approached Trinity House and they sort of backed me with everything except the money.

And every time somebody went ill, if I was free,

on my time off, they'd send me to cover for them

and I just ticked off the lighthouses I hadn't been to

and they promptly delivered.

So I used to commute by helicopter all over the place.

It was lovely.

But glamorous, it most certainly wasn't.

HE WHISTLES AS HE VACUUMS

Lots of people think

when you become a lighthouse keeper you're a bit monastic.

You're locked in, so you have to be able to talk to each other.

You can't even go to the toilet without telling the other two where you're going.

It's... It's...

It's a bit like marriage.

Well, here we are on a last outpost.

Yep. Not many of us left.

Imagine three keepers living in that area for 28 days

where, if you stick your backside up against the door, take five steps,

your nose is up against the wall on the other side.

In there, you'd have a TV, a cooker,

perhaps a microwave.

But none of this dented Peter's enthusiasm for capturing this strange world on camera.

And he even enlisted Gerry Douglas-Sherwood to help present it.

OK. All right?

The Needles Lighthouse you see today was built in 1858.

It replaced a lighthouse on top of Scratchell's Bay,

which was just round the corner, on the mainland.

'During my career, from 1970 up to 1998, I really saw the whole gamut'

of what it was like to be a keeper,

from the 19th century to the 21st century, really.

I dealt with the ships, I slept on board ships, I did boat reliefs.

I worked on paraffin lights, I worked on the old-fashioned compressed-air fog signals.

And, being an engineer, that was a great joy to me

and I never lost that liking for the job itself.

Right, this was the Norwegian-style emergency fog signal,

which was in use in case the main machinery broke down.

Place it over the rails like this and, when your time came round,

give it a turn. Like so.

HORN BLASTS

HE LAUGHS

HORN BLASTS

During the early years of the 20th century,

the pattern of the rescue services at sea - lighthouses, lifeboats and the coastguard -

remained very much unchanged.

But the impact of war at sea,

and especially in the air over the seas round Britain,

was to change everything.

One of the major advances the Second World War brought about was the Air Sea Rescue Service.

This change in thinking derived, of course, from the fact that a pilot

was a highly-trained, very valuable asset to the country.

And therefore it was important to recover him,

and his skills, in one piece, and not leave him to the brutal ocean.

Early attempts at saving pilots were fairly rudimentary.

It was rather like a steel dustbin that was anchored in the Channel,

with a door on it, and a ladder, and a cooker, and some warm clothing,

and the idea was

that downed air crews would make their way to these "succour stations",

climb aboard, make a cup of tea, and wait for someone to pick them up.

In practice, these succour stations were of limited benefit.

There was no guarantee that a downed pilot would be able to reach one.

But gradually, matters did improve.

The military began using fast motorboats, aided by spotter planes,

to rescue air crews soon after they came down into the sea.

They took rather unusual aeroplanes like the Otter, and they added these to the organisation.

And the next thing, you've got search and rescue starting to operate.

And by the end of the war, I don't know the numbers, but they'd saved thousands and thousands of airmen.

By the time peace came in 1945,

a national air sea rescue organisation was beginning to emerge.

And this fledgling service would be revolutionised by the introduction of a totally new type of aircraft.

Certainly in terms of 100, 200 miles out to sea, the most significant advance and benefit to anybody

in the water is the development of the search and rescue helicopter.

Because it can react quickly, it can be on the precise point

of the scene, and it can pluck people out of the sea.

BELL RINGS

By the early 1960s, the RAF and the Navy had established search and rescue units around Britain,

responding to both military and civilian emergencies.

Their helicopters made rescue possible where older techniques struggled to reach casualties.

Eric Smith was a helicopter winchman at Chivenor in North Devon.

A keen amateur film-maker, he recorded life in his unit.

Just think what I had. I had a camera aeroplane, I had a camera -

so I've got air to air shots of aeroplanes which would cost a film company a bomb.

And I've got all the props I needed, because they were for real.

And over the period of three years that I was on that unit, I took hundreds of feet of film.

The community aspect was, number one, a very small crew -

pilot, navigator and the winchman down the back.

And, although two of us would be officers as a rule

and one of us would be a sergeant, we got on like a house on fire

and we were very closely knit.

My role aboard the aircraft was to sit quietly in the back until I was needed, really.

So I would sit in the back in transit, probably nodding off.

But when we got to the scene of the incident, then I was Action Man.

In 1962, just a year after he'd joined,

the unit was called to the aid of a ship in distress off the Cornish coast.

Eric's skills as a winchman were about to be tested to the limit.

A French fishing trawler, the Jeanne Gougy, had run aground off Land's End.

When the helicopter reached the site, Eric and the crew found a vessel in serious trouble.

Eric didn't have HIS camera,

but two local film-makers watching from the cliffs above

filmed what followed.

This ship was sunk. This ship had capsized.

This ship was resting on the bottom of the sea. The sea was covering it,

and the waves were running at 15 to 20 feet.

Every time there was a trough in the wave,

so a bit of the ship would show.

Looking at that, it was impossible,

in our professional opinion -

which was a very weighty opinion -

that anybody could be alive

in that wreck.

The pilot said, "We will search the area."

And we pulled two dead men out of the sea.

We thought it was a total loss.

As well as the helicopter, other rescue services had been called out.

The lifeboat from nearby Sennen Cove retrieved several bodies from the water,

but coxswain Maurice Hutchens saw no way of getting close enough to help

anyone aboard who might still be alive.

I remember the job because it was a tremendous ground sea running,

as a result of a storm further off in the ocean.

Every boat has its limit, and if you got picked up in one of those seas,

you would have been smashed against the shore. Simple as that.

It wasn't a case of being able to get in there in ANY boat -

even today's boat would find it extremely difficult to operate

a rescue in conditions like that.

We decided to go from the scene and take the bodies to Newlyn,

because there was nothing we could do.

In the past, that would have been the end of any rescue attempt.

But as events took another dramatic turn, the helicopter rescue team

were about to demonstrate just what a difference they could make.

A phone call came through to Culdrose Naval Air Station.

And it said a woman on the cliff has seen a man alive in the wheelhouse.

And we used an Air Force expression that has been in use for many years

and said there was no way that anyone could be alive in that ship.

And they insisted that there was.

So we climbed into our yellow helicopter, and off we went again.

We flew over the top of the ship, and I looked straight down

into the wheelhouse, and there was a man in there.

And he was alive.

And I could not believe my eyes.

And that's when things got a bit more serious,

because I knew I was the one that was going to have to go down there.

Just as I was coming over the side of the aeroplane, the pilot had said to me,

"Smudger..." he said - they all called me Smudger - "Smudger,"

he said, "you're not to come off the cable."

Now he was that frightened for me.

And I said, "Oh, yeah, OK."

Because I wouldn't have obeyed such an order normally.

He suddenly went very formal.

He said, "Sergeant Smith, you are not to come off the cable.

"That is a direct order. Do you understand?"

I said, "Yes, sir." And that was the most formal we ever got.

I worked my way round to the door that's been ripped off,

and I look in the ship and it's full of water.

Oily, black water. It stinks of oil.

So I lowered myself over the edge, and there was the man.

He was a big man, he was a six-footer.

And beyond him was another man.

I had no radio, no communication.

So I just got the strop, and I put it over the man, and I tightened it up.

And as I got hold of him, he just went limp.

I didn't think he'd died, but I thought, "He's given up. It's up to me now."

I had to pull him out of the perch that he'd got. I gave the lift signal.

And we handed the survivor over to some people on the cliff.

And I scrambled back into the aeroplane again, and we went back,

and they lowered me again into the ship to get the second survivor.

So I managed to get him out, and then we landed him.

Was I pleased to be out of that ship, I tell you!

And off we went, back to Chivenor.

I thought, "I earned my pay today."

Eric Smith saved the lives of two men that day.

For his bravery,

he received one of the nation's highest civilian awards,

the George Medal.

No-one ever found out why the Jeanne Gougy came to grief in 1962,

but many of the boats that were wrecked off the Cornish coast had lost their way.

They were unable to navigate around the hazardous rocks.

Navigation skills, especially in poor weather, have always been essential to safety at sea.

At the beginning of the 20th century,

the tools sailors used to help them navigate were simple but effective.

All navigation starts from very, very basic precepts.

You want to know the speed of your ship through the water,

you throw something over at the bow

and you count how many seconds till it passes the stern.

You know the length of your ship, therefore you calculate it up from that.

And originally, it was a piece of wood usually. And it was called the log chip.

And then that developed into the notion of putting something over the stern which pulled a line off a reel.

And you calculated the number of knots that spun off the line -

they were all tied at pre-set distances -

and that is how we end up with the "knot" at sea as a measure of speed.

Former St Ives lifeboatman Martin Roach recalls the navigational skills of his father's generation.

If they were going off, say, 30 mile, they would allow for the tide,

and they knew the drift, they knew it.

Some of them couldn't read or write, but they knew the tides, and they knew which way to go.

All they had was a compass. Dead reckoning.

"Dead reckoning" was a way of working out a position with only basic equipment.

Sailors would use the log and the compass to calculate the speed of the boat and its direction.

When visibility was poor, especially near the coast,

they would either creep forward with a foghorn sounding,

or just drop anchor and wait for the fog to clear.

Poor visibility became less of a problem during the course of the century,

with the development of electronic aids to navigation.

Perhaps the most well-known of these was radar.

After the Second World War, the production of radar became a commercial possibility.

It was no longer a state secret, and it became a common thing

for ships to be equipped in increasing numbers in the '40s and '50s.

And this produced a big upswing in the ability of sailors to be able to see in bad weather.

And it was becoming more important TO be able to see in bad weather.

Britain's shipping lanes were getting increasingly congested.

One of the busiest was the Dover Strait, the narrowest part of the English Channel.

Here, as well as the risk of ships hitting the coast,

there was the danger of ships hitting each other.

In spite of modern technologies such as radar,

poor weather in these increasingly congested waters

always spelt trouble.

The effect of fog in the English Channel, of course, in the '70s

was quite clear.

Every time we had fog, there was collisions at sea.

Tony Hawkins, like other members of the Dover Lifeboat,

spent decades dealing with the tragic consequences of collisions.

Many of them were filmed by one of Tony's friends, film-maker Ray Warner.

Ray was very much part of the town.

And he obviously had contacts in the town that used to let him know

when there was a disaster,

or, of course, he would have heard the lifeboat maroons being fired.

One of the most dramatic events Ray filmed took place in January 1971.

I can remember being woken in the night by what I thought was thunder.

I thought, "What a crack of thunder!"

Because actually there was bits of masonry falling down the inside of our chimney, in the bedroom.

I thought, "Oh, dearie me." And I sort of remember pulling

the clothes up over my head and trying to go back to sleep.

And within a few minutes, the lifeboat maroons went.

MAROON EXPLODES

The sound also woke Terry Sutton, a local newspaper reporter.

My wife and I were in bed asleep,

and then there was a terrific explosion.

And, of course, being a reporter I was

out of bed, on to the coastguards, trying to find out what it was.

A Peruvian freighter, the Paracas, had ignored shipping lanes,

and, in thick fog, collided with the Texaco Caribbean,

an empty Panamanian oil tanker passing in the opposite direction.

Oil fumes in the Texaco Caribbean's empty tanks ignited.

That caused a massive explosion.

So much so it shattered windows in Folkestone,

which was at least seven miles away from where the collision occurred

which was off the Varne Bank in the English Channel.

The Paracas survived, and was towed away to a continental port.

But the Texaco Caribbean sank.

I can remember the coxswain saying, "Come on, you lads, your training's going to come in tonight."

But on this occasion, their life-saving training would be of little use.

We never found survivors.

All we found were seamen that had obviously been in their bunks or on duty,

some with life jackets, some without.

And they were dead.

Those not killed by the explosion had drowned.

However, the wreck of the Texaco Caribbean was just the first chapter

in a tragedy that unfolded over several weeks.

The wreckage was just below the surface.

Immediately a warning was put out to shipping,

but lots of shipping didn't take a lot of interest.

24 hours after the Texaco Caribbean,

the German freighter the Brandenburg came up, and that hit it.

The Brandenburg sank before lifeboats could even reach it.

Of a crew of 32,

only 11 were rescued.

Two weeks later a Greek vessel, the Niki, ignored warning buoys

and sailed straight through the site of the wreck.

Repeating the tragedy of the Brandenburg, her hull was ripped open,

and she sank with all 22 officers and crew lost.

I can remember the coxswain saying, "We're going to be

"recovering bodies for weeks and weeks after."

It was unbelievable.

Despite the post-war developments in navigation technology,

these collisions resulted in the loss of three ships, and 51 lives.

The vast increase in the size of ships navigating their way through

the increasingly congested shipping lanes of the Dover Strait

had created a new scale of problem for the rescue services.

Dover Coastguard, this is Dover Coastguard...

The Texaco Caribbean tragedy

led to a radical change in the way the Dover Coastguard police this stretch of water.

The incident that occurred in 1971 was one of the driving incidents

that led to the adoption

of the traffic separation scheme we see today.

Today, the Coastguard enforce a two-lane superhighway for all ships going through the strait.

So this is a chart of part of the area of interest,

the Dover Strait traffic separation scheme.

This is the southwest lane here for traffic southwest bound,

this is the northeast-bound lane here

for the traffic going northeast direction,

and this is the separation zone down the middle.

So it's the area that vessels should avoid,

to separate the two sets of traffic.

Today we have a very advanced and sophisticated way

of navigating through our very busy shipping lanes.

Radar is incorporated with our digital charts,

we also have vessel identification systems on the different vessels.

And we can tell from that where the coastline is, where we're going,

we can see where the other ships are,

and that automated system will tell us whether we're on a collision course with a ship -

even what the ship's carrying, how many people on board, its speed.

This increasingly sophisticated technology,

along with the skills of rescuers, had been used to protect mainly

people who earned their living from the sea.

But following the economic boom of the 1950s and '60s,

more people put to sea not for work, but for pleasure -

a few in large ocean racing yachts, but many more in small dinghies.

Small boats had become cheaper and more available,

people had more disposable income to buy them.

And there is nothing quite so good as messing about in boats.

And people took advantage of that.

The inevitable consequences were felt by the rescue services.

As the number of leisure vessels increased,

so the number of calls TO leisure vessels increased.

By the 1970s, lifeboats and coastguards along the south coast of England

were being kept busy over the summer months with calls from yachts or dinghies in trouble.

But the calls to the rescue services on the weekend of the Fastnet Race in 1979

suggested a problem of an altogether greater magnitude.

STARTER: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

The fight to save the lives of this group of yachtsmen would result

in the largest combined rescue operation since the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940.

The 600-mile race around the Fastnet Rock off southern Ireland

began in 1925 with just seven competitors.

Entries for the race in August 1979

numbered more than 300.

One of those entries was a yacht called Grimalkin.

Our start was at twenty past one, on the 11th.

And it was about 15 knots, gentle force three.

It was a beautiful day,

and we were up for a great start.

But the gentle force three wind didn't last.

Force six or seven is something you can cope with.

A good crew or a trained crew such as Grimalkin's can deal with it.

But when you get above force seven to force eight,

you begin to go into thinking about what's going to happen after that.

That night, progressively the wind picked up.

RADIO ANNOUNCER: 'Now the shipping forecast

'issued by the Meteorological Office at 2230 GMT on Monday 13th August.

'Fastnet - southwesterly severe gale force nine.

'Increasing storm force ten imminent.'

We ashore became very aware

that the wind strengths were building.

I can remember walking up a hill towards the race office,

and I was having difficulty in walking against the wind.

And if I was having difficulty, I could just start to imagine what was happening at sea.

By midnight on 13th August, the competitors found themselves

in the middle of one of THE most violent storms in the history of ocean racing.

Nick Ward's yacht Grimalkin

was in trouble.

We knew that the waves and the wind meant that we had no other option than survival,

and the safety of the boat.

We'd suffered four or five what they call B1 knockdowns,

which is where the boat's mast is horizontal to the sea.

The boat couldn't cope with it. Horrendous conditions.

And so the skipper made a decision to go down below, and to send a mayday call.

That mayday call was relayed to the St Ives Lifeboat in the early hours of the 14th.

As usual, Tommy Cocking was on duty.

We were called, I think, at half past five in the morning

to a yacht called the Grimalkin. That was our target.

But we didn't find the Grimalkin,

we came across a yacht called the Azonore II.

Standing on the deck hanging on to the mast for grim death

was this guy just stood on top of his yacht holding on to the mast.

We managed to get up close to him to ask him what his intentions were or what his situation was,

and as we got to within about three feet of him

he let go of the mast and just jumped on board the lifeboat.

So it was quite clear what HIS intentions were, he'd had enough.

Tommy Cocking towed the stricken yacht back to port.

He never did find Grimalkin.

I remember looking behind me and seeing a wave,

and after that the boat went through a total capsize but I was knocked unconscious.

While Nick lay unconscious, three of the crew abandoned ship.

They thought that Nick and the two others were lost.

But Nick came round in the water.

He managed to haul himself and one of his crewmates back on to the yacht.

But he couldn't save him.

And so I was left not knowing where my crewmates were.

Because the life raft had gone, I thought they were dead.

My other crewmate had just died, and so I thought I was the only one left.

Grimalkin was just one of scores of stricken yachts scattered across the Irish Sea.

Rescue helicopters were called in to search vast areas in the hope of finding those in trouble.

One of the airmen involved was a Royal Navy helicopter winchman, Harrie Harrison.

In a major search and rescue like this,

the sea is divided up into areas, boxes,

that are then allocated to a specific aircraft to go and search.

We were tasked to go and search a box that was about 30 miles square.

By that time, I was slumped into the rail round the stern.

Hypothermia had started to set in.

I was hearing music in my head...

Hearing what I thought was Pink Floyd!

When in fact, it was the...

HE CLICKS HIS FINGERS IN A STEADY RHYTHM

..of the helicopter blade.

It looked like rescue was here.

In the helicopter was the winchman Harrie Harrison,

and beside him was a cameraman who managed to take these few shots

of Nick crouched in the yacht.

From the doorway, it was quite clear that there were two people on the yacht.

One looked well, and the other looked to be a casualty.

Nick was sitting at the rear of the cockpit.

He was conscious and able to talk to me,

and it was quite clear that we needed to get him back to hospital as soon as possible.

He put a double lift round me, and bang - we were gone.

So I just wanted to hug him,

and be lifted by him,

knowing that the ordeal was over - it was amazing.

Incredible feeling.

Two of Nick's crewmates were among the 15 who died

in what became one of Britain's worst-ever ocean racing tragedies.

And it was a figure that would have been much higher, if it had not been

for the skills of people like Tommy Cocking and Harrie Harrison.

Every yachtsman, 2,000 or so of them,

owes a great debt of gratitude to those servicemen that did such a wonderful job.

In the years following the 1979 Fastnet Race, those service personnel and RNLI volunteers

would combine their skills with increasingly sophisticated technologies,

and continue to perform acts of heroism and bravery.

But the oldest system for protecting people at sea would suffer a different fate.

The remorseless march of technology

would make the lighthouse keeper redundant.

It was...a strange thing, really,

cos we had been told for years

that we had a job for life,

and in the same breath they were also saying one day we'll automate you.

And we just used to think, "Oh, yeah, of course you will. How are you going to automate this place?"

So it was a bit of a shock when it actually happened.

But happen it did. Automation began in the early 1980s, and the keepers lost their jobs.

The process gave urgency to Peter Halil's quest to record the life of the lighthouse keeper on film.

I had this thing in me that I needed to film Christmas on a lighthouse,

so I went away to the Needles for Christmas.

Peter was accompanied by fellow keeper Gerry Douglas-Sherwood,

and the trip captured one of the oldest traditions of the lighthouse service.

That was a list of lasts, shall we say?

It was the last tower rock to have a regular boat relief.

And the keepers lobbied Trinity House to keep the boat relief,

because the whole system worked so well.

We'd come down to the Isle of Wight, across the ferry,

the boatman would be living on the island, get all your food and everything,...

It was almost like a family group somehow, going out with Tony Isaacs, who was the boatman.

Interesting times.

Best way to go to work!

'We had a good time. It was very relaxed, we had nice weather.

'Sounding for fog a bit, but because we were all away from home

'on the lighthouse, we were always determined to make the most of it.

'That's why we shared in the cooking.

'We shared in putting up

'the decorations.

'And it was just a really, really nice atmosphere.

'And we thought... we all thought it was going to be our last Christmas ever on board a tower.

'So obviously we were just there to celebrate.'

Cheers. Happy Christmas...

He's going to clink with the onion gravy(!)

When I was finally made redundant, at Nash Point in South Wales,

I was the very last keeper off station.

I was the one who locked up the doors, put the milk out.

It was a sad day, because I knew that from then on there'd be no more keepers.

I'd never be involved in that environment again.

I suppose the time... The good things it brings back is the time we had here.

The sort of life. It was quite an idyllic life, really.

As you can see, you're surrounded by nature.

People pay a fortune to come on holiday for two weeks of the year,

and I was here 365 days of the year.

So...

yeah, it was a nice life. It's a shame they found us out and got rid of us.

Peter Halil finally left the Lighthouse Service in 1997.

But his films, and those of others,

cast light over the ways in which a few people over the 20th century

were able to use great skill and courage

to try to save the lives of people in trouble at sea.

And though they were assisted by increasingly sophisticated technologies,

their movies also show,

in the most dramatic fashion,

that the sea

was never conquered.

Technology can eliminate a great many things,

but the unpredictability of nature,

and its inherent hostility to us,

can never provide us with all the answers.

Nature has a nasty habit of catching us out.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd