Cruel Sea: The Penlee Lifeboat Disaster

'Land's End coastguard Land's End coastguard.

'Union Star, Union Star calling Land's End coastguard.'

'Union Star, this is Falmouth coastguard. Over.'

'We're off...

'approximately eight miles east of Wolf Rock,

'engines have stopped and we are unable to get them started.'

25 years ago,

a cargo ship called the Union Star suffered engine failure off the coast of Cornwall.

In hurricane winds and 60 foot waves,

the Penlee lifeboat set forth to try and rescue the ship's crew.

Eight men, all volunteers,

made the ultimate sacrifice in one of the greatest disasters in lifeboat history.

I look back on it, and I see those men on the rails,

and the efforts they did on the rocks,

and you can't imagine the bravery of people like that.

Despite the fact that it's 25 years, she went out and she's still out.

There's that gap in people's lives and feelings that...

will never go away while there are people alive who experienced it.

You know, I used to long, as a journalist,

that I would get a world exclusive.

I got my wish, but it broke my heart.

In the far south of Cornwall, a few miles from Land's End,

lies a place called Mousehole.

The events that happened here 25 years ago

changed this small village forever,

scarring the lives of those left behind.

In 1981, Mousehole was a close-knit fishing community,

at the heart of which was the Penlee lifeboat.

Based a mile from Mousehole off Penlee Point,

she was called the Solomon Browne,

and she was the pride and joy of the village.

The Solomon Browne was a wooden Watson classed lifeboat.

We quite were pleased with her because she'd been recently refitted

and we thought she was the state of the art boat.

But it was a class of boat that was stationed all round the country.

Growing up, the lifeboat was a big part of the village.

Mousehole was just starting to become a tourist village.

It's more...there's more locals living here

and I always wanted to be on a lifeboat.

I can remember we used to run it when I was a child,

and help scrub it down, things like that.

Most of the crew were born and bred in Mousehole.

Many of them were fishermen.

And they were all devoted volunteers.

They were lead by the coxswain, Trevelyan Richards.

You're still getting the family element in lifeboat crews, fathers, sons and grandsons?

Yes, we got one or two here on our present crew.

Where do they come from? What sort of profession are they?

Mostly fisherman and they come the same village as what I do.

And if they're not fisherman, they have connections with the sea.

So I'm pretty lucky that I have a crew like what they are.

Trevelyan was a good coxswain.

There was a character in his way and set in his ways.

Er...a fisherman all his life.

We ought to establish that although you are the coxswain,

you've got a full-time job as a trawler skipper, haven't you?

Yes. This is a part-time job.

He was in the Home Guard when the war was on,

but as a coxswain, he was an extremely nice man.

In every community, you always get a nucleus of people,

they all stand above the rest in what they do,

because they can take any flak, and they don't really care.

They'll always march on what they think is true.

Trevelyan's up in the top notch with them.

Nobody would contradict him,

he was the boss.

He was a hell of a character.

He could be quite hard on them or he could be...

They could be pretty wild at times.

They had a lot of fun.

On the night of 19th December, 1981,

Mousehole was all set for Christmas.

The village had a unique way of marking the festive season.

Christmas was a big thing in Mousehole.

And we have the local Christmas lights on every year and it is a big celebration.

We have a thing called Tom Bawcock's Eve, the day before Christmas Eve,

23rd December, when all the local fishermen, seamen, get together,

and have a a great big party if you like, really.

It's a big thing in Mousehole.

Everybody was drinking,

laughing, joking...

The darts had just started. I'd done the draw for that.

Everyone was laughing and saying, "Cor, how'd you pick me against so and so?"

Whilst people were enjoying themselves,

outside, the weather was gradually deteriorating.

THUNDER RUMBLES

It had gone from...

a high wind to this extraordinarily screaming wild gale,

in a very, very short time.

Um...it had a sort of strange note in the wind.

I'm not making this up, it really did. It was a screaming noise which I've never heard of.

WIND BLOWS AND WHISTLES

As the weather worsened,

out at sea, the Union Star was struggling with engine failure.

On duty that night to receive the calls,

was Colin Sturman.

The Union Star told us just after six, he had an engine problem,

which in itself is not unusual.

We have ships call us with engine problems several times a week.

Even today.

Um...but he said that obviously the weather conditions were bad.

And he was concerned that if he couldn't get his engine started, they would be in difficulty.

The Union Star was on her maiden voyage,

carrying fertiliser from Holland to Ireland.

It was one of the fleet of coasters

built by Union Transport, who were having a very successful time.

It was a good model because it was fit for work in coastal waters.

It was very low-profile

and so it could go up under the bridges of the big rivers in Europe.

And they built four of them.

The Union Star was the latest one.

The skipper of this brand new boat was Henry Morton.

Happy-go-lucky type of guy,

very professional and straight down the line really.

He didn't take any messing off anybody,

and he was, um,

a pleasant enough guy, really.

I spoke to him in the morning about 10 o'clock.

And he said everything was going OK,

and I asked him if he'd be round the corner. We call Land's End the corner. He said after tea.

Then he'd be running away with the weather towards Arklow. And he seemed quite happy.

And...I asked him what the weather was like

and they told me that it was southerly about Force 5,

but it was forecast to deteriorate and that the ship was handling it well. It was rolling a bit.

But by early evening, the situation was very different.

Worried how far the Union Star might be drifting,

the coastguards sent one of their local officers to a lookout point,

just along the coast from Mousehole.

I got a call from Falmouth to say there was a vessel in trouble,

near the Wolf and would I start the radar up,

and put a radar plot on, to positively identify the position.

By the time I got up here and put a marker on the radar,

he'd drifted some to the north.

The Union Star was heading straight toward the treacherous coastline.

If you come ashore on this coast,

you've got very little chance of getting off...

and you'd break up quite quickly.

You imagine a yacht coming ashore on any of these points,

in even weather like this...

and it'll go down very quickly.

RAIN POURS

In Mousehole, the Penlee lifeboat was put on standby.

Two of the crew members waiting for the call were Nigel Brockman and his son Neil.

My dad was an assistant mechanic and he would have been in charge of the radios and the radar,

and do a bit of navigating.

What kind of equipment do you carry, Nigel?

I've got a radar,

big master set and the Westminster VHF....

What's your aim?

Er...

You've buggered me now.

Most people knew my father.

He could never be serious about anything, he was always joking.

He was like the joker in the pack.

If anything stupid was happening, he'd be in the middle of doing it.

And I...I've never heard a bad word said about him, never.

Everyone I've ever spoke to...people I don't even know come up to me and say they knew my father...

which I like. They say how much they admired him and liked him.

A salvage tug was contacted to tow the stricken Union Star,

but this would involve paying salvage costs,

as part of a contract called a Lloyd's Open Form.

So Morton declined the offer.

When he was talking to the tug captain, very early on,

the captain said, "Shall I come out? "He said, "Yes, come out and stand by."

And the tug captain said, "Will you accept Lloyd's Open Form?"

And he said, "Obviously it's a bit early to make a commitment to do that."

News that the lifeboat might be needed began to spread throughout Mousehole.

One of the youngest volunteers was merchant seaman Kevin Smith,

who happened to be home for Christmas.

He loved the sea. The sea was in his blood.

He always to me seemed to be like a free spirit.

He'd go off to sea, never quite know when he was coming back.

And he'd come back and it was like a breath of fresh air in the village.

Kevin was my brother-in-law at the time.

I sailed with Kevin many times when I was fishing. Great bloke.

You'll find anything goes really.

There's a massive zest for life.

Six years earlier,

the Solomon Browne had taken part in the rescue of a sinking ship called the Lovat.

Kevin was a crew member,

even though he'd only been a teenager at the time.

-You were on the Lovat rescue weren't you?

-Yeah.

-And that wasn't pleasant.

-That was '75, I think.

-And you were very young?

-Yeah.

-In fact you were too young to have been there officially?

-They told me so, yeah.

Kevin was very young - 15, 16.

He'd actually fabricated his age to get on the boat at that point,

and went out on the Lovat rescue

and was pulling men out of the sea that were younger than him.

And he was awarded on vellum for that -

a very, very brave thing to have done.

Did you enjoy it? Well, that's a damn fool question, but you'll remember it, I imagine.

-I'll always remember it, yeah.

-Very unpleasant.

-Yeah, I'll always remember it.

The Penlee crew had to pull several dead bodies out of the water.

They were all honoured by the RNLI for their role in the rescue.

Like most of the crew, there wasn't a lot of speaking on board the boat.

I think we was all sort of choked up about it, you know.

But ah...

I think what upset the crew most of all

was when they took a youngster aboard - 16.

I'll admit it was a bad job - when five men lose their lives, like what we had.

But when you get a youngster of 16, you know,

with everything to look forward to and life's out there for getting.

It was a southerly wind gusting up to Force 11, which is hurricane force.

Even the broken waves, when they hit the cliffs, were some 30 foot in height.

I'd never seen sea conditions as bad as that and I've never seen them since.

With water in the fuel tank, it was now impossible to restart the engines of the Union Star

and a helicopter was needed.

The pilot who would communicate with Morton was Russell Smith,

an American who was in England on a naval exchange programme.

When we first set off it was only about 30, 40 knots of wind, maybe a little more.

Not all that bad, really.

But as we proceeded to the scene,

the weather worsened significantly, very rapidly,

and we could tell it was going to be a full gale very shortly.

Initially the position was given as eight miles east of Wolf Rock,

which put her about six miles south of Tater Du Lighthouse.

When we identified the correct position, with the helicopter from the flare,

she was only about two, 2.5 miles off the coast,

which made things significantly different from a response point of view.

With the Union Star so close to shore,

the Penlee lifeboat was asked to launch.

The launch crew that night were Dudley Penrose and Raymond Pomeroy.

It was their job to launch the lifeboat safely.

-It doesn't seem like 25 years ago.

-No.

-No.

-They were brave men, brave men.

-They were that.

-A lot of people wouldn't have gone that night, I know.

-No.

The first I knew that the lifeboat was wanted...

I knew it was a terrible night.

We all knew that, it was a terrible day in the making.

The first I heard of it was the coxswain's wife, Trevelyan's mother,

Trevelyan's mother phoned me to say that a boat was wanted,

and that was about ten to eight that evening.

When the maroons were heard, all the crew stopped what they were doing

and rushed to the lifeboat station.

One of those was 33-year-old Barrie Torrie,

a fisherman who was married with two young sons.

Barrie was just a crew member.

He'd been on there a long, long time.

I'm not sure how old he was when he first went, um...

but just a teenager, I think.

Um...it was just part of his life, part of his upbringing,

just always been at sea.

We'd planned to go out and we had a babysitter organised,

then the shout went out that they were going.

Barrie went and said, "I'll see you later."

Then I was kind of trying to decide, "Well, shall I just wait here or shall I go out?",

cos we were meeting some friends, so I went out with these friends

and we were only in the village - he knew where I was -

and, um, I just sort of waited.

More than a dozen men responded to the call,

but only eight were needed.

Trevelyan chose the best crew he had for the job,

the ones he knew could do that job, the ones he could trust -

the best hands he had, the best crewmen he had for that job.

He wanted his most experienced crew that night

cos it was a hellish night and he knew it was going to be tough.

Trevelyan took Barrie Torrie...

..Kevin Smith...

..Nigel Brockman

and the lifeboat mechanic, Stephen Madron.

He also chose Charlie Greenhaugh, the landlord of the local pub,

John Blewett...

and the 22-year-old Gary Wallis.

The eight were selected for their skill and experience,

but none could have predicted the outcome of that terrible night.

The crew were all there, all dressed,

which was really, you know, unusual for us because, er,

lifeboat men dress for the occasion

but everybody was dressed properly that night.

I always remember Trevelyan helping Barrie Torrie with his life jacket.

cos Barrie didn't like wearing life jackets, and ah...

he wouldn't wear one as a rule, but that night he had to put one on

and Trevelyan had to show him and help him on with it, you know.

All the crew were around the stern of the lifeboat.

We used to always stand around the stern when they launched

and that night Trevelyan got 'em all inside

cos it was such a bad night, you know,

with the sea and spray breaking right over the lifeboat

after they put the mast up because the exhaust went up the mast,

and you had to put the mast up, you know, before you start the engines up.

At only 17, Neil was too young,

but Trevelyan was also keen not to take two members of the same family.

I was absolutely gutted because I never went.

I was upset because I wasn't asked to go

and I've gotta say, the boat was launched and I've never seen a piece of seamanship like that -

people don't realise what the weather was like that night -

to get that boat in the water was some piece of seamanship.

We waited and waited and waited for quite a few minutes

to catch the right moment.

'Penlee lifeboat launching.'

She went down, the sea hit the bottom of the slip,

and she went down behind the next one, and was gone.

But when we closed the doors up that night,

Raymond and myself were the last two to leave the boathouse.

And the wind was just whistling through the rafters,

an awful eerie feeling,

and there was always that suspicion that it wasn't a very good night.

A 47 foot boat is...

about the size of a decent yacht nowadays.

And as soon as they went down the slip, they were in very rough seas.

They would have been awash, the decks would have been awash.

Even the after-cabin, water used to slosh around in it,

because it was a self-draining situation.

So life on board, even without going on deck,

would have been quite horrendous.

You'd have sea breaking over the boat,

the boat'd be rolling all the time, pitching.

Forward, back, up and down.

Like being in a washing machine, is the best way to describe it.

The sort of rain...you had to physically drive around,

you had to work the engines, spin the wheels, it was hard to control that boat.

As Trevelyan confirmed the lifeboat had set off,

the helicopter was already on the scene.

The ocean was...

very confused, and getting worse.

And, er, the...

casualty was seen bouncing...

significantly, rolling, in the sea.

They only had navigation lights when we first came on scene.

We were attempting to effect a rescue at that point.

And then he put his anchor out

and turned his bow into the sea.

We asked him at that point if he'd mind putting on some more lights

so we could see the boat better and position ourselves better and such.

Because it was a black night, we couldn't see a thing,

we couldn't see where the boat was moving very much.

And so he turned on all his floodlights.

We asked the crew if they wanted to come off,

and initially they were sorting out, trying to start, the engines.

Then, from that point, the weather was worsening

and they were drifting towards the coast,

and we were trying to get their attention

that that was happening fairly quickly.

They then decided to remove the woman and two children.

That was our first surprise -

there was a woman and two children on board.

The woman was Morton's wife, Dawn.

The children were his step-daughters.

He'd picked them up en route

so that they'd be together for Christmas.

Dawn's children came over from South Africa

and they were to stay in England. That's why they were on board.

I think it possibly had an effect...

on the thinking of the captain, certainly.

He would obviously have this emotional issue to deal with.

It's bad enough just having to look after the crew without your wife and two young girls,

who've probably never been on a ship before.

They were only a couple of days on board, may have been seasick during the passage.

It would have been difficult.

Another thing that isn't well-known is that Dawn was pregnant at the time.

The wind was now freshening, probably at least 60mph.

Probably more.

The waves at that point were 50 foot seas,

and it was getting more difficult.

There were times we had to rapidly change our position,

cos the ship was coming up higher than we expected.

There were a couple of times it came very close to our rotors of the helicopter.

If that happened, it would break the rotors, and we wouldn't be here.

So we had to adjust a number of times

because the ship would suddenly pitch

much more violently than was expected.

We tried lowering the crewman, the ship was sideways

to the waves, in a confused sea,

it was rolling significantly, and pitching.

And it was difficult getting our crewman down.

HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRR

My concentration was on the deck that I was trying to get to.

I'm not in communication with the aircraft,

I'm in their hands and they're trying to put me onto that deck.

I do recall how very clean and new the green painted deck looked.

I remember focusing on this piece of green deck

and they brought the first lady out and one of the men was, effectively,

holding her against the bulkhead, standing on this deck.

I was focused on the deck and she'd got these bright pink court shoes on.

I couldn't tell you anything else about her

but looking at that piece of deck where I was aiming

there's an enduring memory of these bright pink court shoes

which were so incongruous in that violent situation.

The dreadful conditions had made the helicopter rescue too dangerous.

The Union Star was less than a mile from the shore

and her fate now rested on the efforts of Trevelyan and his crew.

So the old saying, "Women and children go first," still holds now.

You would go for women and children first and it'd make a difference.

Although you're there to save any life that's precious,

that's what we do for a living we save lives.

With the helicopter standing by,

the Penlee lifeboat fought to come alongside the Union Star.

When we pulled off to let the lifeboat go in,

they were now pretty well into the shallows

and into the very severe breaking seas, um,

and we sat and watched whilst they tried to effect that rescue.

You could see the Solomon Browne being bashed up against the side of the Union Star

and the crew standing on a rail and reaching out trying to grab the ship,

throwing lines over, like the grappling hooks,

to try and pull and steady themselves.

The anchor was down,

but the anchor wasn't holding us steady.

I don't think he realised how quickly he was drifting towards the rocks.

The spray and the green water, as I would call it,

were crashing up against the wheelhouse

and it was getting very difficult...

..and now we're looking at 60, maybe 70, foot waves.

I can imagine how they felt on board cos I'm sure it was shaking the ship

and violently, er...

and the risk of coming outside would've been tremendous

cos you don't know when, in the dark sea and the rain when the next wave is coming.

As it eventually went right into the surf then,

the Union Star did start to roll very seriously, um,

I'd think in excess of 50 degrees.

At one stage, I did see the Solomon Browne lifeboat

literally alongside the Union Star and as she rolled the lifeboat came up on her side.

So, she was effectively out of the water.

The Solomon Browne came in bow to bow to the Union Star as it was in the rocks.

I thought, "This is incredible, what's he doing in the rocks?"

There really wasn't much room to manoeuvre.

And the wind was gusting so violently...

it was like being between two boxing bags, being thrashed about.

A local journalist made his way down to the cliffs overlooking the scene.

When I first arrived on the cliff

I could see the helicopter and I could see the Union Star

being battered in the waves

and I could see the lifeboat and it was from there that I watched the whole incident unfold.

Trevelyan Richards, he was doing a superb job in atrocious conditions.

The way he positioned and got himself over those steep waves

and that's almost slowing it over cos you don't go straight

and where he was putting her was tremendous seamanship.

Then all of a sudden there's a huge wave.

I'd think the height of the wave was probably 50 to 60 feet high.

The lifeboat crew obviously saw this and went to stern quite hard.

I could see that from the cliff.

They very nearly got over the crest of the wave

but the crest of the wave picked the lifeboat up and dropped the lifeboat across the deck of the Union Star.

Solomon Browne went up onto the Union Star,

and was well off the water at that point,

and I thought they were going to go over together.

But after sliding off the deck of the Union Star,

the lifeboat managed almost immediately to get back alongside.

In the dark, cos it's very dark, you'd see shadows of people

running out of the wheelhouse

and it appeared that they were just jumping to the lifeboat

and the lifeboat crew was out with their arms out to catch them.

Several people, looked like about five to us, ran out

and jumped across to the Solomon Browne.

They were wearing their bright fluorescent orange life jackets.

So they were relatively easy to spot as they seemed to pass from one vessel to the other.

And then before the next breaker came in, they turned seaward

and in among all these rocks, I don't see how they made it,

they turned to get seaward and this huge wave came in and they went underneath it and disappeared

and surfaced on the other side, basically, like a submarine.

We assumed, at that point,

that he was going to continue going out to sea and head home.

We broke it off at that point,

feeling that we had done all that we could do.

We assumed Solomon Browne had made the same decision

and er, we turned her home.

But the crew of the Solomon Browne hadn't made the same decision.

They were about to make one final rescue attempt.

SILENCE

It's a devastating feeling when you hear that call and the call

and the call and nobody answers.

It's just...

It gives you that very, very hollow, sick feeling in your stomach.

ON RADIO: 'Penlee lifeboat.

'Penlee lifeboat. Falmouth Coastguard. Over.'

Unfortunately, on the way back, one of the first things the people

asked when we arrived as we were listening to people calling the Solomon Browne,

they said, "Have you heard from Solomon Browne?"

and you get that terrible sinking feeling that something's gone wrong.

ON RADIO: 'Penlee lifeboat. Penlee lifeboat. Falmouth Coastguard. Over.

'Penlee lifeboat.

'Penlee lifeboat. Penlee lifeboat. Falmouth Coastguard. Over.'

So we refuelled,

rinsed the engines with fresh water to clean out as much of the salt

as we could and launched again.

THUNDER RUMBLES

In Mousehole, Barrie's wife Lynn was unaware of any problem with the lifeboat.

I don't really remember thinking anything disastrous is gonna happen.

So, I came home at some point in the evening

and made sure the boys were fast asleep and went to bed.

Which is, you know... it was quite normal,

erm, because if they went out on a shout, you didn't know what time they were coming back.

I didn't have a radio. I know a lot of wives would listen in

but we didn't have one set up and I just assumed they'd be back.

There was a brief glimmer of hope when someone claimed they could see the lights of the Solomon Browne.

We continued to call the lifeboat.

About 45 minutes later, the auxiliary lookout at Penzer Point

called in and reported seeing a lifeboat coming back to Newley.

So we were quite heartened by that.

We told the launching authority to expect them in Newley.

And a whole bunch of people went down to meet her,

of course, she never turned up

and nobody knows to this day what those lights were.

Don Buckfield made his way to the scene with a coastal rescue team.

They could see the Union Star on its side, just below the cliffs.

There was wreckage, washing up and down with the waves

and I saw a life jacket with the lights still working

and, er, on reaching the top of the cliff again,

we became aware that Falmouth was concerned for the lifeboat

and at that time I could almost definitely say that that was a lifeboat jacket in the water.

The discovery of the lifejacket confirmed the worst had happened.

The Penlee lifeboat

and the Union Star had been wrecked.

A friend of mine...

who I'd been out with, a girlfriend, came knocking on the door.

I don't even know what time it was.

She said, "Something bad's happened to the lifeboat."

And, er, I don't really think much registered after that.

Um, you know, I couldn't say anything specific because it was all just...

I just remember lots of people, all the time thinking,

"We should all be quiet - we'll wake the children up." You know?

And I told them straightaway,

as soon as they woke up the next day,

that their daddy wasn't coming home.

For Kevin's family, it was his brother

who brought the devastating news.

I can remember him coming into his mother's front room...

and I've never seen grief like it.

There's no grief that can compare to a mother losing her child.

And Pat was a very, very strong woman.

What an awful thing for anyone to have to do.

It's like, now I can see,

it's playing back in my head like a video.

Just the disbelief, and the shock,

it was just such a sad time.

By first light, search parties continued to look for wreckage.

Many of those searching

included family and friends.

Personally, I was out searching for ten days.

I think it was the fact that I was going to find Kevin alive, I suppose.

I just kept searching,

thinking it was a futile search

but something said you had to keep going -

"You will find someone."

We started to find bits and pieces of bodies.

Once that happened, you knew...

..that that was it, really.

We only found one whole body.

That was Nigel's - my mate's.

In the end, only eight bodies were recovered -

four from the Solomon Browne,

and four from the Union Star.

You live and do your job...

..and live to do it again.

And, er, when some of your own are taken,

it hurts.

It hurts deeply.

MUSIC: "Offertoire" from Requiem by Gabriel Faure

You can't imagine the bravery of people like that.

To just put their lives on the line, the salt of the earth,

thei fathers, their brothers, their sons...

The sons of Mousehole.

Things like Christmas Eve, we were burying

Trevelyan in the morning, my father in the afternoon.

Boxing Day, we had more funerals.

It was hard-going.

# Oh domine

# Jesu Christ

-# Jesu Christ

-Rex gloriae

-# Rex gloriae

-O Dominates... #

You weren't allowed your own private grief.

Everything you did was noticed.

Everything you said was written.

So it was very, very difficult.

Just going out of the house was impossible.

The ashes of Dawn and one of her daughters were scattered out at sea

close to where the Union Star was wrecked.

Dawn's other daughter and Henry Morton were never found.

My mother took it very badly.

She couldn't accept it, particularly with his body not being found.

I don't think she ever accepted it till the day she died.

She believed he was suffering from amnesia

and was wandering round the West Country somewhere

and one day he'd come back and knock on the door.

15 months later, there was a formal inquiry

into exactly what happened.

It raised questions about Morton's actions

and the decisions he made that night.

It was very difficult.

I would've preferred to speak to some of the people, the families from the lifeboat.

It was a very difficult position for me to be in,

particularly with all the criticisms going on, etc.

I found it very hard.

His only crime is he was a little confident about how fast he was drifting into land.

He was drifting faster than he thought

and I think he was slightly on the optimistic side about that.

One of the issues examined was why Morton declined the salvage tow

when it was first offered.

When they suddenly decided they wanted a tow, it was too late

because the tug couldn't get in.

It was too shallow for the tug to get in to put a line on.

They should've been forced to take a tow

hours before she even got near the shore.

Now the rules have changed somewhat

and the coastguard can initiate a may day on a ship's master's behalf.

Indeed, we have the powers to require a ship's master

to take a tow if that's what we deem appropriate.

We don't have to be a passive responder any more.

We can take the initiative.

The inquiry concluded that no-one was to blame for the tragedy

and that the events of that night were the result

of water getting into the engine of the Union Star

and above all, the extreme severity of the weather.

When the inquiry,

when the results, the findings of the inquiry came out,

my brother was exonerated and that really the cause of the tragedy

various small things that all added up to this big jigsaw,

that at the end of the day it was the sea that done them.

No-one else.

When you live by the sea and you live with the sea, things happen.

This is why we need lifeboats. Things like this happen.

You can't blame it on us, that's what you get living by the sea.

I mean, every year there's probably

30 or 40 fishermen lost every year around the British coast.

For the 25th anniversary of that tragic night,

Russell Smith has come over from America to pay his respects.

'My wife and I wanted to make a connection,'

and that's really the main reason we're back.

Just to visit, say hello, say we care...

..and say we'll never forget.

-Hello, there.

-I'm Russ.

I come from Ireland, me.

-Dublin?

-County Donegal.

-Raymond.

-Rich man of our time.

We've met before.

Yes, I'm sure we have.

'I'll never forget. Never ever ever.

'All my children now, I tell them that story as well,'

so...because it's something that should never be forgotten,

the heroism

and the bravery on that night will always be remembered.

'Falmouth coastguard, to Penlee lifeboat.'

'Penlee lifeboat to coastguard, go ahead.'

'Falmouth coastguard to Penlee lifeboat, we are now leaving...'

The loss of the Solomon Browne didn't stop the people of Mousehole

from maintaining the lifeboat tradition.

Today, the Penlee lifeboat is based a couple of miles from Mousehole

in the fishing village of Newlyn.

Neil Brockman, turned away by Trevelyan for being too young,

is now the coxswain.

I was asked by the RNLI if I'd like to become coxswain

and to start with, I didn't want to do it

because I thought I was too young. I was only 28 at the time.

I didn't think I was experienced or old enough to do the job

and they did beg me or really persisted to ask me to do it,

so I said I would, so I said I would take it for 12 months

to see how I got on and I've been there ever since.

I've always thought Neil's the best man for the job, anyway,

because he's totally committed to the crew and the RNLI.

I know he's a very good friend of mine but I will stand by that.

On a professional field, he is a hell of a coxswain.

I fell into my job from boat crewman,

right up from crew to mechanic, coxswain/mechanic, now coxswain.

'I've got the best team in the RNLI, the best crew.

'They'd say that at any station, but I've got a very experienced crew.'

Every one of my crew are seamen or ex-fishermen

or they're actually to do with the sea.

'So I'm lucky in that way.'

'His father would've have been very proud of him

'and he was very proud of his father,'

so it's a sort of public thing but also a private thing.

'It's just such an honour to know

'that they're carrying on in the tradition of the Royal Lifeboat Institute

'and that these people don't do it for money,

'they do it for the giving, volunteer work.'

that gives life to other people, really,

because they still go out on rescues and assist other people

in very difficult conditions all the time.

25 years later,

the old lifeboat station is empty.

Kept exactly as it was in 1981,

it stands as a memorial to the crew

of the Solomon Browne.

I can't imagine how awful it must've been for them.

Having a young daughter myself and young children,

it just must have been horrendous

and I can only imagine they were going to do everything they could.

There's no way they could've said,

"We can't, it's too dangerous, we can't do this any more,"

and just turn around and come back home.

It's just not something they would've done.

I've got no doubt in the back of my mind

that if I'm with six of my crew, there's eight other crew with me, no doubt whatsoever.

They'll never be forgotten. I'm proud I sailed with them all

and knew them all personally.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd - 2006

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