Peril from the Seas Coast

Coast is home.

We're here to explore what happens

when our coast becomes a wild frontier.

Land and sea don't always live in harmony.

When the water boils, the land quakes, and so do we.

Whole villages washed away,

boats in a battle of life and death.

What becomes of us when we face peril from the seas?

My tale of peril starts on the shore of East Anglia.

The curious calm, here in Norfolk, seems idyllic enough.

But a breath of wind brushing your cheek brings a change of mood.

The hairs on the back of your neck bristle.

Something wicked this way comes.

It's November 1703.

A mega storm is about to devastate a huge swathe of southern Britain,

leaving thousands dead.

Lethal winds whipped across the land

before blowing out into the North Sea.

Go back 300 years

and windmills were a common sight on the coast of Norfolk.

Then, one dreadful night in November the weather turned.

And so did the sails of the mills.

Inside there's a brake -

a wooden block that presses against the spinning shaft to stop the sails

But the wind is irresistible. There's no stopping the sails

and they spin faster and faster.

The wooden parts of the mill run out of control.

Friction creates smoke.

And where there's smoke, there's fire.

It's said The Great Storm set over 400 windmills alight

They were seen blazing like monstrous candles.

While they burned,

thousands of people perished around the coasts of southern Britain.

There's a way to re-live that terrible night

as if it was yesterday.

When the wind died down,

one man was determined to make sense of the chaos.

The journalist who wrote the definitive account of

The Great Storm Of 1703 is a great hero of mine -

Daniel Defoe.

Defoe was a commentator on the momentous events of his day.

He knew Norfolk well.

This was a prosperous part of Britain 300 years ago,

thanks to trade across the North Sea.

Daniel Defoe's travels around these shores inspired his work.

He'd go on to write the classic castaway story Robinson Crusoe,

but this book, Defoe's first book, The Storm,

tells true tales of ordinary folk battling extraordinary odds.

He says of the storm, "No pen can describe it,

"no tongue express it, nor thought conceive it"

Defoe investigated the facts behind the Great Storm,

and key to that investigation was the drawing together

of eye witness accounts.

Daniel Defoe's use of first person testimony

was a revolutionary approach to journalism,

which he used to produce a vivid overview of the storm's impact

It affected a massive area, from the South West and Wales,

it hit London and across East Anglia where I am now.

Defoe carefully catalogued the tales of devastation

left in the storm's wake.

The first impacts were felt here, on the coast of Cornwall.

The storm blew in from the Atlantic.

The granite outcrops of Cornwall's coast

were impervious to the battering,

but the people were not.

The most infamous casualty died alone.

Henry Winstanley was inside the lighthouse

he'd recently completed on the Eddystone Rocks.

It had taken years to build,

but was blown away in minutes by the devilish sea.

Winstanley's body was never recovered.

The storm raged on along the south coast

taking a terrible toll on the Royal Navy.

A staggering one in five of their sailors perished.

Many of them died here on the Goodwin Sands just off Kent.

There's a really graphic picture drawn at the time,

showing the naval ships running aground on the sands

and the sailors desperately struggling to reach the shore.

Defoe's description was so graphic it would have shocked his readers.

He wrote, "The fatal Goodwin, where the wreck of Navies lies,

"A thousand dying sailors talking to the skies."

The storm wreaked her fury across the whole of southern Britain

before the killer wind whipped over Norfolk out across the North Sea

There are tales of ships off this coast

getting swept 100 miles away.

One ship ended up in Norway

That dreadful night, three centuries ago,

was even more severe than the notorious storm of 1987.

Then southern England again witnessed

extraordinary scenes of devastation.

But if a storm on the scale of 1703 raged across Britain today

it would cause catastrophic damage in built-up areas,

estimated at more than £10 billion.

Wherever we live in our isles,

what blows in from the ocean puts us all in peril from the sea.

It's an ill wind, indeed, that someone can't find a use for.

Those in search of the biggest breeze head northwards.

The Western Isles of Scotland

are some of the windiest bits of Britain.

Our weather often blows in this way from the Atlantic.

So, there's an automated weather station on the tiny isle of Tiree.

Reports from Tiree are a familiar sound for many.

'Tiree automatic,

'southeast by east six - slight showers - five miles 987...'

What's less well-known is how vital Tiree was to weather forecasters,

who helped win the Second World War.

To relieve a rarely told tale of aerial heroics,

Dick is with veteran RAF weather observer Peter Rackliff,

who's flying back to his wartime base.

When was the last time you were in Tiree?

-1945.

-1945, yeah?

I was just 19.

How debonair are you there? Look at that.

Debonair, well, I don't know.

I didn't put my Brylcreem on that day. No Brylcreem, there.

Peter wasn't a Brylcreem Boy of fighter command.

He flew in a Halifax Bomber converted to carry Met observers,

men measuring the weather coming in from the Atlantic,

heading towards Europe.

Peter and his comrades of 518 Squadron were storm chasers of the Second World War,

at the forefront of the forecast running up to D-Day.

Advance warning of the weather was a life or death matter in the war,

D-Day could have been a disastrous failure

if it were not for people like Peter

feeding observations into the forecast

The painstaking preparations for D-Day meant

planning for every eventuality, especially bad weather.

A storm would make the landings impossible.

The forecasters of 518 Squadron would help set the date for D-Day.

But the work down here at Tiree has largely been forgotten,

we're here to put that right.

Peter, do you recognise this runway?

I do, yes.

So, you would use this runway?

-Oh, definitely, yes.

-Where did you go?

Well, one flight was westerly into the Atlantic for 800 miles,

and then we flew northeast towards Iceland

returning to base at Tiree.

It was about ten-and-a-half hour trip, yes.

Those lengthy forecasting flights

took them nearly halfway to Canada

before coming back to the airfield, at Tiree.

From 1943, planes like this rolled out day and night onto the tarmac at Tiree

to measure the weather coming in from the Atlantic.

Soon the ocean was all too close below.

We used to like to get down to about 60 feet, if we could.

I was right up in the nose,

a navigator sat immediately behind me,

I gave him surface winds

and he gave me the winds at height, which were very important.

The crews deliberately flew into weather

that would ground other planes.

The pilots often had a job to handle it.

The second pilot and the skipper would have to, sort of,

do whatever they could do with the controls to try

and keep the aircraft reasonably stable.

They flew into the face of Atlantic storms measuring temperature,

pressure and wind speed, readings sent back in coded radio messages.

It went to the stations in Bomber Command,

and it meant they could draw a pretty comprehensive chart

and that would make a radical improvement to their forecast.

The finest hour for the forecasters of 518 Squadron

came in early June 1944.

'The landings were the greatest hour of crisis of the Global War.

'The Germans had boasted it could not be done,

'but it was done,

'and the mighty...'

But the success of D-Day wasn't a done deal.

Weather flights from here on Tiree

played an important part in planning the invasion.

Meteorologist Sarah Cruddas

is showing me the forecast map from D-day.

Lots of observations marked around Britain,

but the weather was blowing in from the far Atlantic,

and that was our blind spot.

Well, that's why places such as Tiree

were so important because they are able to fly

1,000 miles in this direction up towards the Icelandic gap

and really collect all that information that was missing,

and because our weather comes from the west

we could get a better idea of what was coming towards us,

and it gave us an advantage over the Germans.

Yeah, there'd been high pressure over France,

low pressure over England,

so it had created quite windy conditions just before D-Day,

but you can see here this area here just by the Normandy landings

that's called a ridge,

and that actually brought in quite settled conditions of calmer seas

and less windy conditions.

There was just enough of a break in the weather for them to land.

Timing the day of the invasion

to coincide with the brief break in the weather

was a masterstroke of judgement.

Group Captain James Stagg was responsible for the D-Day forecast.

To help him, Stagg used vital information from 518 Squadron,

who flew out over the Atlantic to measure an incoming cold front.

This cold front was formed

by two depressions, which merged in the north west of Scotland.

Our aircraft must have flown through it from Tiree

on half a dozen occasions on the 3rd and 4th of June.

I know Eisenhower wanted to go on the 5th, but I mean he...

he just couldn't do it

because Group Captain Stagg told him,

"Well, that cold front that we've been able to locate by our aircraft

"is going to be in the Channel on the morning of the 5th,

"and it's going to cause an awful lot of grief on the French Coast.

"So, if you can time it to go on the 6th then everything should be fine."

The men storming the beaches of Normandy

on 6th June couldn't have known that shoulder to shoulder with them

were the storm chasers of 518 Squadron

some 700 miles away on Tiree.

To forecast the weather heading towards France

they had to fly high over the Atlantic into thin freezing air.

Their enemy was ice.

Chunks of ice would fly off and you hear

a bang on the side of the fuselage, quite a loud bang.

They weren't just measuring the weather, they were part of it.

Quite a few aircraft were struck by lightning,

and on the nose we used to get this, raindrops

used to fracture and we used to get what I called

a golden spark discharge.

It was simply charged up raindrops hitting the Perspex

and producing a little golden coloured spark.

It was actually quite a danger on some of these missions,

there was loss of life, wasn't there?

Oh, yes, yes. In the 18 months I was here, we lost 12 aircraft.

Some went missing on the North Atlantic

but, unfortunately, we never found any wreckage or anything.

They just seemed to be swallowed up by the ocean, I think,

most of them were, we certainly lost quite a few crew.

You must feel some pride about what you achieved,

and the work of 518 Squadron.

Yes, I do. I think the world of the Squadron

and I think they did a marvellous job

over the Atlantic and there we are.

It's one of those things in the past which is something you never forget.

Peril from the sea used to strike in secret around our shores.

Today there's help at hand.

From the air.

From the water.

While we sleep, remarkable rescues take place in pitch darkness.

But once the sea held sway, like here at Whitby.

Holidaymakers are unaware but 100 years ago the town looked out to sea

in horror as a tragedy unfolded within sight of land.

Unravelling a dramatic, yet forgotten, disaster story

is Coast newcomer, poet and storyteller Ian McMillan.

I've got here the front page of the Daily Mirror

from Monday November 2nd 1914.

"A hospital ship has foundered just a few hundred yards from this coast,

"but it's so stormy that it's almost impossible to rescue the crew."

One woman was lucky enough to get off the stricken ship,

but then Mary Roberts was a lucky lady.

Two years before, she'd been rescued from the Titanic,

but she said the shipwreck off Whitby was even worse than that.

Now, with the help of Mary Robert's relatives,

and lifeboatmen of Whitby, I'm going to tell a tale of terror at sea,

that gripped the entire nation for days.

A disaster that caused outcry

and helped propel Britain's coastal rescue services into the modern age.

Our seas would never be the same again after

the wreck of the hospital ship Rohilla.

To see why, I'm going to examine the tragedy of her loss with a forensic eye.

Every accident investigator needs an incident room,

and I've set mind up here at Whitby Lifeboat Station.

I've collected a precious few of the possessions

that were recovered from the wreck of the Rohilla.

Her story starts on 29th October 1914,

scarcely three months after Britain had declared war on Germany.

The hospital ship Rohilla left harbour in Scotland, bound for France.

So, what happened next?

To see why Rohilla came to be wrecked just off the Whitby coast,

I'm meeting up with Colin Brittain.

He's spent years researching the dramatic events.

We're looking out here so we can more or less

see where the Rohilla ended up, can't we?

It is, that's right, just a small part of the ship's double planking.

The weather was terrible, wasn't it?

It was very bad, it turned into a very severe gale.

Why did she end up down here, though?

Because of the wartime restrictions all the lights were turned out

and the navigational buoys were silenced.

This part of the coastline here,

Whitby Rock is a very treacherous part.

It's claimed many ships in the past.

-And it had a big impact, didn't it, throughout the country?

-It did.

It's still recorded today in the annals of the RNLI

as one of the worst it's attended.

So, on the 30th October 1914 at 4.00am,

the Rohilla hits rocks and tears apart.

Later that morning, it became clear just how close the wrecked ship was to land.

But a raging storm stopped survivors from swimming ashore.

Rockets with ropes attached were fired from the cliffs.

But they all missed.

Rohilla had no rockets to fire a safety line herself - a fatal lapse.

Now she was relying on Whitby's lifeboat.

The rescuers here on shore

could almost reach out and touch the Rohilla,

500 yards out there on the rocks,

but the boiling sea kept them back, and for those onboard,

trying to swim to safety looked like a suicide mission.

So, where was the lifeboat?

My next witness is Peter Thompson, former lifeboat coxswain.

So, Peter, this is the kind of boat

they would have tried to row out to the Rohilla on, isn't it?

This is exactly the same as the original boat that made

the first rescue attempts.

And it feels like a very sturdy kind of boat,

but the conditions at the time were terrible, weren't they?

What we have to remember is that we're approaching the harbour by now

and the waves across there will be anything from 15 to 20ft high. Breaking seas.

The boat is 34ft long, so, it would have just been swamped.

With the storm raging it was impossible to row

beyond the safety of the harbour.

Outside the sturdy walls, monstrous waves lay in wait.

Going out into the open sea wasn't an option.

Instead, they decided to launch the lifeboat from shallower water,

on the beach beside the Rohilla,

but that meant man-handling their heavy wooden boat over an 8ft high sea wall,

and across the rocks on the other side.

Then, of course, it was straight into the surf opposite the wreck

and the rescue started then.

When the lifeboat reached the Rohilla,

the five women aboard the stricken ship were the first to be rescued.

Among them was Mary Roberts who had survived Titanic just two years earlier.

We think this is Mary here. Let's go and meet her relatives.

Today, her great grand-daughter Mandy and her husband Ray

have returned to the scene of Mary's traumatic ordeal.

She seemed to spend most of her life at sea,

quite a woman for that age. We're talking back in the early 1900s,

but she did compare, actually, that the Titanic

was an easier wreck than this one out here, this was the worst wreck.

I guess that's cos with the Titanic

it just hit an iceberg. It wasn't a storm,

whereas this was in this terrible, terrible storm.

Yeah, and, of course, being able to get survivors off

of this beach with the cliffs must have been absolutely horrific.

Must have been so frustrating

for the people on the cliff to see the boat there...

And not be able to get down and do anything.

For the second time what did she do then? I suppose she gave up the sea for ever.

-Went back to sea.

-Did she?

-Yeah.

-Absolutely.

In all, the lifeboat took 17 survivors from the Rohilla on its first attempt.

Dragging the lifeboat over the rocky shore tore a hole in her hull.

Even so, she managed a second rescue attempt

bringing back 18 more survivors,

but then she had to be abandoned.

The lifeboat was dashed on the rocks and pounded to pieces.

Hope faded with it.

Survivors brought back to shore painted a terrible picture

of conditions for those left on the wreck,

corpses lashed to woodwork battered by the storm,

survivors clinging to the wreckage as the ship broke up,

no wonder some of those left onboard tried to brave the raging seas

and make that terrible swim to shore.

Rohilla was just over 500 yards out to sea.

But only 35 of the 299 onboard had been rescued.

As news of the unfolding tragedy spread,

a newsreel crew was dispatched to film the drama

for a public hungry for news of the tragedy.

Let's see what they saw.

It is funny when you watch this, you realise how close it is,

or it does genuinely look like you could just wander out to it.

It's also quite gobsmacking to think that here's a piece of film of it,

that what was before just a story in a newspaper,

suddenly it's there, it's moving.

You can see the waves moving, the waves crashing against the boat.

Hard to fathom how terrifying it must have been,

but you do get a very good image of it from here.

So, this was rolling news from nearly 100 years ago.

Some desperate souls swam for shore,

many others remained onboard the wreck.

As darkness fell, those battling for their lives on the Rohilla

braced themselves for a night of horror.

Saturday morning didn't bring any respite from the atrocious weather,

more than 24 hours after the hospital ship Rohilla had struck the rocks,

lifeboats from along the Yorkshire coast were struggling to reach her.

So, despite heroic efforts,

the rescue crews couldn't get close enough to the boat for long enough,

cos these boats relied on manpower,

and rowing against the power of the sea proved impossible.

But help was on its way, motorised help,

from up the coast on Tyneside,

a lifeboat that represented the future for the RNLI

had powered her way down to Whitby.

Motorised lifeboats able to battle through rough seas were few and far between in 1914.

But now, she was the last and only hope.

At 6.30 on a Sunday morning, the Henry Vernon,

a motorised lifeboat similar to this old gem sets off to the Rohilla

where the survivors have been clinging on for more than two days.

Onboard in 1914 was second coxswain, James Brownlee.

Onboard now is his granddaughter Dorothy Brownlee.

At first light they set-off from Whitby harbour

and they picked up the last 50 survivors.

My granddad's quoted in a newspaper as saying that they were bruised

from head to foot, and I think it just touched everyone

who saw the state of all these people.

So, without your granddad, the loss of life would have been much greater.

It really would.

I can't see any way in which those last 50 men could have survived.

Efforts had just about been given up because it was too severe.

The storm showed very little signs of abating.

Certainly proved the value of a motor lifeboat

because the men didn't get so exhausted.

So, you must be very proud of your granddad.

I really am, yes, very proud.

Here's a picture of him,

which was very familiar to me as a child,

and he's wearing his medals. Three of them are for the Rohilla rescue.

But who was the last person off the boat?

The captain was the last person to come off the boat,

and it is said that he climbed up the ladder

and he was carrying a small black cat, the ship's cat,

which, apparently, had been unperturbed by all the commotion.

Of the 229 people on board His Majesty's Hospital Ship Rohilla,

85 perished, but thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the rescuers

144 survived to tell their extraordinary story.

Rescuing survivors from our perilous seas would never be the same again.

More motorised lifeboats were brought into service.

The days of rowing to the rescue were numbered.

Where the sea meets the land, danger is ever present.

Many have met that challenge, and still do,

facing peril from the seas with ingenuity,

resourcefulness, and simple courage.

Manning every lifeboat is the crew,

and it's these brave men and women who keep us safe on our wild coast.

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