Peril from the Seas Coast

Coast is home.

And we're exploring the most endlessly fascinating

shoreline in the world -

our own!

The quest to discover surprising,

secret stories from around the British Isles continues.

This is Coast.

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?

We're venturing to wild waters in the Western Isles.

Dick is with one of the unsung heroes of the RAF -

weather forecasters who helped determine the outcome of D-Day,

battling Atlantic storms.

Quite a few aircraft were struck by lightning.

Chunks of ice would fly off and you'd hear

a bang on the side of the fuselage. Quite a loud bang.

Down on the South East Coast, peril from the seas strikes Tessa.

Ding, clash, dong, bang.

How did the Victorian iron men

building the new iron-clad Navy help shape our welfare state?

They received medical treatment

beyond the wildest dreams of everybody, bar the very rich.

On the icy North Sea, Coast newcomer poet and storyteller Ian McMillan

uncovers a century-old shipwreck that shocked the nation,

and made our perilous seas safer.

One woman was lucky 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.

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

..where trouble is brewing.

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.

We're on a journey to explore

peril from the seas that surround our isles.

On the south coast of England, we've often faced

unfriendly neighbours across the Channel.

Along this shore there once lay a ring of steel -

steel ships to protect us from invasion.

Naval seamen sign up knowing they may be called upon

to roam savage seas.

But even in dock, ships at close quarters bring their own dangers.

Go back 150 years and building Britain's first iron fleet

was a lethal business.

Our Naval dockyards used to be perilous places,

as they know in Chatham.

A shipbuilding boom transformed this workplace into hell on earth.

A story Tessa's here to explore.

Chatham is home to a remarkable cathedral like structure,

built to house wooden warships,

the roof protected their timbers from rotting.

But by the 1800's, these huge halls were slipping into history.

The age of wooden warships was over.

The Navy's future was iron.

Here in Chatham in 1861, they began building

their first iron giant - The Achilles.

Bending the metal into shape on the ship

took a terrible toll on its workers. Charles Dickens came to Chatham

and saw the construction of The Achilles.

the site struck him as a wild frontier,

a vision of a new industrial hell.

The nightmarish sounds inspired Dickens to write,

"Ding, clash, dong, bang,

"this is, or soon will be, The Achilles.

"Iron armour-clad ship 1,200 men over her bows,

"over her stern, under her keel, between her decks,

"crawling and creeping into the finest curves of her lines

"wherever it is possible for men to twist."

Building in metal was always a dangerous game,

where Health and Safety consisted of flat caps and quick hands.

In the Victorian era the welfare of workers often wasn't considered,

but constructing warships was so crucial to the Empire

that the builders of the Queen's fleet enjoyed special care.

By the mid 1800s, the health and welfare of shipbuilders

had become so vital to the Royal Navy

they received medical treatment beyond the wildest dreams

of everybody, bar the very rich. For instance,

when they were injured, they were treated by top naval surgeons.

Here in Chatham, the surgeon was William Gunn,

his letters detail the new perils the men faced from working with iron.

Each letter is a window into the world of Surgeon William Gunn.

It's almost as if he's talking to you.

"The men in the metal mills work five nights in the week,

"and they are very liable to accidents

"from the peculiar nature of their duty.

"Contusions, lacerated and punctured wounds and burns,

"particularly of the head, hands, feet,

"face and eyes are now very common."

The dockyard surgery dealt with a steady stream of casualties.

Medical historian Richard Biddle has seen how the shift to metalworking

led to different kinds of injuries.

With wood they're very focused on the lower half of the body

because the men are using axes to chop wood.

Then, when they begin to use iron,

if you're riveting iron plates, for example, you're up here.

And so what happens is that the injuries shift upwards,

the old injuries continue but injuries to the eyes and burns,

eyes in particular.

And did surgeons, therefore, see their work quadruple, if you like?

Well, Gunn certainly talks about how the frequency of injuries go up,

but he's also concerned by the new nature of injuries.

They're horrific, some of them.

His surgery, we ought to think about it as being a cross, I would say,

between what we would think now is a GP surgery

and then an Accident and Emergency facility.

The workers also received home care and half pay while off injured.

To check-up on his patients, William Gunn paid them surprise visits.

Surgeon Gunn soon learnt that where there are welfare benefits

there are also welfare cheats.

On the 5th of October, 1864,

Surgeon Gunn decided to call in on a man called William Tiltman,

he was meant to have been off sick for three months but when he found him,

he discovered he'd actually been moonlighting as a butcher.

Those early benefit cheats got the sack.

But plenty of genuine cases needed the special skills

Surgeon Gunn developed to deal with horrific metalworking accidents.

"As injuries of the eyes caused by pieces of metal had become

"so frequent of late, I have demanded an electromagnet."

I mean, that's a pretty clever thought, isn't it, actually?

It is, yeah, and we've actually tried to mock-up an electromagnet

and iron filings in an eye,

which I thought would be quite interesting just to see whether this thing works or not.

-Oh my G...

-They're not human.

-So, you're going to now switch on the power current.

-I'm switching on so here we go.

-Oh, look! They're just hopping out.

-It's incredible, isn't it?

It looks almost painless.

Cor! There's one, you've got a stubborn one,

let's try and get that last one.

The man is screaming in agony.

Yeah, yeah, sure enough.

I mean, people with eye injuries despite what...

When you read the initial accidents appear to be very gruesome

they do go on to recover and return to work.

So they could keep bashing metal ships into shape,

the Navy's new iron men were patched up,

and given privileges the public could only dream of.

It took nearly 100 years

and two World Wars before free health care became a right for all.

When servicemen began returning home in 1945

the mood of the nation was to build a Britain fit for heroes.

The time was ripe for the birth of the Welfare State.

'On July 5th,

'the new National Health Service starts.'

Are you sure I don't have to pay anything for all this?

Nothing. You and your family...

Do you think the work here was actually a precursor

to our modern-day welfare state?

Certainly, what you see in Chatham is the beginnings of a welfare state

It's a microcosm, perhaps, of things that happen after that,

so, for Chatham as a dockyard town,

I think it functioned as a welfare state.

Building Britannia's ships to rule the waves was a dangerous job,

but if left a legacy of welfare for workers that we all now enjoy.

Unexpected benefits come from our relationship with the sea.

But so do some clear and ever present dangers.

Many who live on the coast are in peril from the sea.

And the sea shows no mercy to those who venture offshore.

Each wreck tells a story.

The most famous fictional tale of a foundered ship began here at Winterton.

Author Daniel Defoe was as captivated as me

by this calm yet perilous coast.

So fearsome was the reputation of this shore

that Daniel Defoe used it to open his book Robinson Crusoe.

Crusoe was eventually marooned on a distant isle in foreign seas.

But the first shipwreck in this book

is here at Winterton on the coast of Norfolk.

The dangers here can't be seen from the beach.

I've got to venture out to sea.

Way offshore, there are deadly strips of sand,

which only reveal themselves at low tide.

This looks like dry land, doesn't it? But it's not. It's a sandbank.

In an hour or so it's going to be covered in water,

and if you look over there,

one-and-a-half miles away across the open sea,

you can see mainland Britain. The coast of Norfolk is lined by

many other sandbanks, which lurk just beneath the surface.

This is the graveyard of countless ships.

You can understand why Daniel Defoe

chose this lethal coast for the opening passages

in his book Robinson Crusoe.

Sandbanks and ships don't mix.

The church at nearby Happisburgh has a grim memorial

to those in peril on the sea.

This neatly tended plot is the mass grave of 119 men.

They drowned when HMS Invincible failed to live up to her name,

coming to grief on a notorious sandbank in 1801.

So many ships foundered here that parishioners decided

they couldn't rely solely on spiritual salvation,

they took more practical steps.

And they cleverly combined doing a good turn with turning a profit.

The boatmen from Norfolk villages set-up their own rescue teams

long before the RNLI was born.

What those rescuers needed was a vantage point, like this,

where they could spot ships in trouble.

I've got a photograph, here, from further along the coast.

You can see a wooden watchtower,

built by one of the rescue teams and below it their hut.

Rescue teams like this were some of Britain's earliest emergency services.

They called themselves Beachmen,

and were only found on the East Anglia coast.

If you go looking in the dunes of Winterton-On-Sea,

there are still clues to the Beachmen's presence.

David Higgins is showing me.

Around here is where they had their watch houses.

-How do you know?

-Well, here you can see some of the building materials

that they used to make the watch house.

And this has still got mortar attached to it, look.

-Yes.

-How interesting! Look at that.

All within the dunes there's these rectangles defined by plants

that shouldn't be here, and even here is an apple tree.

Look at that! With apples on it.

So, this is probably an apple core hurled down from the watchtower

-by a Beachman who'd been looking out for wrecked ships.

-Exactly.

But who exactly was a Beachman?

Well, a Beachman was a man who,

essentially, did salvage work on the sandbanks,

looking for ships to snag themselves on the sandbanks,

and then they would race out there

and get the salvage work, and, hopefully, get a good payout.

They drove a hard bargain when they got out there

and talked to the Masters, they would tell the Master, you know,

that they were in grave danger

and they readily signed-up to get this work done.

You make them sound like land-based pirates,

rushing out to take advantage of other people's misfortunes.

Well, they didn't see it that way,

they saw themselves as rectifying the Master's mistakes.

There's a part of you that would have been a Beachman, wouldn't there?

I can see you running down the beach to grab the tiller first

and setting off towards Scroby Sands to pick over a derelict, David.

Well, I would love to have done that, yes.

And David isn't alone.

Generation after generation wanted to join the Beachmen.

Well, this is a book of the family trees of the Winterton Beachmen,

effectively, erm, all the families, but particularly the Georges,

which was the biggest family in the village.

My goodness.

-We go...

-It goes on and on.

-..16 feet

Make some space on the... Is the beach big enough, David?

Wow!

That's how important the George family was

to the whole seafaring community here in Winterton.

Lifesaving runs in the blood of the boatmen here,

a promise to protect and serve passed from father to son.

The Beachmen were trailblazers in making lifesaving into a living.

But by the late 1800s,

their boats were out-dated, and the rescue service pioneered

here in Norfolk had grown nationwide.

So, Beachmen became part of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution,

operating from Caister.

By the 1960s, their station held the record for the most lives saved.

They'd rescued over 1,800 seafarers,

but that wasn't enough to save their own service.

Faster lifeboats could now cover a greater area,

the RNLI thought fewer stations were needed.

In 1969 they left Caister.

But the Beachmen's descendants wouldn't hang up their sou'westers.

Derek George is a fifth generation Beachman of the famous George family.

How did Caister keep their lifeboat afloat?

Many people in the village thought it was impossible.

There were no precedent, no previous experience to run a private lifeboat,

but nevertheless a ten-man committee was formed,

and over the years... This is our 41st year of independence,

and we are here still today.

As we approached the millennium and technology marches on,

we needed to have a more modern lifeboat,

August of 2004

we took delivery of the fastest lifeboat in the United Kingdom,

1,000 horse power, 40 gallons of fuel an hour.

Are you trying to get one up on the RNLI?

I can't answer that question.

You only really appreciate just how powerful this beast of a boat is

when you've got the salt spray parting your hair.

I think it's safe to say the spirit

of the original Beachmen still survives on these seas.

Those that work on water know how perilous the sea can be.

Whether their boats are big or small,

fishermen keep a weather eye on the sky,

right around our shores.

Like here on the edge of the English Channel at Alderney.

This tiny isle gets battered by weather

rolling in from the wild Atlantic.

So, the fishermen look for feathered friends to help with the forecast.

And folklore plays its part as Andy Torbet's finding out.

It's a lonely old business being a skipper at sea.

Spotting a storm can mean the difference between life and death.

It's no surprise, then,

that fishermen can be a superstitious bunch,

and they look to the creatures that surround them

for signs of approaching wild weather.

Now, this little chap is a storm petrel,

so-called because to see one of these little sea birds

was a signal that a big storm was heading your way.

The storm petrel gets its name, and its fame,

from its weather forecasting talents.

When they're feeding, they seem to walk on water,

but if they sense an approaching storm, they fly to land,

a sure sign for fishermen to follow them.

I want to see this feathered weather bird for myself,

but I've got my work cut out.

In the English Channel in the 1950s,

it was thought there was 10,000 storm petrels.

Today it's less than a tenth of that number.

Increased pollution of our seas

hit the storm petrel population hard.

They only come to land to breed,

spending the rest of their lives out on the open sea.

I'm going to try and track them down,

and I'm starting my search with those who know these little birds best

Like storm petrels,

fishermen here are few and far between these days,

but Ray Gaudion is hanging on.

All right, how you doing?

-Pleased to meet you, Andy. Can I come onboard?

-Yes.

Ray's going to take me out on a trip

in the hope of seeing the storm petrels at sea.

So, you're normally out here looking for lobsters,

but today we're looking for these chaps storm petrels.

They're tiny little creatures to see.

Only the size of a sparrow, aren't they?

Well, I'd say more like a starling, they fly fast, as well.

-And do you see as many as you used to?

-No, I don't.

I'm sure when I was younger you used to see a lot more.

There's quite a few kind of myths and legends

surrounding the storm petrels, aren't there?

Well, they've always been revered, to start with,

with the older seamen that I went to sea with,

we never had long-range shipping forecasts or anything like that,

and we'd always, "Oh, Mother Carey's chickens. Bad weather coming."

Mother Carey's chickens - that's one of their nicknames, isn't it?

That's what we always...the old fellas used to call them, you know.

Whatever you call them, these storm petrels are elusive blighters.

Ray's seen storm petrels here before,

but without a storm, they could be far out at sea.

I'll have to tempt them with some tasty treats.

In here is a special recipe of cod liver oil, mackerel,

herring and skate guts...

I'm assured this potent mix is perfect for attracting petrels.

Well, the gulls like it.

Well, it's attracted a load of black backed gulls

and some herring gulls, but no storm petrels yet.

The scavengers are loving the free lunch,

but it seems my own quarry has a more refined taste.

Looks like I'll have to go the extra nautical mile or so to find them.

I learnt to drive boats just like these in the forces.

Maybe not bright orange ones,

so I'm going to take us across to the island now.

I'm heading to a storm petrel breeding site.

Appearing now off the bow is Burhou Island.

Now, that's a welcome sight for birds

that'll spend the vast majority of their life out at sea,

and they come back to land on these rare occasions to breed.

I'm joining a team of scientists here to study the petrels.

-Liz?

-Hi.

Heading up the conservation efforts is Liz Morgan.

Welcome to Burhou.

Most storm petrels won't come back till after dark,

but a few may still be on their nests deep in this old wall.

Liz has a trick to find out.

This is a storm petrel call. If an adult's on the nest it should reply.

Can you hear a little peeping noise?

Yeah, I can hear that, yeah.

That's a storm petrel chick.

The chic's probably sat there by themselves.

The adults out at sea fishing won't come back to land while it's light

because of predators like the gulls.

Under the cover of darkness, that's the only time they feel safe.

That's it - my first storm petrel.

With baby home alone, the parents can't be far away,

but they won't be back till night.

As darkness falls, Liz and her colleagues set up nets

to ring and monitor Burhou's population.

After that flop with the bait before,

let's hope sky fishing works better.

These nets normally do very well as the birds sweep in off the sea.

Stretched across their flight path, these nets are specially designed

to catch but not damage these little birds.

Now, we have to wait, and hope.

Got one!

And another.

With these nets filling up nicely, Paul Veron picks the petrels out.

It's not actually doing them any harm is it?

No, they hit the net and drop into this little pocket

and then we have to go and take them out.

Imagine that bird riding out the fiercest storm

that the oceans can throw at it.

In all, we get 61 birds, a great sign for the petrel population,

which Paul now reckons is around 1,000 breeding pairs.

This fragile little chap somehow manages to survive

the perils of the sea. It's a rare privilege just to see one.

To hold him is magical.

You don't really get any closer than that.

-Paul, shall I release it now?

-Yes, please, just on the grass.

Designed for a nomadic life, bravely roaming the oceans,

the storm petrel is almost helpless on dry land,

where they stumble around like little drunken sailors.

By the morning, the wild seas have reclaimed these drifting creatures.

Until the next storm, we're unlikely to see them again.

When you're tucked up warm at home, sheltering from a storm,

rain lashing at the window can be strangely comforting.

But think of those at sea.

When in peril, beacons of bright hope bring seafarers comfort.

We have over 200 lighthouses around our coastline.

Now their keepers have been retired, the lights shine automatically,

but they still need maintenance.

The Northern Lighthouse Board looks after those in Scottish waters.

There's one visit that brings back

dreadful memories of tragedy on the Flannan Isles.

We're now just approaching the Flannan's.

We can see them up ahead here.

We can see islands quite clearly, there,

and you can see the lighthouse very prominent on the north side.

The Flannan light stands as a sombre reminder of peril from the seas.

Growing up we, of course, we heard about

the mystery of the Flannan Isles and the keepers.

Probably first of all when I was in primary school

and we did the poem by Wilfred Gibson about the Flannan Isles.

"Of the three men's fate, We found no trace,

"Of any kind, In any place."

Men like Captain Eric Smith remember how,

on 15th December 1900 the Flannan light went out.

Its three keepers had vanished, never to be found.

Were they snatched by sea monsters?

Were they plucked away? Did aliens land?

Were they kidnapped by foreign boats? Who knows?

There were all these stories going round cos nobody knew any different.

The helicopter is just coming in to land now on the island.

Today it's just such a quiet day, flat calm,

what little weather there is coming from the north,

absolutely nothing between us and America,

and it's hard to appreciate what could happen,

and how big the seas get up here.

Because, you know something happened

there's a kind of eerie feeling sometimes.

First time I've been here since well over 20 years.

And now this is the living area,

living room, very cramped.

But it's functional.

This would have been the principal lghtkeeper's.

This would have been his, he's got two windows, I suppose,

because he's the senior man.

Oh, well, here we are at the optic for the light,

which is the main reason for all this,

the lighthouse, the construction, the land,

and everything, to keep this optic turning.

A terrible, terrible tragedy. There's no other way.

Three people lost their lives and all the families that were affected.

It was just so incredible that such a thing could happen.

The enquiry into the lost lighthouse keepers was inconclusive.

It's thought a huge wave washed the three men away.

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.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd