For years, a framed photograph of the Mary Stanford’s crew hung on my grandmother’s wall. 17 men look out from it, and one of them is her brother, Charles Southerden. He was 22 when the lifeboat capsized on 15 November 1928, taking every man aboard.
That photograph now hangs in Rye Harbour church. As the 98th anniversary approaches, it reminds me that the disaster was not only a page of local history but a loss felt inside individual homes, including ours.
My grandmother, Eva Coleman, was Charles’s sister. To the wider world he is one name among 17. To her he was a brother, a young man with his whole life in front of him. Across that small village, fathers, sons, brothers and husbands were lost, some from the same family. Those overlapping losses bring home the scale of what Rye Harbour suffered that morning.
The story is well known here. In a gale of rare violence, the Mary Stanford set out to help the Alice of Riga, a Latvian ship in trouble off Dungeness. The sea was so fierce that it took three attempts to launch her. Minutes later, word came that the Alice’s crew had already been saved. Recall signals were fired, but the lifeboat had no radio, and her crew, fighting oars and sail in the storm, never saw them. She capsized, and none of the 17 survived.
Recently, I photographed the crew portrait, Charles’s memorial stone, the crew memorial in the churchyard and the pebble tribute laid by the community, some of it painted by local children.
Seen together, they tell a story of their own; remembrance being handed from one generation to the next. A picture my grandmother kept at home has become part of something the whole village holds.
This November, I will be thinking of Charles and the 16 men who went out with him. Sharing their photograph is a small way of keeping their faces, their names and their courage in view.
The Gospel in the Storm and Steve's other books can be found HERE.
By: Steve Coleman
