By Lisa Ramsden
The grandson of a decorated lifeboatman, who won three gallantry medals in just over a year for saving lives at sea, has shared his relative’s remarkable story in a special podcast.
Patrick ‘Pa’ Murphy has opened up about the RNLI’s crucial role in World War Two – and how his late grandfather and namesake, Pat Murphy, who was a coxswain with Newcastle Lifeboat, was honoured for his heroics.
This one-off podcast, ‘Stories of Courage’, was launched last week to mark Remembrance Day.
Highlighting some of the incredible stories of courage from the Second World War, RNLI members, and relatives of wartime crew, are featured throughout the podcast and help bring some of these tales of courage to life.
Mr Murphy, whose King Street home overlooks the spot from where his late grandfather often took to sea responding to emergencies, said he was “absolutely thrilled” to take part and share an insight into his grandfather’s heroics. When war broke out in 1939, the RNLI didn’t change – it carried on its mission to save lives, work it often carried out under extreme danger.
In the six years that followed, launching to sea meant facing whole new threats, as lifeboat volunteers battled bombs and bullets as well as the conditions.
Some even took part in the Dunkirk evacuation, when a flotilla of over 1,000 vessels crossed the English Channel to rescue over 338,000 Allied soldiers from advancing German forces.
Over the course of the Second World War, despite the added risks, these crews launched 3,760 times, saving 6,376 lives – not all of them Allied ones.
This podcast, according to Hayley Whiting, the RNLI’s heritage archive and research manager, “pulls together a snapshot of some of those stories”.
Speaking to the Mourne Observer, the Newcastle man explained his grandfather, who died in 1964 aged 82, was awarded three gallantry medals for rescues performed in the space of just over 12 months. Then he went on to be awarded the British Empire Medal, receiving the prestigious accolade from King George VI.
In the podcast, he focuses on the rescue that won his grandfather a gold medal for gallantry. He admits that his late grandfather, renowned for being a modest and unassuming man, would not know what to make of his heroics at sea being shared in such a way, or being shared at all. But Mr Murphy, quite rightly, says his family remains very proud of his achievements and his service with the lifeboat.
This most famous service of the war years, and indeed of the Newcastle boat at that time, is recorded in the now hard-to-find ‘Sailing Ships of Mourne’, which was first published in 1971, followed by a revised edition in 1995.
It tells readers how the men, on their return from this mission, spoke of going to sea on the 21st of January 1942 in a strong gale and poor visibility, with some likening the winter sky they set out in to being as ‘dark as a grave’.
Pat Murphy, his brother Bill, who was second coxswain, and fellow local men Robert Agnew, William James Leneghan, Patrick McClelland, Thomas McClelland and Patrick Rooney, boarded the ‘L.P. & St Helen’ lifeboat and made their way along the coast to Ballyquintin Point, at the tip of the Ards Peninsula.
Having left Newcastle at 5am, they arrived at the wreck of the SS Browning, a Liverpool-registered steamship, with its stern hard aground on a reef of rocks, five-and-a-half-hours later, and over 20 miles away from home.
The entire rescue was a series of episodes of superb seamanship. It included the crossing of Strangford bar, at the entrance of Strangford Lough, with a gale blowing over the tide, creating what was described at the time as ‘a mass of jumbled seas’.
The crew had to skilfully manoeuvre the lifeboat through a narrow space, and unscathed, into the shelter of the badly damaged steamship.
They then rescued all 39 officers and crew, which was followed by the precarious journey northwards and along the rocky coast to find shelter.
Four hours after arriving on scene, and over nine hours after the Newcastle boat set out on its rescue mission, the 39 passengers were landed at Portavogie by Coxswain Murphy and his crewmates. Six of those rescued were sent at once to hospital, while the rest were taken in by villagers.
In addition to Pat Murphy receiving the Lifeboat Institution’s Gold Medal for gallantry, his brother Bill and the engineer, Robert, received Silver awards and the other crew members were awarded Bronze medals for the crucial roles they played in this spectacular rescue.
The other medals Coxswain Murphy received were in recognition of two rescues he was central to, and which occurred less than a fortnight apart in 1941.
He received the Bronze medal for gallant conduct and skilful seamanship when he and his crew rendered assistance to the Hoperidge in a south-east gale and snow on 19 January of that year.
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