During Victorian times the basic method of lifeboat rescue
in Ramsgate went something like this:- Ship gets into some sort of trouble
usually on the Goodwin Sands, which were known in ancient times as “The great
shippe swallower” – The maroons were fired and the lifeboat crew man the
lifeboat – The Ramsgate steam tug tows the lifeboat upwind of the vessel in
distress and lets the lifeboat go over the shallow water of the Goodwins – The
lifeboat crew row the lifeboat to the vessel in distress while the tug races
round the Goodwins – The lifeboat rescues any survivors – Rows to the deep
water on the other side of the Goodwins where the steam tug takes it in tow –
The tug tows the lifeboat back into Ramsgate Harbour.
Back in Victorian times during stormy nights the lifeboatmen
often waited for the maroons to go up in the rectory of Holy Trinity and the
vicar wrote down some of their accounts of rescues, click on this link if you
want to read some http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/storm
I publish a modern reprint, which you will find on the
shelves of my bookshop in Ramsgate, it’s also available on the internet at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/catalogue/id333.htm as you see captioning one picture properly can be a bit of a palava
Ramsgate lifeboat skippers. From left to right, Tom
Cooper1963-74, Douglas Kirkldie 1946-52 and Arthur Verrion 1952-63.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.