On This Day: Volunteer sea rescuers die after their lifeboat capsizes during a heavy storm

NOVEMBER 15, 1928: Seventeen volunteer sea rescuers died after their RNLI lifeboat capsized in Rye Harbour on this day in 1928 amid a heavy storm.

Almost the entire male fishing population of the pretty East Sussex town drowned after being thrown from the RNLB Mary Stanford into treacherous water.

The men – including a father and his two sons, two sibling trios, two pairs of brothers and two cousins - had been on their way to help the distressed Latvian vessel Alice of Riga after it was hit by the larger German ship Smyrna amid 80mph gale-force winds.

Tragically, the volunteers had failed to see three recall signal flares fired into the sky to urge them to return after another lifeboat had rescued the Eastern European sailors.

All 17 on board the Mary Stanford – which had previously saved 10 lives after being launched 63 times in its 12-year history – died in the disaster.

Two bodies were not immediately recovered.

A British Pathé newsreel showed the funeral poignant procession for the 15 remaining seamen as their flag-draped coffins were carried along the shoreline.

These men – Herbert Head, 47, and son James Head, 19; Albert Smith, 44; Joseph Stonham, 43; Walter Igglesden, 38; Charles Pope, 28, and his brothers Robert, 23, and Lewis, 21; Robert Cutting, 28 and his brother Albert, 26; William Clark, 27, and his brother Leslie, 24; Arthur Downey, 25, and his cousin Morris Downey, 23; and Charles Southerden, 22 – were all buried together.

The body of Henry Cutting, 39, whose two brothers also perished in the Rye Harbour lifeboat disaster, was found three months later and interred in the communal grave.

But the corpse of John Head, 19, who had died along with his coxwain father and brother, was never found.

Many locals believed the two missing men had been thrown from that the Mary Stanford and that the vessel capsized while after searching for them.

This may explain why the crew failed to turn back when the recall signals began being fired at 6.50am – only five minutes after the lifeboat had been launched.

Others questioned the seaworthiness of the vessel, life jacket conditions and the men’s fatigue after they had only just returned home from fishing when they were called out.

But a 1929 inquest reported: “As there were no survivors of the crew, the cause of the Lifeboat capsizing is a matter of conjecture.

“But, from the evidence available, we are of the opinion that while attempting to make the Harbour on a strong flood tide and in high and dangerous breaking sea, she was suddenly capsized and the crew were thrown into the water, two men being entangled under the boat.

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“The broken water and heavy surf caused the loss of the crew.”

Yet the crew might have been saved if Ramsgate Coastguard Station had been quicker in passing on a radio message it received at 6.12am that the Alice had been saved.

In the aftermath, the Royal National Lifeboat Institute launched a charity appeal and raised a £35,000 pension fund for the victims’ dependants.

A Manx stone memorial tablet gifted by the Isle of Man stands at Rye Harbour and stained a glass window depicting the tragedy was placed in Winchelsea Church.

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John Stanford, the son of Mary Stanford, also paid for another lifeboat to be named Mary Stanford to be built in 1930.

It was stationed at the village of Ballycotton in County Cork, southern Ireland and had an illustrious career saving 122 lives until being decommissioned in 1959.

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Since the RNLI's founding in 1824, more than 140,000 lives have been saved at sea – costing the lives of 168 volunteers.

The worst single tragedy was the Southport and St Anne’s lifeboat disaster off the Lancashire coast in 1886 when 27 crewmen died after two vessels capsized.