Grace Horsley Darling (24 November 1815 – 20 October 1842) was an English Victorian heroine who in 1838, along with her father, saved 13 people from the wreck of the SS Forfarshire.
Grace was born in 1815 at Bamburgh in Northumberland and spent her youth in two lighthouses, (Brownsman and Longstone, pictured above), of which her father, William, was the keeper.
In the early hours of 7 September 1838, Grace, looking from an upstairs window of the Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands, spotted the wreck and survivors of the ship, SS Forfarshire on Big Harcar, a nearby low rocky island. The Forfarshire had foundered on the rocks and broken in half. One of the halves had sunk during the night.
She and her father, William determined that the weather was too rough for the lifeboat to put out from Seahouses (then North Sunderland), so they took a rowing boat (a 21 ft, 4-man Northumberland coble) across to the survivors, taking a long route that kept to the lee side of the islands, a distance of nearly a mile. Grace kept the coble steady in the water while her father helped four men and the lone surviving woman, Mrs. Dawson, into the boat.
Well done Hugo!
