Saving Grace by Kim Rooney

Grace Darling, Victorian heroine, was a twenty-four year old media celebrity when she declined the opportunity of writing a memoir of the night that made her famous. "I have no doubt," she demurred, "[it] would be interesting a few years hence, but I have never thought of doing it, and I do not think I could find time for such a thing at present."¹ Grace did not believe there was much to write about and hoped her silence would bring to an end her unwanted fame. In both matters, she was to be proved wrong.

Of course there was something to write about. In the early morning of 7th September 1838, the "splendid and powerful steam-vessel", Forfarshire, laden with goods and sixty-one people, buffeted by treacherous seas and gale force winds, hit Harker's rock, (now known as Big Harcar) and immediately split in two. Although just three miles out from England's north-easterly coastline, the only immediate salvation was to come from within the Longstone lighthouse, three hundred yards away. The lighthouse keeper, William Darling, and his daughter, Grace, together rowed out to the vessel to do what they could for those that clung to the wreck and to life. The then twenty-two year old Grace was undoubtedly brave, but in reality she had no choice. William was an experienced second-generation lighthouse keeper, used to the danger of salvaging lives from shipwrecks with the help of his family. Only a few years previously, during a December gale, he had struggled with three of his sons for several hours to save the life of one man. On the night the Forfarshire floundered, all of William's sons were on shore. Grace was his only available assistance.

William rowed their twenty-foot Northumbrian coble to Harker's rock. Grace's task, to keep the boat steady alongside the rock as her father climbed its face in search of survivors, was clearly an ordeal. "I have often had occasion to be in the boat with my Father for want of better help, but never at the saving of lives before, and I pray God may never be again..."² God was to answer her prayer, for this was her only life saving venture, but gave her a new and more treacherous tribulation: the curious distortion of the events of this night and the fame it brought in its wake.

The first words written about the sinking of the Forfarshire came from William Darling, who wrote in his Journal:

"...about 4am on the 7th, the vessel struck the west point of Harker's rock, and in fifteen minutes broke through by the paddle-axle, and drowned forty three persons; nine having previously left in their own boat, and were picked up by a Montrose vessel... and nine others held on by the wreck and were rescued by the Darlings."³

There are no heroes in this account. Terror and death at sea are simply recorded, as are the actions of the lighthouse keeper and his daughter. Not that William Darling was emotionally immune to such loss of life, for this journal entry is headed Melancholy.

Newspaper reporting of the event was a less quiet affair. Initially, columns were filled with the details of the Forfarshire's doomed passengers and the protracted inquest process that revealed how leaking boilers and tempestuous weather had allowed the four-year-old steamship to lose all but eighteen lives. This was not enough for local newspaper readers reliant on weekly editions for entertainment. On the 15th September, The Berwick-on-Tweed Warder's report encouraged its readers to picture, "...a young woman ...prompted by an impulse of heroism which in a female transcends all praise... [who] urged her father to go off in the boat at all risks, offering herself to take one oar if he would take the other!" [original italics]⁴

The young woman was Grace Darling and the report was inaccurate but soon repeated with fervour by The Times that proclaimed, "Is there in the whole field of history, or of fiction even, one instance of female heroism to compare for one moment with this?"⁵ Yet, tucked away in the offices of the Corporation of Trinity House, William Darling's employers were to read a different account of how the Darlings decided to help the Forfarshire's stricken passengers. "...When the tide being fallen we observed three or four Men upon the rock; we agreed that if we could get to them some of them would be able to assist us back..."⁶ Here is a joint venture, not a solo enterprise. Forty years later, Grace's sister Thomasin, wrote that her father's letter had been a "clear and concise statement of facts [and] may serve as a model of composition to many who, more instructed and more learned, do not write so well."⁷

If the journalists had not written well, the first 'biographers' were to do worse. G.M.Reynolds's Grace Darling, or the Heroine of the Farne Islands and Grace Darling, or the Maid of the Isles, by Jerrold Vernon, were published hastily in 1839. So little was yet known about Grace, that it had to be invented. Vernon conjured up a romantic past with "scenes and characters of an imaginary nature". He did not hide the deception and enclosed a letter to Grace with a copy of the book:

"...I trust you will easily excuse [these] as from the miscellaneous nature of your reading you will often have discovered the reins given to Fancy, and that fiction is often frequently mingled with the gravest truths for the purpose of adorning a moral and giving point to a tale."⁸

Grace did not easily excuse him. The book was "not to her taste" and not one she would have had on her shelves, "romances, novels and plays... are books my father will not allow a place in our house, for he says they are throwing away time."⁹

And time was falling away. The sudden business of fame was taking up what little life Grace had left. "She might have said with Byron -'I awoke one morning and found myself famous',"¹⁰ wrote her sister Thomasin. Imaginative prose had created Grace Darling, Victorian heroine, feted by Queen Victoria herself, and now Grace had to live up to the expectation. The persistent demand for autographs, locks of hair, portraiture sittings and the need to acknowledge presents was, her sister said, an "...onerous task in the middle of her daily avocations." Even Grace's name was appropriated for fame's purpose with a newspaper declaring "... [a] poet or novelist need not desire one better fitted to bestow on a paragon of womanhood; we would fain see it embalmed in a sonnet by WORDSWORTH..."¹¹

Grace disliked the attention, and despite her father's wish, that "she should see more of the world," she resisted. She began to resist life itself. In April 1842, she caught a cold that was still with her in June. By October, she was dead. "She went like snow," said her sister Thomasin who nursed her to the end. Grace's terminal illness at the age of twenty-six is often diagnosed as tuberculosis. Thomasin, possibly believed otherwise, for she wrote of her sister's premature death, "...hers was a disease which no skill, nor care, nor kindness could arrest."¹²

Fame is seldom ended by death and as the century progressed, without Grace Darling, mugs and figurines bearing her likeness continued to clutter the mantelpieces in Victorian homes. Wordsworth, as it had been suggested, finally 'embalmed in a sonnet' Grace's name and several lines were inscribed on her memorial stone:

The Victorians found such a romantic figure too mesmerising to forget. Eva Hope's Grace Darling, Heroine of the Farne Islands, published in 1875, did little to help. Eva Hope was also the author of traditional biographies on Queen Victoria and General Gordon. Lytton Strachey who, over forty years later, would write about these Eminent Victorians in quite a different and revolutionary way, was heavily critical of Hope's kind of biography or Life with its "ill-digested masses of material", "slipshod style" and most of all its "tone of tedious panegyric". Hope's Life of Grace Darling with its subtitle, Her Life and Lessons is full of such false praise and sermonising. Hope was, after all, Mary Ann Hearn, a Baptist-born writer of hymns, writing under a nom de plume. "It would be little use," preaches Hope, "to write or read any biography or record of deeds and lives, unless some good lessons could be learnt from the same."¹⁴ Of Grace's one 'heroic' deed and brief life, Hope was aiming to instruct and mould "the girl of the period into a vigorously healthy, sensible, devoted, self-forgetful woman."¹⁵ However, Hope found that where the long lives of Queen Victoria and General Gordon had provided much material, there was little life to tell in a Life of Grace Darling. Like Jerrold Vernon before her, Hope used scenes of an 'imaginary nature,' combined with Christian rhetoric and copious sentimentality to fill the vacuum.

Thomasin Darling, exasperated by the continuing fictionalisation of Grace's life and that of the Darling family, wrote with the help of a ghost-writer, Grace Darling: Her True Story From Unpublished Papers in Possession of Her Family. Published in 1880 it sought to tell Grace's story in her own words. However, Grace's words are few and Her True Story did little to dispel the myths, not least because it was printed locally with scarcely any readers. It did not stop Eva Hope's tome being reprinted in 1886 and as one century made way for the next, Hope's pious words would continue to ripple to the surface as Grace's life and lessons were retold, especially for children, particularly for girls.

The occasional adults-only biographies of Grace's life, periodically published during the 20th century, did little to detract from the picture book story. The tale was merely retold to match the mood of the era. In 1932, as Britain recovered from one World War and moved slowly and inexorably towards the next, Grace's fate and flight from fame could be seen as a warning to an unsteady nation. "Where the girl of today faces publicity with courage, sanity and humour, Grace allowed herself to be literally pestered to death,"¹⁶ wrote Constance Smedley in Grace Darling and Her Times. The psychoanalytic buzz of the 1960s enabled Richard Armstrong in Grace Darling, Maid and Myth to intriguingly suggest that, "one name stands out like the Longstone Rock itself - William Darling. He is the key to any real understanding of Grace, the manner of woman she was, what she did and why."¹⁷ By 1988, Grace was getting the Mitford makeover in Grace had an English Heart. It is a transparently personal account of a biographer in search (or not) of her subject. "Oh the amazing relief. Decompression,"¹⁸ Jessica Mitford wrote when the book neared completion. As Mitford came to the surface for air, the prospect of saving Grace from the mythmakers fell away too. Now a new Millennium drew near but children could still read about "Grace [who] rowed a boat in stormy seas to save lives and became a heroine"¹⁹.

"They magnif [ied] a deed which has no need of fiction," said Thomasin Darling of those who wrote about Grace and the night she helped her father. Yet it was the fictionalisation of the deed and not the deed itself that made Grace Darling a heroine but forgot to make her father a hero too. Even those who questioned the mythmaking have not managed to redeem Grace for herself. Mention the name Grace Darling and a picture of a solitary girl in a rowing boat still surfaces to the mind. Grace's belief that writing her autobiography would have meant more unwanted intrusion into her life and those of her family cannot be challenged. Yet the writers who picked up the pen instead, created a 'posthumous life'²⁰ that she would surely have liked even less. A memoir might not have prevented the 'magnification' but it could have sharpened the focus. If only Grace had had more time.

¹ Atkinson, D & Darling, T. Grace Darling: Her True Story. From Unpublished Papers in Possession of Her Family, Northumberland, 1880, p.46.
² Atkinson and Darling, p.35.
³ Jessica Mitford, Grace Had an English Heart, Dutton, New York, 1988, p.17.
⁴ Mitford, p.34.
⁵ Mitford, p.44.
⁶ Atkinson and Darling, p.5.
⁷ Atkinson and Darling, p.4.
⁸ Mitford, p.130.
⁹ Atkinson and Darling, p.36.
¹⁰ Atkinson and Darling, p.34.
¹¹ Quoted in Mitford, p9.
¹² Atkinson and Darling p.56.
¹³ Eva Hope. Grace Darling, Heroine of the Farne Islands, Walter Scott, Felling-on Tyne, c 1875, pp.235-237.
¹⁴ Hope, p.293.
¹⁵ Hope, p.13.
¹⁶ Constance Smedley quoted in Richard Armstrong, Grace Darling, Maid and Myth, Dent, London, 1965, p.15.
¹⁷ Armstrong, Grace Darling, Maid and Myth, p.18.
¹⁸ Mary, S. Lovell, The Mitford Girls, Abacus, London, 2002, p.514.
¹⁹ Magnusson, Magnus & Moorcroft, Christine. Grace Darling, Channel Four Learning, London 1998.
²⁰ The phrase comes from the poet John Keats, who also died at the age of 26 from tuberculosis.