Grace Darling: Northumbrian Heroine

by MJ Sunderland in People, February 10, 2011

Grace Darling was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper who became a celebrated Victorian heroine when she rescued thirteen people from the wreck of the SS Forfarshire, which foundered on the Farne Islands in 1838. The Farne Islands are a group of islands off the coast of Northumberland, England. These bleak, but beautiful islands have no permanent population, but Saint Cuthbert lived in solitude and died there in 687.

Grace Horsley Darling was born in 1815 at Bamburgh on the Northumberland coast. She grew up in the Brownsman and Longstone lighthouses, of which her father, William, was the keeper.

In the early hours of 7 September 1838, the SS Forfarshire was wrecked on Big Harcar, one of the rocky islands that make up the Farne Islands. Looking from an upstairs window of the Longstone Lighthouse, Grace saw the wreck and survivors of the ship. The Forfarshire had foundered on the rocks and broken in half. One of the halves had sunk during the night.

Longstone Lighthouse

Believing that the weather was too rough for the lifeboat to put out from North Sunderland, Grace and her father set off to rescue the survivors in a 21 ft, 4-man Northumberland coble. This meant travelling nearly a mile in horrendous conditions. On reaching the wreck, Grace kept the boat steady as William helped four men and one surviving woman, Mrs. Dawson, into the vessel. Mrs Dawson had lost her two young children during the night. The party then rowed back to the lighthouse. The weather remained so violent that everyone was forced to stay in the lighthouse for three days before returning to the mainland.

Grace’s achievement won the plaudits of the nation. Fictionalized accounts of her deeds were published, thereby perpetuated her legend. Jerrold Vernon’s Grace Darling, or the Maid of the Isles (1839) gave birth to the image of ‘the girl with windswept hair’. Her deed was commemorated in verse by the poets William Wordsworth and Algernon Charles Swinburne. William Bell Scott’s series of paintings at Wallington Hall in Northumberland depicts her rescue.

Sadly, Grace died of tuberculosis at the age of 27. She was buried in St. Aidan’s churchyard at Bamburgh. A stone monument to her memory was erected in St. Cuthbert’s Chapel on Great Farne Island in 1848.