‘Mousehole died that night’: how the Penlee lifeboat disaster unfolded

December 19 is the anniversary, marked by west Cornwall each year, of the Penlee lifeboat disaster, in which the eight crewmen of the Solomon Browne died trying to rescue the crew and passengers of the Union Star – while, with appalling irony, the village of Mousehole was illuminated by its famous Christmas lights.

The anniversary is usually an opportunity for the Cornish to be divined by outsiders and made into myth: to be praised for their heroism, but not seen for their own doughty reality. This year, for the 40th anniversary, the playwright and film-maker Callum Mitchell has written a drama-documentary for Radio 4, titled Solomon Browne, which resounds with a sense of place, and incalculable loss.

Mitchell grew up in Newlyn and went to school in Mousehole alongside the grandchildren and nephews of the crewmen. His mother grew up in the Kings Arms in Paul, the village above Mousehole. His grandfather was friends with Charlie Greenhaugh, who ran the Ship Inn in Mousehole and died that night. His closest friend lost both his grandfathers. Each day, walking from Newlyn to school, he passed the lifeboat house on Penlee Point and its memorial.

Mitchell initially wanted to write a stage play and collected testimony from the families. “But what I found amazing,” he tells me, “were the voices themselves”. He realised that the story had “to be told in their voices”.

Mitchell is attracted to things that are “stripped back”; he was assistant director to Mark Jenkin on the extraordinarily spare Bait (2019), a Bafta-winning film about the gentrification of a village very much like Mousehole, a village that has changed completely in the last 40 years. “But of all the things I have done, this is the one where I have felt the most responsibility.”

So, he used Cornish voices. There is Neil Brockman, son of Nigel Brockman; both were members of the crew, but the coxswain Trevelyan Richards would not admit Neil. “No more than one from a family on a night like this,” Richards said. “Calm down,” Neil’s father told his son. “You’ll go next time.”

Eleven men came to the boathouse to volunteer when the signal maroons went up; Trevelyan took seven. (“Not tonight, Doc,” he told the local GP, Dennis Leslie. “You’re too old.”) Among the other voices is Jane Torrie, who babysat her brother Barrie’s two children but missed him on the street as he went to the boathouse and she went to his home. There is Jo Payne, the daughter of Charlie Greenhaugh, who called out, “Have you got your fags, Dad?” as he left the pub. “Yeah, they’re in my pocket,” he replied, and hurried to Penlee Point, where he shouted, “You’re not going without me!”

There is Baden Madron, whose brother Stephen was the boat’s mechanic and second-in-command. The other crewmen were John Blewett, Kevin Smith and Gary Wallis. “Selflessness,” says Mitchell, is what united them: “That they responded in the way they did and without hesitation.”

Mitchell tells the story through fragments of recollection: the radio messages that passed between the Union Star, the Solomon Browne and the coastguard, and his own prose. Because he knows Mousehole so well, the immediacy and empathy are extraordinary. He imagines Trevelyan Richards, “56 years old, coxswain, captain”, watching his crew as “they put on their oilskins, their Wellington boots, the initials RNLI stitched across their chests in red thread”.

Mitchell calls them “men of this village, men of this place, husbands and brothers, fathers and sons.” Consciously or not, this work is not only an homage to the men who were lost. It is for a whole way of life. Greenhaugh’s speech at the switch-on of the Christmas lights a few days before “speaks of belonging: of belonging to this place, these people, this village”.

That is Mitchell’s continual refrain: belonging. The Solomon Browne, he says, again imagining Trevelyan Richards’s gaze, “is tipped to match the angle of the slipway. The large wooden doors that face out to sea are folded open, and the storm comes screaming towards you”.

Mitchell imagines the perspective of the captain of the Union Star, Henry Moreton, whose pregnant wife Dawn and stepdaughters Sharon and Deanne were aboard because it was Christmas: “You are Henry Moreton, already playing catch-up, keen to keep steaming despite the dramatic shift in the weather. You are no fool, Henry Moreton, and you know you are without power, drifting towards land, at the mercy of a ferocious storm. You pick up your radio.” Moreton’s first call to the Falmouth coastguard was at 6.04pm. Moreton’s words are perhaps the hardest to hear: a calm and competent man, speaking courteously (“We’re very much obliged to you”) and struggling to conceal his fear.

Like all famous tragedies, it happened incrementally, in tiny instalments. The engines of the Union Star, a coaster carrying fertiliser on its maiden voyage to Ireland, were filled with seawater. The engineer George Sedgwick tried to get them going, but they wouldn’t be fixed. The weather was worsening. The wind was 100mph. A Royal Navy Sea King helicopter from RNAS Culdrose tried to winch the women off but the waves were 60 feet high, and the mast threatened the rotor blade. On one attempt it came within a metre.

A tugboat, the Noord Holland, which initially came unasked, could not get close to the Union Star without moving into the breakers, and no one on the Union Star could get across the deck to fix the line. The Solomon Browne launched at 8.12pm and speeded towards Tater Du. As the Union Star was dragged towards the coast, the Solomon Browne made pass after pass to her side, coming alongside again and again. The seamanship, I am told, was breath-taking, miraculous.

But the crew of the Union Star – James Whittaker, Anghostino Verressimo and Manuel Lopes – could not, until the very end, dash across the decks to waiting arms. Men were watching from the cliffs or listening in on radio channel 16. Local fishermen cried to their friends on the Solomon Browne: shall we come to you? The Solomon Browne got four people off – they reported it at 9.21pm – but we can’t know who. The message broke off. Both ships foundered near Lamorna. Only eight of the 16 dead were recovered. Twelve children were made fatherless. Five women were widowed.

Three lifeboats launched to help the Solomon Browne: the Robert Edgar from the Isles of Scilly, coasting for a quarter of a mile on a single wave, it is said; the Vincent Nesfield from Sennen; and the Duke of Cornwall from the Lizard. The Sennen boat could not get round Land’s End, and the others were too late. That is the repetitive and insistent thrum of this story. Too late.

“I want to say Mousehole died that night,” says Jo Payne in Mitchell’s drama. “It was never the same again, ever.” “What we lost that night,” says Neil Brockman, “wasn’t just the crew. We lost the heart of the village.” Even so, a new lifeboat crew was assembled within a day, and Brockman was among them.

“Henry Moreton and Union Transport are savaged in the national press,” Mitchell says, “but not by this village. Not by these people. None of the blame came from them.” “Sixteen people lost their lives that night,” says Payne, “eight from this village, but there were eight more souls: two of them children, and a pregnant lady. And –” (she sounds incredulous) “– to be blamed?” A memorial to the Union Star victims is planned for the cliffs above Tater Du, and Payne is organising it. “We are one family, we are united,” she says. “The Penlee crew have places that their families can visit. The Union Star doesn’t have anywhere.” A 1982 inquiry exonerated everyone but the weather.

Forty years on, Mousehole is nothing like it was. Then, the harbour was filled with fishing boats. Now, they are few. Instead, paddle-boarders in flat caps roam the harbour, and the village, such as it is, exists for visitors: by loving it, they have destroyed the thing they seek. No wonder Mitchell is fascinated with belonging. “Today the homes which once housed fishermen are gutted and transformed into boutique retreats, each one indistinguishable from the next,” he says. “Pristine fishing buoys decorate the windows. Matching grey plaques brand them with quaint nautical names.”

Praise can have the capacity to conceal. It can deny simple human needs. The most extraordinary thing about this story is that, for the crew of the Solomon Browne, it was ordinary. “It always came home,” says Jo Payne. “It always did.”

Solomon Browne airs on Radio 4 at 2.15pm today then is available via BBC Sounds