THE COST OF SAVING A LIFE

There have been many tales of heroism in the annals of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.  Few can match and none will surpass the cool actions of Coxswain Robert Patton of Runswick Bay in 1934.

The Disperser, a salvage ship had run into a heavy storm and was sinking off the North Yorkshire Coast.  Robert Patton took the Always Ready, the Runswick Bay lifeboat out to her.

They spotted one crewman clinging desperately to the side of the Disperser.  The lifeboat crew did their best to save him.  The storm was worsening and the salvage ship was quickly sliding beneath the waves.

Many attempts were made to cajole the trapped man into leaping for safety.  Eventually Patton jumped into the sea and swam to the man before he sank.

His crew were advising him to leave the survivor before the sea claimed them both.  Patton kept hold of the man and held him above the waves long enough for the crew to haul him safely onto the lifeboat.

The crew then reached down to pull Patton to safety.  The Always ready and the Disperser swung together in the swell and Patton was crushed between the hulls.  He died of his injuries two days later.  Among his last words were ‘I couldn’t let the little fellow go, he would have drowned,’ to RNLI officials.

It turned out that the reason the man had not leapt to safety was that he was physically disabled.

Robert Patton was awarded the RNLI Gold Medal posthumously and the Runswick Bay lifeboat was renamed the Robert Patton – The Always Ready in his honour.  A song was written to commemorate his courage and over 4,000 people attended his funeral in Hinderwell Cemetery.  His headstone, overgrown and weather-worn, though still showing its lifeboat motif is still there.

‘He was an absolutely acknowledged leader, both as a lifeboatman and as a fisherman,’ said Clem Jones, who was 13 years old at the time and remembers the feelings of horror, anguish and pride that whisked through the village in the aftermath of that dreadful day..  ‘One of his men said “we’re like a ship without a rudder without Bob,” to my father.’

Local divers Andrew Jackson and Carl Racey from Scarborough became interested in the story and began searching for the wreck of the Disperser in 1999,

It took the pair three years and innumerable searches, using underwater radar to find lying in 100 feet of water off the coast, near Whitby

‘There were six possible shipwrecks on the seabed of the right size that could be the Disperser,’ said Mr Jackson, an official for Yorkshire Water.  ‘The story really does pull you in.  The more that you know about it, the more interest there is.’

Among the artefacts that they recovered from the survey ship were items of diving equipment that were last used on that fateful day in 1934.