Grace Darling
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Grace Horsley Darling (24 November 1815 – 20 October 1842) is one of England's best-loved Victorian heroines, on the strength of a celebrated maritime rescue in 1838. Grace was born in 1815 at Bamburgh in Northumberland, and spent her youth in two lighthouses of which her father 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 ship, Forfarshire, which had run aground on the Harcar Rocks only a few hundred yards away. Knowing that the weather was too rough for the lifeboat to put out from the shore, Grace and her father took a rowing boat across to the other island and rescued nine frightened survivors, bringing them safely back to the lighthouse.
She died of tuberculosis, unmarried, in 1842. She is buried with her father and mother in a modest grave in St Aidan's churchyard, Bamburgh, where a nearby elaborate cenotaph commemorates her life. A plain stone monument to her was erected in St Cuthbert's Chapel on Great Farne Island in 1848.
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[edit] Legacy
Even in her lifetime, Grace's achievement was celebrated, and she received a large financial reward in addition to the plaudits of the nation. A number of fictionalized depictions propagated the Grace Darling legend, such as Grace Darling, or the Maid of the Isles by Jerrold Vernon (1839), which gave birth to the legend of "the girl with windswept hair". Her deed was committed to verse by Wordsworth and a lifeboat with her name was presented to Holy Island. One of the series of Victorian paintings by William Bell Scott at Wallington Hall in Northumberland depicts her rescue.
At Bamburgh there is a museum dedicated to her achievements and the seafaring life of the region.
It was suggested by Richard Armstrong in his 1965 biography Grace Darling: Maid and Myth that she may have suffered from a cleft lip. He is the only biographer to put forward this theory and it was strongly disputed by a former Grace Darling Museum Curator, who contended that it was built on virtually no evidence whatsoever.
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution Mersey class lifeboat at Seahouses bears the name Grace Darling.
[edit] See also
- Ann Harvey, a Newfoundland 17-year old who in 1828, with her father, brother & dog, rescued 163 shipwrecked people.
- Roberta Boyd, a New Brunswick girl who was hailed as the "Grace Darling of the St. Croix" after a rescue in 1882.
[edit] Further reading
- Richard Armstrong - Grace Darling: Maid and Myth (1965)
- Thomasin Darling - Grace Darling, her True Story: from Unpublished Papers in Possession of her Family (1880)
- Thomasin Darling - The Journal of William Darling, Grace Darling's Father (1887)
- Eva Hope - Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands, Her Life and its Lessons pub. by Walter Scott (1880)
- Jessica Mitford - Grace Had an English Heart. The Story of Grace Darling, Heroine and Victorian Superstar (1998) ISBN 052524672X
- Constance Smedley - Grace Darling and Her Times Hurst and Blackett (1932)
[edit] Sources
- H. C. G. Matthew, "Darling, Grace Horsley (1815–1842)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 24 Feb 2007
[edit] External links
- Grace Darling Museum from the RNLI
- Grace Darling page on Britain un-Limited
- Description of the sinking of the Forfarshire and Grace Darling's part in the rescue, from The Tragedy of the Seas, 1841, from Google Book Search
- "Grace Darling: Victorian heroine" BBC
- Grace Darling genealogy
