Grace Darling

Grace Darling (November 24, 1815 – October 20, 1842) is an English Victorian heroine, 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.

This is the lighthouse where and her father were stationed when she performed her legendary rescue

In the early hours of September 7, 1838, Grace, looking from an upstairs window of the Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands, spotted the ship, SS Forfarshire, which had run aground on big Harcar 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 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.

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 William Wordsworth in his poem Grace Darling (1843). 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, which has been strongly disputed by other experts.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution Mersey class lifeboat at Seahouses bears the name Grace Darling.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Armfield, Annie Constance Smedley. Grace Darling and Her Times. London: Hurst & Blackett, ltd, 1932. OCLC 1900295
• Armstrong, Richard. Grace Darling, Maid and Myth. London: Dent, 1965. OCLC 4458661
• [Atkinson, Daniel H.]. Grace Darling; Her True Story. From Unpublished Papers in Possession of Her Family. London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co, 1880. OCLC 63965542
• Darling, William. The Journal of William Darling, Grace Darling's Father; At the Brownsman and Longstone Lighthouses, Farne Islands, from the Year 1795 to His Retirement from the Service of the Trinity House in 1860. London: Hamilton, Adams, 1886. OCLC 10420223
• Hope, Eva. Grace Darling, Heroine of the Farne Islands; Her Life, and Its Lessons. London: W. Scott, 1875. OCLC 34527567
• Mitford, Jessica. Grace Had an English Heart. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989. ISBN 9780525246725

External links

All links retrieved December 7, 2007.

• Grace Darling Museum from the RNLI
• Grace Darling
• Description of the sinking of the Forfarshire and Grace Darling's part in the rescue
• "Grace Darling: Victorian heroine" BBC
• Grace Darling genealogy
• Grace Darling by William Wordsworth

Credits

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