Fusilier

This time they had judged the distance correctly, and after they had secured a rope from the bow and another from the stern of the ship, they were ready to begin work.

The wrecked vessel was the Fusilier, bound from London to Australia with emigrants.

She had on board more than a hundred passengers, sixty of whom were women and children.

As soon as the lifeboat got near enough, the captain called out to the men in the boat, "How many can you carry?" They replied that they had a steam tug waiting not far off and said that they would take the passengers and crew off in parties to her.

There was a scene of great enthusiasm on Ramsgate Pier when the tug with the lifeboat in tow entered the harbor with flags flying to tell the glad news that all were saved.

And as the one hundred and twenty rescued men, women, and children were landed, cheer after cheer rent the air.

It is interesting to know that the Fusilier was afterwards got off the sands.

End of chapter six Chapter seven of Stories of the Lifeboat by Frank Mundell This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Bradford to the Rescue Of the many heart-rending scenes which have taken place on our coasts, there is perhaps none more calculated to move our sympathies for the imperiled crews and our admiration for the devotion and unconquerable courage of our noble lifeboatmen than the wreck of the Indian Chief, which took place on the 5th of January, 1881.

And when I was doing my research for Walking Leap Salient, the book that I wrote about walking the ground in Flanders many years ago, I came across the story of the Rachel Brothers from London.

who were serving in the Royal Fusiliers there on the Menin Gate.

Three of them killed in the fighting on the Belluarda Ridge in May 1915, when their battalion of the Fusiliers took very, very heavy losses there.

And they were killed, all of them the same day, all three missing, all three on the Menin Gate.

So that's two families that lost three sons in the Great War.

He was killed with the 13th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment in April 1916, was buried at Bethune.

Jesse Stevenson, whose scroll I had, was 13th Royal Sussex South Downs, killed at Richebourg, and he's buried at Cabaret Rouge.

And the one I picked up most recently is Stanley Harold Stevenson, who was with the 17th Royal Fusiliers and died of wounds in that October 1918 fighting, and as I mentioned is buried at Desloe Farm, which is not that far from Bapome.