The Kingsbridge

November 9th 1947

November 9th 1947

The tug Carbon was being towed from Portland to Southampton for salvage when the towing line broke off the Needles. The Carbon drifted into Compton Bay and went aground on the rocks. It appears it was not worth anyone’s while to recover her and so, known as, ‘the wreck’, she has remained a familiar landmark and source of adventures for successive generations. Below is what still remains of ‘the wreck’ in 2010.

February 23rd 1964

The Brother George, a Liberian steamer, was on her way from the Manchester Ship Canal to Rotterdam with a crew of 28. Ralph Cook remembers as a teenager waking in the middle of the night to see blinding lights coming through the windows of Red Cottage, Brook Green.

At 1.45am with visibility down to about a mile, the coastguard at Brook saw the steamer heading for the Ledge. He fired a rocket to warn her to change course but it was too late. Once aground, the Yarmouth lifeboat and the coastguards set up a line-carrying rocket to the ship. One of three tugs which answered the calls for help was the Dutch tug Witte Zee. In the process of trying to free the Brother George, the tug was holed by a rock and her crew had to abandon her two miles off shore. The tug’s crew were saved by the Yarmouth lifeboat and the Red Funnel tug Gatcombe. The Witte Zee was towed away from the shore but eventually sank four miles off Compton Bay. Meanwhile the Brother George was still aground, and a salvage master from Holland was finally put on board to direct operations. In bright moonlight at 7pm on Monday crowds gathered on the cliff top to watch the first real attempt to tow the steamer clear. The stranded vessel proved to be one of the biggest open air attractions on the Island for many years and the police had to control the traffic on the Military Road, normally deserted at this time of year. Groups everywhere were tuned in to the distress frequency on their transistor radios and the ‘May Day’ signals from the tug could be clearly heard coming from several directions. Mr H. Morris, one of the auxiliary coastguards at Brook recalled that in 1915 the three masted barque the Souvenir was lost about 50 yards west of the point struck by the Brother George and just about the position where the tug Witte Zee was holed.

Courtesy of the Isle of Wight County Press.