Friday 22 January 2016

50 years ago: The miracle of Frinton-on-Sea beach


IT HAPPENED 50 years ago this week on a snow and wind-lashed Frinton beach – a near-disaster of epic proportions!
Amid the horrendous weather on the night of Wednesday 19th January 1966, the young team on board pop pirate ship Radio Caroline were relaxing a few miles off the Essex coast, blissfully unaware they were in extreme peril.
Unbeknown to them, their 470-ton ship, the Mi Amigo, was dragging its anchor and drifting out of control towards land. The vessel inched nearer and nearer to a Frinton and Walton coastline lined with concrete and wooden breakwaters and groynes. It would need a miracle to avoid smashing into them, with potentially fatal consequences.
By some bizarre coincidence, that week’s Top 20 pop chart on Caroline had included songs whose titles seemed to foretell the drama:
* My Ship Is Coming In – Walker Brothers (Philips)
* The Water is Over My Head – Rockin’ Berries (Piccadilly)
* Let’s Hang On – Four Seasons (Philips)
* A Hard Day’s Night – Peter Sellers (Parlophone)
Spot the omens there?  It seems somebody been trying to tell them trouble was ahead!
* Frinton beach on the morning after
The drama started after nightfall when a swivel rope controlling the three anchors holding the vessel in international waters suddenly broke in the Force 8 gale. In mountainous waves the ship began to drift and was tossed around dangerously.
Coastguards soon spotted what was happening, but the crew and DJs sleeping or watching TV inside the ship were used to choppy seas and noticed nothing unusual. The crew member on ‘anchor watch’ was hampered by blinding snow and hadn’t a clue they’d broken loose.
The coastguards phoned Caroline’s agent Percy Scadden in Harwich, who raced to Frinton seafront and began flashing his car headlights at the distant ship in a futile attempt to alert them to the danger. In desperation he then phoned Anglia TV who broadcast a message of warning. Of the thousands who heard it, none were on board Radio Caroline.
Meanwhile fierce easterly winds took the ship relentlessly coastwards and it looked like the game was up when the 133-foot vessel headed straight for a concrete groyne; “That’s it – they’ve had it now,” was the reported comment of Coastguard station officer Edward Shreeve at this point. But somehow the vessel skimmed over the hazard, barely touching it.
At around 11pm most on board were watching the wrestling on TV when a crewman rushed in with the news they were hopelessly adrift. Once up on deck all could see they were dangerously close to the bright lights of Essex, and getting closer.  Attempts to start the engines came far too late to help; the ship was clearly going to be hurled on to land, the only question was exactly where and how bad the wreck would be.
* "The gods parked the ship up very nicely!"
Suddenly came a crunching sound as the huge propellor churned up shingle and the vessel came to a shuddering halt 50 yards from Frinton beach. Parachute flares and a line rocket lit up the area as a rescue squad went into action on the beach, working several hours to rig up a breeches buoy lifeline. Equipment was ferried over a treacherous 15-foot snow-covered sea-wall, while Walton lifeboat and other vessels stood by in deeper water.  
Twenty-foot waves raged, the snow continued and it was a hairy operation. Taken off in various states of shock were nine DJs and crew, including the soon-to-be-famous Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis. Blackburn admitted he’d gone first to make sure the press got his photo, and later had to refute allegations he’d set the whole drama up to get himself publicity!   
At 3a.m. the ship – captain and crew still aboard - was declared high and dry. She had somehow avoided serious shipwreck by not only floating over one concrete breakwater, but had come ashore right between two wooden breakwaters, within a gap where one breakwater had been removed years before. It was the only large gap in over five miles of coastline. Any other stopping point and the Mi Amigo and those on board might have perished.
Caroline founder Ronan O’Rahilly, in a state of high emotion on the beach, said the gods had been on their side and had parked his boat up nicely. The precise location was given as Cheveux de Fries Point, Great Holland, close to Frinton Golf Club.
Walton coastguards and an 11-strong Life-Saving Corps rescued nine men in all with the breeches buoy. These were taken to nearby Portobello Hotel for dry clothes, bed and breakfast and later taxis to Harwich.
* Tony Blackburn
The DJs inevitably got the lion’s share of attention in the next day’s media, but the real heroes of the hour were rescuers Shreeve, Curtis, Ward, Hartley, Street, Sayers, Speight and Hipkin.
The beached ship became a real tourist attraction (my own family was among the visiting hordes!), and hundreds watched a ‘kedging’ operation get the vessel off the beach on high tide two days later.
She was towed to the Netherlands for a refit, gaining a generator, more powerful transmitters and an antenna mast extension.  Tony Blackburn and others were meanwhile holed up in the Gables Hotel in Dovercourt waiting for instructions, having heard Caroline’s boss insist this was all just a temporary problem: “The show must go on!”
 
 
 
 
 
 
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