GALLANT OLD SALT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 72, Issue 293, 10 December 1929, Page 13

GALLANT OLD SALT

NOTED LIFEBOAT COXSWAIN CAREER OF JAMES CABLE. SAVER OF MANY LIVES. Failing sight is affecting gallant Janies Cable, the famous lifeboat coxswain of Aldeburgh, who will be 78 next month. A splendid figure of man, his eyesight he said recently, is his only trouble. Those brave, keen blue eyes have done splendid service for nearly half a century looking out from the shore over the stormy North Sea to help ships in distress. Mr Cable, who retired in 1917, keeps no count of the ships or the lives he has saved. Testimonials from the Royal Humane Society line the walls of his little parlour, and its bronze medal is one of his most treasured possessions. So also is a fine silver cup, enamelled with the arms of Finland and engraved with an inscription from the Finnish Senate of pre-war days, testifying to the coxswain’s valour in rescuing a ship from Helsingfors. How this gallant old sailor first went down to the sea, which, while he himself was still a smal Ichild, claimed the lives of his father and grandfather is told by himself. “When I was 13,” he said, “I went to work at the shipyard where they used to build fishing smacks. I had been there about three months when Pilo Henry Barley, master of a fishing smack, came into the yard and said he wanted a cabin boy. This was at 10.30 a.m., and the vessel was to leave at one o’clock. I ran home, and found my mother had gone to a wedding. The church was full, and I could not get in, so it was twelve o’clock before I saw my mother come out I told her I was going to sea, and that I had to be there by one o’clock. She cried and ‘took on,’ and said I should not go. But an old lady with her said: ‘lf the boy wants to go to sea, let him go.” Half-a-Crown a Week. “So my mother bought me some warm clothes, and I was there at one o’clock. We started for the fishinggrounds on the east coast of Scotland, •nnd went through the Pentland Firth and round the Orkneys.” James Cable’s first wage was half-a-crown a week. But in a few months he was made cook at four shillings a week. At sixteen he was earning ten shillings a week. Four years later he made his first long voyage, to Penang and the Indies, in a tiny barque of 300 tons, the Eleanor, which sailed 47,000 miles in 14 months. Many strange adventures followed until James Cable found a berth in a handsome liner bound for Australia where later on he settled down to sheepfarming with an uncle. He was there for three years, but at 24 he was home again in Aldeburgh; and there it was that he began his remarkable career with the gallant lifeboats of that fine old town, earning his living as a fisherman meanwhile. Mr Cable’s first adventures were with the George Houndsfield, of which he was made second coxswain. On January 18, 1881, only a few months after joining the crew, he took part in the rescue of four separate ship’s crews in one of the worst winter days ever known on the cats. Many a gallant adventure followctl in the ten succeeding years during which the George Houndsfield did duty. She ended her career on November 1, 1890, and is still to be seen on the beach at Aldeburgh. Mr Cable uses her to store his nets in. Service in Wartime.

A new boat, the Aldeburgh, was built at Yarmouth under the guidance of James Cable and his comrades. She was lost on December 7, 1898, with six of her crew. The Mark Lane, the City of Winchester, and the Edward G. Dresden carried on the fine work, and James Cable was foremost in it all. During the war he was called to the aid of many a mined and torpedoed vessel. But in 1917 he felt he ought to retire in favour of a younger man. Now Mr Cable’s portrait hangs in the Town Hall, and the gallant old salt, in his honoured retirement, is pointed out to visitors by his admiring townsmen as he walks by the shore and in the streets of their pretty little town