Dawson had lost her two young children (James, 7, and Matilda, 5) during the night. Darling kept the coble steady in the water, while her father helped four men and the lone surviving woman, Sarah Dawson, into the boat. Grace Darling at the Forfarshire by Thomas Musgrave Joyĭarling and her father, William, determined that the weather was too rough for the lifeboat to put out from Seahouses (then North Sunderland), so they took a rowing boat (a 21 ft (6.4 m), four-man Northumberland coble) across to the survivors, taking a long route that kept to the lee side of the islands, a distance of nearly a mile (about 1.5 km). The Forfarshire had foundered on the rocks and broken in half one of the halves had sunk during the night. In the early hours of 7 September 1838, Darling, looking from an upstairs window, spotted the wreck and survivors of the Forfarshire on Big Harcar, a nearby low, rocky island. The room was their living room, dining room, and kitchen in one, and had a spiral staircase leading to three bedrooms above and the light at the top of the tower. The family spent most of their time on the ground floor of the lighthouse, which consisted of a large room, heated by a wooden stove. Longstone Lighthouse had better accommodation, but the island itself was slightly less hospitable, so William would row back to Brownsman to gather vegetables from their former garden and to feed the animals. The accommodation was basic, and the lighthouse was not located in a good place to guide shipping to safety, so in 1826, the family moved to the newly constructed lighthouse on Longstone Island. Her father ran the lighthouse (built in 1795) for Trinity House, and earned a salary of £70 per year (equivalent to £5,500 in 2021 ) with a bonus of £10 for satisfactory service. She was the seventh of nine children (four brothers and four sisters) born to William and Thomasin Darling, and when only a few weeks old, she was taken to live on Brownsman Island, one of the Farne Islands, in a small cottage attached to the lighthouse. Grace Darling was born on 24 November 1815 at her grandfather's house in Northumberland. Lighthouse at Longstone: The upper window in the white ring was Grace Darling's bedroom, from which she saw the wreckage of the Forfarshire.
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