Henry Blogg

Henry Blogg was born in Cromer, Norfolk, in 1876 to an unmarried mother, and left school at eleven to go crab fishing with his stepfather. He joined the lifeboat crew at eighteen, became coxswain in 1909 and held the job for thirty-eight years. He was teetotal, did not smoke, said very little and, like many fishermen of his generation, could not swim.

The Norfolk coast is a graveyard of ships, and the lifeboat was a pulling and sailing boat for the first part of his service. In January 1917, in a blizzard, his crew of mostly elderly men rowed out repeatedly over fourteen hours to a Swedish steamer, the Fernebo, which had been split in two by a mine; they got the survivors off on the third attempt in the dark. It won him his first gold medal. He did the same kind of thing again and again: in 1927, 1932, and during the Second World War, when Cromer's boats rescued the crews of a convoy of six ships stranded on the Haisborough Sands in one day in 1941, eighty-eight men in all.

His record over fifty-three years was 387 launches and 873 lives saved. Along with the three gold and four silver medals of the lifeboat institution he received the George Cross and the British Empire Medal.

He lost his only son as a child and his wife in the 1950s. He was not comfortable with praise, and after retiring in 1947 he still went to sea for crabs. He died in 1954.