Tales from the old man of the sea

Chris Webber spends time with the oldest member of one of Redcar's oldest families and hears stories dating back to the days of his ancestor Captain Cook.

LET 85-year-old Jim Thompson tell you a tale and he'll hook you and reel you in like he would a fish into his boat - a coble named after his mother, The Daisy Ellen, still outside the old fisherman's home, taking pride of place among those of the working fishermen.

The tale of how the boat came to be there belongs in a storybook. When Jim sold it many years ago he cried, remembering his family's brutally tough fishing life, dating back at least 400 years.

Jim tells the tale of The Daisy Ellen. "It was early morning on New Year's Eve, 1972 and I was out checking the boat. I looked up and I saw this light, this flare, right out at sea.

"Somehow I knew it was Tony Young and the others out there. I ran as fast as I could down to the boat and I saw a fisherman I knew. I stopped and said: 'There's something wrong out there.

"I went out and found them bailing out the boat. Mick Preston, who was with Tony and another lad, Ged Maltby, had apparently said, 'Don't worry, Jimmy will save us, he'll be here any time'. Anyway, it turned out they'd hit wreck and the ship's propeller had gone through the bottom of the boat.

"I towed 'em in, steady away. There were pressmen ashore but I told them, just leave us be'. You never told them anything if you rescued a fellow fisherman you see, you didn't know if they'd be embarrassed."

Twenty years later and Tony Young, one of the young men Jim had saved, spotted The Daisy Ellen, moored in a dockyard. It was dilapidated, ready for the breakers and it broke Tony's heart. He'd never forgotten the sight of Jim in The Daisy Ellen coming to his rescue.

Tony bought it, practically rebuilt it and painted the name of the legendary Thompson brothers, of whom Jim is the only survivor, on the side. Now it's stationed on Redcar's famous Fisherman's Square, yards from Jim's home.

Surrounded by newspaper cuttings, Jim recounts this story among a dozen others. For Jim is trying to distil a lifetime of yarns in a couple of hours.

The Thompson family can directly trace their family back to James Thompson, who was born in Redcar in 1801. That was the year before the world's oldest surviving lifeboat on which many Thompsons were to serve, The Zetland, came to Redcar, then a village of just a few hundred souls. Yet Jim's father Jack was quoted in The Northern Echo back in 1952, saying that the Thompson's life at sea went back more than 400 years. Others have worked out that the Thompsons married into another seafaring family, that of Captain Cook, at the time of the great captain's life.

Jim, who at one time served on lifeboats with his two brothers, his father and his uncle, talks lovingly of his family. There was his tough father, who bore the family name of Jack, and his mother, Daisy, who would stay up all night while her men were at sea, keeping the fire burning.

His two brothers, Jack and Mark, and his own exploits on the seas were so famous they were once written about in a book about North-East seafarers called A Kingdom by the Sea, by Betty James. James was impressed by "the handsome brothers, melting all the girls hearts". All three served on minesweepers in the war. Jim's two sisters, Nellie and Nancy, are still alive.

It was a tough life for the Thompsons, like all the fishing families. "I remember my dad would have me up on the boat as a little kid, up in the early hours of the morning," says Jim. "He would put me ashore at half past seven in the morning. I would walk to school with no proper shoes."

But still, tough life or not, Jim, a father of two girls late in life, wishes he'd had a son to continue the tradition of fishing. "We never had money but we knew the life, I never wanted it to end," he says.

How could he want it to end, a man who grew up hearing tales of rescue at sea throughout the ages from his dad, Jack? One story of Jack - whose own father served on The Zetland and was one of a team which won a famous rowing trophy and 100 guineas in 1873 - was that of the rescue at the wreck of The Rohilla in 1914.

The Rohilla, a First World War hospital ship, was bombarded by waves before sinking off the Whitby shoreline. The Scarborough lifeboat could not get near and the Tees lifeboat, manned by Jack, attempted a rescue. But the Tees lifeboat was battered by the waves and eventually began to sink. Jack and the team held on for their own lives until, they too, were rescued at the height of the storm. The lifeboat team all survived, but of the 220 crew of The Rohilla, only 146 made it ashore.

Jim himself remembers the wreck of The Walrus in 1937. "My brother Jack was really unwell and my dad told him, 'you're not coming Jack, so don't try'. But Jack sneaked on at the other of the boat anyway and by the time they realised it was too late. They lost radio contact not long after and ended up being out for 16 hours on the same job.

"I was ashore at the time waiting for them coming back but dad took the lifeboat into Hartlepool. He knew his business, you see, the storm was too bad and dad knew they couldn't take it to the Tees.

"Dad was black and blue at the end - they all were, out all night - but not a life lost. His eyes were full of broken blood and his eyelids full of salt, he was battered, aching all over. They ended up spending their time waiting all morning in a bus queue in Hartlepool. There was no transport for them to come home, it was the bus or nothing after 16 hours rescue at sea. That just wouldn't happen today. And it's a good thing it wouldn't, too."

Still Jim's stories come, all punctuated with the inevitable words, "don't build me up, man, I was just one of 'em. All the fishermen and lifeboatmen did their bit". Not that the lifeboatmen ever did it for personal profit. Legends abound of fisherfolk looting wealthy men's wrecks, but saving life was always sacrosanct.

"I remember once there was a little lass stranded way out," remembers Jim. "My mate Twacker, pulled her out by her hair and saved her life. Her mother came up to us with a roll of notes as thick as your hand. Well, there was no way we were taking that.

"Next day the little girl herself came and gave us her sweets, her bag of humbugs. We took that. It was so nice. Something like that from the little girl we saved. I always remember that."

Jim, who was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1977, has talked to many a reporter over the years. Like all good lifeboatmen, he knows the value of telling the world about the good work of the lifeboat service. "I remember our mates would say in the pub, 'between you Thompsons and Wilf Mannion, we can't get a decent read of the paper'." And yet a more modest man, and a more modest family, you could not wish to meet.

Today, the tradition of the Thompsons is kept alive by Jim's nephew, Rodney, a man who served on the Redcar lifeboat for 20 years and still works as a skipper of the Tees pilot cutter. The tales of the Thompsons at sea are not over yet.