Object of the month: Henry Freeman's cork lifejacket

Each month we take one object from the museum cases and tell its story properly. This month: a replica of the cork lifejacket associated with the most famous photograph ever taken in this town.

The ninth of February, 1861

A gale out of the south-east had been building for days, and by that morning it was driving ships onto the coast faster than they could be counted. Whitby's lifeboat went out five times. On the sixth launch — to the schooner Merchant, driven ashore off the West Pier — a wave struck the boat broadside within sight of hundreds of people on the pier, and capsized her. Twelve of the thirteen crew drowned, most of them within yards of their families.

The thirteenth was Henry Freeman, a 25-year-old former brickmaker on his first day of lifeboat service. He was also, not coincidentally, the only man aboard wearing the new cork lifejacket recently issued by the RNLI — a design most of the old hands distrusted and refused.

The photograph

Some years later Frank Meadow Sutcliffe — the photographer whose images define Victorian Whitby — sat Freeman down in his sou'wester and cork jacket and made the portrait that has appeared in practically every history of sea rescue since: a big, steady, weathered man looking straight through the lens. Freeman went on to serve the Whitby lifeboats for over forty years, many of them as coxswain, and helped save several hundred lives. The disaster that orphaned his first crew also settled the argument about lifejackets for good — after 1861, the cork jacket became standard.

Why it matters here

Whitby has launched lifeboats since 1802 — before the RNLI itself existed — and the station below St Mary's continues that service today. Several of our oral-history interviewees are lifeboat family: one, recorded in 2011, could name every man in the 1861 crew from memory, taught to her as a child "so they'd not be forgot."

The jacket, the Sutcliffe portrait and the station's service boards are together in the maritime room. Free to visit, six days a week, Church Street.