Grace Darling was born on this day 197 years ago in Northumberland, England. The daughter of a lighthouse keeper, Grace became famous at the age of 22, after an incident which occurred in the early hours of 7 September 1838. Looking from the upstairs window of the Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands, she spotted some survivors of a shipwreck on a nearby rock.
The weather was too extreme for a lifeboat to be launched from the mainland, so Grace and her father set off from the lighthouse at around 7am in a rowing boat. Staying to the lee of the islands, they traversed a distance of about half a mile to reach the survivors. Grace’s father leapt onto the rock to assist the nine survivors while Grace took the oars and held the boat off from the rock. They took five of the survivors back with them in the first trip, including a woman whose two sons had drowned and a man who was badly injured.
Grace’s father then returned with two of the men to collect the remaining four from the rock. As news of the rescue spread, the story soon caught the national imagination, and Grace became a folk heroine. Queen Victoria gave her an award for her courageous actions, and she received numerous letters asking for locks of her hair or scraps of the dress she wore during the rescue. Grace died of tuberculosis four years later, but the legend lived on.