The Wreckers, by Bella Bathurst

A hundred yards from the gift shop with its ships in bottles and china hedgehogs is the sea, and beneath the sea, a graveyard. The picturesque features of the seaside, the lighthouse and the rocks, have a desperate history. Often seaside resorts were developed during a period when the picturesque meant the sublime, and the sublime, in its original sense meant the the terrible.

Today a visit to the seaside is often a heritage experience, yet the heritage of the sea is ambiguous. Not only the voices of the drowned are lost in the surf; the voices of the witnesses are lost too, in guilty silence.

Bella Bathurst, well known for her history of the Stevenson family's contribution to lighthouse engineering, has travelled around Great Britain and its islands to construct an oral history of wrecking. The literature of wrecking is unreliable, most of it made during the period when the taste for the sublime dissolved into melodrama. The oral history is merely shifty - all wrecking is a crime - but Bathurst is evidently a persuasive interviewer, and has opened a magic casement on to a lost world on the edge of living memory.

Anyone who has taken a washed-up beach ball home is legally a wrecker. All flotsam, jetsam and marine detritus such as dead porpoises should be reported to the Receiver of Wrecks, an ancient office which has come to rest on a lone marine archaeologist based in Southampton. What most people understand by wrecking is the deliberate luring of ships on to rocks. There is a lot of water between these two extremes.

The temptations of wrecking are obvious. "For a fully-laden general vessel to run aground in an accessible position on an island in winter is more or less like having Selfridges crash land in your back garden." Or sometimes more like a branch of Victoria Wine. This is the plot of the charming Ealing comedy Whisky Galore. Often when casks of brandy bobbed ashore, men, women and even children broke them open on the spot and drank themselves into a stupor. Many drunks died of exposure on the beach.

The shipwrecked could expect little compassion. Any corpse washed ashore would be stripped of its valuables and possibly its clothes. The question is, what happened to the half-drowned? It is suspected they were finished off. In both the Orkneys and Cornwall there was a powerful conviction that any man rescued from the sea would live to harm his rescuer. The superstition was gender specific; Bathurst has come across of a case where the almost legitimate flotsam of a wreck was shunned because the shipwreck had drowned women and children. The Orcadians generally took what they could use themselves or trade in kind. On the Cheshire coast where plunder was sold for cash in Liverpool and the emigrant ships made female casualties more commonplace, it's said drowned women were found with earlobes bitten off for their earrings.

Bathurst has found a variety of wrecking traditions dotted around the coast, from the Beach Companies of Norfolk who boned up on legal expertise to claim their spoils formally, to the treeless Hebrides where shipwrecks were the sole source of timber for building. In spite of adamant denials that ships were deliberately wrecked, it is plain that the main interest of wreckers was looting rather than life-saving. Stranded mariners and their passengers were taken off as an afterthought, and at a price. To be fair, property over life was the priority of the ship owners, the insurers and the authorities too. When an interest in saving life at sea developed in the early 19th century, lifeboatmen were recruited from wreckers who had the interest and the experience. Many of the gentle and reflective old men Bathurst interviews are highly decorated lifeboatmen.

So Britain's best loved charity was built on piracy. It is the sort of topsy-turvy detail which delights Bathurst. In Celtic mythology the sea was believed to be a kind of inversion of the land and the macabre history of wrecking has a carnival element, in such images as the humble croft fitted with a grand piano and simple fisher folk washing down their porridge with a glass of ever so slightly salty claret.

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