Pharos: The Yorkshire trawler which met its mysterious fate in icy waters off the British coast

Sunk without trace… John Vincent reports on the Yorkshire trawler Pharos, which met its mysterious fate in icy waters off the British coast.

Disaster is an ever-present danger for "they who go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters", to quote a line from the Book of Psalms.

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Our oceans are littered with the wrecks of an estimated three million vessels resting undiscovered around the world after succumbing to the violence of nature.

Painters, particularly in the days before modern lifeboats and marine radar, frequently depicted dramatic scenes of all types of craft foundering on rocky outcrops and lifeboatmen lugging their craft into mountainous seas to battle their way to stranded sailors as onlookers watch helplessly from the shore.

SHIPS AHOY: David Duggleby valuer Holly Hammond with the collection of marine paintings, including Pharos and Ellesmere. Pictures: David DugglebySHIPS AHOY: David Duggleby valuer Holly Hammond with the collection of marine paintings, including Pharos and Ellesmere. Pictures: David Duggleby
SHIPS AHOY: David Duggleby valuer Holly Hammond with the collection of marine paintings, including Pharos and Ellesmere. Pictures: David Duggleby

Many vessels, of course, came to grief far away from the coast, the piteous lamentations of the crew unheard. One such, pictured here, was the early steam trawler Pharos , built in 1901 at the Hull shipyard of Cook, Welton & Gemmell for Grimsby trawler owners Roberts & Ruthven. Named after the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, created to keep sailors safe, she was involved in a serious collision with the Dutch steamship Gelderland in heavy fog 17 miles off Spurn Point in 1903.

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Fully repaired, Pharos (registration number GY 1211) sailed for the Faroes fishing grounds on September 23, 1906, only to be posted missing two days later. No distress call was heard and there was nothing to indicate her fate. She was later officially declared lost with all hands and her fate remains a mystery to this day.

The somewhat naive 1902 oil, entitled Grimsby Trawler Pharos at Sea, by "pierhead painter" George Race (1877-1959), a blacksmith's son from Brightside Bierlow, Sheffield, surfaced at David Duggleby of Scarborough, where it fetched £915. Race, who received no formal training, was among a group of marine artists who specialised in portraits of ships for the seamen who crewed them.

It was among a clutch of paintings of early Humber steam trawlers with remarkable stories attached, discovered in the collection of a North Lincolnshire maritime history enthusiast.

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Another doomed vessel, also painted by Race, in 1898, was the Hull-built, Grimsby-based trawler Seti, one of the first shipping casualties of the First World War. It fetched £975.

The war was barely a month old when she was captured by a torpedo boat, which was part of a German squadron that had been laying mines off the mouth of the Humber. The crew were taken prisoner and Seti was sunk.

A third painting , a 1913 watercolour by Hull artist Joseph Arnold of the local steam trawler Ellesmere, newsworthy for saving the crew of a sinking rival ship, went for £1,220.

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The former Royal Navy vessel, then named Helga, was involved in the Easter Rising when British forces used her to shell areas around Dublin, including Liberty Hall, Dublin, in April, 1916 and in 1918 she was credited with the sinking of a submarine off the Isle of Man.

Renamed Muirchu (Irish for Sea Hound), she was the Irish Free State's only sea-going asset for many years, acting as the country's fishery protection vessel.

Muirchu was on her way to the breakers' yard on the night of May 7, 1947, when she began sinking in the Irish Sea five miles off the Wexford coast.

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Her 11-man crew and a several civilians on board were rescued in the nick of time by the Ellesmere, built on the Clyde in 1903 and which had been involved in numerous brushes with Muirchu over the years. Ellesmere was fishing nearby and spotted Muirchu’s distress signal.

Radio distress calls were in their infancy in 1906, when Pharos met its fate.

The first instructions were for ships in distress to use the Morse signal CQD but in 1906, at a convention in Berlin, the three dots, three dashes, three dots system soon became known as SOS as it bore the same dot-dash sequence as those letters. Incidentally, the letters were not chosen to stand for "Save Our Souls", as many believe.

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They do not relate to any specific words and were used because they were easy to recognise and transmit.

A host of marine pictures, many by Staithes Group artists, surfaced at the Duggleby's art sale, including watercolours Looking Out to Sea - Staithes Fisherwoman and Daughter by Robert Jobling (1841-1923), which fetched £1,950, and his Preparing the Coble at Runswick Bay (£975); Henry Scott Tuke's The Viking - Clipper Ship Under Tow (£1,035); Frederic William Jackson's Unloading the Boat - Whitby Harbour (£1,220); Robert Farren's Heading Home with the Catch (£610); Frank Henry Mason's Off Scarborough (£365); and Hirst Walker's The Rock of Linus (£415).

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