George William Manby
George William Manby was born at Denver in Norfolk and for a short while attended the same Downham Market school as Horatio Nelson. It is doubtful the twelve year old Nelson would have remembered a child seven years younger but the common experience later assumed great significance in Manby’s life. Manby’s father had fought with the Welsh Fusiliers under Wolfe at Quebec and his son trained as a gunner at Woolwich. At seventeen, he volunteered to serve in the American War of Independence but he was turned down on grounds of his height. He was never a sea captain but a served with the Cambridge Militia – the equivalent of a nineteenth century, Territorial Army. Manby eventually inherited a small estate at Hilgay, near King’s Lynn and Lordship of the Manor but things didn’t go well and he moved to South Wales. Manby’s wife sought relaxation in the arms of a Captain Pogson of the East India Company, who shot Manby in the back of his head. Taproom gossip had him walking away from a duel. The lovers fled the country, leaving Manby to nurse his wounds and his debts. At thirty eight years of age, he wrote a treatise on the threat posed by the French. His pamphlet brought him to the attention of the Secretary at War and looking like a tramp, Manby desperately offered his services to assassinate Napoleon. The Secretary had been a fellow officer in the Cambridge militia and instead decently appointed Manby Master of Great Yarmouth barracks with the rank of Lieutenant-Captain.
In the nineteenth century, the seafarer’s lot was dangerous. The East Coast was the country’s main north-south highway but between 1866 and 1875, nearly ten thousand ships were lost – excluding fishing vessels. About one percent of fishermen drowned every year – which seems a low figure until one considers that fishing for thirty years earned a thirty percent chance of drowning. The first chart of the North Sea wasn’t produced until 1847 and up to the end of the nineteenth century many skippers were illiterate.
Yarmouth Roads provide some scarce shelter along the East Coast and it was usual to see a large fleet of ships anchored off the harbour. On February 18th 1807, a storm swept a sinking merchantman onto the gun brig Snipe. She was carrying thirty French prisoners of war and a number of women and children but had to cut her cable and was swept on the beach close to the pier. The wreck was only sixty yards off the beach and a local pilot named Phineas Grimble bravely tried to get a line out to her but became so entangled with the rigging that the line he was carrying strangled him. No one made another attempt and only twenty souls out of a total of ninety-eight on board survived; the rest either drowned or died of cold and their cries were heard by everyone on the beach. Manby had stumbled across the paradox that ships are in greatest peril, not in the middle of vast oceans but when closest to shore. The loss of the Snipe clearly made a great impact on him and he wrote:
“I then made a vow that if it pleased God, I would produce a means to prevent a similar occurrence.”
Manby remembered that as a young gunner at Downham, he managed to fire a line right over the church (he broke one of the church windows in the process). After some initial difficulties stopping the line closest to the shot being burnt through, he developed a mortar small enough to be carried on horse-back. The following year, the brig Elizabeth of Plymouth stranded 150 yards from the shore at Great Yarmouth and with Manby in charge, the crew of seven were all rescued. Manby is reported to have fallen to his knees and cried but overcame his emotion sufficiently to persuade the master, John Prouting to write a statement describing the incident. The Navy viewed the soldier’s attempts to help sailors in difficulty as impertinent but Parliament voted him two thousand pounds for his invention. The famous Manby Mortar was used in the rescue of a thousand people and only became obsolete with the arrival of the Boxer rocket in 1865.
Manby was never quite satisfied with his lot and felt his inventions should have been worth a knighthood; a delusion regularly often reinforced by various courtiers. He wrote regularly to Dawson Turner, a wealthy Yarmouth banker and patron of John Sell Cotman, complaining of government indifference. After the death of his first wife, Manby married Sophia Gooch. The arrangement failed to find favour with his bride’s brother, later Sir Thomas Sherlock Gooch and heir to the family fortune and a substantial estate in Suffolk. He regarded Manby as a penniless mountebank; an adventurer whose motive in courting the forty year old Sophia was to get hold of her fortune and he carried on a relentless campaign of slander and vilification against Manby. The success of this defamation was considerably aided by Manby’s own behaviour. He continued to spend long periods away in London and even Paris, hoping for the Legion d’Honneur; whilst his wife was left in Yarmouth in virtual penury to fend off creditors and a long suffering sergeant ran the barracks. Medals and minor honours were showered upon him and 1831 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; yet still no knighthood. Debt was a constant problem as Manby developed the ideas that flowed from his mind in the form of uncontrolled enthusiasms. When the owner of his London rooms seized his medals, Manby was panic-stricken but Dawson Turner bailed him out again. Manby was pompous, proud; full of his own importance and ridiculous in the eyes of many of his contemporaries; yet he made a significant contribution.
He experimented with fitting wooden barrels into under the thwarts of a lifeboats as an early example of built-in buoyancy. James Beeching built an example was built in Yarmouth, which for some reason, was tested in Lowestoft. Manby was not popular there, whilst safety at sea was regarded by many on the beach as an unwarranted intrusion into their rightful living. The lifeboat was launched and floated when filled with water but the lifeboatmen began to rock it from side to side. It turned sideways to the tide and capsized. Manby couldn’t swim; indeed confessed to a terror of the water. The crew helped his Beccles tailor ashore (history does not relate why on earth he was on board) but the diminutive Manby was left to his own devices. He later remarked that the incident proved any man could swim if put to it but was afraid he had hastened the end of an Admiral Pakenham, who despite gout had gone into the sea to help him.
A whaling trip to Greenland generated similar resentment of his ideas from seamen but resulted is the invention of a harpoon with an exploding head – Manby cannot possibly have realised the implications of his invention on ballistics over the following century and a half. He produced an early percussion cap in an age of muzzle-loading, flintlock weapons, although he often wrote that the idea of taking life rather than saving it was alien to him. He went on to design the first powered lifeboat, the first chemical fire extinguisher (which he named the ‘Extinctor’) and an elastic ‘jumping sheet’ to save people leaping from blazing buildings.
None of Captain Manby’s inventions won him the status and income that he so desperately sought. At the age of eighty he was finally removed from his position at Yarmouth barracks and moved to a modest little house on the High Road in Gorleston, looking out over South Denes to the impressive pillar erected to the memory of the Norfolk Hero. Whilst his wife was dying on the first floor, Manby’s lifelong delusions about Nelson lead him to transform the ground floor of the house into a rather sad little Nelson museum and continuous correspondence with the Nelson family. He commissioned his own memorial, which he had erected in the tiny front garden of his house. A later occupant found the mortgaged marble structure so out of scale that he had it removed by the council. The tiny Captain Manby died penniless and alone at the age of eighty-nine. Despite his delusions and pomposity, it doesn’t seem quite what a man who’d saved so many lives deserved. Manby Cottage hasn’t even warranted a blue plaque.
