Seventeen lives remembered

On 15 November 1928, the Rye Harbour lifeboat Mary Stanford launched in dreadful weather to assist a vessel in distress. It capsized, and all seventeen members of its crew lost their lives.

The RNLI records the enduring impact on the village and the annual acts of remembrance. This was a real tragedy involving local families, and it deserves to be remembered in its own right.

The disaster is one of the historical threads connecting past and present in The Gospel in the Storm. The novel’s mystery is fictional; the courage and loss of the lifeboat crew are not.