RNLI Grace Darling Museum

The Original Rescue Coble

The centrepiece of the museum is the actual coble — a traditional flat-bottomed wooden fishing and inshore boat — used by Grace and her father William Darling to row out from Longstone Lighthouse to the stricken SS Forfarshire on the night of 7 September 1838. The coble is one of the most emotionally powerful objects in any British maritime museum: a small, fragile-looking vessel that conveyed two people through conditions that had already broken a paddle steamer.

It is the single most important artefact of the Grace Darling story and an irreplaceable piece of Victorian maritime and social history.

Portraits of Grace Darling

The museum holds a significant collection of portraits of Grace Darling, including works commissioned during the four years between the rescue and her death in 1842.

Artists competed for Grace's portrait sittings as her celebrity spread across Britain, and the collection illustrates how her image was constructed and reproduced in Victorian popular culture. The portraits range from formal oil paintings to prints and lithographs produced for mass distribution — a revealing window into how fame was manufactured in the early Victorian period, long before photography could do the same work.

The range of images demonstrates how Grace was interpreted differently by different artists: as romantic heroine, practical rescuer, and tragic symbol.

The SS Forfarshire Disaster — Story and Artefacts

The museum presents a thorough account of the wreck of the SS Forfarshire on the Big Harcar rocks of the Farne Islands in the early hours of 7 September 1838.

The Forfarshire was a steam-powered paddle vessel travelling from Hull to Dundee; her engines failed in severe storms, she was driven onto the rocks, and of the 61 people aboard, 43 died. Artefacts recovered from the wreck, accounts of the disaster in the contemporary press, and documentary evidence of the subsequent inquiry are all presented to give context to Grace's rescue of nine survivors from the rock — an act of seamanship and courage that would transform her into a national figure within days.

Grace's Celebrity — Gifts, Letters, and Public Adulation

The museum holds a remarkable collection of gifts, letters, and documents that arrived for Grace Darling from an adoring public after the rescue — a phenomenon without real precedent in British history at that time.

The collection illustrates the extraordinary nature of her celebrity: poetry, commemorative objects, letters from aristocrats and working people alike, petitions, and formal tributes. Studying the objects and letters in the collection gives a vivid sense of how the Victorian public's emotional response to Grace was channelled and amplified by the press, and how her story spoke to contemporary values of courage, femininity, duty, and sacrifice.