Alexandra Lifeboat Blog

by Roselyn Fauth and Geoff Cloake 2025

Timaru_Alexandra_Lifeboat_Story Sheet_8 x A4.pdf

This is the story of our Alexandra lifeboat. Why it matters to us today.

Built in Britain in 1862 and brought to Timaru in 1863, the Alexandra lifeboat was ordered by the Canterbury Provincial Government at the time, from England, at a cost of £300, for the people of this town. At the time, Timaru’s coast was exposed and unforgiving. Ships anchored offshore in the open Roadstead, and when the sea rose suddenly, lives were often at risk. As the harbour works and modern port infrastructure reduced the need for open Roadstead rescues, Alexandra’s role shifted from working vessel to community taonga. She appeared in parades and commemorations, a physical reminder that progress was paid for in risk, loss, and volunteer grit. The vessel was put on display at the bay for its 50th anniversary and then relocated to the Timaru Landing Services building, and then into storage at the Timaru Botanic Gardens. In 2025 it returned to the bay thanks to the creation of its new home championed and fundraised for by the community.

Congratulations to the Timaru Suburban Lions. They have turned a long discussed dream into timber, steel, and shelter, raising the funds and momentum to bring Alexandra back to Caroline Bay in a purpose built structure where the public can see her, and where her story can be told properly.

Each time she has been relocated, it has marked a change in Timaru’s relationship with the sea: from survival, to prevention, to remembrance, to education. The Lions have added a new chapter, one that returns her to the Bay, close to the water she once faced, and close to the families who still feel that history in their bones.

From a community effort, one of our most powerful relics of our past now has a place to stand, look seaward, and remember.

Ships at sea could loose their anchor and drift into danger. This is a very old anchor at the Caroline Bay Playground.

Shipyard where the Alexandra was built, Britain. Based on a image of Messrs Forrest of Limehouse life-boat building yard where Alexandra Timaru Lifeboat was built - The Illustrated London News Google Books - Page 478 

Royal National Life Boat Institution of Great Britain Plans 

An Engineering article about the RNLI lifeboat design.

The Alexandra arrived at a moment of global change in sea rescue. In 1854, Queen Victoria granted a Royal Charter to the National Lifeboat Institution, later known as the RNLI, giving authority to a new, coordinated approach to saving lives at sea. Central to this was the development of self-righting lifeboats, designed to survive capsizing and heavy surf. 

One of the strongest supporters of this work was Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, a leading Victorian philanthropist who helped fund lifeboats, equipment, crews, and seafarers’ welfare. Through this combination of design, organisation, and philanthropy, lifesaving technology advanced rapidly and spread far beyond Britain.

Prince Albert Edward “Bertie” and Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Illustration based on the wedding announcement of the couple. Invitation, 1901, New Zealand, by Benoni William Lytton White, A.D. Willis Ltd. Purchased 2001. Te Papa (GH009568).

By Roselyn Fauth

By Roselyn Fauth

Artists and designers have long helped communities recognise courage and service. Medals are one way we do this. A bravery medal is more than a piece of metal. It is a symbol. When a medal is designed, images and words are carefully chosen to honour courage, care for others, and actions taken in difficult moments. Today, you can be the designer.

Artists have always used images to tell stories. A stamp is a tiny canvas. When an artist designs one, they choose a moment in time and share it with the world. Today, you can be the artist. In 2025, the 1862 Alexandra Lifeboat returned to Caroline Bay. This template invites you to design a stamp that captures that moment and shares its story of sea rescues, the heros, those lost and the way the community has used the lifeboat to reflect and remember our maritime stories and history.

By Roselyn Fauth

1856 LIFEBOAT, DESIGNED BY JAMES PEAKE, ESQ.. ASSISTANT MASTER SHIPWRIGHT AT H.M. DOCKYARD, WOOLWICH. ADOPTED BY THE ROYAL NATIONAL LIFEBOAT INSTITUTION. CONSTRUCTED BY MESSRS. FORRESTT, OF LIMEHOUSE. illustration By J Peakes. Published in The Engineer, Vol 201, P20. READ THE ENGINEER'S 1856 ARTICLE ON PEAKE'S LIFEBOAT. The lifeboat Alexandra, built in Britain and shipped to New Zealand, followed the self righting design developed by James Peake for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. While based on standard RNLI lifeboat patterns, boats supplied to colonial ports were often built with slight variations in width and fittings to suit local surf conditions and long distance transport. This also has some fantastic information: rnli.org/archive-and-library

Before radios, engines, or modern safety gear, rescue at sea depended on muscle, courage, and the judgement of those willing to launch into breaking surf. On the Timaru coast, where ships lay offshore and waves could turn deadly in moments, survival often came down to one boat and the people brave enough to crew it. That boat was the lifeboat Alexandra.

By Roselyn Fauth

Screenshot of the sign design in progress by graphic artist Roselyn Fauth 2025.

Its been a few years of research by my father Geoff Cloake and I, and we are really excited to see it all come together for our signage for the Alexandra lifeboat shelter. I realise not everyone wants to stdy the timeline, so here is a story instead to help you imagine what happened.

This is not just a vessel... Imagine yourself standing on Timaru’s stony beach in 1860 as a storm rolls in. Six experienced Deal boatmen, known internationally for their surf-launching skill, attempt to reach the Wellington using a surfboat. The ship survives. Its rescuers do not. Two men drown and become the first recorded burials in Timaru’s cemetery. Would you have risked your life with no proper gear?

This was Timaru before the breakwater. This is why the Alexandra was ordered from Britain in 1862, because people like you would not stand by and watch more lives lost.

By Roselyn Fauth and Geoff Cloake

Before Timaru had roads or bridges, the sea was teh communities lifeline. Pretty much everything and everyone arrived through the restless Roadstead, where ships lay exposed to sudden squalls, dragging anchors in dangerous swells while small boats ferried people and cargo to shore. Wrecks were common, and rescue was left to those brave enough to race into the surf in open boats: Deal boatmen, the Rocket Brigade, and the crew of a wooden lifeboat built in 1862 and sent from Britain to serve this young port. Her name was the Alexandra.

For years she carried a mixed reputation. A fatal capsize in 1869 cast a long shadow, and by 1882 many considered her “laid up and ordinary”. Yet she was still cared for, still ready. And on Black Sunday, 14 May 1882, when a calm blue sky turned treacherous and three rescue boats overturned in heaving seas, the Alexandra proved why she had been built in the first place.

What followed became her finest hour. Before a stunned crowd of more than a thousand, the old lifeboat rolled and righted herself again and again as her crews fought to save the men scattered among wreckage from the Benvenue and City of Perth. Across three desperate missions in fading light, the Alexandra capsized four times and still returned to the surf, ultimately helping bring 43 men back from certain death.

It was a day of courage and heartbreak. Ten men were lost, yet dozens survived because volunteers refused to stop rowing. Timaru has never forgotten this moment. The Alexandra was later paraded through the streets as an emblem of gratitude and grief, and today she remains one of the oldest surviving lifeboats of her type in the world. Her story anchors a much larger one about a community shaped by the sea, and by those who chose to face it...

By Roselyn Fauth

ILLUSTRATION OF A ROCKET BRIGADE RESCUE. The British Coastguard and the Board of Trade, refined and standardised the early sea-rescue rocket-apparatus designs. Image is copyright IstockPhoto.

Imagine standing on Caroline Bay in the 1870s, watching a ship drag anchor in roaring sea swell. There is no breakwater, no tug, no Coastguard. Only a volunteer crew with a rocket apparatus and the hope that their line reaches the mast in time.

The Rocket Brigade saved people on ships close to the shore by firing a small rocket from the beach to carry a light line over the wrecked ship. Once the ship’s crew hauled that line aboard and secured it to the mast, the brigade sent out heavier ropes to establish a strong, taut hawser between shore and vessel. They attached a breeches buoy, for people to climb into. They then hauled each person across the surf to land. It was used in Timaru from 1866.

By Roselyn Fauth

The 1862 Alexandra lifeboat is one of South Canterbury’s special maritime treasures. Long before roads stitched the region together, rescue was done by oar and courage, and the Alexandra was at the centre of it. Built in England and arriving in Timaru in 1863, she is today one of the oldest surviving lifeboats of her kind anywhere in the world. Bringing the boat back to the bay is so much more than what we physically see. Its about what the vessel stands for. For generations, she stood as a reminder of the people who faced the sea so others might live...

A medal that was up for auction: https://www.noble.com.au/auctions/lot?id=483721 The Freemasons of St Johns Lodge awarded medals for gallantry during the rescue on 3 July 1882.

At first glance, it is just silver. Small enough to pin to your chest. Smooth at the edges. The kind of object that might be catalogued, boxed, and eventually forgotten once its story is reduced to a label, or in this case appear in a online auction. But when you look closely, the medal begins is more than simple. It holds so many stories. Tales of the event that called on the brave, the people who struck the medal, designed it, awarded it, recieved it and cared for it all these years.

On one side, a lifeboat struggles in heavy seas. The waves rise higher than the vessel. Above it shines down the All-seeing Eye, the Eye of Providence. On the reverse, a wreath of laurel and oak encloses a name. Not a ship. Not a disaster. A person. The inscription records bravery in saving life in the Timaru roadstead.

It is only when you stare at the medal for a while that its weight becomes apparent.

This particular medal has travelled far. One example surfaced at auction in Australia more than a century later, catalogued and offered for sale. Another is held in national collections like Te Papa, which I can't show you because it is under copyright, and another is in the South Canterbury Museum. Each reappearance raises the same question... How did something made for a single event, a single act of thanks, come to live such a long and wandering life. The story it carries begins on Sunday 14 May 1882...

https://www.wuhootimaru.co.nz/images/WuHoo_-_Maritime_Communication_-_Design_A_Medal_251202_By_Roselyn_Fauth.pdf

By Roselyn Fauth

View of township looking across water to foreshore with Southern Alps in background.  Pencil and watercolour (A-157-018) by Arthur Lagden Haylock (1860-1948) c1878. Arthur probably created this when he worked in Timaru as a cadet in the Lands Office. Courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

When I joined CPlay as a volunteer a few years ago, I never imagined that a community playground would pull me into the history of Timaru’s maritime past. I was one of a small group of volunteers who wanted to upgrade the Caroline Bay playground and theme it around the Bay’s history. To do that, we actually had to learn the history first. Seven years later after many rabbit holes and side quests I keep thinking my history hunt is complete, until I have another question or find conflicting information. Fortunately the hunt has been easier thanks to the archiving and information gathering done by so many others.

By Roselyn Fauth

James Balfour's grave in the Dunedin Southern Cemetery. Photo Roselyn Fauth 2026.  John Melville Balfour was born in 1831 and died in 1869. He was a Scottish-trained engineer and a former employee of the Stevenson engineering firm of lighthouse engineers. He was appointed Marine Engineer to the Otago Provincial Government and arrived in late 1863. One of his first priorities on arrival was the erection of the Taiaroa Head Lighthouse. In 1866, after the establishment of the Marine Board of New Zealand, he was appointed Marine Engineer and Inspector of Steamers. He drowned in 1869 at the age of 38. He is recognised in engineering histories as one of the outstanding engineers who contributed significantly to New Zealand’s development. He played a key role in establishing New Zealand’s lighthouse system along Scottish lines and he impacted the course of the Timaru harbour development with his experiments and early plans. He drowned in 1869 at the age of 38.

It is easy to stand on the safe edge of Caroline Bay today and forget how unforgiving this coastline once was. Before the breakwater, before the harbour, before cranes and container ships, Timaru was a wild beach of surf and rolling stony shingle. Every ship that anchored in the roadstead at that time carried a risk, and every rescue launched from the shore often asked people to place their lives in the hands of the sea.

Into this world stepped James Melville Balfour. He was born in Edinburgh in 1831, steeped in the traditions of the great Scottish lighthouse builders. His early training with the Stevensons, and his family connection to Robert Louis Stevenson, placed him firmly within a lineage of precision, bravery, and coastal engineering at its finest. When the Otago Provincial Government sought expert advice, the Stevensons recommended Balfour. He arrived in 1863 with energy that seemed almost inexhaustible.

Benvenue Disaster 50th Jubilee, 1932. A portrait of three surviving crew members of the lifeboats involved in the Benvenue wreck, taken on the occasion of the fiftieth jubilee, 14 May 1932. Depicts the three men as (from left to right) as Isaac James Bradley, Carl George Vogeler, and Philip Bradley. South Canterbury Museum. 14/05/1932 CN 1457. https://timdc.pastperfectonline.com/photo/06F405BF-F04D-4339-A7A7-381944387269

Vogeler, Carl George, 1860-1934

Bradley, Philip, 1853-1936

Bradley, Isaac James, 1860-1936

By Roselyn Fauth

Long before modern radios and satellite navigation, sailors relied on a range of communication systems to share information, send warnings, and save lives. Timaru’s maritime history is closely tied to these methods, which carried news of shipwrecks, guided vessels into harbour, and connected seafarers across long distances. Three of the most important systems were Morse code, the International Code of Signals, and semaphore.