Joan >Perhaps there should be pension records for the widows? A small gratuity or lump sum payment may have been paid to the wife if a man died on duty, but no pension would have been due to next of kin of a naval rating, although different rules applied to officers. Ratings' families would have to wait until the carnage of the First World War shone a very bright light on the shortcomings regarding the maintenance of service families and prompted the introduction of the equivalent of marriage allowances for serving personnel and pensions to those dependents who lost the bread winner whilst he was on duty. One occasionally reads of collections being made on behalf of personnel being lost, say if a ship went down, but this wasn't always the case, although a sale of a man's effects to a ship's company i.e. his uniform etc., was the traditional method of raising money for the next of kin, and a surprisingly large sums of money were sometimes raised, with items being put back into the sale to be sold again, but in this case, probably not being on board a ship I wouldn't have thought that much could have been raised when 3 men died, since most of the men serving at a coast guard station would be married with families. There was little awareness of health and safety as we know it today, and it is apparent that many accidents, such as the one that you relate, were all too common during the 19th Century, and I can think of many similar accidents along the south coast of England, but am unaware of any further meaningful investigation etc. regarding the events unless it involved the actual loss of a naval vessel. About the only remedial action I can remember reading about was the introduction, in the 1860s, of a steam ferry to take personnel from Portsmouth Harbour out to RN ships lying at Spithead, but I suspect that there was not only a safety aspect here, but the saving of money for the users, since prior to the introduction of the ferry, if a ship's boat was not available one had to use a waterman's boat to get ashore and return, and boating accidents in that stretch of water were all too frequent, often involving loss of life. One gets the feeling that about the only things that resulted in serious inquiries were accidents that had cost the Admiralty money, such as gunnery and engineroom accidents, although I stand to be corrected ? It is perhaps worth pointing out to others who may read this that it is possible to download a lot of CoastGuard material for ADM 175 from the National Archives, with which it is possible, in many cases, to trace the career of a member of the CoastGuard where ever you live ! At the last count I think I counted 114 volumes covering the period dated from roughly 1820-1920, about 22 Gb. of files. Paul On Sat, 18 Jun 2011 11:08:51 +1000, "Joan & Peter Gibbs" <joan.peter.gibbs.3@bigpond.com> wrote: >Some time ago we posted a query to the list concerning my great grandfather Coast Guard John BITTLE (boatman) (aka GEIL taken from his mothers maiden name GILL and used throughout his Royal Navy and later Coast Guard career), b.1839 Kenton, Devon. Tony Davey gave great assistance trying to trace his death in Claggan, Ireland. Ultimately this proved to be near Belmullet and we were fortunate that a local library found a newspaper cutting relating the circumstances of his drowning on the 27th August 1877 whilst manning a Coast Guard Galley with two others, Walsh and Harwood (chief boatman), who also drowned. >The question is, surely there would have been an official coast guard record of this event as they were ostensibly on duty at the time sailing from Belmullet down to the coast guard base at Claggan? Perhaps there should be pension records for the widows? A couple of years ago we visited the archives at Kew and asked this same question but unfortunately they were unable to find or suggest any further information. >Happy to send off list the newspaper cutting if anyone can help? Thank you, Joan Gibbs, Queensland, Australia.