How the Grace Bussell legend was made

Eight weeks after the SS Georgette went ashore at Calgardup Bay, a sixteen-year-old girl who had ridden down to the beach was being described in print as Australia's Grace Darling. Fifty-nine years later, a survivor of the wreck told a newspaper that the captain had stood on the bridge waving a revolver during a terrible storm, and that the girl had ridden eight times through roaring breakers to save nearly fifty people.

Almost none of the second account is true. What is interesting is that the man who gave it had been on the ship. He was twenty-one years old on the morning of the wreck, and eighty when he was interviewed, and in the intervening years the story had been running in the newspapers and the poems and the dinner-table conversations of the colony continuously. By 1935 it had replaced what he remembered.

This page traces how that happened, decade by decade, from the documents.

The frame arrives ready-made

On 31 January 1877 — fifty-one days after the wreck — a piece appeared in the Fremantle Inquirer under the heading "A Western Australian Grace Darling." It was written by H. C. Barrett, and it fixed the comparison that would define the story for the next century and a half.

The invocation was deliberate. Grace Darling was the Northumbrian lighthouse keeper's daughter who, in the early hours of 7 September 1838, had rowed out with her father William through a gale to take nine survivors off the rocks from the wrecked Forfarshire. That was a genuinely remarkable act, and the sea that night was by every account ferocious.

But the frame was already distorted before it reached Western Australia. By 1877 the Darling legend in Britain had consumed the woman. She had been painted, lionised, subjected to public mania in her own lifetime, her hair sold as relics, her image reproduced on pottery. She died of tuberculosis at twenty-six. And her father's equal part in the rescue had been steadily written out by the same sentimentalising process that turned a competent woman in a rowing boat into a Victorian heroine.

So Barrett was not comparing Grace Bussell to what Grace Darling had done. He was comparing her to what the legend said Grace Darling had done — a young woman, alone, riding out into a storm and saving the shipwrecked through courage and feminine virtue. The second-order distortion was built into the borrowed frame from the start.

What the closest witnesses actually said

Later in 1877, Henry Clay of the Colonial Secretary's Office began assembling testimonials in support of a Royal Humane Society medal. He approached two of the passengers.

George Leake was a twenty-year-old law student who had been aboard, had bailed water through the morning, and had watched the landing from the beach. He would later become Premier of Western Australia. Writing on 6 August 1877, he was careful in the manner of a man already training himself for the law:

I do not think that either of the riders were in any great danger at all for they did not get amongst the breakers as has been said in fact it would have been impossible either for a horse to keep its legs or a rider his seat in such a surf as there was there running. I hope it will not be thought that there is any attempt to detract anything from the praise due to Miss Bussell: indeed I consider she behaved admirably and had there been any necessity to go out further than she did, she would have attempted it without a moment's hesitation.

The passenger James Lambe wrote a fortnight later in similar terms:

The greatest depth to which she rode I would judge at about four feet. I did not see Miss Bussell plunge into the surf a second time, and to the best of my knowledge the woman and child were the only persons rescued by Miss Bussell.

Neither man was hostile. Neither had anything to gain. Both had been there.

The testimonial that prevailed

Set against them was Thomas Connor, the Georgette's owner, who had been aboard on the last voyage and who wrote to the Colonial Secretary's Office on 20 August 1877:

I hereby certify that I saw Miss Grace Bussell riding down a very precipitous hill at full speed, rush into the surf where the boat was capsized… and assisted twenty persons to reach the shore. During the time she was in the surf, her life was in great danger.

Connor had every reason to prefer this version. His ship had been lost with seven drowned in the capsized lifeboat, his pumps had failed, the marine inquiry was examining the maintenance of his vessel, and he was heavily exposed financially. A disaster that could be retold as a gallant rescue was worth a great deal to him.

His testimonial prevailed. In November 1877, at a meeting of the Royal Humane Society in Trafalgar Square, the silver medallion was voted unanimously to Miss Grace Vernon Bussell and the bronze medallion to Samuel Isaacs, described in the record as her black servant. The account read into the minutes had her riding down a very steep cliff at full speed, reaching a boat capsized in two and a half fathoms, and making for shore with women and children clinging to her horse. Isaacs was named separately and summarised in a sentence: he had returned to the boat and saved a man.

Reprinted from the London Standard into the Adelaide Register in January 1878, that account became the first official institutional record of the event. It established the hierarchy that held for the next hundred and fifty years — Grace first and Sam second, silver above bronze, her act narrated and his summarised.

The Society's own register, Entry 20,278, records the more prosaic detail: Grace was sixteen, the rescue took place at two in the afternoon, and the vessel lay seventy to seventy-four yards off the beach in two and a half fathoms.

The legend hardens

By 1916 the pictures had settled. A columnist in the Western Mail that year described images of Grace "splendidly mounted, bare-headed and with long flowing hair, riding into the open sea," with passengers clinging to her saddle girths and to her horse's tail. He mentioned that the Georgette had been under an experienced local skipper named Godfrey. He did not mention Sam Isaacs. He dated the wreck to the early seventies.

In May 1925 the poet May Kidson published a verse in the Perth Sunday Times titled "The Wreck of the Ship Georgette: To Our Then 'Grace Darling'." In it the sea runs high, the winds tear fiercely down a lone deserted shore, and a fair young girl charges repeatedly into the fray until fifty souls are saved. Nobody else appears in the poem at all.

The correction nobody absorbed

The following Sunday, a letter arrived from M. J. Archer of Calgardup Park, Margaret River — a man who lived at the place in question.

Archer wrote that the old identities of the district very much resented the fact that the principal person concerned in the rescue was usually ignored when the affair was mentioned in the press, presumably, he said, because he was black and a servant. Everyone in the district affirmed that Sam Isaacs had taken the initiative and had done a great deal more towards the actual rescue. Old Sam, he added, was very highly respected there.

Then Archer said something that ought to have stopped the legend where it stood. The sea had not been rough. The waves had not run high. It had been one of the calmest days ever known there. The sea, he wrote, was like a sheet of glass.

Kidson replied the Sunday after. She had told the tale as it was told to her, during a long visit to the Margaret River many years before. Had she heard of the black man referred to, she would gladly have included him. She then restated her three facts: that Grace Darling had saved fifty souls in deep water, that Grace Darling had received the medal of the Royal Humane Society, and that Grace Darling had received a gold watch from the British Government.

She used the Northumbrian woman's name all three times, as though the analogy had finished the job and eaten its subject. And all three facts were wrong in some particular: the watch came from a public subscription, not the British Government, and Sam Isaacs had received a bronze medallion at the same London meeting that gave Grace her silver.

Kidson knew none of this. She had been told a version of the story and had versified it faithfully. That is how the legend worked. It was not malicious. It was transmission.

Grace tells it herself

In December 1930 a journalist writing as "Candida" interviewed Grace — by then Mrs Fred Drake-Brockman — in Adelaide, where she was visiting her daughters.

Grace said that as a girl of fifteen she, with a black boy, had swum out to the wreck of the steamer Georgette and rescued practically all of the passengers and crew. She mentioned in passing that a grandson of Sam's, named George, helped her in her garden.

She had been sixteen, not fifteen. Nobody swam out to the wreck; the ship had grounded close in and the rescuers worked from the beach. Sam Isaacs went unnamed, reduced in her own telling to "a black boy." And his grandson was working in her garden — the social arrangement that had structured the rescue in 1876 still structuring the two families fifty-four years later.

Either the legend had so thoroughly replaced her own memory of the defining event of her life, or she had learned to tell it the way the world preferred to hear it.

Two years later the Country Women's Association of Western Australia hung her photograph in their rest home at Cottesloe, to be an inspiration to women for all time.

The dream that was invented

In December 1933 a long account appeared in the West Australian under the initials "A. F. S." It supplied the one element the legend still lacked: destiny.

In this version Grace woke on the morning of the wreck and told her mother, "I had my dream again last night — I saw a ship driven by the wind, come crashing upon the beach."

The dream appears in no primary source. It is not in the Bussell family diaries, the inquiry transcript, George Leake's letter, Annie Simpson's letters, or any document closer to the event than 1933. It was invention — but it completed the shape. The rescue had been foretold, and Grace had been chosen for it.

Sam appeared in the same account briefly, rendered as "a quarter-caste" who burst into the kitchen and spoke one line of invented dialect before Grace rode.

"A. F. S." was A. F. Fergusson Stewart, Grace Bussell's son-in-law. He later expanded the piece into a booklet, Australia's Grace Darling, published by the Tourist Bureau of Western Australia and handed to visitors for decades. The copy held at the Pioneer Village Museum in Margaret River carries a handwritten annotation in an unidentified hand: Not all accurate! AFS = Grace's son-in-law.

The annotator was right, and had the gold watch to prove it: the booklet repeated the British Government attribution that a public subscription had actually paid for.

What was happening to the Isaacs family meanwhile

In 1934 the Centenary Memorial Book of Western Australia recorded that a Sam Isaacs had followed up Grace Bussell and joined in the saving of lives at the wreck. His medal went unmentioned. He had followed up; she had received.

In the same year, in the same city, a one-armed man named Samuel Andrew Isaacs appeared before the Royal Commission on Aborigines. He was thirty-four. He was on the electoral roll, held a ticket with the Australian Workers' Union, and had always been paid union rates. It was submitted on his behalf that his father was the man who had assisted Grace Bussell at the wreck of the Georgette.

His counsel was K. E. Drake-Brockman — Grace Bussell's own son. He told the Commissioner that Isaacs's father had been known to him and to his mother all their lives, and that Samuel Andrew Isaacs was a citizen entitled to full status, just the same, he said, as myself or you, Mr Commissioner.

The Commissioner replied that while he could do nothing at the moment, he might be able later to suggest some form of certificate.

Sam Isaacs the elder had been dead fourteen years by then. He died on 15 July 1920 on the road between Busselton and Karridale, thrown from his sulky while lighting his pipe. He sat against a tree through the night and was gone by dawn. He was seventy-four. The death notice in the West Australian called him a splendid teamster in the thickest forest, an expert bullock driver, a good bushman, and a kindly and trustworthy settler — and noted that he had gained considerable distinction at the wreck of the Georgette.

There is one more glimpse of him, from outside the legend entirely. Writing a memoir in the Western Mail in April 1942, Inspector W. Carroll of the Western Australia Police recalled a family outing of his childhood in the late 1880s, a trip to Hamelin Bay by spring-cart. The cart was driven by one Sam Isaacs, hero of the wreck of the steamer Georgette — of which, Carroll added, my uncle John Godfrey was captain.

In that account Sam is not a legend figure at all. He is a working teamster, known by name and reputation to a family who used his services, driving children through the scrub. It came from a man who had ridden in his cart. The 1930 account, in which he is "a black boy", came from the woman who had ridden beside him.

The revolver

In October 1935 a survivor named James Johns gave an interview in Kadina, South Australia, prompted by news of Mrs Drake-Brockman's death.

Johns said that on the morning of the disaster he had seen Captain Godfrey on the bridge, clinging to a support with one hand and brandishing a revolver with the other. A terrible storm was raging. A cabin boy had dived from the ship and saved two children. Eight times the brave girl and the man — Sam Isaacs, named once and thereafter "her attendant" — had ridden through the roaring breakers, saving nearly fifty people. The British Government had presented her with a gold watch.

The revolver is worth dwelling on. There is no firearm in the inquiry transcript, in any contemporary newspaper account, in any passenger letter, or in any officer's deposition. Godfrey's own testimony runs to several pages and describes in precise detail what he ordered and when — the state of the pumps, the condition of the boats, the moment he told the mate to slack the lifeboat's painter. He does not mention a revolver, because there was not one. What there was, as several witnesses noted, was a whisky bottle, and the inquiry declined to rule conclusively on it.

Fifty-nine years of retelling had given Godfrey a gun. The moderate sea and offshore wind of every contemporary account had become a terrible storm. The cabin boy James Nunan, who jumped without orders and climbed onto the upturned lifeboat, had become a diver saving children. And Sam Isaacs, who by the most careful testimony had initiated the ride and worked for hours in the broken water, had become an attendant.

Two months later, in December 1935, a writer using the name "Moonda" published a long and careful account in the West Australian, drawn directly from the letters of the survivor Annie Simpson. It described the lifeboat as she had lived it — three parts full of water before anyone boarded, her three refusals, the sea that stove the boat against the hull, the gig crammed with fourteen people. It named Dundee, Dewar and McLeod. It described the Dempster brothers.

It said nothing about the beach at Calgardup Bay, because Annie Simpson had not been there. She came ashore at Injidup, miles north, and wrote only what she knew. "Moonda" introduced her story as one that captured the imagination no less than Grace Bussell's dramatic rescue from the beach.

Even the corrective had to be framed against the legend.

Where it stands

For most of a century the sign above Redgate Beach told the settled version, and that was the version visitors carried back down to the car park: the waves high, the girl riding into them, the man beside her secondary, the captain unmentioned.

The display that stands there now tells a considerably more balanced story. When Parks and Wildlife revised it in recent years, an officer named Peter Simmons looked at the proposed images and noticed that every one of them had Grace in the foreground and Sam behind her. He went to the illustrator and asked for them to be switched. It was as if Grace was the thing and Sam just followed, he said. That was kind of not true.

The historian Marcia van Zeller, whose 2014 Curtin University thesis remains the most thorough modern reconsideration of the wreck, put the cost of the legend plainly:

The riders' celebrity has eclipsed the actions of several unsung heroes, crew and passengers who committed an astonishing act of bravery in this maritime tragedy.

None of this diminishes what Grace Bussell did. She was sixteen. She rode twelve miles and went into broken water on a horse to help strangers out of a swamped boat, and George Leake — who thought the danger had been overstated — also thought she would have gone further without hesitating had it been necessary. Both things are in the record.

What the record does not support is the version that replaced it: the storm, the fifty souls, the swim to the wreck, the prophetic dream, the revolver, and the man beside her fading out of his own story one retelling at a time.