250 Years of Lifesaving and Water Safety

Being an island here in the UK, we are surrounded by coastline and as such have a huge amount of history and heritage in water safety and lifesaving. In fact, this can be tracked right back to the early 1800s and to just one man, a man called Henry Trengrouse. His name is not familiar to many people, but to our Commercial Director, George Trengrouse Shillito, (Trengrouse’s 5x Great Grandson) it is one he has grown up with.

To support Drowning Prevention Week this summer, George travelled to Cornwall, 250 years on, to uncover his name’s sakes family history and celebrate Henry’s early innovations and designs that went on to shape the modern approach to lifesaving we see today.

Henry Trengrouse was a humble Cornishman. In 1807 he witnessed a disastrous shipwreck in which hundreds of lives were lost. This tragedy drove him to conceive the idea of the Breeches Buoy - a rope-based rescue device used to extract people from wrecked vessels that were close to land but could not be reached. He spent many years of his life travelling to London, to speak to the Government to convince them of the idea yet met a huge amount of resistance at the time and spent over £300,000 of his own money trying to get his ideas adopted. Sadly, his ideas were not picked up until after his death. The Breeches Buoy became a commonly used lifesaving device, and he later went on to design the first cork life jacket, both of which helped to save many, many lives.