Polzeath Wrecks HMS Medea

Of all the wrecks in our area this one of 1939 can still be visited. Probably not for very much longer as there's very little left but the rusted remains are easy to reach from off the footpath at Trebetherick Point.

The HMS Medea was being towed from Portsmouth to a breaker's yard at Newport, Gwent when it broke its tow-rope in a gale off Trevose Head and  drifted into the mouth of the Camel Estuary and grounded on Greenaway rocks.

Searchlights from the Trebetherick and Port Isaac coastguard teams lit up the scene, where the crew of the Medea were huddled on the bridge. The teams fired six rockets with lines towards the Medea with the sixth being successful and the crew of four were taken off by breeches buoy.

A fifth member of the crew had previously been lost overboard.

Local Jenny Oaten tells how her husband Brian was born in Trebetherick in the same storm! She tells how “The storm was  so strong that the Trebetherick coastguards told us they had to crawl on hands and knees to get to a position on Greenaway where they could fire their rocket breeches buoy rope-based rescue devices. They had to call for Port Isaac coastguard back up who had bigger rockets”

HMS Medea was built in 1915 as HMS M22, a M15-class Monitor warship with a crew of 69. It was converted and renamed around 1925 as a minelayer, and then in 1937 as a training ship

The wonderful "photoshopped" image of the ship and presentation can be found at Kresen Kernow, the home of Cornwall's archives. The glass negatives reference number is GE/2/CG/641A

'Outstanding heroism rewarded: Captain V S Rashleigh presenting the Board of Trade Shield for the most meritorious service of 1939 by any Rocket Life-Saving Apparatus Company, to Coastguard Macdonald, of Port Isaac, and Volunteer R S Male, of Trebetherick, for the rescue of three lives from the SS Medea on Greenaway Rocks on January 2nd, 1939. In the background are the LSA crews, and police officers who assisted at the rescue. The presentation is superimposed on a photo of the wreck as it still appears on the Greenaway Rocks at the estuary of the River Camel' (Cornish Guardian newspaper, Thursday 7 March 1940, page 7).