Radio 2’s Loves Folk collection celebrates seafaring volunteers

Throughout the centuries, folk music has been filled with tales of heroes and heroines and their many adventures. We may live in a world of telephones and computers today but there’s still room for bards strumming their ballads, and now a new BBC radio series will celebrate some very ordinary heroes through folk music to mark the 200th anniversary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).

When Vicky Murphy was nine months pregnant and her husband was pulling her up a cliff by her dungarees to escape a fast rising tide in Cornwall, she didn’t even know if she’d live let alone that one day a song would be written about her dramatic rescue. 

After banker Al Kassim was rescued by a lifeboat when a trip to sea with friends went wrong he pledged to become a volunteer at the UK’s busiest RNLI station, but he never dreamed the famous Fisherman’s Friends singing troupe would write a song about him. 

And when personal assistant Emma Neave-Webb, inspired by a talk, became a whale watcher on the Orkney Islands and helped save a stranded pod with the help of locals and their pots and pans, the idea that she’d one day be celebrated in song never occurred to her.

These are just three of the seafaring stories featured in the Radio 2 Loves Folk series, which sees five well-known singer-songwriters celebrate ordinary heroes with a link to the sea by composing a song about them.

‘I was 35 weeks pregnant and we’d had a lovely afternoon at Chapel Porth beach when the tide started coming in much faster than we could have imagined,’ recalls Vicky Murphy of her dramatic rescue in 2009. 

‘We tried to clamber up the rocks but the water kept coming higher and higher – the waves were 6ft high and they swept us off our feet.’

At one point Marc helped her reach higher ground by grabbing the straps of her dungarees, but as she managed to clamber up he collapsed. ‘I scrambled as far as I could go but he was laying there lifeless below; he didn’t have the energy to carry on.’ 

Fortunately a surfer spotted the desperate pair and called the RNLI. ‘No words will ever fully describe the fear, emotion, pain and physical drainage we felt that day,’ says Vicky.

Folk singer Martyn Joseph was the man tasked with trying to put the rescue to song, and the result is a tune called Chapel Porth Beach. ‘The best folk songs make us feel we’re not alone,’ says Martyn. 

‘There’s a great power in showing that we’re a community. I think that’s particularly important in a world where we seem so divided, so polarised. I really believe in the power of music to gather people together under a common thought.’

Al Kassim was on a sailing trip with friends in Portsmouth when their boat hit a storm and ran into trouble. ‘We lost steerage and it became really hairy very quickly,’ he recalls. ‘But eight minutes after we’d made a distress call to the RNLI there was somebody on our boat and instant relief; he’d come to rescue us.’

Determined to pay back that help, Al was thrilled to discover there was an RNLI station just a few minutes’ walk from his office in the City of London, set up shortly after the Marchioness disaster killed 51 people on a Thames pleasure boat in 1989. 

Incredibly it’s the busiest RNLI station in the country with an average of two call outs a day – everything from people who’ve fallen (or jumped) from one of the Thames bridges to others becoming ill on party boats.

Al does one 12-hour shift a week and his 17-year-old daughter is planning to follow in his footsteps. Being immortalised in a song written by the Fisherman’s Friends and writer Seth Lakeman is ‘surreal’ he says. 

‘I don’t feel like I’m doing something special – I really am not worth it because I get to do something I really love, something that has such a positive impact on me. So to have this song written about me feels incredible.’

The Fisherman’s Friends, immortalised in the 2019 film, have a close association with the RNLI (the band’s name comes from the five fishermen in the band and their RNLI ‘friends’ who made up the rest of the group’s singers) and were thrilled to have Al as a subject – they were particularly impressed when he leapt into action in front of them.

‘He epitomises the characters in the volunteer crews who put themselves at risk day in and day out,’ says the band’s Jon Cleave. ‘It was also interesting to hear the impact that volunteering has on him and that’s not specifically related to lifeboats, but for all the people who volunteer to help others.’

Al went to Port Isaac in Cornwall to hear the band play his song and afterwards joined them in the pub. Band member Toby Lobb recalls how they were surprised to see him leap into action. 

‘Someone burst through the doors of the pub and said, “Is there anyone here that can help while we wait for an ambulance?” Someone had collapsed on a walk. Al immediately jumped up and was out there dealing with it. That’s just the kind of person he is.’

Another heroine featured is Anna Heslop from Cullercoats in North Tyneside, who became her station’s first female helm in its 170-year history after seeing the crew in action. She was 17 when she saw a young boy get into trouble in the sea while she was out walking her dog. 

‘I remember calling 999 and asking for the “sea police” as I’d never heard of the RNLI. Within minutes the boy had been rescued. After that I was invited down to the station. I asked, “Do you have any women?” and when they said no I decided to join.’

Over the years she’s endured a fair bit of sexism and banter but nothing she couldn’t handle. ‘It’s like having 29 older brothers,’ she laughs. ‘It’s mainly great fun. During training, right from the start, I loved it.’ And she’s no longer the only woman – her mother, grandmother and fiancée are also now involved.

Among the rescues she’s been involved in are saving a stranded party of 11, and helping a baby just a few days old who’d stopped breathing while on a beach that had been cut off from the mainland. 

Lady Nade, who has written the song Anna with Boo Hewerdine, says, ‘She had so many amazing stories, it was hard to know where to start. But what an honour to be asked to create a song about her.’

Not all of the songs are about the RNLI. Emma Neave-Webb’s story involves a very different type of rescue. She was the PA for an accountancy firm when, inspired by a talk about whales she heard on a cruise, she decided to devote herself to marine animals. 

She moved to Orkney, became a volunteer with the British Divers Marine Life Rescue and also works as a co-ordinator for the International Whaling Commission.

Among her acts of heroism include what’s thought to be the only successful refloating of a killer whale in Britain, and averting the mass stranding of pilot whales who’d got confused and stuck in shallow water. 

She got locals to stand on the beach and make as much noise as possible with pots and pans to convince the creatures to turn around. ‘It was a massive team effort,’ she says modestly.

Her song, Pilot Whales, has been written by Kris Drever who says he was thrilled to get the chance to write about an ordinary heroine. ‘Ordinary people, by and large, aren’t kleptocrats or megalomaniacs but they’re still extraordinary in some way – they just don’t need everyone to know it.’

The beauty and power of the sea is a theme in all the songs, but none more so than in Jeff Allen’s story. A former soldier who worked in counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland, he’d struggled to adapt to civilian life. 

His marriage broke up, he was deeply depressed and he was contemplating suicide. But then he started sea kayaking, and it became a ‘natural therapy’. He decided to challenge himself with a 5,000-mile journey around Japan and found that it got him out of the dark hole he’d fallen into.

Now he passes on that love of the sea, his spirit of adventure and the therapeutic qualities of paddling through his company. ‘Nature is this great anti-depressant,’ he says. 

‘The movement from left to right when you paddle is similar to eye therapy and kayaking allows you to be both reflective but also constantly in the here and now, because the wind can change direction suddenly or you get waves splashing in your face.’ 

His song, Flow, has been written by Cara Dillon and Sam Lakeman and Jeff says listening to it was ‘a moving experience, it’s an anthem for anyone who has suffered from trauma’.

For songwriter Sam, getting the chance to tell Jeff’s story was a reminder about why folk music has been loved for so many centuries. ‘The name says it all – folk – it’s the people’s music; it represents the everyday man’s voice,’ says Sam. 

‘The themes that folk touches upon last throughout the ages – lost love, conflict, social upheaval – all these things we all grapple with. I love the idea that with this project we’re simply adding to the canon.’

• 21st Century Folk 2024 on BBC Sounds from Monday July 29 and BBC Radio 2 on Sunday August 4 8-10pm.