1st September 1833. A gale blew up across the North Sea and English Channel. Hundreds lost their lives. Yet it’s the packet ship, Earl of Wemyss, en route from London to Edinburgh, which caught public imagination for the men’s failure to act with honour.

When the stricken vessel ran aground on a sandbank off Brancaster, the male passengers and crew got ashore, accommodated at the Ship Hotel. Tragically, the Captain sent eleven women and children to their berths but failed to batten down the hatches. Violent waves smashed through the skylights and filled the women’s cabin. All inside drowned.

A further indignity, the Lord of the Manor’s son-in-law, Joseph Newman Reeve, supervised the salvage efforts. When the dead bodies were laid out in St. Mary’s Church they had already been searched and clothes and valuables removed. Newman Reeve was put on trial at the Norwich assizes, charged with stealing property from the dead, but he was found ‘not guilty’, perhaps in part due to the belief that coastal residents were ‘the lawful heirs of all drowned persons’, entitled to keep property that came their way via others’ misfortune.

Two of the victims, Miss Susanna Roche and her nephew, four-year-old Alexander Roche, share a grave at St. Mary’s in Brancaster. The worn headstone laments ‘their persons were stripped of every valuable and their property plundered’. Just a short distance away is the grave of Joseph Newman Reeve.