Eccentric inventor was sailors’ friend

July 27, 2004

MANBY CLOSE (Rider Haggard Road)

A NORWICH road pays tribute to an eccentric and brilliant Great Yarmouth man who saved thousands of lives but died in poverty.

One of Captain Manby’s inventions to rescue people from ice and, inset, a sketch of the brilliant eccentric.

Captain George William Manby is forgotten today, as he was neglected during his lifetime.

As a prolific and public-spirited inventor, he deserved better but was his own worst enemy.
He was a rare combination — something of a genius and a bit of a lunatic. Nobody took him very seriously.

The son of an Army officer, he was born in Norfolk in 1765 and went to school at Downham Market. At the time, Horatio Nelson, seven years older, was in the senior school.

Manby was expected to follow an Army career but he showed little aptitude for soldiering, partly owing to his small size and sensitive feet.

After a brief period in the Cambridge Militia, he married a beautiful girl named Jane Preston and inherited her family estates. Unfortunately she was extravagant and Manby foolish . . . in five years the fortune was gone.

Manby then got into a fight with a Captain Pogson who was involved with his wife and was shot in the back of the head. An operation to remove the bullet was said to have affected his sanity.

He was arrested for debt but his brother rescued him from jail and he returned to Norfolk to become Master of the Yarmouth Barracks where he became an elegant man about town.

One night, during a fierce storm, a ship ran aground on a sandbank.
Repeated attempts were made to throw a line to it but without success and many of the crew and passengers drowned. Manby, watching the struggle, had an idea. He worked out how to fire a line from a gun to a ship and then how to get passengers to the shore. Thanks to him we had the Breeches Buoy.

He then turned his attention to inventing a contraption to save people who had fallen through ice and followed that up with a portable fire extinguisher.
Preoccupied with his inventions, he toured the country but he was always hard up and in 1821 — trying to avoid creditors — he sailed in the whaling ship Baffin to the Arctic.

He was intending to try out a new harpoon gun he had designed, but the whalers didn’t appreciate his efforts and the gun was sabotaged.
Manby continued to have bright ideas. He worked out how a gun could fire two shots at the same time.

When he was nearly 80 he was dismissed from his posts at the barracks and retired to a small villa outside Yarmouth where he built a large monument . . . to himself.

He turned his house into a Nelson Museum and moved into the basement, but few went to see it. Manby died, alone and forgotten, in 1854 aged 89.
He was one of our greatest unsung heroes.

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