The Alondra had been launched on 9 July 1899 from the yard of David J. Dunlop at Port Glasgow, Renfrewshire, built for the London-based Rio Tinto Company. She was a passenger and cargo steamship of steel construction, roughly 300 feet long, 40 wide, 20 deep, rigged as a two-masted schooner. By 1915 she had passed into the hands of Yeoward Bros. of Liverpool, who were still her owners when she ran onto Kedge Rock the following winter. The rock sits in shallow water close to Sherkin Island, ringed by cliffs that make the approach treacherous in any weather and impossible in a December gale. The Alondra had picked the worst possible place to founder.

A lifeboat station had been promised for Baltimore in 1913, but the engines for the boat were still tangled up in wartime shortages. So when Archdeacon John Becher learned what had happened on Kedge Rock, he had no lifeboat to launch. He gathered a crew anyway and set out in a local boat. They tried twice to reach the wreck and failed both times, putting back to shore as the light went. The next morning, with a rocket apparatus and the help of two Royal Navy trawlers working from the cliff tops, the surviving twenty-three men of the Alondra were hauled to safety. The RNLI later awarded Becher and Lieutenant Arthur Sanderson of HM Trawler Indian Empire its Silver Medal for Gallantry. The story of a country archdeacon improvising a sea rescue in the middle of a war became, eventually, part of the founding mythology of Baltimore's lifeboat station.

Today the Alondra lies in relatively shallow water -- between roughly five and twenty metres -- where the rock holds her broken hull in place. She has become one of the staple dive sites of Roaringwater Bay, alongside the German submarine U-260, scuttled in 1945, and the bulk carrier Kowloon Bridge, which went down in 1986. Divers descend through cold green Atlantic light to plates and bulkheads softened by a hundred-odd years of growth, kelp moving where her decks once were. In 2013 a film crew sponsored by Arts Council England, working with the RNLI and the Baltimore Drama Group, made a short dramatisation of the rescue that toured as part of an exhibition marking the lifeboat service's work during the First World War. Cast almost entirely from the village itself.

The rock is still out there. It does not appear on any of the more dramatic maps of the coast -- it is not Fastnet, not the Stags -- but for the small boats that pass it on the way out of Baltimore Harbour, it remains exactly the kind of low, ugly hazard that takes ships in bad weather. The Alondra's story is one of many along this coast: a steel hull built on the Clyde, sent out to do the dull commercial work of empire, ending on an Irish rock in a winter storm. Sixteen men in a lifeboat that should have saved them. Twenty-three rescued by men who had no business being on the sea that day. The remembered names are mostly the ones who lived.