The Royal Charter storm was an extreme event by any standards. It developed as a small depression west of the Azores, and by 9 a.m. on October 25th, 1859, it had deepened to 960 hPa. and reached Brest in northern France. From there it moved towards Plymouth, heading north-north-east, and at 6 a.m. the following morning it lay over the English midlands, about 100 miles southeast of the isle of Anglesea.
If you can imagine that island as roughly circular to form a clock-face, the port of Holyhead lies at about a quarter to. By the same reckoning the little village of Moelfre is at eight minutes past the hour, and it was near here, 142 years ago on the morning of October 26th, 1859, that the SS Royal Charter experienced the storm.
Royal Charter was a steamship of some 2,700 tons that also carried sail. It had left Melbourne in Australia two months previously, bound for Liverpool with 430 passengers and crew.
It called at Cobh in Co Cork, then known as Queenstown, and on the morning of October 25th weighed anchor for the final leg of its long voyage. By the early morning of 26th the vessel was steaming eastwards north of Anglesea.
The ship's proximity to the rocky shore near Moelfre has always been a mystery. It has been assumed that for some reason the captain expected the strongest winds to come from the south-west, which indeed they would have if the storm had passed over Northern Ireland rather than the English Midlands; in this case the island would have afforded shelter.
Instead, the brunt of the gales came from the north; Royal Charter ran aground, and as the wind increased to hurricane force in the succeeding hours, the iron ship was totally destroyed. A few of the passengers and crew were saved by islanders, but 400 of the souls aboard were drowned.
Shipwrecks in those days were commonplace. Indeed, between October 21st and November 2nd of that year, 1859, over 200 vessels, large and small, were wrecked in Irish and British waters. But because of the great loss of life involved, the Royal Charter tragedy impinged itself upon the public mind.
It was sufficient, even in those days, to merit a major tribunal of inquiry, instituted by the Board of Trade. As an outcome of this tribunal, Admiral Robert FitzRoy of the British Navy was charged with organising a system of storm warnings which were to be sent over the newly-invented electric telegraph to threatened coastal areas. And thus, a few years later, came the forerunners of the shipping forecast that we know today.