The Sunday Times - Scotland - February 26, 2006
River hero’s own mission of mercy
George Parsonage was mortified when police banned him from saving souls, but it was time to give the Clyde hero his life back, writes Nick Thorpe
Among the commendations and bravery medals on the walls of George Parsonage’s home a single photo lodges in the mind. It shows the Clyde’s lifeboatman and his father, Ben, scrambling ashore carrying something heavy wrapped in a grubby pink blanket. From its end protrudes a greyish human foot.
It is a macabre reminder of the high stakes for Britain’s most unusual lifesaver. Saver of 1,500 souls during his long tenancy at the solitary house on Glasgow Green, he has also recovered several hundred corpses. I always imagined a sort of people’s superhero complete with various aliases: Riverman, Lifeboatman, or plain George Parsonage. An art teacher by day, yet known to disappear dramatically from classes when summoned, he has battled the Clyde for each and every threatened life. If you fall off the quayside, capsize your canoe or even throw yourself off a bridge, your greatest — perhaps only — hope would be the urgent slap and creak of his oars.
The reality was more complicated. “It’s a love-hate relationship, this job,” he told me the day we first met in 2003 at his boathouse. “There’s nothing to beat the adrenaline when you save a life, but equally there’s nothing like the depression that comes on when someone drowns, when you deal with the parents. It makes you so determined to prevent the next accident.”
An athletically fit man with a ruddy face and the firm handshake of a rowing champion, George was definitely at the traditional end of the nautical spectrum. Despite a fleet of 18 craft, including a new motor launch, at his disposal, he always preferred the original Bennie, a sleek rowing boat beloved of and named after his late father.
“A rowing boat’s the fastest boat you can row in a river and still get a man over the gunwale,” he explained. “If you’re in a rowing boat you’ll hear people shouting from the bank, telling you what’s going on — you won’t hear that over an engine.
“And outboard motors are notoriously finicky, whereas your arms will always work in an emergency.”
Strathclyde police had for decades collaborated in an improbable but proven arrangement, drawing on George’s unparalleled knowledge of the river. When an emergency call came in, often in the middle of the night, a police car would rush him to where the victim had entered the water, towing Bennie behind on a trailer.
Where there was no obvious launch point George — adrenaline-charged — would heave the boat over walls or railings and clamber in. Rowing furiously out into the stream he would strain his eyes for a glimpse of breaking surface water, listening for shouts or cries in the darkness.
The first half-hour was crucial. After that the water temperature probably meant he was looking for a corpse. Often he would search for weeks at a time, trawling up and down with his grappling iron, waiting for the river to release her burden.
“You never really get used to it,” said George. “But if it was somebody I knew I’d want the body back too. But believe me, I’d do anything to be redundant.”
George’s job was itself a historical anomaly. Humane societies once existed all over the world, a response to religious censure of attempted suicides. Many societies, like Edinburgh’s, simply offered equipment and rewards for public rescues, and many had gradually ceded to conventional emergency services.
But the Glasgow Humane Society, a charity funded by donations from individuals and public bodies, had had an officer at the ready on the Green since 1790 and wasn’t about to retire him now.
At first George’s parents shielded him from the grimmest realities of his father’s job. But one day his father enlisted 14-year-old George’s considerable rowing skills on their first joint recovery, dragging the body of a young boy from the river after an accident on a home-made raft. It marked a turning point.
When Ben Parsonage died unexpectedly of a heart attack in October 1979, a huge question preoccupied George amid the grief and funeral arrangements: was it now time to change direction and devote himself to his art? But not for long. The police chose that moment to report a river accident. “They obviously didn’t know Dad had died. I just went out and did the search myself. There was no way out. It was as though I was destined.”
A quarter of a century later, despite an MBE and a Mountbatten medal, George’s reputation as a people’s hero was not unanimously shared. Somebody dropped a paving slab on his head from a bridge as he passed beneath, fracturing his skull.
His knack of recovering weapons or stolen goods from the river also made him the bane of the criminal fraternity. And it was not uncommon for George to be cursed or assaulted by drunks or drug abusers as he tried to save their lives.
George needed a holiday, if only he could allow himself to be off-duty long enough to take one. “It’s far too consuming for anyone 365 days a year,” he agreed. “You can’t put a frying pan on in case the doorbell goes, daren’t have a bath unless there’s someone else in the house.”
In the end he found his future wife only when she did the one thing guaranteed to attract his full attention: “I rescued her when her boat capsized.”
Coming ashore to meet his wife, Stephanie, and their two children, I noticed for the first time George’s sculptures, welded from scrap dragged from the river. The most telling cri de coeur was a near-lifesize metal representation of a sculler standing on end, resembling a crucifix. On closer inspection the sculler’s hands were not gripping the oars, but were nailed to them.
“George believes his destiny is here and that he can’t wriggle out of it,” explained Stephanie, a hospital doctor. “He’s a complicated man. He’s an artist, that’s where his talent is and he did try his hardest to get out, have a life, but he never managed it.
Three years later things are markedly different on Glasgow Green. Strathclyde police announced last year that health and safety regulations barred George Parsonage from rescuing people on his own and stopped paging him in emergencies.
Coming just as the lifeboatman went to London to receive a Royal Humane Society lifetime achievement silver medal from Princess Alexandra, the announcement seemed appallingly insensitive.
But nine months into the new arrangement, with Strathclyde Fire and Rescue filling the gap on jet skis, he seems more sanguine. “If the police have internal regulations that say you can’t rescue a person on your own then that’s their prerogative,” he said diplomatically.
No longer on 24-hour call, he still trains volunteers in preventative safety — retrieving footballs from the river, replacing vandalised lifebelts, providing cover for regattas — and patrols the upper stretches with a newly recruited second officer, Eddie McGowan. They’ve saved at least two lives under the new arrangements.
“It’s not the end for the Glasgow Humane Society, but nobody will ever have to do the job like I did it,” he said this week, just back from a family holiday.
Some call it a disgrace: Glasgow’s hero prevented from doing his historic job by a plague of health and safety regulations. That’s one interpretation. Another is that, after half a century of rescuing other people, somebody finally decided it was time to rescue George.
Nick Torpe’s Adrift in Caledonia: Boat-Hitching for the Unenlightened is published by Little, Brown, £12.99 on March 2. The author will be reading at Waterstone’s West End, 128 Princes Street, Edinburgh on Thursday, March 9 at 6pm. See www.nickthorpe.co.uk for details