Manby mortar

The apparatus was invented by Captain George William Manby, inspired by his witnessing a ship HMS Snipe (1801) run aground off Great Yarmouth in 1807.

[4] There had been earlier unsuccessful attempts at similar ideas, including by the French agronomist and inventor Jacques Joseph Ducarne de Blangy,[5] and a ship to shore idea by Sergeant John Bell, in 1792 the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce gave him a bounty of fifty guineas, he was at that time a sergeant, afterwards a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery.

[6] The Manby apparatus was also prefigured by proposals, unfulfilled, made by George Miller as early as 1793 to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce for the purchase of a mortar and line to rescue people from vessels wrecked on the Dunbar shoreline.

Later Manby credits Captain Harris RN of the Colonial Ropery at Great Grimsby (opened in 1835) with supplying rope more suitable for this use, due to its lightness, pliancy, strength and durability, at the Lincolnshire Shipwreck Association trials of the mortar and Mr Dennet's rocket apparatus held at Cleethorpes in 1838.

Unfortunately even as late as 1844 a letter published in the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette described the loss of life of the York Union at Winterton and the Sarah of Goole driven ashore at Corton, due, it is thought, to their crews not knowing their role in operating the equipment.