December 19 is the anniversary, marked by west Cornwall each year, of the Penlee lifeboat disaster, in which the eight crewmen of the Solomon Browne died trying to rescue the crew and passengers of the Union Star – while, with appalling irony, the village of Mousehole was illuminated by its famous Christmas lights.  

The anniversary is usually an opportunity for the Cornish to be divined by outsiders and made into myth: to be praised for their heroism, but not seen for their own doughty reality.  This year, for the 40th anniversary, the playwright and film-maker Callum Mitchell has written a drama-documentary for Radio 4, titled Solomon Browne, which resounds with a sense of place, and incalculable loss.

Mitchell grew up in Newlyn and went to school in Mousehole alongside the grandchildren and nephews of the crewmen. His mother grew up in the Kings Arms in Paul, the village above Mousehole. His grandfather was friends with Charlie Greenhaugh, who ran the Ship Inn in Mousehole and died that night. His closest friend lost both his grandfathers. Each day, walking from Newlyn to school, he passed the lifeboat house on Penlee Point and its memorial.

Mitchell initially wanted to write a stage play and collected testimony from the families. “But what I found amazing,” he tells me, “were the voices themselves”. He realised that the story had “to be told in their voices”.

Mitchell is attracted to things that are “stripped back”; he was assistant director to Mark Jenkin on the extraordinarily spare Bait (2019), a Bafta-winning film about the gentrification of a village very much like Mousehole, a village that has changed completely in the last 40 years. “But of all the things I have done, this is the one where I have felt the most responsibility.”

So, he used Cornish voices. There is Neil Brockman, son of Nigel Brockman; both were members of the crew, but the coxswain Trevelyan Richards would not admit Neil. “No more than one from a family on a night like this,” Richards said. “Calm down,” Neil’s father told his son. “You’ll go next time.”