The trawler that disappeared
A successful relief fund, organised by the mayor of Tynemouth, surprisingly raised £3,500 for the struggling families of the crew members, despite the grinding economic recession of the 1930s and the approaching Second World War.
However, in a controversial decision, the money was not divided between the dependent families, and a trust fund was instead set up to decide who would receive the money.
Extensive searches were made in the North Sea above Aberdeen, but news articles from early 1939 mention the only thing ever found was a raft which was suspected to belong to the crew of the Jeanie Stewart.
A Chronicle reporter who joined one of the searches, aboard the trawler Boyne, described the atrocious conditions in the North Sea as he wirelessed back to our old offices in Newcastle’s Westgate Road. “We are now heading south, 600 miles off the Scottish coast. There is an easterly gale, mountainous seas, and hailstones as big as marbles.” Eighty years after the disappearance of the Jeanie Stewart, Terence Grewcock is living with wife Kathryn in Surrey, and has threegrown up children and five grandchildren.
He says: “To sum up, it was a tough beginning, but it turned out well in the end.”
There remains no further clue of what happened to the trawler all those years ago.
There is an easterly gale, mountainous seas, and hailstones which are as big as marbles