A NEW project is under way in a bid to give much deserved recognition to the men and women who have helped put it on the map through the centuries.

Clever Essex has been set up by Metal, a group which restores old buildings into community hubs across the country, in a bid to de-bunk the contemporary stereotypes the county sometimes has and is being funded by a Heritage Lottery Fund Grant.

It has now set about getting together 125 characters from the past who lived in or spent a significant amount of time in Southend as part of celebrations for the borough’s 125th anniversary.

These characters will be brought to life at Village Green 2017, on the Clever Essex Stage on Saturday.

Here we will be taking a look in coming weeks at some of the names which have already come forward as part of the Clever Essex campaign which will also include a balloon debate in schools featuring 32 Clever Essex characters in a hot air balloon.

The balloon is losing height so someone has to go - youngsters taking part in the workshop will have to debate who should go.

This week we take a look at Lionel Lukin, who was inspired to invent a very important vehicle.

BORN at Dunmow in Essex in 1742 coach-builder Lionel Lukin is responsible for an invention which has come to be vital in the county and beyond.

The youngest son of William Lukin, the family lived at Blatches in the market town of Little Dunmow between Chelmsford and Braintree.

His father belonged to an old Essex family and Lionel became a coach builder.

Gazette:

Home - the picturesque market town of Dunmow, where Lukin was born

Historians say he always had a taste for science, and friends in high places, and it was this which led to him coming up with an idea for a vehicle which would go on to help save millions of lives.

Having become a member of the Coachmakers’ Company in 1767 he became friends with the Prince Regent and the secretary of state for war and the colonies and these two relationships allowed him to bring some of the ideas he had been toying with to public notice.

One of these was for an “unsubmergible” boat which led to him making alteration to a Norwegian yawl boat which he had bought in 1784.

As a result he developed a boat which would not capsize in gales or sudden bursts of wind - or sink if it filled with water.

And he did this by putting airtight and watertight compartments inside, or filled with cork or a light material which would repel water so that it was lighter than the water it was in.

Gazette:

Lifeboat - an early image of a lifeboat

It was the Prince Regent, Prince of Wales George IV, who encouraged him to test the invention and even offered to pay his expenses.

The prototype was tested in the Thames and a patent was take out by Lukin on November 2 1785.

The boat was reported to have save several lives during its first year of use but even the involvement of the Prince of Wales wasn’t enough to bring it to wider public attention and no more lifeboats were positioned along the coast.

Lukin retired from business in 1824 and went to live in Hythe Kent where he died in 1834 when, at his own request, the inscription “this LIONEL LUKIN Was the first who built a Life-boat, and was the original Inventor of that principle of safety, by which many lives and much property have been preserved from Shipwreck; and he obtained for it the King’s patent in the year 1785.”

Although he had tried so hard to get the lifeboat in use historians say hardly any efforts were made to help shipwrecked sailors until four years after Lukin had died.

The Adventure, of Newcastle, was wrecked at the mouth of the Tyne and all of the crew were lost - dropping into the sea just 300 hundred yards from the shore because no boats were strong enough to battle the huge waves.

The disaster caused such strong feeling a committee was appointed, at a meeting of those living in South Shields, to offer premiums for the best models of a Life-boat “calculated to brave the dangers of the sea, particularly of broken water.”

From the many plans which were offered to the Committee, two were selected—one by William Woudhave, a painter, and one by Henry Greathead.

Although his design was then taken forward many credit Lukin as having originally come up with the idea, which he indeed patented.

Today the RNLI charity operates thousands of lifeboats, saving lives on a daily basis, including across the waterways of Essex in holiday spots such as West Mersea and Clacton.