By Roselyn Fauth
My dad, Geoff Cloake, helped me on this history hunt. Turns out that the sixth person ever buried in the Free Ground at Timaru was a man whose life had shaped our maritime history in ways few people today realise: Duncan Cameron, coxswain of the Alexandra Lifeboat.
The weekend everything went wrong
Back in May 1869, Timaru didn’t have a harbour. Ships had to anchor out in the open roadstead, and everything was loaded and unloaded by surfboat. The sea often had the final say in how things went. That Queen’s Birthday weekend, it certainly did.
Two barques — the Collingwood and the Susan Jane — dragged anchor and were wrecked in heavy swell. The Rocket Brigade fired lines from the cliffs and got their crews ashore by breeches buoy. People crowded the beach and the clifftops, watching it all happen. Then the schooner Twilight raised a distress signal. Shouting was heard from the water. People thought they were witnessing a third disaster.
In the middle of all this, volunteers rushed the lifeboat shed and tried to get the Alexandra out. The Harbour Master tried to regain control. Oars snapped. Waves washed men in and out of the boat. It was chaos.
Eventually, the Alexandra made it off the beach with a small crew — Mills, Cameron, White, Baker, Newton and Oxley.
They got only as far as the reef when a huge sea hit the lifeboat and rolled her over.
The Alexandra did exactly what she was designed to do — she righted herself at once. Most of the crew managed to climb back in. But Duncan Cameron didn’t surface.
The newspapers told the rest:
“It is generally supposed that Duncan Cameron was rendered insensible by a blow on the head, either from the steer-oar or some part of the boat, as he was a most expert swimmer…”
(Timaru Herald, 26 May 1869)
The next day, The Press reported a similar belief — that he’d likely been struck and stunned as the boat went over.
Dad and I sat with that for a while.
The papers described him as an excellent swimmer, calm, experienced, and steady. Before coming to Timaru he’d spent ten years in the Taranaki surfboat service. He was the foreman of the Government Landing Service. He had a wife and four children.
And he died trying to save a crew who, as it turned out, didn’t actually need rescuing at all.
A man buried without a marker
Finding his grave on the map of the cemetery felt strange. Here was someone who meant so much to the town in 1869 that concerts were held to raise money for his widow. The Timaru Choral Society changed their concert plans immediately and donated the proceeds. The Garrick Club performed for his family. Subscription lists appeared in shops. People genuinely grieved.
And yet today he lies beneath a simple patch of grass in the Free Ground — no stone, no sign, no hint that he even existed.
Dad and I found ourselves standing on that quiet piece of ground, piecing his life together from old newspapers and lifeboat logs. It felt like the sort of story that shouldn’t just fade away.
How Duncan’s death changed everything
What became clear, the deeper we went, was that Duncan’s death wasn’t just a sad footnote. It was a turning point.
The Alexandra lifeboat had only been in Timaru for a few years at that stage. She was built to Royal National Lifeboat Institution standards — self-righting, self-bailing, state-of-the-art for the 1860s. But she needed trained crews, proper procedures, and coordinated leadership. The chaos of the Twilight launch showed exactly what could go wrong without that.
The official investigations that followed Duncan’s death recommended sweeping changes:
A paid, regularly trained crew.
Proper launch authority.
Formal drills.
Better management.
Clearer responsibilities between lifeboat and Rocket Brigade.
And those changes came.
The Alexandra went on to serve Timaru for decades.
By the 1870s and 1880s she and the Rocket Brigade were working as a proper integrated rescue system.
You only have to look at the 1882 Black Sunday disaster to understand how important that was. The Alexandra capsized multiple times that day — and righted herself every time. She rescued dozens of people in seas so rough that nine others died. She proved that her design worked exactly as intended.
His death forced Timaru to build the rescue system it desperately needed. It helped shape the culture of training, readiness, and coordination that saved more than a hundred lives over the following decades.
It is no small legacy.
He earned far more than an unmarked grave.
Returning to the Free Ground
Once Dad and I knew all this, the experience of standing in the Free Ground felt completely different. These aren’t empty spaces between headstones. They’re people. They’re stories. They’re the foundation of our town’s history, even when the grass has swallowed their names.
Duncan Cameron isn’t the only one here with a story worth telling. Some were early settlers. Some were labourers, sailors, mothers, infants. People who lived hard lives with little money but whose contributions mattered.
We walk past them every day without knowing.
That is why this monument matters.
It gives a voice back to those who never had one.
It restores their place in our landscape.
It lets us say: we see you now.
For me, it also honours the small journey Dad and I took — wandering the cemetery, chasing newspaper clippings, reading lifeboat logs, discovering how one man’s story connects to the whole sweep of Timaru’s maritime history.
Duncan Cameron may lie in the Free Ground, but his legacy is anything but small. He helped shape the lifesaving services that protected Timaru for half a century. His death led to reforms that saved countless others. And his story now has a place again — not lost, but remembered.