The memorial to the RMS Amazon in St John the Baptist is one of those tablets that quietly links Paignton to events far beyond the parish boundary. It commemorates a local young man, George Frederick Goodridge, who died in one of the most shocking maritime disasters of the early Victorian period, when the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s newest vessel burned and sank in the Bay of Biscay on her maiden voyage in January 1852. The plaque itself is modest, but the story behind it is anything but. It represents a moment when the ambitions of modern steam navigation collided with the realities of wooden hulls, untested machinery and a winter sea.
The Amazon had left Southampton on the afternoon of 2 January, bound for the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico. She was a hybrid vessel of the transitional era: iron‑framed, wooden‑planked, with auxiliary sails and a powerful new engine that had already shown signs of overheating. Contemporary reports describe her stopping twice to cool her bearings, a routine precaution on new steamships but one that hinted at the stresses placed on early marine machinery. By the time she reached the approaches to the Bay of Biscay, the wind had freshened to half a gale and the ship was running at about eight knots.
Shortly before one o’clock on Sunday morning, fire was seen bursting up through the hatchway forward of the fore funnel. Within minutes the flames had taken hold of the pine superstructure, the pitch‑coated timbers and the wooden fittings around the engine room. Attempts to fight the fire were quickly abandoned as the heat became unbearable. The ship could not be stopped; the engines were inaccessible behind the flames, and with the wind astern she drove forward faster, fanning the blaze. The crew tried to launch the boats, but the combination of speed, sea state and panic made it almost impossible. Several boats were swamped the moment they touched the water. Others hung by a single tackle, spilling their occupants into the sea. Many passengers never reached the deck at all, overcome by smoke or trapped in their cabins.
Only twenty‑one people survived out of more than 150 on board. Most were rescued by the brig Marsden, which found the Amazon’s lifeboat and a small dinghy drifting in heavy seas. Their accounts, published in the newspapers within days, describe the ship burning from stem to stern, the masts collapsing one by one, and finally the explosion of the magazine shortly before she sank. They also record the behaviour of Captain Symons, who remained on deck directing efforts to save the passengers until the last possible moment. Among the dead was a nineteen‑year‑old Paignton man, George Frederick Goodridge, whose memorial now hangs in St John the Baptist’s.
The inscription reads:
IN MEMORY OF
GEORGE FREDERICK GOODRIDGE,
THE BELOVED SON OF
JOHN & MARY GOODRIDGE,
AGED 19 YEARS.
4th OFFICER OF THE ROYAL MAIL STEAM SHIP
“AMAZON”
WHICH WAS LOST AT SEA,
ON THE NIGHT OF THE 3RD OF JANUARY 1852.
The disaster caused a national outcry. The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company had invested heavily in its new fleet, and the Amazon was considered one of its finest ships. Her loss, coming so soon after the stranding of another company vessel, raised questions about the safety of wooden‑hulled steamers and the design of their boats and fittings. The inquiry that followed highlighted the vulnerability of pine‑built upper works to fire, the difficulty of launching boats from a fast‑moving paddle steamer, and the dangers of overheating machinery in the early days of marine engineering. For coastal communities like Paignton, however, the disaster was felt more personally. The parish had long supplied sailors, engineers and firemen to the merchant service, and the loss of the Amazon was not an abstract tragedy but a local one.
