Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

34 Orthodox British Boys Rescued From Rising Tide on School Trip

A school trip to Britain’s picturesque south coast nearly turned tragic when 34 Orthodox teenage boys from London and their two teachers were trapped by rising tides and had to be plucked to safety Monday night.

The trapped teens were forced signal for help with the light from their cell phones after ignoring danger signs and becoming trapped among the cliffs.

On a trip organized by the Ahvas Yisroel community centre in North London, the group of 13- and 14-year-old boys and their teachers went on a walk down a stretch of coastal road between St. Margaret’s Bay and Dover Beach in Kent, according to an article by Jewish News. As the day came to an end and the tide started to rise, the boys and their teachers became trapped among one of the cliffs.

By 9:27 p.m.., the group started calling for help to the Kent Police, said RNLI’s Dover Beach Lifeboat Station on Twitter. Upon arrival, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in Kent told the group to use the light from their cell phones to indicate their location.

“We are hugely grateful to the coastguard whose swift actions ensured that everyone was returned to shore safe and well,” a spokesperson from the group told the BBC. “A full internal investigation will be held to ascertain the facts and understand the lessons to be learned.”

Volunteers were “liaising with @kent_police and families of hikers that got lost in the Dover Cliffs,” said Shomrim, a Jewish neighborhood watch organization in North London, in a tweet.

By 11 p.m., 31 members of the group were rescued immediately by lifeboat while the rest had to be airlifted by helicopter after separating from the rest of the group and becoming trapped in a more isolated part of the road.

Mark Finnis, coxswain of Dover Royal National Lifeboat Institution, told the BBChttp://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-36466422 that the group ignored “nine warning signs” that informed them not to take that particular stretch of road.

“None of the people we took on board our lifeboat were dressed in any attire that you would associate with clambering over rocks,” said Finnis.

No one among the group’s 36 people was injured or required a hospital visit, said the UK Coastguard.

In a series of tweets released in response to the incident, Port of Dover Travel said that it was “pleased to see coordinated response in bringing people safely ashore” but hoped that the situation would serve as a lesson to “stay safe” around water.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.