The Roll-Call of the Reef by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Classic Ghost Stories

Tony Walker

Fiction, Drama, Science Fiction

4.9 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A gale howls in from the sea as a traveller takes shelter with a smallholder on the Cornish coast. Above the hearth hang two relics: an old cavalry trumpet and a weathered drum, bound together with a brass-lettered lock. No one knows the word that opens it. As the fire burns low, the smallholder begins to tell a tale—half history, half haunting—of shipwrecks, silence, and the names that must still be answered. The Roll-Call of the Reef was first published in 1911 in Noughts and Crosses, a collection of stories by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. It remains one of his most enduring supernatural tales and has been reprinted in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), who published as “Q”, was a Cornish writer, critic, and anthologist. He is best known for his editorship of The Oxford Book of English Verse and his lifelong dedication to the literary life of Cornwall. ⭐ Join my Patreon ⭐ https://patreon.com/barcud Go here for a library of ad-free stories, a monthly members only story and early access to the regular stories I put out. You can choose to have ghost stories only, or detective stories or classic literature, or all of them for either $5 or $10 a month. Many hundreds of hours of stories. Who needs Audible? Or, if you'd just like to make a one-off gesture of thanks for my work https://buymeacoffee.com/10mn8sk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:39.3	everybody come back isn't that sir you tried to get into the locked
0:45.8	day didn't you try to the dead come back mother what's the secret
0:50.9	the roll call of the reef by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch.
0:57.0	Yes, sir, said my host, the quarry man, reaching down the relics from their hook in the
1:01.7	wall over the chimney-piece.
1:03.7	They've hung there all my time and most of my fathers.
1:07.0	The women won't touch him.
1:08.5	They're afraid of the story, so here they'll dangle and gather dust
1:12.3	and smoke till another tenant comes and tosses them out of the doors for rubbish.
1:17.5	"'Phew, it's coarse weather.' He went to the door, opened it, and stood studying the gale
1:23.4	had beat upon his cottage front straight from the manacle reef. The rain drove past him into the
1:29.7	kitchen, a slant like threads of gold silk in the shine of the wreckwood fire. Meanwhile, by the
1:36.4	same firelight I examined the relics on my knee. The metal of each was tarnished out of knowledge,
1:42.5	but the trumpet was evidently an old
1:44.6	cavalry trumpet, and the threads of its party-coloured sling, though frayed and dusty, still hung
1:50.5	together. Around the side drum, beneath its cracked brown varnish, I could hardly trace
	...

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