IT was in February, 1895, that I first entered " the House of the Institution " in order to submit my name as a candidate for the vacancy of District Inspector of Life-boats, caused by a decision of the Committee of Manage- ment to add a new Inspector to the already existing four. The " House" was then situated at No. 14, John Street,, Adelphi; and though it had merits of its own, as have all the houses made famous by the Adams Brothers, it was ill - adapted to the requirements of a modern office, with its gas-lit and rather incommodious rooms, which the staff had already out - grown when I joined the Institution. Nevertheless, those few of us who still remember it maintain a sentimental regard for the old building, (and the peace and quiet of that historic 'quarter, so near to, and yet so far from, the roar of the Strand. There are signs that the new building in the Charing Cross Road is itself becoming too small for its requirements, and it seems possible that the day may come when the Institu- tion will again have to seek a new home.

How good if the forthcoming Cen- tenary could see it housed in a building worthy of this great National Service ! The imagination conjures up the vision of a noble edifice, fronting the great river—that highway of the shipping of all nations which our Life-boats help to safeguard. However, it is not for the purpose of recording my dreams of the future, but rather my recollections of the past, that the Editor has put this space at my disposal.

I was appointed first to the Irish District, where I remained nearly five years. The first year was marked by one of the most appalling disasters that has ever overtaken the Life-boats of the Institution, when, on December 24th, 1895, two splendid Life-boats, both stationed at Kingstown, were wrecked, and the whole of the crew of the larger boat drowned, in their attempt to save life from the Norwegian barque Palme, stranded in Dublin Bay during the height of a heavy south-easterly gale.

I was living in Kingstown myself at the time, but knew nothing pf what had happened until an overheard word in the street told me of the disaster. I hastened down to the shore, but was only in time to meet the bodies of the gallant men as, one by one, each clad in oilskins and life-belt, they were washed up, and reverently laid out by their mates. Late.in the night of that Christmas Eve we worked on the beach.

It was a scene which will never fade from my memory.

The only other Life-boat available was a small pulling-gig, stationed at Poolbeg, inside the bar of the Lifiey.

Nothing more could be done that night; but at day-break on Christinas morning I attempted, with the aid of a tng, to tow this boat out of the river and round to the Bay; however, the heavy seas on the bar made this impossible, and after two had broken on board the vessel and found their way into the engine-room, we were reluctantly com- pelled to give up the attempt. If only a Motor Life-boat had been stationed on the Irish Coast in those days t The crew of the Palme were eventually rescued in a very gallant manner by Mr. Thomas McCombie, an officer of the Irish Lights Board, who was able to get his own boat to sea from Kingstown Harbour, after the weather had some- what subsided.

During the five years I spent in Ireland I covered many a long " Irish " mile by road, as a great number of the Stations were" at long distances from the railway. The motor-car had, indeed, been invented, but had not then been brought into use, and I did all my work in that extraordinarily convenient vehicle, a jaunting, car. My beat lay almost entirely on 'the East Coast, as, owing to the absence of shipping, ' and consequently of wrecks, on the West Coast, no Life-boats are stationed there, with the exception of one on the distant island of Aranmore, off the coast of Donegal, a visit to which involved a drive of fifty-four miles from the nearest FEBRUARY, 1920.] THE LIFE-BOAT.

13 railway station, followed by a long trip in a boat.

It was in 1899, shortly after the outbreak of the Boer War, that I left Ireland for the Western District, my stay in which must have corresponded almost exactly with the period of the War, for I remember hearing of. the disaster of Colenso on my first visit in the new district, which was to that splendid Life - boat Station, Apple- dore; and I celebrated the signing of the Peace in a remote village in Wales with my successor the night before I turned the district over to him.

One of our party on this occasion was ! that first-class officer, and very dear r friend of mine, Commander Charles Cunninghame-Graham, who during the first fourteen years of my service with the Institution was Deputy .Chief Inspector of Life-boats. One of the many duties of the Deputy Chief Inspector is to visit the coast when problems arise which require the decision of a superior officer, as, for instance, the opening of a Life-boat Station in some spot- where none has existed previously, or the closing of an existing Station. The Inspector, for the district always accompanies him on these occasions,'and many a delightful and. instructive trip did I have with Graham. The great charm of his manner, no less than his keen interest ' *in, and knowledge of, men and things, made him the most delightful com- , panion, and endeared him to all with j whom he came in contact. Moreover, his knowledge of Life-boat work was f unique, and his loss to the Institution, ! when he retired from its service, was f irreparable.

'*! From the West Coast I went to Scot- pland, which is known officially as the Northern District, as.it includes the counties of Cumberland and Northum- I berland. In the latter county I made •acquaintance with one of the best pLife-boat crews with whom it has been imy privilege to go afloat, consisting sfentirely of miners from the famous (Cambois coal mine, which extends for iles under the bed of the North In Northumberland, also, I was to make a pilgrimage to Bam- igh and its little churchyard by the sea in full' sight o| the Fame Islands, and pay the homage of a Life- boatman at the tomb of the intrepid girl whose blameless life, ho less than her famous deed, might surely fit her for canonisation as :the patron saint of the Life-boat Service.

In 1908 I moved on to the Eastern District, and here I realised that, in spite of my thirteen years' experience,.

I still had much to learn about the handling of Life-boats. When I left the Royal Navy in 1895 I was under the fond impression that I knew all that was to be known about boat work ; but I was soon undeceived, and came to learn that in this particular branch of the seaman's art, the sailor, as the man who sails the deep sea in a ship is called technically, has much, if not everything, to learn from the coast fisherman, whose business is entirely in open boats. It was on the East Coast, however, that my education in this respect was completed, if it can be said that any man's education is ever com- pleted. The hardy fishermen of Norfolk and Suffolk are, I suppose, second to no other men in the world ia their skill as boatmen. Such' skill is doubtless in- herited from their Scandinavian fore- bears, whom so many of them still resemble in type and feature; but it has been nurtured by generations of service to the long, low, outlying sand-banks which fringe this portion of the coast of , England, making it more dangerous to shipping than any other portion of the United Kingdom. When it is remem- bered that it is right in the track of a large proportion of all the vessels bound for the port of London, it is not to be wondered at that on the Hasborbugh Sand, lying some ten miles off the coast of Norfolk, there are the bodies of more wrecked vessels than on any other shoal in the -world, not even excepting the famous Goodwins.

In 191JJI made my last move, being appointed'to the Southern District, and in the following year I had the good fortune to realise the.ambition of my career in the Life-boat Service by taking part in -a Life-boat rescue. Hitherto, in all my long experience of Life-boat work, though I had many and many a time taken the boats afloat for exercise 14 THE LIFE-BOAT.

[FEBRUABY, 1920.

L k ' in bad weathers I tad never had an opportunity of being present at " the real thing." The story of the hospital ship BoJtitta, wrecked off Whitby, was fully told in The Life-Boat for February, 1915, and need not be re- peated here. Nor will I attempt to describe the thrill I felt as we left the narrow harbour in the grey dawn of that .November day, and headed for the tremendous seas which were breaking over the doomed vessel; nor my feelings as we lay alongside her and the fifty survivors—-who had been for two days and two nights huddled together on the bridge, washed by every sea that swept her—dropped one by one into the Life- boat. But I know that, as each man, when he reached safety, uttered the most heart-felt thanks I have ever heard from the lips of men, I became conscious, perhaps for the first time fully, of the | real value of the Life-boat Service, and realised that my past labour in it had not been altogether in vain.

Incidentally, this rescue conclusively proved two things: The immense value of oil in smoothing a sea alongside a wreck, for it is open to doubt whether the task on this occasion would have been safely accomplished without it; and the inestimable importance of the Motor Life-boat, for not only could no other kind of boat have come forty-four miles, as this one did, in order to per- form the service, but I am prepared to Stake my professional reputation on the statement that, owing to the tortuous nature of the passage between the rocks, no other than a Motor Life-boat could have safely reached the vessel at all.

My appointment to the Southern District completed the round of the whole coast of these islands, so that in my time I have inspected every Life- boat Station in the kingdom. In November, 1914, 1 was called up on active service, and, after nine months afloat, was appointed Coast Watching Officer for Norfolk and Suffolk, where I served till the end of the war.

During this period I was able, with the permission of the Admiralty, to render, some assistance to the Institu- tion in a voluntary capacity by inspect- ing the Life-boat Stations in these two counties. It was whilst I was thus employed that I witnessed the finest piece of Life-boat work that has ever come under my notice, when the Cromer Life-boat, manned by the old men left behind by the war, after twice being beaten back to the beach by the heavy seas, saved the crew of the Fernebo. I described this scene fully in The Life- Boat for February,'1916.

It is, of course, impossible in the space at my disposal to review all the changes which have taken place in the Life-boat Service since I joined it; but looking back over the quarter of a century which has elapsed, one appears to stand out more conspicuously than the others. This has been the gradual increase in the size of the Life-boats. For some seventy years the general policy of the Institution had been to build boats light enough and small enough to be transported on a carriage to a spot as nearly opposite the wreck as possible, and there, launching off the beach, to approach it under oars to leeward.

The modern tendency is to station a large and powerful boat in an advan- tageous position where she can launch into deep water, and, if possible, cut off the doomed vessel before she reaches the shore; or, if too late to do that, can approach to windward, and, dropping anchor at a convenient distance, veer down to the wreck. The invention of a particularly powerful sailing boat by G. L. Watson, the famous yacht de- signer, shortly before I joined the Institution, gave a considerable fillip to this tendency, which the subsequent adoption of motors in Life-boats has done much to augment. The present scheme of the Institution to build a fleet of Motor Life-boats and station them at salient points round the coast, not, if possible, more than fifty miles apart, is the final fruition of this modern policy. I recall a conversation I had with Cunninghame-Graham in the early days of my Life-boat career, when he said, "It is not small boats, as at present, stationed in the bights, but- large ones -in the horns of bays which the future will see." He did much in his time to bring about this result, and perhaps I may claim to have done a little, also, to help in this direction.

The perfect Inspector of Life-boats FEBRUARY, 1920.] THE LIFE-BOAT.

15 should be a man of many parts. First and foremost, he must, of course, be a seaman; but he must add some knowledge of the art of the boatbuilder in order adequately to report on the state of the b/ ats he "inspects, and on any necessary repairs to them; of the wheel-wright, for he must examine the Life-boat carriages, and be sure of their condition for transporting the boat over rough and uneven ground; of the builder, in order to examine and report on any defect in the Life-boat houses; of the civil engineer, that he may do the same for the slip-ways ; of the marine engineer, when he is in- specting a Steam Life-boat; of the motor mechanic, for Motor Life-boats; of the accountant, as he has to examine the Branch accounts, and see that they are properly kept; of the orator, for he must on occasion speak in public on behalf of the Institution; and lastly, a little of the writer's craft must be thrown on to the heap, if his reports are to be lucid, and clearly understood at headquarters. In addition to such knowledge, he must show tact and patience in dealing with all classes of men, from the lord of the manor, whom he seeks-to interest in the local Life-boat, to the fishing-lad whose grievance against the Institution it may be his business to inquire into and, if possible, remedy; nor is it always with men alone that he has to deal, for alas! it is sometimes his painful duty to call on and condole .with widows whose husbands have been lost in the service of the Institution.

I have described an ideal, one which, indeed, I have fallen far short of myself-; but some of all these multifarious duties I -have had to perform at various times during my career.

The life of an Inspector of Life-boats is in many ways an arduous one.

When visiting a Station he always launches the Life-boat and takes her- afloat however bad "the weather; indeed, the worse the weather the more useful and necessary the exercise; but this means that very frequently, especially in winter, he gets wet to the skin, and is unable to change till he can get back to the place where he is stopping, which is often not till some hours afterwards, when he has completed his. inspection.

He has practically no home life; he sees little of his family; he spends his time among strangers; he lives in un- comfortable hotels. But there are many compensatory advantages. It is a free, open-air, healthy life; it is full of adventures; it brings him into con- tact with all sorts and conditions of men. He receives much hospitality, and makes many friends, some of whom he keeps for life. Of these none stand out more conspicuously in my memory than the various coxswains of Life- boats whom I have met round the coast. The pick of a picked body of men, they combine the simplicity of character of the fisherman with the moral qualities which go to make leaders of men. Was it not on just such that the great choice fell in Galilee of old? " Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for a friend." These men and their crews are ready not only to lay down their lives for a friend, but for the stranger within their gates. National in name, but far more than national in scope, the Insti- tution recognises no difference of race or creed or status. No one can read the record of each boat's service which is set up in every Life-boat house without being struck by the large number of foreign vessels served, which is nearly always out of all proportion to the numbers of British 'and foreign vessels sailing the seas.

' Words fail me in which to express the regret I feel at now severing my connexion with the Life-boat Service.

I am more proud than I can say to think that I have given the best years of my life to be a humble servant in such a cause, which shines in the dark- ness of a material age with all the glory of a great spiritual light.

" Not till earth be sinless, not till death strike blind the skies, May the deathless love that waits on deathless deeds be dead.".