THE most northerly of all the Institution's Life-boat Stations is at Stromness on the west coast of Mainland or Pomona, the largest of the f i f t y - s i x i s l a n d s which form the Orkneys. There was a still more northerly Station on the island of Stron s a y f r o m 1909 until the beginning of the War, but it was then closed owing to the impossibility of getting a crew, and has not been re-opened.

The Stromness Station itself was e s t a b l i s h ed in 1867, and since 1908 it has been provided with a Motor Life-boat.

It was in fact one of the earliest Stations to which a Motor Life-boat was sent, and the Stromness Boat has of the most striking examples in the provided some of the crops will be destroyed in a night, and it is one of the peculiar features of this coast that sudden and violent gales from o p p o s i t e p o i n t s succeed each other rapidly, often in the space of a few hours.

Of the most interesting and important Station, Stromness, Mr. G.

L. Thomson has been the Honorary Secretary for the past n i n e t e e n years. On every occasion since his appointment on which the Lifeboat has been called out, he has personally superi n t e n d e d t h e launching, and on two occasions he has himself gone out in the Boat.

What the superint e n d e n c e of a l a u n c h f r o m records of the Service of the value of motor-power.

Stromness used to be the port from which the vessels of the Hudson Bay Company, as well as most of the Arctic expeditions, set sail, and it furnished a large proportion of the men employed in the Greenland and Davis Strait fisheries. Few large vessels now call at Stromness, which is within twenty miles of the main routes between Scandinavia and America passing between the north coast of Scotland and the Orkneys ; and during the summer months it is the headquarters of the Scottish Herring Fleet.

The Orkneys are a very stormy corner of the world. The autumn gales are Stromness may mean is well illustrated by the service to the Grimsby trawler Freesia on 1st January, 1922, which was described in the February issue of the The Life-Boat. The Freesia was wrecked, and sank more than twenty miles away, round the coast of Mainland, and as soon as the Boat had been launched, Mr. Thomson motored across the island to the scene of the wreck. There he found that the trawler had already sunk, and that the only survivors were drifting on a small raft.

His first business was to place signalmen round the cliffs to guide the Life-boat, and then, fearing that she might be too late, he appealed for shore-boats to put out. His appeal was answered, and three boats made gallant but unsuccessful attempts to reach the raft. It was sometimes so heavy that the greater part ] left to the Life-boat, arriving after along and stormy journey of just four hours, to rescue the two men a few minutes before they would have been carried to certain death.

On this service the Life-boat travelled altogether fifty miles, and was afloat nine hours. In November, 1920, she went to the help of the s.s. Nodesta in distress ten miles off North Ronaldshay, and over seventy miles away from Strom- ness, and in the service to the s.s. Comet, described elsewhere in this issue, she travelled 114 miles.

Of the two occasions on which Mr.

Thomson has himself been out on service, one was the very first service of the Motor Life-boat in May, 1909, a few weeks' after she arrived at the Station. One of the sudden north- easterly gales came up when the Cox- swain and nearly all the Crew were out fishing. Several small fishing boats were in danger, and Mr. Thomson and the Harbour Master got together a scratch crew, and were successful in rescuing a fishing boat with four men on board.

In nearly twenty years of service for the Life-boat cause, Mr. Thomson's only regret is that the Admiralty did not inform Stromness when H.M.S. Hamp-shire was lost off the Orkneys in June, 1916, with Lord Kitchener on board.

Many of the Hampshire's crew were drifting on rafts along the shores of Bir- say and Sandwich, and it is the belief of the people of Stromness that if their Life- boat had been called out, a large number of these men would have been saved.

Besides being Honorary Secretary of the Stromness Station, Mr. Thomson is a Justice of the Peace for the County of Orkney, and a member of the County Council. For many years he was a member of the Stromness School Board.

He was Chairman of that body for thelast five years of its existence, and he is now a member of the Education Autho- rity of Orkney. In his, as in so many cases, it is those already giving gener- ously of their time and energy to public work, in other ways, who are most ready to work also for the Life-boat Service.

Mr. Thomson is a true Scot. He has brought to his work for the Life-boat Service the Scot's combination of earnest- ness and dry humour, and it has had the happiest result in maintaining, among these difficult northern seas, a Station with a well-trained and loyal Crew, ready for every call, however distant it may be..