Mr. William Potter, at one time Assistant Surveyor of Life-boats, died on 4th May last, at the age of ninety- four. The son of a dockyard shipwright, he was born in 1831, was apprenticed as a shipwright at Woolwich. Dockyard, and was later transferred to Devonport.

Here he worked as a shipwright until the Crimean War. Towards the end of | the war he was appointed a charge-man of shipwrights and transferred to the Royal Dockyards at Malta. After the war he returned to Devonport as a ! shipwright, and for a time he did over- seer's work, superintending the building of a number of ships for the Navy.

Later, he was appointed Inspector of Timber, and held this post until he retired in 1891. Eighteen months later he was appointed Assistant Surveyor of I Life-boats to the Institution. He was engaged at first on coast survey work, and then, in 1898, became Resident ! Assistant Surveyor, first at the Thames Ironworks, and then at the yards of Messrs. Saunders, at Cowes, super- intending the building of the Institu- tion's Life-boats. He remained at Cowes until April, 1915, when, at the age of eighty-four, he retired on a pen- sion. During the seventeen years that he was Resident Assistant Surveyor, he superintended the building of from 300 to 400 Life-boats. It was after his retirement that one of the workmen said of him, " He used to harass us a bit, but he made good workmen of us." An officer of the Institution recalls his fine healthy old age, and his extraordinary gift, almost a sixth sense, for knowing the soundness of timber and the delicate grades of quality. He could tell if a baulk of timber were sound simply by laying his hand on it, and he was never known to pass any timber which had afterwards to be rejected. About the man himself there was something which seemed to suggest the character of a rugged old tree, healthy to the core..