Presentation of the Prizes in the London District. LAST year, for the first time, the presentation of the prizes won in this com- petition in the London area (consistingof the schools under the London County Council) took place at one meeting, instead of at the different schools. The meeting was held at the Caxton Hall, Westminster, on 10th December. The Mayor of the City of Westminster (Mr. George H. Heilbuth, J.P.) presided, and the presentations were made by Captain A. F. B. Carpenter, V.C., R.N., Captain of the Dockyard, Deputy Superintendent and King's Harbour Masterat Chatham, who commanded the Vinsentation dictive at Zeebrugge.

Supporting the Mayor on the plat-form were Sir Godfrey Baring, Bt.

(Chairman of the Committee of Management), Lady Bertie of Thame (Chairman of the London Women's Committee), Mr. 0. W. Nicholson, M.P. for the Abbey Division of Westminster, the Mayor of Fulham (Alderman W. J. Waldron), a school in whose borough won the Challenge Shield, and Mr. George F. Shee, M.A., Secretary of the Institution.

There were also present (several members of the Committee of Manage- ment, the London Women's Committee and the Education Committee of the L.C.C., and the ceremony included a short programme of sea songs sung by Mr. Arthur Cranmer, accompanied by Miss Isabel Hirstfield.

After Mr. Cranmer had sung " Drake's Drum," " Cheer'ly Men," and " Rolling Down to Rio," the Mayor of West- minster said :— Of all Institutions in this country none appeals more to the hearts and the imagination of the people, whether old or young, than the Royal National Life-boat Institution. The men who man the Life-boats are all heroes and are ready at all times to risk their lives for the benefit of humanity.

We have met this evening to present the prizes won by London schools in the Duke of Northumberland's Life-boat Essay Competi- tion, which each year is held by the Royal National Life-boat Institution.

I should like to remind you that this com- petition was founded by the late Duke of Northumberland, who was at that time the President of the Institution. This is the fifth year in which it has been held, and boys and girls from the elementary schools all over Great Britain and Northern Ireland have taken part in it.

The country is divided into six districts. In each district the school which sends in the best essay has the honour of holding the Challenge Shield for the next year, and in each district thirty-six individual prizes are also awarded. Over nine hundred and forty schools took part in the competition this year, and one hundred and sixty of them were London schools.

Only the two best essays are sent in from each school. That means that you boys and girls to whom prizes have been awarded have won them in competition with hundreds of boys and girls in other schools as well as your own. I think you should feel very proud of that fact.

The Challenge Shield this year has been won for the Fulham Central School for Boys by W. Neal, whose essay is not only the best in London, but one of the six best in the whole of Great Britain and Ireland. This is a very great distinction, and I think that W. Neal and his school will feel that it is a still greater dis- tinction when I tell them that this is the first time, in the five years, that the London Challenge Shield has been won by a school north of the Thames, and the first time that it has been won by a boys' school! I feel that all the prize winners should be proud of the way in which the prizes are to be presented to them. We have here this evening Sir Godfrey Baring, the Chairman of the Com- mittee of Management of the Institution, and members of his Committee. We have the Member of Parliament for the Abbey Division of Westminster, Mr. 0. W. Nicholson. We have Lady Bertie of Thame, the Chairman of the London Women's Life-boat Committee, and other members of her Committee. We have also members of the Education Com- mittee of the London County Council. We have His Worship the Mayor of Fulham (Alder- man W. J. Waldron), who, I know, is very proud, extremely proud, that a Fulham school has won the Challenge Shield, because he has personally done so much for the Life-boat cause in his borough, and upon that we can congratulate them.

Finally, we have Captain Carpenter, who commanded the Vindictive at Zeebrugge.

(Cheers.) I think you thirty-five boys and girls should feel it a very great honour that you are to receive your prizes from an officer who not only fought in such a famous action, but won that very great distinction, the Victoria Cross. I will now call on Captain Carpenter to present the prizes.

Captain Carpenter.

Before presenting the prizes Captain CARPENTER said : I should like to commence by saying what a great honour it is for me, as a mere sailor, to be asked to present the prizes and speak in connexion with what I call Public Welfare.

I feel that it is a very great privilege, because in speaking here at all I am speaking very largely to the younger generation. I and my generation will soon pass away, and when we have gone it will be for you younger people to take over the responsibilities which have been upon our shoulders to a certain degree. You will, of course, do much better than we have done. We, I hope, have done our best, but your standard will be a higher one than ours.

Where we have failed you will succeed. Where we have succeeded your success will, I hope, be greater than ours.

Now before I present the prizes I will say a word or two in connexion with the Life-boat work. To begin with, who are these men who carry out this work of life-saving ? They are all volunteers. No question of material reward enters into it, and if any reward does enter into it, it is the reward which is to be gained by the satisfaction of knowing that they have done their utmost to succour shipwrecked mariners. Often when the chances of saving life are, one might say, infinitesimal, the satis- faction is still there, and possibly all the greater when they can feel assured that they have done their utmost to bring off a million to one chance. It is what we might call true sportsmanship. It is the traditional sports- manship of Great Britain, and it is the sports- manship which is so well exemplified by the President of this great Institution, the Prince of Wales. No wretched calculation of the degree of danger or discomfort enters into the matter when a Life-boatman is called out, and there is no other thought in their minds but to do their utmost, each for each, you might say, to accomplish the object that they set out to do. In fact, the work of each for weal of all would undoubtedly be a fitting motto.

Now what are the special qualities that are necessary for these Life-boatmen ? Firstly, I would put courage. Practically all their work, I should think probably ninety-nine per cent, of it, is carried out in the face of great personal danger. It requires a certain amount of courage to face and do well in danger, but in this particular case it requires, I would venture to suggest, a very great moral courage to induce a man who is in a position of perfect safety to volunteer to go out and place himself in a position of the greatest peril. It requires great moral courage to do that, and, having done it, when he is in the position of considerable danger, it requires great physical courage to enable him to endure the strain, which is often very prolonged.

Another dominating factor is that of a sense of duty. I do not of course refer to the sense of duty merely between employer and em- ployee, but the sense of duty to the dictates of humanity, the sense of duty to those who are in actual danger. It is the spirit of self- abnegation regardless of sacrifice and also regardless, I might add, of the admiration of the public. It does not matter one jot whether the shipwrecked mariner is a Britisher or a Chinaman, a Buddhist or a Roman Catholic, a Tory or a Bolshevist. Lives are in danger, and that is the be-all and end-all of the con- sideration that comes into the mind of a Life- boatman when he is called out to duty.

Women and the Life-boats.

I should doubt whether any of the essays have referred to the women in connexion with this subject. We used to say that it was not the man behind the gun who was all im- portant, but that it was the woman behind the man behind the gun. And with regard to the late war, the Great War, it was often stated that the women who had to stay at home had to play the hardest part. That was true. They had to play the very, very hard part of waiting, waiting anxiously against the day when that almost inevitable telegram would come to tell them that their dear ones had been shot down. But those women were at home and were removed fairly far from the dangers that beset their menfolk. Now the women of the Life-boatmen are practically in the fighting line. They themselves see the tremendous struggles taking place with the elements, and as often as not they lend a hand so far as they are able to do. We are all familiar with the heroic deeds of Grace Darling, and we all know that there are other women who have emulated that heroine. But I do say this, that these women of the Life- boatmen are in a position of very great anxiety, anxiety very largely concerned with the ques- tion as to whether the Life-boats and the other apparatus which their men have to use is the very best that can be had. And, putting all else aside, I would suggest that we should remember the anxieties of these women and do all we can to give their men the very best apparatus so as to reduce that anxiety.

I would say a word here about the force of the sea in heavy weather. During the War one of our battleships was steaming through the Pentland Firth one day in very heavy weather. A very heavy gale was blowing from the westward and the very strong currents which there are in that locality were running diametrically in the opposite direction, which always causes a very fast and heavy sea. About midnight this great battleship was suddenly struck by a tremendous wave, and this wave smashed up the whole of the woodwork of the bridges to matchwood and broke up all the ironwork of the bridges out of all recognition.

Every soul on the bridges was swept overboard except one. The captain of the ship was swept overboard, and you can imagine the thoughts that were in his mind at that moment. How- ever, instinctively, I suppose, he struck out, and a moment later, very much to his astonish- ment, he touched bottom, and the bottom he touched was the upper deck of his own ship, because he had been washed back on board by another wave.

Eleven-Inch Armour Crushed.

The navigation officer, the only other sur- vivor, was found down at the other end of the ship under all the wreckage of the bridges with a large piece of iron sticking into his body. The steersman was in the conning tower at the wheel. This is a circular tower made of very thick armour, as far as I remem- ber about eleven-inch armour, and so strong is it, to give you an illustration, that if six motor lorries charged it at the same time, ;oing as hard as they could, all that would lappen would be that the lorries would smash themselves up, the paint would be slightly scratched and the armour would remain in exactly the same shape as it was before. But the wave that struck this ship was of such terrific force that it broke that armoured conning tower just as if it has been made of brown paper. The man at the wheel was killed outright, and they reckon that over 2000 tons of water found its way into the ship between decks. And even up in the fighting top, seventy feet about the sea level, they found the whole place full of water after they had gone through this experience. Any other class of ship would have simply disappeared alto- ;ether, but this great battleship struggled into larbour next morning and actually put on record these facts which I have been telling you. Had not the ship survived and so been able to put them on record, I should feel in- clined to say that this little account of the strength of the sea would have been looked upon as a fairy tale.

The Institution as Employer.

I have dealt with the Life-boatmen and the spirit in which they volunteer for the work, and some of the qualities they require. They are the employees of this Institution. But what about the employers ? Who are the em- ployers ? Not the Government, but the British public. Now what sort of employers are we ? Do we, by some knavery, trick these men into serving us so as to avoid starvation ? Most certainly not. Do we force them in any way to take on this work, or do we make them suspicious of our actions in any way ? Most certainly we do not. And do the Committee of Management refuse to listen to advice or take the advice of their employees ? Most certainly they do not refuse. They welcome the advice of the men who do the work for us.

And so, therefore, as far as that goes, we are model employers. But are we model em- ployers altogether ? Do we provide these men with the very best possible apparatus that can be had for carrying out their work ? I suppose it might be true to say that from this point of view we are not absolutely one hundred per cent, perfect employers, because it is very hard to make people realize the fact that you cannot provide all this apparatus, Life-boats, etc., unless the money is forthcoming.

Now, I naturally do not suggest that the schools ought to produce the money. Nothing is further from my thoughts, because the money must obviously come from those who have it by good luck and those who have it by good management, or in other words, those who work. It is from the capitalists, if you like that word, and the wage-earners that the money must come, not from schools. But the public, that portion of the public which can, undoubtedly, lessen the Institution's anxieties in this respect, are perhaps a little tiny bit lethargical. It is very hard for them, living far inland, to realize that the work is done for them as well as for anybody else. Only a very few years ago I happened to be in another country where they have an organization into which they try and bring as many of the people as possible. I am referring to the United States, and every year they have what they call a membership drive. It lasts about a fort- night, during which they have lectures and speeches all over the country and try to get as many people to join the Red Cross as pos- sible. It just so happened that I was able to give them a little humble assistance by address- ing a few words in that connexion, and it rather astonished me when I found that the officials of the institution were actually dis- appointed with the result, because the result of this drive in that particular year was that they got no less than twenty-two and a half million people to join at a dollar subscription a time. Twenty-two and a half million dollars were forthcoming, over five and a half million pounds, for the Red Cross in a single year. I mention this to show what can be done when you get a great community like that all realizing the absolute necessity for, and the value of, the particular organization which has been brought before their notice.

We are not inferior to Americans. We can do just what they do, as good as they do, and better, but we cannot do this sort of thing.

We cannot get so much money from the public for this Institution as will free us from anxieties until the public fully realize the absolute necessity for it. Now I come to the chief point. Who is going to make them realize it ? Why surely it is the rising generation who have been given an interest in this particular sub- ject, who have worked it up to enable them to write their essays. They are interested in it.

They know, better perhaps than many of the older people, the necessity for supporting this Institution. And it is for them as they grow up, you young people as you grow up, to nudge their brothers and sisters and elders as soon as they are in a position to help this Institution, and suggest to them that it would be a very good thing to do.

(Captain Carpenter then presented the Shield and other Prizes, after which Mr. Arthur Cranmer sang " Sea Fever " and " Hearts of Oak.") Sir Godfrey Baring proposed and Mr.

0. W. Nicholson seconded a vote of thanks to the Mayor and Captain Carpenter, and after they had responded the. National Anthem was sung.