JUST after four in the morning of 8th February, 1934, the life-boat station at Runswick, Yorkshire, re- ceived a message from the coastguard that distress signals were being fired five miles N.N.E. of Staithes Nab. A gale was blowing from the W.N.W., with a heavy sea and rain showers.

At 4.25 the motor life-boat The Always Ready was launched, and at 5.30 she reached the vessel in distress, the salvage steamer Disperser, of West Hartlepool. The steamer had been in tow of a tug and was sinking. Of the eight men of her crew seven had been rescued by the tug. The eighth man was still on board. He was lame.

With considerable difficulty in the heavy seas the life-boat got alongside the sinking steamer and her crew called on the man to -jump. Instead, he lowered himself over the side and hung there. Coxswain Robert Patton seized him, and called to him to let go; but he only clung the tighter. At that moment the life-boat was carried away from the steamer. Coxswain Patton could have loosed his hold, but he knew that if he did so the man would almost certainly fall into the sea. He held on; was dragged overboard; and fell into the sea between the life-boat and the steamer ; but he still held the man.

Then a heavy sea flung the life-boat back against the steamer, and Coxswain Patton's life-belt took the full force of the blow. The rest of the crew dragged the man on board, but before they could rescue their coxswain, he had twice more been crushed between life- boat and steamer. Soon afterwards the steamer sank.

The life-boat reached Runswick again at 6.15 and the coxswain was taken to hospital. Several of his ribs had been broken; the pelvis had been fractured in three places; there was a fracture of the vertebrae, and other injuries.

When, two days later, he was visited by an officer of the Institution he was conscious and able to speak of the service. He had known the risk he ran ; but the man was a cripple ; he had no life-belt; had he dropped into the sea in the darkness he would have been in great danger of drowning.

Coxswain Patton's own words were : " I could not let the poor lad go, as he might have been drowned." Nine days after the service he died.

Award of the Gold Medal.

The Institution awarded him, pos- thumously, its gold medal—the highest honour which it can bestow, and which is given only for conspicuous gallantry.

It was accompanied by a copy of the vote, inscribed on vellum and signed by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, K.G., as President of the Institution. The medal was presented to Mrs. Patton at the annual meeting in London on 20th April by the Prince of Wales.

The Institution also paid the expenses of Coxswain Patton's illness and funeral (at which 4,000 people were present), and has pensioned his widow and daughter as if he had been a chief petty officer in the Navy, killed in action.

The Carnegie Hero Fund Trust have awarded a supplementary pension to Mrs. Patton, and are assisting towards the secondary school education of her daughter, while a sum of nearly £200 has been received in response to a local appeal made by the Marquis of Normanby, President of the Runswick and Staithes branch.

The new motor life-boat at Runswick, in which the service to the Disperser was carried out, has been built out of a legacy from the late Mrs. Elizabeth B.

Brown, of Scarborough, and according to her wishes was to be named The Always Ready. This has now been altered to Robert Patton—The Always Ready, and on 20th September the life- boat will be given this name by H.R.H.

the Princess Royal.

Thirty Years' Service.

By the death of Robert Patton the Institution has lost one of its finest coxswains. He was forty-six years old, and for thirty years (except for the years of the Great War, when he was serving with the Navy in mine- sweepers) he had been a member of the Runswick life-boat crew. He joined it in 1904 at the age of sixteen.

In 1931 he was appointed coxswain.

He came of a life-boat family. His father was second coxswain at Runs- wick for twenty-seven years and won the Institution's bronze medal.

The first service in which Robert Patton took part was in January, 1904, to the steamer Aynthia, of London, from which the crew of thirty-six men was rescued. In October, 1914, he was one of eighteen men at Whitby who were singled out for special awards for their bravery and untiring efforts in going into the surf to rescue men who had jumped overboard from the wreck of the hospital ship Rohilla. In 1932, as coxswain, he was presented with an inscribed gold watch by the owners of the Belgian trawler Jeanne, in gratitude for the rescue of the eleven survivors of her crew of fourteen.

" A Very*Brave English Gentleman." In his broadcast appeal on llth March1 Major-General Lord Mottistone told the story of Patton's gallantry.

Several of those who answered that appeal said that they had known Patton and sent their gifts in memory of him. One of them wrote : " Bob Patton was a man whom I have had the pleasure of knowing for thirty years, and I have spent many happy holidays in that pleasant village of Runswick, where he lived. . . . He was a very fine and very brave English gentleman. . . . He was much more than just a fisherman, and that little community at Runswick, which is only a tiny village with about thirty cottages in it, will miss him very sorely indeed.

It is so much more noticeable in a small place like that when one so good and so useful is taken in the prime of life than it would be, perhaps, in a large town, where there might be others to carry on the work of the one who has died." 1 See page 277..