Storm Warriors of the Suffolk Coast, by Ernest Read Cooper, F.S.A. (" Suf- folk Coast"). With a Foreword by the Secretary of the Royal National Life-boat Institution. Heath Granton, Ltd. : 3s. Qd.

MAJOR COOPER has spent a lifetime in the study of the life and history of the Suffolk coast. He has also taken a most active part in its life. For twenty years, from 1900 to 1920, he was the honorary secretary of the Institution's station at Southwold, and was often out in the life-boat on exercise and service. He has been many other things besides. He was Town Clerk and Clerk to the Magistrates. During the war he was also Clerk to the Military Tribunal, Secretary of the Water Company, Secretary of the Ferry Company, Captain of the Fire Brigade, the Officer Commanding the 3rd Volunteer Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, the Manager of the Harbour, Deputy Lloyd's Agent, the Sub-Com- missioner of Pilotage, and the Secretary of the Canadian Relief Fund. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and a member of the Society for Nautical Research, of the Royal United Service Institution, and of the Council of the Suffolk Archaeological Institute. He is an honorary member of the Great Yarmouth Archaeological Society, and the Ipswich and District Natural History Society, Trustee of Dunwich Trusts and a Vice-President of the Suffolk Preservation Society.

A Book of "Infinite Pleasure." When one adds to that long list that he has been a yachtsman for over forty years, is a member of the Royal Harwich Yacht Club and Vice-Com- modore of the Deben Yacht Club, it will be realised what a wealth of experience he has brought to his books on the Suffolk coast. Of one of these books, his Suffolk Coast Garland, a well-known writer on the sea wrote to the Institution a short time ago : " I always regard that as one of the best books of its kind ever written, and it has given me infinite pleasure.

It is one of the books that I can con- stantly turn to for enjoyment—when I have a moment's peace to read for the sake of enjoyment." Now Major Cooper has again earned the gratitude, not only of all interested in Suffolk, but of all interested in the life-boat service, by collecting in this book the records of some of the most famous of the life-boatmen on the Suffolk coast during the past hundred years. Here will be found names already very familiar to readers of The Life-boat: James Cable of Aide- burgh, and Jack Swan of Lowestoft, whom Major Cooper calls " the king of longshoremen." Here, too, are earlier names which also deserve to be remembered with honour: Joshua Chard, and Ben Herrington, Jack Craigie and Bob Hook.

Some of them are men whose families go back for centuries. For over three hundred years the name of Herrington is found in the annals of Southwold.

So, too, is the name of Craigie. Major Cooper has found it in the records of Southwold in the seventeenth century, but he thinks that it goes many cen- turies farther back than that, to the Crageir of the Icelandic sagas.

A Strange House-moving.

There are stories in his book of more than life-saving—of wrecking, smuggling and piracy, for he has wished to show every side of that hard but indomitable race of seafarers which has given us the life-boatmen of the East Coast. One story will show their quality.

It is a story of Harry Waters, reputed to be the last survivor of the Royal George, which sank at Spithead in 1782 : His little •wooden cot still stands in the back street at Southwold, although when built it was on the front. Being uneasy at the sea encroachment he said he was going to move it inland, but nobody thought he was serious until one day someone looked out of the Cliff house and let out a shout, for there was old Harry's home trundling along by itself, and Mrs. Waters shaking a duster out of her chamber window. Harry had got his cottage on to rollers, buried an anchor with a good tackle on it and carried the fall through the window to a Spanish windlass which he had rigged up inside, and there wasHarry's home rolling gently along as the owner hove on the windlass indoors, while his missis got on with her cleaning up aloft.

As the secretary of the Institution says in his Foreword to the book : " If there could be found, for every part of the coast of these islands a historian with the knowledge which Major Cooper has of the coast of Suffolk, what a story could be written ! " The book can be bought from the Institution, price 3s. 6d. post free..