LIFE-BOATS have other things to do besides the saving of life from shipwreck.

Among the islands off Scotland and Ireland their help is often asked, when rough weather makes impossible the use of ordinary boats. The most common of these duties is the taking of doctors to sick people in the islands, or the carrying of the sick to hospitals on the mainland. Every winter brings such jobs to be done, and never have there been so many of them as in the heavy snowstorms and gales of January, February and March of the present year.

In the seventy-one days from January 4th to March 15th, there were twenty-eight such errands for life-boats.

Most of them were in the north of Scotland. Lerwick, in the Shetlands, was out nine times and Aith four, and of those thirteen journeys, eleven were to help the sick, two were to carry food. The other life-boats which went on such errands were Campbeltown (twice), Tobermory and Port Patrick, on the west coast of Scotland; Holy Island and Gorleston (twice), on the east coast of England; Salcombe, in Devon; Llandudno, Fishguard and St. Davids, in Wales; Donaghadee, Cloughey and Galway Bay, in Ireland.

Snow-bound Roads In ordinary bad weather it is the gales which bring these duties to the life-boats, in the traffic between the islands and the mainland, but in this past winter more than half of them were on account of the heavy snow. There were altogether ten cases of life-boats carrying help to the sick and seven of carrying food to the hungry, because the roads were impassable through snow, and the only way was by sea.

Most of these were in the far north, Of the thirteen journeys by Lerwick and Aith, eight were because of snowbound roads, and there were others, for the same reason, in the south of Wales by the life-boats from Fishguard and St. Davids, and in south-west England by Salcombe. Salcombe was the most southerly place at which the Arctic weather compelled the transport of food by sea because the roads were closed. This was on January 30th and February 1st, and on February 6th the South-West Divisional Food Office at Bristol wrote to the Salcombe station: " News hag reached me from Salcombe of the splendid service performed by members of the life-boat crew during the recent appalling weather conditions in your district. There seems little doubt, but for the readiness and publicmindedness which your crew displayed, several of your surrounding areas would have been in dire straits for the foodstuffs at a time when they were obviously in vital need.

"May I, on behalf of the Ministry of Food, and of myself, ask you to convey to the crew a very warm appreciation of their efforts, so much the more commendable since they were outside the scope of their normal duties which in themselves are extremely arduous." There were other unexpected duties in that winter weather. Valentia went out to bring from an island the body of a man, Padstow to help three children, caught by the tide on a rock, Aberystwyth to rescue a boy at night, stuck on the face of the cliff. There was, too, the inevitable false alarm. Ramsgate went out at midnight, and searched for a long time, in answer to shouts apparently from out at sea. She found nothing. The shouts had come from boys and girls playing on the slopes of snow on the cliffs.