AT 6.10 in the evening of Wednesday, April 23rd, the life-boat at The Mumbles vent out in a gale of exceptional severity to the help of the steamer Samtampa, of Middlesbrough, which had been driven ashore on the rocks off Sker Point, eleven miles south-east of The Mumbles. No more was seen or heard of the life-boat until daylight next morning when she was found ashore, bottom up, near the wreck of the Samtampa. All her crew were drowned. The Institution has pensioned their nineteen dependent relatives as if the men had been sailors of the Navy killed in action. A full account of this disaster will be published in the next number of The Life-boat.

The coxswain, William Gammon, who -was 47 years old, had a very distinguished record. He was one of the seven men who during the war won the gold medal of the Institution for conspicuous gallantry. This was in October, 1944, when he rescued forty-two lives from the Canadian frigate Cheboque in a fierce gale, by night. He had already won the bronze medal, in January, 1941, when, in order to rescue the crew of a steamer driven ashore, he took his life-boat in the darkness right among the coast defences of steel railway lines driven into the sand beneath the water. In his seventeen years as an officer of the life-boat he took part in the rescue of 127 lives. His portrait is on the cover.