The Annual Meeting was held at the Central Hall, Westminster, on the 27th of October, 1948, with Sir Godfrey Baring, Bt., chairman of the Committee of Management, in the chair.

H.R.H. the Duchess of Kent, President of the Institution, presented the medals for gallantry and other awards, and gave her presidential address.

The speakers were Admiral Sir William James, G.C.B., the Right Hon.

Oliver Stanley, M.C., M.P., Commodore the Right Hon. the Earl Howe, C.B.E., V.R.D., P.C., R.N.V.R., a vice-president of the Institution and vicechairman of the Committee of Management, and Colonel J. Benskin, D.S.O., O.B.E., a vice-president of the Institution.

Supporting the Duchess on the platform were the Mayor and Mayoress of Westminster, the Mayors and Mayoresses of 27 other London boroughs, the Mayors and Mayoresses of St. Albans, Deal and Weymouth, representatives of the Coastguard, King George's Fund for Sailors, and the Shipwrecked Mariners' Society, vice-presidents and honorary life-governors of the Institution, members of the Committee of Management and members of the Central London Women's Committee.

The Chairman's Address It is with special pleasure that we welcome at our meeting to-day our President, Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent. It was a very great disappointment to us, and I am sure it was a disappointment to Her Royal Highness, that she was prevented by illness from coming to our meeting last year.

Her Royal Highness will present the awards for gallantry and for distinguished services, and I know how much it will add to the honour which we show to-day to our lifeboatmen and to our honorary workers, that they will receive their awards from her hands.

We are very glad also to welcome the mover and the seconder of the first resolution, two very distinguished men, Admiral Sir William James and The Right Hon. Oliver Stanley. Admiral Sir William James is not only an Admiral but a well-known writer on naval matters; he has sat in the House of Commons; and he was for several years a member of the Institution's Committee of Management. Mr. Oliver Stanley's brilliant and witty speeches have for a long time past relieved the tedium of long parliamentary debates. Many of you will have heard him here before, when he spoke at this meeting ten years ago, as President of the Board of Trade.

We had hoped also to have with us the Prime Minister. In fact, he had already promised to come, but his doctors told him that he must undertake no outside engagements.

Disappointed though we are that he is not present with us, his intention to come is a tribute to the Institution, and to its work as a great voluntary service, which we deeply value. I am sure that you will all, irrespective of party, join with me in wishing the Prime Minister an early recovery of his full health and strength.

We have also with us the Mayors and Mayoresses of nearly thirty London Boroughs and two towns, Deal and Weymouth, whose life-boatmen have come to receive awards for gallantry. London never forgets that she is the Port of London, and we always heartily welcome at our meetings the Mayors of so many of her Boroughs. We are deeply grateful for all that they do to help our branches.

The report and accounts for the year are before you. I can sum them up in three sentences: Never before has the Life-boat Service been so busy in time of peace; never before has it cost more to maintain; never before, thanks to the devoted work of our honorary members in conjunction with the public, has it had a larger income. I now present to you the annual report and accounts for the year 1947.

Report and Accounts and Elections The report and accounts for 1947 were adopted, and the President, vice-presidents, treasurer and other members of the Committee of Management, and the auditors were elected.

Presentation of Medals by the Duchess of Kent The secretary read the accounts of services by the life-boats at Walmer. Shoreham Harbour, New Brighton and V eymouth, and the Duchess of Kent presenteu medals for gallantry: To COXSWAIN FREDERICK UPTON, OF WALMEH, KENT, the silver medal for rescuing in a gale thirty lives from the Italian steamer Silvia Onorato, stranded on the Goodwin Sands, on the 4th of January, 1948.

To PERCY CAVELL, THE MOTOR MECHANIC OF WALMER, KENT, the bronze medal for the same service. He has twice been awarded the Institution's thanks on vellum.

To COXSWAIN JAMES UPPERTON, OP SHOREHAM HARBOUR, SUSSEX, a bar to his silver medal for the rescue in a gale on the 8th of August, 1948, of three men, two women and a boy from the yacht Gull wrecked outside Newhaven Harbour.

To SECOND-COXSWAIN WILLIAM JONES, OF NEW BRIGHTON, CHESHIRE, the bronze medal for landing six men from a fort in the mouth of the Mersey, when in danger of collapsing in a south-westerly gale on the 22nd of September, 1947. Second-coxswain Jones was in command of the life-boat for the first time.

To COXSWAIN FREDERICK PALMER, OF WEYMOUTH, DORSET, the bronze medal for rescuing in a gale on the 6th of June, 1948, three men from the motor yacht Mite, on her way from Malta to London.

The President's Address It was a very great disappointment to me that I was prevented through illness from coming to this meeting last year. Nineteenforty- seven was a terrible year, a year darkened by the shadow of the tragic loss of the gallant Mumbles life-boat crew, whose widows I am to meet in a few days, when I visit Swansea. The heroism of their menfolk will never be forgotten.

This year it has been a great pleasure for me to present medals to the brave men of Walmer, Shoreham, New Brighton and Weymouth, whose gallantry on the high seas is happily unclouded by the loss of any of their comrades.

I have been much interested by the developments in life-saving equipment that I have seen in my visits throughout the year to lifeboat stations all over this country and in Northern Ireland.

But it is not with these things alone that I have been impressed. Only those who are familiar with the cheerfulness, unceasing vigilance, and indomitable courage of the life-boat crews can measure the debt which we owe to every one of them. I am indeed proud to be associated with a Service whose name is rightly famous throughout the world.

I should like, too, to thank all those whose generosity in the past year, as in many others, has helped to make this great work possible, and whose support of the Royal National Life-boat Institution has been more magnificent than ever before. With them we must remember the devoted services of those who have, once again, volunteered then: help with unfailing readiness and tireless enthusiasm.

To them, and to all who are in any way connected with the Institution and its work, but above all to the coxswains and crews of our life-boats, I send my most sincere thanks and good' wishes for the future.

(Loud Applause).

Admiral Sir William James It is my privilege to move this resolution, in which we express our appreciation of the great work done by the crews of the life-boats and also of the work done by the honorary officials.

The resolution is couched in simple terms.

There are very few adjectives. But, like some of those short, monosyllabic verses in the first chapter of Genesis, it conjures up a never-ending, purposeful story, and in this case a never-ending story of unsurpassed gallantry and unremitting endeavour without thought of reward. I feel sure that we are not here alone to-day. We may not see them, but I feel that here with us to-day in spirit are all the deep-sea mariners of the world, because the ships of all nations with a sea-board sooner or later take soundings off our coast, and that "wire-slackening", which is the signal that the lead has found bottom, is also a signal that the ship is within reach of a British life-boat. How comforting it must be, when there have been no sights for several days, when the coastal waters are enshrouded in fog, or when a rapidly-falling glass portends a great storm, to know that if anything untoward happens, a British lifeboat will appear on the scene if it is humanly possible. These life-boatmen of ours demonstrate again and again that "the Brotherhood of the Sea" is not just an idle phrase, but a vigorous reality. I would that the statesmen of the world could follow their example.

NO LACK OF MEN FOR ADVENTURE Last year I was privileged to give a lecture in what are known as the "Lees-Jones Lectures" at Cambridge University. The subject was "The Influence of Sea-Power on the History of the British people," and after tracing through that influence from the first day, when the first King's ship was launched at Erith, I found I could sum up the whole business in one sentence: We became a great people, and we have so far held our position in the world, because we have been able to protect from assault our merchant ships outward-bound with soldiers and inward-bound with food and commodities not found in these islands. That was the whole story: no mention of the weapon, you will notice, that varies through the ages. The merchant ship is very much the same to-day as it has always been, though it is now propelled by steam and not by sail. It still is and will always- be a commodious receptacle for bulk cargoes that can circumnavigate the world at an economic speed. Well, there is more to be added to that summing-up. There was something missing. That something missing was that we have always been able to man those ships; and that is one of the most striking things in our history. We are, as you all know, a nation of dormice. There are no people so brave, so determined, 'when attacked; no people so gullible, and so ready to snooze, when victory has been won by great exertion.

And in those snoozing periods, so frequent in our history, you will find that we -have always paid very scant attention to our Merchant Navy; and yet there never has been a lack of men and boys who, seeking adventure, have left their town or village and made for the nearest sea-port—never.

If that continuing urge to seek what lies beyond the horizon is such a striking feature of our history, how much more striking, how much more notable, is this continuing acceptance of grave risks in order to save the lives of brother seamen 1 Some of you know, I think, the blind sailor's prayer, which ends: " I have filled my heart, Lord. Now I pray to keep the laughter and the colour in this uplifting sleep." Well, you know, for the ' deep»sea mariner there are hazards, there are great discomforts often, but there is laughter and often a riot of colour. But for the men whom we honour to-day there are only hazards; there is no laughter; the only colours are sombre, the blacks and greys of storm-clouds and angry seas. Indeed, these men are noblemen of the seas.

It may have occurred to some of you, as it has occurred to me, that we ought to be reducing our Life-boat Service. Shortly after the first World War, we were told that there would be no more shipwrecks. There was this wonderful new wireless, these radar gadgets for helping ships into port. The other day a young' naval officer told me that the Navigation Branch was at an end, because all a captain had to do was to look into some mystery-box on the bridge and he could see exactly where he was, and that if he saw a buoy and wondered what buoy it was, he made a signal to it by wireless and it replied and gave its name. (Laughter.) I thought that would make you laugh, but it is absolutely true. Yet, despite all these aids to navigation, we cannot reduce the Lifeboat Service; and why? Because man has not yet dominated Nature and man is not yet a complete robot. He is still, thank God, a human being, and he still makes mistakes.

But what we must be most grateful for is that science does enable us to build and equip boats which reduce the hazards of these " noblemen of the seas," as I have called them, and which give them a much greater chance of bringing to a successful issue their missions of mercy. For that, we should be ever so grateful.

The other day I came across in Kipling some lines in a poem called "A Song in Storm," and I thought they epitomised the great purpose of the life-boatmen : Be well assured, though wave and wind Have mightier blows in store, That we who keep the watch assigned Must stand to it the more.

No matter though our decks be swept And mast and timber crack, We can make good all loss except The loss of turning back.

Mr. Chairman, if you are ever looking for a new motto for the life-boatmen, I give you those last two lines, We can make good all loss except The loss of turning back.

I beg to move the resolution. (Loud Applause.) The Right Hon. Oliver Stanley, M.P.

It is never a very easy task to speak after an Admiral; he very seldom leaves you anything to say; but when you speak after an Admiral who has also been a Member of Parliament and a University Lecturer, it is quite clear that the cupboard is left very bare.

I want to cast my mind back—and perhaps take back the minds of some of you in this hall—to a day ten years ago, in 1938, when, as President of the Board of Trade, I moved the resolution which has just been moved by Admiral Sir William James. Ten pretty terrible years have gone between those two dates—ten years in which all of us have experienced loss and most of us have experienced peril—ten years in which millions of people all over the world have met death, sometimes in its most horrible form, and other millions all over the world have passed dangers with varying degrees of courage. I think our countrymen might be excused if, after ten years such as those, they had begun to be callous, if they had begun to forget an appreciation of the brave and begun to forget sympathy for those in danger; but I am glad to say that that is not so. Our people have come out of this devastating fire with hearts as warm and imaginations as vivid as ever they were. And in the ordinary, very simple terms of this resolution, we are paying tribute to-day to those two things: appreciation of the brave and sympathy for those in danger.

, We Jiave heard to-day read out the accounts of four, typical examples of the courage which these men have shown in the past twelve months. They may be the finest examples, but they are by no means the only ones. All of us, I think, who have heard those accounts read out will agree that of all the heroism which has been shown in these last ten years, these deeds that we have just heard about, for cool, calculated courage—courage not as shown in hot blood, courage not shown for a few moments of great danger, but courage to persist and to keep on, with none of the dramatic side of war—for courage of that kind, these exploits rank with anything shown by anyone anywhere in the years of war.

THE FEELINGS OF THE RESCUED If we appreciate the courage of those who serve our life-boats round our coasts, it must be a man or woman of very little imagination who cannot enter the other side of the picture, who cannot imagine for himself, in these very episodes we have heard about this afternoon, what must have been the feelings of those upon the boat who were in such dire peril. However bravely they faced the end— an end which seemed certain, in circumstances of the most awe-inspiring—however bravely they were prepared to face it, what a dread, drear outlook it must have been! And we can feel what it must have meant to those people when they saw the life-boat which, at the last moment, brought them rescue in their peril. So we can feel that anything we do, however humble our effort, to help this great Service may result—in fact every year does result—in hundreds of people being suddenly relieved from the imminent, urgent, and apparently inevitable, fear of death.

It is indeed disappointing, as the Admiral has told you, that with all the advances of science, peril by sea seems to-day to be as great as ever it was. We would have hoped, in view of some of these great scientific advances which have added so much to the power of destruction, that perhaps there would have been an equal advance in them along the road to safety. But, as he has told you, that is not so, that the calls upon the life-boats to-day are just as large as ever they were before science made these new discoveries.

In fact, I believe this summer the calls have been more frequent than they have ever been before in a summer of peace, and only just a little less than they were in the summer of war in 1940, during the Battle of Britain. So that the need for our help, and the need for our effort, grows no less. Indeed, it grows greater, because, just as the demands for the services of the life-boat increase, so, alas, the cost of maintaining those services is increasing too. Even to maintain, far less to increase, that on which people all round our coasts have counted, will take more effort and more money than it ever did in the past.

Before I came here, I heard a spontaneous and very pleasing tribute to this organization.

The man I was sitting next to at luncheon said to me, as I was going out, when I told him that I was coming to this meeting, " You are going to a meeting of the best-run charitable institution in this country." (Applause.) That is a pretty good tribute, and a pretty encouraging one, because it does make all feel that, whatever they can give, whatever they can raise, will go not to waste for administration, but for the fine purpose for which they intend it.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR VOLUNTARY SERVICE Finally, you will see that the resolution expresses our thanks not only to the coxswains and crews of the life-boats, the people who are in the front line, who have to run the danger, but also to all the committees, the secretaries, the officers and the voluntary workers, the people without whose efforts and without whose help the front line could never be kept in being. We are indeed grateful to all of them and to all of you. We live in a day (I must not trench on political matters) when the opportunities for voluntary effort are becoming more and more restricted, and yet I believe that a great deal of the greatness of our people has been founded upon voluntary service in one capacity or another, given by millions of our fellow countrymen up and down the land. It is the feeling that we should do something not merely because we are ordered to do it. not just because we are paid to do it, not even because we necessarily enjoy doing it, but because it is for an object in which we believe and because it is a service which we think we are rendering to other people. Here still remains one of the finest opportunities for voluntary service of this kind, and I only hope that this opportunity, at any rate, will long be left open for those who wish to show an appreciation of the men who carry out our business upon the seas, and a desire,'as far as possible, to make their business, just as our business, safe and.

secure. I have much pleasure in seconding, this resolution. (Loud Applause.) The Chairman This resolution has been moved and seconded in two of the most admirable and arresting speeches, if I may respectfully say so, that I have ever heard at an annual meeting, and I have great pleasure in putting it to the meeting: " That this meeting, fully recognizing the important services of the Royal Life-boat Institution, in its national work of life-saving, desires to record itshearty appreciation of the gallantry of the coxswains and crews of the Institution's, life-boats, and its deep obligation to the Local Committees, Honorary Secretaries,, and Honorary Treasurers of all Station Branches, and to the Honorary Officers and hundreds of Voluntary Members of the Financial Branches and of the Ladies' Lifeboat Guild in the work of raising funds to maintain the Service." The resolution was carried.

Presentation to Honorary Workers Since the last annual meeting eight honorary workers had been appointed honorary life-governors of the Institution, the highest honour which it can confer on an honorary worker, and the Duchess of Kent presented vellums, signed by herself as President of the Institution to three of them who were present at the meeting.

MRS. F, M. HEATH, of BARMOUTH.

MRS. TALBOT CADDOW, of CARLISLE.

COLONEL LAWRENCE WILLIAMS, of MOELFRE, ANGLESEY.

The gold badge had been awarded to eleven honorary workers, and the Duchess of Kent presented their badges to six who were present at the meeting: MR. FREDERICK CLARK, of CLOUGHTON,.

YORKSHIRE.

MRS. HORROCKS, of PRESTWICH.

MRS. F. ALLSOP, of HYDE.

MR. B. B. BENNETTS, of PENLEE.

MR. J. W. BAYES, of FLAMBOROUGH.

MR. H. E. SELLERS, of ASHBOUHNE.

Vote of Thanks A vote of thanks to H.R.H. The Duchess of Kent was proposed by Commodore the Earl Howe, R.N.V.R., and seconded by- Colonel J. Benskin..