LAST Christmas a number of life-boats again took out Christmas parcels from their towns to men on neighbouring lightships. The Weymouth life-boat took them to the Shambles, Selsey to the Owers, Barry Dock to the Breaksea, Margate to the Tongue, and Walton and Frinton to the Sunk and the Kentish Knock.

At the same time the life-boat crew at the very lonely Humber station at the end of Spurn Point were receiving gifts. The Father Christmas in this case was the Yorkshire Evening Post.

Members of the staff of its Hull office paid a surprise visit to the station with toys and books from the paper and its readers for the children of the life- boatmen.

At Penlee the radio telephone of the life-boat was used to entertain men on lighthouses and lightships from South Wales to the Isles of Scilly for half an hour on Christmas morning when the seven-year-old daughter of the motor mechanic, Margaret Drew, and members of the Mousehole male choir sang carols in the life-boat's cockpit. The men on the lighthouses and lightships sent back their thanks by their radio-telephones and then sang carols to one another..