THE LIFE-BOAT FLEET 154 Motor Life-boats 1 Harbour Pulling Life-boat LIVES RESCUED from the foundation of the Life-boat Service in 1824 to July 31st, 1950 - 76,938 Mr. Punch on the Life-boat Service This article by Mr. P. R. Boyle, with illustrations by Mr. Norman Mansbridge, appeared in "Punch" on January 25th, 1949, under the title "Eleven Lives a Week" and is reproduced by very kind permission of the proprietors of " Punch.'" The article was written after visits to the station at Newhaven and to the Institution's depot at Elstree, and the pictures were drawn at Newhaven.

THE Cecil and Lilian Philpott sits very solidly in her cradle, the way you see her in the picture. With the tall ladder be- side her you might think she had been set up there permanently for exhibition purposes or as some sort of memorial.

But it is the work of a moment to cast off those chains; and then the touch of a hand on a lever will tilt her forward hydraulically, cradle and all, and at one blow of a hammer twenty tons of boat will go silently down the slipway. A fine smother of foam, followed by a surging climb of the stemhead towards the sky, and before you can say " Do it again " Coxswain Harvey will have spun his wheel, and the Newhaven life-boat will be heading for the open sea. Mr.

Punch's artist will be wiping the spray off his sketchbook.

True, on this occasion there are " no wrecks and nobody drowned," but there is no difficulty at all in understanding that for a short time we are moving in a new and but dimly imagined world.

For one thing we are surrounded by obvious signs of this fact. Life-boats when one is aboard them have a way of ceasing to look like money-boxes, and after a century and a quarter of steadyevolution this is not surprising. The familiar red-white-and-blue boat, that looks so small on a stormy ocean, is the product of all that ingenuity has been able to devise for one purpose and one purpose only—the saving of life at sea.

This is the sole object for which the Royal National Lifeboat Institution exists; it treats all sea-borne persons alike, in war and peace impartially, and in this connection its attitude towards salvage is noteworthy.

It is sometimes possible for a crew to bring in the vessel whose people they went out to save, and then they are entitled, if they choose (and often they do not), to claim salvage, which can be a very rewarding thing. Such a claim is notified to the Institution, which immediately washes its hands of the whole thing and becomes strictly neutral. The crew is allowed the use of the life-boat, paying only for the fuel it uses and for any damage done to the boat. Single-minded people, the R.N.L.I., and their attitude to wrecking something removed from that of the Scilly Islanders of olden times, who used the prayer "We pray Thee, O Lord, not that wrecks should happen but that if they do happen Thou wilt guide them into the Scilly Isles for the benefit of the poor inhabitants." And yet if the life-boats are designed for one purpose only the men who man them are not. With the exception of the motor mechanic, an occasional cox- swain and three or four crews at isolated stations, all are amateurs. Even the station secretaries are Hon. They have other fish to catch—though they are by no means all fishermen and many work ashore at jobs that have no connection with the sea. Fishmonger or pawn- broker, the life-boatman must work reasonably near to his boat and be ready to drop everything and run at the first shattering whisper of the maroon.

He may be in bed and asleep or sitting down to his Christmas dinner, but he will pull on his boots, gum, thigh, mutter some disgraceful words and go.

This in spite of the fact that he has no signed agreement and is under no obligation of any sort beyond the one that he imposes on himself. Add to this the fact that the life-boat expects to put to sea when everything else is struggling to safety, and something rather breath- taking emerges.

Asked to account for this, a bowman explained the heroic enterprise in the words: "Well, we like it, I suppose." Pinned into a corner (between the starboard engine control wheel and the Schermuly pistol) and pressed to describe just how much he liked being up to his waist in water for eight hours in a winter gale in the Channel, he was understood to say that he loathed it like poison. But he will be there next time, and so will his seven comrades and the helpers on the beaten shore.

So it goes with eight score motor life- boats, of varying types and sizes, ready at a moment's call all round the coast- lines of the British Isles, including Ireland. True, there are rewards, ac- cording to the circumstances of a call, but they represent little if any gain.

To see the mainspring that keeps the whole thing ticking you must go not to the coast or the head offices in Grosvenor Gardens but to the depot at Boreham Wood. This is where everything comes from, except things that must go direct to the boats, such as petrol and oil.

Walk round with Commander Upton, the superintendent. (He keeps a care- ful eye on one, alas!) Here is every- thing that a life-boat uses, a matter of some forty-five thousand different items, some made on the premises and some by contract to R.N.L.I. specifications, all tested, indexed and ready for imme- diate issue.

Immediate issue. Suppose a boat comes in from service at three of a Sunday morning and telephones to the depot to ask for a new mast, a micro- phone for the radio telephone and some more rum. All these desirable require- ments will leave the depot within the hour, for that is the maximum time allowed for any dispatch. Here is rope by the mile, from light heaving-line to superlative ten-inch manila hawser.

Here ultra-reliable lifebelts are being made. This crowded scene of lathes and pensive men—life-boatmen also in a very real sense—is the machine shop.

Elsewhere are spare rudders for every type of boat, over there some of the fifty thousand collecting-boxes are being painted, and that canvas-shrouded mound on which you barked your shin so carelessly is £2,500 worth of Diesel engine. (They design their own en- gines, you know. They will run under water but stop when upside down, be- cause it would be so tiresome for the crew of a self-lighter to find themselves bobbing in the water while their boat turned right side up again and chugged away without them.) These people buy their own trees too, and eventually cut them down and send them off to be made into boats, for even builders are not allowed to choose timber for the boats. When gear is sent to a builder at, say, Cowes it is packed tenderly into a van that takes it over in the ferry and delivers it right in the yard. No bumping about in trains. One has the impression that if a propeller-shaft or a consignment of sparking-plugs is not wrapped in cotton wool it is only because none sufficiently serviceable can be obtained.

And how feel the men who know they have only to ask for what they want in order to receive, by return, something that is the best of its kind in the world and made regardless of expense? If you cannot imagine, ask anyone who "has ever tried to get something impor- tant but unavailable in a hurry from a purser's or quartermaster's store.

Biscuits and chocolates are free; the manufacturers provide them perpetu- ally for nothing. Everything else is paid for by those who feel so inclined.

It costs nearly £800,000 a year, and is in no way dependent on the Government.

"In the past twenty years life-boats have been out on service over nine thousand times. They have rescued over twelve thousand lives." (Average for the whole hundred and twenty-five years: eleven lives a week.) " In these services over ninety thousand life-boat- men have taken part, and of those ninety thousand life-boatmen fifty-six have lost their lives. That is to say that one man in every sixteen hundred has lost his life and one life has been lost for every two hundred and thirteen lives saved. Those figures show the quality of the men and their boats." They certainly do. We can surely spare a thought—at the very least-—for these men who of their own courage and goodwill go lightheartedly, down slip- ways and across open beaches, out into the cold and terrible violence of the sea..