IN 1948 Mr. Paul Rotha made for the Institution a twenty-minute film, with music and a running commentary, which was to show the Life-boat Service from the point of view of the fishermen from whom its crews are drawn. It was taken at Hastings and is based on fact.

It tells the story of an old fisherman with such confidence in himself and his boat that he lias no use for the Life-boat Service. He has so little use for it that, when his own son joins the life-boat crew, he refuses to have any- thing more to do with him. They go their own ways and never speak. But a day comes when the old man's own fishing boat strikes a sunken wreck.

She is badly holed and begins to sink.

Even then his pride refuses to give way. He makes no signal for help.

But his plight is seen from the shore, and the life-boat goes out to his rescue.

For long he refuses her help, but at last is persuaded to come on board.

The life-boat then takes his boat in tow, with two life-boatmen on board her, baling hard; but they cannot keep the water down. She steadily fills.

At last the coxswain is compelled to cut her adrift, and as the life-boat moves on towards the shore the old man sits alone watching her until she has sunk. He has lost his boat, but he has learnt his lesson, and the last shot shows him happily reconciled with the life-boat coxswain and his own son.

At the end of 1948 the film was leased to British Lion Film Corporation who were given sole rights for three years to show it in cinemas. It has now been shown in over 1,200. The agreement left the Institution free to show the film to audiences which did not pay to see it, so that its branches were free to use it at their meetings, and in October, 1950, the film was accepted for show- ing to such audiences by the Central Film Library (part of the Central Office of Information) whose films are seen by twenty-two million people a year..