Freemen of the Sea, by Dora Walker (A. Brown & Sons, Ltd., B.C. 1. 10/6) Miss DORA WALKER, who is president of the Whitby Ladies' Life-boat Guild, has written a charming anecdotal book about the seafarers of Whitby; a series of true "fishermen's yarns" told to her by some of the seafarers themselves and recounted. They make absorb- ing reading. Local salts come readily to life in such observations as "After that voyage for a change I tried one of 'Marwoods' steamers, the Conocopia.

Bos'un I was by then. She was a foul-weather ship!" (From The Mari- ner] and "He's forty-nine, and they told him in the Custom House that he need not go, but he replied 'The lad and I have been fishing together, and I am not leaving him to go into this alone'." (From A Coble Skipper's Diary.) Other characters fill out the picture with verisimilitude: the "Stow- away," John Robert Dryden, who hid aboard his father's trawler, to go to sea at the age of five; Old Bob's wife ("My missus was a good bailer. Up at 4 a.m. to skein she'd be") and the "joskins"—men who work on the land most of the year but go to sea when the herring season comes.

Herring fishing, of course, is the chief occupation and industry of Whitby.

But the author writes too of the ship- building family of Smales, active in Whitby since the eighteenth century, and of the adventures of local seamen serving in the Navy during the late war. Appropriately enough she winds up with a chapter—The Yellow Oil- skins—about the Life-boat Service; in particular, the life-boatmen of Whitby and their boats. She describes a ser- vice in November 1950, and then, going back a century, tells us that the life-boat which made a spectacular rescue on February 8th, 1861, was built by one of the men who sent a model to the great 1851 Exhibition.

This is a well written intimate book about its subject. It is illustrated with a number of fine photographs of Whitby, of fishing boats at sea and in harbour, and of Whitby life-boats and life-boatmen past and present..