THE portrait on the cover is of Cox- swain Stanley Smith, of Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, who retired in August of this year, after twenty-seven years of service in the life-boat. He has been in it since the station was estab- lished in 1924. He was appointed second-coxswain in 1933, and cox- swain in 1944, so that he has been an officer of the boat for nineteen of his twenty-seven years. In 1949 his two sons, Stanley and Colin, who had both been members of his crew, sailed across the Atlantic in a twenty- feet yacht which they had built them- selves..