PEEHAPS the most charming thing in Patrick Howarth's most attractive book* is the way in which he has set his story. As he moves round the coast, apparently quite casually, from one carefully chosen life-boat station to another, he begins each chapter with a picture of the place—English, Scots, Irish, Welsh—to take, and hold, your eye as you listen to him.

So he seems to see the Life-boat Service as a permanent part of the very landscape of the British Isles, the variety of its story repeating the extraordinary variety of those coasts —-"the rocky shores and sheep on the grassy hills" of east Scotland; the contrast between the grey granite of Aberdeen and the pink granite of Peterhead (spoilt a little by "the sickly yellow of the life-boat house"; for Mr. Howarth has regretfully to admit that the life-boat houses themselves have not added to the beauty of the scene); Southend-on-Sea "which Gainsborough and Turner painted, and Disraeli and the Gentleman's Magazine admired", with its ancient mud and cockle fishermen, its modern jiving and jazz; the delicious mixture—on the foreshore at Deal—- of the tablet that records the landing * Th", Life-boat Story by Patrick H warth, with a Foreword by H.R.H. The Duchess of Kent, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 21s.

of Julius Caesar and the corporation's putting-green, the children's playground and the life-boat house.

Ballycotton Committee His interior of the committee room, in the Irish Republic, where the Institution's Ballycotton station is administered, is the equal of any of his landscapes: "Nearly every man of prominence in and around Ballycotton is a member of the life-boat committee. Among them are a doctor, a farmer, a storekeeper, a retired bank manager, a Roman Catholic priest and a clergyman of the Church of Ireland. Some threequarters of the committee are of the Catholic faith; the honorary secretary of the station is a member of the Church of Ireland; there are Quakers and Methodists and the staunchest of republicans among those who serve.

At the gatherings of the committee which take place after the formal business has been concluded, when the talk may at first be of herrings or horses or rugby football, it can be learnt after a time that a remarkably large proportion of the committee members took an active part in either the first or the second war against Germany." Variety and Versatility There, at a glance, you have the splendid paradox of the Life-boat Service, the variety and versatility of the men whom it unites in a single purpose. It began at the beginning with its founder, Sir William Hillary, who could unite with the same practical sense of the need for a life-boat service, the troubles of Ireland, the government of the Holy Land and the adornment of London. It continued through the second founder, the fourth Duke of Northumberland, admiral and First Lord of the Admiralty, who also, as Mr. Howarth points out, took part in a scientific expedition and helped to produce an Arabic lexicon. It is repeated again today in his record of Dr. Joseph Soar, the honorary secretary of the station at St. David's—a soldier in his youth, a cathedral organist for the rest of his years, a member of the life-boat's crew, a medallist of the Institution. As Mr.

Squeers said, "Here's richness." There is the same richness even in the most trivial things that Mr.

Howarth has collected, in the life-boat which at its latter end became a hencoop, in the rescued Russian captain who stepped aboard the life-boat carrying his gold-mounted umbrella.

And he brings out the full surprise of that richness by including in his stories of life-boat rescues the journey of the Lynmouth life-boat by land right over the top of Exmoor to launch at Porlock.

(As the life-boatmen came with their boat towards Porlock Hill they passed near that farm where, a hundred and two years before, Coleridge had dreamed Kubla Khan. That is perhaps worth recalling, for their great journey through that night of gale is, at times, almost as fantastic as a dream.) Portrait of a Welsh Coxswain Here its value is that it showed lifeboatmen as resourceful, determined, undefeatable on land as on the sea, and and, in a way peculiarly their own, they belong both to sea and land.

You see it in Mr. Howarth's beautiful portrait of a Welsh coxswain, which, as you look, seems to become a composite portrait of all life-boat coxswains —those men with one foot standing firm on their native soil, the other as firmly set in their native sea: "A man with humorous, understanding eyes, who spent many years at sea and who now lives in a house with a 500-year-old water mill, where the osiers of his own planting are turned into the lobster pots of his own making." And what could better express the charity and goodwill of the Life-boat Service, that confident trust in the goodness of one's fellows (whether to risk their lives or to give their money) which is the very spirit of its work, than Mr. Howarth's tribute to the banks and the Inland Revenue Department ? "They seem, in defiance of probability, to be filled by the pleasantest of men.".