During 1975 Dublin branch and ladies' guild achieved the fine result of £24,000. Of this amount £5,874 came from the lifeboat shop run by Mrs Montague Kavanagh and her helpers, and £4,198 was raised in a one-day spring sale. £3,324 was collected on two very wet flag days and £3,038 came from house-to-house collectors.

Sounds of battle rang round Longslade Heath in the New Forest as the Bumbledon Knights, in full 'armour', met the Plough Yokels, in country smocks, for a comic football match on a sunny Sunday last July. Speed of play necessitated the use of a bicycle by the referee and fortifying liquids were dispensed from a red sports car which careered among the players. A lifeboat collecting box yielded £11.40 after its passage through spectators. The match, and a raffle which followed, wereorganised by Michael Patrick, manager of the Plough Inn, Tiptoe, and at the end of the day the RNLI benefited by £60. Since then the inn has collected a further £13 in its boxes.

A cheque for £150 was presented to New Romney and Romney Marsh branch by Ashford North Boys School.

The result of a sponsored general knowledge quiz in which about 200 boys in the third and fourth years took part, it will go towards a new boathouse for Littlestone ILB.

Hallowe'en in Beccles: Maria Rauscher, Skip Shipley and Joe Crowfoot, the minstrels, played, danced and sang at a garden party, at each of the seven inns of the town and, last of all, at a fish-and-chip shop. With them went John Suckling and Roy Stroud, committee members of Beccles branch, and by the end of the evening they had collected £17.53 for the Institution.Cromer claims the longest-running fund raising event in the history of the RNLI: a football competition which goes back 70 years to 1906. Originally it was for a cup given by the Tucker brothers, but since 1950 this cup has been awarded to the runners-up, while to the winners has gone a cup presented by E. P. Hansell in memory of his father, E. M. Hansell. Service as well as local teams have competed, all of junior status. All matches are now played in Cromer in the early part of the year, as soon as the evenings are light enough.

Receipts reached a peak of £100 in 1957, and now average about £50 annually.

Over the past few years, Clacton-on- Sea ladies' guild has held a number of fashion shows from which the RNLI has benefited by over £1,000.

Richard Beck of Dunfermile, Fife, built in 1971 a replica Liverpool lifeboat (f" = 1') based on James and Ruby Jackson, formerly stationed at Anstruther. Since then this model has been on almost permanent display at the Scottish Fisheries Museum, Anstruther, which kindly allowed it to be used for RNLI fund raising. As a result of this and other activities more than £600 has been collected.Two fine results from Salcombe: Crew members, by running disco dances last summer, raised £1,400 for the lifeboat service. Mr and Mrs T.

Heycock of Millbay, East Portlemouth, presented the branch with £110, collected by allowing boats to use the beach in front of their house, making no charge but suggesting a contribution should be made to the lifeboat box.

Northampton ladies' guild raised £395 at a Caledonian market held in the Guild Hall last November.

Eday is a small island in the Orkneys with a population of only 170, yet in its special effort year for the RNLI 150th anniversary the ladies' guild raised £227.65-J. As well as a house-to-house collection (£54.15) they held a beetle drive with auction and box supper (£28.12) and a Burns's supper (£9.43); the young men of Eday Youth Club raised £44.41 with a sponsored crawl around the Community Centre (one man completed 23 laps); and, finally, the biennial summer sale of work cleared £91.544.

Thames Gas Sailing Club raised £165 for the RNLI with a sponsored sail-in at Thorpe, near Chertsey, last September 20 and 21. Thirteen members took part, seven of them for 24 hours' duration.

£1,500 was raised in 1975 by a holiday draw competition organised by the southern district office. First prize, a return voyage for two on the Union Castle liner Windsor Castle to Las Palmas, was won by P. M. House of Southampton. A tie for second and third prizes resulted in G. Carter, of Southampton, choosing a week's holiday for two at a Pontins holiday centre, while Mrs S. Perry, of Portsmouth, chose two return flights to Jersey by British Airways. All prizes were kindly donated by the companies involved.

On one day of last autumn's Scottish Offshore Oil Exhibition at Aberdeen a collection for the RNLI was organised by Mrs Cowper, honorary secretary of the Aberdeen ladies' guild. £106 was taken, including £2 in Norwegian kroner.

To crown a summer's punting four Oxford undergraduates, Neil Johnson and Chris Reddick (St Edmund Hall), Keith Plunkett (St Catherine's) and Marcus Sephton (New College), undertook a sponsored punt from Oxford to Cambridge by the shortest navigable route: the Cherwell, Oxford Canal, Grand Union Canal, Great Ouse and the River Cam. They lived off biscuits, eggs, fruit and orange squash and camped each night by the water's edge.

Where canals were too muddy for punting, they resorted to a towrope.

The 170-mile journey took ten very gruelling but rewarding days, and £250 was raised for the RNLI.A cheese and wine party held at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, on Friday, November 7,1975, was attended by 260 people and raised more than £400 for the RNLI. Rear Admiral Sir Edmund Irving represented the Committee of Management and among the guests were Admiral and Mrs Bazalgette and the Mayor and Mayoress of Greenwich.

The ladies' guild of Middleton St George, a village in Co. Durham, last year raised £355 with a coffee morning at the Devonport Hotel, by kind permission of Mr and Mrs K. Cotterill, and sales of souvenirs. The raffle of a cake, baked and magnificently decorated with a model lifeboat by Mrs J. B.

Robson, brought in £12.

As part of Golders Green Unitarians' 50th anniversary celebrations last October the Hoop Lane Players put on a production of Peter Terson's 'The Whitby Lifeboat Disaster'. £40 was collected in the interval for the RNLI.

As in previous years, B. M. Miller, harbour master of Port Hamble, organised a fireworks party at Hamble last November. More than £200 was raised for the RNLI.

Two members of Morecambe and Heysham Yacht Club, Mr and Mrs Spencer, organised a Christmas draw which raised £574.22 for the RNLI.

They collected 115 prizes from local people; the first prize was a £30 wristwatch donated by John C. West Ltd.

and the list included such unusual items as a thermometer and a tray of eggs.

Mr Spencer is a former Morecambe ILB crew member.

Coventry ladies' guild was invited by the Lady Mayoress of Coventry to see films about the city and its new cathedral, and to take tea with her afterwards in the Guildhall of St Mary. 150 members and friends were present and £45.50 was raised for the lifeboat (continued on page 137).