'COME ON, BEN,' and as Bridlington lifeboat prepares to launch on service Police Constable Usher quickly boards as seventh man; 'I'll come with you,' and at Douglas Chief Inspector Robin Corrin (later Deputy Chief Constable) helps make up a scratch crew—the maroons had gone up while the fishing fleet, and so most of the crew, were at sea; or at Blyth Superintendent Gladstone, now of Whitley Bay, goes out with the lifeboat as signaller—the crew was short. . . Dramatic pierhead jumps, maybe, but they illustrate how close are the bonds in many coastal areas between the police force and lifeboat service.

It is not surprising that the police should be there, on the spot, in an emergency. The police station may well have been the first to hear that someone is in difficulty at sea. On one occasion at Blyth, when a call came through, the police officer on the desk immediately handed over to a colleague and within minutes was chest-deep in the surf helping to launch the ILB. It is far from unusual for a service report to start like this one: 'Torquay Police informed Brixham Coastguard at 1537 on October 5, 1973, that a girl was in the water off Meadfoot Beach and asked for the help of the ILB For that service, Motor Mechanic Barry Pike, an ex-policeman, was awarded the Institution's silver medal for gallantry, as well as the RalphGlister Award for the most meritorious service of the year performed by the crew of an inshore lifeboat. He had leapt from the ILB in a dangerously rocky area among masses of loose seaweed in an attempt to save the girl and, although washed ashore exhausted, had doggedly gone back into the sea again and again. It had been a police constable on top of the sea wall who had directed the boat to the position of the casualty, and who managed to grab Barry Pike and pull him out, barely conscious as, after being thrown on the shore by the waves, he was sucked back by the undertow.

He opened his eyes to see the silver braid of a superintendent leaning over him, asking if he was all right.

Hartlepool ILB crew remember a call that came from the police station on Christmas Eve, 1974. It was 2330. 'We want your boat—Merry Christmas . . .' On station The police force is well represented in lifeboat crews, particularly for inshore work; about a quarter of the ILB stations have a police officer or two on their crew lists, although, as one man is posted elsewhere or another volunteer comes forward, the names may change; •Aberdeen and Sunderland have a particularly good representation. And it is not really surprising, either, that policemen should make good lifeboatmen.

The characteristics demanded by the one way of life are, after all, those which would be looked for in the other; perhaps most important, the ability to take initiative combined with that sense of discipline which makes a man a reliable member of a team. Policemen would also, automatically be trained in first aid and swimming—and, of course, having radio communication, they are easy to alert when a call comes.

It goes even deeper than that, for in many parts of the country police officers have positive encouragement to participate in lifeboat work: it starts at the top. Nowhere is this more true than on the north east coast of England. In that area, when the maroons go up, it is more than likely that panda cars will be out helping to rush crews to the lifeboat-house; or, where a carriage boat has to be hauled by her tractor across the road for a beach launch, as at Redcar, the police will be there to control traffic.

Policemen may well be used as spotters, particularly when there are bathers in trouble: from a cliff, or any vantage point giving a little height, they will probably have a better view over the sea than the ILB crew low down on the water in an inflatable boat, searching through a swell; with their radios, they can quickly pass directions to be relayed by the Coastguard to the boat.

In most areas of the north east, a young police officer volunteering to join a lifeboat crew has the active backing of his senior officers, as he would have were he to choose to take part in any other community service in his free time.

He will get practical help; if, for instance, a change is needed in his duty rota to free him at a certain time for lifeboat work, his request will receive sympathetic consideration. That makes a great deal of difference. And then, the senior officers themselves may well be serving on station branch committees.

Chief Superintendent George Cameron, following in the footsteps of Chief Superintendent Frank Burge as a member of Hartlepool station branch committee, himself comes from a Boulmer and Alnmouth lifeboat family.

His grandfather and uncle, William and Robert Stephenson, were both coxswains, spanning the years 1898 to 1929 between them. William Stephenson was awarded the silver medal for gallantry in 1913 for the rescue of 25 French fishermen from the trawler Tadorne, wrecked in fog while outward bound from Boulogne to the Iceland fishing grounds. Chief Superintendent Cameron's father, John, was motor mechanic at Boulmer from 1931 to 1952, and tractor driver before that.

He knows from first hand the concern which will take a lifeboatman down to the boathouse every night of the winter to trim paraffin lamps and make sure the engines will be ready if needed; as a boy he used to walk down with his father.

Fund raising? There are sure to be members of the force joining in, too.

There is PC Arthur Sykes, for instance (now a sergeant back at Bridlington), who, while at Flamborough, gave tremendous support in every way to the branch and guild—social activities, fund raising, flag days. Last autumn, even though, several years ago, he had been transferred to an inland town, he set off with PC John Myhill on a sponsored walk from Fleetwood to Flamborough in aid of the RNLI. They walked 152 miles in five days, raising £1,260—and what a welcome awaited them in Flamborough! Then the North Humberside Police Military Band and Male Voice Choir have given two concerts at Withernsea in aid of the RNLI, the first organised by the Lions Club. Crew members at Hartlepool,including several policemen, are sturdy fund raisers, and, in that town, WPC Dodd has her own 'beat' in guild work.

Going, just for a moment, further south down the east coast, the first woman all-round Chief Inspector in the Essex police force, Lorna Brooks, appointed last October at Basildon, is a keen and hard working member of Canvey Island branch.

Throughout the north east, a thread of constabulary blue runs through the cloth, but let us see how the pattern appears at just two of the stations: Tynemouth and Withernsea.

Tynemouth Watching over the approaches to a port, on the north bank of the Tyne, close by the fish quay, Tynemouth lifeboat station is part of a busy shipping river; part of its present life and of its history. If was the Tyne, back in the late eighteenth century, that saw much of the earliest pioneering of lifeboat design, when from despair at the helplessness of those on shore to save drowning seamen within their sight there emerged determination to find some solution. The Gentlemen of the La we House' and the prize they offered for the best design for a boat to save life at sea; William Wouldhave of South Shields and his model of a boat which would right herself; the Original, built by Greathead and launched at South Shields in 1789 which, manned by Tyne pilots, rescued hundreds of people without the loss of one of her own crew.

Thirty more boats were built to the same design and sent to different parts of the country.Pioneering again, it was at Tynemouth, established as an RNLI lifeboat station in 1862, that the first motor powered lifeboat, /. McConnell Hussey, was placed in 1905, under the supervision of Lieutenant (later Major) H. E. Burton, a Royal Engineer member of the Newcastle and Tynemouth branch. As local seamen, used to sail and oar, were reluctant at first to accept the petrol engine, Lieut. Burton manned the boat with his own sappers until, eight months later, a crew of local men was built up.

Lieut. Burton, at their request, remained as honorary superintendent of Tynemouth lifeboat, and, with Coxswain Robert Smith, was in the crew of Henry Vernon (which replaced the first experimental motor boat in 1911) on the service to ss Dunelm in 1913 and the service to HM hospital ship Rohilla in 1914; Henry Vernon took off the last 50 survivors from Rohilla after steaming 45 miles by night along an unlit coast against the gale—and then had to struggle back into Whitby Harbour through terrific seas. For the former service both men were awarded the silver medal for gallantry, for the latter the gold. Those were days of close association between army and lifeboat service.

The pioneering tradition has continued, for, in the 1960s, Tynemouth was one of the places chosen by Professor Pask and his working party for sea trials of available lifejackets (watched, Dr Geoffrey Hale who served on the working party remembers, by inquisitive seals). As a result of these and other trials and much experimental work, the present RNLI lifejacket was evolved.

That was in the days when Robert Brunton, DSM, was coxswain.

Robert 'Bobbie' Brunton took over as coxswain in 1963 from P. Denham Christie, vice-chairman of the branch and coxswain for 9| years, during which time Bobbie Brunton had served as second coxswain; he had joined the crew in 1949, just two years after Tynesider, Tynemouth's present 46' 9" housed slipway Watson lifeboat, first went on station. Mr Denham Christie, who was managing director of the Swan Hunter Group and is now their adviser on training and safety, has been a member of the Committee of Management since 1962 and, not counting Sir William Hillary, is only the second coxswain to serve on that committee. He is now chairman of Tynemouth branch.

When Bobbie Brunton reached the time for retirement last November, he was succeeded as coxswain by Captain John Hogg, master mariner and a Tyne River pilot. There are 19 in the Tynemouth crew, eight of whom are eligible, by age, to form the crew of the D class ILB which came on station in 1965.

Some of the crew are seamen; foyboatmen, like Assistant Mechanic Frederick Arkley (who, with Trevor Fryer, a joiner by trade, won the bronze medal in 1974 for an ILB service to the tug Northsider, driven ashore in a gale while trying to help a grounded oil exploration vessel) and master mariner H. L. Park. Other ways of life are also represented, and that includes the police.

'Close by the fish quay' . . . those are perhaps the relevant words. Chief Inspector Robert Rutherford has been in the crew now for nearly 25 years; but when he became a crew member he was PC33, his beat on the fish quay. He was at hand to get to know the lifeboat, get to know lifeboat people, to help them— then to join them. Sergeant John Norris, who has served as assistant winchman and is a 'founder member' of the ILB crew, came by the same route—a beat on the fish quay.

The first time PC Robert Rutherford, as he then was, went out in Tynesider it was on the longest service the Tyne-mouth lifeboat has ever done. She went out to a German motor vessel, Hans Hoth, listing and in difficulties some 88 miles north north east of the Tyne, and stood by until a tug arrived and took over. Tynesider was at sea for 33 hours; when she got back to station, her crew remember well, she had three gallons of diesel fuel in one tank: the other was empty.

PC Rutherford was awarded the Royal Humane Society's testimonial on parchment for his part in the rescue of a 73-year-old man in January, 1959. While on his beat, he was told that a man was in the water near the jetty's edge. He immediately jumped in and for 27 minutes supported the elderly man until a boat came to the rescue. It was that same year, 1959, that he became assistant motor mechanic of Tynemouth station, an appointment he held until 1969 when, his own responsibilities increasing, he became emergency motor mechanic. He is never troubled by seasickness, so, on a long service, it is always he who makes the soup! Now his son, another Robert, has joined the ILB crew.

John Richardson, a police sergeant and later a court official, is head launcher for Tynesider, and has served in that capacity and as a launcher for a dozen years or so. He is also a member of St John Ambulance Association and Brigade and helps with first aid training.

Withernsea If Tynemouth is old in lifeboat work, Withernsea, at least in its present life, is young. A former station, dating from 1862, was closed in 1913.

When Withernsea was re-opened as an ILB station in 1974, the main initiative for its formation came, in fact, from a policeman: PC Ben Usher. He had come to the town with experience out of the common run. He was a swimmer, holding a formidable array of lifesaving awards; he had sailed while in the army in Hong Kong; when he joined the police in 1966 he was posted to Bridlington where he became an ILB crew member and occasionally went out as seventh man in the lifeboat —he was in the crew for the service on the night of September 13, 1970, for which Crew Member Fred Walkington, now coxswain of Bridlington lifeboat, was accorded the thanks of the Institution on vellum . . . 'It was a rough night.

That was when Fred jumped off the lifeboat on to the foredeck of a little glass fibre boat. He was lying on the foredeck holding the rope on to the cleat which was simply bolted to the glass fibre deck— we expected it to splinter and come adrift at any time. But he did a good job that night, jumping on to that foredeck. . . .' One thing leads to another . . . In the winter of 1970 a BBC film team, with Richard Robinson as producer and Paul Berriff as cameraman, came to make a film of Bridlington lifeboat. When, the next spring, this same team was preparing to make a documentary film of anexpedition through almost unknown waterways in western Canada, led by Captain Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham- Fiennes, Ben was invited to go with them in charge of their boat: an inflatable of the type used by the RNLI.

With four months leave of absence, Ben joined the Headless Valley expedition: from Fort Nelson against the current up the Fort Nelson River, the Lower Liard and South Nahani Rivers to the Virginia Falls—twice the height of Niagara. Back by the same way to Fort Nelson, then across land to the Yukon border, to take to the rivers again; down Hyland River, the Upper Liard, the Kechika, along Williston— a man-made lake—Parsnip River, Crooked River to a series of lakes— Kerry, Tudyah, Macleod and Summit, a portage across to the mighty Fraser River, down to Vancouver, out into the Georgia Straits and across to Point Roberts in the United States. About 2,000 miles, the length of British Columbia, through the Rocky Mountains.

Fast-flowing waters, rapids to be shot, whirlpools, shallows: quite an education in boat handling.

Back in England, Ben Usher was posted to Withernsea, essentially a holiday resort with a population that increases ten fold in the summer months— or even more if caravan and chalet sites down the coast, empty in winter, are taken into account. And the people take to the sea. There is a boat club, well organised and well disciplined, but other than that there are bathers, small boats, fishing cobles, tiny rubber dinghies, children on inflatable beds.

Feeling that if help were needed by this community there would not be time for one of the flanking lifeboats to get there, Ben Usher called an open meeting with a view to applying for an ILB at Withernsea.

The idea had already been mooted by other people and the meeting was well attended. A steering committee was formed and the RNLI approached.

After a great deal of background work on the part of the divisional inspector of lifeboats, first Bob Walton and later Lieut.-Commander Harry Teare, an ILB station was established in 1974. Among other members of the branch committee was Chief Superintendent Dennis Harper, later to be followed by Chief Superintendent Duffill. From the first Ben Usher has been concerned with crew training, and he has usually had one or two policemen among other volunteers to join the crew.

There is terrific local pride in the ILB.

As soon as the maroons go off people come down and line the sea wall to watch—and one or two interesting things are happening, as Ben explains: 'It is always a fairly spectacular launch off that beach. The sea rolls in in a pretty nasty fashion. People watch the boat going and perhaps begin to realise that the sea isn't quite such a placid lake as they thought it was.' By watching, people are learning a lot about boat handling, too, and it is noticeable that they are putting into practice what they have learned when they themselves put to sea.

Standards are rising, and that in itself is a very useful spin-off.

The first award for bravery for the new ILB station at Withernsea was for a service on August 30, 1974. PC Usher was just signing off duty on that afternoon when a call came through to the desk from the owner of a cafe by the shore to say that two children had come running in, in great distress. They had been bathing when, with the wind and waves, they had begun to get into difficulties. They had managed to struggle back to the beach but their two friends were drifting out to sea.

Ben Usher went immediately to the boathouse and, realising that the situation was critical, asked a colleague to inform the Coastguard and the honorary secretary that he and Terry Dawson, who was also at the boathouse, were launching the boat. So rough was the sea that eye witnesses were convinced that the ILB would not be able to get (continued on page 287).