• The quality of lifeboat station histories seems to improve steadily. A recent outstanding example is The Men of The Mumbles Head by Carl Smith (J. D. Lewis and Sons, Gower Press, Llandysul, Dyfed, £3.50).

Mr Smith, who is a schoolmaster and a member of the present Mumbles lifeboat crew, has a good story to tell. It goes back to the year 1832 when Silvanus Padley, son of the Swansea Harbour Trust Clerk, together with five pilots saved a vessel from being smashed against Mumbles pier. The formation of a local committee following the incident was the beginning of a lengthy process leading to the establishment of an effective lifeboat station by the RNLI at The Mumbles in March 1863.

The people of Wolverhampton have recently raised the funds for a new inshore lifeboat to be stationed in Wales, and it may be of interest that one of the early Mumbles lifeboats was also provided by Wolverhampton. She was displayed there publicly and rowed across a pool before being brought to Swansea free of charge by the Great Western Railway.

One of the most famous incidents in the history of The Mumbles station was the disaster in 1883, when four members of the lifeboat crew were lost and two daughters of the local lighthouse keeper made valiant efforts to rescue the drowning men. This gave rise to Clement Scott's rollicking poem, The Women of Mumbles Head. Mr Smith reveals a number of inaccuracies in the poem. In particular there seems to be no justification for Scott's reference to 'three craven men who stood by the shore with chattering teeth refusing to stir'. In fact one of the three, a gunner in the Royal Artillery named Hutchings, received the RNLI's thanks on vellum.

The terrible disaster in 1947, when the whole of The Mumbles crew were lost only six months after carrying out a service for which the coxswain, William Gammon, was awarded the gold medal, is duly described, as are some of the outstanding services carried out by the crew under the present coxswain, Derek Scott.

Mr Smith has assembled a number of fascinating photographs, including one of a large number of top-hatted Wolverhampton citizens standing in front of the boat they helped to provide and one of the same lifeboat at the RNLI's yard in Poplar after she had been involved in the disaster of 1883.—P.M.

O The National Maritime Museum's series of Maritime Monographs and Reports is ideal for serious studies of all aspects of shipping lore which might not readily find a commercial publisher.

They have also the inestimable advantage of being produced by people who know their ships and the sea, and are not afraid to include extra-illustrative material which, it so happens, the modern offset printing process embraces with ease.

Ian Merry's The Westcotts and their Times (National Maritime Museum, £4.00) is a fascinating and well illustrated history of a Plymouth shipowning family, including a wealth of material covering the wider field of merchant sail in the last hundred years.

The ports of the south west were the homes of a number of important fleets of sailing craft in the barquentine/ schooner categories which traded widely: salt and general goods to Newfoundland and the Canadian maritimes; back with stock fish for the Latin countries; fruit from the Peninsula and the Azores; sugar from the West Indies; wines from the Mediterranean and the Canaries. These fleets, like that of the Westcotts, usually included other schooners and ketches for coasting in the home trade, and barges for river work.

The text, besides covering the Westcott family, gives histories for each of their vessels. It tells of many of the company's masters, mates, seamen, with logs and first-hand accounts of voyages.

Among the last is the author's account of his voyage in 1930 in the barquentine Frances and Jane. There is also a valuable survey of the mining and other industrial activities on the upper Tamar —an area now silent, but with several sites preserved sensitively to create enclaves of interest for visitors among beautiful scenery.

Admirably complementing the text are the varied appendices with reproductions of ship plans, press cuttings and documents one does not often see: ships' registers, crew lists, a builder's certificate and an apprentice's indenture.

These well repay a careful study with their wealth of information.—G.E.F.

• The Penguin Book of Sea Stories (£1.10) is edited by Alun Richards and contains an interestingly varied collection of yarns, including both fact and fiction. No doubt readers will form their own opinions as to which has the greater impact—the carefully devised tale of the master-storyteller, or the stark and inescapable logic of truth.

Certainly Conrad has a magic touch with which his crisp words enclose the reader, making him a part of the scene and events taking place. Yet it would be difficult to imagine a more vivid account in precise seaman's terms, or greater drama, than that disclosed by the true story of the wreck of Indian Chief. This must surely rank as one of the great epic tales of wreck and rescue and one which establishes for all time the heroic spirit of lifeboat crews.

In all, the book covers a wide range of talented writers and dramatic incidents and may clearly be taken in one large dose or spread over a period of casual reading with equal pleasure, as time and inclination suggest.—E.W.M.

• For a lifeboat, a distress call means 'Launch!'; for a helicopter, 'Scramble!'.

Working together to save life at sea, surface and air craft can, when occasion demands, rise to remarkable heights of achievement. Each, contributing what is possible in its own element, has a different approach, different problems, different skills. The experiences of the one add greater depth to the records of the other.

In Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Frank Pearce looks at sea rescue from the viewpoint of the helicopter crews of the Cornish naval air station, HMS Seahawk, Culdrose, who, from 1970 to 1976, rescued 365 people. Reconstructing outstanding operations and talking to aircrews, Frank Pearce has produced a very readable booklet of great interest.

One service recorded in detail is that to Merc Enterprise on January 16, 1974; the service for his part in which Coxswain John Dare of Plymouth was awarded the bronze medal for gallantry.

A Danish coaster sinking, and, battling through hurricane force winds in an attempt to rescue her crew of 19, five Sea King helicopters, crewed by British and German airmen, seven ships—two Dutch, three Russian, one Japanese and one British—and the 52' Barnett Plymouth lifeboat. Eleven men were saved.

Photographs taken from a helicopter give a very good idea of the wrath of the sea, and Mr Pearce's account brings home just what the air crews were up against: 'It was an incredibly difficult task to maintain the correct length of cable to their winchman in these enormous rollers and quite impossible to preserve a consistent height. The aircraft had to literally fly up and down, matching the rise and fall of the sea. As a consequence there were times when the aircraft had to be suddenly dropped about 60 feet as the sea fell away into a trough and then rise just as rapidly to clear the crest of the next wave . . . On one occasion a particularly large roller passed only 10 feet below the aircraft and took the winchman deep under water. From the effect of this passing wave, the wire was pulled aft at a near horizontal angle and the helicopter towed backwards by the drag on the winchman's body. After what seemed an interminable time, he re-appeared from the back of the wave and 30 feet below the crest, gasping for breath and struggling to retain his helmet and boots which had been almost wrenched off. A second or two later, he was swung violently forward into the next equally large wave to re-emerge with a badly cut eye from the winch hook which had swept back and smashed into his face.' And that was not the beginning nor by any means the end of their troubles.

Nevertheless, the helicopters succeeded in winching seven of the survivors to safety; the other four were rescued by volunteers from the Russian stern trawler Leningrad who, with ropes fastened to their waists, dived into the boiling sea. It had been a fine example of International co-operation.

A booklet well worth its price of £1.20 from booksellers, or £1.37, including postage and packing, from the publishers, Bantam, Minnie Place, Falmouth, Cornwall.—J.D.

• A new addition to the many books for the aspiring mariner, Practical Pilotage for Yachtsmen by Jeremy Howard- Williams (Adlard Coles, £2.50), would make a good nautical highway code.

A pilot is by definition the steersman and pilotage the ability to handle a vessel among others and through the hazards of harbour, channel and anchorage.

Whoever takes tiller or wheel in hand and embarks, even on nothing more adventurous than an afternoon's jolly out to the harbour mouth and back, should have an adequate knowledge of pilotage. This little book is intended to provide just that. It attempts no more, navigation is not in its brief, just the necessary information about buoys, rights of way, lights, signals and a little about the weather. To the cognoscenti all pretty elementary stuff, but not to those many thousands who put to sea in dinghies, runabouts and weekenders, with never a thought of venturing more than a few miles from mooring or public slip, and to whom navigation is something for the birds and the salt-stained types who slip silently into harbour at the end of a bank-holiday weekend, with a little yellow flag fluttering below the crosstrees.

Certainly recommended reading, even if only for the excellent memory check on page 58, which taught me more about the international signal flags in minutes than I have managed to assimilate in years of contemplating the poster on the back of the door to the heads.— B.A..