Following the publication in the winter issue of THE LIFEBOAT of a description of the work of present-day divisional inspectors of lifeboats, here are some extracts from an article by the late Captain Basil Hall, RN, a one-time inspector of lifeboats, which was first published in the same journal 58 years earlier. . . .IT WAS IN FEBRUARY, 1895, that I first entered 'the House of the Institution' in order to submit my name as a candidate for the vacancy of district inspector of lifeboats, caused by a decision of the Committee of Management to add a new inspector to the already existing four. The 'House' was then situated at No. 14, John Street, Adelphi I was appointed first to the Irish District, where I remained nearly five years. The first year was marked by one of the most appalling disasters that has ever overtaken the lifeboats of the Institution, when, on December 24, 1895, two splendid lifeboats, both stationed at Dun Laoghaire, were wrecked, and the whole of the crew of the larger boat drowned, in their attempt to save life from the Norwegian barque Palme, stranded in Dublin Bay during the height of a heavy southeasterly gale.

I was living in Dun Laoghaire myself at the time, but knew nothing of what had happened until an overheard word in the street told me of the disaster.

I hastened down to the shore. . . . Late in the night of that Christmas Eve we worked on the beach.... The only other lifeboat available was a small pulling-gig, stationed at Poolbeg, inside the bar of the Liffey. Nothing more could be done that night; but at daybreak on Christmas morning I attempted, with the aid of the tug, to tow this boat out of the river and round to the bay; however, the heavy seas on the bar made this impossible, and after two had broken on board the vessel and found their way into the engine room, we were reluctantly compelled to give up the attempt. If only a motor lifeboat had been stationed on the Irish Coast in those days! . . .

During the five years I spent in Ireland I covered many a long 'Irish' mile by road, as a great number of the stations were at long distances from the railway. The motor car had, indeed, been invented, but had not then been brought into use, and I did all my work in that extraordinarily convenient vehicle, a jaunting car. . . .

It was 1899, shortly after the outbreak of the Boer War, that I left Ireland for the Western District, my stay in which must have corresponded almost exactly with the period of the war. . . . I celebrated the signing of the psace in a remote village in Wales with my successor the night before I turned the district over to him. One of our party on this occasion was that first-class officer, and very dear friend of mine, Commander Charles Cunninghame- Graham, who during the first 14 years of my service with the Institution was deputy chief inspector of lifeboats. One of the many duties of the deputy chief inspector is to visit the coast when problems arise which require the decision of a superior officer, as, for instance, the opening of a lifeboat station in some spot where none has existed previously, or the closing of an existing station. The inspector for the district always accompanies him on these occasions, and many a delightful and instructive trip did I have with Graham....

From the West Coast I went to Scotland, which is known officially as the Northern District, as it includes the counties of Cumberland and Northumberland.

In the latter county I made acquaintance with one of the best lifeboat crews with whom it has been my privilege to go afloat, consisting entirely of miners from the famous Cambois coal mine, which extends for many miles under the bed of the North Sea....

In 1908 I moved on to the Eastern District, and here I realised that, in spite of my 13 years' experience, I still had much to learn about the handling of lifeboats. . . . I came to learn that in this particular branch of the seaman's art, the sailor, as the man who sails the deep sea in a ship is called technically, has much, if not everything, to learn from the coast fisherman, whose business is entirely in open boats. . . . The hardy fishermen of Norfolk and Suffolk are, I suppose, second to no other men in the world in their skill as boatmen.

Such skill is doubtless inherited from their Scandinavian forebears, whom so many of them still resemble in type and feature; but it has been nurtured by generations of service to the long, low, outlying sand-banks which fringe this portion of the coast of England. . . .

In 1913 I made my last move, being appointed to the Southern District, and in the following year I had the good fortune to realise the ambition of my career in the lifeboat service by taking part in a lifeboat rescue. . . . The story of the hospital ship Rohilla, wrecked off Whitby . . . need not be repeated here.

Nor will I attempt to describe the thrill I felt as we left the narrow harbour in the grey dawn of that November day, and headed for the tremendous seas which were breaking over the doomed vessel; nor my feelings as we lay alongside her and the 50 survivors—who had been for two days and two nights huddled together on the bridge, washed by every sea that swept her—dropped one by one into the lifeboat. But I know that, as each man, when he reached safety, uttered the most heart-felt thanks I have ever heard from the lips of men, I became conscious, perhaps for the first time fully, of the real value of the lifeboat service....

Incidentally, this rescue conclusively proved two things: the immense value of oil in smoothing a sea alongside a wreck . . . and the inestimable importance of the motor lifeboat, for not only could no other kind of boat have come 44 miles, as this one did, in order to perform the service, but I am prepared to stake my professional reputation on the statement that, owing to the tortuous nature of the passage between the rocks, no other than a motor lifeboat could have safely reached the vessel at all It is, of course, impossible in the space at my disposal to review all the changes which have taken place in the lifeboat service since I joined it; but looking back over the quarter of a century which has elapsed, one appears to stand out more conspicuously than the others. This has been the gradual increase in the size of the lifeboats. For some 70 years the general policy of the Institution had been to build boats light enough and small enough to be transported on a carriage to a spot as nearly opposite the wreck as possible, and there, launching off the beach, to approach it under oars to leeward. The modern tendency is to station a large and powerful boat in an advantageous position where she can launch into deep water, and, if possible, cut off the doomed vessel before she reaches the shore; or, if too late to do that, can approach to windward, and, dropping anchor at a convenient distance, veer down to the wreck.... The present scheme of the Institution to build a fleet of motor lifeboats and station them at salient points round the coast, not, if possible, more than 50 miles apart, is (continued on page 131).