• Richard Evans of Moelfre has now joined the distinguished band of lifeboatmen of whom a full-length biography has been written. This is Lifeboat VC by Ian Skidmore (David and Charles, £4.95).

The great rescues from Hindlea in 1959 and Nafsiporos in 1966, for which Richard Evans was awarded gold medals for gallantry, are vividly recalled.

There are also a number of other accounts of services which indicate something of the variety of work which lifeboat crews are called upon to do.

On one occasion Moelfre lifeboat towed in a cow which had fallen into the sea and which was in calf. The difficulties of war-time service without lights or radio are also emphasised.

To many the most interesting parts of the book will be the descriptions of life in a small fishing community rather over half a century ago. Richard Evans's grandfather, Richard Matthews, never learnt to read or write, yet he was the local butcher and a fine seaman. He made his own nets, sails and masts and built houses with his own hands. The commercial importance of fishing to supplement the low wages of seamen is also stressed. One of the most vivid pictures is of colliers arriving off Moelfre, from which the coal was hand-winched from the holds into carts, which were then drawn by horses over the shingle.

As many lifeboat supporters know, Richard Evans is now a brilliant public speaker with an exceptional capacity for holding an audience's attention. It may therefore seem strange to learn of the young Dick Evans, who when he first went to sea stayed on board rather than risk the danger of losing himself in the back streets of ports and worried because he had difficulty in speaking English.

The new work must be an essential feature of any adequate lifeboat library.

It is well written with a smoothly running narrative and an air of authenticity.

It is a pity therefore that it is marred by a number of factual errors.

Outstanding record though it has, Moelfre station has not, as the author states, won more medals for gallantry than any other. The late Coxswain Dan Kirkpatrick of Longhope did not die on the day he was to go to London to receive his third lifeboat medal.

Inshore lifeboats do not average 50 calls a year. These and a few others are, however, only minor blemishes.—P.H.

• The public library at Cowes contains a small maritime museum one corner of which is devoted to Uffa Fox and includes, among other things, a letter he wrote as a young man applying for a job at a local boatyard. In the letter he chats away about everything under the sun—including his preference for plump girls—in his own inimitable style. It is an extraordinary letter and, like everything else he wrote including the material chosen for Best of Uffa compiled by Guy Cole (Nautical Publishing Co., £8.50), it is immensely readable. You may disagree with some of his opinions and deductions but you cannot fail to be entertained and somewhere, for everyone, will be snippets of instruction and moments of inspiration.

Best of Uffa is composed of material from five volumes of design choices published in the 1930s. You will not put it down without experiencing the contagion of his inextinguishable love of life, of boats and the sea.—B.A.

• Family tradition in service to seafaring people is well understood by lifeboat people, who will surely find the story of the Stevensons told by Craig Mair in A Star for Seamen (John Murray, £7.50) enthralling. For five generations this Edinburgh family of civil engineers were lighthouse builders, gradually bringing to Scottish coasts navigational aids vital to the safety of the men who sail those waters.

The story began in 1786, the same year that Lionel Lukin's 'unimmergible', the first boat to be adapted for lifesaving, was established at Bamburgh.

It was in that year that Thomas Smith took to the newly established Northern Lighthouse Trust his invention to improve the intensity of light in simple oil lamps: a parabolic shaped reflector to be fitted behind the lamp.

Thomas Smith and his descendants —Robert Stevenson, who was both his stepson and his son-in-law, his grandchildren Alan, David and Thomas, his great grandchildren David and Charles, and his great great grandchild Alan—all became in their turn designers, engineers and supervisors for the Northern Lighthouse Board, spanning the years from 1786 to 1971.

Even the best-known of the family, Robert Louis Stevenson, was trained as a lighthouse engineer before turning to writing.

They designed and supervised the building of towers, lanterns, lamps and optics, fog signals, enginerooms, storehouses, keepers' dwellings, beacons, buoys, radios and piers, and they were also responsible for their maintenance. Until 1900 they undertook an annual inspection tour of all installations. By the 1930s they had built over 90 lighthouses including the lighthouses on the notorious Bell Rock, a reef 11 miles out in the North Sea covered by several feet of water each high tide (completed 1811) and on Skerryvore Rock, 12 miles out into the Atlantic (completed 1843). Muckle Flugga, Cape Wrath, Sule Skerry, Flannan Isles and many others were to follow. Eventually the Stevensons' influence was to stretch right round the world: to New Zealand, Newfoundland, India, Australia, Japan and China.

An impressive chronicle of high adventure and imaginative hard work well worth reading.—J.D.

• A number of innovations appear in the latest edition of Reed's Nautical Almanac, for 1979 (Thomas Reed Publications Ltd, £6.25). Welcome minor additions and changes have been made to the tables and explanations, in particular the tide tables which have been extended to cover the French Atlantic coast; the section on the use of the tables has been much improved and simplified with a new table for interpolation of heights at times intermediate between high and low water. The continental port entry section has been extended to include Dutch ports.

One new departure is the extension of the text of the chapters describing the use of the tables and the problems of coastal navigation to include calculations performed on the hand-held electronic calculator. This prompts one to observe that many of the more lengthy tables—traverse tables, versines, log cosines, departure into difference of longitude and so on—are rendered obsolete by the arrival on the chart table of the electronic calculator with trigonometry functions. Perhaps, in future years all these could be omitted or replaced by a single table of natural five-figure sines and cosines for the benefit of the navigator whose calculator does not include trig, functions.

There is a correction to the BBC Radio changes given on page 826 which must be noted. At the time the Almanac went to press it was intended that there should be two wavelengths for Radio 4 on long wave. This decision was later revised by the BBC and there is now only one: frequency 200kHz, wavelength 1500 metres.

The contents page has been redesigned with coloured flashes leading to marks on the edges of the pages for easy reference. One day we may hope that the colour printing will extend to the cloud illustrations in Chapter XXI which lose so much from being printed in black and white.

In all respects the Almanac maintains the high standards set by previous editions and it is perhaps churlish to repeat the perennial complaint of small ship navigators that it should be printed in two volumes; one annually, containing the ephemeris and tides, and one less frequently with the unchanging chapters on general matters. This step would be a great help to the seafaring public which has to pay the everincreasing cost of the complete issue every year.—K.M.

• Accidents Happen by Ann Welch (John Murray, hardback £5.95; paperback £2.95), with the subtitle Anticipation, Avoidance, Survival, is a book that has been written no doubt following a great deal of research and contains a fund of useful advice amidst amusing illustrations. Although not principally concerned with the sea there are some very good sections for the help of boat owners relating to wind and weather, fog, conflagration and even the traditional 'lookout'.—E.J.

• Among books recently received are: The Shell Book of Practical and Decorative Ropework by Eric C. Fry and Peter Wilson (David and Charles, £3.95), which shows the bights and tucks of each knot in clear photographs taken from the point of view of the knotmaker's own eyes. After working through decorative knots, plaits, sennits and mats, the book ends with designs for a small bell toggle, a large bell toggle and a multi-unit mat.

Merchant Fleets in Profile, by Duncan Haws (Patrick Stephens, Cambridge, £4.95), which is the first in a proposed series of books giving brief historical records of shipping companies and their fleets and including profile drawings of many of their ships.

This volume covers the P and O, Orient and Blue Anchor lines.

The Puffin Book of Salt-Sea Verse compiled by Charles Causley (Kestrel hardback, £4.50; Puffin Books paperback, 90p), which is an anthology ranging from the writings of Ancient Greece to those of the present day, across many countries and touching on many sea-related subjects.

And finally, Old Harry's Bunkside Book, by J. D. Sleightholme (Adlard Coles, £1), which is a collection of stories about 'Old Harry' originally published in 'Yachts and Yachting' and 'Yachting Monthly'. A good bunkside book indeed.

Fire . . .

Fire at sea can be both swift and devastating. All too often not enough thought is given to its prevention; not enough preparation made for fighting it. The Royal Yachting Association Seamanship Foundation, in conjunction with Nu-Swift, has produced a poster illustrating some of the reasons why fire occurs and how they can be prevented; it also gives information about suitable fire extinguishers to carry on board. These posters are available, price 20p each, from RYA Seamanship Foundation, Victoria Way, Woking, Surrey GU21 1EQ..