• To say that the colour photographs which fill Lifeboat (Franklin Watts) are enough to sell the book on its own is to do an injustice to Heather Deane's clear and concise description of the RNLI, how it works, what it comprises and how it arrived, through history, at its present state of development.

But the photographs, of sparkling colour and definition, do more than merely illustrate the story, they present the RNLI almost as large as life. Padstow lifeboat station, the crew and their new 47ft Tyne class lifeboat are featured to show what is expected of a lifeboatman of today. The book also examines how lifeboats are built, maintained and equipped, it visits RNLI headquarters and depot at Poole, and contains a remarkable cutaway drawing of the quayside workshops and stores.

Although it has younger readers in mind, Lifeboat is an excellent exposition of the RNLI and should answer many questions from both young and old alike.

It is available from RNLI Trading Ltd, price £5.95 plus 80p post and packing.—E.W-W.

• Margaret Brown may not be as famous as Grace Darling but her heroism in a January gale in 1876 on the Northumberland coast is no less striking.

The story of how the 27-year-old first helped form a human chain to pull four men from an up-turned boat and then ran five miles to Newbiggin through open country and across a flooded river to alert the rocket apparatus crew is vividly told in Jill Mitchell's Story of the Cresswell Lifeboats.

The women who launched the lifeboat and the men who crewed her were a hardy breed of fisherfolk and one family, the Browns, seemed to make up most of their number during the life of the station between 1875 and 1944.

Every coxswain bore that surname and one of the booklet's interesting photographs shows an entire crew of Browns standing proudly before their lifeboat.

The booklet (produced by Jeff Morris) can be obtained by post from Mrs J.

Mitchell, Green Gates, Cresswell, Morpeth, Northumberland, NE61 5JT.

Price: £1.25 including postage and packing.

—E.W-W.

• As well as producing Jill Mitchell's book, Jeff Morris has made a second addition to his series of lifeboat histories by writing The Story of the New Brighton Lifeboats (price £1.25 including post and packing, available from Mrs W. Jones, 64 Rolleston Drive, Wallasey, Merseyside, L45 6XF).

With his customary precision, Jeff Morris has chronicled the hectic history of this lifeboat station which, since it was first set up by the RNLI in 1863, (there were lifeboats independently run just along the coast at Magazines before this date), has seen no fewer than 19 different lifeboats saving over 1,100 lives.

The very first RNLI lifeboat at New Brighton was the innovatory tubular design, built of iron, resembling, to a certain extent, an oar-powered catamaran.

The open-minded tradition of.