A new tvpe of lifeboat, known as the Oakley tvpe, came into the service of the Institution in the summer of 1958.

She is 37 feet in length and has a beach weight of 9.12 tons. She is, therefore, light enough to be transported over a beach on a carriage and launched by tractor.

Thus, the September 1958 edition of THE LIFEBOAT recorded an event which was to have such an enormous impact on the lifeboat service in the decades to follow. Sadly, Richard Oakley, MBE, MRINA, designer of this type of selfrighting lifeboat, died in March this year.

He joined the RNLI in 1928, having originally been employed by S E Saunders Ltd, who had built some of the finest of the earlier powered lifeboats.

In 1940 he became Surveyor of Lifeboats and designed the 37ft Oakley class which went into service in 1958 and the larger 48ft 6in boat in 1963, the year he was appointed the Institution's Naval Architect.

Both these types of lifeboat employed the innovative self-righting technique of transferring 1'/: tons of water ballast into a righting tank on the port side.

So interlinked became the name of Richard Oakley and the lifeboats he designed, it is not altogether surprising that in an essay on lifeboats a schoolgirl stated that they were constructed either of steel or of oakley. Mr Oakley retired in 1966 but his name will long live on in the Institution's history as one of the principal architects of the modern lifeboat fleet..