35 years ago The report of the 1959 AGM in the June 1959 issue of THE LIFEBOAT makes an interesting comparison with that of its successor 35 years later, the costs may be missing several zeros compared with today's figures but threeand- a-half decades ago muchofthe underlying business was along similar lines. There were new boats under development and new equipment was on trial... The then Chairman, The Earl Howe, began his address: For the third year In succession life-boats were launched more than 700 times. That is really a remarkable thing.

Between the wars life-boats were never launched more than 500 times, but since the last war the figure has gone up and up, and for the last three years it has exceeded 700...

Last year was an interesting year and might be considered an outstanding year, particularly in one respect. A new life-boat was completed to an altogether new design produced by one of our own staff, Mr Oakley. In memory of that outstanding achievement we have called the boat after him the Oakley life-boat, and successive boats of the class will be known as the Oakley class. A feature of this life-boat is that she is self-righting. If she is capsized she will right herself, and she does this in six seconds. As you know we have had self-righters in the service for a long period, and about the middle of the last century the Institution started to build all its boats as self-righters. One of the features of those boats and the ones that succeeded them was that they were built with rather a narrow beam, with the result that they were apt to capsize rather more easily than non-self-righting boats. We found that the crews, when we questioned them, preferred for the most part to go to sea in a non-selfrighter than a self-lighter...

This new boat has been through a most exhaustive series of trials and has come through with flying colours, and we have sent her to Scarborough.

.. .she represents a great advance in design. The selfrighting is achieved by the transfer of water ballast from one compartment to another, and this is done quite automatically.

Another thing which we have been able to do during the past year has been to complete our programme of fitting the selected boats in our fleet with very-high frequency radio-telephones. The reason why we have done this is to enable complete co-operation to be achieved between aircraft with fixed wings and helicopters and life-boats...

We have continued with our progress of providing more and more stations with new tractors and new carriages. You cannot do that for nothing. The tractor that two years ago cost about £6,000 costs £8,000 today, and in the effort to try to keep pace with rising prices we have to be all the more active and do all we can in order to pay the bill.

... you will have noticed that receipts have reached an absolute record, upwards of one million pounds!.