A lifetime of lifesaving Joel Grunnill tells the Lifeboat how he overcame ice, injuries and even bullets during his so-far-78 years of volunteering Skegness born and bred, Joel Grunnill was part of the Lincolnshire town’s lifeboat crew for 45 years. He continued a family tradition that began when the first Skegness lifeboat was stationed in 1825. ‘The Grunnills had always been on the lifeboats, so it was natural for me to get involved,’ says Joel, now aged 81.

Joel’s volunteering hasn’t just involved going to sea. He’s given up his time to raise funds for the charity too. When a child, he and his sister, Ruth, helped with street collections. ‘That’s my first memory of the RNLI. I can’t have been more than three years old,’ says Joel. His mother, Mary, was a keen fundraiser, especially as his father,Wilf, was on the lifeboat crew.

Wilf changed role in 1932, when a tractor arrived to replace the horses – the power behind the launch and recovery of lifeboats for the previous 100 years (see the Lifeboat Summer 2005 issue for more on launching methods). As a poultry farmer,Wilf was then the only crew member who already knew how to operate a tractor and so he became chief driver. Joel accompanied his father to the station for many a launch, helping out as he grew older.

Under fire Upheaval came in 1939 with the start of the Second World War. All across the country, lifeboat crews were depleted as their members left for military service. It was for the very young and the old to replace them, including Joel and his father. The Skegness lifeboat launched two or three times a week in the early 40s, often to search for survivors of crashed aircraft, both German and Allied.

‘We had to operate in different ways during the War,’ Joel explains. ‘We couldn’t use maroons [signal rockets] to alert the crew to a shout. If a plane went down, air traffic control would contact the station’s Honorary Secretary, who would then ring my family because we were the only ones with a telephone.We’d drive around town and I’d knock on doors and pick everyone up.

‘There was barbed wire across the beach and we had to get the lifeboat through a gap before we could launch her, which made things more difficult. Sometimes we would turn up and the airmen would be still alive, other times they were dead or we could only find a bit of wreckage,’ remembers Joel. ‘We went out for hours at a time in some freezing and rough conditions.’ It wasn’t just the biting cold and North Sea swells that put the lifeboat crew in danger, though. ‘We were shot at by the Home Guard one day, while out on a shout,’ Joel recalls.

‘We had seen some signalling in the distance and we had not realised that we were supposed to reply. Then we saw some splashing in the water around the boat and heard machine-gun fire.We all dived onto the deck and waved a white rag. Luckily no one was hurt.’ Once, Joel was aboard when the lifeboat sailed into a cluster of mines and had to be gingerly steered to safety.

Joel’s most memorable wartime rescue was in October 1941 when an Allied bomber ditched into the sea in a gale, 7 miles out from Skegness. An RAF rescue boat, based to the south in Boston, could not reach the aircraft in the rough seas, so the Skegness lifeboat was launched. Meanwhile the airmen had escaped from the aircraft aboard a rubber dinghy. ‘The sea was so big that we had trouble spotting them,’ recalls Joel.With the help of another aircraft signalling above, the lifeboat found the dinghy and pulled the five men aboard. They were shaken and seasick, but uninjured. After recovering from their ordeal at an RAF hospital, the rescued airmen presented the lifeboat crew with an oar from the dinghy, inscribed with the names of the grateful rescuees. A fresh start? The regular lifeboat crew who had survived combat eventually returned and Wilf Grunnill went back to driving the launching tractor.

Joel continued as a crew member. Mines, barbed wire and bullets were no longer a problem, but the lifeboat crew faced plenty of other challenges during rescues. In January, February and March 1947, England was hit by some extremely cold weather, so much so that the North Sea off Skegness partially froze. Joel vividly recalls being on a nine-hour rescue in those icy conditions. ‘We were going out to a ship, and had to weave through the ice and fend it off with boat hooks,’ he says. ‘The lifeboat couldn’t go very fast and the ship was quite far out to sea. I’ve never been so cold!’ Such challenges never seemed to put off Joel being on the crew, even when he was injured. He needed hospital treatment on three occasions: first, a towline broke and hit Joel across the face; then someone threw a drogue [a sea anchor] and accidentally knocked him unconscious; then his foot was caught between the lifeboat and another vessel. ‘I would always come back, though,’ says Joel.

Fifty-five on Joel’s motor mechanic business prevented him from being a full-time coxswain, but he had most other roles on the lifeboat. By the time he retired from the crew in 1984, he had been a launcher, signalman, radio operator, navigator and second coxswain.

And his affair with the RNLI did not end there. He went on to be station Honorary Secretary (now known as Lifeboat Operations Manager) and Chairman. These days he helps his cousin, April, to regularly empty more than 200 lifeboat collection boxes, scattered around the shops and pubs in the district.

‘Today’s crew have a huge amount of respect for Joel,’ says current Coxswain John Irvine. ‘He is so knowledgeable and enthusiastic. When we come back from a shout, he’ll often be at the station, keen to hear what has happened and to compare with his own experiences.We got back at gone midnight the other night and he and April were waiting there with coffee and biscuits. Joel really has given a lifetime to us and to the RNLI.’ .